Storage Unit

Storage Unit

　

The heat held the city like doom. It was everywhere and nowhere, nourished by continents of growing corn that surrounded the town. In the country, the corn stalks rose like flames from the wet earth and their tasseled ears were torches and their breath stagnant humidity infested with mosquitos. Heavy mist that smelled of carnage blanketed the dawn, but by mid-day the sun was high and hot, pronouncing judgment on the landscape and it did not go underground until nine-o’clock at night and, then, the darkness was windless, warm and all-enveloping.

Scott’s rented rooms were without air-conditioning and the fans that he owned, devices that he had once used to evaporate water leaked into his basement, were all in storage. He lived up a flight of gloomy, sodden-looking stairs in an old white house near downtown. A family of Sudanese refugees lived in the lower half of the big house and all of their windows were plugged with air conditioners. Stretched naked on his cot, Scott heard the air conditioners in the windows below him rushing like cascades of water in the mountains and, beneath that sound, there was a faint trickling noise, condensing vapor draining out into the tattered, spider-web draped bushes gathered around the home’s foundation walls. Scott thought of the growing corn and the air conditioners sucking heat out of the quarters where the Sudanese family lived, displacing that warmth, now redolent of curry and African spices, under his windows where convection, he supposed, would convey those hot currents over his own window sills and into his rooms. It was intolerable. Something had to be done.

Scott turned on the TV and, listlessly, went to his kitchen. The last beer in his refrigerator was lukewarm – the appliance couldn’t keep up with the heat – and there was a smell of rot inside the white box. Perhaps, the odor came from the dirty dishes heaped in the sink – it was too hot to further warm the house by running hot water. He went to his computer and typed some emails, but the keys soon became slippery and unreliable with sweat. A fat fly, disabled by the heat, squatted on a screen window. Outside, the cicadas buzzed like chainsaws in the trees twitching slightly in a fitful breeze and, so, dragging the shadows of their leaves back and forth across the blazing shingles of his roof. The shadows were vaguely abrasive and made raw what they rubbed against.

The beer warmed rapidly in the bottle squeezed in his hand and Scott felt sluggish. He stretched out on his cot again and tried to watch TV, but the pictures were blurred by the sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes, and, in any event, the screen also seemed to radiate heat, a bright warmth as if emanating from a 100 watt light bulb. It was an old TV; Scott’s ex-wife had the new, more efficient, flat-screen. He tried to watch sports but the pictures were foggy and the warm beer made him drowsy and so, at last, he fell asleep. In the preceding 24 hours, the temperature had not dipped below 87 degrees with high dew-points and Scott had not been able to sleep. He knew that he was a bad man and felt guilty about his divorce and the ruin of his family and, so, Scott was able to interpret his insomnia and discomfort as penance for his selfish and destructive behavior. He deserved to be uncomfortable and the hot sheets of sweat glistening on his breast and belly, perpetuated by the high humidity, was part of his punishment.

He awoke without feeling rested and the beer taste in his mouth tormented him. Scott’s head was leaden and he was unsteady on his feet. The afternoon was ending in a milky haze and, somewhere among the cornfields, a thunderstorm was browsing the gravel roads and the little dangerous intersections and the grain elevators like lightning rods thrust into the green-blue sky. The surf-sound of the Sudanese air conditioners continued. Scott knew that he owned two fans, at least, both mounted on pole-like stanchions. Before the divorce, the fans were kept in the basement, unplugged but, like the dehumidifier, ready to be activated if there was a flood that dampened the concrete floor or made the masonry block walls sweat. After the divorce, the fans were among items that Scott had hauled away from the house that he no longer owned. Several U-Haul loads of surplus furniture, old CDs and records, toys, and exercise equipment had gone to the rented storage unit across town. Scott put on his underpants and an athletic jersey and, then, looked in the drawer in his kitchen where he kept his bills and check book. Among the paper clips and old pens, he found a cracked coffee cup half full of pennies and nickels with the stubby key to his storage unit. Scott thought that it would not be too much of a violation of the terms of his penance to retrieve the fans from the storage locker and, at least, push the scalding air around in his apartment.

Once he held the key in his hand, Scott knew that he would have to put on his hot jeans so that he would have a pocket in which to keep the key. He slipped on his tennis shoes, still tied, and went outside. Except for the surging air conditioners, it was silent and the streets were deserted. The low towers of downtown seemed to stand apart from one another, as if it were too warm and uncomfortable for the buildings to gather closely together and there was a faint, chemical odor of charcoal and lighter fluid in the air. The trees drizzled shadow over the white sidewalks and ants were carrying winged corpses across the pavement. Somewhere a motorcycle tried to accelerate but failed, choking itself off. 　

The inside of Scott’s car was an inferno and the seat-belt buckle was a brand on his flesh. He turned up the air conditioning as high as possible and drove with open windows away from downtown toward the suburbs. Long lines of cars were queued up at the fast food places, people preferring not to leave their cars but to order from behind the wheel and, with his windows down, he could hear voices amplified by the drive-up speakers. A sad, little farmer’s market was set up on the boulevard near the shopping mall – people sat on fold-up lawn chairs under awnings improvised from blankets and tent stakes. Wilted flowers made a fringe around a fried chicken place. Potholes in the parking lot caught at his car’s underside and wrestled with his chassis and a feral cat with a small bird in its jaws stalked along the curb.

