Still, Costco at least boasts a section where a man can find sausage in a bun. I’ll admit Sophie has a point when she claims every Englishman is constantly on the lookout for a sausage. Costco also sells a cold brew sans alcohol but with a sharp fizz like new beer, sweeter than Parisian lemonade, in paper cups the size of tureens one can refill at no charge.

Have I remembered Soph’s Costco card? All right, Jarry Station, here I come.

I labour once again to master the eye-avoidance people practice in subway cars. The Montreal trains are full of passengers who are not white or who are too young or too old to own cars. I seem always to be the only tall white man on the train.

I end up wedged next to a black woman weeping unobtrusively, her tears sliding in silent streams down a face otherwise expressionless, even serene.

I depart the car to transfer at Station Sauvé.

Hello bus 121, pilgrimage through cathedrals built of strata and substrata of expanded polystyrene covered in glass fibre mesh embedded in crack-resistant polymers replete with cracks and groaning bulges and peaks and valleys of synthetic stucco stretching endlessly to the new world horizon.

Why did I not even lay a hand on that woman’s arm, to comfort her?

5 Costco

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

AFTERNOON.

Costco and environs. Montreal, Quebec

THE REAR BUS SEAT IS EMPTY! I plonk onto its wild velvet pattern as we sway around traffic islands, past Walmart and fly-by-night computer repair outlets.

That which is, already has been. And that which is to be, already has been. And God seeks what has been driven away….

Ecclesiastes always strikes me as the only reasonable part of the Bible. It supports my belief that if you arm yourself with philosophy, you can be master of whatever befalls you. As Montreal’s charmed balconies peter out and warehouses abound I find Ecclesiastes more comforting than I did in any pew with my mother, or at wartime devotions, or by candle in my billets and camps.

Our driver lurches in and out of her stops. I know nothing of those who board, nothing of these outskirts’ shopping centres or parking lots. I ride anonymous in their sprawl, waiting for the crater that might jolt me properly into being in the present instead of floating in the past. They call Montreal’s copious potholes nids-de-poule—chicken nests. I need our bus to bump in and out of a giant one of those, maybe an ostrich’s home instead of a chicken’s.