The heavenly white marble lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco sits at the top of a breathless hill. The film junket is waiting in another room. The film was terrible, but Geoffrey Rush awaits. Parched and sweaty from the climb, not dressed to be here, I find a vision of water. The dispenser is a glass tank, clear blue and panes thick, metal spigot on the bottom to dispense. No plastic anywhere; even the glasses, laid mouth to linen tablecloth, are non-disposable high-end kitchen ware. Waiters sweep through the lobby, picking up the empties and making sure the water is full.

The water inside the cooler is the subtle blue that it always seems to be in a cartoon because animators can’t color in clear. That pale azure is layered with fresh sliced lemons floating halfway to the top. Above them, a lush layer of fresh mint leaves. Another level of lemons, yellow as Sicilian sunrise, and then sliced cucumbers, the skins peeled in alternating dark and pale green stripes. Atop the cucumbers, a weight pressing the whole thing together into layers as alluring as a panini or a cake, as artfully arranged as Mapplethorpe nudes, is a ten-pound berg of clear ice. My first glass goes down too fast, gulped only in my haste to replace what I felt leaking from my lower back as I climbed, down in runnels to tickle my popliteal and paint my burning calves with precious mineral lacquer.
 
The second glass is the one that’s packed with subtle flavor, lemon announcing itself acidly, first like the yellow that makes a tennis ball greener than the grass. Cucumber next, a rumor between two facts. Mint clears the palate last, high finish like the promise of morning toothpaste. Decadent presentation of the only fluid we need to survive, but this isn’t a place for mere survival. I figure that out when a waiter plucks the still-sweating glass from my hand after I’ve drained it three times. After the rush of Geoffrey, I give the Ritz most of its water back before filling my satchel with their thick, branded paper hand towels.
 
Many worse ones to compare to this queen of ice waters, many occasions on which the question of what people living in an ever-hottening hell dream about. Restaurants who sanitize their dishes with heat sending out still-feverish glasses filled from the tap with a few flat cubes slid on top as an afterthought. The coolness dissipating as it touches your lips; welcome to Tartarus. All that is left is lukewarm water and the illusion of satisfaction. Mere survival.
 
Even the best-laid plans can lead to disappointment when thwarted by impatience. A tall tumbler packed with good ice, small nuggets with smooth walls, Evian poured over from the mouth of a virgin bottle. But a moment’s haste and you’ve drank it down before the ice and the water have had any chance to get acquainted. Only the final swallow bears the virtue of the deep cold. You can pour another; that part is easy. The hard part will be waiting until it is right.



And when is it right? Ideally, ice and water were friends long before they met you. Cozy in a thick-stemmed goblet when your table was laid, they’ve been in conversation about the old days when they were jungle rain and dinosaur piss, declaring that they’ve not been so close since the Yangtze was swollen with spring floods. They’re deep in remembrance, melting and cooling, warming and rising toward the rolled glass lip before you turn your hand around it. Relief floods you as you take that coursing cold into your chest, down to your belly. Yes, you’ll have a martini, of course you will. But you really needed this first.
 
Staff bearing stainless-steel pitchers clouded over with the cold they contain, pouring with nimble wrists not from the spout as indicated, but from the side as instructed by experience. Because that angle lets the ice slide over into your vessel, and the oldest of all conversations begins again. Brook babbles and glacier gabbles. The water inside you clamors; every swollen cell wants to speak, too. Old ladies in reunion, knitting their clear streams of hydrogen-oxygen-hydrogen.
 
Tiresome folk will invoke the hose, but only because they associate it with the virtue of fatherless afternoons when going inside, even to get a drink, might risk your freedom. But do they recall the scent of hot rubber, when the hose had been laying across the driveway in July? Bloody tang of rust if you tongue the threaded proboscis of it, black soil sometimes peppering the aperture. If you drank too soon, belly-searing heat and terrible shock. If you let it run a little, a cold that draws you underground, reminds you that the water comes from a place where the sun doesn’t shine. The perverse sensation of pressure, and where will you take it? Let it fill your cheeks too fast and they ache, the water sometimes bursting through your held-closed throat to come out your nose. Stubborn, you might swallow it all, feel like a pail that sloshes when you run full of water. You’re it, you’re it, you’re it.  
 
But the real forbidden taste is the hose half-frozen in January. The pipe shrieking as you turn the knob with your mittened fingers, the airy sound of water coughing up in an unexpected season. Maybe your folks were thorough and the hose is wound up and properly stored, or maybe you had to hunt it out of the freezing mud and dead grass. Either way, if it’s outside, water settled in any low point is frozen when it finally comes to your steaming-hot mouth. Spattering your boots, hoping not to be caught, you feel the long, thin curve of the ice against your tongue, burning like the stinger of a tundra insect.

