The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  At the celebratory beer-drinking, Eriksson took him aside and invited him to stay with him and his family near Houston, told Keith that they had room and would be glad to have him. The offer was so unexpected that Keith was rendered silent. But then he told Eriksson that he would be fine, that he appreciated it but he would be fine. Eriksson slapped him on the back and told him that he thought he would say that but that he was serious and the offer was there.

  It occurred to him now that some part of him must have already known, that Eriksson’s words must have resonated in him somewhere so that he could feel the ending of it, the crew in its last moments of being a crew, an understanding that this might be the only crew he would ever be a part of.

  They returned to their corner table and toasted everything they could think of: the ISS itself, the shuttle, the ground crew in general, the ground crew by name, their replacement crew, the CAPCOM, NASA, their waitress, the bartender, the bar itself, the city, the country. The beer became tequila and whiskey and the evening blurred and blurred and blurred.

  When they left the bar, he embraced each of them in turn and they disappeared into their separate worlds and he drove his weaving car back to JSC, returning to his office and sitting again at his desk. If he was aware at all that his crew members had come to feel responsible for him, it was not a conscious awareness, although now, sitting on the floor of Quinn’s empty room in the cul-de-sac, the fact seemed obvious. They thought he was coming off the rails. Perhaps they were correct.

  But there was no such self-awareness then, only the desire to return to his office and continue the work he had already started, if only for an hour or two as a way to clear his head before returning to the crew quarters and sleep. The multiple pitchers of beer and various shots of tequila and whiskey had thinned him at the edges and there was a sense of confusion in his thoughts, a shaking or trembling amidst the field of logic he had constructed or reconstructed. He thought again of being at the end of the robotic arm and what he felt was a strange and inexplicable feeling of panic, as if his boots had broken loose of the foot restraint and his body was adrift in the infinite reaches of space. The panic was the same when he recalled the vague half memory of Quinn somehow visiting him during his migraine weeks before. The whole of his thoughts had come to reflect a reality he did not want to acknowledge, a reality wherein he might shatter all at once into the brittle unannealed shards of a grief he had managed so effectively to avoid.

  And so he had returned to his office. He had discovered a problem in the calculation of the orbit paths, a problem in the system itself, and had set himself to repairing that problem, to writing a better equation and a better program and he sat down at his desk again to continue that work and thought momentarily of the offer Eriksson had made, and then realized he was weeping, alone in his office, his crew members all around him fading like nebulae, their various colors off-gassing into the darkness. The chair across from his desk remained empty.

  When he woke in the morning it was to a voice: “Captain Corcoran. Hey, Keith, time to wake up.” It was Jim Mullins. Of course it was. Mullins who closed the door and then sat across from him, the desk between them with its scattered papers and wet patch of drool. Mullins who explained to him that the office was concerned about his behavior, that he was working too much, that it was time to take some days off.

  “It’s not appropriate,” Mullins had told him and when Keith had asked what that meant Mullins had said, “Appropriate for the grieving process.” He called it PTSD, actually used that term, as if he was a war veteran of some kind, although even Keith knew that the operative initial was for trauma, that they saw him as being a victim of a trauma. What he could not understand was how they failed to see how much work he was getting done. Why did they not see that? Why had they decided that they would be better off without him?

  And he had told Mullins, point-blank, that he did not want to leave and what had Mullins said in return? That he would be willing to make it official by putting Keith on some kind of medical leave. That Keith needed time to grieve. As if Mullins somehow knew what he needed.

  So it had gone. He had packed up his personal items from the crew quarters the next day and NASA arranged a flight to take him home.

  No voice-mail messages and like a fool he had continued to dial in every day, as if someone would call him with a question or a project. Some equation that could not be solved. Some engineering issue that needed his particular expertise. Eriksson had only called twice and his offer to let Keith stay with him and his family seemed a weird joke now. What could he hope to accomplish by offering such a thing?

  He rose from his seat on the floor then, the beer can empty, and stood at the window. His headache was becoming increasingly impossible to ignore and his body felt heavy, so very heavy, the emptiness around him palpable, as if the air had solidified and he had become locked within it like an insect caught forever in a droplet of amber, the empty house a vacuum sucking everything he ever thought he knew into the black of space. Dark matter. The curvature of light. His empty house. His daughter gone and never to return. His absent wife. And his apparently failed career. How does one work for so many years to become an astronaut and have it be like this?

  He walked back down the hall to the master bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet there and retrieved the little bottle of pain pills and the blister packs of Imitrex and swallowed the tablets with a handful of water. Then he showered and put on his bathrobe, returning to the bed and propping the single pillow against the headboard and reclining there with his finger on the remote control. The images on the television were of faces and bodies in motion, their expressions like false mirrors. They thought he had lost it somehow. He could not imagine how any of this could be true and yet his phone had been silent. Voice mail empty. E-mail in-box empty save for human resources circulars regarding open enrollment for health insurance.

