I had eaten in a hurry and was walking away from Pete’s Pastrami Hut, wiping my face with a napkin, nearly deaf with all the traffic and road construction noise exploding in my ears on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I remember seeing the red neon beer sign on the other side of the street, the dark-haired teenage girl standing beneath it in her white and blue school uniform, the thin old man walking past her, his gloved hands clutching the handle of a shopping cart full of brown paper bags and cardboard boxes. On the sidewalk a can of Copenhagen rested on its side like a fat coin next to the wadded up remains of a Fifth Avenue candy bar. A tall man wearing a red cap jogged past me, smelling of aftershave, swearing under his breath and jingling change in the pockets of his white slacks. The light ahead turned green and a green and white checkered taxi cab made a fast left turn and then swerved into the right lane, carrying a poster of a Jim Carrey movie on its roof. A helicopter, loud as a jet, flew by, its sound directionless and its light body and blurred blades hidden from view by banks, billboards and trees. Two men wearing suits and identical ties swept by me, each one carrying a suit case and talking in English with a French accent. I smelled fried chicken from a corner café and an assortment of flowers in plastic pots on a wrought iron cart. A man wearing an uncomfortable looking hard hat and yellow vest broke cement with a jackhammer that he handled as if it were pounding him into the ground while other men in similar vest and hard hat brought traffic to a stop with signs so that a dusty yellow dump truck could back uneasily out into traffic. A clump of people stood outside an electronics store, watching the latest news.
The end wasn’t coming with a whimper, it seemed, but a bang, while all about me humanity went about its usual business.
My silver, sun-powered Citizens wristwatch told me that it was 12:33. As I walked on I saw gaunt, heavily dressed men squatting near the cool, dark entrance of an underground parking garage. It was just starting to get hot and I could feel the first trickle of perspiration down my back. I wore brown, soft-soled leather shoes, tan slacks, a white shirt that was not as crisp as it was that morning, a grey tie and a tan sport jacket. Two heavy Cross pens, one ink, the other lead, weighed down the inside of my breast pocket.
My name is Herbert Harvey, my friends in school called me Har Har but now I am 35 and running late for a meeting. I hoped that my bald spot was still covered over, that my five-O-clock shadow had not decided to come out early, and that I didn’t smell like pastrami and hot peppers.
The lobby of the Sanwa Bank Building was cool, dark green and quiet. My footsteps faintly echoed on the glossy, earth colored tiles and I suddenly felt small and heavy, like a chubby little boy or awkward, flightless bird. The elevator whooshed open, I stepped in and pressed the button for the third floor. Since I had the elevator all to myself I checked the zipper in my fly and smoothed my thin, neatly trimmed hair. Plenty of time, I told myself. Why am I always in a panic? The answer, of course, was obvious. For months everyone had been in a panic, or something close to it.
The doors whooshed open and a woman with frizzy hair the color of strawberries got in as I stepped out. It was now 12:43. I turned left, walked past the elevators, turned right and then turned right again at the security station. As I approached the glass doors of my office I saw Marian Kawakami supporting her chin on the palm of her hand, looking down with her usually sleepy eyes at an open magazine on her desk. I pulled the heavy right door open, heard nearly inaudible “smooth jazz” from tiny speakers perched on the wooden file cabinets, and asked Marian what was up.
“I’m reading a recipe for zucchini meatloaf,” she said without looking up.
“Really?” I said. “You like zucchini?”
“Not a whole lot,” she said. “But my mother-in-law does.”
“She staying with you?”
“No, but we send each other recipes in our e-mails. Last week she sent me a recipe for peanut butter meat balls. It’s a kind of Thai dish. I don’t care much for Thai food, though. I don’t even like Japanese food. Maybe I should have been born Mexican or Italian. Now that I get a good look at this I don’t think I’d ever cook it. It just looks kind of yucky if you ask me.”
“I’m sure your mother-in-law would be thrilled,” I said, looking down at the picture on the glossy page of something that looked like a mushroom that had decided to crawl on all fours before being slaughtered. Yucky was the perfect word.
“Steve said he has his cell phone if you want to reach him and that he’ll be in at four. He had to go to the dentist.”
Steve Cunningham is my partner. Twelve years ago, when we were both barely out of college, we started this little business.
“I know.” I said. “That broken crown has been bothering him for weeks.”
“I don’t know what people do to their teeth,” she said, flipping the page. “I never had a cavity in my life.”
