The Hottest Day

During the hottest summer on record, I was in a terrible slump. I could find only part-time work, so I volunteered as much as possible. “Please,” I begged, “that batch of incoming mail for the city councilor simply must be processed.” I was appointed summer relief, in charge of sending personalized responses to the councilor’s snowbank of letters and cards, chiefly well-wishers, due to recent news of her lymphoma.

I replied, rephrased, and, whenever possible, redirected the concern to different departments of the city. Yes, it was a mentally taxing and strategically stupid choice of how to spend a summer. But – a huge plus – her office had air conditioning.

My walk-up had no air con. The tired old brownstone couldn’t bear the electrical load, according to my cheapskate landlord. Oscillating fans and wet facecloths – that’s how I slept on sultry nights when I slept alone.

Air con. That became the heavyweight argument that governed all my choices that summer.

Where should my friends and I eat? At Lalibela, with its picturesque vine-clad patio? Or Burger King, with its chilly, impersonal air conditioning?

Burger King.

Where should we go tonight? To a free open-air concert by Cowboy Junkies in the park? Or to a plotless art film in a glacially air-conditioned cinema?

Art film.

Where should we wander about this weekend? Among the towering black pines of the old-growth forest? Or among the All Sales Final racks of the frigidly air-conditioned local mall?

Mall.

The air con rule of thumb was wreaking havoc on my love life, too. “Love life” is perhaps too sentimental and outdated for pairings that were experimental and non-exclusive. But I hope you catch my drift. Did I want to bed down with Isaac, who had charmed me with his wit and common-sense approach to life’s quandaries during the regular school year, but who lived in a heritage building cooled only by cross-drafts and a creaky old GE fan? We worked up a sweat just necking on the sofa, never mind dancing the horizontal mambo. I had to fight to lie close to the fan if I wanted to get any kind of decent post-coital cooling.

Mason was charming in a different way. He was a rhino, big and tough, impervious to sarcasm, whose impassive facial expression invited all kinds of fun interpretations. We communicated via sexy video game avatars. And bonus, he had all-you-could-shiver air conditioning in his place.

What was a poor, heat-stressed student to do?

When the heat is above the resting temperature of the body, with humidity at one hundred percent saturation without any breeze: that is one hot day. String together fourteen such days and you have two crappy weeks where plant leaves turn brown and curl up, and birds crouch panting in the shade.

Three pigeons were Lords of the Shady Puddle on my street and one day as I approached, only two flew away. The third, beak open, kept its beady red eyes on me and fluttered its wings but refused to take to the oven-like air again.

I was reminded of Don Quixote roaming the plains of La Mancha, of the barren landscape of the Holes where Stanley Yelnats stayed. Most of all, I remembered El Camino del Diablo, a dirt road extending through the Sonoran Desert in a book by Luis Alberto Urrea. In describing death by hyperthermia, Urrea wrote that people in the final stages of heat-death lose rationality as their nerves become damaged. They imagine they can go for a swim in the lake in front of them. They strip off their clothes to cool themselves down as they are slow-roasting under the hot sun. Urrea described the neatly folded piles of clothing with the shoes placed on top beside the corpses.

*       *      *

Isaac had more body hair than I did and thus had greater incentive to address the air con issue. The relentless heat corrupted him. Or maybe it was because I mentioned our mutual friend Mason had air con. Whatever. Isaac hustled down to Wal-Mart and bought a portable AC unit. “You realize this goes against environmental sustainability, right?” The way he said this to me was like a kid asking permission.

The sweat was even messing up my eyeshadow, sticking my eye-folds together. “Whatever,” I said, blotting the mascara dripping on my face.

Isaac bump-bump-bumped the AC unit upstairs. I could see the large wet stains on his shirt from where he had carried it. Tenderness filled me. His effort to haul the beast upstairs was equivalent to giving me his last bun at Buchenwald.

Yet… did I say thank you? I don’t think I did.

I was heat-crabby. You know that term “hangry” for hunger-induced anger? We need a lexicon for levels of irritability caused by living in an oven.

He plugged the unit in, shut the windows, and we settled down with two chilled kombuchas to await the magically cooling zephyr. The unit’s hum went from low to insistent then suddenly –

Brzzzt!

The lights went out and the hum stopped.

Despite Isaac’s efforts, I could not return to loving regard. I could not even return to an even keel. My brain, if analyzed, would show a hot surface, like those images of the sun, with small explosions of heat on it -- coronal flares. My brain was in a flare-up state, and I did not trust myself to say anything to him.

My boyfriend before Isaac and Mason complained I got too volatile. I was an unpredictable combination of dove and hawk. Like a bipolar parrot, I was as likely to give a love-peck as to rip off his head off. I didn’t want to keep wrecking things.

When the power did not return, I was forced to peel my sweating thighs from Isaac’s secondhand pleather sofa and investigate.

Was the power only out for Isaac’s apartment? I went to the door, opened it and listened. Silence.

I looked in the stairwell. No lights, although light from the evening sky shone through the windows. Had Isaac’s air con blown out the building’s electrical system? I trudged downstairs to the outside. No streetlights shone, but the evening was young, and I didn’t know when the lights were set to turn on.

I observed the low-rise apartment across the street. No windows were lit up -- but maybe people were away. I walked a little way until I could see the familiar green-orange-red-white of the Seven Eleven. It had no light.

“Brown out,” I said to no one in particular. I poured as much disgust as I could into that phrase, because in that moment a rage flashed in me. The municipality -- the power companies -- the regulators -- could no one do something about the heat crisis?

