that the man on this documentary just said that after the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck the Earth at what is now called the Chicxulub crater sixty-six million years ago—revised from the sixty-five million years ago we learned as kids—an area now concealed under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico where the samples of limestone reveal a heat spike caused by a force estimated to be about ten billion Hiroshimas—he said hiroshimas as a common noun, as if the city were itself the bomb that flattened it, as if there were never any other unit by which Hiroshima the city had been measured, as if a hiroshima were not the millions of people and places and points in time that existed inside a city but instead only the explosion that ended a war already won by no one on Earth—catalyzing an explosion ten billion times the power of that one bomb, which means it was caused by the impact of an object seven miles wide—the size of Maria Atoll or the suburb where I live or the city of Venice and all its outlying island structures and port, where I once imagined speaking bad Italian and eating olives with you—and traveling as fast as forty-four thousand miles per hour—twelve kilometers per second at low-end models, a speed eclipsed only by how quickly I answer your texts—displacing thirty thousand cubic miles of dirt, a hole in the ground the size of Massachusetts—the size of I miss you, the size of how much longer—into the atmosphere, as high as the stratosphere that orbits the planet, obliterating the sun and heating the Earth to pizza-oven temperatures—I need you naked temperatures—but the real threat to life was the aftermath, the half-mile-high tsunamis that traveled inland, pouring down the throats of every mountain and valley, over every ice cap and sand dune an incomprehensible volume of water, a deluge on every last plain, drowning every forsaken being in its path, overflowing dens like open mouths and annihilating life one water-full lung at a time, every light-seeking cell at once, every cold-blooded body in a flash, every breath—after that, he says, the animals remaining on Earth would have been able to hear the wave that would kill them coming, but they would not have seen it in the dark. The man says it would have been unimaginable. The man says methane with two long vowels and I remember it again: the silence, the waiting, the crash, the heat, the darkness, a beat, the wave after wave after wave, every little death, the blindness, the drowning, the unimaginable rush and roar of it all, and then