Radicalized by the Heatwave

Before the heatwave, I thought the worst part of living in France was no Diet Coke, only Coke Zero.

Diet Coke, specifically, is one of humankind’s most perfect technologies, because unlike all my other vices, it provides a disproportionately high level of pleasure with virtually no drawbacks or consequences.

According to Newton’s third law of motion, forces come in pairs; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

According to Sir Isaac Newton, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

According to my psychiatrist, the reason I’ve been having horrific night terrors is because of the beta-blockers I’ve been taking. They are remarkably effective at tempering the physical symptoms of my anxiety during waking hours. I am finally able to withstand minor inconveniences without experiencing the cortisol spike of someone being hunted for sport, the only drawback being that I wake up to the sound of my own screaming several times a week, damp, in a puddle of my own cold sweat.

It turns out, all that cortisol has to go somewhere.

“Despite backlash, Louis Vuitton is going ahead with a beach-themed runway show on actual sand with a simulated tidal wave as its centerpiece”

I believe Diet Coke may be as close as it gets to a biological free lunch. I know some studies point to aspartame, the artificial sweetener, being allegedly linked to cancer, but a cashier at a grocery store once warned me to wash my hands immediately after touching the receipt she was handing me because the heat-sensitive paper was “insanely carcinogenic” (it was a receipt for a pack of cigarettes).

Stress is the real killer, and by that logic, things that make me happy must be good for me. What makes me happy is Diet Coke, not Coke Zero, which uses a combination of aspartame and acesulfame potassium. I do not know if this makes it more or less carcinogenic than Diet Coke, which uses only aspartame in its formula, but believe me when I tell you that it changes the flavor in some truly ineffable way, and up until the heatwave I thought that was the worst part of living in France. 

In France, they call it Canicule. La Canicule, to be exact, because it is a feminine word, a word with a delightful and ancient origin story. It comes from the same root as the English word “canine”, the Latin canicula, meaning “little dog.” It refers to the star Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, which rises with the Sun in those late summer days that I grew up calling “the dog days of summer,” without ever knowing why. In the ancient Mediterranean, the little dog’s appearance in the sky from late July into August became symbolically intertwined with oppressive summer weather. Which is why, in the dog days of summer, when Paris becomes unbearable, you go to Normandy, Corsica, Provence, maybe Marseilles if you’re basic like that, Biarritz, Hydra, Ibiza, Mallorca, maybe Menorca if you have kids. This collective emptying, les grands départs, has been going on, same time every year, for generations. So when the little dog showed up early this year without warning or precedent in the third week of June, right in the middle of Men’s Fashion Week, no one was ready. 

No one I know in Paris has an air conditioner, because it is easier to leave the home than to cool it. The Parisian apartment is a winter object, designed to retain heat. Window AC units are totally incompatible with the ubiquitous French window, rendering them virtually non-existent in the city, which would leave the portable corrugated single-hose variety as your only remaining option for in-home climate control.

I am told that in France, owning a residential AC is a sign of, and synonymous with, conservative politics. An exhaust hose dangling from a Parisian window has taken on an implicit subtext, a subtle but unmistakable symbol of ecological indifference and bad faith. As an American, there is something about it that feels spiritually reminiscent of a MAGA hat in its sly antagonism. And there is something grotesque about it, a flaccid tube dangling out an open window like that. Something obscene about the innards turned outward, the organs of a private place revealed, its bowels exposed, a prolapsed rectum.

It’s making me think about how every single thing has a metabolism, and how people are really just tubes that take things in at one end and release them at the other, and somewhere along the course of thousands of years of evolution, our tubes managed to grow appendages like arms and legs, and how those appendages are really the only things that separate people from worms, and how our metabolism is the thing that both keeps us alive and then ultimately kills us.

It’s making me think about how a few years ago, during a low-grade but prolonged manic-depressive episode, I accidentally got addicted to colonics and started going twice a week to have a tube lubed up and inserted into my tight little asshole by an Australian woman with long gray pigtails who called herself a healer. Upon first insertion I would always burst into tears and sob uncontrollably, and the healer would gently explain to me again that I had lots of trauma stored in my colon, and that an emotional release was to be expected. She told me that people cry during colonics all the time, and not just from the pain.

