Anneliese showed her teeth in an uncertain smile. “What are you talking about? You just got here.”
The explanation was brief and vivid and unsparing with regard to my lack of concern or feeling. All three of them looked at me a minute, then Anneliese said, “What if he’s dangerous?”
“He’s not dangerous,” I said reflexively.
“I’m going with you,” Anneliese said, and in the next moment she was pushing a matching pair of ten-speed bicycles out the door, hers and Chris’.
Chris waved his glass. “You think maybe Paul and I should go instead? I mean, just in case?”
Mallory was already straddling the bike. “Forget it,” she said, with a level of bitterness that went far beyond what was called for, if it was called for at all. I’d done what anyone would have done. Believe me, you just do not get between a couple when they’re in the middle of a fight. Especially strangers. And especially not on a sweltering afternoon on a deserted country road. You want to get involved? Call the cops. That was my feeling anyway, but then the whole thing had happened so quickly I really hadn’t had time to work out the ramifications. I’d acted instinctively, that was all. The problem was, so had she.
Mallory shot me a look. “You’d probably just wind up patting him on the back.” She gave it a beat, lasered in on Chris. “Both of you.”
That was when things got confused, because before I could respond—before I could think—the women were cranking down the drive with the sun lighting them up as if we were all in the second act of a stage play, and the dogs, spurred on by the Lab pup, chose that moment to bolt under the lowest slat of the bleached wooden fence and go after the sheep. The sheep were right there, right in the yard, milling around and letting off a sweaty ovine stink, and the two older dogs—mine and Chris’—knew they were off limits, strictly and absolutely, and that heavy consequences would come down on them if they should ever lapse and let their instincts take over. But that was exactly what happened. The pup, which, as it turned out, was a birthday present from Chris to Anneliese, didn’t yet comprehend the rules—these were sheep and he was a dog—and so he went for them and the sheep reacted and that reaction, predator and prey, drove the older dogs into a frenzy.
In that instant we forgot the women, forgot the couple on the road, forgot spritzers and croquet and the notion of chilling on a scalding afternoon, because the dogs were harrying the sheep and the sheep had nowhere to go and it was up to us—grad students, not farmers, not shepherds—to get in there and separate them. “Oh, shit,” Chris said and then we both hurdled the fence and were right in the thick of it. I went after Nome, shouting his name in a fury, but he’d gone atavistic, tearing wool and hide from one bleating animal after another. I had him twice, flinging myself at him like a linebacker, but he wriggled away and I was down in the dirt, in the dust, a cyclone of dust, the sheep poking at my bare arms and outthrust hands with their stony black hooves. There was shit aplenty. There was blood. And by the time we’d wrestled the dogs down and got them out of there, half a dozen of the sheep had visible gashes on their faces and legs, a situation that was sure to disconcert the farmer—Chris’ landlord—if he were to find out about it, and we ourselves were in serious need of decontamination. I was bleeding. Chris was bleeding. The sheep were bleeding. And the dogs, the dogs we scolded and pinched and whacked, were in the process of being dragged across the front yard to a place where we could chain them up so they could lie panting through the afternoon and contemplate their sins. That was the moment, that was what we were caught up in, and if the women were on their bicycles someplace wearing a scrim of insects or stepping into somebody else’s quarrel, we didn’t know it.
A car went by then, a silver Toyota, but I only caught a glimpse of it and couldn’t have said if there were two people in it or just one.
—
We never did get around to playing croquet—Mallory was too worked up, and besides, just moving had us dripping with sweat—but we sat on the porch and drank zinfandel and soda with shaved ice while the dogs whined and dug in the dirt and finally settled down in a twitching fly-happy oblivion. Mallory was mum on the subject of the couple in the Toyota except to say that by the time she and Anneliese got there, the girl was already in the car, which pulled a U-turn and shot past them up the road, and I thought—foolishly, as it turned out—that that was the end of it. When six o’clock rolled around we wound up going to a pizza place because I was outvoted, three to one, and after that we sat through a movie Anneliese had heard good things about but which turned out to be a dud. It was a French film about three non-specifically unhappy couples who had serial affairs with one another and a troupe of third and fourth parties against a rainy Parisian backdrop that looked as if it had been shot through a translucent beach ball. At the end there was a close-up of each of the principals striding separately and glumly through the rain to separate destinations. The three actresses, heavily made-up, suffered from smeared mascara. The music swelled.
