Heat Signature

.

My twin brother calls from the hospital. He’s finished his blood draw and wants to know the word in Portuguese for watermelon. I recite the word for him – melancia – though my brother’s mind isn’t likely to keep hold of it. Zach can no longer keep a hold of his house keys or his phone, which he left yesterday in the bathroom sink. Before we hang up, I ask him to please wait for me in the lounge area for outpatient services, not to wander outside the hospital.

I know exactly what news involving a watermelon he’s just seen on the TV. Last night, on the other side of Pennsylvania, an escaped murderer who’s been on the lam for nine days appeared on a security camera, stealing a watermelon off a truck. In the grainy footage, the melon blurs in the murderer’s hands as he heaves it above his face and cracks it open against his forehead. Every news source has been playing the same clip, ending right after the moment of impact, the stripes on the watermelon splitting into jagged halves. In the gap between the split halves, the murderer’s mouth and nose appear for one startling second, and that’s it. The footage ends.

The clip is so startling that maybe Zach will still recall it when I reach the hospital to pick him up. Despite the chambers growing dim in his mind, he manages to remember that this murderer all over the news was born in Brazil, same as my husband, Paulo, and our two children. I’m the only one in my household who was born here, in this former steel town on the Pennsylvania border with West Virginia, where we’ve returned for just one school year. Paulo keeps reminding me of our agreement to leave in June. I promised him that ten months will be long enough to satisfy my desire for my children to know my twin brother before he becomes unknowable – and to know myself as well, as someone who didn’t stay away, helping through her credit card while her only sibling loses his ability to remember a boiling pot of water, to keep track of his seventeen-year-old son.

To my own children, I’ve presented this temporary move to my hometown as a reality check. In their international school in Rio, their friends all have passports and use them frequently. They joke at lunch about plane food and jetlag. I expected my kids to struggle at first, adjusting to the humbler discussions at the public school here, which has far fewer students now, and no chess club for my son. There’s still a cross country team that runs along the same wooded road where I practised in middle school. Neither of my children, though, has an interest in daily runs along the deepening reds of the changing leaves. They don’t care about experiencing the seasons. They want to run over the sand again on São Conrado Beach, to be with kids and teachers who would never presume that they have special insight on a murderer just because they are Brazilian as well.

When the first headlines aired about the manhunt, I encouraged my son and daughter to be patient with their new classmates, to keep their composure when asked to explain how this fugitive learned to crabwalk with such stealth under barbed wire. The best response, I told them, was a calm and gracious one, to explain that in fact they have no special knowledge.

It feels possible to exist in present tense again. 

My son was swift to reject this tactic of an earnest answer. He recognised that there was no protection, at eleven years old, in earnestness. He opted for his father’s strategy, of deflecting the endless manhunt questions with humour. When his math teacher asked him to weigh in on a clip last week of the murderer stealing somebody’s broken-down boots out of a garage, my son replied that the newer boots in the garage must have been the wrong size.

This morning, my son declared his reserves of humour were now depleted. In the drop-off line for school, he wouldn’t get out of the car. He said he was too nauseous to go inside. My daughter refused to go inside as well, even though they both knew I needed to pick Zach up from his blood draw.

Não posso, my daughter declared in Portuguese. She insisted she couldn’t bear it, another school day full of inane questions about Brazilian waxing, and now the watermelon. I assured her in the car that the manhunt would end soon. I switched to English to make this promise, buttressing my guess with numbers. I explained about the two hundred government agents who were apparently searching various counties now, with drones and trained dogs. I kept talking at my children, hoping they might leave the car just to get a reprieve from my voice. When they still wouldn’t get out, I started rambling about my confidence in the advanced methods of detection that were possible now, the new precision of thermal cameras on drones, capable of finding even well-hidden people through the signature heat of a body.

Mas quem ê você? my daughter asked, as if she had no idea who I was – as if I were a doppelganger of her real mother, who loathed drones. She let me know, in Portuguese, how much she hated the way I’d started switching to English in the car when I dropped them off at school.

Well, excuse me, I told her, for the sin of wanting to speak in my native language. Could you get out please? Agora!

