Once, years ago while driving through Missouri, Wilson had come upon a town just minutes after a tornado had ripped through. The corrugated tin of trailer roofs lay strewn over the ground; storefront windows were shattered. A shower stall lay tipped on its side by the only gas station, and a woman’s long-haired wig hung from the branches of a tree. Downed power lines draped the wreckage like webs. But what was most remarkable, what made Wilson pull off the road and just stare, was how things were still falling from the sky: a plywood door, the cushion from a sofa, a plastic lawn chair. He got out of the car to look up and watch these things grow from dark specks against the sky into things familiar, falling onto the land like some bizarre rain. The air was eerily still in the wake of the force that had stirred it, thick with a smell deep and electric, sweet and rotten at once—the smell of ozone, he had told himself, though it struck him more as the smell of death.

Wilson hasn’t thought of this story in years, and he’s not sure why he’s thought of it now, but he’s glad to have unearthed the memory before it was lost for good, buried somewhere deep in the southern hemisphere of his mind beneath so many other memories. At the same time as he is glad to have remembered, the fact that he had forgotten makes him uneasy, worried about the other memories he might be missing. He’d like to be able to pour all the memories out of his mind and spread them on his desk, just to remind himself of everything he has in there.

“Mr. Carter,” a voice suddenly bursts through the intercom on his desk. “Your wife on line one.”

Wilson looks at his watch; it is ten fifteen, and he was meant to let Ruth know by ten where he plans to take Isabelle to lunch today so that she can meet them there after her appointment. Maybe, he thinks, the reason he thought of the tornado was to distract himself from what he is supposed to be thinking about—the papers on his desk and where to take Isabelle to lunch.