Why was the greedy older generation dumping their live grenade of greenhouse gases into our lap, the lap of the generation who had not even completed their schooling?

We still did not know what we did not know.

I boiled with rash decisions. I would return to the heritage building, collect my things, and immediately break up with Isaac. And Mason. And I would run to a convent, any convent as long as the cloister had air conditioning. Forget romance, cuddling, getting misled into procreation. A world unfit for birds was clearly unfit for babies.

I turned to go back, the air still heat-shimmering above the street. The asphalt was as springy and pliable to walk on as a kitchen throw rug.

My head ached. I couldn’t remember Isaac’s address and when I tried to retrace my steps, I became disoriented.

*       *      *

No one was on the street, except for one man walking into the sunset, apparently minding his own business. He was older, dressed in janitorial clothes, and carried a large net. The mesh of the net was too big for insects or birds -- more like a cartoon dogcatcher’s net.

What was he up to? My irritation drained from me, replaced by curiosity, and I slipped into the nearest niche. He stood atop a hill, facing west, and the sun was a fiery ball slipping out of view. He picked up his net and extended it toward the sun.

Inwardly scoffing, I watched him stretch the telescopic arm of the net out and out into the ink-blue sky until finally the net scooped the glowing orb before it escaped from view. My skepticism turned to wonder.

His workman’s clothes had sweat-darkened splotches. He was wearing specially tinted glasses, like a welder’s visor. Sweat trickled from his hairline, and he was panting with the effort of capturing the celestial body.

“What will you do with that?” I asked, and he jumped and looked around until I emerged from the shadows.

“I’m putting it in the shed for the night.” He dragged his arm across his forehead.

“The shed? Do you need a hand?” I said. “I did shotput in high school.” I flexed my arm, which must have looked absurd because I was wearing a skimpy dress and flip-flops. You know, heatwave dressing.

“Well... if it’s not out of your way,” he said. He gave me the once-over, then angled the handle my way. It was slick with his sweat, but I was so heat-stunned I didn’t find that gross. “Someone’s been leaving the infrared generator on all night while I’ve been away,” he declared. “The thing is, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not burning away the atmosphere.”

“How true.” I squinted, recalling a dinner party where everyone left the candles burning in their haste to go watch fireworks -- and returned to blazing curtains. “Where is the shed?” I asked.

“A little way ahead.”

As I dragged the glowing ball over my shoulder, my back was bathed in warmth while overall the sky darkened from blue to navy blue. Goosebumps arose on my sweat-glazed neck and front arms.

I felt nervous, as if I’d been handed the leash on a stranger’s Rottweiler. I had to move this humongous blob like a heavy hot-air balloon controlled by very long leads. Although much diminished in intensity, its radiance still made the muscles around the bottom of my eyes -- you know, that “bags under the eyes” muscle, the obicularis oculi -- ache to look at it.

“Does it go in the shed every night?” I asked, forcing my eyes away from the demonic disc to the weary-faced worker in his humble heat-resistant uniform. He looked like a black stick figure against the pyrotechnic platter, but up close I admired his stitched-on pockets, four-holed buttons, and embroidered name patch. Sol.

“No,” he said. “Once in a while, before things burn to a crisp.”

Gratitude swept through me with such force I felt nauseous. I kept it in check, though. No sense getting weird, right?

When I looked around again, I saw another person approaching, silhouetted against the scorching circle. I’m reaching for comparison here -- but he looked sort of like J.S. Bach. A portly older guy who wore an elaborate white powdered wig, a floppy neck scarf, and jacket and breeches. Definitely not of this century or even the last.

“Guten abend, Herr Doktor Fahrenheit,” Sol said, bowing.

Herr Fahrenheit had a red sunburned face and eyes clouded by glaucoma, but, like an old blind dog, he turned with alacrity toward a friendly voice. They exchanged a few words in German and then the gentleman continued on his way.

Sol sighed, shook his head, and said to me, “You see why I drag the miserable monster into a shed from time to time?”

I squinted. The incendiary sphere was pulsating now, Zeus’s disco inferno, but I suspected this might be related to the effects of heat on me. “Are we getting close?” I whispered.

 “Oh yes,” he said, “and you are pulling the load of lava better than I ever could.”

We reached the crest of another hill, and from that I looked down on the largest Quonset hut I had ever seen. I hesitated, looking back at the molten spheroid. Although dimmer now, having gone from white-gold to rosy-gold to copper tones, it gave the impression of a round mass of molten coinage metal -- and the prefab hut looked laughably cheap and far too rickety to contain such grandeur.

Yet, we marched toward it.

The Quonset door was like a barn door, on a sliding mechanism, and Sol pushed it open for me. After three tries I retracted the telescopic handle and simply let the gargantuan globe roll inside. It immediately lit up every nook and cranny. The earth trembled slightly.

The sun came to rest in front of a large statue of a big, fat baby covered head to toe with thick black oil. Texas crude.

“This is Junior,” the weary man said with muted pride.

What I thought was a statue was in fact this massive dude who began to move, rubbing his belly, lifting his man boobs, luxuriating in the heat and the oil. He dipped his fat fingers in the puddle of Texas crude and from the end of his fingers flung droplets of oil that hit the solar surface and flared, releasing puffs of billowing gray smoke.

I began to choke and wheeze on the smoke. Shadows around the perimeter of the hut drew forward -- I saw they were very thin people covered with soot.

They drew nearer and nearer and soon I couldn’t catch my breath. I collapsed, awakening as Isaac called my name.

The End