Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Fart



            It came to my attention late last night that a fart which is somewhat of a legend in our family is being falsely accredited to me.
            Now, I’m sorry to you people who have found me through the expat blog site and came here expecting some useful information on Lebanon. I’ll be back in Beirut in a few days and promise to share more examples of my inability to adjust to Lebanese life. Today’s blog is about clearing my good name.
            It started last night when Theo made a Thai stir-fry and the smell of it settled in the bedroom Theo and I share (she has been with us here in Newfoundland since M and Dude and my in-laws left).  We opened all the windows in the house while she was cooking but the smell of fried onions and peanut sauce, instead of blowing out into the brisk, fishy air of Conception Bay, collected in our bedroom with a kind of solid resolution and plans to spend the night.
            The windows in the bedroom were wide open so there’s no reason why the stir-fry air should have pooled there.  I can’t explain the phenomenon scientifically.  Maybe there was some kind of thermal inversion going on.  All I know is that when I went in to get ready for bed I was surprised by how strong the smell was and called out a comment about it to Theo, who was in the bathroom washing her face.
            Hardly were the words out of my mouth when I heard a thundering in the hall and there was Theo, nostrils twitching and an expression of alarm on her face.
            “Good god,” she cried, “you weren’t kidding. It stinks to high heaven.  Are those windows open as far as they’ll go?”
            Without waiting for an answer she fell on the nearest one and cranked it, rocking wildly, to the limits of its range.  Then she grabbed her pyjama top which had been hanging by a hook in the wall and began fanning the air furiously with it. “Quick, get the hall door open, it might create a cross breeze.”
            “Geez, it’s not that bad,” I said, standing in the middle of the room idly scratching a black-fly bite. “We probably won’t even notice the smell once we’ve been in our beds a few minutes.”
            She shot me a withering look.  “Says the person with no nose.”
            “No nose! Hey, now, I happen to have a very sensitive nose.  It’s just that compared to yours it’s nothing more than a fleshy out-pouching on my face.  You don’t have a human nose.  What you’ve got is the olfactory super sponge of a sniffer dog.”
            “I can’t help it.  I just experience smells very strongly.”
            “I know.  I vaguely recall the eight thousand times this sort of thing has happened before.”
            “It’s not just that I experience smells more strongly -- they can actually make me feel sick. You want to help me fan or what?”
            “You should get a job in the airport.”
            “I think this fanning is helping.”
            “Or in a perfume factory.”
            “At least, I hope it’s helping.  There’s no way I’m sleeping in a peanut sauce cloud all night.”
            I sat down on the bed. “Say, it has never occurred to me before to ask you if you experience fart smells more strongly than a normal person. A packed elevator must be hell for you.”
            She eyed me wildly. “Of course.  You have no idea.  I don’t even take elevators if I can help it for that reason.”
            “Hmm.” I mused. “Have you ever tried customizing some  sort of charcoal air filters to fit up your nose? Though you wouldn’t want to be smell-impaired all the time.  Like if there was a gas leak in the house or something.”
            Theo stopped fanning and took a rest in the chair. “That reminds me.  Remember the story of the Gas Leak Fart?”
            “Remember it? It’s only the most famous fart in our family history.”
            “Yeah, well, when we had the family get-together at my place last month I overheard it being retold.”
            “Oh yeah?  Well, I certainly never get tired of hearing it.”
            “Well, me too, but the thing is, this time the story had changed a little.”
            “Well, stories do that over time.  As long as the essence of the story remains intact I guess it doesn’t matter.”
            Theo hesitated. “Maybe, but in this case the starring role had, er, undergone a replacement.”
            “The starring role . . . now wait just a minute, what are you getting at and why are you looking at me with that weird expression?”
            “Oh dear. What I'm trying to say is the latest version of the story has you in the starring role.”
           
            I think I may have fainted a little.  Theo kept talking for a few minutes but I only heard a rushing in my ears.  When I came to my senses I was able to question her precisely regarding the identity of the orator of the story and, most critically, who was in the audience.  I demanded to know why Theo hadn’t stepped in and set the record straight on my behalf (she only shrugged and said that everyone seemed to be enjoying it so much that she hated to interrupt).
         When I learned that the audience included our brother’s fairly-new-to-our-family wife I jerked straight up in bed, demanding my lap top be brought so that an email to my sister-in-law could be dispatched immediately.
            “On second thought,” I said, “I don’t need to write an email.  I’ve decided to do one better.  I’ll write a blog about it; it’ll reach more people that way.  Who knows how long that story has been circulating in its present format?”

