The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  “The best?” Keith said. He had not reached for the intercom nor depressed the button to be heard and so Eriksson said, “Understood.” And then, “Standing by.”

  Eriksson left the intercom floating in the air before them. The two men adrift, neither speaking, not even looking at each other.

  “This doesn’t … ,” Keith said. And then, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know,” Eriksson said. It was quiet between them and then Eriksson said, “Do you want me to get your laptop ready for Barb?”

  “Barb,” he said. “No, I can do that.” As if to show that this action was indeed possible he opened the laptop and clicked on the appropriate icon to initiate the link.

  “You’ll get through this,” Eriksson said.

  “OK,” Keith said, simply. His voice was clear and he felt composed and ready, as if for some component of the mission that he had only just learned of but which nonetheless needed completing.

  “Don’t worry,” Eriksson said.

  “I’m not worried,” Keith said.

  Eriksson looked at him carefully.

  “What?” Keith said.

  “Let’s talk after.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll be just past the hatch if you need me,” Eriksson said.

  “Got it.”

  Eriksson looked at him again, his expression one of concern. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” Keith said.

  Eriksson nodded, turned, and pulled himself to the other end of the module. In a moment he was gone from sight.

  The laptop before him was open and he stared at it for a long time before his eyes focused on its glowing background image, an image of himself and Barb and Quinn taken a few years before, a snapshot from a trip they had taken to Houston, one of the few actual vacations they had taken together. He was smiling awkwardly but both Barb and Quinn looked beautiful. How old had she been when the photograph was taken? Fifteen? Slightly younger?

  He might have continued to stare at the image as he waited but his eyes blurred and when they refocused a point of light drifted in the air before him, a faint luminescence like a distant star. Like a diamond. His first thought was fascination. Then confusion. Then he recognized it at last as a drop of fluid, a liquid of some kind suspended in the recycled oxygen of the compartment. Then he could see another and then another, as if a collection of tiny stars were forming in the air a few scant inches from his face, a new and unknown constellation which he watched with curiosity as if the individual points of light had originated from some other source. Not from him. Not from the tears that floated out and away from him as if drawn toward the image on the screen. Look at those, he was thinking. I’ll have to tell her about this. Another, this large enough to wobble slightly until it settled into its silent shining orb. I’ll have to tell Quinn. Adrift then. Adrift.

  The chamber filling slowly with tiny stars. Count them now and they will equal some infinity of zeros.

  My daughter. Oh my god. My daughter is dead.

  Four

  She must have been waiting for him because her high-pitched voice came almost the very moment he swung open the door: “Hey! Hey you, astronaut guy! Hey!” He might have simply swung it closed again but he did not and she continued to shout as she trotted in his direction from across the street.

  He was embarrassed that he had opened the door yet again but he had come to hear the sound of a delivery truck in every low-frequency hum that wobbled through the empty rooms. Each time he waited for the doorbell’s ring or the sound of the driver’s knock and when no such sound came he would set down the paint roller and walk to the door in his socks and open it to find nothing—no package, no driver, no truck—instead only the emptiness of the cul-de-sac, the day coming to a close and darkness once again falling over the house like a shroud.

  But this time he had opened the door not to silence but rather to the sound of the little girl who had run across the street from the direction of Jennifer’s house and now stood before him, bouncing slightly on the tips of her toes and smiling with excitement. “You’re the astronaut guy?” she said.

  He sighed and glanced around the entryway for the box even though he already knew that there was no box to be found.

  “Hello?” she called up to him. “Anyone home?”

  “Yes,” he said at last, “I’m the astronaut guy.” He looked at her. She was perhaps nine or ten years old with brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “Do you need something?” he said.

  “Yep,” she said and when he did not respond she asked: “Is it fun?”

  “Is what fun?”

  The little girl rolled her eyes as if exasperated by his apparent lack of intelligence or insight. “Being an astronaut,” she said.

  “Oh.” He thought for a moment. His throat felt tight. He tried not to think of Quinn. “Yes, it’s fun,” he said.

  “What do you get to do that’s fun?”

  “Do your parents know you’re out here?”

  “My mom knows,” the girl said quickly, as if it was necessary to get this information out of the way so she could focus on the more important question at hand: “So what’s the answer?”

  “Oh, let’s see,” he said. “I get to wear a space suit.”

  “That’s the fun part?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that the funnest part?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Really? I don’t think so. What’s the funnest part?”

  He looked at her. “You’re kind of demanding,” he said.

  She smiled and nodded. “Precocious,” she said.

  “Who calls you that?”

  “Grandpa.”

  “Ah,” he said. “What’s the funnest part?” He paused and then said, “When the rocket blasts off.”

  “What’s fun about that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked at him as if confused or irritated; he could not tell which. Then she said, “You’re not really good at this.”

  “Good at what?”

  “Telling about being an astronaut.”

