The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  He unloaded the trunk of the car into the kitchen and piled the boxed dinners into the freezer, thinking now that he should have bought a radio of some kind. Something to fill the silence all around him. He turned to place the trashcan at the end of the counter but then paused. Not only was there a trashcan already in place but as he looked from one to the other he realized that he had purchased exactly the same kind. It might have been funny but it was not. His breath a long exhausted sigh. He set the new trashcan next to the other and began unpacking the coffeepot.

  Such was his homecoming.

  Two

  It had been just at the moment of his greatness. Of course it had. Were the intersection of vectors to coincide with some other moment, some other instant that was here and then past, would anything have changed? Even now there was no way of knowing what she had been doing when any one of those pinpoints fled, the long spiral unscrolling ever upward and away. This one: when Eriksson’s radio voice sounded in his ear, “A-OK, Corcoran?” and his own response came, “OK here.” And another: when they tethered themselves to the body of the ISS, their motions clumsy in the stiffly pressurized space suits. And yet another: when the airlock turned and opened in absolute silence and he moved through the black porthole and into the darkness of space and at last into the field of numbers that he had imagined all his life. She might have just arrived at the party then, perhaps had been handed something to eat or drink, perhaps was talking to someone. A boy? Someone else? But of course it was impossible to know. And he did not think of her anyway, not then, because he was already outside, already floating in the dazzling contrast of blazing light and the incomparable distance of the stars. Eriksson’s voice again: “Mission Control, we are clear of Quest and are proceeding to the MSS.”

  “ISS, you are clear to proceed,” came the response.

  He could see Eriksson’s helmet where it appeared over the edge of the truss: a black orb framed in white, his face invisible. Behind him the solar arrays glowing like dark, angular eclipses and beyond that only space itself: black and infinite and stretching out forever.

  They would need to reach the base of the robotic arm, the arm he had designed himself and which had been installed on the previous spacewalk a month ago and now would be used to exchange the nitrogen tanks. He would be attached to the nether end of the arm by his feet and would be moved bodily in a huge arc across the whole of the station, from one end of the truss to the other, holding the empty tank in his gloved grip, stowing it on the far side of the station and then bringing a full tank back the same way, performing that long parabolic arc twice. That was the task, but first they would need to reach the base of the arm, and so they moved, hand over hand, the process like crawling sideways over the exterior of a submarine or an enormous floating propane tank, and then to the dark crisscrossing beams of the truss, that structure stretching away beyond him in both directions and the round tubes of the modules in which they lived and worked already below him, toward Earth. He moved slowly, without speaking, his breath a rhythmic and repeating hiss as he moved and each task a focused act: the flexing of his hands inside the huge white gloves, the way in which they curled around the metal handles, the silence of the tether as it slid along with him, the repetition of his breath in the helmet. Each honeycombed panel memorized. The round rivets. The aluminum shield. Everything here named and numbered. The diameter of the moment: two thousand and thirty two millimeters. Fifteen-point-five-eight-three feet, the three extending into some forever of thirds and curving into those thirds as the robotic arm came into view, its structure collapsed into a loose stack of overlapping angles as if some thick white straw had folded in upon itself, the terminal end nearly touching the outer skin of the Kibo Module. Before him, the white base of Eriksson’s boots waved in parallel like floating quotation marks as he pulled himself forward over the curve of the Unity Node and across the trussworks, hand over hand, the tether following, up through the white padded girders where the dark interior of the truss opened in shadow like the hidden superstructure of a skyscraper.

  An occasional word from Eriksson to Mort Stevens inside the station and the CAPCOM in Houston but otherwise silence. Silence everywhere. Only the sound of his breathing and the occasional click as Eriksson’s microphone activated and deactivated. The curves and angles of the structure over which he moved. Perhaps the whole compass still turned in its twisting helix, yet to find its northpoint, all possibilities fluxing out into the darkness around him.

  That had only been a season ago and yet was gapped now by a distance he could hardly believe, the curved glass of his helmet replaced by the curved glass of the rental car’s windshield so that, instead of the clean compact functionality of the ISS, his current view was of the back of the car that preceded him. He had been home for two days and had awakened with a familiar feeling of weightlessness, a feeling that faded almost immediately but the memory of which continued to cling to him. Even now, parking the car and entering a vast hardware store, he could feel its shape in his mind: a sphere, a lit globe, a clear sparkling star that floated amidst the endless aisles of gray industrial shelving, fading slowly until it was gone.

  He returned home with a single five-gallon bucket of satin finish eggshell white and all the related supplies necessary to begin painting the living room and kitchen, a project he began immediately, taping off the cabinetry and the kitchen window and sink. His progress was slow and meticulous but soon the window and the bottom edge of the kitchen cabinets were framed in bright, almost luminescent blue. Then the kitchen island: he unrolled a sheet of clear plastic to drape over that surface and sealed it by taping the circumference of the plastic to the linoleum floor.