  After a few moments he rose and retrieved another beer from the refrigerator downstairs even though he knew he was already well on his way to being drunk, and opened it as he returned to the bedroom, stepping past the dropcloth he had left in the stairwell. Then a heavy slump onto the bed. He clicked the television remote again. Talking faces and gesturing bodies and occasional cartoon figures and commercials. How many times had he flashed through the stations in their endless loop already? Twice? Three times?

  Drive-by shootings in towns he had never heard of. The usual economic terror. Foreclosures everywhere. Apparently the entire country was suddenly unemployed. A small plane crashing into the freeway. There were forests somewhere according to the news, but they were all aflame. Where were these places? And floods somewhere else. A kind of biblical mayhem then. The earthbound comet again.

  Inexplicably, he thought of his neighbor, Jennifer, who was probably across the street even now, and actually felt himself rise to the thought of her. He went through the channels once more, hoping in some distant part of himself that there might be some adult channel somewhere that he had missed but he found nothing and after an additional trip through the stations he dropped the remote to the bed again and then tried to adjust the pillow behind him but nothing he could do was particularly comfortable. The giant sofa remained downstairs, a piece of furniture he hated and had not wanted to buy but which now felt like a beacon. There had been a huge flat-screen television in the corner across from it at one point, another purchase Barb had made, but of course that was gone with everything else. It occurred to him that he could certainly move this television downstairs, a prospect that immediately seemed a logical solution to the current problem of his aching body and mind and his general state of anger and boredom and frustration.

  In some other moment than this he might have thought the action through, or least might have considered it more carefully than he did now but this was not such a moment. Instead he downed the remainder of the beer and rose from the bed, his head fuzzy from the mixture of painkillers and alcohol, and shifted the armoire away from the wa
ll with some effort and unplugged the television and the cable jack and then stepped back and wrapped his arms around the television itself and lifted it. Like the armoire itself, the television was much heavier than it looked and the smooth angles made for tentative purchase. He jogged it in his hands for a better grip, his mind aching from the effort, and then started for the doorway leading to the hall and then the stairs, his bathrobe flapping at his calves as he moved. Who did they think he was? Who the hell did they think he was? He banged the corner of the television against the wall, staggered back a step and shifted his hands for a better grip. “Crap,” he said aloud.

  He managed the first run of stairs to the landing and momentarily leaned the corner of the television against the wall, using the angle to reposition his hands again, the box square but with smoothed angles and rounded corners so there was little to hold with any confidence. Then he leaned away from the wall and turned and began to step forward again, his back aching and his arms already like rubber.

  Had he been less exhausted or more sober he might have remembered the dropcloth that remained in the stairwell. But of course that was not the case. When his feet went out from under him he reacted with self-preservation, pushing the heavy object in his hands away from him with explosive force as his body dropped all at once to a sitting position, the impact driving sharp needles of pain through the back of his skull. And there he sat, watching, as if in slow motion, as the television rocketed end-over-end down the remainder of the stairs, his arms remaining outstretched in front of him as if he could somehow will the flying plastic and glass box back into his grip. But then it was already over, the television slamming into the far wall between the entryway and the living room and knocking a triangular hole through the freshly painted drywall with a resounding crack.

  He sat midway down the stairs as if that had been his intent all along, his vision already clear and the shock of pain subsiding into the fuzz that was his drunken mind. Crap. Crap crap crap. He closed his eyes and took one long breath. Then he opened them again and rose to his feet and kicked the dropcloth out of the way, descending to the television and shifting it out of the hole it had made in the wall. Tufts of pink insulation. Something else to repair and repaint. Fantastic. But surprisingly the television itself looked intact. He twisted it slightly so that it was propped up on one corner, shifting it into his grip and closing his eyes for a moment before rising to his feet with a loud grunt, the television cradled awkwardly in his arms. Every thought he had left was focused on lying down on the sofa and closing his eyes.

  He entered the living room and managed to set the television in the empty space once occupied by the big flat-screen. There was no stand of any kind in the corner and the small television looked pathetic there on the carpet, the enormous gray leather sofa facing it as if the black box was something of grand importance.

  At first nothing happened when he plugged it in and pressed the power button. Then, from somewhere far inside, a hissing and popping followed by the faint smell of burning plastic. He jerked the power cable out of the wall and sat there in front of the television on the floor as the whole house rocked woozily around him. The gray sofa lay in silence in the center of the room, a sofa he had told Barb he disliked when they first saw it at the furniture store but which she had purchased anyway after he had returned to Houston for more training. Now it was one of the few items she had left behind, a lumbering whale that had beached there in a room lined with blue masking tape and stinking of paint. The scene was enough to make him wonder why he had chosen to bring the television downstairs at all.

  “Goddammit,” he said aloud. Then he said it again, loudly and drawn into a kind of angry howl, “Goddammit!”

