The Crushing Heat

I would write about the heat but I can't remember it. I think it has scrambled my brain. I was just outside lobbing the wiffle to my son and it seemed to hover and swoon in the soupy air. His red bat whooshed around at what seemed like a fairly decent clip but I was only able to put this together in retrospect. At the time it seemed as if the ball left my hand, I experienced the heat in a timeless thoughtless vacuum, and then I was congratulating my son (my voice sounding just as it does on tape, the tone harsh and the enunciation marked by the timid sloppiness of a tongue-chewer. As if somehow these words were exiting my head without vibrating the bones of my skull) and chasing after the ball as it ticked down the asphalt.

The sun grappled and grabbed, it pulled me out of the shadows and into another senseless struggle, it crept slowly around corners and had at me all over again. I felt my only hope was to outlast it, to let the turning of the earth's mighty shoulders wrest me from its grasp, but by then it might be too late.

And after lunch I'd read, while lying on the sofa in the study, about some artist whose name I can no longer remember who created works of such ludicrous uselessness that I wanted to laugh out loud, his concepts being the sorts of ideas that a thousand gutter punks in a thousand crumbling industrial towns holding in a thousand bong hits in two thousand lungs have uttered with in fits of glassy inspiration. And as I dozed I was conscious of this huge pulsating day holding the house in its golden grip. And I thought that there was no way I would ever be an artist. Because I lacked this man's courage, the courage to bring these horrible concepts to light, the courage to stand by my abominations with such firmness and conviction that others began to believe, too. And in the end the only ones still laughing where the sweaty and heat-addled dilettantes, twitching on old sofas.

After I woke I went to the park where I threw tennis balls to my son and he hit them with an old racket of mine, broken in a fit of anger but still serviceable. The sun had turned the tennis court into a lightless sun, radiating heavy heat up through the soles of my shoes, up the blooming legs of my shorts, into my nostrils. Drops of sweat leaped from my body as if from a burning building. And my son shouted and hit the tennis balls with a dull ping. He was fine.

I went to buy sunglasses at the surf shop but was so stunned from the heat that I fell into the clerk and we did a clumsy dance in the narrow aisle. He was a local surfer -- quite good, I knew him from the lineup, and I did not know how to apologize, so I asked him if he'd been out recently, and we had a conversation which I not only don't remember now, but in which I only barely participated at the time. Someone shouted "gangster rap alert" and the clerk/surfer ran to the counter to turn down a song in which, I now realized, someone had been describing a profane episode involving massive gonads, anal sex, the final stages of turning a girl out. Two young towheaded children stood at the counter, staring up at the speakers with awed expressions. The store was cool and the racks of t-shirts and wetsuits looked so crisp and colorful that I thought I might stay a while. I sat on the wooden steps leading up to the board showroom and waited. With heat like this, there was no reason to hurry.