By Greg Sanders
L. sat at home listening to an audio cassette he’d received from his girlfriend, K., as a farewell – as a kind of adieu, see you later but no guarantees, Buster, and don’t bother trying to find me. He sat alone in the darkness not out of solipsism, but because it was mid-August in New York City and there was a blackout. Naked, L. sat at his desk wearing his Walkman listening to K.’s voice at the lowest possible volume to conserve the batteries, but still he got a certain kick out of it when they finally did begin to die, for she could drone on for so long, and this being her supposedly final message to him, what he imagined would be her pithy observations of his flawed character, the encapsulation of everything she’d imagined they’d meant to each other – for it to be all this and still for her to be going on and on for more than what L. imagined was a half hour – it was funny when the slowing tape turned her voice into a baritone on laughing gas. Then there were only the police and fire and ambulance sirens out on the streets.
“The natives’re riotin’” L. said aloud. It was after nine and the sun had left its residue on the horizon, like popsicle juice around a fat kid’s lips, as L. saw it. That L. was naked is not so relevant except to show it was hot, damn hot, in his apartment with no current to drive a fan or air conditioner compressor or anything for that matter. No cross breeze either, just one window facing the street, so that he recalled K.’s last recorded words in a thick sweat that stung his eyes. Until the power came back he’d have to keep her words in his mind, swirling them around like cloying grape jelly. “What we had, when we had it right, L., was a good time. You and me can agree on that I think, and I know I learnt a lot from you, what with the museums and the books you lent me I think I’ve become a better person. You’re a better man forknowing me. I taught you more about yourself, made you see the good you have in that good heart of yours. I think, though, that you still don’t believe how good you are, which is one more reason I got to leave and do this thing I’ve always wanted to...” Then her voice had started to get stretched out and L. wasn’t sure what she was saying, but it didn’t matter because the heat was distracting him and he was drinking from a big bottle of beer whose cold he’d wanted to save from the blackout. He would let nothing go to waste and get as much coolness into his body as possible. After the beer he’d have to drink his milk and then orange juice and then eat his yogurt then the vegetables and citrus fruits including a lemon, which he could do, and then he’d have to fry his eggs assuming the gas was still on, which it should be. It was going on pitch blackness now. What else had K. said? “I’m trustin’ you not to tell anybody about my fake I.D.’s and all that jazz.” It was just like her, L. thought, to put on tape evidence of her wrongdoing.
Though the sun had now vanished, it seemed to be getting hotter by the minute. Such are the physics of a large city. All that heat energy trapped in the granite, the asphalt, the steel of cars and trucks and busses, the flesh and blood of its residences, all that heat trapped there during the day and radiating into the night. What was it about K. anyway that L. would miss? The sex for one. Her insight? Doubtful, she talked with lots of “they shoulda done”s and “the fact of the matter is”s and “ever-wonder-why?”s as though she always knew better, which L. doubted that she did; in fact he thought she was a bit dim upstairs, but very streetwise, which he wasn’t, particularly. She’d always said he gave too much money to beggars. “You see a guy, he’s missing a tooth, his sneakers are worn through, he’s holding a cup out so you jam a dollar bill in it, huh? You’re a sucker,” she’d dime or a smile to any stranger on the street. Now she was off to see the country, hitchhiking west with a false name, a new identity, to live some movie script in her head. On the way there she would be buffeted by the interstate winds and her rough-and-tumble experiences on the road – oh, how she hoped to suffer and struggle in the right proportions, how to meet some little-assed, big-shouldered trucker who’d make her feel how L. never could: a bit dirty. This is what L. imagined anyway, to get himself upset. He wondered where she was then, at that moment, and concluded that she was probably just entering Pennsylvania, maybe riding shotgun in one of those new 300 h.p. Nissans, or just the oppospring03, in an old Caprice with a Pakistani family of six. It didn’t matter, she’d be chalking up the experiences while he melted away on the same loveseat he’d first kissed her on.
There was the sound of a breaking shop window out on the street but L. didn’t move for a minute or so. He was five floors up and as he saw it, out of any real danger, other than being poached alive. There’d be looting. He’d figured that. The Starbucks across the street was the one getting it and as he looked out the window and watched a representative mix of his neighborhood’s ethnic groups – his own included in that mix – running out with espresso makers and bags of coffee beans and big brass scales and some other machines and utensils that seemed medieval, he couldn’t help laughing at them. There was no irony in it whatsoever, which is what made him laugh. It was the only store without a steel gate and so it was the first store on the block to get looted. K. was out of there and good for her, he thought, out in Pennsylvania, passing through some Dutch-named town, or some town named Some Town as though she were passing through the words themselves. Which was what L.say. She never gave a would love to become just then, a word on a piece of paper, any word, to escape the staggering heat, to escape his own heart that was beginning to grow heavy with K.’s absence. He needed to escape the heat anyway possible.
He could hear the sirens getting closer, but sat there on the loveseat, motionless. When the emergency vehicles stopped in front of his building, the strobes making his walls like those of a Mexican discotheque, he ambled over to the window and watched as a bloodied, shirtless man was strapped onto a gurney and wheeled towards an ambulance. The guy looks like me, L thought, the guy looks exactly like me. He pressed his hands onto his own thighs but there was no tactile sensation, no resistance. The damn heat, numbing, oppressive, hallucinogenic. The man on the gurney was now being administered CPR with a hand pump over his mouth as a second attendant, a slim woman, leaned over his torso. It looks as if she were nursing him. L. could smell her perfume intermingled with the sidewalk trash smell, and the ambulance itself, idling, was putting forth a mini hospital room odor. He was frightened suddenly with a bolt of recognition. His window’s security gate was wide open as was the window, which wasn’t so unusual, but so too was the screen. The man on the gurney was now being shut into the ambulance. L. moved on to the fire escape and looked down. A section of the sidewalk was cordoned off with police tape directly below his window. Now he could see a folded note taped to his window, and then he watched as his apartment door opened and a police detective stepped inside. “What’s going on?” L. asked. “Why has the rioting stopped?” The detective walks past him and removes the note from the windowpane. “Goddamn heat is making people insane” the detective says to nobody as he gingerly opens the note in an empty apartment.
