The Heatwave

The heat has been punishing, booming down on the scorched concrete of the city like some mysterious weapon from space. On Bloor, I rode my bicycle by three water bottles, each one upside down and carefully arranged on the sidewalk as if an art installation. Their caps were off and a slow, small trickle of water bled out from each one, tiny streams heading toward the ocean of greater concrete on the street.

Across from this, splayed on a bench lay a dusty, shirtless man baking in the sun, all of his life’s possessions scattered about him like discarded Kleenex. It felt like he was trying to defy his circumstance, the weather and all the people who had been trying in small ways to help him.

As I was locking my bicycle a tall, beautiful Russian woman, just as thin and cruel as a switchblade, walked toward me. She was a tennis superstar, a billionaire’s trophy, somebody who would never fall in love, and the language she used with her companion was precise and directional. There was not a sentimental bone in her body, and concealed beneath her sunglasses she was still able to make it clear that she wanted me out of her way. Disdainful, she was a supermodel who would not break stride, and I hurried in my task, trying to make myself smaller and less obtrusive as the city beyond opened up before her terrible beauty.  And then, just a few moments later, a middle-aged man talking to himself, his hands a fury of unknowable intent, walked past me too, “ I don’t care, I’ll take the day off work, end up downtown and probably get a blow-job,” he said to nobody living in the visible present.

At the Real Thailand restaurant, beneath faded pictures of some Thai King, sat a scattering of elderly, single women sitting alone at various tables. With swollen ankles and sunken faces, they stared straight ahead. Their hearts and minds elsewhere, they existed within humid, little bubbles of sadness.

In front of a corner store a beggar noticed my Montreal Expos t-shirt and we fell into a conversation about the city and baseball team, discovering that we lived there at the same time. Free associating, as if on some sort of game show, we shouted out the names of all our favourite players:

Andre Dawson!

El Presidente!

Casey Candaele!

Pasquel Perez!

Hubie Brooks!

And then we reminisced  about the unhurried evenings we had each spent at the Big O watching games. Sitting in the cheap seats smoking cigarettes and drinking our knapsack beer, the future we were both living on this hot afternoon so distant and unimaginable.