  The activity was meant to keep himself occupied but already he could feel his mind wandering, not to his memory of the International space station or to engineering tasks but rather to Barb and, yes, to Quinn. In the midst of such wandering thoughts he would pull free the last strip of tape he had placed and would reposition it or would physically grasp the refrigerator to wheel it out or back a few additional inches and then would return to the task before him, each track as defined and precise as a line on a graph: this singular ray pushing out along a trajectory that mapped the edge of one plane against another, the line of blue tape marking out a set of answers clear and simple and predictable, all things reduced to numbers, angles, vectors, equations.

  The cabinets rose nearly to the ceiling but there was a short space above them of bare wall too high to reach and so he returned to the hardware store and bought a folding aluminum ladder and several additional rolls of tape and plastic sheeting, placing all these items in the trunk of the car, the ladder extending a foot or more from its interior so that he had to reenter the hardware store once more to retrieve a scrap of plastic string to tie down the trunk lid.

  Across the parking lot he could see the green awning of Starbucks. He knew he had passed at least one similar awning nearer his house and it might have been that he had passed many more. The mathematics repeating. Everything here identical to itself, a grandeur of sameness framed by the black asphalt of parking lots and the lighter gray of sidewalks, all things within his sight enormous and clean and new as if the whole of the scene had been here forever and had never changed. No history. No passage of days. Indeed time itself an abstraction the meaning of which had dissolved so that each moment slipped into the next without distinction, change, or possibility.

  . . .

  When he arrived home he sat for a long moment behind the wheel looking up at the flat front of the empty house. It was difficult now to understand why any of them had ended up here, in this neighborhood that was a plane ride away from his office in Houston, but then he knew that part of the reason, or perhaps all of it, had been his own belief that Quinn’s life would be much the same as his, that she would excel in the same way that he had. Was that not an equation the solution of which had function and meaning and importance? Was that not what every father would want for his daughter? />
  At last he turned off the motor and opened the door and as he did so the garage across the street began to hum open. To his left stood the closed square door of his own garage, a space he still had not entered even though the central reason he had returned to the cul-de-sac was to remove his own belongings from the house. He knew such items were in the garage, boxed and waiting for him, and that he should be loading them into a U-Haul and driving back to Houston to find someplace to rent or buy but he had not done so, instead remaining to paint the house and watch over its sale, although he knew these efforts were not necessary. He knew he should just walk away from the whole thing and leave the empty container behind. That was what Barb had done, after all. And yet he remained, a proposition baffling even to himself, the idea of opening the garage and sorting out its contents something he simply did not yet want to address.

  A red sportscar had emerged from the dark interior of the open garage across the street and as Keith turned toward his own house the driver’s voice came: “Hey there, neighbor.”

  He turned back toward the street. The temperature had risen five or ten degrees since he had left the hardware store and the air was thick with heat. “Hey there,” he called in return.

  She might have been in her mid-forties, oversized black sunglasses and a broad friendly smile framed in the open window of the sports-car, brown hair pulled back from her face. He expected the car to drive away but then she called out to him again: “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said. “Jennifer. I live, well, I live right there.” She motioned to the house.

  “Good to meet you,” he said in return. She did not drive away and he stood awkwardly, waiting, and then set the laptop bag on the hood of the rental car and stepped forward into the street. When he arrived at her car she extended a hand out the window and he took it.

  “I’m Keith Corcoran,” he said.

  She smiled and removed her sunglasses and hooked them into the front of her top. Keith found his gaze following them into her cleavage and when he snapped his eyes back to her face she smiled more broadly as if to acknowledge that she had noticed this wayward glance. “You’re all moved in?” she said.

  “Not really,” he said. “Mostly getting it set up to sell.” He paused, wondering briefly how much she might already know and what to say next. Then he said, “You probably met my wife, Barb. She was living here before.”

  She stopped smiling for a moment, staring at him, and the silence that ensued was long enough that he began to wonder what he had said to bring the brief conversation to a stop.

  “I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?” he said.

  “Oh, no, not at all.” She sounded surprised and looked out the windshield briefly, as if charting her route out of the cul-de-sac. Then she turned to him again. “I thought you both moved out.”

  He paused before answering. “More or less,” he said, looking for more words but finding none. What was he supposed to say? “She moved out, anyway,” he said at last.

  “Well, you seem to be holding up all right, considering.”

  Again he wondered how much she knew about Barb. What she had told her about Quinn. Maybe they had been friends. “Uh, yeah, I’m doing OK,” he said. “Considering.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Barb? Uh … she’s in Atlanta. At her mom’s.”

  “Atlanta?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You were friends?”

  She was quiet for a time, looking at him. “Just neighbors,” she said at last. Once more she turned her gaze toward the open end of the cul-de-sac, saying nothing for a long while, and then turned to him again, this time a smile on her face. “So you’re the astronaut,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Welcome back to Earth.”

  “Well,” he said, “thank you.”

  “Gosh, I probably look a mess,” she said abruptly. “I’m just off to the gym.”

  “Oh, no, you look …” He paused. Then he said, “Beautiful.”

  “Oh, you’re too sweet.” She laughed.

  There was a sense of relief that the conversation had apparently righted itself and he smiled.

