I have something of a confession to make: when I go into my daughter's room to tuck her in and turn on the fan in her window, I get something of an erection.

Don't make the wrong assumption; Lord knows it's not the act of putting a little girl into bed that causes the arousal. If I ever thought that I was getting a rise out of a four year old girl in her nightshirt then I'd either kill myself of have myself committed… probably the former at that.

It's turning on the fan that does it. It’s an old beast, a mini double-box that I've had from my mind-teens, and when it gets up to full speed the motor makes a low, steady roar. She loves the breeze it pumps in; her room's a regular oven when it's off, but she's afraid to turn the fan on herself. To her it sounds like a big monster growling from the window. I can understand. It's really not the kind of sound I'd like to hear in a dark room either.

I tuck her in and kiss her on the forehead and when I turn to the window she pulls the sheets over her head so that the fan won't know she's there. Its when my finger is poised on the switch, just before I turn it on, then I get the quick tingle between my legs.

Nor is it some weird fetish I have for fans. It’s the memories that I link with this particular fan that cause it. If I tossed this one in the trash and went out and got a new one, I doubt that it would happen anymore.

If inanimate objects could talk then this fan would be my ideal biographer. It's sat in my window ever since I got it; when the seasons turned I just never got around to taking it down before it got warm again. That fan got to watch me during my formative years, the all-nighters I learned to pull during high school, the first girl friend I had to push it off of the sill for so that I could furtively sneak her through the window. My room was the center of my life, except for the study down the hall where the family computer was kept.

I considered buying a new fan when I left for college, but decided against it when I realized that for the price of the fan I could get extra inch and stereo sound on the TVs I was looking at. So I kept the old one. It got banged around during the move, loosening the blades and giving it the roar that earned it the nickname of "The Beast."

I've heard a lot of people talk about what hell is like, but their descriptions are always lacking. True hell has to include college dorms in May and August. I think that it's a scientific fact that no other object on earth is as efficient a solar oven as a dorm room in summer. At least nothing else I've encountered does as good of a job at causing its occupants to perspire constantly, their clothes giving off that peculiar vinegar-butter popcorn odor that can only be produced by a good, day-long sweat.

Not even The Beast at full blast was able to make it better. Roasting air kicked into movement is only marginally better than when it's still. That's one of the predominant memories I have of college, sitting in front of my computer, trying not to sweat onto the keyboard as I typed, wishing that I was making enough money to afford an air conditioner.

I'm sweating as I turn The Beast on as it sits in my daughter's window. I still don't have an air conditioner. Repaying the loan that this tiny, half falling down house cost me leaves little enough as it is, even less after food and the other essentials. I suppose if I saved every cent left over each month, I'd have enough to be able to enjoy the frosty nip of artificially cool air just in time for October to render it pointless. However, there are swimming lessons to consider and my daughter loves the piano more than almost anything, so there's the cost of those to consider as well. Sometimes, when I'm swimming in sweat the second I wake up, I weigh the cost of her lessons against an air conditioner. Then, I just have to remember the look on her face whenever she sees the big black grand at her instructor's house (which, I might add, is also air-conditioned), to know that the lessons are more valuable than a Kwikool could ever be.

There's also something to be said about the anticipation for when I turn the beast on, that second of relief when I'm blasted by both fans at once, the sweat almost driven from my body. For a moment I'm almost cool, and then comes that tingle.

If the Beast were my biographer, then my college years would definitely be something I'd want it to heavily edit—and not just for the fact that I most definitely did not display the scholastic aptitude I conned my parents into believing I possessed. I started my freshman year in my alma mater's elite medical program, and I did a lot of everything that year, except attend class and study. Most of what I remember from my first year of college were my carefully constructed pyramids of 'the beast’ (Milwaukee's Best beer for the uninitiated) toppling from the breeze kicked up by the other Beast.

I got a tanning that summer, from both my parents and the school when they saw my grades. The medical program kindly informed that it didn't want me to darken its door ever again, and my parents told me that if I got kicked out of college then I was to consider myself kicked out of the house.

