T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“Ted,” Maureen says, and I feel her grip at my elbow, and then we’re moving again — hurrying, sweeping, practically running — out of this place, down a corridor under the glare of the lights that are a kind of death in themselves, and into a worse place, a far worse place.

—

The thing that disturbs me about Chicxulub, aside from the fact that it erased the dinosaurs and wrought catastrophic and irreversible change, is the deeper implication that we, and all our works and worries and attachments, are so utterly inconsequential. Death cancels our individuality, we know that, yes, but ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and the kind goes on, human life and culture succeed us — that, in the absence of God, is what allows us to accept the death of the individual. But when you throw Chicxulub into the mix — or the next Chicxulub, the Chicxulub that could come howling down to obliterate all and everything even as your eyes skim the lines of this page — where does that leave us?

—

“You’re the parents?”

We are in another room, gone deeper now, the walls closing in, the loudspeakers murmuring their eternal incantations, Dr. Chandrasoma to Emergency, Dr. Bell, paging Dr. Bell, and here is another nurse, grimmer, older, with deader eyes and lines like the strings of a tobacco pouch pulled tight round her lips. She’s addressing us, me and my wife, but I have nothing to say, either in denial or affirmation. I’m paralyzed, struck dumb. If I claim Maddy as my own — and I’m making deals again — then I’m sure to jinx her, because those powers that might or might not be, those gods of the infinite and the minute, will see how desperately I love her and they’ll take her away just to spite me for refusing to believe in them. Voodoo, Hoodoo, Santeria, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I hear Maureen’s voice, emerging from a locked vault, the single whispered monosyllable, and then: “Is she going to be all right?”

“I don’t have that information,” the nurse says, and her voice is neutral, robotic even. This is not her daughter. Her daughter’s at home, asleep in a pile of teddy bears, pink sheets, fluffy pillows, the night light glowing like the all-seeing eye of a sentinel.

I can’t help myself. It’s that neutrality, that maddening clinical neutrality, and can’t anybody take any responsibility for anything? “What information do you have?” I say, and maybe I’m too loud, maybe I am. “Isn’t that your job, for Christ’s sake, to know what’s going on here? You call us up in the middle of the night — our daughter’s hurt, she’s been in an accident, and you tell me you don’t have any fucking information ?”

People turn their heads, eyes burn into us. They’re slouched in orange plastic chairs, stretched out on the floor, praying, pacing, their lips moving in silence. They want information too. We all want information. We want news, good news: it was all a mistake, minor cuts and bruises — contusions, that’s the word — and your daughter, son, husband, grandmother, first cousin twice removed will be walking through that door over there any minute…

The nurse drills me with a look, and then she’s coming out from behind the desk, a short woman, dumpy — almost a dwarf — and striding briskly to the door, which swings open on another room, deeper yet. “If you’ll just follow me, please,” she says.

Sheepish suddenly, I duck my head and comply, two steps behind Maureen. This room is smaller, an examining room, with a set of scales and charts on the walls and its slab of a table covered with a sheet of antiseptic paper. “Wait here,” the nurse tells us, already shifting her weight to make her escape. “The doctor’ll be in in a minute.”

“What doctor?” I want to know. “What for? What does he want?”

But the door is already closed.

I turn to Maureen. She’s standing there in the middle of the room, afraid to touch anything or to sit down or even move for fear of breaking the spell. She’s listening for footsteps, her eyes fixed on the other door, the one at the rear of the room. I hear myself murmur her name, and then she’s in my arms, sobbing, and I know I should hold her, know that we both need it, the human contact, the love and support, but all I feel is the burden of her — there is nothing or no one that can make this better, can’t she see that? I don’t want to console or be consoled. I don’t want to be touched. I just want my daughter back, that’s all, nothing else.

Maureen’s voice comes from so deep in her throat I can barely make out what she’s saying. It takes a second to register, even as she pulls away from me, her face crumpled and red, and this is her prayer, whispered aloud: “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”

“Sure,” I say, “sure she is. She’ll be fine. She’ll have some bruises, that’s for sure, maybe a couple broken bones even…” and I trail off, trying to picture it, the crutches, the cast, Band-Aids, gauze: our daughter returned to us in a halo of shimmering light.

“It was a car,” she says. “A car, Ted. A car hit her.”

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.