As I’ve mentioned before, it can get hot in Cairo.
On Sunday the temperature was 45ºC/113ºF in Cairo, and on Monday it was 43ºC/109.4ºF. It remained 40ºC/104ºF until after 10:00 p.m. that night. This led to some serious blasting of air conditioners in some–but not all–parts of my life. This intricate formula of exposure to a mix of extremely hot and freezing is exactly what leads to ironically catching a cold, the kind that has the quality of eternal torture because the weather is also hot.
So yesterday I woke up at 6:00 a.m., and by 7:00 a.m., I was already sweating. The air conditioner was intense inside my office, mostly because it’s stuck on one temperature, and so I had to wear a jacket. But it was still hot and stuffy in the corridors, as well as in the offices of some of the people with whom I interact whose air conditioners are altogether not functioning. I also had to go back and forth outside to the reception, as well as to the outdoor waiting area, which was so bright it felt like planet Earth was under some kind of unmerciful galactic spotlight so the other planets could see us more clearly.
Around noon my body quit, and I began having suicidal thoughts, which I probably went around sharing out loud with various co-workers, security guards, cleaners, perhaps even the roaches in the file room. I don’t remember much.
By 3:30 I was no longer able to maintain consciousness. I went into my co-worker’s office, sat down, put my feet up, closed my eyes, and began hallucinating an out of body experience in a fair land of mild weather and love.
The air conditioner in the work bus as well as the cars of my co-workers work properly on full blast, but they were not enough for overcoming this heat. It was like trying to beat down a California brush fire with a glass of ice water. After reaching Downtown, with the ground rocking, I took an air conditioned taxi through traffic and let myself be dragged home drooling, which I also barely remember.
I reached home and passed out into the sweaty nightmarish sleep of unreasonable heat. I woke up gasping for air and thinking that my neck, which for some reason was very cold and numb, was broken. I thought I might have moved a wrong way in my sleep, causing a full-body paralysis. When I was finally able to steady my breathing and stretch out my muscles, I realized I had a cold.
In this fucking weather that is hotter than Satan’s spunk and twice as sticky, as Mister Aedan has described the Middle East. A cold.
It started with my throat feeling like I had eaten a beach. That feeling continued until that beach I ate felt like it had razor blades in the sand. Then the cough came on, and my voice started sounding like a 13 year old boy at the worst part of puberty. Then my nose joined in the party, as well as some other symptoms that are probably inappropriate to mention.
So I took the next day off work, and spent it in bed in the dark with the windows closed and the air conditioner on, pretending like the sun didn’t exist anymore. I decided that I didn’t want to see the sun again, that it is my enemy, and that I refuse to leave my house until December when the weather becomes reasonable again.
I slept on and off and had an ongoing dream repeating scenarios from my recent trip to Turkey with the boyfriend, only it contained psychedelic talking animals–fictional and non-fictional–some stuffed animals that had come to life, some cartoonish–who organized themselves into an army that guarded Istanbul. It was difficult to determine whether they were friends or foes. Similar to the real trip, we ate lots of food, but in the dream it was all magical chocolate and rare secret things that give superpowers and other nonsense. Sometimes we had to solve puzzles in order to find trinkety tools that helped us acquire special foods. We had a meeting with some Asian-American girls who helped us on our adventure. The dream culminated with me having an emotional moment alone in a vast maze of a shopping mall where I looked down to the floor below me and found the food court full of plants that had feelings (too much Plants vs. Zombies?). I think the moment was emotional because I had some kind of epiphany about the real meaning of this mission, but I don’t remember what it was now. I went downstairs to the food court, passed some families who had way too many kids, and waited in a line to enter the women’s bathroom, which was organized by immigrants. There was no line for the men’s bathroom. The immigrants began yelling in strange accents that the roller derby girls were coming through, which they did, and so the people there had to get out of the way.
I woke up dizzy and starving and staggered to the refrigerator and found the leftover chicken from the soup and chicken meal I had had the night before in an attempt to eat in alliance with the sick theme.
And I continue to sit in my room in the dark blasting the air conditioner while shivering under the blankets until it’s time to emerge in December…
***EDIT***
The power went out in my flat. No air conditioner. No fan. Only unrelenting heat and quickly impending death.
***EDIT***
The power went out at 3:00 a.m. because a switch in the mains melted. So it was out in the whole building. Which affected the motor that allows water to be pumped to the flats in the building, so there was also no water.
*Photo from Web420 Pschedelic Blog.
