The Heat





He jumped into the futon bed, and spread the towel across his forehead and scalp to absorb all the sweat. But the sweat ran down his forehead, jaws, right down to his chin, down to his sternum and absorbed only partially by his t-shirt that was already soaking wet. So the sweat ran on tiny little streams around his stomach and chest tingling him, and giving the impressions of tactile hallucinations, like insects were crawling over his skin.
The weather lady on the set of his non-high-definition TV, in a beige pant suit that was already too hot for the southland, waved her hand across their high -definition shot of the map, and showed the arm of the Doppler mega radar sweeping its radius, showing no traces of colors green and blue, which would have indicated patches of rain. But no, there weren’t any rain in the 200 miles radius, and only a fool would have expected rain around here. Neither rain nor hurricanes visited here- no windmills, no wheat field, no jungles, nothing but same, same same.
Everything felt as unbearable as the mini-malls, the cul-de-sacs, the many, many pale apartment buildings. Even the heat felt man-made, like there was a huge furnace somewhere, underneath the concrete and asphalt. Somebody’s mistake for having made and leaving it there. Or made and left by an alien ship. There was something hurried and inhuman about it.
Instead the non-high- definition set showed all shades of orange and ruby red- the colors of sizzle dominated the screen, and even if your eyes were close- you’d still sense the colors flaring up the room with their intensity and verve, like wild fires were exploding the spaces. And the rooms were lit by this fiery angry red, which why the weather lady was dressed hot too. The air conditioners had to compensate for the heat outside instead, and it must have been chilly around the station, and he thought he could hear its humming through the microphone which sat like a jewel on her jacket’s lapel.
He opened his eyes to her 7 day forecast and it was all the same, temperatures in the 3-digits across the southland- like a continuous bad temperament, or the climate turned to a rabid dog: “ The high pressures dominate the region”- so she said, as an explanation everyone should, ought to understand. A little bit of weather- people- talk.
He thought of calling his girlfriend, asking her to come and nurse him back to health. He not-unconsciously regarded her as responsible for what ailed him. Had she not left a half-smoked cigarette in an old coffee mug pretending to be an ash tray- he wouldn’t have lit it just to inhale its Menthol wake of a smoke, which had struck his left lung like a serpent, and wounded his lung so badly now that it hurt each time he raised his head above the sea level of his thin mattress. He would cry in pain, grinding his teeth- that’s how bad his lung tissues had been burned.
So, yes he thought she should come over and nurse him back to health. But she, in her furlough, snappish way of talking, the way she relegated unwonted ideas to the back of her mind, and then away- and with her flatness of affect, which was an irritating mark of her, had said: ‘But you know if I catch what you have, I’ll be in bed for six months.’ But it had sounded so callous, so indifferent to him there and then. And she had said it so plainly as though reading it from the real estate section of the Times that he had struggled to forgive himself for asking her in the first place. But then, reading, or for that matter writing , weren’t some of her strong holds. For the same reading and writing test that had inspired a career counselor to call his academic advisor with some exuberance and good news, would have been a flattening sound in her wake.
But despite this, she made twice as much money as he made in one year. Something she had been quick to question and compare. His answer had sparked her brown eyes for one receding moment, the way one takes pleasure in something from outside in, like on the surface of things, something glittering and in passing. But what a self-important careerist she had been. Never mind that, he didn’t like to pause on things like that. Onward.
He had met her one year ago to be exact. In a yellow dusty October day like this day. They had met at a Holloween party he had attended only too reluctantly. His friend had talked him into coming, just so because he hated aloneness, like it was a heavy awful weight, and he wanted to distribute it by talking him into its sharing. But he hadn’t been much of a help, he wasn’t too social to begin with. And to rescue one from aloneness, well, that was a full plate..
He had noticed her, right away. How could he not. She was dressed in a costume that what was anything but scary. A large chiffon flourishing skirt, bright and blue, spread all around her like a lake almost. And her silk-like blouse, in the 50’as style, sparkled too, like she was supposed to be a swan sitting on her lake. All taut, and organized, upheld, and shiny. She clearly had spent some time over it. And a pair of red pumps stood on her feet, stuck out like two minor boats, she leaned on them like railings.
