“Now I go,” Peter said. He rubbed his hands together as if he were brushing off flour. “Very nice to meet you,” he said.
“OK,” Keith said. They shook hands a second time and Peter nodded at him and then turned on his heel. Audrey was staring at Keith and when he looked up at her she turned to Peter and said something quietly and Peter’s voice boomed back at him again: “Yes, he is astronaut. Famous astronaut. Look on Internet.”
Audrey looked back at Keith and smiled. “Neat,” she said.
Keith nodded toward her.
“Don’t get any ideas!” Peter said, yelling down the length of the narrow room even though it was small enough to render such volume unnecessary. “Famous astronaut! Magnificent!” He looked at Audrey one last time and then backed through the door and out of the shop.
The door swung closed. Silence. Christ.
Audrey looked at him. “Wow,” she called to him. “That’s true?”
“It’s true,” he said.
“Cool.” She looked again into the white box and then reached inside, pawing through colored tissue paper and finally extracting a large snow globe that was set upon a bright pink base. Within the glass sphere stood a castle tower upon which was mounted a clock. There were figures around the base but Keith could not make them out from where he sat. Perhaps a prince and princess or something similar.
“I guess you have an admirer,” he said.
She looked up at him briefly, an expression of concern or of confusion appearing on her face for an instant. Then she shrugged, as if dismissing his observation entirely. “Peter’s all right,” she said. “He’s been coming here forever.”
He watched her as she shook the globe and then set it on the counter, peering into its watery interior in silence as flakes of white plastic swirled across the clock and across the figures.
Keith returned to the newspaper on the tabletop. Everything was as it was: sitting at the coffeeshop, not really reading, his hands covered in tiny dots of eggshell. Eventually he would rise and move back out to the car and would feel the air conditioner against his face and he would return to the house in the cul-de-sac where there would be no package waiting for him, only a span of days that could not be counted by any system he could devise.
Five
By the time evening came, he had been pacing for the better part of an hour, moving upstairs, walking sometimes halfway down the hall toward her room before returning to the first floor, to the living room, to the kitchen, and then rotating in the direction of the stairwell once again. He was not thinking of that room in any specific way, not even in avoidance. Instead his thoughts centered on that last morning in Houston when he had awakened at his desk after celebrating with the crew to find Mullins standing across from him. Even as he found himself in the upstairs hallways yet again, he knew that he had never felt so foolish as he had in that moment, at least not since he had been a child, in the days when the other children would ridicule him for saying just the wrong thing at just the wrong time. Those days so far behind him now that he never thought of them at all and yet with Mullins standing there it had been much the same sensation, the weird wave of panic and the realization that there was no taking back what had already happened, time ever corkscrewing out into the curvature of space.
He had been thinking he should call, that he should simply call Mullins’s office and ask him directly what his status was, even flipped open his phone once on the way up the stairs, the second beer of the evening clutched in the opposite hand, and then closed the phone as he yet again entered the hallway that led to Quinn’s room, telling himself that he had nothing to say to Mullins whatsoever, and then turning back before he reached that still-open doorway, wandering into his own bedroom where he spent the next hour flipping absently through the television stations. At some point he had removed the phone from his pocket and had been clicking it open and closed without conscious thought. And that was when he finally dialed the number.
It was well past eight o’clock and he had not anticipated an answer, expecting—perhaps even hoping—to make some kind of statement to Mullins’s voice mail, but then there was a click and Mullins was there, saying his own name as a greeting and Keith actually stuttered and then said, “Jim, it’s Keith Corcoran.”
“Hello, Keith,” he said. “How’s the time off?”
“It’s OK. Good, I mean.” He had been sitting on the mattress but he stood now and then leaned back down for the remote and clicked the television off and then began pacing slowly through the room, setting the empty beer can on the dresser as he did so.
“Glad to hear it,” Mullins said.
“I didn’t think you’d answer.”
A pause. “What can I do for you, Captain?” Mullins said. Monotone. Businesslike.
“Uh … look,” he said. He paused again. Then: “So maybe we ended on a bad note last time?”
“No, it’s fine,” Mullins said. “Stressful situation for everyone.”
“OK,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mullins said but there was no change in his tone of voice. “What can I do for you, Keith?”
“Well, so I was just checking in on something,” he began. He cleared his throat. “I spoke to Eriksson today. Anyway, I was looking for that box of files I asked the office to send.”
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “Hang on.” There was a pause and Keith could hear muffled movement and the sound of a door closing. Then Mullins returned to the line. “I can’t send anything like that out of the building. It’s in the regulations. National Security. You understand.”
“But we all work from home sometimes.”
“Even when that happens no official materials are supposed to leave the building.”
“But they do.”
“That’s not official policy,” Mullins said.
“So where does that leave me?”
“I’m sorry, Keith. I just can’t send you anything. I wish I could. Believe me.” A lull and then Mullins added, “So is there anything else?”
