It's getting warm again. At night the air conditioner runs. This duplex isn't sealed up very well. This duplex is kind of a shithole. It was built in 1953. A real low point for duplexes. The HVAC guy comes to check whatever needs checking and tells me that we're basically living in a worse-case scenario HVAC-wise.

"Uh oh," I say.

"Calm down," he says. "Be a man about it."

He walks around with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. His disappointment is obvious. It seems we could have been doing a better job at whatever it was we were supposed to be doing. He wipes some dust off a shelf with his fingers.

"Pets?" he says.

In Speedboat, Renata Adler says that when you live in the city anyone can call your life into question. But I live in a small town and it's the same thing here. At any moment you can be revealed to be a person who doesn’t know what's going on. It's a risky business even picking up the phone. It could be anyone calling. Lately I've been getting calls from a number that looks like mine. The person calling could be me.

“Why do you keep calling me?” they say when I answer.

“I haven’t been calling you,” I say. “You’ve been calling me.”

I get the feeling we're both being scammed. But for what purpose? And at what loss? How is this even a viable business model, I'd like to know? It seems the scams have gone art house. They're all 501c(3).

"There's a sucker at every poker table," Matt tells me. "I never know who it is so I always know it's me."

Our ceilings are too high. Our ducts are too small. There is no room to expand the ducts. They'd have to knock out the bedroom wall. They'd have to get creative. Our ceiling fan, I find out, has been spinning in the wrong direction.

"Anything else?" I ask the HVAC guy.

"Yeah,” he says. “I know you haven't been changing the filter.”

"We have been changing the filter," I say.

"Listen," he says. "It's cool. You don't have to lie to me. I'm on your team."

"We've been changing it," I say.

"If you lie to me I can't help you," he says.

"Every month," I say. "Like clockwork."

"Don't think of this as an inspection," he says. "Think of it as a collaboration."

Lacking much else by way of plot, I watch the weather for rising and falling action. A few months ago it was all falling. Now it's all rising. The weather is a George Saunders short story. Over time, the weather is a George Saunders short story collection. The grass seems to be turning green again. The leaves are coming back. It's almost tempting to see some sort of pattern in all of it. I said almost.

"I think sanity is the most profound moral option of our time," Renata Adler says. But that was fifty years ago. Fifty years ago and counting.

During the day it gets up into the 80s. The air conditioner runs constantly and inefficiently. Eleven cents per kilowatt hour. Cooling down the neighborhood. A drain on natural and unnatural resources. I've heard the most environmentally devastating concept ever invented was human comfort. A close second was the atomic bomb.

At night we drink Topo Chico on the patio and complain about our jobs. They're so much work, these jobs. They're so demanding. While we talk the dog hunts around the backyard for squirrels. Last night he found a snakeskin in the grass. It occurs to me that a house that lets so much out could also let things in.

The light fades and then we’re sitting in the dark. Our next-door neighbor starts grilling something on his driveway. He listens to mariachi music and turns on his car headlights. Glowing white smoke floats up over the fence like a mushroom cloud. Later our whole place smells like brisket and hot sauce and I have some mariachi tune stuck in my head but don’t know any of the words.

Mike Nagel’s essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Split Lip, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere around the internet. His first book, DUPLEX, is now available for preorder from Autofocus Books: autofocuslit.com/books. He lives in Plano, Texas.