The Meteorite

The heat makes me do terrible things. Strange things I would never do if it wasn't so hot. Impulsive, impetuous, dangerous things. I am no longer myself when it gets above 95 degrees. I am someone else. I am some sort of wild animal. I fade and I melt. I get sick and I convulse. I have affairs. I fuck things I wouldn't normally fuck. I eat things I wouldn't normally eat. I curse at people who got it coming. I quit jobs and don't return calls. I am brutally honest and irritable, sunburnt, and delirious.

Now I understand why Satan is such an asshole. I cruise past those dickheads walking around without shirts on boiling asphalt streets. Their bodies in various states of sweaty morbid decay. Red and broiled skin. Waiting for an overdose or a tragic accident. Tattoos all over their scabbed skin. The parade of hoochie mamas pushing strollers full of kids they neglect. Cracked sidewalks. Rancid gutters. The city is overcrowded and they are building more low-income housing. It smells like sewage and burning plastic already. I got to move away.

A client showed me a meteorite. He says it is worth two million dollars. He lives in a shitty rundown apartment that smells like his dog who has never had a bath in his life. The apartment is in a house that was once nice and sits in the historic part of town. A doctor probably lived here. A lawyer. It was built in 1850 and has a grand staircase that's been painted over a thousand times. There is a stained-glass window that remains dignified. It is subdivided into four apartments and each tenant is more deplorable than the last.

The meteorite is on the mantle by itself. It's his prized possession. He said he would never sell it—not in a million years. I don't have the heart to tell him it's actually hematite and worthless. Before I discovered Playboys, I was a rock hound. I wanted to be a geologist.

"You can rub it for luck," he offered.

What the hell. I rubbed it.

I got drunk at an Irish bar. I fucked the bartender twice in the bathroom and it isn't even noon. She was hampered by a broken heart, and I just happened to say the right thing. I played her like a fiddle. The bar isn't really Irish but it is painted various shades of green and has shamrocks hanging in the windows though it's well into June. It has an Irish name. It's where people go on St. Patrick's Day to pretend like they are Irish but they'd be more Irish swimming in a bowl of Lucky Charms. And they drunkenly slur about the snakes and Ireland and wear beads like idiots. Then someone inevitably punches his wife and everything is ruined. They just can't take a punch like they used to.

I called my boss and told her to fuck off—I wasn't coming in. I am day drinking. My sweltering balls swell ten times their natural size when I am drinking. The police will never suspect a thing if I drive hammered at noon. If I get pulled over, I'll tell them it is my blood sugar. Hyperglycemia. I got it all worked out. The Mother's Against Drunk Driving won't get me.

I didn't actually tell my boss to fuck off, though I wanted to. I wanted to tell her to go to hell, not because I didn't like her, but because it was fucking hot and being a social worker sucks dick. There's no other way to put it. You're a glorified Kleenex. I called off with a migraine headache, though I didn't have a migraine headache and don't even know what one feels like. I couldn't go back in the office. Not today. Not even for the free air-conditioning.

The bartender brings me an Irish aspirin. I didn't actually fuck her, either. It was only in my mind—like I am a perverted Walter Mitty. I can fuck whoever I want in my mind and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.

But I have never done an impetuous thing like that in my life. I don't know how I would even go about it. She did, however, break up with her boyfriend the night before—which she told me all about though I didn't ask—and she checked her phone as though she was desperately waiting for a message that would never come. She even tried to resuscitate it with her thumbs. What a pathetic look she gave it.

"This is a terrible shift when you are working on tips, sugar," she says. All my life I wanted a nickname and this is what life finally stuck me with. Sugar. From a cum-guzzling bartender. She asks if I want food and I say no so she doesn't turn on the fryer. I am the only one in the bar besides for her. She has the TV on some sports talk show. People are fucking idiots, talking about sports all the time. They obsess over pointless things. It couldn't get much worse. No one reads anymore. There's hardly anything worth reading.

Then some drooler plods in to play Keno and flirt with the bartender like it is his routine. Darling, he calls her. Over and over. Darling. She smiles and I notice she's missing a tooth. I wonder if it got knocked out. She calls him Ken. Then Ken declares it's hot outside like he's Ben Fucking Gelber. He says it might rain late, though, and orders a Busch Light and cracks it open. He says it's hot again and talks about people I don't know to the bartender. I'll probably never see either of them again and that's fine with me.

I am bored. Now I know why I don't take days off. I don't have a wife to cheat on so the excitement of a lurid affair cannot be realized. I've never turned into a werewolf by the light of a full moon. I've never had sex with the neighbor's poodle as much as I talk about it.

I drove to a nearby lake and rented a canoe on a whim. I had never been to the lake before, but I passed the road it was on a thousand times. I paddled out to the middle of the lake as though I knew what I was doing and looked over the side into the green water that appeared like an abyss. The lady who rented me the canoe had given me a life jacket, but I didn't wear it. I wanted to jump in, but I am too big of a pussy. I am afraid of drowning. I am afraid of what I cannot see. I am afraid of deep water in which I have no control. The water is the color of those shamrocks at the bar I left an hour ago where the darling bartender was probably still checking her lifeless phone for a pulse as Ken plays Keno.

