It is already so hot by eight o’clock. Drew sits in the armchair facing the window, the fan resting on the sill, his feet only centimeters away. He savors the breeze that travels across his legs, up along his thighs, over his naked belly. But it reaches no higher. The warm air resting against his neck, settling across his shoulders, is like cotton batting made heavy and damp by the heat, the day that’s hardly here yet, his flesh.
         In the room behind this one, in the shadows that won’t stay cool much longer, Julie is sleeping face down on the bed, swaddled in the sheet which twists over one leg, under the other. It was still dark when he left the room, but he took with him the memory of a thigh he has not seen in weeks.
         The last thing she said to him last night was “I’m sleeping in tomorrow. You’ll be gone when I get up. Ten-ish.”
         Drew thinks of these words, plays them through his teeth, testing their various meanings. Her words often glance off him; sometimes he can almost catch their gist, but seldom their entire meaning. She could have been reciting her plans for the day, or ordering him to leave. He most often notices the monotone of her voice if she calls from work, or when she phones from one of the noisy places she frequents in the evenings, while he stays home with Seinfeld on TV, or CBC’s Ideas if he’s up to any kind of mental stimulation.
         “I would like a baby,” she told him not long ago, as if she was choosing something for supper.
         “It’s spread to her brain,” she said, as if she was talking about a soap opera character, rather than her own mother.
         “I hate bugs,” Drew says aloud in Julie’s unconvincing monotone. Of course, he doesn’t, only the fruit fly that’s flickering around the nectarine pit on the ledge next to his toes.
         “I hate bugs,” he says again, shifting the emphasis to the first word.
         Drew flaps his arm in front of him and tests the air for change. It’s not yet nine and already the apartment is as hot as a tomb, like those he and Julie traipsed through in the Valley of the Kings the first fall after they met. Years ago. A whole civilization away.
         “I hate history,” she had told him in Shephard’s Hotel, where, underdressed, they’d gone for a drink to watch the ‘real’ tourists, as she called them, the ones swanning through the lobby in their mock Arab galabeyas and silly headdresses, greeting each other across the hardwood floor in high voices.
         The next day, when even he had tired of tombs, they had ventured to the Cairo museum which was like an overcrowded hell with tour guides waving little flags to attract their charges’ attention. Later, Julie led him to the big market, along winding alleys,  away from the hawkers selling wooden boxes inlaid with camel bone which they said was ivory, silver and gold cartouches, mint tea in little glasses, to the stalls that sold bright plastic buckets, heaps of sorbet-coloured towels, all the things they could find back at home in K-Mart. Mouse traps and cards of safety pins, battered cans of Heinz Beans, Lipton Iced Tea Mix.
         Drew was disdainful of the ubiquitous wares, but found himself drawn deeper in to the maze of streets, lured on by the wail of music from tinny radios, the conflicting stenches, sweet, sour and spicy, that threaded through the lanes. Julie had wanted to find the street of tent makers, but they’d given up after the beggar children became too tedious.
         “Yallah.” Drew flaps his arm again, but the fruit flies are not to be distracted. “Yallah”, Julie had yelled at the grubby street children who clung to their arms, pulled at their clothes pleading for baksheesh, their voices wheedling and sly.
         “Yallah,” is perhaps what Julie was telling him when she said she’d be up at ten, that he’d be gone by then. “Piss orf old bean.” Drew tries on what he thinks is an Oxbridge accent, but isn’t. But nothing’s changed. The heat has settled on him like a bad dream of which he recalls little but the feeling of unease. Through the quiet of the apartment he listens carefully, hoping to hear a snore, a grunt, a series of deep breaths from the woman who sleeps in the room behind him.
         Drew leans over the arm of his chair and picks up Julie’s cigarettes and a heavy mock crystal ash tray holding a book of matches which offers a real estate license for just $300 and the chance to improve four major muscle groups. He could do with a body building course, he thinks, but as he can only recall offhand three muscle types, he decides he’d do better with a real estate license.
         Once when he was a kid he answered an ad for information about flying lessons. Each day he’d waited for the mailman, hiding in the small bathroom near the front door so his mother wouldn’t catch him loitering. He was expecting a thick package of instructions on how to lower and raise flaps, a coded diagram of a plane’s control panel, something about navigation, track and drift. He imagined he’d need a leather helmet with ear flaps like the war pilots wore, and a white silk scarf, or a red one. He tested nicknames such as the Jolly Ace and Lugger Drew without knowing what an ace or a Lugger was. He made a map of what he thought his own neighborhood might look like from above, using curved lines to denote the sidewalks he barreled along on his bike and had applied  big red crosses on the general location of his enemies’ houses, a black checkmark against the spot which indicated the outdoor pool where he’d once caught a glimpse of a woman’s nipple as she reached up to catch her son as he dove off the side of the pool. He remembered how the boy’s cries, which could have been of fear or joy, had been swallowed up by the air and the sounds of cries and splashing all around.
         He can’t remember if he ever received anything about flying lessons, but he read somewhere recently that the international language of the air is English, so that traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur or Manchester can communicate with pilots from anywhere on the globe, and be understood.
         But he knows that words themselves give little away. Julie’s monotone delivers good and bad news with equal emphasis. “Put the right emph-assis on the right syl-a-bull,” he recites, wondering where that snippet might have come from. “Eins, Fie, Drie, Feer, Fumph” is as far as he can count in German, and it’s probably not right anyway. “I love you. Goodbye,” he says. No one phrase makes any more sense than the other.      