  “So you’re probably just here for a few days,” she said.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe longer than that.”

  “Well, let us know if we can do anything for you.”

  “OK,” he said, then added, “I’ll do that.”

  “It’s great to meet you, neighbor,” Jennifer said. She extended her hand and he took it. Her hand was soft and warm.

  He glanced at her cleavage again, an act that was almost involuntary. Her face and chest were tan, her breasts swelling inside the confines of her top. It occurred to him that he was essentially single. It was a thought made strange because he had not arrived at that conclusion before. “Great to meet you too,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I saw it on the news. I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh,” he said. He stopped and then, “That’s … ,” and again fell silent. After a moment he said, simply, “Thank you.”

  “If there’s anything you need, you just come and let us know.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said again.

  She smiled and then the window hummed closed and the car sped to the corner and out of sight.

  He felt aroused and actually thought momentarily of entering the house and masturbating but the idea seemed so pathetic to him that he did not enter the house at all, standing instead for a long moment in the heat next to the rental car and then walking to the end of the cul-de-sac. He stopped at the edge of the sidewalk where the length of chain separated the concrete from the dirt and grass and thistle and stared out across the field to the trees on the opposite side. The ground everywhere radiated with heat. Perhaps too hot even for the great, dark bird. Mouse and lizard and whatever else all huddled in their various dens of cool darkness. Already the chill of the air conditioner had faded and his sweat stuck the NASA polo against his back and beaded on his forehead. He scanned the trees. Their leaves blue and shadows deep and dark. Beyond them: the roofs of houses just like his, one after another, stretching on as far as one could see, distant hills with clusters of neighborhoods and curving streets of identical, earth-toned homes. He wondered momentarily what that bird might see from its widest high circle. A landscape like a huge and multicolored intestine. Self-similar. Fractal. Maybe there were empty fields elsewhere. Eyes searching for death hidden in the close-cropped lawns. Keith looked up, hoping to see the black shape where it spun in a slow-moving orbit against the bright blue of the sky but such a shape did not appear.

  For the remainder of the day he continued masking off the kitchen and the exhaustion he felt was surprising and profound. He had been weak upon his return to Earth—they all had—but there had been six weeks of daily physical rehabilitation and conditioning. And yet he felt completely spent, stepping off the ladder at last to survey his work: the kitchen tightly sealed and taped with care and attention. It was night now and despite his fatigue he spent a few moments tidying up the work area and organizing the stack of painting supplies for the next day. It was not until he had completed this task that he realized he had neglected to eat both breakfast and lunch, a situation that had been, at one time, an occurrence so regular that it had become a kind of running joke between him and his wife and which now bit into him with a cruel irony. There had been periods when he would work through meals two or three times per week, his workday eight or ten or twelve hours without stop or rest or break, until he was the last engineer remaining in the office, until only he and the cleaning staff remained and still he would continue to tabulate out his calculations and angles and data. He had never asked Barb to understand because he thought she already did, or rather that if she lacked the understanding it was not something he could justify or explain. He told himself that it was simply who he was and any other choice would have been to deny the very force of his being,
each goal clear and achievable because he had worked so hard to achieve those goals and because he had developed the discipline necessary to do so.

  He had learned—even as a child—that there was a difference between assumptions and expectations. He had never assumed anything about his success but indeed he had come to expect it. He would make the best grades in his classes because he put in the most time studying. He would be quickly promoted at his first real job because he worked harder than any of the other new hires and later, when he accepted a commission in the Air Force, his OPRs would show his superiority because he performed his tasks with correctness and exactitude. His teachers and peers had called him a genius and he knew he had a gift but that was not why he succeeded, or rather that was not the only reason. He succeeded because he had learned how to work with that gift as a kind of discipline, putting in the time and effort to see his projects or problems or challenges through from beginning to end. This had been his force and his credo. This had been the engine of his forward motion: not only his ability to see the numbers and to feel, as if intuitively, their relationships, but also the indomitable and inextinguishable power of attention and focus. There had been a time when his wife had been at his side, helping push that engine forward, but it was not so long ago—a year, maybe two—that she had called him “obsessive,” as if the time he was putting in to his own destiny was somehow optional or as if he had changed. But he had not changed over the course of their marriage. At least not in any way he could recognize.

  Even now he remained the same, if all he could think to do was paint this empty house. It was an absurd way to pass the time and he knew that. Of course he did. It was pathetic and it was not even serving its true purpose. Had he been working on a project—a real project—the numbers might have been complex enough to consume him. But there were no such numbers here. And yet there was nothing else to do, so tomorrow he would spread the dropcloth along the base of one wall and would pry open the bucket and pour the paint into a tray. If he worked with the same steady determination he could complete the first coat in the kitchen in just a few hours, a process he reviewed as he carefully unpeeled the tape and pushed back the clear plastic to access the microwave and slid his frozen dinner tray inside, realizing as he did so that he had also sealed off the new coffeepot he had purchased the day before and the cabinets that held the chipped mugs, the two or three bowls he had been using for his breakfast cereal, and the drawer in the island that held the silverware.