As soon as they slammed their doors, I regretted my sharp response. I felt frantic leaving the parking lot, trapped behind other parents negotiating the seven potholes before the exit. In my calculations for our one-year stay here, I didn’t factor in the growing lack of taxpayers in the county, the dwindling number of homeowners to fund things like school buses, or even new pavement. I didn’t consider whether the layered emotional outfits I’ve assembled for my parenting persona in Rio might not fit here, outside this middle school, that I might feel stripped, every day, to my moodiest, fourteen-year-old self.

Once I reach the school exit and can hit the gas, get some distance between my vehicle and anyone else’s, it feels possible to exist in present tense again. I call Zach to make sure he’s all right and ask him if I should still stop at Mason’s coffee shop or skip it.

But his café’s right down the road, my brother says, why would you skip it? It doesn’t matter if you still have a crush on Mason.

I tell Zach that I’ve never had a crush on Mason, that he’s misremembering. Zach responds with one of his big, throaty laughs and says it’s my brain that’s misfiring now.

I’ll get your cappuccino then, I tell him and let the argument go. I don’t know why his deteriorating mind has fixated on a crush I never had. I wasn’t attracted to Mason in high school, and there’s no way Zach could know about the recurring dream I had about Mason in Brazil, after reading the prognosis from Zach’s neurologist. Mason had been the only friend of Zach’s in high school who resisted the pressure to play football. Mason had waited tables and played drums while Zach and their other friends chose to get crushed and thrown to the ground and suffer one concussion after another. No one fretted in the nineties about head injuries, what damage to a growing brain might not reveal itself for years.

When I dreamed about Mason in Rio, he was cutting my hair. Instead of a café, he was the owner of a barbershop. Zach was in the dream, too, spinning in a barber chair next to us while I cringed at the clumsy, blunt way that Mason was chopping at my bangs. The dream was suffocating and contained no aspect of attraction to Mason, nothing sensual, not like my disturbing dream two nights ago of the murderer’s skinny, shirtless torso slipping out of my reach, as he keeps slipping out of everyone’s.

I’ve never made sense there in the deep, bodily way that my children and Paulo can, with ease.

My compulsion to dream about touching the murderer’s bare, bony chest causes my face to flush as I step into Mason’s café. The door chimes as I walk into the ambush of nineties nostalgia on every possible surface. The Bon Jovi posters peeling on the walls. The aluminum Snoopy lunch boxes piled on the shelf behind the register.

How about that big-ass watermelon? Mason says as I draw closer to the counter.

Quite a heavy load for a man on the lam, Mason adds and asks if I know whether Brazil’s national fruit is the watermelon. He tells me he has developed a fascination with national fruits.

I have no idea what Brazil’s fruit is, I tell Mason, maybe it’s the cupuaçu.

Coopa-zoo? Wowza – did I say that right? Mason asks and urges me to pronounce the name for him again, and I do. Repeating the pronunciation of cupuaçu for Mason, I feel a faint sensation of spinning. Portuguese feels newly random in my mouth, speaking it aloud for Mason, as if I could have ended up anywhere at all in adulthood – could have slipped for a decade into some other language instead. I could have ended up dreaming of Mason chopping at my hair while off living in any country at all, as long as I got to prove I had an ability to make sense somewhere else, which never really happened in Rio. I’ve never made sense there in the deep, bodily way that my children and Paulo can, with ease.

After a second, better attempt to pronounce cupuaçu, Mason emits a whistling sound and turns his back to me. He starts the foam for Zach’s cappuccino and pulls out the oat milk for my cup without my asking. At the register, Mason rings me up for just one cappuccino, as he does every time, compelling me to buy another bag of his homemade pistachio granola, even though we have half a dozen unopened bags of his granola at home already.

It’s beyond comprehension, isn’t it? Mason says and I wait for him to continue, unsure if he’s still talking about the vowel sounds in cupuaçu.

Any afternoon you need some help, Mason offers, we could keep an eye on him here in the cafe, just bring him over.

I nod at Mason’s offer, thank him for the free coffee. To hear him discuss Zach this way, like a child, causes a constriction in my throat. It’s a relief to push through the chiming door and get away from Mason and his dusty, Bon Jovi-filled portal to the past, though I feel out of sync with the clean brightness outside, too.

The drive to the hospital takes me over the long steel bridge over the Conemaugh River, where several boys are swirling along in rubber inner tubes. Two of the boys are clutching each other’s tyres, laughing as the churning water delivers them together, in their separate tyres, under the bridge, and then they vanish – or at least from my view as I reach the pavement that resumes on the other side.

