“What did I tell you?” I said.
She took a moment to scan the article, then glanced up at me. “It says it was incinerated in the upper atmosphere.”
“Most likely, it says. And it’s wrong, obviously. You were there. You saw it.” I pointed through the doorway to the living room, where the piece of mesh — stiff, twisted, blackened from the heat of reentry — occupied a place on the bookcase where formerly a vase had stood between Salinger and Salter in the American Lit section. “Tell me that’s not real.”
The night before, out in the field, she’d warned me not to touch it—“It’s dirty, it’s nothing, just some piece of junk”—but I knew better, I knew right away. I took it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger, expecting heat, expecting the razor bite of steel on unprotected flesh and thinking of The War of the Worlds in its most recent cinematic iteration, but after we’d had a moment to examine it under the pale gaze of the cell phone and see how utterly innocuous it was, I handed it to her as reverently as if it were a religious relic. She held it in one hand, running her thumb over the braid of the mesh, then passed it back to me. “It feels warm,” she said. “You don’t really think it came from that meteor or whatever it was?” She turned her face to the sky.
“Satellite,” I told her. “Last I heard they said it was going to come down in Canada someplace.”
“But they were wrong, is that what you’re saying?”
I couldn’t see her features, but I could hear the dismissiveness in her voice. We’d been fighting all day, fighting to the point of exhaustion, and it infuriated me to think she wouldn’t even give me this. “They’ve been wrong before,” I said, and then I cradled the thing under one arm and started back across the field without bothering to see if she was coming or not.
Now she said, “Don’t be crazy. It’s just some piece of a car or a tractor or something, or a lawnmower — it fell off a lawnmower, I’ll bet anything.”
“A lawnmower in the sky? It hit me. Right here, on the shoulder.” I jerked at the neck of my T-shirt and pulled it down over my left shoulder in evidence.
“I don’t see anything.”
“There’s a red mark there, I’m telling you — I saw it in the mirror this morning.”
She just stared at me.
—
A week slid by. The heat never broke, not even after a series of thunderstorms rumbled in under a sky the color of bruised flesh — all the rain managed to do was drive up the humidity. We were supposed to be enjoying ourselves, we were supposed to be on vacation, but we didn’t do much of anything. We sat around and sweated and tried to avoid contact as much as possible. Dinner was salad or takeout and we ate at the kitchen table, where the fan was, books propped in our hands. It was hard on the dog, what with the complication of his fur that was made for another climate altogether, and I took him for increasingly longer walks, just to get out of the house. Twice I brought him to the park where the satellite had sloughed its skin, and if I combed the grass there looking for evidence — metal, more metal, a screw, a bolt — I never said a word about it to anybody, least of all Mallory. What did I find? A whole world of human refuse — bottle caps, cigarette lighters, a frayed length of shoelace, plastic in its infinite varieties — and the bugs that lived in and among it, oblivious. I came back from the second of these excursions and found Mallory on the couch where I’d left her, her bare feet and legs shining with sweat, magazine in one hand, Diet Coke in the other. She never even glanced up at me, but I could see right away there was something different about her, about the way she was holding herself, as if she knew something I didn’t.
“I took the dog to the park,” I said, looping his leash over the hook in the entryway. “Hotter down there than here, I think.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You want to go down to Gabe’s for a drink? How does a G and T sound?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking up at me for the first time. “I guess so. I don’t care.”
It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of Nine Stories had fallen flat. “Where’s the thing?” I said.
“What thing?”
“The mesh. My mesh.”
She shrugged. “I tossed it.”
“Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?”
In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid to the trashcan, only to find it empty. “You mean outside?” I shouted. “In the Dumpster?”
When I came thundering back into the room she still hadn’t moved. “Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it.”
Her lips barely moved. “It was dirty.”
—
I must have spent half an hour out there poking through the side-by-side Dumpsters that served our building and the one across the alley from it. I was embarrassed, I’ll tell you, people strolling by and looking at me like I was one of the homeless, a can man, a bottle redeemer, and I was angry too, and getting angrier. She had no right, that was what I kept telling myself — she’d done it just to spite me, I knew it, and the worst thing, the saddest thing, was that now I’d never know if that piece of mesh was the real deal or not. I could have sent it to NASA, to the JPL, to somebody who could say yea or nay. But not now. Not anymore.
When I came back up the stairs, sweating and with the reek of rotting vegetables and gnawed bones and all the rest hanging round me like a miasma, I went right for her. I took hold of her arm, slapped the magazine away and jerked her to her feet. She looked scared and that just set me off all the more. I might have pushed her. She might have pushed back. Next thing I was out the door, out on the street, fuming, the sun still glaring overhead, everything before me looking as ordinary as dishwater. There was a bar down the street — air-conditioning, music, noise, people, a change of mood that was as easy to achieve as switching channels on the TV — and I was actually on my way there, my shoulders tense as wire, when I stopped myself. I patted down my pockets: wallet, keys, cell phone, a dribble of dimes and quarters. I didn’t have a comb or a toothbrush or a change of underwear, I didn’t have books or my iPod or the dog, but none of that seemed to matter, not anymore. A couple in shorts and running shoes flashed by me, breathing noisily. A motor scooter backfired across the street.
We kept the car in the lot out back of the apartment. I went the long way around the building, keeping close to the wall in case Mallory was at the front window looking to see where I’d gone off to. The tank showed less than a quarter full and my wallet held three fives and three singles — along with the change, that gave me a grand total of nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents. No matter. I’d stop at the ATM on the way out of town and if things got desperate I did have a credit card, which we reserved for emergencies only, because we really struggled just to make the minimum payment every month. Was this an emergency? Mallory wouldn’t think so. The geniuses from NASA might not think so either — or the farmer whose sheep bore crusted-over scabs on their legs and throats and sad white faces. But as I wheeled the car out of the lot I couldn’t help thinking it was the biggest emergency of my life.
I didn’t know where I was going, I had no idea beyond the vague notion of putting some miles behind me, heading north maybe till the corn gave way to forest, to pines as fragrant as the air that went cold at night and seeped in through the open window so you had to pull a blanket over you when you went to sleep. The car — the rusted-out Volvo wagon Mallory’s mother used to drive to work back in Connecticut — shuddered and let out a grinding mechanical whine as I pulled up in front of the bank. I got out, mounted the three steps to the concrete walkway where the ATM was and waited the requisite six feet, six inches away from the middle-aged woman in the inflated khaki shorts who was just then feeding in her card. The heat was staggering. My shirt was wet as a dishrag, my hair hanging limp. I wasn’t thinking, just doing.