In 1812 a volcano erupted in Indonesia. The event—seven thousand times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens—sent two million tons of rock, ash, and sulfur into the air, disrupting the global climate for years to come, resulting in blighted crops, snowy summers, fires, widespread famine. This lasted well into 1816, when Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary and Percy Shelley vacationed in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva hoping to escape the constant storms and gloomy weather that still lingered. To keep themselves occupied, they challenged one another to a ghost-story competition. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first novel about bloodsuckers and the precursor to Dracula, and Shelley wrote Frankenstein. So you could say that the two primary texts of the horror genre were born out of a time of explosive forces and intolerable weather.

Jack taps at the rain-dappled window and says, “Who knows what monsters will erupt from this period in history?”

Five years ago, he reminds them, the meteor strikes packed a punch equivalent to many dozens of volcanoes erupting at once. They introduced gases, particles, and temperature fluctuations to the atmosphere that continue to disrupt weather patterns worldwide. The drought in the Pacific Northwest has only just broken. Just now. And the ten-day forecast looks good and gloomy. They should hope to continue to experience this lovely, delicious mix of delicate mist, light showers, and roof-drumming downpours that used to be the standard around here.

“Do you know why I’m so excited about this?” Jack says, clapping his hands together. “Because it’s great news for all of us fungi fans!”

He hated how hollow his voice sounded. There was a time when he would have delivered this information with sincere enthusiasm. There was a time when he considered teaching to be a theatrical performance or even a religious experience, one he prepped for by writing out all of his lectures and practicing their delivery in front of the bathroom mirror. There was a time when he would put his whole heart into the classroom, because he truly gave a shit about inspiring others to love nature, to worship with him at the same soggy chapel built of spores and mycelia. But that time has passed.

Twenty-five sophomores and juniors are on the roster for his Bio 414 seminar, and five weeks into the semester, he can’t name a single student. They’re all the same fleshy blur of concert tees, beanie caps, nose studs, Apple watches, and Doc Martens. More often than not, he is what he once despised—the professor who seems to be phoning it in, droning through his lectures without any real sense of electricity or connection.