Nobody went into the river when I was kid here. Everyone knew the industrial runoff from the steel mill flowed directly into the water, and it’s still rare to sight any fish in it or a frog. When my nephew offered to take my son and daughter tubing a few weeks ago, I said absolutely not. Paulo thought I was being too cautious, that floating just once down the river was no big deal, that it couldn’t be too harmful if kids here went tubing all summer. The discussion started at dinner and Zach insisted the river was fine now, and that my kids were big enough to avoid swallowing any water if they fell out of their tyres. My son begged me to agree until I yelled that I would never allow them to go floating down a river full of carcinogens. Why not sign up for more tackle football, too, I shouted at the table, lots of people still doing that, must be fine!

Zach and his son left as soon as they finished eating, and my kids kept their distance from me after dinner as well, for hours. At some point, I’m going to have to bring up the question with Zach of where he’ll live next year, once his son, now a senior in high school, starts college and may not be able to help him overnight. I want my nephew to be able to live in a dorm, to have a full college experience, but that would be possible only if he trusted I was overseeing his dad’s daily care, and I don’t know how to make that viable. Having Zach move back with us to Brazil, once the school year ends, would likely accelerate his disorientation. His unstable ex-wife has yet to respond to any of my voice messages.

After the bridge and the floating boys, I drink my coffee in hot mouthfuls that burn my throat. To avoid the traffic light before the hospital, I take the back road, past the long, concrete emptiness around the brick buildings of the steel mill. The last operations in the mill closed a few years after I left for college and Zach stayed on, got his business degree from the branch campus in town of the state university, where Mason and most of our class got their bachelor’s too. I saw one classmate last week outside the hospital. She didn’t ask me for insights on the murderer, which I appreciated, although maybe she just wasn’t following the news, or didn’t know I’d been living for over a decade in Rio, had become a translator for one of Brazil’s most inscrutable writers.

In the vast, mostly empty hospital parking lot, I recognise the young woman sitting cross-legged on the ground, murmuring into her loose hair. I’ve seen her sitting in this lot before, barefoot and Ophelia-like. In her faint voice, she sounds like she’s reciting a sequence of events, announcing an emphatic FIRST before lowering her voice, uttering other, softer words I can’t make out. She yells the word SECOND then murmurs a few other words, before shouting a vigorous THIRD.

While I cross the lot with Zach’s coffee, her recitation stirs me to mumble some consoling private logic of my own – a disclaimer I translated a few years ago that appears like an epigraph, before the first section of the novel: whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly. My intention, translating the second adverb, had been to imply exertion, but not necessarily pain. The author’s original sentence didn’t refer to pain explicitly, but rather a harder-to-name sensation, the exhausting effort, I’d inferred, of seeing others, and herself, with more clarity – and more mercy. The editor had disagreed with what he called my ‘overreading’, had insisted the word painstakingly was the best choice.

I abided by the editor’s hunch and acknowledged my instinct might be incorrect, as perhaps my instinct to drag my family back here to Pennsylvania was a mistake. Do que quer que seja, I say aloud as I reach the entry to outpatient services, reciting the author’s original words, which I repeated like a spell, for weeks, before attempting any iteration in English.

You talkin’ to yourself in those funny words? a familiar voice says and I come to halt before the double doors to look around for Zach, who’s clearly not inside where he promised to wait for me. He’s not over by the broken vending machines either, or in front of the doors to lab services.

Where are you? I ask and receive a loose, throaty laugh in response. It is such a deeply known sound. Everything in me turns toward my brother’s laugh, as I’ve been turning to him since we were zygotes. His laugh sounds like it’s arriving from somewhere close, but there’s nothing large enough to conceal a bulky, six-foot-two man – only a cement beam and several empty parking spots.

Please don’t hide like this, I implore my brother and he laughs again. Wherever he’s standing, he goes on waiting for me to find him.

.

.

Idra Novey is a novelist, poet and translator. Her novel, Take What You Need, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and named a Best Book of the Year with The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, NPR, Today and an Author Pick at The Guardian. Her first novel Ways to Disappear was a finalist for the L.A. Times First Fiction Prize and her recent book of poems, Soon and Wholly, was named a Best Poetry Collection of 2024 with Electric Lit and a Staff Pick with the Poetry Foundation. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Guardian.

---

To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.