It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone goes around saying, “It’s just too hot.” 

“Muy caliente,” say the men mowing the lawns.

“Slishkom zharko,” says the valet parking cars.

“Hot as F,” says the woman working the drive-through window at El Pollo Loco.

Walter is up high in the hills, lying on a chair, looking at the sky. He is thinking about the view from an airplane descending over the mountains, across Big Bear and Arrowhead and through the clouds to the high-rises of downtown, the Hollywood sign, In-N-Out Burger, houses big and small, and then the pools, so many pools. 

The topography of the LA Basin keeps the dirt in, warm air on top of cool. By midafternoon the sky will be tinged with a haze that turns the air orange and brown and hangs until sunset, when there is the illusion that it is gone, but you can feel it with every breath you take, you can taste it.

Walter tilts his head back, bringing Cheryl’s legs and the house beyond into view. Upside down and backward⁠—this POV fits perfectly with something fundamental in his experience. His own house, his parents’ house, is downhill from here⁠—six and eight-tenths of a mile down. Yesterday, when he told Cheryl that he would come for a swim, he was sure he’d be home in time for dinner. But by the time they’d been in and out of the pool and eaten lunch, he didn’t have the energy to leave. It was literally too hot to be outside, like being at the center of something about to explode, so they went into the basement and lay on the concrete floor and googled things. Hottest day in history: July 10, 1913, Death Valley, 134 degrees.

Later, after sundown, they went outside. 

“There are no stars,” he said.

“If you want stars, just go down the block, the neighborhood is crawling with them,” she said, before pausing to survey the night sky, faraway airplanes and satellites blinking in the distance. “Is there something you long for?” she asked. “Is there something you want, something you need, whatever it might be?”

“Snow,” he said. “Or maybe innocence. I wish I could go back in time and discover myself anew, or have a do-over, something like that.”

“Me too,” she said, exhaling heavily.

“I know,” he said. The specter of her younger brother Billy’s death from a snakebite a couple of years ago hovers over everything like an atmospheric anomaly.

Walter listens to the sloshing of the weir, a.k.a. the flap⁠—the sound in the mouth of the skimmer that indicates things are working well. Depending on the weather, the wind, the height of the water, the sound is sploshier or more clicky. Cheryl is lying at the edge of the pool, one hand in the water, mumbling, “Water, we are mostly water.” 

They are each other’s mirror, laboratory, test subject. Whatever they will offer the world they try out first on each other. Walter is soothing, she drinks him like water. His skin is white as a cumulus cloud but plagued with eruptions of all kinds. 

“What is that?” she asks, pointing to a small black spot on his leg. “A birthmark?” 

“Dirt,” he says, flicking it away. “My legs are too skinny.”

“A lot of men have thin legs,” she says.

“My ankles are like wrists,” he says. “And my calves are nothing.” 

Walter has always been uncomfortable in his skin. He wonders when it started, whether it began as soon as he emerged enrobed in his milky amniotic sac. He used to tell people “I was born with a caul,” but then realized they thought he meant a calling⁠—a spiritual summons to become something, like a priest or a soldier.

“I am definitely feeling the heat,” he says, turning his chair so that his back is facing where the sun would be if they could see it through the haze.

“Well, I hope they are feeling it too,” Cheryl says, turning her chair as well. 

“Who is ‘they’?” he asks.

“The people who ruined the planet,” she says.

“We are the people who ruined the planet,” he says. 

“I definitely did not ruin the planet,” she says. 

“You definitely did,” he says.

“Okay, well, if I did, I didn’t mean to, like, I didn’t know I was doing it at the time. I wasn’t fully conscious of the effects.”  

“At a certain point are we not also responsible for our consciousness?” Walter asks.

This is the kind of question Cheryl doesn’t like; it asks a lot of a person⁠—both opinion and accountability. She tugs at the straps of her bathing suit. For the entirety of her life, Cheryl has been in a war with her clothing, nothing feels right, nothing fits right. 

“Are we on fire?” Sylvia, the mother, shouts from inside the house. “I’m suiting up.”

“I don’t know,” Walter says. “There’s smoke on the horizon, and where there’s smoke …”

Sylvia steps out, swathed in zinc oxide. She looks like a mineral-based ghost. Her husband, Ben, follows her. She turns to him. “What are you doing? You can’t just go out like that, unprotected.”

“I’m just going out to tell them to come indoors,” Ben says, gesturing at Cheryl and Walter. “It’s scalding out here. I was supposed to play golf, but part of the freeway collapsed.”

Abigail, the eldest, slips past her parents and hovers like a beam of steel over the lounge chair where Cheryl is laid out. 

“Get up,” she says to her sister. “I need your chair.”

For some reason there are only two. Blame the landscape architect who didn’t want things to look cluttered.

“It’s too hot to lie on the flagstone,” Cheryl says. “I’ll fry like an egg.” 

“You can sit on the grass,” Abigail suggests.

“The blades are too sharp. It was just mowed.”

Abigail hands Cheryl a towel. 

“I need more,” Cheryl says, and Abigail hands her another. Where Abigail is long and lean to the point of emaciation, Cheryl is what in LA they would call chunky. 

Ben opens the umbrella and adjusts it so that both girls are protected. He stands over Abigail. “You look like I don’t make enough money to feed you,” he says.

“You’re not supposed to say that,” Abigail says. “You should talk to the psychiatrist. Mother, tell him to talk to Dr. Felt.”

“Do you want Esmeralda to bring you some lunch?” Sylvia asks.

“Just water,” Abigail says. “When the weather is like this, everything is an effort. Even this empty glass is so heavy.”

“Splash yourself,” the father says. 

“Make ice cubes,” Abigail says. 

“It’s blistering,” the mother says.

“I’m melting,” Cheryl says. “Literally turning to liquid. Look at me, water is pouring out of my body.” In contrast to other young women, who get dewy or glow when they are heated, Cheryl forms little round balls of sweat. 

“Was it hot like this when you were growing up?” Walter asks Ben, who is looking out over the city. 

Ben turns to Walter. “When we built this house no one wanted to live up here, but in my eyes, this was freedom. When it all goes to shit, when what is beneath us is crushed, we will come out on top.”

“What sign are you?” Abigail asks Walter. She is turning the pages of a magazine, ripping out the scented perfume cards and inhaling each one deeply before sailing them onto the grass like small frisbees.

“Pisces,” Walter says.