I didn't have many relationships my freshman year (that is if your definition of relationship was a girl whose name you bothered to pick up in the morning); the few I had never lasted more than three weeks tops. I didn't have any relationships my sophomore year (even if your definition was looser than mine) and the only beast I allowed in my room was the fan. By the end of my sophomore year I managed to not only haul myself out of academic probation but onto the dean's list.

My parents forgave me my previous transgressions, but the medical program still pulled out cattle prods if I wandered within twenty feet of its offices. I briefly flirted with a liberal arts degree before discovering that I had a passion for the highly employable field of medieval French history. I let my social life kick back up, but this time I was smart enough to not get too excessive with my excesses. I even had a couple more girlfriends my junior year, but I didn't meet Her until the middle of my senior.

She always said that she could hear the capital letter when I referred to her with a pronoun, and depending on her mood she would find it incredibly creepy, incredibly romantic, or just plain weird. When we first met it seemed like our relationship would follow the trend set by all my previous ones. I ran into her in one of my graduate level history courses but we didn’t actually 'meet' each other until the post-final exam party. I was brooding over my presumed failure in the nostalgic embrace of too many cans of 'the beast.' She wouldn't drink beer to save her life, preferring instead to indulge her sweet tooth through alcohol. That night I learned that a tumbler filled with a mixture of cheap vodka and maple syrup trumped ‘the beast’ by any road, and anything amaretto by the shot is probably one of the best things to down during a 'Nick at Night' drinking game.

We staggered back to my room, but ended up passing out on the couch without managing to get anywhere. She was, I think, the only girl I took home while drunk and didn't fuck. I woke up with my shirt half-tangled around my face (a definite bonus because I ended up drooling something fierce that night). She was still fully dressed, and we had both spent the night fighting to see who could fit the largest body portion into the scorching wind (it never seemed to get cooler when the sun went down: just more humid) kicked up by my Beast.

Morning was spent swearing at the sun (in less than fluent French) and spending time alternatively soaking aching heads in the sink and drenching bloated bodies in the shower. It was when I realized just how hot she looked under running water that we had what must have been the most incredibly, overwhelmingly, absolutely least satisfying sex of my life. Things improved later on, and, given that the thermometer seemed to linger on the plus side of four hundred degrees ten months out of twelve, cool showers become one of our favorite places for intimate entanglement.

We only screwed two or so more times in that period of our relationship. Admittedly, that period of our acquaintance had no foundation to speak of and by the time we more or less broke it off we were both openly seeing other people.

It was a pleasant surprise to find that we were both in the same nine hundred level seminar course in the winter semester (so called despite the fact it started mid-January but ran until May; the course that ran from June to August was the Spring). I forget precisely what it was about, the development of knighthood in France up until they stared having their butts routinely handed to them by English peasants with longbows, or something like that.

It was convenient to start off already knowing someone else in the class, because once you got into high level courses, finding a study partner was a pain. In French history courses it’s an established fact that the higher level the course the further up your ass a stick is shoved, until you’re conceited and arrogant enough to do a real Frenchman proud.

It was our third all night study session at the library, combing through the special archives translating period correspondence when I realized that when she was using her mind she was the most incredible drop dead unbelievably gorgeous woman in existence.

I assume she had a similar revelation about me because we ended up back in my room, blowing off class the next day alternatively making love and trying to fit as much of our bodies as possible in front of The Beast without falling off of the couch.

I think that the temperature that day beat every high since the earth congealed. As incredible as the sex was we had to stop because we were screwing ourselves into dehydration. The last time we did it the couch cushions were making squish noises.

