INT. AUSTIN’S APARTMENT—NIGHT
One hot summer’s night, Austin Quinn, as he preferred to be called at night, sat alone in his apartment gazing at his computer screen in deep thought. It was late. He glanced up at the blue clock on the wall. It was 00.42. He turned his eyes back to the pulsing cursor. He watched it while he waited for inspiration, but all that came was perspiration. The light from the screen lit up his pallid face and made his Ken doll black hair darker. He wore a pair of cream tennis shorts. Sweat droplets ran down his chest and down the middle of his back. In his late twenties, single, and suffering from chronic loneliness, Austin Quinn hadn’t written anything new for a long time. His life lacked form. He felt he was a character in someone’s novel. The thought that it was not too late to escape hovered at the edges of his mind.
The city seemed to be melting in the heat, and Austin could detect the faint whiff of rotting garbage waiting to be collected on the sidewalks below. The city’s inhabitants hated being in the city during the summer months. They disappeared to exotic beaches or cool mountain retreats for their holidays. They sat in auditoriums with sunburnt shoulders, listening to sweating comedians forcing laughs, or in chambers open to the night sky where they looked through fat telescopes at the constellations and sipped lemonade drinks with bobbing ice. During these times, the city was unusually quiet and less malevolent, not as voracious, not as capricious, as it was in cooler times.
In the heat, the city ‘rested’, as Austin had described it in the opening of his novel. He typed the paragraph more
