Some women love this sensual humidity. Sweat drizzles along the folds of their skin and they flush with inward pleasure and aren’t quite aware their pleasure shows but wouldn’t be sorry if they knew. They stroll along populated avenues wearing pretty, floaty dresses and dreamy little half smiles. I enjoy that kind of heat myself. I wear a dress of handkerchief linen and a Panama hat and savor the small feathery tickle of moisture on my flesh.

The heat this summer lasted longer than anyone expected; not much rain for relief, except for a late-night storm a few weeks ago, when for several thrilling hours lightning flashed and crackled overhead as though to rend the heavy sky. Yet, the city remained hot; the rain cooled nothing down and by morning the damp sidewalks were steaming.

Late last week the charm of the heat evaporated. Like many others in the city, I felt exasperated. “Right,” I said: “this can end now.” But it didn’t end, and other heats were rising. Not just the usual fetid smells and the screech of horns in snarled traffic, but: an old homeless man who lives in my neighborhood — “The King of Albania,” someone named him — became a little too joyous and talked more insistently to no one. Rollerbladers among the taxis, whose deadpan, high-wire-across-Niagara act always diverted me, now appeared a shade menacing in their Mad Max padding and gleaming near-naked bodies. On the F train to Brooklyn a very beautiful black woman was talking fluently to her companion, another beautiful woman, about the devil.

It felt as though the weather would never break. Had it ever been this hot for so long?

I thought about other summers and wondered if the globe weren’t warming too damn fast. Humid skin had lost its glow and become just sweaty. I showered often and stayed in the air conditioning. Listless friends drifted over. Lying about like bored summer campers, we thought up idle distractions. Little anecdotes floated out of fevered memories, until the talk turned to ghost stories, and a friend of ours, a young mother, recounted an odd occurrence.

One summer day about six years ago, she took her toddler son to play in Washington Square Park. She had bought him a toy rattle-drum in Chinatown, and he was shaking it energetically back and forth, when a voice, a resonant, articulate baritone, said politely: “You called?” She looked up: there stood a man whose approach she hadn’t noticed. A bum? No, that’s what was odd, she said: he was beautiful, and well- and cleanly dressed, except that around his waist was wound a belt, and dangling from it were what looked like fetishes, or lucky charms, though she couldn’t remember anymore what they had been — the foot of a small animal? Odd objects, anyhow. His manner, poised and graceful, reminded her of the actor James Earl Jones.

“’Called?’” she said.

“The rhythm of the drum,” he said. “It is very powerful, you know. The drum called me.”

She felt wary, but his manner was reasonable, and she decided to remain cool. How had Kaih acted around this stranger? I asked. She reflected, then said thoughtfully that he hadn’t seemed bothered at all. He had sat calmly on his blanket and watched the man. The man asked her if she lived in the neighborhood.
Around the corner, she said, still polite and noncommittal, as if they were conversing normally, and in return asked where he lived. On the Bowery, he told her, in the morgue: he was a ghost, he said. She remembered clearly his saying: “I’m a ghost.” She must have gasped, she thought. His tone remained courteous. He repeated his advice about not shaking the rattle — it had been the rhythm that had called him to them. She said: “Kaih must have been shaking the drum a certain way, but I hadn’t noticed.” Another odd thing: she couldn’t recall his leaving, or in what direction he had gone. She hesitated to say he had disappeared, but when she looked around a moment later, she saw no sign of him. He hadn’t stopped to talk to people, as park bums often do. He hadn’t seemed to her like a park bum: he was too well-dressed and well-mannered. She had watched for him during the next several days but hadn’t ever seen him again.

“It was a hot day, just like this,” she concluded. “I still don’t know if there is a morgue on the Bowery. I’m not sure I want to know. I remember thinking at the time that this encounter was strange; but I wasn’t frightened, nor was Kaih, and I’m certain I wasn’t dreaming, because I remember being intensely, physically, aware of Kaih that afternoon. Kaih has always been self-possessed: he is very attuned to people, and he was calm. The experience was vivid. Who could the man have been?”

Kaih now is almost seven. One day last December he went up to his mother and put his hand on her belly. “There’s a baby in here,” he announced. Our friend was astonished, and amused, and gently took away his hand; but a week later she learned to the delight of her husband and herself that she was indeed pregnant. The child is due any day. She’ll be relieved when it comes; like all of us, she’s tired of this heat.