A client called and I dropped my phone in the bottom of the canoe where it vibrated like a fish out of water. I picked it up and threw it into the lake where it sank and swam away. It was full of utter uselessness. How miserable it is to have a phone full of people but no one to call. The entire internet at my disposal. The history of the world. Everything there ever was to know. Practically something about everyone somewhere. Games. Novels. Poetry. Music. Religion. Social media sites. Dating sites. Pornography of all sorts. Recipes for baked spaghetti and banana bread. Anything. But I didn't want any of it. It was too much and it was a cancer that I was sure was killing me.

I realized after about 30 minutes that canoeing in the heat was not a good idea. There were no clouds for cover and in the middle of the lake I felt exposed and as though I was an egg frying in a watery pan. So I paddled to a small island which was thick with wildflowers and pine trees and moored the canoe for a respite. Besides for those trees and wildflowers, there was nothing on the island other than geese who screeched at me in protest of my arrival. They seemed to think they owned the place like the Indians thought they owned the place.

Little did they know.

And so, in all my white-male glory, I conquered the island from the savage birds in the name of God and King. But just short of planting my flag, I quickly discovered that I wasn't alone. Not for the geese who capitulated as I walked past to summit the small but evident hill, but for another human who had arrived prior to me, also by canoe, which I could see moored on the opposite side of the island in a much smoother landing that was free of the cattails through which I had fought to dock. She was evidently much smarter than I, as things go, and her canoe basked there like a contented naked woman with silver skin. She was sitting well-prepared on an unfolded flannel blanket with a picnic basket by her side on the beach reading a book.

I leaned against a tree and gazed upon her like she was an exotic bird and I was a twitcher. And standing there, I became an ornithophile. It was as though she was something I had never seen before—a woman reading a book—in a blue-flowered short romper. A fantastic dodo. A blue-speckled warbler. If she looked back she would see me staring at her, but intently she read, curled up on a slender leg.

I didn't want to intrude and disrupt her contentment. And for a moment while I stood there in the shade of a hemlock tree, I forgot about the heat. I forgot about everything in the world besides for my view. It is what they say of a lake—and it is also true of a beautiful woman—they can make you forget everything.

It was a gander that gave me away. One that refused to recognize me as his conqueror. One that wanted to prove his masculinity to a goose and who saw me as a threat and his chance. How absurd, I thought, this querulous nuisance believing in his bird brain that I was going molest a female of his species—that I had any interest in them at all. How could he not see that I was infatuated with this reclusive stranger who I did not know how to approach. The bird, though, in his anger introduced me, standing by my leg. I named him Carl.

I wanted to say something. Please forgive my intrusion. Inquire as to what she was reading. To say something witty or erudite to fill the awkward silence. I could have said a million things. Something surely, I've said before. A familiar recipe of words that if spoken just right to the right woman would have resulted in some form of companionship. A brief human bond, casual sex, or an effort at establishing myself in her life. How stupid it all is. I was no different than Carl, searching for a way to attract a mate to continue the species. But I couldn't help myself. My desire was greater than my rationale.

She turned and smiled at me. That was all. And whether it was the mood I was in or the way the breeze carried off the lake and played upon my face like the fingers of a beautiful woman, I walked down to where she sat and took my place next to her on the flannel blanket. She looked over at me, like she were only a dream, or I was a dream to her, and her eyes met mine with such curiosity and grace that I knew I was welcome and that I did not intrude.

She set the book to her side. "Delta of Venus" by Anaïs Ninn—a book of erotica I had once read and pleasured myself to. I could have asked her if she ever read "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller. But of course, she had. You don't get to Anaïs Ninn if not through Henry Miller. But still, I did not say a word and neither did she. I sat as though I belonged there. And we watched the wind ripple the water like ruffled green bedsheets after lovemaking as we inhaled each other and all the peace left in this mad world.

It is a strange way for strangers to act. To casually sit next to each other and not interact with words, to not fill each other's ears with senseless drivel. I knew nothing about her, and she knew nothing about me. I kissed her. Passionately. Violently. I unbuttoned her romper and we made love on the beach of that nameless island, not sure if anyone else might come. It didn't matter. Not a single word was spoken, neither to consent nor protest. We understood each other without words, and the brutality of our animalistic lovemaking was augmented by the heat and the daring nakedness of it all. I wanted to take and she wanted to be taken.

She was a good lover as it goes, but she was not for the pocket, and that was not the nature of our affair. It would be contrary to it. We lied there afterwards for a while, naked, dirty, and exhausted, looking up at the clouds through the heat. Our bodies glistened with sweat. Should someone come, they could enjoy the other side of the island and leave us alone. If they wanted to call the police, it would be a hell of a thing for the police to care enough to canoe out and arrest us for our indecency. It hardly mattered. Nothing mattered. We lied there for an hour or so until I got dressed and kissed her goodbye—never one to overstay a welcome.

I walked back the way I had come, through Carl and his cohorts, and found my canoe bobbing there in the cattails. Then I rowed back to the shore, turned in the canoe, and went home. Perhaps it was the meteorite I had rubbed for luck that had brought her to me or me to her. But the heat would never bother me again, however oppressive. It would only remind me of an impetuous lover I once took and could never forget.