“Lucky girl,” I said with a mouth full of gold and silver fillings. It’s a wonder I make it past most metal detectors in airports.
“I’d be lucky if my husband wasn’t such a cheap prick. I want a gas range barbecue so now he’s looking on e-bay.”
“Count your blessings,” I said seriously.
“Yeah, that’s what people tell me,” she grumbled, now looking at winter coats.
As I walked to my office I said,” I thought you’d have the news on.”
“I’ve been watching the news for two months but now it makes me too nervous,” she said.
“My wife says the same thing,” I said. I couldn’t blame either of them. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen and it didn’t matter a hill of beans what people like me thought about it. We had enough food and water in our garage to get by for six weeks. It was what the government of California recommended, and for once we went along with what everyone else was doing.
Stanley Fishback and Larry Kramer didn’t show up until five minutes after one. I had only spoken to them over the phone so far. Neither one looked as I had expected. Stanley was thin and tall, a blond who had turned white and then almost entirely bald even though he was, I guessed, only a year or so older than me. Larry had the short and thick build we used to call a “fireplug” in high school. He had a square, heavy face, dark hair cut a militaristic millimeter above the scalp and a neatly trimmed mustache.
Their voices were a comic mismatch. Stanley’s tall and thin frame produced a deep, resonant baritone, while Larry the fireplug sounded like an adolescent boy.
We shook hands, talked briefly about the news and the unseasonably warm December weather. A year ago we might have chatted about Christmas. While almost everyone went ahead and bought trees and a few small, inexpensive presents, I had noticed a certain amount of reluctance in people to talk about the holidays. The holidays don’t go well with impending disaster, I suppose.
“We got pre-approved for the loan,” Stanley said. “IndyMac Bank, for up to five hundred thousand.”
“Excellent,” I said and then invited them to sit down.
“Well,” Larry said. “Together we have over a hundred and fifty thousand saved up for a down payment and we paid up all of our credit cards.”
“If you don’t own property cash will do,” I said. “Tired of the apartment?”
“It’s run by a bunch of Russian mafia drug dealers,” Stanley said with a surprisingly sunny expression on his face.
“We don’t know that,” Larry murmured.
“The hell we don’t!” Stanley shot back. “You should see these guys, a real bunch of thugs. In two years they took a perfectly good apartment and let it run to seed. We’ve had to go to court three times to get simple repairs made. A bunch of low-lifes moved in, too. And now they’re raising the rent. I never want another apartment as long as I live unless we go to Kansas or some such place.”
“Home ownership is still the surest way to accumulate real wealth,” I said, and then thought, as long as your home isn’t being blown to smithereens.
“Well,” Stanley said, as if reading my thoughts. “We think the worst isn’t going to happen and, anyway, might as well live for tomorrow. You have some houses to show us?”
“Do I!” I said, grabbing my car keys. “I think I have something you’ll love. Three bedrooms, what you want, a small backyard, very private, perfect for entertaining, at the end of a quiet cull de sac, new floors, two and half baths, in move-in condition and put on the market yesterday morning. Wanna see it?”
Three hours later I drove alone through slow traffic on my way home. I thought about how Stanley and Larry had walked hand in hand through the empty house, discussing where they would put this and that piece of furniture, how the light would look with new paint and new lamps, the kind of throw rugs they’d put in and how they would like to redo the window in the living room. I pictured them padding through the house in robe and slippers, sipping coffee and reading the morning paper. It was nice to be right for once in a long while. They loved the house and made an immediate offer.
Later, when I told Steve about it in the office, he said, “business is booming”, although with cotton in his mouth it sounded like, “misness is mooming.”
I flipped open my cell phone and called my wife. A pick up truck full of gardening equipment pulled in ahead of me. On its bumper sticker were the words, “With Jesus There is No Death.”
How will you know? I thought. How will any of us know?
“Hello?” Myra said.
She had a low voice for a woman. It always amused me when she talked about how people sometimes mistook her for a man on the phone.
“I’m driving and I’m talking on my cell phone,” I said.
“That’s a ticket. I don’t know why you don’t get a hands-free plug in. They’re only a couple of bucks for Pete’s sake.”
“I’m old fashioned and, anyway, the police got bigger fish to fry,” I said. “How are you?”
“The electricity went out this morning for ten minutes and it scared the crap out of me,” she said. “Other than that I’m fine.”
I heard a thin stream of water making an echo.
“Are you peeing?” I said just as a toilet flushed.