Scott went to a theater and bought a ticket to see a super-hero movie. It was almost too cold in the theater auditorium and the carpet and seats smelled of mildew. The movie was loud and long and Scott slept through most of it. A couple of other people sat isolated in the theater, but Scott ignored them. After the show, he went into the lobby, bought some popcorn and candy and a ticket to another movie showing in the multi-plex. The movie was a foul-mouthed romantic comedy in which several beautiful movie stars pretended that they were homely and cursed a lot. The leading man in the movie spoke with a British accent. There were more people watching this film, mostly middle-aged women, and, by the end of the picture, several of them were sobbing loudly. Scott wondered what had touched them so profoundly. The chill in the theater was sepulchral, a vacant, indifferent cold like something that might oppress you far underground in a cavern or a catacomb.

After the romantic comedy ended, Scott went to the toilet. He sat in a stall and wondered if it was worth driving all the way across town to get the two fans for his rooms. Some spirit in him opposed the trip through the night to retrieve the fans. The self-storage unit was in a remote suburb and he felt groggy, even a little confused – although he was confident, he could find the place, the sequence of roads that he would have to follow seemed unclear to him. For a moment, he thought that it was the kind of question on which he should consult with his wife, but, then, he remembered that he was divorced and that this was, in fact, the kind of decision that he had once wanted to make for himself, without consulting anyone, a decision touching upon his comfort and personal convenience. He shook his head and smelled the stink of disinfectant in the toilet and, then, there was a woman’s voice – "Is it empty?" "No, I’m here," Scott said. "Sorry, we’re just cleaning up," the woman replied. Scott told her he would be finished in a minute.

The parking lot was dark and the overhead lamps on the lights were all broken. A freeway throbbed in the distance. Immersing himself in the night was like falling into a warm bath. It was still, at least, 90 degrees.

He drove through a bad neighborhood. A man naked except for a stained underpants was standing in an intersection trying to remove his skin. A few blocks later, four police cars were drawn up beside a house and there was a conclave of people, grave and silent, standing on a lit porch. So many people were standing on the porch that the old wood seemed to be sagging. A fire truck hurrying somewhere lumbered heavily through an intersection.

He drove among taverns. The police had set up road blocks and were stopping cars and checking their drivers for intoxication. Even though Scott was completely sober, he felt a strong surge of panic.

At the freeway ramp, a wild-eyed beggar accosted him, pleading for money.

He drove around the edge of the city. He saw a car wreck and a corpse covered with a blanket lying in the ditch and ambulance workers leaning over a smashed vehicle as if it were an abyss dropping down to the center of the earth.

Heat lightning coursed through the sky.

He exited the freeway and came to a place where there were streets cut into the fields, complete with storm sewers and freshly poured curb-lines, even sidewalks in some places gliding along the boulevards, but no houses of any kind, no businesses, ghost neighborhoods of vacant lots between long, broad roads interrupted at intervals by round-abouts. A canal with pale concrete banks ran between groves of whispering trees. Then, he saw a hillside half cut-away and terraced and, on the terrace, there were rows of low metal buildings under tin roofs only very slightly sloped, numbered garage doors facing gravel lanes between the storage units. The complex was as long and broad as a football field and lit by mercury lamps between the buildings. It was a very different-looking place at night than it had been during the daylight, as silent as a tomb, the regimented buildings like barracks in a sinister military encampment.

Each lamp was thronged with halos of distraught, orbiting insects. He heard their chitinous wings tapping at the metal and glass. The lamps hummed and the anonymous storage units spread out around him on all sides, making a featureless maze.

He found the unit marked with the number on the key. The garage door slid up into the ceiling with a loud grating sound that startled him. The sound echoed and Scott stood back from the storage unit, a little appalled.

There was no light in the unit and the darkness gaped at him. After a while, his eyes adjusted and he could see into the space. The two fans were near the back, rotor-faces turned to him like pale, indifferent flowers. He had to navigate some boxes and slide between a Nordic Track machine and some exercise bikes to reach the fans. The fan on the left was leaning against a baby’s crib. Some small pastel-colored blankets were stacked on the mattress in the crib. There was a mobile screwed onto the crib’s rail, brightly colored circus animals dangling down over where his babies had once slept. The other fan’s electrical cord was tangled among the bicycles that Scott had bought for the family – the four bikes were jumbled together and half-fallen against the aluminum wall. Scott had to kneel to extricate the cord from the spokes and wheels of the bicycles. He stood up and rested his hand on the hard, leather seat of one of the bicycles. Scott stood in that place for a long time. It was hard for him to breathe.

He put the fans in the back of his car, pulled down the garage door – it bellowed in protest again – and, then, drove away from the Self-Storage units.

A thunderstorm lit up one quadrant of the sky. Airplanes were taking off and landing at the airport.

A couple blocks from his rented rooms, Scott saw that someone had affixed a poster to a street sign. The poster was handwritten and advertised a garage sale – clothing, furniture, baby items, the sign said above the address. Scott knew that it was illegal to use the metal pipe supporting a city street sign as place to post a notice. He looked across the intersection at the placard pinioned in his headlights. A heavy truck lumbered by. He drove up to the street sign, parked, and, then, walked up to the poster. He clawed it down and threw the cardboard in the gutter. Then, it occurred to him that he should not litter and so he put the ripped cardboard sign with the fans in the back of his car.

At his house, he pitched the garage sale sign in the garbage and, then, carried the fans up the stairs to his rooms. The Sudanese air conditioners howled in his ears. His rooms were hot as an oven.

Scott aimed the fans at his bed. One of them would not work when he plugged it in. The other fan slowly began to turn. But he had plugged the fan into the power-strip for his computer and the circuit was overloaded. The light in the room went off and the computer made a sizzling sound and, then, the fan rotor stopped turning. Scott unplugged the fan and went downstairs into the dank basement to reset the fuse.

It had begun to rain outside but the water falling from the sky was hot, like tears or blood.