Hypothermia

Kitty Hawk where, in 1903, the Wright Brothers defied gravity with their tiny, pathetic first flight, which lasted all of twelve seconds. Since then we’ve never stopped perpetuating that defiance: we fly to Tokyo, we stay up all night drinking Diet Coke, we make babies for the hell of it.
    The ocean is tempting but the books I’m reading are checked out from the university library, and it looks bad if you return them all greasy, stained with Coppertone. This house—somebody else’s—feels very strange, its quiet emptiness closing in around me. I never really thought I could miss my oversized brothers-in-law.
    11:00 A . M . The conquest of the Canary Islands was a strange thing, really more of a sudden interruption in the midst of timeless tranquility. In one of her books, the Cuban Professor Eyda Merediz—like myself, an émigré to Washington, D.C.—writes that Spain’s incorporation of the Fortunate Isles into its Empire provided a model for subsequent Spanish incursions into the Americas: Columbus’s bizarre descriptions of his first landing in the West Indies result from his perceiving Atlantic America through the nascent mythology of the Canary possessions. This probably also accounts for the perverse insistence on seeing our own tormented continent as an Edenic territory: what those Spanish captains found on the Canaries was nothing like the complex, militarized civilizations that Cortés or Pizarro fought to conquer, but a separate universe, infinitely isolated in its megalithic serenity. The German anthropologist Hans Biedermann has shown that, before being assimilated into Spanish culture, the Guanches were the last bastion of the European Stone Age: despite a reliance on draft animals they neither used wheels nor forged metals.
    In settling personal feuds, the Guanches practiced a custom that, as recorded by various historians, seems to me particularly disturbing. When two villagers had a falling out, the whole community would accompany them to a special enclosure, in whose center were two raised stones set in the earth at a certain distance from one another. Armed with small sacks of rocks, the enemies faced off from atop these stone-age pitching mounds and took turns hurling their projectiles at each other’s head. The Guanches’ aim was legendary, so deadly that the excitement of the contest came not from the combatants’ striking each other but from seeing who was best able to dodge the rocks. Losing typically meant getting killed; naturally, there were plenty of bets on both sides. Maybe our own contemporary forms of violence—guzzling Diet Coke on night flights to Tokyo alongside the kid you had for kicks—provide a better way of settling things.
    2:00 P . M . It took several moments of severe uneasiness before I realized that I’m hungry. I missed lunch because there was nobody here to ask me for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve been married for quite a few years, long enough so that I can no longer remember any whole day when I was a bachelor. On top of that, I’ve now been a father for five years.
    Not long ago, Cathy and our little boy traveled to the Midwestern plains for the eightieth birthday celebration of one of her grandmothers. I don’t recall why, but I had to stay home. In less than twenty-four hours I resumed the rhythm that I’d lost after our son was born: I worked all night and woke up in the middle of the afternoon. I ate a dozen doughnuts a day. When they returned home, the fruit in our bowls was swarming with flies and the milk had gone sour. I wonder if that’s how all bachelors live. Do they ever cook themselves a nice chicken almondine or toss a Greek salad? I suppose that every time Odysseus ate a vegetable, during all those years he spent sleeping around, away from his wife and child, it counted as a Greek salad. But what does a bachelor do when faced with the endless horizon of a Saturday alone?
    In the kitchen pantry I find a box of Froot Loops the size of a suitcase. A lot of it has already been eaten, making me think that it must be a daily staple for one of my brothers-in-law. Setting the box out on the table, I figure I can finish it off without leaving anybody malnourished: tomorrow morning, between the pool and breakfast, I’ll have time to visit the supermarket and replace it before everybody gets up. By the time they’re all out of bed I’ll have already played soccer, outfitted Buzz Lightyear with his galactic armor, and read the