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “It came back on?”
“What?”
“The electricity,” I said, resisting the urge to shout.
“Ten minutes later. I think just our side of the street. Scared me. I ran into the bedroom and turned on the little crank radio we got but all they talked about was the missile. You know that little radio works pretty good. Where are you?”
“The freeway,” I said. “Robbie call?”
“This afternoon,” Myra said. “He’s excited. The last game ended in a draw, said he had a closed position with a bad bishop, so we talked about that for a while. He met a girl who came all the way from White Plains, New York.”
“Tell him to leave the girls alone,” I said.
“You can tell him yourself,” she said. “He said he’ll call later when you’re home.”
“That’s good,” I said sincerely. “Need anything before I get home?”
“No, I think we have everything we’ll need. Better hang up before a cop sees you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
Without thinking I switched on the radio, thought better of it but left it on. I don’t believe in the supernatural but lately found myself praying whenever the news came on. It was a short, simple, to the point supplication: don’t let anything screw up The Mission.
A man was talking. It sounded as if he stood behind clattering machines and in front of light bulbs popping and fizzing. Small voices buzzed around him like bees. His voice was young, high pitched but not nervous, with a slight drawl that made me think of a thin, sharp-faced boy pitching knuckle balls on red dirt behind a wooden fence.
“So far,” he said, stopping, I imagined, to lean into one of the mikes. “The only hitch, if you want to call it that, has not in any way put the mission at risk. There was, as you know…yes, I’ll…a delay of only thirty seconds to initiate separation and launch…and…no, we didn’t lose contact, everything’s running smoothly, we’re very optimistic. We expect confirmation of impact at four Pacific Standard Time. Then I’ll…what’s that? I think I’ll hug my wife and go to bed. We’re all, I guess all of us running on adrenaline and gallons of caffeine but really, Doctor Harris and I have been amazed at how smoothly everything’s been running for the last six months. Just, uh, hang in there with us for a few more hours and then we’ll all be able to sleep…”
I switched the radio off while there was still good news and then found that I had been gripping the steering wheel hard enough to break it. A few more hours. A few more hours could feel like a lifetime. I thought about my wife at home and about my son Robbie playing chess in San Diego. It infuriated me that in a moment of weakness we had let him go but what did it matter? The kid lived for the stupid game and had begged us for weeks to let him attend the tournament. What in the hell did he see in it? Staring at wooden pieces on a board would drive me nuts. If the mission failed-and that seemed unlikely-we had months but I wished he were home waiting for me. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had stepped outside the house this morning. It seemed unreal that the world could just keep going on. The eternal optimism of human beings, I suppose.
Trying not to think about cigarettes, I fished in my pockets until I found my last stick of Juicy Fruit. The sun hovered just below rooftops on a cloudless sky as I pulled into our circular driveway. The silence of the car with the engine off gave me a feeling of sitting inside a pressurized compartment. I started to turn the radio off and then remembered that it was off. Strange how things like that happen. As I sat chewing gum I heard birds singing to each other, each one warbling variations of the same tune. Life goes on, I thought. The cycle of birth and death is insistent about the future. The thought came to me that life is probably the only process that creates time. Now the question was, did we have any time left?
I rolled out of my black Buick LeSabre feeling heavy and in need of a nap. There was a brief case in my hand I didn’t remember taking out of the car. Life not only goes on, I thought; it goes on automatically.
The house was cool and dark. For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything except the white throw rug near the door and spots of light in the middle of the stairs. Then the outline of the coffee table and Myra’s upright piano formed. I switched on a lamp, set my briefcase on the coffee table and then walked through swinging wooden doors and into the kitchen, listening to Myra softly padding down the stairs. Ah, beer! I popped open a can, sat down at the kitchen table and looked at a pile of junk mail that must have come that day.
“I was just on the phone with Spencer,” Myra said as she walked into the kitchen.
She had on sneakers, red slacks and a white sweat shirt. Her long brown hair spread loosely on her back. There was no makeup on her small, pale face, which made the freckles on her nose and under her eyes prominent enough to count.
Spencer was her brother, a bright but academically challenged construction worker who now lived in a trailer and did part time security work for a casino on an Indian reservation. Married three times and currently divorced, he spent most of his free time collecting conspiracy theories that had to do with international finance, Jews and The Book of Revelation. In person he was friendly, soft-spoken and self-deprecating. On the phone or on-line, however, he was weird, completely irrational and disturbing.