Keith said nothing for a long moment. Then, simply: “I guess not.”
“How’s your time off?”
“It’s fine,” Keith said. “You know I have clearance.”
“It’s not the clearance. There’s just no way I can do it.”
“Maybe I could sign something.”
“You’re not hearing me on this.”
“I’m hearing you but you don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” Mullins said. “It’s policy though so my hands are tied.”
Keith had walked down the stairs during the conversation and had retrieved another beer from the refrigerator and was returning to the second floor now. He cracked open the can and paused on the landing and took a long drink.
“So you’re doing OK?” Mullins said.
“Fine.”
“Mind if I ask what you’ve been up to?”
“Do I mind? I don’t know. I guess not.” He was irritated but his tone was flat and even and Mullins did not respond. “I’ve been trying to get my house ready to sell. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
“That’s working for you?”
“It’s working fine.” Keith said. “So how long am I out?”
“What do you mean?”
“On vacation. Or leave. Or whatever it is.”
“I guess that’s something you should decide.”
“So I can come back to the office anytime?”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“What would you say then?”
Mullins exhaled. “You need to take a little time and take care of yourself,” he said.
“I’ve taken a week.”
“Look, Corcoran, I’m just not sure you’re ready to come back yet. The thing that happened … I just …” He trailed off, then added: “Look, a week doesn’t seem like very long.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve been through this already, haven’t we?”
&nbs
p; “I don’t think so,” Keith said.
“Well,” Mullins said, “I don’t know what you want me to say here.” He sighed audibly. “I checked the logs, Keith. You did eighty-four hours the last week you were here. Seventy-nine the week before. Almost ninety the week before that. Do you want me to go on here?”
“Yes, I want you to go on.”
Keith could hear Mullins’s breath through the phone. The rhythm of it was like a circle.
“Look,” Mullins said at last, “when one of my astronauts is working himself to death that’s a problem I need to deal with.”
“I’m not working myself to death.”
“Look, Keith, you’ve gone through a significant trauma and I’d be lying if I told you I was following some kind of protocol here. There’s no protocol for this. The loss of a child—that alone is significant—but with you up on the ISS …” Again his voice trailed off. Then he said, “Look, I’m trying to help.”
“Crap,” Keith said. There were more words he wanted to say but he would not say them. Instead he said, “This is … ,” and then paused and then said, finally, “This is a crappy deal.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Captain,” Mullins said.
“So am I.”
“What does the flight surgeon say?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Why would I know?”
“She doesn’t say anything other than that she doesn’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Silence on the line.
“What if she gives me a clean bill of health?” Keith said.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. The first step is you take some time off. That’s true of any mission, not just this one. After that we’ll talk about your flight status.”
“My flight status?”
“Well, yeah, of course.”
He said nothing. He had been walking through the upstairs slowly during the conversation, looking at the walls he had yet to paint, looping into and out of the various rooms, sipping at the beer as he did so, and now found himself in the bedroom that had been Quinn’s, in that room at last, and he stood and stared out the window to the street below. He could see to the end of the cul-de-sac but no farther. Nothing past the chain that divided the sidewalk from the vacant lot.
“You know you’re important around here,” Mullins said. “You must know that.”
Again, Keith did not respond.
“Take some time to take care of yourself,” Mullins said. “Go see a national park or something.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ll do that.” He breathed. No movement out there in the night. He was angry and he knew that his tone likely reflected that anger but he could not change that now.
“Call me when you know what you’re doing,” Mullins said.
“I don’t even know what you’re asking me.”
“I’m asking you to keep me informed.”
“OK,” Keith said.
“Take care.”
He did not answer, instead clicking the phone closed and standing in the empty room for a long moment. After a time he leaned his back against the wall and let gravity pull him to the floor. His eyes closed. He pressed his fingertips against them.
The room around him was a gray and silent cube. He had not entered it a single time since he had returned from the mission. Not once. And now that he was within its walls, he realized that it was likely he had never actually stood in the room at all, instead hovering in the doorway during their conversations, Quinn herself answering from within. This room, he reminded himself. This room: the same space in which she had spent some small portion of her life and which was now an empty gray cube of intersecting planes. What significance could such a location have if only to symbolize the absence of those who had departed? He could recall the words he had said and the way she had peered up at him. But how could that matter now?
The sum total felt as if some part of him had crumbled or rather had simply ceased to be, the indomitable engine of his ever-forward motion blinking out all at once and his longing for that box of files from his office in Houston appeared to him now exactly as it actually was: an absurd and pointless clinging to an image of himself that already did not exist. They thought of him as damaged, had ordered him out of Houston, out of his office. He had lost his flight status and might never regain it. But then perhaps he still did not fully accept it for what it was, sitting with his back against a gray wall in a room that he knew had been Quinn’s room but which was also not Quinn’s room, which was no one’s room and thinking, of all things, not of Quinn but of his job. My god.
