Two people at a corner table, a candle between them that keeps guttering every time the door opens, and neither of them will move it. She has torn the label off her beer in one long strip and folded it into a tiny square. He laughs a half-second too early at everything, then hates himself for it, you can see it cross his face.
Their hands are on the table maybe eight inches apart and both of them are aware of exactly that number.
I flew with a man who kept a photo of his wife taped to a locker. He'd been married thirty years. He said it started in a room like this, a candle, a torn label, the eight inches.
People think the fragile part is up there. The vacuum, the hard radiation, the fact that the entire atmosphere keeping you alive is, from orbit, a blue line thinner than the skin on an apple. It is fragile up there. But I sat behind six inches of aluminum and felt safer than these two look right now. They have no shielding at all. He is deciding whether to say the true thing or the smooth thing. She saw him decide.
From two hundred miles up you cannot see a single border. You cannot see a country. You have to be told which pale smudge is a whole city of eight million strangers. What you cannot see, at any altitude, is the eight inches between two hands, or the exact instant one of them closes it.
He moved the candle.
Now nothing is between them but the table.