FLATBUSH, BROOKLYN – It was 74 degrees on Election Day; I wore bike shorts on the two-block walk to my polling site. The iced coffee in my hand proved unwieldy as I scanned my ballot, the poll worker’s hands fluttering nervously nearby. By the time I completed my civic duty, I still had most of my coffee left, along with a mostly free afternoon. When I messaged my editor to get a vibe check for the day, she told me, “For election coverage, I think nobody has a sense of what to write right now but then it will get either pretty easy or pretty hard.” It was as true then as it is now.
But I had that strangely beautiful afternoon ahead of me. It was the kind of day that tricks everyone into believing they like summer in New York, except it was early November. My face and legs began to prick with heat as I settled onto a park bench and lit a joint. A pickup basketball game unfolded before me. A group of teens gossiped at a table nearby, shedding their black puffer jackets as the sun's warmth intensified. I remembered a wish I’d made earlier that year, that this fall would be the most beautiful I’d ever witnessed. I wondered if it was a curse. In a group chat with my best friends, one of them a culture editor at the New Yorker, said, “I hate to say this and I want to be wrong but I kind of think he’s going to win.” My legs began to burn; I pulled a book out of my bag, my jacket over my knees.
I’d recently restarted James Baldwin’s Another Country; the novel begins with a doomed affair between a white woman and a black man in late 1950s New York. As the sun beat down on the back of my neck, Rufus, the black man, approached the end of a rapid denouement. “Sometimes I listen to those boats on the river,” he says to his friend, a white man named Vivaldo.
“I listen to those whistles—and I think wouldn’t it be nice to get on a boat again and go someplace away from all these nowhere people, where a man could be treated like a man.” [Rufus] wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and then suddenly brought his fist down on the window sill. “You got to fight with the landlord because the landlord’s white. You got to fight with the elevator boy because the motherfucker’s white. Any bum on the Bowery can shit all over you because maybe he can’t hear, can’t see, can’t walk, can’t fuck—but he’s white!”
“Rufus. Rufus. What about–––” [Vivaldo] wanted to say, What about me, Rufus? I'm white.
Nausea gripped me, the sort that comes from too much heat and hunger. The rest of the day passed in a sort of languorous haze. I studiously avoided my phone, luxuriated in mindless, tactile tasks; I went to the grocery store and the gym, took an indulgently long shower, fussed over an unnecessarily extravagant dinner. I turned on the new season of Love Island: Australia knowing that I'd never finish it. It was warm enough in my apartment that I considered turning on the window AC unit I'd yet to uninstall. Instead I fell asleep with the windows open, imagining that I'd wake up in August, another two months between me and the present.
The next day was even warmer: 79 degrees. I hit snooze on my morning alarm five times in a row before confronting the last text in my group chat: "yeah, it's over." A friend, another black woman, came over to my apartment; I turned the heat off as she stepped in. The rest of the day passed in a sort of anxious stupor, minutes sluggishly inching by. We sat on the couch and shared a joint, ate donuts and nachos and considered other countries. When the time came for her to leave, we lingered at the door, united in a desire not to be left alone with our own thoughts.
Tears stung my eyes as I sat on the train that night. I was going to see Anora at Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Brooklyn. I've never seen anyone order more than one drink at a screening there; that night, nearly everyone around me had at least three. Afterward I shared another joint in a nearby park with my date; we'd both spent time in Texas, were both familiar with the state that, perhaps more than any other, shaped the present we now shared. I batted mosquitos away from my exposed forearms, remembered how my parents, Chicago-born products of the Great Migration, always told me I had sweet blood. On the night of the election, my dad had texted the family group chat, "Unfortunately it may be what people need to wake up. The old folks use to say people don't believe fat meat is greasy."
By the time I got back to my apartment, the mosquito bites had already begun to swell. They'd laid claim not just to my arms but to my upper shoulders and back; I spent the night lying awake under the glow of my TV, hot and itchy and scared. The rest of the week stumbled by, always in that increasingly surreal heat. The longer it went without breaking, the more ominous it began to feel. In my inbox, a newsletter from Emily Atkin's HEATED: "Now that Trump has been re-elected, the goal of preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is dead, nine climate scientists and policy experts told me this week."
By Friday evening, Prospect Park was on fire. Two acres of land were burned in a brush fire after the driest October in New York on record. Our indicted mayor was on the burning ground, having recently won four out of five of what Hell Gate described as power-consolidating "troll ballot propositions." Yesterday, the city was engulfed in smoke from wildfires in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey. “It’s just been a week of, like, disaster," one Williamsburg resident told the New York Times. I turned my heat back on, took a shorter shower.
It's tempting to think of that strange heat as an omen, as a sign of what's to come. But we don't need divination for that; the incoming powers that be have already made clear exactly what they intend to do. The heat, like Trump's victory, was no harbinger; it was a consummation of choices made by a nihilistic cabal of bigots and grifters.
It's supposed to rain today, for the first time in over 40 days and 40 nights. It might be too late for those two acres in Prospect Park, for the 39 in the Palisades. Fires start when it's like this, and then you put them out. What else can you do?
