After five mostly uneventful years, early December saw my first official apartment crisis. The problem was the radiator, a broken control knob preventing me from playing God with the hot air. With shut off shut down, the radiator spent ten days spewing heat into my unit like it was a replica Krakatoa. Good thing it didn’t erupt, though I pretty much did.
How hot was it? I don’t own a thermometer so let’s say it wasn’t just hot, it was Hot. How Hot? It was Hot enough to sweat through any and all outfits. It was a fever's dream. In fact, let’s say it wasn’t just Hot, it was HOT. I’ll put it this way – I had a formal event on a Friday night and it was HOT enough that I had to dress in the hallway. It was HOT enough that I was putting towels soaked in cold water on my burning forehead, as a nurse would do for a defeated soldier, lethally wounded, lying in a frozen forest of fleeing feet. Little tricks like this solved the problem – well, I shouldn’t say that, since the problem was the radiator, and I didn't solve the radiator. Let’s try again – little tricks like this solved the HOT problem caused by the problem radiator. Overall, it wasn't one solution but a combination, half-successful remedies coming together to pass the time, like drinking wine while venting about your Tuesday.
My first remedy was pretty obvious – I opened the windows and invited winter over. Anytime's good, but come around soon. Seasonal air has always been my most reluctant guest. I remember how in summer it could take hours after I shut off the AC before the heat lingering on the windowsill would make itself at home. The winter chill likewise took some time to warm up, at first tentatively poking around at my feet before carefully working its way past my knee until it finally settled in at my hip. The idea sort of worked, I knew from high school science how heat rises and cold air falls, and my apartment proved loyal to the textbooks as it segregated itself into a top and bottom half.
The window was the line and everything below it was now a crisp thirty-five degrees, everything above it burning to a crisp. I could lie on the brittle floor, nearly frozen, wrapped in a blanket and clueless about what to do next like an Iditarod racer whose dogs had vanished. I was cold and the heat remained an issue. When I stood up, my torso would protest against the invasion from the busted radiator until I sank down again, defeated, sweating bullets. I decided to enlist my old ally, the AC, dormant since fall. This was clever like a dead fox, the radiator overpowered the cooling effect, the tropical air marching into my territory to the beat of the fan. Radiator 1, AC 0. I didn’t even stand up to turn the thing off, I just belly-skated across the hardwood and snapped off the plug.
The fan fluttered to a stop and the quiet aftermath calmed the air. It wasn't so bad on the floor but I knew it was only refuge. I felt the high ground staring down at me. I waited until it was time. It ticked steadily forward, leading the way into the future, to the inevitable, forever unable to melt, unable to freeze. It was unchecked by any obstacle, Napoleon’s soldier who made it home first from Russia, for Christmas, each second presenting the next, each second the present. Time’s present for me was bedtime and I waited until I had to open it. My bed was the no man's land, where the border is always on the line, every useless thing pointlessly contested. The pillow was lukewarm like a glass of milk kissed by the microwave, the bedsheets a Zamboni turnpike, the blankets blowing in the wind. My third solution was really something special, an idea only I could come up with – I went sledding. My floors are a little slanted in certain places, you see, but I put up with things if I can sleep well. The bed tobogganed into the corner, I stacked books underneath the box spring for balance, and I laid down to sleep in my trench, a log sloom lumbering beneath the heat, longing for home.
Everything starts downhill. I had my success, the battle was won, the war went on. The sled dragged up the hill again. The air migrated freely around a moving line and the arrows pointed through the quiver. I laid still and floated down to the sleepy shoreline. The flood of dreams receded from memory and I rocked through the hours like I was in a canoe on a cloudy spring day, waiting for low tide. The magma swam with the lava and my forehead was warm under the cool cloth. It was all the same and I was there. I cut another window in the wood to plug the leak and I lay on my back in the water, out of habit, out of necessity, out of ideas. I stayed perfectly still, floating on books, frozen in time as it melted away, tempted to sit up and see where I'd crash, and touch the air again.
