This heat, is the hot that is all encompassing, forever touching and licking you salty to saltier. It’s pore awakening, lung breaking, dripping, sticking, shrilling things like: “Don’t even look at me” sort of scorch. “Even your balls call it getting too close.” Ceiling fan spinning overhead mixing tepid air hot, just whirling the atmosphere dizzy. Sexy barely there outfits on bikes, shinny reflective surfaces wet your vision. Walkers, snail through the city streets being slowed by the gum stretching along relentlessly a pink string growing blacker with every slumbrous step, collecting all manner of memories with them.
It was a bright Saturday morning and there I was, a corduroyed butterball, warbling away in the back seat, my lazy eye lost in the middle distance of incipient stardom. Dad and I drove along Tecumseh Road to Ajax Lumber, parking next to the totem pole. Then it dawned on me: I was being kidnapped, sold into slavery or worse, sent to Mémé’s house in Vanier. That pole was the port-key, one touch of its bogus eagle-beak and a life of incessant embroidery, rosary recitations and unilingual servitude awaited me. Hell’s demons had nothing on grandma and Peanut, her Chihuahua.
Sunday sings a sleepy song. Southern exposure shoots shards of hot white flood-like brightness, blinding the portraits hung on Victorian plum walls. No dark shadows lurking, pure crisp lines dancing undisturbed over last night’s array of tossed lingerie and slightly sipped flutes of champagne whose sparkles fizzled their final pop hours ago. Dormant pools in finely cut crystal becomes alive. Refractions set ablaze a spectrum of color on a skin-toned landscape. It’s a tango, imprisoning a prism of color over flesh barely covered by slippery satin sheets. We ponder the method of this muse that shakes us awake, squinting.
Death passed me by that morning, sped right past the Market knocking the generator into my wheel and tossing me into the traffic on Front Street. Or so I was told, because all I recall was the unearthly clatter, then nothing—no darkness, no light, just nothing at all till I found myself coming back to my senses and already walking around. And so I doubt now I’ll even notice death when it finally does come, just the last thing that happens before, like the last thing you remember before falling asleep, except this time you won’t be waking up.
The humidifier burbled away in the corner and I stamped the sticky February slush off my desert boots and onto her Chat Noir doormat. It was the oddest place for a reading, an albino’s dorm room. I met her in Anthro and rumour had it that this enormous blancmange of a woman had the power, a peaked seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. She settled back onto her tiny bed and peeled bits of skin off her cankle. I handed her $20 and cut the cards. Holding them nose-distance from her eyes she told me that I would die young.
I’ve always been a crier. A loud, gavalte, snot-filled blubberer. Last summer, I wailed and held my stomach for twelve hours during the gut-wrenching coach ride back from Folkestone to Winchester. The lure of cheap Cadburys and the lull of incessant English chirping did little to relieve the hell of motion sickness, a susceptibility forged as an unbelted toddler roaming the backseat of a smoke-filled and suspension-challenged Desoto. Nobody came near me on that bus. No offers of tea or tissues. It could have been because I was the only French-speaker on the Battlefield Tour, but I don’t think so.
It was too cold to stand outside so Dan and I watched through the garden door. The moon was so high that to view it we had to lay on our backs and shoulder to shoulder like boxed toy soldiers, looking up. I told him how his Pépé tinted a pane of glass with candle smoke so that I could safely witness a solar eclipse. Together we watched until the blood moon covered all but a tiny fingernail’s worth of light. My son’s reward was a shooting star at 3 am; mine came when he agreed to keep me company.
Believe it or not, but when you grow up in New Jersey, there comes a point when New York City loses its allure and becomes just another place for school trips, birthday parties, or maybe a family outing to the Museum of Natural History in your father’s nicotine-stained Oldsmobile.
My dad was okay, I guess; but I never really did see him much. He went in on the train every morning before I got up and usually came home after bedtime. He did tell me once about his office building and promised to take me there and buy me lunch in the fancy restaurant at the top for my birthday, but he never did. And you know what? I thought those explosions were really cool, but one of the big kids at recess said to shut up, and I told him to shut up because my father was dead.
