Sticky heat, dribbly flavored shaved icees, spiders and a reprieve from my classes.
Oh, it is uncomfortable to lie so still that I don't think about how humid and hot it is and try to fall asleep. My sheets are like a pliant extra layer of skin reticently peeled away from my moist skin after I roll one way or another. The room cooler helps a great deal, but makes our throats itch and threatens to give us colds by changing our body temperatures so rapidly. A couple of times already we have left it on all night. The air conditioner lays a heavy stone of sleep upon our heads, burying our bodies like a weighted anchor, leaving you drowsy like a darted rhino in the Serengeti, unable to move quickly.
But the sounds of summer night are returning: crickets, wonderous then oppressive rain, and the string of bike gangs driving along the interstate south to nowhere gunning their crotch rockets and snarling traffic. I imagine having a long rope strung across the road at chest height to a cyclist, stripping these chimpira or horn enthusiasts from their saddles one-by-one. And a long-distance slingshot with eggs for ammo, so I can pit their fallen bodies with the ooze and crack of egg white and bleeding yolk.
I made friends with a 10-inch biting centipede who strode over my leg the other night in the gloom. I shouted "Uh-ahh-ya-ha-ha-AAAAGGGGH" and other unrecordable greetings. It responded by curling into a ball, lashing its backside and running for the closet. I cried out again from the kitchen as I searched for a greeting stick -- a newspaper, a kitchen knife, a fire extinguisher. Finally, I got a bucket of hot water and tossed in the segmented squeal-inducer with long chopsticks, emboldened by my unamused wife who heard me yell.
One thing about the heat -- it brings out the smell of the tatami matting, the cypress and cedar wood, fetid water vapor trapped under the rotting boards of the laundry sink. It stills the air in the kitchen in the mornings and helps give me that timeless stare outdoors that scares our neighbors' children as I stand in my shorts by the window with my cup of coffee. I am like a naked, middle-aged Tin Man his armor rusted away, escaped from the Wicked Witch and hiding in a small Japanese house in the Witness Protection Program.
The heat also causes our electronics to act erratically. My wife has gained and lost at least two kilograms within 24 hours. Somehow it has beamed the weight off her and placed it somewhere else in the house. We are hoping it wasn't to the backside of the cockroaches who hunt at night in our kitchen sink. The movie I wanted to watch on satellite TV inexplicably was unavailable the other night. I blame that on the heat and not on my refusal to pay for premium channels. Clocks stop. Driers smell funny. The washer hump-a-jumps like it's holding a howler monkey inside its tub.
And speaking of mosquitoes, because now it is time we should, they hang in the adobe like wall matting to catch the right breeze and take turns dive-bombing heads and ankles and other exposed body parts. Heat and mosquitoes are a cruel villainous team, one causing you to strip and thrash about, the other picking up your infrared body heat and picking off your exposed appendages red dotted bite by ever-itching red-dotted bite.
But, one of the BEST things about the onset of summer evenings is the kakigori which we call "flavored, shaved ice in a cup with lots of syrup." But that is like saying a bagel is just a pregnant donut with a sugar deficiency. These summer treats are liquid hypersonic kid-warping brain-twisting addictive tonics, easing your inner hot, slapping the mannered bitter overheated adult you once were and changing you on the spot to a drooling, sticky-faced ice snorter.
No one is the same in my family after having one. And sometimes we prey on each other's.
But, finally, the sugar rush is gone, the bickering at bath and defiance of bedtime overcome, and the quiet of the living room is mine. It is romantic times like this that my wife stays asleep comfortably with the kids in the cooled bedroom upstairs, and I futz around with the remote control to catch an unpaid glimpse of the Star Channel.
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