It is just past midnight. I am in bed with a book, naked, and hardly able to focus on the clustered words and rigid descending paragraphs, because Maureen is in the bathroom slipping into the sheer black negligee I bought her at Victoria’s Secret for her birthday, and her every sound — the creak of the medicine cabinet on its hinges, the susurrus of the brush at her teeth, the tap running — electrifies me. I’ve lit a candle and am waiting for Maureen to step into the room so I can flick off the light. We had cocktails earlier, a bottle of wine with dinner, and we sat close on the couch and shared a joint in front of the fire because our daughter was out and we could do that and no one the wiser. I listen to the little sounds from the bathroom, seductive sounds, maddening. I am ready. More than ready. “Hey,” I call, pitching my voice low, “are you coming or not? You don’t expect me to wait all night, do you?”
Her face appears in the doorway, the pale lobes of her breasts and the dark nipples visible through the clinging black silk. “Oh, are you waiting for me?” she says, making a game of it. She hovers at the door, and I can see the smile creep across her lips, the pleasure of the moment, drawing it out. “Because I thought I might go down and work in the garden for a while — it won’t take long, couple hours, maybe. You know, spread a little manure, bank up some of the mulch on the roses. You’ll wait for me, won’t you?”
Then the phone rings.
We stare blankly at each other through the first two rings and then Maureen says, “I better get it,” and I say, “No, no, forget it — it’s nothing. It’s nobody.”
But she’s already moving.
“Forget it!” I shout, and her voice drifts back to me—“What if it’s Maddy?”—and then I watch her put her lips to the receiver and whisper, “Hello?”
THE NIGHT of the Tunguska explosion the skies were unnaturally bright across Europe — as far away as London people strolled in the parks past midnight and read novels out of doors while the sheep kept right on grazing and the birds stirred uneasily in the trees. There were no stars visible, no moon — just a pale, quivering light, as if all the color had been bleached out of the sky. But of course that midnight glow and the fate of those unhappy Siberian reindeer were nothing at all compared to what would have happened if a larger object had invaded the Earth’s atmosphere. On average, objects greater than a hundred yards in diameter strike the planet once every five thousand years and asteroids half a mile across thunder down at intervals of three hundred thousand years. Three hundred thousand years is a long time in anybody’s book. But if — when — such a collision occurs, the explosion will be in the million megaton range and will cloak the atmosphere in dust, thrusting the entire planet into a deep freeze and effectively stifling all plant growth for a period of a year or more. There will be no crops. No forage. No sun.
THERE HAS BEEN an accident, that is what the voice on the other end of the line is telling my wife, and the victim is Madeline Biehn, of 1337 Laurel Drive, according to the I.D. the paramedics found in her purse. (The purse, with the silver clasp that has been driven half an inch into the flesh under her arm from the force of the impact, is a little thing, no bigger than a hardcover book, with a ribbon-thin strap, the same purse all the girls carry, as if it’s part of a uniform.) Is this her parent or guardian speaking?
I hear my wife say, “This is her mother.” And then, the bottom dropping out of her voice, “Is she—?”
Is she? They don’t answer such questions, don’t volunteer information, not over the phone. The next ten seconds are thunderous, cataclysmic, my wife standing there numbly with the phone in her hand as if it’s some unidentifiable object she’s found in the street while I fumble out of bed to snatch for my pants — and my shoes, where are my shoes? The car keys? My wallet? This is the true panic, the loss of faith and control, the nameless named, the punch in the heart and the struggle for breath. I say the only thing I can think to say, just to hear my own voice, just to get things straight, “She was in an accident. Is that what they said?”
“She was hit by a car. She’s — they don’t know. In surgery.”
“What hospital? Did they say what hospital?”
My wife is in motion now too, the negligee ridiculous, unequal to the task, and she jerks it over her head and flings it to the floor even as she snatches up a blouse, shorts, flip-flops — anything, anything to cover her nakedness and get her out the door. The dog is whining in the kitchen. There is the sound of the rain on the roof, intensifying, hammering at the gutters. I don’t bother with shoes — there are no shoes, shoes do not exist — and my shirt hangs limply from my shoulders, misbuttoned, sagging, tails hanging loose, and we’re in the car now and the driver’s side wiper is beating out of sync and the night closing on us like a fist.
AND THEN there’s Chicxulub. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid (or perhaps a comet — no one is quite certain) collided with the Earth on what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. Judging from the impact crater, which is one hundred and twenty miles wide, the object — this big flaming ball — was some six miles across. When it came down, day became night and that night extended so far into the future that at least seventy-five percent of all known species were extinguished, including the dinosaurs in nearly all their forms and array and some ninety percent of the oceans’ plankton, which in turn devastated the pelagic food chain. How fast was it traveling? The nearest estimates put it at 54,000 miles an hour, more than sixty times the speed of a bullet. Astrophysicists call such objects “civilization enders,” and calculate the chances that a disaster of this magnitude will occur during any individual’s lifetime at roughly one in ten thousand, the same odds as dying in an auto accident in the next ten months — or, more tellingly, living to be a hundred in the company of your spouse.
ALL I SEE is windows, an endless grid of lit windows climbing one atop the other into the night, as the car shoots through the Emergency Vehicles Only lane and slides in hard against the curb. Both doors fling open simultaneously. Maureen is already out on the sidewalk, already slamming the door behind her and breaking into a trot, and I’m right on her heels, the keys still in the ignition and the lights stabbing at the pale underbelly of a diagonally parked ambulance — and they can have the car, anybody can have it and keep it forever, if they’ll just tell me my daughter is all right. Just tell me, I mutter, hurrying, out of breath, soaked through to the skin, just tell me and it’s yours, and this is a prayer, the first of them in a long discontinuous string, addressed to whomever or whatever may be listening. Overhead, the sky is having a seizure, black above, quicksilver below, the rain coming down in windblown arcs, and I wouldn’t even notice but for the fact that we are suddenly — instantly — wet, our hair knotted and clinging and our clothes stuck like flypaper to the slick tegument of our skin.