Of the Times

Stepping out of his apartment and into the icy, mid-December chill, Adam Carrick declares, "It's fritzing cold!" his words muted to a mumble by the scarf drawn over his mouth, his breath instantly condensing in tiny wet beads against the scarf's itchy wool. His slacks are pressed and presentable, but what they make up for fashion-wise they lack in warmth. Adam is no fan of long johns -- which are for fishermen, farmers, and fags -- but a pair of those badboys, regardless the color, would do him well right now, because a harsh wind blows, and his legs are numb. Damn numb.

Pfreezing! shouts Carrie Garth's inner voice, the one that cares little for correct spelling. Because, she muses, it is p-freezing; there's cold, and then there's this. Substitute the P for whatever crude oath you know, or make up one of your own, girl, she thinks. She checked the weather this morning while her kettle boiled, and she thought she'd bundled up accordingly, but no. Gusts of blustery wind slap her exposed cheeks like a skeletal hand, and it feels as though the broad side of an icicle sword is pressed against her forehead.

Adam is walking toward the bus stop, head down. His ears are red and screaming, twin satellite dishes receiving a signal of cold that his brain deciphers in capital letters: COLD!

Carrie wishes she had gloves on. Her hands are thrust deeply into her coat pockets, but they're still chilly, as are her toes. It is a day unkind to extremities, and the leaves feel it worse than the branches, the pawns before the bishops.

There's a red light at this particular crossing, on this particularly cold day. As our two subjects stand ten yards apart, each bound in opposite directions, Adam is humming a Counting Crows song, Carrie wriggling her toes to the beat of GZA's "Cold World."

Then the light turns

(blue)

green.

Adam starts on his side, ahead of the pack. For him, this is a sprint for warmth. His office is five minutes away, and he will get there in under four, bet your sweet bippy. He will assuredly be cold again, but he never wants to be out in this cold. Because it's cruel. Unnatural. Like mentally retarded babies and aspiring basketball superstars' busted knees.

Carrie is lost in thought, imagining herself a frozen human icicle, much like Jack Torrence at the end of Kubrick's mindfuck film. But she picks up the pace when the throng before her commences marching. She has only thirty or so strides to the bus stop, and while that won't provide warmth, on a day like today she's ready to go wherever any bus, whichever one stops first -- even if it goes to the atomic wasteland of Ilsan -- will carry her. Because it's cold. It's certainly been colder, somewhere -- definitely in Antarctica -- but that can't placate a near-hypothermic person, much like a starving Alabama boy can't compare the hunger he feels to the plight of Sudanese refugees. Carrie is cold. Degrees of temperature can measure its force, but not its blow.

Stepping down from the bleached white-gray curb, she walks onto the crossing on toes as untrustworthy as a punch-drunk prize fighter's. Ahead of her, eyes straight and narrow, is a gentleman. It's insanely cold, but Carrie Garth isn't mad in the mentally disturbed sense; she knows what she sees, and her vision is true: Prince Charming, if for one night or every one to follow for the rest of her life.

Adam pauses midway through the intersection. Love at first sight is bullcrap, so he's been told, but here is an angel, one with bushy eyebrows and a feminine mouth that even John Romita Sr. could never draw, a bow turned downward in the cold, perhaps upward in warm weather; an elastic mouth that just might reveal the secrets of life.

"Sorry," Carrie says as they bump shoulders while passing.

"Excuse me?" Adam says, turning around.

"You brushed me. Or maybe I brushed you. Anyway, sorry."

"My fault entirely."

Sadly, it's too fucking cold for conversation. Too cold a world, where displaced Sudanese boys are eaten by lions.

Numb.

Damn numb.