T.C. Boyle, "Chicxulub"

conductive potatoes & skull-sized prisons

“But my daughter.”

Middle school science experiment: take a battery, a lightbulb, a few pieces of wire, and a potato. Using just these things — using all of these things — get the bulb to light up.

Sounds good, lemme just — a potato?

A potato, yes. Have at it. You have fifteen minutes.

There’s a genre of short story that works similarly. Take two showily disparate narrative elements — a Miami wedding and the Farmington Mine Disaster; a runaway cat and the attempted assassination of William Howard Taft — and then try, via writerly legerdemain, to connect them so as to illuminate the reader’s inner lightbulb. 

These stories are hard to pull off. The writer must (a) prevent exhausting the reader with the mental effort required to construct and maintain two distinct classes of object, and (b) come up with a compelling reason for these objects to be side by side in the first place. The potato must, in other words, unexpectedly conduct the battery’s energy — otherwise no light, and a weary, bewildered reader.

Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” with its alien contact and daughter plots, is a semi-successful potato-battery story (held back, at least for me, by its Crichton-esque dialogue). David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” cutting between an interminable focus group session and the ascent of a mysterious building climber, is a spectacularly unsuccessful one (my lightbulb would have emitted darkness if it could). War and Peace swells both potato and battery to Mt. Rushmore proportions — Tolstoy places the Battle of Austerlitz beside a teenage girl longing to dance and illuminates an entire continent.

The model potato-battery story — the one that demands to be read by any students, or skeptics, of the form — is T.C. Boyle’s “Chicxulub.” It tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl getting hit by a drunk driver, and also of Earth’s eons-long history of being hit, or nearly hit, by asteroids and meteors. Its twelve pages leave me crackling like a power line.

The narrator is the seventeen-year-old girl’s father (“My daughter is walking the roadside late at night — too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone even in a town as safe as this…”), and the asteroid interludes seem, at first, to be his way of avoiding the brutal simplicity of his story.

He and his wife, feeling friskily romantic on their night home alone, get a call after midnight from the hospital. The caller can’t, or won’t, even say whether their daughter is alive. Tasked with recounting such a night, who wouldn’t zoom out into the realm of the inhuman? 

“Have you heard of Tunguska? In Russia?

This was the site of the last-known large-body impact on the Earth’s surface, nearly a hundred years ago.”

But the cosmic realm turns out to be not so inhuman after all. 

“If the meteor had hit only four hours later it would have exploded over St. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious and baroque city.” 

The asteroids aren’t a distraction from human vulnerability, it quickly becomes clear; they’re the apotheosis of it. The narrator is, effectively, doomscrolling — finding a public correlate for his private agony. And like many a doomscroller, he can’t wait to share the fruits of his terrible research:

“My point? You’d better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are bigger than a mile in diameter.”

But the story of the accident — the horrible, personal weight of it — keeps drawing him back.

“But my daughter. She’s out there in the dark and the rain, walking home.”

That three-word sentence — But my daughter — is the plain bit of wire that connects the story’s divergent elements, and that encapsulates the story’s ingenious, merciless method. Yes, a meteor (called Chicxulub) once wiped out just about every living thing on Earth, and yes, yes, it will in all likelihood happen again — but my daughter. 

In a letter to a troubled friend, Philip Larkin once wrote, funnily but nastily (his signature scent), “Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand mine is happening to me.” “Chixculub” is that letter written to life on Earth. Death and disaster are nothing new, nothing personal — in fact they’re the brick wall toward which all of humanity is and always has been helplessly hurtling — but each one of us, through no fault of his own, happens to feel singularly preoccupied with the fate of his own moist and breakable shell.

Boyle doesn’t lament this fact or celebrate it; he just makes brilliant use of it. It’s an artifact of how we’re wired that we will never experience the end of the world except as it plays out on our own nerve endings. There’s a peculiar comfort in this. Even when the big one strikes, we won’t have to bear anything more than our own (gruesome, heartbreaking, intolerable-seeming) sensory displays.

But this feature has an inverse, and it’s less comforting — our own personal disasters inevitably have a flavor of the end of the world about them. The apocalypse becomes personal — the personal becomes apocalyptic. “Chicxulub” slides back and forth along this hellish seesaw. The daughter’s fate, hurtling toward her father, looms exactly as large as the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs.

Which makes the story sound awfully bleak. But it won’t leave you hopeless, I promise. Because even as Boyle dramatizes the predicament of our compassion-warping locked-in-ness (the world is ending, but my daughter) he slips us a key. For the fifteen or so minutes it takes to read the story, the narrator’s nerve endings and vulnerabilities become ours. There’s a way out of our skull-sized prisons after all! Hooray! 

Now what’s that in the sky?