I took a long gulp of beer and then asked her what was up with Spencer.
“Just the usual He saw a video about the thirteen Satanic bloodlines, a secret group called the Illuminati and how we’re all being manipulated by Hollywood and NASA into panic so that the new world order, so on and so on. He’s sending e-mails to people and sooner or later I’m sure he’s going to get himself arrested or killed. He’s always been weird, eccentric, on the lunatic fringe but now he’s just plain nuts. I mean, he doesn’t even make sense.”
“I know,” I said, folding my hands around the near empty can of beer. “I get his e-mails. They always have links to sites that have to do with UFOs, CIA mind control experiments, Masonic symbols on government seals, oh, let’s see, what else? British monarchy and drug cartels. Yeah, I think that came from him.”
“Herb,” she said evenly. “He scares me.”
“Oh I don’t think he’d ever hurt you or any of us,” I said.
“No, he doesn’t scare me in that way. What I mean is, a lot of times schizophrenia runs in families. Spencer didn’t start to get really weird until after high school. I like it that Robbie is bright and intellectual, that he reads all the time and wants to go to college but a part of me is also... I don’t want to worry about it but it’s always in the back of my mind.”
“Spencer may not be, strictly speaking, schizophrenic,” I said, holding up the palm of my hand. “Sometimes, slowly, over time, people get weirder and weirder. There might not be anything wrong, organic, I mean, with Spencer’s brain.”
Myra took a deep breath, put her elbows on the table and then cradled her forehead in the palms of her hands. She looked like Robbie contemplating a move over a chess board. I finished my beer. Even warm, the last sip was divine.
“Well,” she said, sitting up and then rubbing her hands. “You know how mothers are. We worry about everything. What’s the old saying? Whatever can go wrong will.”
“There’s always a lot to worry about,” I said. ” If anything happens we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now he’s just a bright, good kid, never gave us much trouble. So…you know, smells good in here, like baking.”
“Cupcakes,” Myra said. “School’s having a bake sale the day after Robbie gets home. He asked me if I could make cupcakes.”
“What kind?” I said hopefully.
“Vanilla. He wanted me to make vanilla so I did.”
“Damn that kid,” I said. “Plays chess and doesn’t like chocolate. What’s with that?”
“Your brother the big shot college professor taught him how to play chess and as far as chocolate goes, he never liked it, even as a small boy, try as I might.”
“He was always an independent little cuss,” I grumbled, rubbing my head, messing up my hair, probably exposing my bald spot. “I guess genes win out, not mine though. I think he got all yours and my brother’s. You two didn’t have a thing going on did you?”
Myra snorted and for a second, as she covered her nose, her face turned bright pink.
“You remember what he gave Robbie for his second birthday?” she sputtered.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact I do,” I said, grinning.
“A glow in the dark skeleton!’ Myra nearly screamed, slapping the table. “We had to take it out of the room because he couldn’t sleep with it on his dresser.”
Myra laughed so hard that tears ran down her face.
“He teaches anatomy,” I said, wiping my own eyes.
When Myra could breathe normally again she said, ”I love Phil but he’s the biggest nerd on the planet.”
“Well we just have weird brothers,” I said.
“I made chocolate cupcakes for you,” she said. “I figured after all that work I might as well enjoy a few myself.”
“God bless you, woman,” I said solemnly.
After a light diner of salad and chicken from a foil package, we lay in bed with the television off, eating cupcakes on little paper napkins. I stared at the blank screen, wondering if Myra would be upset if I asked her to watch the news with me. Normally that’s what we did but for the last couple of weeks the news made her anxious and depressed. Hell, I suppose it made everyone anxious and depressed.
“Well, by four o’clock we’ll know,” I said, chewing on the last of my cupcake.
Myra sat up, crossed her legs and then looked down at her lap. With her feet bare, she looked as if she were in a yoga position.
“You think it’ll work?” she said.
“I do,” I said with a little more confidence than I actually had. “I mean, look. It’s just a big rock in space, coming toward us. All the missile has to do is nudge it, just nudge it so that it goes off course. And if it misses there are back up missiles. People have thought of everything.”
“You know who I’ve been thinking about lately?” she said.
“Who?”
“Marie,” she said. “Almost everyday I think about her. I keep picturing this little old woman wandering the streets two weeks after my uncle died, seeing a sign for fine art lessons, memorizing the number, going home to give the school a call and then, the next day, sitting there with crayons in her hands, hunched over a pad of drawing paper. A year later art galleries are buying her work.”