We were almost inseparable after that, although a major contributing factor would have been that all the research papers for our seminar class kept us working the library about twelve hours out of every twenty-four. We certainly got along better than most of the other groups in the class and passed with a 3.2 final grade without ever once having tried to kill each other (one of the other groups was banned from the archives after they tried to choke each other to death with eight hundred year old stock tallies). Weekends were usually spent blowing off all the steam we had spent the week accumulating, and clueing each other in to our strange little quirks. I loved nothing more than a good chicken pot pie, whereas she loved to use sushi and sake to indulge the side of her that was 1/32 Japanese (or 1/16, or 1/6, or 1/4, or 1/2; the fraction increased in direct proportion with the amount of sake she had in her).

Still, we got close, really close. She was spending so little time in her own room that she started having her mail forwarded to mine. Things could've gotten ugly at the semester's end, when we had to continue our degrees at another university. By now I was absolutely fed up with the heat and suggested the Moon, but that idea was shot down once it was pointed out that 1.) The Moon lacked an atmosphere. 2.) It also lacked a graduate program.

After a couple of false starts, we both got accepted into the same graduate program and moved halfway across the country (although you couldn't tell from the temperature) and, much to our parents’ dismay (my mother was nearly apoplectic and spent the next year asking where'd she'd gone wrong in raising me) got an apartment together. It lacked central cooling of course, and between rent and tuition we couldn't even afford to get a second fan, so most of our time was spent huddled on a love seat in front of The Beast.

We spent the next four years there, working through the program, things remaining fairly stable, right up until midway through the third year. When you read "prevents accidents 99 out of 100 times" on birth control you never really stop to think that eventually you're going to beat those odds. Suffice it to say it was quite a surprise when we found out the dice had fallen in our favor. I went out and bought a lottery ticket. It lost.

We got married over winter break, three days before Christmas. My mother finally stopped asking where she had gone wrong in raising me when we announced the wedding. We didn't announce the reason why we had suddenly gotten the marital itch until the reception afterwards. Suffice it to say not everyone was as open-minded about it as we tried to be (I don't think I need to detail my mother's reaction).

For our honeymoon we went on a gala trip to Sea World, where I quickly wore out my charm with comments on how advancing pregnancy would increase her resemblance to Shamu. Upon our return to school we resumed our work on our degrees as if nothing had happened.

Well, not precisely nothing. We started spacing out the apartment to make room for the baby, and—so that we could afford the necessary accessories—we started eating ramen three meals a day.

We both got our degrees right on schedule and so we no longer had to worry about any additional tuition costs. On the down side we each had at least three years worth of back loans to pay off.

I was at the post office when she went into labor. We’d spent three weeks trying to find a university that was interested in a couple of newly minted French history professors and I was mailing off the latest stack of applications. There was no one there when I got back; the hurried note that she’d left on the coffee table had been snatched off and blown under the bathroom door by The Beast. I didn't find it until an hour after I got back.

She’d taken our car to the hospital, which left me to pace frenetically at the bus stop. I didn't quite commandeer the bus, but I'm sure that the driver had never before had someone launch into a series of violent expletives, in French, whenever she made a regular stop that wasn't the hospital.

After a century or two I finally made it to the maternity ward. She was already in full labor, and the doctors initially wouldn't let me into the delivery room. The labor wasn't going well, something about a 'malpresented broached birth," or something like that (I never did have a good head for medical jargon, as I learned my freshman year).

After twenty hours of full labor the doctors finally performed a c-section, and on July 4^th, at 9:35 am, our daughter was officially born. We’d never talked about a name, and I was bubbling over with asinine suggestions like Liberty or Freedom, or a dozen other ill thought out ideas.

She was much more sensible than I, and, after minimal discussion, got me to agree on Marisa.

Unfortunately, my wife was as sick as Marisa was healthy. She was healing poorly from the caesarian and a week later a bad case of pneumonia settled into her lungs. I didn't believe the doctor when he told me. I couldn't reconcile that something as linked to winter and bad colds as pneumonia could exist down here.

Despite my persistent disbelief her pneumonia continued to worsen, and then was compounded by a sepsis infection. On July 18^th, two weeks exactly after our daughter had been born, she slipped into a coma. Four days later she was dead.

