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

That was the defining moment. My shirt was wet. I’d been humiliated, adrenaline was rocketing through my veins and my heart was doing paradiddles, and what I was thinking was, Who’s to blame here? Who stuck her nose in where it wasn’t wanted? So we got into it. Right there. And I didn’t care who was watching. And when the band took a break and Chris and Anneliese joined us and we finally got a round of drinks, the conversation was strained to say the least. As soon as the band started up again I asked Anneliese to dance and then, out of sympathy or etiquette or simple boredom, Chris asked Mallory and for a long while we were all out on the dance floor, Chris eventually going back to Anneliese, but Mallory dancing with a succession of random guys just to stick it to me, which she succeeded in doing, with flying colors and interest compounded by the minute.

And that was how we found ourselves out in that dark field on the night of the satellite, letting things spill out of us, angry things, hurtful things, things that made me want to leave her to the mosquitoes and go off and rent a room on the other side of town and never talk to her again. She’d just told me she hated me for maybe the hundredth time — we were drunk, both of us, as I’ve said, the encounter on the road the tipping point and no going back — and I was going to retort, going to say something incisive like, “Yeah, me too,” when I felt something hit my shoulder. It was a blow, a palpable hit, and my first thought was that the Toyota guy had followed us in order to exact some sort of twisted vengeance for an incident that never happened, that was less than nothing — the girl hadn’t got in our car, had she? — but then I felt whatever it was skew off me and drop into the wet high grass with an audible thump. “What was that?” Mallory said.

I wasn’t making the connection with the streak of light that had shot overhead as we’d climbed out of the car — or not yet, anyway. “I don’t know.”

“Here,” she said, pulling out her phone to shine the light on the ground.

The object was right there, right at our feet, cradled in a gray-green bowl of broken stalks. It was metallic, definitely metallic, some sort of steel or titanium mesh six inches long and maybe three wide, like a sock, the size of a sock. And it wasn’t hot, as you’d expect, not at all. In fact — and this was when it came to me — the heating had taken place twenty-three miles up and by the time it had got here, to earth, to me, it was as lukewarm as a carton of milk left out on the counter.

—

It was a sign, but of what I wasn’t sure. I went online the next day and found an article confirming that the streak in the sky had been produced by the reentry of a decommissioned twenty-year-old NASA climate satellite scientists had been tracking as it fell out of orbit. The satellite had been the size of a school bus and weighed six and a half tons and that fact alone had caused considerable anxiety as it became increasingly clear that its trajectory would take it over populated areas in Canada and the U.S. A picture of it, in grainy black and white, showed the least aerodynamic structure you could imagine, all sharp edges and functional planes, the whole overshadowed by a solar panel the size of the screen at a drive-in movie. The article went on to claim that all debris of any consequence had most likely been incinerated in the upper atmosphere and that the chances of any fragment of it hitting a given person anywhere within its range had been calculated at 1 in 3,200. All right. But it had hit me, and either they needed to recalculate or Mallory and I should get in the car and go straight to Vegas. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table in the alcove, working a serrated knife through the sections of her grapefruit.

“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.”