He couldn’t help but stare at her. She looked both triumphant, and timid, occupying a space where she should both be stared at, and left to her own devices. It was as though the party must revolve around her, but without occupying her borders. And when he persisted in his gaze, she returned it with a curious and appraising smile, that was admonishing a bit too. For he wasn’t dressed for Halloween, and she was. She’d taken it seriously, while he was startled by how seriously she had taken it. Did she work in that downtown spire?
“Who is she supposed to be?’ He asked his friend not- unfondly.
“Well that’s supposed to be Dorothy.”
“Who is Dorothy?” He didn’t know any of this-she was dressed as though from a page off a cartoon book, nothing scary, just elaborate and exhausting. “Does she work here too?”
“Oh, that’s Pam, she works on the 5th floor.”
“What does that mean.”
“The 5th floor is the computer folks, they do cartoons and Shrek-like stuff. Video games for kids.”
“Can you introduce me?”
“I don’t really know her well…!”
“They say, she wins the first prize for the best costume every year though.”
“Who says, you’ve only been at this job, one month?”
“My office-mate says.”
“What floor, are you guys on?”
“You know what floor, the 11th, you just came by, for Gods’ sake.”
He was right. From a distance the building had looked like a bunch of dark mattresses piled on top of one another. Something like the cube in: 2001: The Space Odyssey. Dark and mournful. His friend had started to grow chin whiskers, and was fussy about them. He continued to watch himself in the reflections of things, the windows, the metal food-ware. He’d said, it made him look older, more distinguished. Fitting the two-thousand- dollar suit, he’d helped him pick. The same way he’d asked for his help with aloneness. He’d asked for help in shopping. He’d urged him to buy the expensive Armani suit. Light fabric, with heavy shoulders. He now felt guilty for talking him into it. It didn’t look much different from the two-hundred-dollar-suit everyone else was wearing. For moments he stared at his friend while he was making the rounds, talking to other suits who stood around, brazen and sharp, like a group of birds sitting, raising their heads, craning , looking as though hard of seeing, and hearing. Cautious, half-scared things. His friend looked suddenly older to him. Different from their days of old in the graduate school. Days when they had sat across sticky tables many times, never looking different, almost as though never aging. Never growing old. Never. How he looked different now, from the detached distance of this conference room turned into a party- room, a few jack-o-lanterns, plastic, and glowing, planted by secretaries who took it all seriously too. His friends hairline was receding, his puffy young face deflated a bit, like the air had been leaking from it like a balloon.
Suddenly his friend turned around and looked at him cautiously. As if his stare had burned a trace through the air-conditioned room like a comet, and had struck him oddly. He was just returning the felt stare. Oh, how embarrassing it felt. He felt guilty at being caught staring at him measuring him critically. But then it occurred to him that he was really looking at his own image, aging through the mirror of his friend’s face. That felt too tragic, but less embarrassing. His friend seemed fond of his new job. The MBA had made a grown up of him. He fit into its skin. In only one month, he had become one of them. His friends’ agility surprised him now. Pliant like a soaked in water birch tree. Upstanding.
