Heat Wave

Sarah kept books at her feet, some stacked and others lined up, slouching toward the floor like fallen dominoes. She lived in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment with no buzzer and rarely any visitors. It wasn’t messy so much as devoid of furniture, apart from a couple of low-slung wooden chairs, four wine crates for a table, her mattress, and quite a few pale-colored pillows scattered about, on which she might read a favored novel, something wry and dramatic.

If she was home in a summer storm she opened the living room windows and sat with red wine, watching her curtains blow inward and her windowsills grow slick and shiny from the wet wind. How wonderfully ominous, she felt, a sudden gust, the flutter of a white curtain, like someone had deserted the place in a rush. Flying down the four flights.

—

In the city, rain smelled like fried fish and grease. But if you let your books get wet on the floor from the wide-open windows, you could inhale their damp edges in the morning and smell that other rain, the leafy kind she thought she remembered, though she’d always lived here, far from fertile soil.

She didn’t mind pages warped by water. You could hear waves if you turned them slowly, the muddy shoreline creeping toward the spine. She didn’t mind spills of wine or whiskey. She found stains on carpets that friends tried to hide, nudging a suspicious ottoman aside with her big toe and saying, “What happened there?” Even a little story from her friend Cora—“Oh, Sam had too much to drink the night old Windsor died”—was worth uncovering.

Sarah had always been drawn to disaster: the heel stuck in the sidewalk crack, umbrella inverted, face contorted, her mother yelling, “Goddamn your father!” She stared openly as a child, wondering if she, too, could one day do all that. She was too cute in a poncho, with no perm yet to flatten in the rain. When she fumed it was childish, if she cried it was vain. Older, she imagined it might be properly tragic, that she would expand to fill such moments: “Goddamn my father!” Wavy, wet hair in her eyes and stuck to her forehead, maybe.

But by adulthood she’d never quite stepped into the limelight, wouldn’t stomp her own foot or cry out. When was there time to be on display? Others’ scores took precedence, their private sores were revealed for the wide-eyed and watching; she couldn’t look away. She even found herself, on occasion, suddenly changing her route to follow a heated exchange. “Don’t you ever!” “What can you not understand?” Or else the city followed her. She’d come home recently to find a middle-aged woman sprawled across her building’s stoop, nearly unconscious. “You got to help me,” the woman slurred when she finally registered Sarah’s presence, though she’d been standing there for many long minutes, trying in vain to announce herself. “You got to help me out of here.”

“Where are you going to?” She said it flatly, but not unkindly, she thought—an attempt to keep the calm.

“I’m a vet, lady,” the woman said, her face changing. Sarah imagined she had said this many times that night. On the front of her gray t-shirt were the words ONE FOR ALL in rainbow colors and a large wet spot across the collar.

She tried to stand but lost her footing, so Sarah grabbed her arm. It was warm and fleshy, but jerked away from Sarah’s grip with surprising strength. “Don’t touch me!” she yelled. Sarah helped her again anyway, until she settled on her feet. It was an intimate, joint effort. “You’re too good,” she said, before drooping, defenseless, back down to the stoop. “I’m not from…I don’t live around here.” She smelled like sunscreen and gin. Her knees were bleeding a little, like she’d fallen. She touched them with both palms and then extended her hands up to Sarah like she was looking for an explanation.

“Can I call someone for you?”

“No!” She held her cropped head in her bloody hands. Her mouth seemed like an unpleasant, sticky place to be as she opened and closed it with some effort. She looked at Sarah like they were old friends that had reached this point of the conversation before and said, “You know?” Sarah didn’t want to call the cops because she knew they’d take the woman in, so she sat with her for an hour while the woman shook her head and muttered what was probably the gist of a series of long stories: “What can I do?” or “Horrible, horrible.” And then she’d look at Sarah.

“I know,” Sarah said many times.

Eventually the woman walked away, just up one minute and away, walking a jagged line until she turned a corner. Sarah missed her immediately.