Myra’s aunt, Marie Kovasky, at age sixty-seven, became our one famous relative. She swore like a sailor, smoked little black cigars, told dirty jokes she had either collected in her head or made up, and painted astonishing scenes of wild flowers. Everyone loved her to pieces. With her big square glasses, pinched cheeks, piles of red hair, a hunched back and a gnarled wooden cane, she looked like an ancient gnome out for a wild time on the town. A year after her death we still grieved.
“She was quite a woman,” I said truthfully. “I never met anyone like her.”
“I keep thinking that that’s how I want to grow old, just taking something up and finally finding my vision. Now, who knows? Maybe I won’t get the chance. Maybe none of us will.”
“It’s too soon to say that,” I said.
“You say they thought of everything, but when I hear that you know what goes through my head? The space shuttle that blew up. They didn’t think of everything then. Why should we think they thought of everything now?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” I said. It sounded weak. I suddenly felt weak all over.
She got out of bed, quickly stripped off her clothes and then got back into bed naked. I slowly undressed and then put on pajamas, going to bed, I supposed, the way my grandparents had.
I turned off the light, then lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. Neither of us said a word for what felt like a long time. Thinking that Myra had fallen asleep, I was about to turn over when she said my name.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
“About what will happen if the meteor comes our way,” she said.
I sat up. Sleep seemed a long way off. The LED lights on our home entertainment system glowed green in front of me like emeralds small or far away. I could feel cold air flowing across the room from the open window in the bathroom. My ears felt as if they were filled with vibrating specks of silence.
“There’s no reason…” I said.
“If it comes to us,” Myra said, cutting me off. “I don’t want to get on a bus with a bunch of strangers. I want to stay here.”
Something cold and heavy settled into my chest. On my nightstand was the envelope the government had sent us containing instructions of where we were to go in the “unlikely” event of an emergency evacuation. No private cars would be allowed to clog up the streets and highways. We were to walk to the “redeployment center” with just the clothes on our back and one small carry-on. I remember the day it came and how terrified reading the instructions had made me. Jesus Christ, I had thought. So this is it.
“If that’s how you feel,” I said, knowing that I was about to pass a possible death sentence on myself. “Then we’ll stay.”
I felt the bed shake as she silently sobbed. All I could think to do was rub her back and neck.
“I’ve been so afraid,” she managed to say. “That you’d leave…”
I rolled over to her and then held her in my arms. So this, I thought, is what we’ll do for love. It seemed an insignificant price to pay.
“I could never leave you,” I said. “No matter what.”
“Then if it happens,” she whispered. Her heart beat against me. “I won’t be afraid.”
We stayed like that, drifting toward the dark shore of sleep, when the phone rang. I answered right away, knowing who it was.
“Hey Dad.”
“Hi kiddo,” I said into the slim cordless unit. “What’s up?”
“Everyone’s in my room,” he said. “Eating chips and watching the news. Man, we clobbered them today! First place, can you believe it? A guy even interviewed us for Chess Life and took our picture. I think you’re talking to the next world champ.”
“I hope I’m talking to the next doctor in our family,” I said. “But I’m mighty proud of you son. Sounds like you’re having a great time.”
“I’m all pumped up,” he said. “We’re going to stay up till four to see what happens, then we’re going across the street to an IHOP that’s open all night, then catch a few hours sleep before we have to get on the van. This has been the greatest day ever.”
“Pug there with you?” I said.
“Yeah he’s here,” Robbie said.
“Pug” was my son’s best friend. I don’t know why anyone would want to call him Pug but as far back as I could remember that’s what everyone called him. Made him sound like a little snarling, obnoxious dog but he was actually a very sweet kid with big blue eyes and a little owlish face.
“Well say hi to Pug and don’t eat too much junk food,” I said.
“Okie dokey,” he said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Bye Dad. Love you.”
I switched the phone off, trying to think of the last time he had said that he loved me. Was he worried? If so, it wasn’t in his voice.
“We raised a chess genius,” I said. “Now I can sleep at night.”
“It’s taught him how to concentrate,” Myra said. Her back was turned to me and her voice came from under the blanket. “What’d you do in high school?”
“Drank beer and got out of math,” I said.
It seems strange to have a son who is so much smarter than me. Robbie skipped grades and went to high school two years younger than most kids. It hadn’t always been easy for him. I had always known by the tortured, lonely look on his face that he had sometimes been teased and bullied; but I didn’t ask him about it and he had never complained. One smart and tough kid that son of mine.