He was an engineer and a mathematician and he had done everything they had asked of him and more because that was who he was and he knew that his experiences during the mission had been unique and so he would be studied and tested and tabulated and recorded. He understood that and had expected it to be so and so it was. He had endured. And when he returned to Earth he had continued to endure the only way he had ever known, which was to work because work was how he had accomplished everything and after the mission that work had come to feel like the only tether still capable of tying him to some semblance of normalcy and was therefore the only tangible method of continuing his ever-forward motion.
Hoffmann had asked him repeatedly about Quinn and about his disintegrated marriage, but he had little to say about these subjects. It was as if he had remained in space or rather that Quinn and, to a lesser extent, Barb were separated from him by the atmosphere itself and he could not reach them and therefore he need not think of them in any way that breached the miles between orbit and Earth. Something had changed during those last months in space after Eriksson had told him of Quinn’s death; between the migraines and the medication, whatever idea of grief there had been congealed into a glaucous and impenetrable distance, his mind turning or trying to turn back toward the ratiocinative, the discursive, the direction from which he had always found his way forward.
At first it must have been the pain that had caused them to question his ongoing ability to function as an astronaut. The migraines had certainly affected him during the mission; there was no denying that fact. But when the crew returned to Earth, the pain did not come with him. At least that was what he had thought. Then, during the fourth week in gravity, he had had his first earthbound episode. It had begun in the late morning during his physical therapy session in the pool. He had just completed a fifty-yard lap, clocking in just at the minute mark, and the trainer was congratulating him on his progress. But he was not listening. Instead, he could hear the whining sound deep in his skull and then the dull thrumming in the center of his brain. Dr. Yasbek had told him to immediately notify her if another migraine was coming on and so he clambered out of the pool and told their trainer that the flight surgeon needed him. He could sense the rest of them watching from the water as he grabbed his towel and his robe and walked back to the locker room and changed, his heart beating in his chest, on the verge of panic. He slipped into his shoes and returned to his room and dialed Dr. Yasbek’s office. There was no answer. He left a stammering message and lay back on the bed and then rose again and closed the blinds. And so it began.
He knew at least that the pain would be extraordinary but that it would end. The previous episodes had taught him that much. And here he would be able to vomit into a toilet that actually flushed, an improvement over vomiting in the microgravity where escaped droplets would float trembling in the air before him like tiny burnt-orange planets both pearlescent and grotesque. After three hours in his room, trembling and sweating and yes even weeping under the blankets in the darkness, he did indeed vomit into the toilet in his quarters and, as was always the case, the pain began to dissipate soon afterward. He thought Eriksson might have visited him at some point but then those hours had been reduced to a kind of weird blur of ghosts and motion and the zigzagging lines that obscured and overlaid everything with an erratic violence that could not be avoided no matter how tightly he closed his eyes. He
thought too that he had spoken to Quinn in that bloodred agony, as if she had somehow reached him through the conduit of his pain.
The feeling that she had sat at his bedside during the night was slow to dissipate and the following day he was in his office again with that feeling still clinging to him, as if her ghost was seated across from him, staring at him bleakly throughout the day and in response he did the only thing he could think to do, which was to pour himself into his work like a man jumping into a dark sea.
Mullins visited him in the early afternoon: an official or unofficial check-in, he did not know which. Yes, he was feeling much better. Thank you. Yes, he would talk to Yasbek later in the day. Yes, he would be able to complete his physical rehabilitation appointment. Everything was fine. No need to worry. Everything was fine.
There were still two weeks of physical therapy as their trainer and NASA medical personnel worked to bring their gravity-weak bodies back to their pre-mission selves. Most of his fellow crew members came in for the appointments and then went home to be with their families. Occasionally he would see Tim Fisher or Petra staying an hour or two to look at the medical data but that was all. But Keith was different. He would return to his office after showering and would sit at his desk and work and rework his equations. Hours would pass without notice. And he hardly thought of Quinn, her face swimming out of the darkness only in those last few minutes before he drifted off to sleep. Barb’s nightly phone calls upon his return to Houston had not served to alter the anesthetized quality of his days and nights. She had even asked him to put the house on the market when and if he returned, as if her request served to underscore the finality of their dissolved marriage, and he had agreed. And of the conversation he had had with Quinn, the final argument: he had managed to will himself into a steady forgetfulness that was akin to ignorance. It had never happened so there could be no guilt and so he did not think of it at all.
The night they were released from the physical rehabilitation program, the crew went to a local bar to celebrate. All of them were taking brief vacations with their families, all returning home. There had been a time when Keith too might have voiced similar anticipation but that time now felt distant and alien to him. They all knew that his wife had left him, that she had told him she was not returning to the house, that her own “vacation” to her mother’s home in Georgia was not a vacation but something else entirely.
The Infinite Tides Page 8
