Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow (@1985 by E. L. Doctorow).

One Saturday, with the sun shining and two feet of fresh snow on the ground, I discovered my brother Donald and his friends in the backyard. Inspired perhaps by the legendary Admiral Byrd, they had undertaken to build an igloo. Talking, chattering, arguing, working away with their jackets thrown off and woolen caps askew, the friends were cutting blocks of snow with a coal shovel and laying out a circular foundation. Their faces were red and their breaths were spouts of steam. As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing; bit by bit, it was eliminating itself as an idea from the light of the sun. I felt that what was being built was not a shelter but some structured withdrawal from the beneficence of the lighted day, and my excitement was for invited darkness, the reckless enclosure, as if by perverse and self-destructive will, of a secret possibility of life that would be better untampered with. I jumped up and down in a kind of ecstasy of my own being, inducing deliberately from my frame a series of spasms of shivers of concentrated awareness. Little by little the light was being blacked out, and when the final block of wet snow was installed at the apex of the hemisphere, my brother, who had been working as the inside man, disappeared entirely.

I was very impressed. It was a marvel of an igloo for anyone to have built, let alone five or six arguing. pushing, shouting boys. Donald dug his way carefully out the side and then they all built a crawl-through entrance, a kind of hemicylindrical foyer. Then a hose was brought out to play water over the igloo so that it would freeze up hard. Then they punched an air hole in the top with a length of broomstick and the thing was done.

By the next day the igloo had become the talk of the neighborhood. Not only children but adults came down the alley from the street to have a look at it.

My mother had donated a square of old carpet and a candle and the five builders had settled in, only some times deigning to respond to the importuning of the children outs side who wanted a turn. Actually, they soon grew bored of occupying the thing, learning fast enough that the real excitement had been the building of it; but it was almost as good lording it over their friends and those who were younger, designating this or that one to take a turn, and instructing him as to the rules of deportment once he was admitted. For a while they had considered charging admission, but settled instead for barter offered in bribe——one child paying with a small American flag on a stick, another a candy bar, another a half-eaten sandwich, and so on. As younger brother of one of the founding architects, I had a special relationship to the igloo, being one of the first guests permitted entrance and, thereafter, more or less free to enter and exit at my own judgment at such moments as the crowd inside was not too great. It was a source of amazement to me how, in this hemisphere of snow, my house, my yard and the Bronx, New York, disappeared in space and time. I was further engrossed by the paradox of the warmth of a structure made of solid ice. You sweated in there, it was so hot. You took off your hat and jacket or you were, almost immediately, glisteningly hot as on the hottest day of summer.

The igloo lasted physically long after the builders and everyone else grew bored with it. Inside a week it was almost totally forgotten. It began to shrink, but maintained its geometry even as it grew smaller and greyer and less interesting. I had discovered this about ice cream cones too——that they maintained their original proportions even as they were consumed. Long after I had lost any interest in sitting inside the igloo I nevertheless took pleasure from its integrity of form, almost as if my brother and his friends had used the magic of an ethereal idea as something to hand——like the most skillful magician.

Eventually I joined some other children working at the igloo and kicking it down into a pile of solid snow. It seemed as important to do that as it had been to go inside and sit down when the thing was in its fresh, crystal glory and all the world was reduced to the cold and silent space of an Arctic night, and the faces of your fellow humans looked at you, red and expectant, with the light of the candle flame filling the centers of their widened eyes.