When the telephone rings in his apartment, it actually rings. It doesn’t warble or twitter electronically, or give you a blast of the latest hip hop hit. It rings the way telephones used to ring in the movies—a jangling, insistent bell that would cue the camera to pan down to that squat, black, suddenly ominous instrument with its worn dial. A hand, perhaps with chipped nail polish, would settle on the receiver, hesitate, and the music would swell. Part of you would think, Answer it, answer it, and part of you would think, Don’t, don’t. It’s him.

Seth’s telephone looks exactly like the ones in those ’40s movies. It’s ringing this afternoon, but he doesn’t answer it. He is a well-mannered man of 43 whom you might easily mistake for 30 and just as easily mistake for a character in an exercise in noir. He is slim, smooth faced with slightly chubby cheeks, possessed of luxuriantly black hair haphazardly parted in the middle in a vaguely Edwardian fashion. He wears round glasses. He is very pale—he is not a man who sees a lot of sunlight. When we met at the Guelph bus station, he was dressed as he always is: in a vintage suit, white shirt, a period tie and a fedora; but now, in his apartment and in deference to the room’s warmth, he has removed the jacket and, of course, the hat.

He shares the first floor of a small brick house in downtown Guelph with Tania, his 30-year-old wife of three-and-a-half years, and three cats, Orange, Greyboy and Little Lulu. It is perhaps the strangest apartment I have ever been in. On the outside of the door, there are two small signs. One reads, “Palookaville: Central Depot. Please Knock Loudly.” The other reads, “Headquarters of the Honourable Northern Brush, Ink, Pastepot and Beefsteak Society.” That door opens directly onto a small living room that is richly, exuberantly, voluptuously eccentric. There are shelves of dolls and figurines. There is a horse from a merry-go-round. There are many, many books. There is a stuffed dog and a stuffed squirrel. There is a plastic nurse doll. There are framed cartoons on the walls. There is a fire chief’s hat. There is a whole shelf of trophies, all of them awarded by Seth to himself, the brass plates on the bases recording one disappointment after another—“Never Called a Boy Wonder, Seth, 1962–1987” is just one of them. When I tell him that, as a child, I was a great fan of Little Lulu, he points out that he has a complete collection of those comics, in reprint in 15 volumes, plus 135 originals. When I mention that I loved Plastic Man, he shows me a Plastic Man comic. When I tell him that I can’t remember the name of Plastic Man’s fat sidekick, he replies that it’s Woozy Winks. Of course.

Guelph, in all its happy banality, may be just outside the door, but I’m in Palookaville now, a town where the telephones still ring, where disappointments have the lustre of success, where men wear hats and marry late, where the only time of day is twilight; a town where a man can live his life twice—once in real time and again in the hyper-real time we know as art.