Let me tell you about the weekend. How many other blog posts begin this way? And then proceed to create a list of "and then"s. And then and then and THEN.

But I'll be brief; just a sliver of Friday; just the bit worth telling.

There was a tornado warning, apparently. The sky began to bruise*, trees bent deep and heavy. Soon Union Square was rushing past us, paper scraps, umbrellas, people running heel-to-toe, the rains. We sucked down spicy lime chicken and pad thai and thanked the opening heavens that we were inside.

"I'm going to dance tonight." I sipped at the dregs of my frozen lychee martini through a straw, watching the couple next to us read from a religious tract. "I'm just warning you."

We compared chopstick technique and watched lightning explode above the skyline.

We were headed to Webster Hall to see Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. Post-"tornado", the outside air hung so thick that walking felt more like swimming. (I want all of New York City, just for a day, to turn into a swimming pool. The fashion: victorian suits, swim caps for hats and goggles for glasses. Streets turned into lanes by lane markers of curbs. Someone blows a whistle, not to catch a cab, but to signal the end of adult swim. A bagel tied to a string thrown into the street to drag out a drowning rat.) By the time we reached the hot bowels of Webster Hall, the band was already on stage, and we were dripping.

We made our way up to the balcony. Balconies at shows are the savior of every short girl, and up there, as if expecting me, was a chair I could stand on to see over the row of people lining the railing. J was getting the beers in, and I was waiting for him to come back.

And then they played "Home."

I used to roll my eyes at people who would cheer on the band's biggest hit. But then they played "Home," and it didn't matter that I was the one cheering on the band's biggest hit. This was the song I was going to dance to. There were other girls dancing too, girls in loose skirts, girls in vintage lace, somewhere an Olsen Twin. And then, suddenly: J was there, smiling big and dancing along with me, sweaty limbs thrown to the ceiling.

Man, oh man, you're my best friend.

Sometimes when I try to turn my New York experiences into stories worth telling, I forget that the periphery - the thick air, the tornado, the dancing girls in vintage lace - none of it makes a lick of a difference to me until my favorite character comes into the scene. And then: I come across the emotion that makes it worth telling.

If none of this makes sense, then just take away this nugget tonight: spend a bit more time with your favorite characters, dancing on balconies.

*Credit to Bruce Robinson for that gem.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

This summer city heat. Enough.

In the cool catacombs of my memory, summer is different. Farmstands of peaches shaded by oak trees. June bugs losing their way. The swimming pool concessions stand with its licorice ropes and Sweet Tarts. Corn-on-the-cob turned in butter. The hum of insects surrounding dusky porches. Thunderstorms approaching with a warning rumble over the hills. The desparation of a hand-cranked window to pull the heat from the back seat of a parking lot car, even as our teeth chatter, our hair still wet from swim practice.

Not this heat, this stifling, ever-present, concrete-bound heat.

Two nights in a row last week I slept on my camping mattress in the front room, trying to imagine away the sweat tracing a sleepy path down my neck. The skins of peaches pucker on the kitchen counter, cold water runs warm and the lights flicker, threatening 2003 all over again. Outdoor tables at restaurants sit empty, challenging. Everyone walks more slowly, moisture forming Rorschach images on the backs of their shirts.

I'm hot. I'm unbearably hot.

In a booth at Prime Meats, sitting behind a cucumber garnished cocktail and a tray of oysters on ice, I whip out a fan, trying to pass it off as a sartorial eccentricity until I'm offered an ice-cold wet towel from the freezer by one of the waiters. "You look like you could do with this."

Never let them see you sweat, we were told. I pretend we're in a Fitzgerald novel, languishing on couches and holding condensating glasses to our foreheads. The air conditioner is doing its best, but even its best is not enough. When a cold towel is offered to my booth neighbors, I advise them to hold it against the crook of their elbows. The woman declines, even as sweat begins to collect at the nape of her neck.

We hope for rain. It comes, and for a moment, the oppression is lifted. And then the sidewalk sizzles the droplets away, traffic whizzes again down the streets, slowing wipers and scattering the moisture in the wake of hot, puffing tailpipes. The whole city is wrung dry like a wet towel, and then left carelessly on a radiator.

The trees are shedding their leaves. We are shedding our layers. Bare shoulders trying not to touch each other on buses. Shirts desparately unbuttoned, hair lifted high off the neck. Toes peeking out from every shoe. How much more can we take off?

How much more can we take?

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

Under a bamboo structure on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, drinking a mojito.

In church trying to follow along with the hymns, whispering to my aunt: "Oh, I know this one." Alone in a pew when everyone rises to take communion.

Dancing in the rain on the boardwalk in Coney Island. Peeking through my hands during the sword-swallowing act.

In Little Italy listening to Red Mike's Festival Band. Contemplating fried food, instead seeking out duck in Chinatown.

Times Square, assisting a superhero in the heat of midday.

Williamsburg.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

This past Sunday, J suggested we take a field trip to see the iron men.

He'd heard about the statues—six-feet-two-inch-tall iron castings of artist Antony Gormley's body—years ago, when Gormley had installed them on disused beaches of his hometown in England. Solitary men cast in iron, keeping watch over the comings and goings of ships. Little Angels of the Northwest. When he read that the statues were coming to New York, he clipped the map from the paper and kept it in his pocket until he was ready to surprise me with it.