  He stood looking at her, blinking, then glanced at the house across the street, then back to the girl, realizing as he did so that she was the same child who had looked through his sliding glass door when the realtor had first been to the house. “Does your mom let you talk to strangers?” he said.

  “You’re not stranger danger. You’re an astronaut. It’s like talking to a policeman or a fireman. Plus my mom’s the one who told me to come over.” She smiled at him: a big, goofy smile that was totally fake and yet somehow endearing.

  “What’s your mom’s name?”

  “Jennifer.” She pointed behind her, across the street. “We live right there.”

  “Yeah, I thought so,” he said. “Why did your mom tell you to come over here?”

  “Because of my school report.”

  “Aren’t you out for summer?”

  “My school goes all summer long.”

  He looked at her, then up at the house, then back at her again. “OK,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t ask, but what’s the report?” He glanced past the little girl to Jennifer’s house again. He had seen her only once since their initial meeting three days earlier, had waved to her just as her car disappeared into the garage. Now that garage door remained closed. He wondered if she was watching him from some upstairs window but if so he could not see her.

  “It’s on someone in our neighborhood. Someone who does stuff.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “You know. Like firefighters and people like that.”

  “Right,” he said. “So I’m your report topic?”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t you think you should ask me first? Maybe I’m really busy and don’t have time to be in your report.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “You don’t really do anything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m not stupi
d.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “You don’t have any furniture.”

  “So?” He wondered if that was all he could have come up with, wondered why he was being run aground in a conversation with a ten-year-old and then tried to remember what Quinn had been like at this age. Would she have spoken to a neighbor with such authority? He thought it unlikely.

  “It’s not good. All you have is a couch. My mom says that’s weird.”

  “Your mom’s right. It is weird.”

  “So why don’t you have any furniture?”

  “Did you figure this out by peeking through the window?”

  She looked embarrassed.

  “It’s OK, but you probably shouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  He thought she might cry but she did not, instead standing there and looking up at him from the concrete. Then he said, “To answer your question, my wife took it all when she moved out.”

  “Why aren’t you with her? Did you have an affair?”

  “An affair? Do you know what that means?”

  “It means when you go be in love with someone else and you want to marry someone else. It’s what my uncle did. I heard my mom talking about it.”

  He leaned against the doorframe, wondering if he should step outside but he had removed his shoes while he was painting and now stood in his socks between the interior of his empty house and the seemingly less empty exterior of the cul-de-sac. His thoughts went again to the neighbor across the street, the tan woman who had sent her daughter here. “What’s your name anyway?” he said.

  “Nicole,” she said.

  “I’m Captain Corcoran.”

  “Hi, Captain Coco-ran.”

  He smiled. “Maybe Captain Keith would be easier.”

  “Captain Keith,” she said. “Hi, Captain Keith.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  Across the street the garage door hummed open. He might have expected the neighbor’s red car to slide out onto the street but instead the neighbor herself appeared out of the shadows and stepped toward them. She was not dressed in her workout clothes this time but her T-shirt was tight across her chest, the neckline low enough that her tan breasts nearly spilled out of it.

  “Does that mean I can do my report on you?” Nicole said.

  He stared at Jennifer as she approached. It was not unlike watching some jungle cat. A panther. He glanced down at his shirt and pants, both of which appeared clean but for a few flecks of eggshell paint, and at his shoeless feet, gray socks on the threshold of the open door. Behind him lay the vacant entryway, tiles smeared with dust and dirt and littered with curls of masking tape. Beyond: the living room he had been in the process of painting. He glanced in that direction only briefly before stepping forward and closing the door behind him.

  “What?” he said.

  “I said,” she repeated, clearly impatient with his lack of attention, “can I do my report on you?”

  “OK,” he said, “but it might have been better if you had asked me that first.”

  “Why?”

  He paused. “I don’t know,” he said. Then: “That’s just usually how it’s done.”

  Jennifer had arrived by her daughter’s side, smiling widely. He had initially thought she might be slightly older than he was but now, with her standing before him, it was impossible to tell, her body uniformly smooth and tight and tan as if she was a being constructed entirely of suede.

  “Hey neighbor,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Is she bothering you?”

  “No,” he said. “She asks a lot of questions.”

  “Jennifer,” she said, extending her hand and shaking his.

  “I remember,” he said. Then he added, “Keith.” Her hand felt smooth and warm.

  “I’m afraid I put her up to it,” Jennifer said. “She had this report to do and I just thought you’d be perfect. I mean you’re so close. Right across the street.”

  He nodded but did not answer. Smiled.

  “The other kids will all have their local mailman or something and Nicole will have our astronaut. That’s pretty special, don’t you think?”

  He smiled again, turning his eyes toward the sidewalk. “I guess so,” he said.

  “You’re a bit bashful about being famous.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “It’s not a very big town.”

  “Seems pretty big to me.”

