Oven-Sent, Asphalt-Scent, 100 Percent Heat

What the heat feels like -- like something wrong you can't stop thinking about, like heat from a computer before it starts to smell funny and goes black, or cut-hand infection heat with your pulse pounding in it and you're 47 wilderness miles from a hospital and you think you could actually die, septicemia, but hotter than that, like the heat when your car is overheating in a traffic jam and you not only have to turn off the air conditioning, you have to turn on the heater, fan on high, to bleed the heat off the engine, and it dries your lips till they feel like popcorn, and makes your heart race.

There's no oxygen, there's just the smells that carry through the humidity -- a Chinese restaurant, the burnt rubber from a car skidding into an accident. Is it just your nerve endings getting belt-sanded by the heat or do noises get louder? Jackhammers, pavement saws, sirens.

There's haze like fingerprints on fast-food glass doors, and glare that makes you wince as if you just remembered an embarrassing thing you did in high school. People on the sidewalk look isolated, pathetic, like tourists lost in bad neighborhoods. Every man is an island, unto himself. Everything is irrelevant -- deserted ball fields, a freight train grumbling through the humidity. The city feels like it's closed for remodeling but nobody's doing any remodeling.

You have a sense of lost and irrecoverable time, like the time you've spent waiting for late planes that never came. The crape myrtle sags in fuchsia desolation, the lilies molt and the weeds prosper madly -- henbit, kudzu, fox grape. The woods have a lurkish fairy-tale feeling. You feel like you're trapped inside one of T.S. Eliot's headaches . . . a heap of broken images where the sun beats . . .

Heat rises under your skirt, the sunlight makes your eyeglasses hot to the touch. If you're a patient of Dr. Freud, you free-associate in words like swollen, unreal, diesel, road kill, recurring, abandoned . . . Heat that makes you feel like a failure of evolution, a stranger in a strange land.

That is, if you don't like the heat.

For those who like it, the ones who are always telling you about being in the Philippines or Death Valley. You think this is hot? Let me tell you . . . The ones who talk about going for long runs that sweat the Protestant right out of you. Cold showers that make you feel wet and dry at the same time, aware of your cool skin in the hot air, like being stoned. Making iced coffee and watching the milk doing its paisley ballet through the ice. The smell of hot lawns and trees, rank, as if wild nature is right there, you're breathing it, you're surviving it.

Hate. Like. Surviving it.