Poke the wound

Dispatches from a heat wave

Barcelona in a heat wave. Sweat rolls down my body beneath my loose-fitting dress—a secret, a bodily awareness so occupying that I lose my train of thought mid-sentence. I’m trying to be present but how can I be, when so absorbed in tracking the tickling descent of each droplet?

At night, to pass the time not sleeping in the suffocatingly hot bedroom, I make a mental inventory of all the times I’ve felt heat like this. I probe each memory, taking my time with each one, but why? They don’t make me feel cooler, that’s for sure. Maybe to convince myself that I can handle it? (I can’t—I will end up fainting on a train before we leave.) Maybe to find some splinter of information that might help me find relief? (Sleeping with an ice pack does help, actually.) No, I think it’s just to commiserate with myself. It is terrible now, and has been terrible before. Poke the wound.

Mallorca, Spain

A heat past hot—everything in the car melting, searing. Your body sounds a warning, like a depth charge in your overheated brain. It’s not that you’re lightheaded, or lethargic, or thirsty—it’s all of that and more. Every sensation is wrapped up into unshakable malaise that settles deep inside of you.

The nearby hills are a crisp brown. The distant ones are shades of haze. Both of them are motionless. Not even a shadow of a bird. The trees are very still, as if conserving energy. Everywhere there are tourists from milder climates—England, mostly—who are either bright or dark red. It’s hard to decide which one looks more painful, more alarming. This heat erases your edges. You are liquid, then evaporated.

Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia

There is no escape. The Australian bush, 1.5 hours down a dirt road of hardened red earth, to a shack with no electricity in the height of summer. The only place to hide is the deep, partially shaded porch. The shade on the porch is generous in square footage but poor in saturation. It’s barely there—a dove gray pallor on the weathered floorboards. There is nothing and nowhere to absorb the sun. The baked red earth reflects it, and the silver needles of the gum trees deflect it. Where is all this sun supposed to go? It seeps into your body, your lungs, your brain. It becomes too much effort to move.

There will be relief here, eventually. Night will fall, and the temperature will drop, but it will still be hot enough to have to sleep on the porch, beneath a sheet to protect yourself from bugs. At dawn the cockatoos will erupt, waking you long before you’re ready. Get up now, they say. You’ll be useless before long.

Savannah, Georgia

Heat like a shawl you pull around your shoulders. No, one of those floor-length sleeping bag coats. It has viscosity, heft. Middle of August, “pre-season” for the equestrian team, which means hours of every day spent dropping sweat onto the back of a sweat-drenched horse. The heat radiates upward from the horse’s withers so fiercely that the bottom of your chin burns hottest. The horse is the sun, but that can’t be right because the sun is also beating down from above. You’re trapped in the middle.

It’s only 10 am and someone says, “I feel like I’m riding around inside someone’s mouth.” You smile weakly at the person who said it. They smile weakly back. You send up a prayer to make it through this day, to make it back to your apartment where the air conditioning will be so cold you’ll shiver like you’re sick. You’ll pay for it when the electric bill comes (in fact you won’t be able to pay it and they’ll turn it off), but that’s a problem for another day.

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