It was back up the cliff to her cave, to the wait for low pressure that breaks the heat. A week with no wind through her curtains, no echo of the churning sea. Down for work, out to the fish place, over to friends’ apartments, always others’ apartments, after a meal or a movie. Sam made cocktails and Cora rearranged—their ground-floor railroad a realm of rotating kitsch—before descending on a shared backyard with their dripping drinks. It was stifling. Sarah knew she’d be up all night, had a crime novel picked out for later. A baby cried somewhere nearby and a driver called out, “Let’s go!”

Sam was a serious man, political, often had a piece of the newspaper folded under his arm and a question on the tip of his tongue. He had a way of cutting off Cora, who had a way of going on for too long about whatever it was they’d just seen.

“Oh, it was just a thriller, Cora, nothing more. Look at poor Sarah, here, hasn’t said anything for hours.”

“Not true,” said Sarah. She had followed the sound of the baby’s cries to the second story of a house behind theirs and one over.

“You know, I thought of you this week,” Sam went on. “I read this article related to your work.”

Sarah doubted it. “About store fixtures?”

“Well, no, it was about automation and the job market. But I figured it applied to, you know, your field. Logistics?”

Sarah met these two at a community meeting with their councilman a couple years back. Everyone else at those packed and muggy meetings wanted to lobby for a new stoplight or computers for a local P.S., but Sam put forth Big Questions for the fun of it while his fellow citizens sharpened their points. Sarah was drawn to their bigness, then, and Cora’s long reach for a metaphor, so she chose the folding chair next to them when others began to desert it.

“Do you think automation will break the middle class?” he said.

Two years is a long time for a friendship, Sarah thought. Long enough to be sitting in that chair.

“What, like A.I.?” asked Cora.

“Yeah, sure, vision-guided robots,” he replied. “Making goods and packing them up. Higher efficiency, fewer jobs—right Sarah?”

On the one hand she appreciated it, him making an effort to give her the floor. He was an investigator for the public defender, she a working actress—they always had so many topical stories to share, such funny, scary, sad material that Sarah sat back and absorbed. But the expectation to have an opinion on this subject made Sarah feel adrift, because she didn’t and Sam obviously did, in spite of it being “her field.” Was it? Technology, industry, the future economy—they didn’t drive her thoughts. She managed warehouse operations for a regional wholesale company—shelving for pharmacies, displays for shoe stores—and didn’t sit at work asking herself if the forklift operator would be like a Luddite pushed aside by Smith’s invisible hand. The forklift operator was just a guy named Judd. Poor Judd. He had a mysterious limp left over from an old job. She’d admit she imagined obsessively the gruesome injury that could have caused it, but never how he’d survive in the gig economy.

“Maybe,” she decided. “But people always find a way to add value.”

“Like complex communication,” said Cora, nodding. “Picking up on social cues.”

“Computers will be able to do that,” said Sam. Better than you, thought Sarah.

“Applying their past experience,” Cora tried.

“And definitely that,” he said. “Better than any of us.”

Anyway, the second story window was heating up: the baby was crying like crazy. Its screams grew hoarse and ragged. Horrible, horrible. Other voices rose to join them. Bodies came in and out of the light.

“Seeking robot with great people skills and at least two years of experience,” Sam said. “You’ll see it on Craigslist, believe me.”

“Believe me,” Cora mocked.

“Is it always this bad?” Sarah asked. They followed her eyes upward.

Sam finished his drink. “Oh, that? I suppose it’s gotten worse.”

“Is this the worst?” Sarah wondered, abandoning her chair. She walked over mangled brush toward the back of the yard and crept close to the fence they shared with the child’s parents, listening in the shadows now to unabashed yelling, peaking at words like “quiet” and “stop” and “don’t” and “rid,” mingled with that red, raw sound.

“Sarah, what’re you doing?” Cora asked. Sarah didn’t look back. She pushed through the gate in the fence, sure that the screams of the child sounded wrong. With none of her usual stealth, she climbed the stairs that led to the apartment in question, a moth to more than a flame—an eruption!