“I accidentally got addicted to colonics and started going twice a week to have a tube lubed up and inserted into my tight little asshole by an Australian woman with long gray pigtails who called herself a healer”

Climate control in France is generally reserved for museums, department stores and hotels that cater to American tourists, because the American solution is to cool a place, not to leave it. Even in the case of these exceptions, air conditioning is pretty generally looked down upon throughout the country. I’d guess that the contemporary attitude towards energy consumption may have a lot to do with a lingering, inter-generational guilty conscience from France historically being one of Europe’s most prolific coal-burning polluters. The country finally got its shit together in the 1970s, when it radically decarbonized its power sector, becoming a global leader in nuclear energy and a relentless proponent of eco-friendly legislation and red tape.

But defiance has always had its own libidinal appeal. I believe this heatwave may have radicalized me.

Day two of La Canicule, the mid-day temperature has hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 18 heat-related deaths have already been recorded, including two young children who were left in a car with the windows rolled up. Dior and Rick Owens have rescheduled their runway shows and I’ve developed a strange rash around my collarbone and clavicle where beads of sweat pool and collect. All of my plants are dead. 

Inside my second-floor one-bedroom, opening the window is like opening an oven. Somehow, the only thing worse than moving around is standing still. There is no relief. All I can do is take a cold shower every 20 minutes and air dry, and then do it again.

I wonder what I did to deserve this, what anyone did to deserve this.

I open my laptop and type into the search bar: “air conditioner no tube discreet.” I am desperate but guilty, ashamed of my weakness and reluctant to expose it, my inability to participate in the shared performance of endurance and restraint. I’m imagining a technology that simply eliminates heat, rather than relocating it.

“Have you listened to a word I’ve said?” says Sir Isaac Newton, rolling his eyes.

“Shut the up, nerd,” I mutter, as I type into the search bar: “how does ac work.”

It turns out, the technology I’m imagining violates every law of thermodynamics, and now I’m learning about cold fusion, a radiation-free form of limitless free energy that, although much hypothesized within the physics community, exists only in theory. 

It turns out, all that heat has to go somewhere.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

It would be really hard to have air conditioning in outer space. On Earth, an air conditioner cools a room by moving heat through either a window or a tube, and dumping it outside, where the atmosphere carries it away. In space, there is no atmosphere to absorb that heat and no air to carry it away. The first country, corporation, or individual to solve cold fusion will be the first country, corporation or individual with data centers in space.

Day three of La Canicule is the hottest day in France’s recorded history. The only places on Earth hotter than France right now are parts of the Middle East and the American Southwest. The mysterious rash has spread to my neck and back. Despite backlash, Louis Vuitton is going ahead with a beach-themed runway show on actual sand with a simulated tidal wave as its centerpiece, and I’m thinking about this Jean Baudrillard essay from 1993:

“Not much snow this winter… So the pistes are made up with artificial snow, providing a real basis for the simulacrum of leisure … The carbon gas produced by all the winter tourist industries is contributing to the warming of the atmosphere, and as a result, an absence of snow.”

On the fourth day of La Canicule, the mysterious rash has spread to my chest and a South African art collector is texting to invite me to meet him and his museum-board member wife for tapas at a hotel in the 5th arrondissement. His family’s wealth is, allegedly, directly tied to the extraction and exportation of a certain rare mineral from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the contemporary Mediterranean small bites place at his hotel has AC and he’s saying I can use his pool access.

No such thing as a free lunch.

The pool is indoors, and the floor surrounding it is made of cool white marble that matches my bikini.

For the first time in days I experience a level of physical comfort I’ve forgotten was even possible. I think to myself, “I don’t deserve this.” And then, “Who deserves anything at all?”

I cool down so much, I decide to spend a few minutes in the sauna.

Follow Emma Stern on Instagram @lava_baby

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