         At Abu Simbul the bus thermometer had registered  one hundred and thirty seven degrees. “It’s hot in here,” says Drew now to the empty room, with no intonation. Then he tries it in a plummy British accent. “It’s very hot. Indeed.” This is the tone Julie’s parents use to comment on whatever catches their interest on their brief visits. “We’re experiencing unseasonable weather,” he says, imagining reporting present conditions to them on the phone, although he never speaks to them when they call. When Julie sends cards, letters, she always signs them ‘Love Julie and D’ as if even she can hardly remember his name.
         Julie murmurs in the other room. Drew shifts in his chair, unsticks one calf from that of the other, edging it away just enough to let a sliver of air through. But he does not get up.
         The nectarine stone has attracted a large cloud of fruit flies that keep hovering even when he flaps his arm in their direction.
         Drew runs his mind along the row of CD’s on the shelf behind him, mentally picks through all his clothes, choosing what to wear, what to pack, what to leave. He imagines the discards heaped in the bottom of the closet, like one of the beggars he saw sleeping in a Cairo alley when he and Julie made their Grand Tour.
         Eight countries in twenty-eight days and what he remembers most is sitting in Shephard’s Bar in Cairo feeling like an intruder. And watching a very fat, florid American get his pocket picked in the market.
         “Silly Bugger,” he’d said, close enough to watch it happen, not near enough to do anything about it. Walking behind the man on the dank narrow street, they’d seen him extract the roll of bills from his pants, peel some off, wave them at a vendor, then stick them in his back pocket. It took the pickpocket just two seconds to slip through the surging crowds, withdraw the roll from the man’s back pocket, and disappear.
         Drew hadn’t felt a jot of pity for the tourist at the time, but now, recalling the scene, something shrinks inside him. All he had to do was shout, make a lunge for the skinny kid in his flapping plastic sandals. Anything to distract one or the other. To change the way things turned out. It wouldn’t have taken much. Any words would have done.
         The air has thickened around him, so ropy he could chew on it. Usually he loves the heat, the feel of sweat like an extra layer of skin enveloping him. Now, he tips his chin to blow down his chest. Although he can’t quite smell it, he knows how his breath smells, that odd mixture of sardines and smoke—although he’s not the smoker, and he hasn’t eaten fish in days. Weeks, even.
         At Der el Medina, after a long hike around the hillside in the glaring sun, he and Julie had rested in a mud shelter while others went down into yet another tomb. They had been poring over their battered copy of Let’s Go to Egypt and Israel, trying to figure the best way out of the spot they were in, when they’d looked up and seen sitting across from them a European woman is a brilliantly white dress with frills around the hem and along the scooped neckline. She was wearing a white hat, flowers pinned to its pink band. She wore pink high-heeled shoes, and clutched a cream purse in her white gloved hands. Her head was tipped back against the mud brick wall, and her eyes, like fine sea shells, were closed, her lashes laying gently on her cheeks.
         Drew had not dared to look at Julie in case either of them laughed. He’d eased his camera from his pack and without really aiming or taking time to set up the shot snapped a couple of pictures of the woman who didn’t move. Soon the rest of the group emerged blinking back into sunlight, and they all stared with some curiosity at the woman before they moved off in a huddle behind their guide.
         That night at a rooftop bar they discussed the woman in white, the few who’d not seen her scoffing at the picturesque descriptions.
         “I got off a shot.” Drew made sure he had names and addresses so he could send everyone a copy. Only later, as Julie rinsed out her underwear and hung it from whatever useful point she could find in the room, she remembered the air balloon they’d seen above the Valley of the Kings when they’d started their trek around the mountain, and so they’d assumed that the woman had been with that tour, rather than simply dropping through the bright dusty air.
         “Did you see her shoes? You’d not get far in those anywhere in the world.”
         Drew could not tell whether he heard censure or admiration in Julie’s voice. And he recalls only now the old Birkenstocks she wore the whole trip until she left them in a wastebasket for the maids at Nuweiba.
         In his chair in the confounding heat at his open window as Julie sleeps behind him, Drew thinks of the woman in white who did not show up in his picture—how spooky is that?—and tries to imagine the hot air balloon, drifting through thin blue air above the desert, the folds of stone and sand below hemmed by the belt of green Nile Delta.
         How do voices carry in the air? he wonders. Does it, like water, make words louder or clearer, or, carried aloft by invisible drifts of wind, do  they bear meanings that no one hearing them can hope to understand.
         Drew stands up, holding his arms away from his sides. “It’s bally hot in here. And going to get hotter, no doubt.” He picks up the nectarine stone and lobs it out of the window where it clatters down on the carport roof below, sounding like gunfire, something final before the quiet. Then he walks towards the bedroom, practicing what he will say, wondering whether to beg and plead, raise his voice in a yell, or slide it across to her in a whine.
         He practices two words with no particular emphasis on either of them. He rolls them around his mouth, then eases them through his lips slowly, one at a time. “Good. Bye.” Then he tries out others, “I. Love. You. Please.” He says these words aloud, just to hear what they sound like in the hot, heavy air, not knowing what they will mean until she can hear them.

LOIS J. PETERSON'S story 'Sign Language' appeared in TPR 2.4. Her work has also been published online in The Painted Moon Review, Eclectica, Southern Ocean Review, pindeldyboz, and in a range of print publications. She's also a creative writing instructor and fundraiser, and lives in Surrey, British Columbia.