Sarah’s head throbbed with the discord of it, her pulse and their fury in her ears, until she was level with the window, standing uninvited on an unknown porch, looking in on a young family’s Friday night. Then she wasn’t sure what she heard but the sharp hiss of her name from below.

“Sarah!”

On the other side of the glass a ruffled schnauzer lay cowering in one corner, its bum tucked under the couch, with a broad, scowling man standing over it, wearing only a bath towel. Puffs of white fuzz—the innards of what must have once been a plush toy—littered the burgundy carpet, leading to the lacerated body across the room, a bunny or a mule. A woman in nursing scrubs held a boy tightly near the stuffed animal’s corpse. He cried so hard that his little body had to force him to take breaths, so that then he could cry some more. The man caught sight of Sarah at the same time as the schnauzer, which darted toward the window and began scratching at the glass and jumping in furious circles. The man bellowed, “What the fuck is this? Can I help you?” The woman in scrubs screamed at him not to curse.

Sarah studied the spectacle for one last moment before racing back down the stairs and into Sam and Cora’s yard. They looked just as baffled as the strangers by her presence. She could hear a screen door slam behind her as the man came outside in his towel to see where she went. Sarah rushed past her two friends and into their crowded kitchen, ramming her knee into a side table she didn’t see. She fell to the linoleum and pulled her leg toward her, scrunching up her face to match the pain. Blood leaked through her gauzy, white skirt. “Mind your own damn business!” she heard, and “Sorry!” “Don’t know what got into our friend!” She thought of what it would look like walking the long way home with a knee dripping blood, a skirt stained red like a special victim.

She must have had an odd expression on her face. “What in the hell is funny?” Sam said, over Cora’s attempt at “What’s wrong?” She had seen Sam lose his temper before; he used to yell at their dog, old Windsor, like it understood English. But he saw Sarah was hurt and kept hold of his anger. Cora got ice and a bandage while Sam stood there blinking, just dumb blinking at her like a robot with poor people skills, like she didn’t compute. He cleaned his glasses and searched for something rational to say. Ask me anything, thought Sarah—make it personal! He found nothing, gave up, got his computer and another drink. “I’m sorry,” Sarah said. Cora was so gentle, the way she lifted Sarah’s skirt just so, like her modesty was at stake. She even started to hum, a melancholy sound. “I really thought something was going on up there,” Sarah said to her with urgency, trying to catch her eye. She felt that if they would just sit with her on the floor for a minute, right then, there was a great knot they were bound to unravel. But the minutes passed. They weren’t going to discuss it; at least, not with her. She imagined Cora tidying after she left: checking for the smallest drop, finding someplace new for the side table. Sam asking, “Do you think it’s more nature or nurture with her?”

Sarah wrote Cora a paragraph of apology the next day—“Something’s up with me, it’s the heat”—and got an immediate, short response: “Don’t worry about it!” The ease with which it was fired off made it terribly impersonal, though she was sure Cora thought her promptness was kind. The knot tightened. I have other friends, Sarah thought. She hung the bloodied skirt in her closet for anyone or no one to see, and wondered if she might run into Cora one day, walking with her son or daughter, humming a melancholy tune.

Under a grey sky, Sarah took a long, hot walk to the water, passing rows and rows of window units. She thought of calling her mother, but no, her theatrics were better witnessed in person, she got distracted on the phone, always stopped herself midsentence to ask Sarah, “what’s that noise?” People filled in the streets by the pier. She thought of buying an ice cream cone and letting it drip down her hands to her elbows.

At the end of the dock were a few crowded benches above the rocks where the seagulls didn’t flinch. Sarah left a trail of vanilla spots behind her. She sat down next to a burly man and a stocky woman with short, cropped hair wearing a gray, graphic t-shirt with AND ALL FOR ONE written on the back in rainbow colors. The woman made room, gave Sarah an unknowing smile, and continued a slow conversation with her friend about the cool ocean breeze “back home.” Sarah stared at them, taking long licks of her ice cream, making a mess of herself. She almost laid her head on the woman’s shoulder, but a sudden, merciful gust put her right, and soon it started to rain.