The actual iron men were relegated to the ground; Gormley had built special fibreglass men to install on various rooftops around Madison Square Park. Apparently the NYPD had to warn the public so that people wouldn't think the statues were suicidal citizens and inundate them with phone calls.

We crept around the perimeter of the park, shielded our eyes from the sun, and spotted them here and there on the skyline, lurking behind old disused water towers, or further up, high at the top of granite towers. Majestic and unexpected, we picked them out one by one, breathlessly pointing into the air, like the crowds spotting Superman in comic books.

There. Look! And up there!

***

Last night, a different event: a ground floor reading and discussion in Fort Greene with Victor LaValle and Maud Newton at Greenlight Bookstore.

I'd only recently finished LaValle's Big Machine, a curious book of faith and doubt, of supernatural encounters with stingray-shaped angels, and the down-to-earth realities of drug addiction and homelessness. On this night, the two writers deftly waded through the murky multitude of topics one could discuss related to this book and landed on the topic of horror.

LaValle defined horror as pushing the reader to feel something powerful and uncomfortable: the gothic stories of Flannery O'Connor, JD Salinger's story of his time at war.

"There are monsters in the book," said LaValle. His editor had wanted to scale back on the monsters, but LaValle insisted, stubbornly, that the monsters needed to be there. His editor eventually persuaded him to meet him halfway, keeping one foot firmly in reality while maintaining that the monsters weren't just in the head of the narrator. LaValle said "I will go with you in this direction, but you have to be willing to lead me there."

When asked where this fascination with horror came from, LaValle said simply that "horrible and unexplainable things can appear in your life and there's no way you can beat them."

Unexplainable things appear in our lives all the time, challenges and questions. What is this I'm seeing? Is it good, or is it bad? What does it mean to me? Will I be okay? It was the same way in the book: when the monsters appeared, to some they were angels; to others, devils.

***

This is how it is with the iron men. Some people might see them and become scared or sad for their implied fate. Others might see them and think of their own moments perched on a precipice in life, ready to make an insane decision, ready to throw themselves into something terrifying, unexpected, or unkown.

But I have a different viewpoint standing on the ground, looking up at these statues. They're not men who have given up on life, but superheroes, ready to leap a tall building in a single bound. Not iron men but Iron Men, waiting for our beacon to call them into action, watching over us, ready to save us from the things we don't want to know, or to remind us of how we can save ourselves.

On the ground, we look up to the sky, shout "there's one!" and point, beckoning others to follow the sightline of our fingers. These solitary heroes on the skyline, pushing us to feel something powerful, something possibly uncomfortable. Something vertiginous. Something altogether unexplainable and unexpected. To me they're angels, horrifying and beautiful all at the same time.

Monsters that need to be there.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

"The walruses are not on display today," said the sign. We sighed, paid $13 each, and accepted the loss. Not even the walruses wanted to go outside on a day like Saturday.

We had decided to make our way through the alphabet, A to Z, a date for each letter. J suggested the idea one late night over tacos on the Lower East Side.

A was for Aquarium.

The dark, magical, terrifying world of the aquarium seemed appropriate on that rainy day. Wet became relative. We watched the raindrops speckle the water overhead in the large tanks, a rhythmic and ever-changing ceiling art for fishes. Stingrays hugged the sandy bottoms, pregnant male seahorses spun through seafans. Little snaking things, giant moray eels the stuff of nightmares. I forgot how creeped out I get by underwater things. Despite their colors, despite the friendly descriptions, as the wind wailed outside and the rain dripped through the walls of the shark pavilion, I felt shivers run down my spine. I grabbed J's arm; he became my anchor as we ran from pavilion to pavilion through the wind and the rain, peering into glass boxes, watching things glide through the water.

As we left, a howl rose up over the boardwalk, the aching, grinding sound of metal being stretched and bent in the wind. The masts of Coney Island were crying like great beasts trapped in mud, like the ghosts of the freak show had clambered up the Parachute Jump, and, once there, finding they had no parachutes, leapt into the sand with a collective and mighty groan.

We took the subway back home to sit in the window of a local restaurant and watch the world slowly fill with water. Outside, discarded umbrellas came to life. One made its way into the road; J gasped audibly as the wheels of one car, then another, then another ran over the umbrella's helpless remains. Some were skittering along the sidewalk like crabs on a beach; one in leopard print nylon skittered downtown, stopped, then suddenly sped off as if it remembered it had somewhere to be.

Someone played Rihanna's "Umbrella" on the hi-fi.

An older couple next to us were finishing their meal, trying to decide if they should make a run for it. The woman turned to us, pointing out the window.

"You won't believe it, but back when we were courting, that March was a windy month. We were walking down the street, and I had to grab on to a lamppost. 'Help!' I said to him, and he turned around and I was hugging a lamppost."

I asked if her feet were flying in the air. She looked out the window and smiled, as if she might see her younger self out there hugging a lamppost.

"Hold on to her," we said to him as they pulled up their collars to leave.

The rain blew harder, umbrellas crawled past. It seemed as if it would never end, as if someone was trying to turn our world into an aquarium. Umbrellas became giant stingrays sweeping the bottom of our new seafloor.

The Korean War vet propping up the corner of the bar stepped outside for a cigarette. Three puffs and he was back inside, wide-eyed. "I thought it was gonna blow ME away!"

It was weather for holding on to something, weather for seeking anchors. Weather for holding on to someone tight so you wouldn't blow away.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.