            So here is the story of The Gas Leak Fart. Some details have been changed to protect the identity of the farter, though I would like him/her to know that allowing the story to be spread at my expense when they might have stepped up and set the record straight is not something I’m prepared to forgive in a hurry.
            On a cold December evening some years ago a group of people met as they did every Tuesday in a community hall off a lonely country road in Alberta.  They had come to learn French and the instructor was an elegant little Frenchwoman named Cecile.
            My dear blood relation, whom for the purposes of this story I shall call Gassy, was in attendance that night and eager to learn more of the romantic language he admired so much.  He was keen to better himself and had enrolled in the class with the belief that a little French would add poise and a certain je ne sais quoi to his character.
            It was – 25 degrees Celsius that night and the old, wood-floor community hall billowed heat through vents from the forced air furnace in the basement.
            It was cosy inside and the students chatted and laughed to each other as they took their seats and waited for Madame Cecile to begin the lesson.
            But poor Gassy was distracted by a faint rumbling and gurgling in his abdominal region. A spasm of pain caused him to wince and for his friend to ask if everything was all right.
            “Oh, I’m fine,” Gassy said, “I think I just ate too much at dinner.”
            He had eaten too much, that was true, but what he didn’t tell his friend was that he’d devoured half a bag of assorted dried fruit after dinner. 
            Madame Cecile began the lesson and Gassy focused his attention on learning how to ask for cheese in a shop.
            The shifting movements in his gut increased alarmingly and Gassy bitterly reflected that it was all his mother’s fault: she never allowed candy in the house and so an after-dinner sweet craving had led him in desperation to the bag of dried fruit.
            He began to feel hot and looked around the room to see if anyone else looked hot, too.  He might ask Madame Cecile if they could turn the heat down.
            He felt he had to get up and move around to settle his abdomen and had just decided to excuse himself when Madame Cecile announced that she had a nice treat for them all. They were going to try some traditional French folk dancing in the empty side of the hall where she had a stereo set up.
            Gassy was enormously relieved.  A little moving around was just what his tempestuous belly needed to sort itself out.  Sitting still in a hard chair was no good when one was trying to accommodate rapidly re-hydrating fruit. 
            The students assembled in front of the little stereo and Madame Cecile, very straight and correct in her posture, demonstrated the first steps of the dance. She turned on the music and the students began, clumsily, to try the steps.
            Gassy flinched as another cramp seized his abdomen.  He imagined the prunes and apricots swelling and pushing against his intestinal wall and knew that something was going to have to give soon. 
         And a few moments later he felt movement in the lowest portions of his interior, warning him that the gas build up was getting close to blowing the pressure relief valve.
            An evening French class wasn’t the ideal place to expel excess gas but at least the hall was very big and had a high ceiling.  The odor was sure to be lost in the voluminous interior of the building.
            He decided to hold it in until he could move to the fringes of the group and inconspicuously point himself away from the others. Of course, this was the sort of reasoning that had got Gassy into trouble before.  Anyone with dried fruit experience should know that you don’t waste time once the pressure gauge needle is in the red zone. 
            Just then Madame Cecile called the class to a halt while she demonstrated the dance again, adding a few more steps this time.  One of the students kept asking Madame Cecile questions while Gassy shifted his weight from foot and foot and groaned, “Come on, oh come on.”  
            At last the students were on the move again, shuffling in lines from left to right and Gassy found a perfect opportunity to ‘crop-dust’ -- releasing gas in a swathe across the back of the hall as the music and clattering of feet safely covered any noises.  Not that there was any appreciable noise; Gassy could tell that this flatulence was of the silent but deadly variety. 
            Gassy felt immediately better after the release and hopped nimbly over the wooden floor, putting maximum distance between himself and the drop zone.  He doubted the others would even notice the smell but he was a firm believer that discretion is the better part of valour.
            He had just reached the other side of the group and was preparing to concentrate on the dance steps when the smell hit him.  It was an eye-watering, sulphurous stench of singular robustness.  For a few seconds he was genuinely confused.  The potency of the odour at such a distance from the drop zone was incredible.  Maybe it wasn’t his fart.  Maybe it was a tragic coincidence and someone on the ‘safe’ side of the room had slipped a juicy one out just as Gassy crossed over.  But tempting as it was to hope, Gassy knew it wasn’t true.  He recognised his own flatus as surely as a mother recognises her own child.
            It didn’t take long for the rest of the group to react to the smell.  One by one they drew to a standstill and turned their heads this way and that, some in confusion, others voicing immediate accusations to their friends beside them.  
            Gassy noticed that Madame Cecile had stopped dancing, too, and was sniffing the air with an expression of concern on her face.  He watched in horror as she marched over to  the tape player and turned it off, clapping her hands to silence the chattering students.
            “Class,” she said, “I don’t want anyone to panic but I suspect there is a gas leak in this building. I may need to call the gas company.”
            There was an excited babble of voices.  Gassy heard a man say they’d better not dance anymore because he’d heard of gas explosions being caused by the friction under a person’s shoe.
            Then a girl said, “Um, not to be rude or anything but it kind of smells like a fart to me.”
            “Me too,” said someone else.
            “No way,” said a young woman who was always showing up late to class. “No fart smells that strong and I ought to know.”
            “It smells more like sulphur than flatulence to me,” said Madame Cecile, “and I’m really not comfortable carrying on here until I’ve spoken to the gas company.  Please return quietly to the tables and wait there while I go into the back room to use the telephone.”
            The students did as they were told, Gassy’s emotions in a ragged state.  He knew that the right thing to do would be to follow Madame Cecile to the back room and once there, quietly explain the situation.  But as his eyes followed her trim little figure and perfectly coiffed hair moving away down the hall he knew he could never do it.
            It seemed to take a long time.  Gassy tried to join in the debate going on around him about whether it was a fart or a natural gas leak but couldn’t seem to drag his attention away from the back room where Madame Cecile was speaking to the gas company.

            At last she appeared in the doorway and stood quite still a moment before lifting her chin and walking purposefully back to her students. Everyone stopped speaking and looked at her expectantly.
            “Class, I have spoken to the gas company and they have assured me that there cannot possibly be a gas leak in this building.” she said.
            “How can they know that just over the phone?” someone asked.
            “Because,” Madame Cecile said with an almost imperceptible shudder, “they have informed me that there is no natural gas service in this area.”