T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

She was beneath him on the bed, her hair in a sprawl. He pulled away from her — pushed himself up as if he were doing some sort of exercise, calisthenics of the will, the heaviest of heavy lifting — and before he knew what he was doing he was out the door and into the night. He thought he heard her call out his name, but the surf took it away. He was furious, raging, pounding his way down the dark strand as if every step was a murder— That dried-up old bitch, and who does she think she is, anyway?

A sudden wind came up off the shore to rake the trees, the branches rattling like claws, and the smell assaulted him again, the smell of rottenness and corruption, of animals and their glands. He kept walking, the wind in his face. Head down, shoulders pumping, he followed his legs till he got beyond the lights of the farthest house and the sky closed down and melded with the shore. There was something there ahead on the beach, a shape spawned from the shadows, and it took him a moment to see what it was: a trash can, let’s all pitch in and keep the island clean, turned on its side in a spill of litter. And inside the can, the animal itself, coiled round the wedge of its head and the twin lights of its eyes. “Get out of that!” he shouted, looking for something to throw. “Get out!”

IN THE MORNING he made his way back up the long dirt drive and signed away the property. By noon, he was gone.

MY DAUGHTER is walking along the roadside late at night — too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone even in a town as safe as this — and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hasn’t consumed two apple martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she gets behind the wheel of the car, will have trouble keeping the thing off the sidewalk and out of the gutters, the shrubbery, the highway median , for Christ’s sake.…But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet, anyway.

Have you heard of Tunguska? In Russia?

This was the site of the last-known large-body impact on the Earth’s surface, nearly a hundred years ago. Or that’s not strictly accurate — the meteor, an estimated sixty yards across, never actually touched down. The force of its entry — the compression and superheating of the air beneath it — caused it to explode some twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, but then the term “explode” hardly does justice to the event. There was a detonation — a flash, a thunderclap — equal to the explosive power of eight hundred Hiroshima bombs. Thirty miles away, reindeer in their loping herds were struck dead by the blast wave, and the clothes of a hunter another thirty miles beyond that burst into flame even as he was poleaxed to the ground. Seven hundred square miles of Siberian forest were leveled in an instant. If the meteor had hit only four hours later it would have exploded over St. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious and baroque city. And this was only a rock. And it was only sixty yards across.

My point? You’d better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are bigger than a mile in diameter.

But my daughter. She’s out there in the dark and the rain, walking home. Maureen and I bought her a car, a Honda Civic, the safest thing on four wheels, but the car was used — pre-owned, in dealer-speak — and as it happens it’s in the shop with transmission problems and, because she just had to see her friends and gossip and giggle and balance slick multicolored clumps of raw fish and pickled ginger on conjoined chopsticks at the mall, Kimberly picked her up and Kimberly will bring her home. Maddy has a cell phone and theoretically she could have called us, but she didn’t — or that’s how it appears. And so she’s walking. In the rain. And Alice K. Petermann of 16 Briar Lane, white, divorced, a realtor with Hyperion who has picked at a salad and left her glasses on the bar, loses control of her car.

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—?”