Three years earlier, in Austin, on the morning before the announcement, the same man awoke to a soft, familiar shaking of the bed. He tried not to sigh aloud. She was turned on her side, her back to him, the pale iceberg tip of her shoulder showing above the dark sea of sheets, rocking periodically with silent sobs as another gale of a storm he didn't understand blew her further from him.
Six months before that he would have wrapped himself around her and shushed her and wiped her tears. Three years before, they would have rocked the bed together. Now, he put on basketball shorts and a t-shirt from the floor beside the bed, and went out to the kitchen.
Outside the window the sky was gray with pre-dawn overcast—moisture blown up from the gulf on the southeast wind. The AC was already running, pumping out the heat before the sun was even up. Even so, it felt humid in the house. The sun would come up and the clouds would burn off by ten. He had wanted to sleep in.
He counted scoops of coffee grounds into the filter basket, and started the machine, then fixed a bowl of cereal, leaving the milk bottle and open cereal box on the counter. He found a news station on the TV in the living room and settled in a corner of the sofa, holding the cereal bowl beneath his chin as he ate.
He had given up trying to puzzle out where things had gone wrong. His marriage had undergone some kind of boiling frog effect. Things had deteriorated so slowly that he hadn't noticed it was happening. Then one day she came home from her therapist appointment in tears and confessed that she wasn't attracted to him. In fact, she said, she'd never been attracted to him. When they met, she said, he had just been a port in a storm, or some shit like that.
He'd have to take her word for it if she said she didn't want him anymore. But as for when they met? It was bullshit. A rationalization to ease her conscience for what she was doing now. Either that or she'd been the greatest faker ever.
Back then, she would look at him and smile a smile that was just for him, a smile that looked into his soul and approved of what it saw. It was like the sun coming into a darkened room. When he bought the ring, he'd told himself he would pay anything to see that smile every day. Now he wondered what he wouldn't give to see it one more time. He tried not to ask himself that. He was afraid of the answer.
On the sofa, he finished his cereal before it got too soggy. News from the TV went into and out of his head without retention, except for one story: astronomers to hold press conference to announce important observations of the orbit of the latest interstellar object. There were no more details.
After a while the boys came out of their room, the big one in his Spider-Man pajama top and underwear, the little one toddling behind in just a Lightning McQueen pull-up diaper, dragging his green and black plush apatosaurus by the tail.
After getting the boys cereal, and coffee for himself, he put on Star Wars, Episode IV, and silently kicked himself for not having found some hidden place to put a notch each time they watched it. The big one's reactions by now had become ritual. As the time approached for the destruction of Alderaan, the kid became more and more antsy, finally leaping from the sofa as if he were one of the shards of the planet, blown into space.
"Look daddy! Look daddy! Look! Look! BOOM!"
What was it with young boys and explosions?
"Yeah, that's pretty cool," the man said, "but it's kinda silly when you think about it."
"Why?"
"Nevermind, kiddo. Watch your movie." There was no point in ruining the kid's fun.
But it was silly, those doomsday machines with their massive capital investments and giant crews and fragile exhaust ports. Why not just crash a heavy object into the surface at high speed? At nine tenths of the speed of light, even a NASA space shuttle had the same energy as two million megatons of TNT. And anyway Alderaan looked like it was a pretty good place to grow food. It seemed like a strategic error to destroy it.
The announcement at the press conference that afternoon was that the interstellar object had changed its orbit. Instead of leaving the solar system like the others, it had moved into an orbit that would rendezvous with Earth. It had moved in a way that required propulsion, alien technology.
Everyone was freaking out.
That night, after the boys went to bed, he sat with her at the kitchen table and they talked about the announcement. The naked panic in her eyes was a beacon to him across the growing gulf between them.
"What do we do?" she asked. He was the engineer, the scientific one.
"I'm not sure there's much we can do," he said. "I mean, the governments, the space agencies, they'll try and do some things—launch probes or whatever. But nobody knows what this thing is going to do when it gets here, and I'm thinking you and I, regular people, we're overmatched."
The Interstellar Object, 8I/2019 K1, was the latest of a series of objects that had been coming through the solar system at intervals since 2017. The first had been 1I/2017 U1, a.k.a. 'Oumuamua. After the second one, they had stopped naming them. All were massive, oblong objects, hundreds of meters long and tens wide. They passed into the inner solar system from more-or-less the same direction, hooking around the sun in hyperbolic orbits. All proceeded in the same stately tumble, end-over-end. All but this last one had continued tumbling away.
8I/2019 K1 didn't have a name yet, but the man was pretty sure it would get one soon. It had passed the closest to Earth of any of the objects so far, and had been the subject of the most direct human scrutiny. Nobody could tell whether this activity had somehow activated it, or whether it simply got close enough to detect our presence, or if it even cared about us at all. Whatever the reason, the object's trajectory changed, and, propelled in some way that no one understood, it had moved into an ellipitical orbit that would bring it around to meet the Earth.
Across the kitchen table, he tried to reassure her. "It's not really behaving like a weapon," he said. "Like, it doesn't seem to be particularly in a hurry. As a projectile, its kinetic energy is about the same as a really big H-bomb. It won't destroy the earth. But we don't even know for sure that it will hit the earth."
"Don't you think we should try to do something?" she said. "I mean, like, prepare?"
"I don't know. How can you prepare for ...?" he said. "Keeping calm and carrying on seems just as good a plan as becoming survivalists or something. Anyway, they say it will take a couple years before the thing reaches us, so we have time to think about it."
"Coach Daisy said something to me once," she said, looking dubious.
Daisy had been their tennis coach. A former hospital director of pathology, Daisy had quit her job to teach at the tennis center down the street.
His wife went on, "She said, 'The cardinal sin in tennis is to hit the ball into the net. If you get the ball over the net, you still have a chance. Even if you hit it long, lots of things could happen. The wind could blow it back in. Your opponent could misjudge it and volley it back. You never know. But if you hit into the net you lose the point for sure.'"
He didn't say it, but he remembered that quote well. He'd been in a daily struggle to get the ball of their marriage back over the net for weeks. But Daisy, who had once told him of her dream to coach a kid to the US Open, had abruptly quit coaching, moved to Colorado, and returned to practicing medicine, so maybe the applicability of this metaphor was limited.
"So what do you think we should do?" he said.
"I don't know. But we should try to get the ball back over the net."
We should. At least that was something.
