Hypothermia

machine: the power was out. I dug around in my briefcase, looking for my in-laws’ phone number. They live farther away from campus, so their electricity was probably still working. I dialed and my wife answered. In a perfectly relaxed voice she asked if the lights had come back on at home yet. She said she’d left me a note on the table explaining how she couldn’t cook anything so she’d taken the kids to have dinner at her folks’ house. I told her where I was calling from. She simply couldn’t believe it. Yes, she’d noticed how strongly the wind was blowing when she left the school but she’d made if off campus without any problems. In the car they’d been listening to a tape of children’s music, and at her parents’ house they’d put on a cartoon video, so she had no idea what was going on. We agreed that they should spend the night there. That way she would be able to pick me up in the car when the authorities finally allowed us to leave. I had to control my voice so that she wouldn’t pick up on how annoyed I was.
    Back downstairs—the cell phone burning in the palm of my right hand—I stopped at the bottom of the stairway. The question was, should I go into the women’s locker room or the men’s?

2. N ATURAL D ISASTERS R ECORDED S INCE I M OVED TO W ASHINGTON , D.C.

Three tornados.
An eighteen-month drought.
Six ice storms.
Hurricanes Isabel, Cecilia, and Laura.
Two floods on the Potomac from winter thaws. Three complete closures of the city due to snowfall. Threat of anthrax contamination.
A jetliner crashing into the Pentagon.
One divorce.

3. L IGHT

    Thy gift sets a spark within us and we are raised up.
    Our souls ablaze, we walk forward on the path.
    S T . A UGUSTINE , Confessions , XIII, 9
    It was the end of August. I had developed the annoying habit of brooding over the storms of volcanic ash that covered Mexico City with thick gray dust during the last spring that I lived there. In those days, when we were preparing to move from D.F. to D.C.—that is, from the Distrito Federal to the District of Columbia—I thought that the ashes were some kind of message from on high, urging me to get out. Now I understand that they were rather more admonitory in nature, but this realization only comes now, as I sit here writing, sketching out such a pleasant yet constricted scene, which has nothing to do with the disjointed flow of reality. Telling a story means tracing your finger through the ashes left by the fires of experience: the touchstone of all tragedy is our inability to remember the future.
    Midsummer in the District of Columbia brings some of the most intense, sweltering weather in the northern hemisphere. Between July and August there are days when you can’t even wear rubber-soled shoes because they start to melt the moment you set foot on the pavement. Unlike in other latitudes, the first whisper of autumn comes not with the crisp northerly breezes of October but instead with the heavy rain clouds left by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of August and beginning of September.
    That morning we decided to take a bicycle ride down to the airport. It makes for a quiet family outing. It’s been years since weekends have felt the least bit restful: running the gauntlet of all the arbitrary, obligatory leisure activities here is even more exhausting than the hardest days at work. However, the ride out to the National Airport has its rewards. Cyclists are treated to a lengthy stretch along the banks of the Potomac. There is also the intensely strange experience of picnicking in the park that the airplanes fly over just before they land. The park’s meadow is so close to the landing field that the planes fill the sky as they descend, drowning out all other sound as they pass within a stone’s throw.
    The clouds looked like solid steel, but as the seasons change they frequently remain that way for days on end without raining a drop. We set out around ten in the morning and followed our normal route: from the house to the playground around the corner, and from there along the path to Rock Creek Park, the spine of the city. There we stopped so that the kids could climb and swing and bounce.
    It hadn’t rained for several weeks, so the benches where my wife and I sat were covered with a fine layer of grit, an automatic reminder of the ashes from Popocatépetl in Mexico City seven years earlier. I mentioned this to Cathy but she told me that those ashes had a different