The dark glasses façade of the building bent the yellowish rays of the sun into the conference room, and made it so gloomy despite the powerful above- the-head parade of lights. He turned to look at the girl, no the woman, she looked womanly in her cartoonish costume, a woman, dressed as a child, he thought. She glowed in the light in a fluorescent shade that made it all too comic, and transitory. He wanted to know her though. She was just then smiling at someone. White white smile. Perfect teeth. He moved toward her in a sheepish way. He didn’t want to startle her in her apparent glory. She looked like a huge doll, made up and ready, a neo-plastic woman breathing, shining. She looked beautiful and shrill to him. When he reached her point in the room, he felt as though he’d crossed some chasm. She looked as though she had expected him all along. Again a white heart-shaped smile, absolutely innocent and convincing. As if the distant plastic, unreal look had been a momentary thing, like an after-thought. She looked so real. Her skin slightly dull with aging, and two circles underneath her eyes. Circles that sat brooding, like they had to compensate somehow for her childish costume. She looked every bit a woman, somewhat around his own age, in her early thirties. When he reached her vicinity, where he could be heard above all the big rooms chatter and noise, he nodded his head toward her as if about saying something harmless like: “I am so and so”. Or: “ I am a friend of so and so”. Bur just as he bent his head toward her in some innocuous gesture, she turned and looked at him with a curious, and enterprising look. But also as if he had come as a soldier and she was about to issue her orders. And her orders were that he should feel friendly, non-threatened, he should set foot in her nearness and be bold even. That’s what he’d thought of her gesture. And almost instantly they began a conversation that was clear and non-muffled, almost as if the noise of the room wasn’t. And a private world existed in between them. A private world that he thought now, in his unhappy illness- had existed in between them like love. And for an entire year, for every minute and second of it. They’d come to feel the absence of time. And now suddenly his illness, which was because of her habit of smoking (so, he thought. )-- had turned things upside down. The seclusion they had felt and practiced for one year: was about to come undone. All her virtues, he suddenly seemed blinded to. All her vices shined like scars.
Now that he was draped across his cheap futon bed. As the sweat stood one inch thick on his skin. As she’d cruelly said she never would share its travail with him. He seemed not to remember the rest of their courtship. Well there was no memory of it now. His head felt crammed with noises that must have escaped from dreams for one moment-- the nightmares for another. He didn’t dare to listen to their noise, it was as if several radio stations had been wired into his brain. Was this music or just noise. Was it an angel that visited or the devil himself. Was he in some hellish paradise, or at the gates of hell. He thought he has pneumonia, cholera, a plague surely. He wouldn’t survive this, he was almost certain. But he would never call her. He would change his phone numbers. Let go of the fashionable cell phone. He never could afford it anyhow. But how reasonable it had seemed, both of them in some faked and feigned form of touch and nearness. (Had it been so false?) The pages and pages of text messages they each had invented, that had been the highlights of each exhaustive almost doldrums day. Where time had been able to stand still. The seclusion a temporary heaven from the seclusion. The heat a mere irritation.
The heat seemed now to envelop everything in sight. To change the shape and form of things for good. Everything was becoming oblong in the way light had turned on itself. he felt like running out of everything at once: breaths, memories, wits and words. How long had he been sick? It felt like a year, but it was more like ten, twelve days. He was trapped in time, like an animal is trapped and is wounded by a snare, and time was gathering more and more speed, dislodging him from himself. He craved liquids, watery things, anything that was running like sap. He wanted to be a plant. Standing, Resilient. Not draped over, supine, disappearing into the folds of a mattress.
She hadn’t come by in the entire time. She’d said she didn’t want to catch whatever he had. But wasn’t that an injustice, after a year of love and stillness? He was embarrassed to call his friend. In the past year there had been no need for him. He hadn’t kept up with him. They hardly called one another more than once a month. Each imagined the other to be too busy with rudimentaries of life. He had imagined his friend a newly born, but oddly aging thing. Something that reminded him of himself, but in an irritating way. He earned too much money in a downtown financial firm. Buying more suits, and a new car that was glossy and produced too much of a noise and lift. In a city where cars were extensions of peoples’ beings. His friend looked as though moving toward that peaceful, hopeful space with more speed than him. This was one of the illusions that held the entire city captive. And the friend had secretly envied his finding of love and its blessing. He was somewhat unconsciously aware of the love’s giving. And what he were to do? Every night he arrived at his apartment from the job downtown exhausted and unable to make time for another. The friends had slowly grown apart. As far as one knew the other was safely in the arms of love, or gainful work. The job must have kept his friend safe and happy. Like a new car would. Wouldn’t it? What an affront these suppositions had been?