Then it was Gabe’s and the pounding air-conditioned exhilaration of an actual real-life band and limitless cocktails. Chris and Anneliese were great dancers, the kind everybody, participants and wallflowers alike, watches with envy, and they didn’t waste any time, not even bothering to find a table before they were out there in the middle of the floor, their arms flashing white and Anneliese’s coppery flag of hair draining all the color out of the room. We danced well too, Mallory and I, attuned to each other’s moves by way of long acquaintance, and while we weren’t maybe as showy as Chris and Anneliese, we could hold our own. I tried to take Mallory’s hand, but she withheld it and settled into one of the tables with a shrug of irritation. I stood there a moment in mute appeal, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye, and it was then that I began to realize it was going to be a long night. What did I want? I wanted to dance, wanted joy and release—summer break!—but I went to the bar instead and ordered a spritzer for Mallory and a rum and Coke for myself.
The bar was crowded, more crowded than usual, it seemed, even though most of the undergrads had gone home or off to Europe or Costa Rica or wherever they went when somebody else was paying for it. There were two bartenders, both female and both showing off their assets, and it must have taken me five minutes just to get to the bar and another five to catch the attention of the nearest one. I shouted my order over the furious assault of the band. The drinks came. I paid, took one in each hand and began to work my way back through the crowd. It was then that someone jostled me from behind—hard—and half the spritzer went down the front of my shirt and half the rum and Coke down the back of a girl in front of me. The girl swung round on me with an angry look and I swung round on whoever had jostled—pushed—me and found myself staring into the face of the guy from the blacktop road, the guy with the distraught girlfriend and the silver Toyota. It took a beat before I recognized him, a beat measured by the whining nasal complaint of the girl with the Coke-stained blouse—“Jesus, aren’t you even going to apologize?”—and then, without a word, he flashed both palms as if he were performing a magic trick and gave me a deliberate shove that tumbled me back into the girl and took the drinks to the floor in a silent shatter of glass and skittering ice cubes. The girl invoked Jesus again, louder this time, while the guy turned and slipped off into the crowd.
A circle opened around me. The bartender gave me a disgusted look. “Sorry,” I said to the girl, “but you saw that, didn’t you? He shoved me.” And then, though it no longer mattered and he was already passing by the bouncer and swinging open the door to the deepening night beyond, I added, my own voice pinched in complaint, “I don’t even know him.”
When I got back to the table, sans drinks, Mallory gave me a long squint through her glasses and said—or rather, screamed over the noise of the band—“What took you so long?” And then: “Where’re the drinks?”
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.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You want to go down to Gabe’s for a drink? How does a G and T sound?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking up at me for the first time. “I guess so. I don’t care.”
It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of Nine Stories had fallen flat. “Where’s the thing?” I said.
“What thing?”
“The mesh. My mesh.”
She shrugged. “I tossed it.”
“Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?”
In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid to the trashcan, only to find it empty. “You mean outside?” I shouted. “In the Dumpster?�
��
When I came thundering back into the room she still hadn’t moved. “Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it.”
Her lips barely moved. “It was dirty.”
—
I must have spent half an hour out there poking through the side-by-side Dumpsters that served our building and the one across the alley from it. I was embarrassed, I’ll tell you, people strolling by and looking at me like I was one of the homeless, a can man, a bottle redeemer, and I was angry too, and getting angrier. She had no right, that was what I kept telling myself—she’d done it just to spite me, I knew it, and the worst thing, the saddest thing, was that now I’d never know if that piece of mesh was the real deal or not. I could have sent it to NASA, to the JPL, to somebody who could say yea or nay. But not now. Not anymore.
When I came back up the stairs, sweating and with the reek of rotting vegetables and gnawed bones and all the rest hanging round me like a miasma, I went right for her. I took hold of her arm, slapped the magazine away and jerked her to her feet. She looked scared and that just set me off all the more. I might have pushed her. She might have pushed back. Next thing I was out the door, out on the street, fuming, the sun still glaring overhead, everything before me looking as ordinary as dishwater. There was a bar down the street—air-conditioning, music, noise, people, a change of mood that was as easy to achieve as switching channels on the TV—and I was actually on my way there, my shoulders tense as wire, when I stopped myself. I patted down my pockets: wallet, keys, cell phone, a dribble of dimes and quarters. I didn’t have a comb or a toothbrush or a change of underwear, I didn’t have books or my iPod or the dog, but none of that seemed to matter, not anymore. A couple in shorts and running shoes flashed by me, breathing noisily. A motor scooter backfired across the street.
We kept the car in the lot out back of the apartment. I went the long way around the building, keeping close to the wall in case Mallory was at the front window looking to see where I’d gone off to. The tank showed less than a quarter full and my wallet held three fives and three singles—along with the change, that gave me a grand total of nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents. No matter. I’d stop at the ATM on the way out of town and if things got desperate I did have a credit card, which we reserved for emergencies only, because we really struggled just to make the minimum payment every month. Was this an emergency? Mallory wouldn’t think so. The geniuses from NASA might not think so either—or the farmer whose sheep bore crusted-over scabs on their legs and throats and sad white faces. But as I wheeled the car out of the lot I couldn’t help thinking it was the biggest emergency of my life.
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 119
