This is probably a week ago when I tell my wife I'll be right back. I take the elevator down and walk out the iron gate toward the corner store. The topic going round tonight is one of the more gruesome sexual assaults any of us can imagine and the justice system's yawn of a response. I start thinking back on my time in Brazil and the rare spurts of violence I've witnessed when right there, at the end of the block, I see a woman get hit by a car.
It's a deep, dull thud accompanied by the sight of her three or four feet up and then on her back on the asphalt staring at the black sky. A crowd circles her by the time I get there. She is about 50, alive and twitching, muttering something that I can't make out, but sounds incoherent. Both sides of her face are in the hands of the woman, fifteen years younger, who has just changed her life forever. I think that of the two, it's her face I'll remember longer.
The crowd keeps the older woman stationary. After another minute, a cop walks up. I go into the store, buy soda and walk past the scene again. I return through the gate, up the elevator, through the door, put my head in my wife's lap and sob.
This is the coldest week of the year here in Sao Paulo. And in thinking about it, the coldest of my life. Like most Brazilians, we don't have A/C or heat. Each day, the sunny 65-degree skies give way to nights in the mid-40s--our apartment just a few degrees warmer than the outside air. There's usually one of these weeks every year, I just don't remember it being this bad. Every night, we stack the bed with four or five quilts, put on sweatshirts and stocking caps and hold on.
My days this week are spent in the cells of a spreadsheet, carefully planning sessions for this conference I'm attending next week at Stanford University. I park my socked feet in the warm beam of afternoon sunlight idling its way across our floor and plug away zombielike. The highlight of my afternoon is an eight minute vacation to the shower. At dark we order food or go to O'Malley's to drink and watch the Warriors lose winnable games. The room of body heat ends up being just as much a draw as the action on the court.
I return home to a home absent of that feeling you're supposed to get on frigid nights: Warmth. Relief. The assuredness that you've left the Winter out there. We're greeted instead by dark hours that seem to have waited up for us. We come close under the covers. The sun finally rises. Then we read about some guy who walked up to a woman signing autographs and put three bullets in her.
The store that we're counting on having heaters is sold out. We circle the mall, jackets off, for a half hour. We split some McDonalds and try one last place in the basement. We're in luck. They've got one space heater left--their display model--and we buy it.
I come home to the reminder of just how disappointing space heaters are. I don't know how hot they're supposed to get, but I take it as a bad sign that I can rest my legs on it. We plug it in and stare at it like that might somehow motivate it. I wheel it over beside the bed, double check none of the covers can get to it and bunker myself. The damn thing probably adds like one legitimate degree. What a waste. Then we wake up to 49 dead bodies covering the city of my birth.
By day five or six, I realize the cold's real punishment is how much it wears you down. The small fits of shivering string together after a while. I've got less energy, less enthusiasm. We don't smile as much. We have our sweatshirts and our blankets, our hours of short sunlight, our heater I keep believing will make a difference. It's not enough. The sun inevitably sets. The cold returns. I guess what makes me the maddest is it's taken me this long to realize there's nothing I can do to stop it.
I can almost walk past the corner store now without looking at the invisible x on the pavement. Skies are a little warmer each day. On the couch, hoodie on, banging out last minute e-mails, I thumb my phone from the Sao Paulo forecast over to Menlo Park. Eighty seven degrees and sunny. I'm ready to absorb it all.
Hopefully it will be enough. Like everyone else, I'm ready for this week to end. For this house to feel the way it should. To pack this heater away in the closet. To not look across the crowd at O'Malley's and think which way I would run. To go on this trip, walk past a dumpster and not wonder if this one is different from all the rest.
