Jodie embraced the machine experimentally, her fingers searching for a hold. They found none. The entire contraption was cruelly sharp, with all its metal edges and awkwardly placed knobs. Jodie imagined the vents slicing her fingers open. She tried to rock the machine in its window seat, but it wouldn't budge. She saw then that she would have to lift the window to free the air conditioner. Jodie's consideration of this problem was rather slow, her mind more suited to abstractions than mechanics.
Jodie leaned all her weight against the air conditioner and pressed the heel of her hand against the window jamb. The wooden frame creaked. The window had not been opened in the two years she had been living here, at least, and for all she knew not for years before that. The wood was swollen, the gap painted over. Jodie didn't expect it to move, but then it did, yielding with surprising ease. The heavy air conditioner shifted too, alarming her. She grabbed the machine with both hands to steady it.
Jodie's head throbbed from the stifling heat. Sweat poured down her face. She licked her lips and admired the salty taste, her own smell. Jodie liked to sweat, but the heat had finally grown unbearable. Triple digits outside and then last night the air conditioner began to make a horrible grinding noise. The air it emitted was only vaguely cool. Jodie was surprised to learn after several phone calls that not only did air conditioner repairmen not make house calls, but also that there seemed to be no new units available in the entire city. Everyone was sold out and no one expected new machines in until the end of the week.
Jodie tried again, reaching her hand into the small gap she had lifted the window, cautious of pinching her fingers. She grabbed the air conditioner by the catch which had secured it. Her muscles strained against the weight. With her other hand, Jodie threw the window up further. The air conditioner rocked menacingly outward. She grabbed it with both hands, and vividly imagined it slipping from her grasp, falling four stories to the sidewalk below and crushing a passer-by. This scenario was considered and rejected. There was no story there, not a good one anyway.
Jodie pulled with all her strength. She staggered backwards and finally extracted the machine. It slipped and she panicked, dropping it to the floor with a metallic clatter and missing her bare left foot by about an inch.
"Shit!"
If the machine hadn't been broken before, it surely was now. It had gouged the hard wood floor, too. Good-bye security deposit, or whatever was left of it after the broken tiles in the bathroom and the piss stains in every corner of the carpeting. But at least the damn thing was out of the window. Jodie had accomplished what she had set out to do.
Jodie stuck her head out the window and inhaled the dry, baked city air. It smelled carbonous and yellow-brown from the flatulence of a million automobiles. There was no breeze to speak of. The air outside was only slightly less stifling than the air inside the apartment. After all that effort, the open window would hardly make any difference.
She looked down at the street, forty or fifty feet below, and had a brief morbid fantasy about jumping. It was no good. The dramatic possibilities of suicide were limited.
Jodie looked over at the high-rise building across the street from hers. Dozens of windows, dozens of stories. Probably none of them worthwhile, but Jodie had always been intrigued by open windows. Most of the windows either contained air conditioners like the one she had just removed, or were shaded. Most of the others revealed only the flickering blue light of a television, or dazed people stretched out on couches to watch. Too damn hot to do anything else on a day like this. Jodie scanned the rows and columns until she found, in a window on the third floor, a woman reclining on a couch wearing only a black bra and panties.
Jodie strained to see, at this distance it was unclear, but the woman seemed to be very young. Maybe as young as eighteen. A thin girl with short dark hair, sitting in her underwear before an open window because it was beastly hot and she had no air conditioning. The girl lifted her hand to her mouth. Smoking? Yes, Jodie saw her exhale a white cloud of smoke.
The girl sat up suddenly. The hand with the cigarette made a violent gesture, pointing towards another room. Angry. Her mouth moved and Jodie fancied that she could hear the girl's voice even above the traffic noise coming from the street between them.
Another figure stepped in front of the window. A man. Also barely clothed, wearing only white boxer shorts. The man was tall and muscular. He seemed to dwarf the girl. His back was to Jodie, and she saw that he had long, sandy-colored hair. His bearing spoke anger, like the girl's. They were arguing. The man raised his arm, as if to strike, but then gestured furiously in the same direction the girl had. He was smoking, too.
The man turned and faced out the window. Jodie shrank back instinctively, but he was looking down at the street. He leaned his elbows on the open windowsill and smoked. His mouth was drawn into either a grin or a grimace, Jodie couldn't tell at this distance. He flicked his cigarette out the window, then turned and said something final to the girl before stalking away out of view.
The girl leaned back and continued to smoke. Jodie watched her for a long while, until the girl also disappeared to wherever the man had gone.
The sheets were damp with sweat. Two in the morning and the heat hadn't let up. It didn't seem to be any cooler now than it had been during the day. Jodie had read once that asphalt retained heat and now imagined invisible waves radiating from the street and penetrating her walls.
She wondered why in God's name she had to live in Phoenix. But she knew the answer. Because she had grown up in Wisconsin and had despised it.
Jodie had always enjoyed the heat, but that had been when she could escape it with the push of a button. Now it was unremitting. Roscoe, curled contentedly beside her, only added to her misery. She pushed at his bulk, tried to at least contain him to half the mattress, but he wouldn't budge.
"OK," she said. "That's enough. Off!"
The beast did not stir. Roscoe was Carrie's dog, a rottweiler the size of a small pony. He seemed to be made of muscle, and had planted himself squarely on the mattress.
"Goddamn it, Roscoe," Jodie said through clenched teeth. "Off!"
A low growl emanated from Roscoe's throat, a warning, and Jodie surrendered. She was angry at herself for being intimidated by the dog, but she knew the animal could easily kill her if he so chose. She had imagined this many times.
Jodie snarled a curse and flopped out of bed. She slammed the bedroom door and stomped out to the kitchen damning the dog, the heat, Carrie, herself. Hurling the freezer open, she pulled out a tray of ice cubes. Jodie filled the sink and dumped the tray into the water. Before she could brace herself, she plunged her face into the ice water. Jodie stood up, gasping at the shock of the icy water coursing over her naked body.
An old fan droned in the window where the air conditioner had been. Jodie had draped a wet hand towel over the fan in an attempt to cool the air a little, but the towel had dried out. As Jodie peeled it from the fan to re-wet it, she glanced across the street.
The window she had spied on that afternoon was dark, but the one beside it- which Jodie had already determined to be the bedroom of the same apartment- glowed with a flickering orange. Candle light. The girl Jodie had seen earlier was now stretched out upon a bare mattress laid on the floor. She was naked. One of her arms was crooked behind her head as she stared up at the ceiling, a cigarette jutting from her lips. Jodie could make out the dark 'v' of her pubic hair and the flickering shadows cast by her small breasts. The candles were everywhere, a dozen or more points of unsteady light.
Jodie moved the fan to the floor and crouched in front of the window to watch.
A door opened. The man emerged from another room. He was also naked. Jodie strained to see, but at this distance, his genitals were only a dark blur. As he crossed the room towards the girl, she sat up and stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the nightstand. The man rolled his neck, the cigarette clenched in his lips, as the girl leaned into him. Her head slowly bobbed at his waist.
Watching this, Jodie analyzed her own reactions, as if for later description. Shame and arousal, in about equal measures. But writers observe, she reasoned. Observation is just a polite word for voyeurism.
