Heat Debt

She woke mid-swallow, throat closed around nothing. The sheet beneath her held the damp shape of her body.

Still. The cooling mat under the fitted sheet had gone to room temperature hours ago. It was rated for six hours. It never lasted six.

The thermostat across the room glowed 78. The compressor cycled through the wall, its low drone so constant it had become the sound of the house from May through October. She reached past the water bottle, past the small fan she angled at her neck, past the sleep mask she'd stopped wearing because it sealed heat against her face. Her phone opened to the screen she'd left it on. A graph in amber and red. 47.3 hours. Last week, 44. The number climbed from May and never fully came down before the next May started it climbing again.

She set the phone face-down.

2:47.

The floor held the day's warmth through her soles. The other side of the mattress was flat, the sheet dry. He'd gone to the other room around midnight. She'd felt the bed shift and release his weight, a small mechanical event she registered the way she registered the compressor cycling on. The dual-zone pad kept his side at 64, hers at 62, but two bodies still radiated into the gap between them, and over the years the gap had widened until he started leaving after she fell asleep. Or before. Neither of them mentioned the migrations. There was nothing to mention. It was temperature.

In the bathroom she turned the shower to cool, because cold tightened everything down and trapped the heat inside. She'd learned this by failing first. Cool water, and her pulse slowed, and the vessels in her arms opened, and heat left through her skin the way night air used to pull it. She stood under the water longer than she needed to.

She went to the kitchen damp, in a cotton shirt that would dry in twenty minutes. The tile was cooler than the bedroom floor. North-facing, ground level. She stood on it and drank water from the tap that came out at body temperature. Just wet.

The Georgia Power envelope sat on the counter where it had sat for eleven days. She set her glass next to it.

The house clicked and hummed. Refrigerator. Compressor. The dehumidifier in the hallway. She'd stopped hearing these sounds years ago, stopped hearing them the way she'd stopped hearing traffic. They were the house breathing now, its mechanical respiration keeping the interior at a temperature her body could almost use. Outside, through the kitchen window, something was calling. One insect, high and constant, filling the yard the way a single station fills a dial. She couldn't remember when the nights had gotten so simple. When the power went out last August for eleven hours, the silence had been the frightening thing. Then the walls warming. The air thickening until she could feel it on her arms like cloth.

She opened the freezer and pressed a pillowcase she'd put in that morning against the back of her neck. The cold shocked. Then didn't. Forty-five seconds, maybe a minute, before the fabric went from frozen to cool to damp. She folded it and pressed the dry inside against her face.

3:12.

Standing in the kitchen holding a pillowcase to her face, she could not remember what she'd come in here for before she'd reached for it. This happened now. She lost words mid-sentence, stood in rooms with her hands empty. Important meetings had moved to mornings, before the fog settled behind her eyes around two. She had stopped noticing any of this. It was just her now, the way the envelope on the counter was just the counter, the way his empty side of the bed was just the bed.

Back in the bedroom she lay down where he'd been. The sheet was dry. The gel layer hadn't absorbed anyone's heat for hours. She pressed her damp back against it and felt the surface begin to draw warmth from her skin.

It would last maybe forty minutes before it equalized.

Her heart rate was still up. She could feel it in her throat, the faint knock that meant her body was still working to shed heat, still running its own machinery the way the compressor ran through the wall. Something in her that would not stand down.

She'd sleep again. Maybe thirty minutes, maybe an hour, before the alarm at 5:30. Enough to shower again and dress and drive to work and sit in meetings and function the way she had always functioned, a person to whom nothing in particular had happened.

The mat warmed beneath her. She turned onto her side.