On the 12th of the illness, the sun still strobed its painful rays pass the blinds and onto his bed. He wasn’t sure why he was ill. Bacteria and cold viruses grew less in the heat. Didn’t they? He was still aware of facts and things, somewhat. And the emergency room was too far for him, and they would needle and prod him. And it wasn’t like he’d been wounded by a gun-shot. The stuff of emergency rooms. They would ridicule him if he went. And he still had half –a- bottle of Tylenol. And it would hold for him.
The temperatures refused to inch downward. The high pressures stayed in the cloudless sky, like the mouth of a beast had been held opened. And it would swallow the atmosphere with it. Something was wrong with the heat. There were times when you expected the southland to sizzle in three-digit degrees. But it was almost the end of October. The autumn was officially 20 days old? The TV set had remained on the same weather station. He couldn’t be bothered to change it.
On the 14th day of his illness. He ran out out of Tylenol. And the headaches were so severe that he couldn’t open his eyes in the light of the day. So he stayed in a hazy form of sleep or unconsciousness during the days. He would only become conscious in the middle of night when the temperatures dived in to late 80’s. He would suddenly open his eyes in the false-coolness of night, to catch a glimpse of his TV screen. And whether he was hallucinating or not- the redness on the weather map was spread northward, across the northern cities. The map was one large red burning thing. The draught-inflamed maps’ colors startled him. The lady in the pant suit was replaced by a man in a shiny suit. Dressed like an older gigolo, all shiny light-reflecting fabrics, like a boy in ribbons and ties-the announcer said he was certified by the American Meteorological Society. What did it all mean? Something like hope and prophesy, he was both scared and indignant.
The man in the suit casually, but sternly talked about the melting ice formations. He fussed as though secretly delighted by all the problems the weather was causing, the way one becomes self-important about a grievance. His fever took him in and out of comprehension of all this. And his mind was elaborating, and repeating every piece of warning: ‘Deadly dozen’ diseases likely to spread due to climate change.
The sentences and others invented by his febrile head would repeat themselves like an itch over and over again. His head now lied on a wet pillow all day and night. The wetness felt as though his head was in waters. As if his head was leaking, and he would wake up startled thinking he was being drawned
On the 16th day of his illness, he stopped raising his head above to look at the colors at night on his TV set. His phone began to ring at odd hours, but his mind was plugged into some outlet that only buzzed in circles of high noise, shrills, and repeated sentences in the voice of the man in the suit. Repeating unexhaustively: Climate changes. Ice is melting. Diseases spead. He felt too weak to move. Too startled to hang on to anything, least of all outwardly sounds. Words started to become just sounds, drilling sounds, sounds of drops of water escaping him, he felt parched shrunk.
On the 18 day of his illness. He stayed unconscious repeating all forms of sounds. And he felt so tiresome that he escaped becoming awakened even though the door downstairs began to pound conspicuously. Someone was banging on the iron security door repeatedly. But it was just a startled sound in a nightmare to him. Even if his brain could manage to hear it consciously. He hadn’t the energy to consider its reality.

On the 20th day of illness his heart, already slowed down. Stopped to beat. A noiseless leaf, self-buried.

On the 22 day of his illness, the neighbors aroused by the smell of decay, despite its dominance already in the weather,- but its sharpened stench elevated, like boils on a skin,- managed to have the landlord open he door and climb in.

On the evening of the 22 day of his illness. In the evening the white van of the coroners office stopped by the apartment,- on the heat-filthy street-to pick up what remained of him.

On the 3oth day of autumn, the wild fires burned 780 acres of brush fire, mobile homes, and garages, Calrans buildings. The flames jumped over the Ronald Reagan freeway, and were finally stopped on the edges of a wealthy subdivision, where cats and dogs and horses were shown being slowly led out. Like the mouth of the sky had wanted to parch their skins in its forces of gray. The humans gathered in the local high school’s gym, where smoke squeezed tears out of their eyes. Where they watched the fires on TV sets, numbed and languid, the day of luckless had arrived. The light of the earth came out like squeezed out of its eyelids. There was nothing sudden, nor light-hearted, everything seemed to be making itself, with obvious poverty.

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