You blink hard and wonder: could the ice cut your throat as it slides down? Could it slice through your stomach like a steak knife dropped neatly from the height of the kitchen counter into the vulnerable pink meat of your foot? No one would ever know how you bled to death. They never found the knife that cut you, melted as it was by the fleetly fleeing heat of your corpse.
 
You didn’t die. You drank from the hose, and you’re fine.
 
Fated lovers are often interfered with. Gadgetry intrudes like a chaperone. Pastel plastic mugs filled with unknown liquid can be kept in the freezer until solid and then the void in middle infused with vain conceit: not ice water, but ice near water. The cup so thick that you bite the edge like you’re about to receive electroshock therapy. Instead, you receive mouthfuls of tasteless polymer-flavored frustration. The chaperone succeeds. You are not quenched; you are barely even wet inside.
 
The same dissatisfaction from forms filled and frozen and made to take the place of ice cubes. Little plastic fish or long silicon rods frozen to cool but not dilute a drink. Somewhere there is someone who demands every liquid undiluted but accepts that the taste will yet be the poisoned miasma of a Target when the trucks get unloaded, but I hope I never meet him. Let your ice be possessed of rosebuds and blueberries, lay sliced fruits in them or sugar their edges, but do not, I beg you, force them to wear a condom. Ice and water must be together raw. They are destined to and ache to rejoin.
 
The qualities of water are mysterious; cohesive and adhesive. It yearns to be one with anything at all; it’s that person you know who changes his personality entirely based on who he’s dating. Youth and impatience told me I could simply put my tall, flexible tumbler into the freezer and then squeeze it to break the crystalline edges and unleash the perfect combination. But cohesion and adhesion meant on first attempt only a thin scrim across the top; a pond on which ants could skate. Second try and I could go longer, marvel at the fingers of ice growing up the inside walls of the cup, paper-thin, dissolving immediately once knocked into the barely-cool sea. Withdrawn, they could be brought dripping to my mouth, licked obscenely as a teenage gangster licks a knife to scare his prey. I could bite it and break it into long thorns in my mouth, crunch it and destroy it. But never once did that method produce the ice water of my dreams— upright arctic shark teeth grinding against one another in a bay of slush, candle ice, a combination so cold that I’d have to trade it from one hand to the other.
 
It's the same whether you learn it from watching Mister Wizard wannabes on TikTok or read it in a book about witchcraft. A plastic water bottle in the freezer for about an hour. Pick it up and tap it on the counter, watch the whole thing turn opaque from end to end. If it’s science, marvel at these short, tongue-lovely crystals you’ve just made. If it’s magic, make a wish. Either way, twist the lid off and crush its hollow body between your hands. Soft slush, snowy and marvelous, rises in a half-rigid column to meet you. Goes down your throat like foam, like a joke about your inevitable death. Hitting bottom in your gut, it greets your heat with the promise of cold to come. Manage to drink the whole thing before it thaws and you are a toy from the claw machine; all stuffed inside with beads of whiteness, of nothing at all. House the whole thing and freeze your brain worse than the want of a coworker’s wife’s name.
 
A lifetime of spellcraft, of cursing the inferior, and now I know exactly what I want. A glass filled with ice cubes, smaller the better. The ideal shape and size are those created by an electric counter top nugget ice machine, but the trays that produce blueberry analogs are also correct. I don’t crunch ice between my teeth; if you feel compelled to, it’s likely anemia. Instead, I want a matrix of ice so dense and so heavy that it does not rise through water displacement when filled. The water and ice should be like star-crossed lovers straining to touch hands through a fence; held apart but yearning and worrying the boundaries down with their ardor. If carbonated. I want to watch the bubbles struggle to boulder upward and escape. If still, I want to hear no sound of buoyancy when I move my glass. A phalanx of ice, unmoving and left sitting long enough to acquaint itself with its liquid camp follower.
 
Stainless steel straw with a silicon bite. I want to drain it in silence, and then while the ice is still optimal, pour another. Damned to a seeming eternity wherein all that I want is so difficult to produce, this one pleasure I will have exactly as I dream it.
 
People in hell do not want ice water. That’s just a convenient encapsulation of their true desire, and I know its name as it condenses, near frosting the surface of my straw. No one who spends all their time wanting fixates on the most basic version of the thing that might satisfy them. They dream up the ideal; not just water to quench thirst but the layers of fruit and flowers in a sweating glass, the lobby of the Ritz rather than a sandy oasis. They don’t want the first glass, the simple slake and the meeting of needs and no more. Not the glass warm from the dishwasher, not the ice in the low-lying hose. Thirst is the most basic drive and we don’t dream of satiety and survival. We remember the best we’ve ever had and we imagine it again, imagine it better, imagine perfection in everything, even a simple glass of ice water. People in hell want what I want:
 
Heaven.

All year, I’ll be writing odes to things I love. Thank you for joining me! My next book is on the way.