“Count your blessings,” Myra mumbled.
I chuckled under my breath. Yes indeedy, count your blessings. You have a wife, a son, a business, and somewhere far, far away a rock headed to earth might put an end to it all. It all seemed more than unfair; it seemed utterly unreal. I scooted under the blanket and hugged myself. When we die, I wondered, will we all die like this, alone? And when the world is cooked or frozen what then? Will the universe roll on like some vast, mindless machine? Suddenly it wasn’t death that was so terrifying but the awful magnitude of existence itself. Stars blowing up, gasses coalescing and igniting into suns, planets forming, life forms emerging and then dying off…good God, what’s the point of it all? Robbie had once told me that there are more possible games of chess than there are atoms. My mind filled up with images of chess pieces forming game after game after game on boards that circled the galaxies.
Brain abuzz with useless thoughts and terrifying images, I wriggled out of the blanket and lay gasping for air, staring up at the dark ceiling. Myra asked me if I couldn’t sleep and then, before I knew what was happening, she was on top of me, her hand in the fly of my pajamas.
This isn’t going to work, I thought. But it did.
When it was over we lay next to each other under the blanket, holding hands, until I heard her softly snoring. I got up, put on my robe and slippers, and then crept downstairs.
It was two in the morning. I sat in one of our hard chairs and wondered why we had such uncomfortable furniture. Two in the morning is the worst time for me to be awake. When I was younger I invented a name for the place my mind always went to at times like two in the morning; I called it the House of Pain. You probably know a place just like it. In one room is the place where I spilled a whole bowl of steaming baked beans on the lap of my favorite aunt during a Thanksgiving Day dinner. Oh, and here’s where I flunked my driver’s test. Twice. But over the years the house had not been big enough, and so turned into a neighborhood, a town and then a city.
In the thrash cluttered basement of one building I told my family that I was not cut out to be a third generation doctor and that I was going into business instead. On the walls hang pictures of their shocked and disbelieving faces. And then there’s the alley where I got drunk for two days after flunking the realtor’s exam for the second time. I’m not destined to pass any exam the first time, I suppose.
I can’t tell you what the monument in the center of the city looks like; all I can say is what it feels like. Made of stone, smooth and round, it is inscribed with delicate letters and is surrounded by flowers.
Three years after Robbie was born Myra gave birth to Cecily. She lived for two days. Myra insisted on a funeral, complete with casket and church service. I remember staring down at the tiny wooden box, holding Myra’s hand, wondering what people must feel as they make such things. Poor kid. Such a long way to come only to stay for two days. Myra and I embraced as the coffin was lowered into the ground. When I felt her body shake I felt the full force of my own grief wash over me. For nine months I had watched her in my mind’s eye, crawling all over the house, toddling in her little shoes, going off to school, doing homework with Robbie, practicing twirling a baton in the backyard, leaving home to attend college, getting married, having children of her own.
The cool screen of the television was a dark mirror of the living room. I rubbed my face, looked at it but felt no inclination to let it spill into fuzzy bright life. I found it hard not to think of the CNN special report I had watched six months ago, a cheery little documentary about what would happen if the meteor exploded over a large city. Everyone would be vaporized. The explosion would dwarf the biggest nuclear bomb we could ever build. And then it would get worse, much worse, as wild fires would erupt, engulfing one city after another. I watched for what seemed hours, hardly moving, until something seemed to crack in my head. I got up off the couch, feeling as if my brain had rotated in my skull. My face felt numb. At first I thought that I had suffered a stroke and was panicked at the thought of being in the house alone. I staggered into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, then buried my face in a towel. For ten or fifteen minutes I wept so hard it felt as if I were cracking every bone in my body.
I looked at the television now and thought that Myra was right. No sense trying to flee. The evacuation centers were a ploy to control panic. If the missile and the backup missiles failed and the rock hit we would just have to take it.
The house felt stuffy. I walked outside, stood by the car, and then looked up at the night sky, for once not caring if the neighbors saw me padding around in my pajamas, robe and slippers.
Somewhere there was a rock; and coming toward it, a missile. I saw a few stars and felt at peace in the cold air. The three of us would be together for Christmas, and for now that seemed enough.
I walked back into the house, sat down, waited, and at four o’clock turned on the television.
-James Hazard
La Verne, California
Copyright 2008