  “Well, you’re still new here,” she said. “Small town with big shopping.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s cute that you’re bashful.”

  He wondered if he was blushing, hoped in fact that he was not. He glanced down at Nicole, who looked up at him expectantly.

  “We’re just headed out so I won’t keep you,” Jennifer said.

  “OK,” he said. Then he paused and stammered, “I mean, it’s OK. It’s not a problem.”

  She held eye contact with him and he only broke it when Nicole called up at him from the concrete, her words punctuated by a short hop as if the sentence caused a physical reaction: “Will you be here later?”

  He wondered if her mother might intervene but Jennifer said nothing. “When later?” he said.

  “Mom, when?” Nicole asked.

  “Maybe it would be more convenient if we invited Mr. Corcoran over to our house for dinner,” Jennifer said. “That way you can ask him your questions and he can eat something and everyone’s happy.”

  “Yeah, Captain Keith can come over!” Nicole said.

  “What do you say, Captain Keith?” Jennifer said. “We can’t do tonight. Homeowners association. Maybe you’re going to that too?”

  “No, I didn’t know about that.”

  “You’re welcome to come, you know. You’re a homeowner, after all, even if you’re selling.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, I don’t want to go to that.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she said. “A lot of busybodies mostly.” She giggled, the sound of a much younger woman, a girl. “I do like your honesty,” she said. Then she giggled again.

  He looked at the ground in embarrassment. No words would come.

  “How’s Thursday?” She looked at him and smiled and once again did not break the contact and he felt a short surge in his lower gut. The concrete felt warm under his feet even though the air around him was still cool and there was the faintest hint of a breeze. He could feel the little girl looking up at him but he continued to stare into Jennifer’s eyes and she stared back at him, her smile closing into a mischievous grin. He did not know if he should break the contact, knew only that he did not want to do so.

  “Thursday?” he said at last. “I think that sounds fine.”

  He tried to resume painting but the attention to detail that was nearly automatic when he had first begun the task had become difficult to find, his strokes wobbling and sloppy. At first he was merely distracted because he was thinking of the woman who lived across the street. But there was something else too: a kind of intrusion that overlay those thoughts and would not be ignored. When his phone began to buzz and he looked at it and saw that it was Barb—her timing perfect as always—his irritation reached a pinnacle and he clapped the phone closed and returned it to his pocket. She had continued to call him every day or two, although he could not determine to what purpose. It had not been to share her grief, or at least if that had been her purpose it was unclear. Instead she would simply engage him in some variety of small talk, asking about his day, telling him about her own. At first, when he was still in Houston, he welcomed the calls because her voice was familiar and even though she had already told him that she had moved out of their home and would not return, he needed that familiar contact. Now, though, her telephone calls had come to feel like increasingly futile exercises. Why call him every day if only to remind him that she was gone and that it was, in some way he could not identify, his fault?

  “Shit.”


  He had dragged the roller against an outlet and stood there surveying the chaos of new paint on the living room wall, a ragged block of eggshell in a field of yellow. Guilt. That was what the intrusion was: simple guilt. It was as if his wife—or ex-wife or whatever she was now—was somehow peering into his thoughts, watching him as he secretly fantasized about the woman across the street. There was no logic to the feeling at all. She had been the one to leave, not him. He had asked her to stay long enough to at least discuss what had happened and how they might proceed into some future neither of them could imagine, but she would not wait for him to return from the mission. Her own return to the house—this house—would be only long enough to collect its contents into a U-Haul to drive back to the Atlanta suburb where she had grown up and where her mother still resided, and this she had done while he was still in orbit, two hundred miles above the surface of Earth. And now a woman had asked him to dinner, a woman who was not Barb. He should have felt elation, triumph, a sense of release from his marriage, but what he felt was guilt. To compound his irritation, there was also a small dull lump of pain at the base of his skull, a fact that he tried not to focus on but which was present nonetheless.

  He knew the marriage had been far from perfect. Had it not been for Quinn they might have dissolved their partnership long before. But it could not be denied that there had been a time when she had been by his side, that she had helped press him in the direction of his goals, of their goals. Even what he thought of as their honeymoon—their real honeymoon—had been part of that progress, her excitement at the adventure of their move to Palo Alto for his graduate work fueling his desire to choose that school over MIT. That drive—from Georgia to California—had been a lovers’ journey filled with tiny hotel rooms and gas stations and roadside attractions and Barb paging through the AAA guidebook incessantly, circling things to see, hotels to stay the night in, restaurants that were good and were near enough to the freeway to actually stop at. There had been a trip to Hawaii funded by Barb’s parents but he remembered the road trip as the real honeymoon, and somewhere amidst those long days of gas stations and fields and farms and deserts they had conceived their first and only child, although they would not know that Barb was pregnant for another month, after they had settled into their tiny Palo Alto apartment and Keith’s first semester of graduate school had begun.