The room seems to tick and buzz with the fading energy of the larger edifice, and I can’t help thinking of the congeries of wires strung inside the walls, the cables bringing power to the X-ray lab, the EKG and EEG machines, the life-support systems, and of the myriad pipes and the fluids they drain. A car. Three thousand pounds of steel, chrome, glass, iron.
“What was she even doing walking like that? She knows better than that.”
My wife nods, the wet ropes of her hair beating at her shoulders like the flails of the penitents. “She probably had a fight with Kimberly, I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet anything.”
“Where is the son of a bitch?” I snarl. “This doctor — where is he?”
We are in that room, in that purgatory of a room, for a good hour or more. Twice I thrust my head out the door to give the nurse an annihilating look, but there is no news, no doctor, no nothing. And then, at quarter past two, the inner door swings open, and there he is, a man too young to be a doctor, an infant with a smooth bland face and hair that rides a wave up off his brow, and he doesn’t have to say a thing, not a word, because I can see what he’s bringing us and my heart seizes with the shock of it. He looks to Maureen, looks to me, then drops his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
WHEN IT COMES, the meteor will punch through the atmosphere and strike the Earth in the space of a single second, vaporizing on impact and creating a fireball several miles wide that will in that moment achieve temperatures of 60,000 degrees Kelvin, or ten times the surface reading of the sun. If it is Chicxulub-sized and it hits one of our landmasses, some two hundred thousand cubic kilometers of the Earth’s surface will be thrust up into the atmosphere, even as the thermal radiation of the blast sets fire to the planet’s cities and forests. This will be succeeded by seismic and volcanic activity on a scale unknown in human history, and then the dark night of cosmic winter. If it should land in the sea, as the Chicxulub meteor did, it would spew superheated water into the atmosphere instead, extinguishing the light of the sun and triggering the same scenario of seismic catastrophe and eternal winter, while simultaneously sending out a rippling ring of water three miles high to rock the continents as if they were saucers in a dishpan.
So what does it matter? What does anything matter? We are powerless. We are bereft. And the gods — all the gods of all the ages combined — are nothing but a rumor.
THE GURNEY IS the focal point in a room of gurneys, people laid out as if there’s been a war, the beaked noses of the victims poking up out of the maze of sheets like a series of topographic blips on a glaciated plane. These people are alive still, fluids dripping into their veins, machines monitoring their vital signs, nurses hovering over them like ghouls, but they’ll be dead soon, all of them. That much is clear. But the gurney, the one against the back wall with the sheet pulled up over the impossibly small and reduced form, this is all that matters. The doctor leads us across the room, talking in a low voice of internal injuries, a ruptured spleen, trauma to the brain stem, and I can barely control my feet. Maureen clings to me. The lights dim.
Can I tell you how hard it is to lift this sheet? Thin percale, and it might as well be made of lead, iron, iridium, might as well be the repository of all the dark matter in the universe. The doctor steps back, hands folded before him. The entire room or triage ward or whatever it is holds its breath. Maureen moves in beside me till our shoulders are touching, till I can feel the flesh and the heat of her pressing into me, and I think of this child we’ve made together, this thing under the sheet, and the hand clenches at the end of my arm, the fingers there, prehensile, taking hold. The sheet draws back millimeter by millimeter, the slow striptease of death — and I can’t do this, I can’t — until Maureen lunges forward and jerks the thing off in a single violent motion.
It takes us a moment — the shock of the bloated and discolored flesh, the crusted mat of blood at the temple and the rag of the hair, this obscene violation of everything we know and expect and love — before the surge of joy hits us. Maddy is a redhead, like her mother, and though she’s seventeen, she’s as rangy and thin as a child, with oversized hands and feet, and she never did pierce that smooth sweet run of flesh beneath her lower lip. I can’t speak. I’m rushing still with the euphoria of this new mainline drug I’ve discovered, soaring over the room, the hospital, the whole planet. Maureen says it for me: “This is not our daughter.”
OUR DAUGHTER IS not in the hospital. Our daughter is asleep in her room beneath the benevolent gaze of the posters on the wall, Britney and Brad and Justin, her things scattered around her as if laid out for a rummage sale. Our daughter has in fact gone to Hana Sushi at the mall, as planned, and Kimberly has driven her home. Our daughter has, unbeknownst to us or anyone else, fudged the rules a bit, the smallest thing in the world, nothing really, the sort of thing every teenager does without thinking twice, loaning her ID to her second-best friend, Kristi Cherwin, because Kristi is sixteen and Kristi wants to see — is dying to see — the movie at the Cineplex with Brad Pitt in it, the one rated NC17. Our daughter doesn’t know that we’ve been to the hospital, doesn’t know about Alice K. Petermann and the pinot noir and the glasses left on the bar, doesn’t know that even now the phone is ringing at the Cherwins’.
I am sitting on the couch with a drink, staring into the ashes of the fire. Maureen is in the kitchen with a mug of Ovaltine, gazing vacantly out the window where the first streaks of light have begun to limn the trunks of the trees. I try to picture the Cherwins — they’ve been to the house a few times, Ed and Lucinda — and I draw a blank until a backlit scene from the past presents itself, a cookout at their place, the adults gathered around the grill with gin and tonics, the radio playing some forgotten song, the children — our daughters — riding their bikes up and down the cobbled drive, making a game of it, spinning, dodging, lifting the front wheels from the ground even as their hair fans out behind them and the sun crashes through the trees. Flip a coin ten times and it could turn up heads ten times in a row — or not once. The rock is coming, the new Chicxulub, hurtling through the dark and the cold to remake our fate. But not tonight. Not for me.
For the Cherwins, it’s already here.
Here Comes
HE DIDN’T KNOW how it happened, exactly — lack of foresight on his part, lack of caring, planning, holding something back for a rainy day — but in rapid succession he lost his job, his girlfriend and the roof over his head, waking up one morning to find himself sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of the post office. The sun drilled him where he lay. Both knees were torn out of his jeans and the right sleeve of his jacket was gone altogether. People were skirting him, clopping by like a whole herd of self-righteous Republicans, though they were mostly Latino — and mostly illegal — in this part of town. He sat up, feeling around for his hat, which he seemed to be sitting on. The pavement glistened minutely.
What was motivating him at the moment was thirst, the kind of thirst that made him suspect everything and everybody, because somebody had to have done this to him, deprived him of fluids, dredged his throat with a swab, left him here stranded like a nomad in the desert. Just beyond his reach, and he noticed this in the way of a detective meditating on a crime scene, was a brown paper bag with the green neck of a Mogen David 20/20 bottle peeping out of it. The bag had been crushed, and the bottle with it; ants had gathered for the feast. In real time, the time dictated by the sun in the sky and the progressive seep of movement all around him, a woman who must have had three hundred pounds packed like mocha fudge into the sausage skin of her monumental blue-and-white-flecked top and matching toreador pants stepped daintily over the splayed impediment of his legs and shot him a look of disgust. Cars pulled up, engines ticking, then rattled away. Exhaust hovered in a poisonous cloud. Two gulls, perched atop the convenient drive-up mail depository, watched him out of their assayers’ eyes, big birds, vagrant and opportunistic, half again as tall as the boombox he’d left behind at Dana’s when she drilled him out the door.