The ride home from work gives you armpits like lagoons and the mossy smell of laundry demands near-constant washing even though the stifling wet breath of the dryers reminds you of the half-dozen or so old people who die each summer. Fewer than in the winter, it’s true, but with a quicker smell. Cooling stations are set up in libraries, community centres, and City Hall, and the buses are full of women in cardigans older than your grandmother whose powdery-fine skin melts off like vanilla ice cream. People are fined for leaving their pets in parked cars and corner stores put up paper signs demanding you leave the fridge doors closed until you’ve decided exactly what you want. The radio urges you not to exercise outdoors and, if you can, to avoid leaving the house if you have respiratory problems. You wear as little as possible, sweat soaking into the tag of your underwear and the rim of your shoe, washing through your hair. Your bike meets your body like a foot in a sofa. Dogs walk slower than their owners and midnight is the first time of day when you might be able to breathe easily. Condensation drips down the side of your beer glass so quickly you’re wary of ordering pitchers in case they boil before you can finish them. On the worst nights you climb the stairs to the flat part of your friend’s roof and weight a sheet with bricks on one side so that it doesn’t blow away when you kick it off in your sleep. Everybody is looking for relief.
Going to bed with someone for the first time, a dance of avoidance and insane lust. The layer you reveal after your shirt peels off and before your bra, an onionskin of sweat and perfume and the breath of all the other people in the club, dancing all night in this weather because Friday night comes fifty-two times a year (sometimes more) and doesn’t care about the temperature. Your fingers slip onto his arms and you tighten your grip in case the humidity expands you away from each other. A good season for the bashful, you never feel naked enough, rubbing at your second skin of moisture, never able to remove it. Then again, you never felt so naked, everything pushing through your pores in drops through a coffee filter. Nothing to hide behind in this weather. A constant film surrounding both of you, getting in between your bodies so that you bounce off each other like opposing magnets and leave handprints against the wall that can’t evaporate immediately. You sweat onto his face and it slides down the side of his nose and if he laughs it goes into his mouth.
Not yet. Before that.
What precedes that. What precedes it—cigarettes that you could hold against the sidewalk to light but use matches because it’s quicker. Money that smells like bodies, bodies that smell like money. The woman behind the bar lingers with her face in the beer fridge a few seconds longer than necessary, handing you the ice cold bottle. Your friend holds hers against the back of your neck and you swear to god you could have an orgasm just like that. The man who takes your money at the door holds out his cupped palm for bills gone liquid in the heat. You could eat out the back of someone’s knee in this weather. Dehydration comes up the sides of everybody’s throat and on stage a man drinks two pints of beer and five pints of water, his shirt changing from grey and loose to black and clingy, hair stuck to his temples and guitar coated wet.
The asphalt of the alleyway is hot under your shoes, you move like dancing bears in old circuses, your rings flying if you shake your hands too quickly. All the hot dog vendors go home early or don’t come out at all, standing before an open fire becomes a form of torture. Leaves are so still in the windless air you think the trees are eavesdropping. Wood of window frames swells and forces the panes to stay up until they are rammed back down in September; the whole street eats sleeps fucks in the open air and you simply become part of the chorus.
This is no weather for humans, you say and think. Not even for animals. This is no weather for living things. This is killing weather. (These are the exact words you will use in January and February.)
Whenever the rain finally comes it will blow right into your room, bash against your desk and soak all the papers and notes that have been left lying there since the last time you did anything resembling work, weeks and weeks ago; they form a white and black background for the layers of concert tickets, bag of pot and roaches, coins, phone numbers, lighters, condoms, hair elastics, matchbooks, eyeliner that always melts off by the second song, watches salt-stained from your wrist.
That’s enough of what precedes it. Now what comes after it. Waking up in the morning with your hair matted on the back of your head, too hard to detangle so you leave it and it slowly turns into two fat dreadlocks your roommate will cut out at the end of the summer. The sheets turn grey, or beige, depending on what colour they started as after only one night. The blanket lies among dust on the floor, not to be picked up for weeks, a single sheet enough to cover you. The smell of the night came into the room with you, the exhaust from a hundred bodies crowding up in the corners of the ceiling where it never sleeps but watches, waiting for you.
The layer of air immediately below, the smells are softer now, more understanding. It rolls by, dragging the clock hands back so that you can have four hours of complete sleep before the alarm rings. It tidies the floor, unravels your socks so you can put them on again without feeling the dampness, spreads out the arms of your t-shirt so that it too can dry. Sucks out the cigarette smoke with its tiny mouths so that your boss cannot tell you are wearing last night’s clothes.
The final layer is the one that rides the humps of your bodies and holds them close in its forty degree embrace, the air that stops your hand as it reaches out to slam the alarm clock silent with a solid wall of oven air that comes at your throat like hot stale coffee, wakes you up in a way like choking.
It is now 7:08 in the morning. The alarm has been blaring for eight minutes. Good morning. You click the noise away and he pushes a pillow over his head and goes back to sleep immediately. You dress quickly and pretend you cannot smell yourself. If the lunch rush today is good you can make enough to complete your rent and still go out tonight. I’ll call you on my break you write in black marker on his upper arm, hoping the sweat won’t smear it off if he rolls over. In nine hours you’ll be finished work and drinking beer on a patio of baking exposed wood. In thirteen hours you’ll be eating dinner on the rooftop of a restaurant, tipping extra because the waiter has to climb the stairs fifteen hundred times with fifteen thousand plates. In sixteen hours you’ll be paying money to squeeze yourself into a room that heats to scalding, being expelled out of it when the music stops, running to climb the chained fence and jump into the community centre pool with all your clothes on. Men with flashlights will shout out that the police have been called, too hot and tired to chase you away themselves, watching you escape in a flurry of drops like a shaking dog. In nineteen hours you’ll be back in this bed having the chlorine licked off you while you speak in one-word sentences.
This is how the days and nights go