I'm not quite sure what happened next. I’ve never been able to handle stress well, as no small number of childhood psychologists could no doubt tell you. From what the doctors told me when I regained consciousness, I managed to toss myself through a waiting room observation window, but I have to take the doctors' word for that (although I have some pretty convincing scars on my forearms). They wouldn't agree to release me until I had undergone psychological counseling, which consisted mostly of a series of boring, overweight doctors telling me that my Marisa was not responsible for my wife's death and that I should not blame her. I could never understand why they said that.

I knew that it wasn’t Marisa's fault, she was just a baby, and couldn’t be blamed for her birth. Besides, even if I had harbored some ill feelings, it was impossible to look at that little eight-pound, wriggling, laughing, baby and not feel my heart swell with almost enough joy to outweigh the sorrow.

It almost killed me to go back to the apartment. We’d spent the last four years there and there was just so much of Her there that I spent the entire night on the couch in front of The Beast, bawling my eyes out. The Beast was my comfort then, pulling away tears as fast as I could pump them out. I was grateful when Marisa woke up, howling to be fed and changed because it pulled me away from my own inner misery.

She was thankfully quiet during the funeral, although everyone else more than made up for it. I was ready to start screaming if one more person offered me their 'heartfelt condolences' and a shoulder to lean on should I need it. Although I have to say that I was never more grateful for my mother's tuna casserole.

After that, I guess I quit my job bussing tables. At least, I didn't show up for work and never returned my manager’s calls. I threw myself completely into Marisa. I think that for a while I turned her into my lifeline. A week later I got another kick in the pants. I was offered a position at my old college. Her application was turned down, and I think I spent a couple hours laughing and crying at how it no longer mattered.

I packed up the apartment and got on a plane with Marisa, returning to the old alma mater. I don't think I did the best job of presenting myself at the interview, but our seminar professor was now head of the history department, and I think he gave me the job partly as a gesture of pity.

I wired back and had everything that I had kept from the apartment sent to me. There wasn't that much. Aside from all of Marisa's things, I couldn't bear to keep much else. There was too much of Her associated with it. I kept The Beast though, because I couldn't bear to go back to an apartment, and so with a little luck and a lot of persistence I managed to get a loan and buy a house, which—as always—left me without enough money for a new fan.

We slept in the same room, her crib crammed into one corner, my own bed into the other until she grew too big for the crib and got her own bed. That was when she got her own room as well as The Beast. The weather was just as hot as I remembered it, and it would be brutally cruel to make a little girl sweat through nights like these. Besides, although I was able to sleep through the roar of The Beast when Marisa was in the room with me, I don't think I would be able to do so alone because imprinted into my mind, into my instincts, is the association of Her in my arms, Her body against mine as The Beast blew around us.

That is why I get the brief tingle of arousal when I reach to turn it on. Irrevocably blazed into my mind is the memory of our bodies locked together, of Her voice in my ear and Her arms around me as we maneuvered vainly to try and bring a little bit more flesh into the breeze.

I look back at Marisa, bravely peeking one eye out from beneath the sheets. It’s unfortunate that she got her looks more from myself than her mother, but when she sees me looking back at her she smiles, and it’s her mother's smile.

Then I flick The Beast's switch and hear the familiar roar as it comes to life and Marisa disappears back beneath the sheets. I turn off the light and tell her that I love her, yes, more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (she can't believe anyone can love anything more than peanut butter and jelly) and go to my own room. I have an early morning tomorrow, grading the papers of students who couldn’t care less about the lecture I had to give them, but it pays the bills and allows Marisa to swim and play the piano in air-conditioned comfort.

It’s sweltering and the sheets stick to me almost immediately. Again I briefly consider an air conditioner, but as always I decide against it. Although it’s hot, it’s also quiet and I know that I’ll always sleep like this, never with an air conditioner and never again with a fan. Because sex is not the only memory I associate with The Beast, and because arousal is not the only emotion to overtake me when I turn it on.