  He returned to the front door and opened it and stepped outside into the night, wheeling the big garbage bin from the side of the house to the front door and returning to retrieve the television. The pain in his mind was constant now despite the Vicodin and beer, as if his slip on the stairs had broken a glass jar inside his skull and the pieces were now free to rattle and scrape the raw red tissue there. He staggered outside with the set, attempting first to heave it into the open garbage container, but the television was simply too large to do much more than sit on the top and so he lifted it again and shuffled out toward the curb, the whole box slipping repeatedly in his grasp.

  He might have thrown it against the concrete. There was certainly that urge. The screen would shatter. The sound of it would reverberate through the streets and houses and the vacant lot. But someone was moving down the street toward him and so he knelt and awkwardly lowered the box to the sidewalk, panting, his arms weak and his hands numb from the effort. For a brief moment he tried to stand but instead sat on the television itself, trying to catch his breath, his bathrobe slumping over him like a burial shroud.

  The figure had been walking toward the end of the cul-de-sac and it stopped now. “That work?” A man’s voice.

  Keith looked up. The face was mostly obscured in shadow. “No,” he said. Then he added, “I just dropped it down the stairs.”

  “Maybe they can fix?” the man said.

  There was a trace of an accent and the man’s face looked vaguely familiar, although Keith could not place it. “I doubt it,” Keith said. Then he added, “Have we met?”

  The man looked at him and his white teeth shone in a broad grin. “You are famous astronaut Keith Corcoran,” he said. “I meet you at Starbucks.”

  “Starbucks?” Keith said. There was a moment of silence and then he realized that it was the loud Ukrainian man. Fantastic.

  “Peter Kovalenko,” the man said. He extended his hand and Keith took it and said his own name but did not rise, noticing for the first time what the man was carrying. It was a white telescope, a relatively large one with its tripod gripped under the man’s left arm and the telescope itself riding up across his shoulder and pointing skyward above his head.

  “Yes, I know this,” Peter said, still smiling. “You live here?”

  He thought briefly of telling a lie or at least a half-truth but instead he merely gestured vaguely behind him toward the empty house. “Yeah, here,” he said. He tried to relax his wrinkled brow and his tight, squinting eyes in the cool night air but it was difficult to do so.

  “Amazing. We are neighbors, then,” Peter said. “My wife and the children are there.” He gestured similarly over his shoulder toward the main road that led, eventually, out of the cul-de-sac maze. “Very exciting. My neighbor is famous astronaut.”

  Keith nodded. “Very exciting,” he said. It was quiet then but for the crickets and the constant hiss of distant freeway traffic. The sidewalk seemed to drift beneath him. So slowly.

  “You are between space missions maybe?” Peter said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What is meaning?”

  Keith looked up at him. “It means I don’t know,” he said.

  Peter looked back but said nothing. The smile did not falter. After a moment he said, “Less light here.” He gestured down the street to the end of the cul-de-sac and the empty lot that lay now in blue-black darkness. Keith did not answer. “For telescope,” Peter said after a time.

  Keith nodded. He had caught his breath but still did not stand. Gravity seemed tilted slightly. How many beers had he consumed? He could not recall. Everything felt distant. The feeling was exactly the opposite of being in the microgravity orbit of the space station and he wished more than ever before that he was back there, right now. In the illogic of his current state he imagined pushing himself through the air and back inside, back into his bed.

  “Maybe they can fix,” Peter said, gesturing at the television.

  “No,” Keith said. “I dropped it down the stairs. It’s history.”

  “Too bad.”

  Again, a pause in the conversation, this one long enough to feel awkward and Keith was just ready to stand and return to the house when Peter said, “I’m pleased to meet famous astronaut.”


  “Thanks,” Keith said, and there was bitterness in his voice that he could not disguise. “Good to meet you too.”

  Peter smiled broadly. “Famous astronaut is my neighbor. I am lucky man,” he said.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Keith said abruptly. “I’m beat.”

  “Of course,” Peter said. He extended his hand and Keith shook it again as he tried to stand. He stumbled a bit and Peter put a hand on his upper arm to steady him as he rose to his feet.

  “OK,” Keith said. “I’m OK.”

  “Yes, yes,” Peter said.

  “I’m going in,” Keith said but he made no move toward his door.

  After a long moment Peter said, “I am glad to meet you.” There was a quizzical, puzzled look on his face. “Good night,” he said. “Sorry about this television.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Keith said. He thought he should have probably taken the opportunity to tell him then that he was not an astronaut, that he had only been joking, but he would not do so, not even now. It was true and that meant it was true for everyone and that included this man and Jim Mullins and Eriksson and everyone. He was an astronaut. Fact.

  “Good night to you,” Peter said. He did a little bow and Keith nodded and then Peter swiveled slightly on his heel and moved past him and into the darkness of the field beyond. There was a chain across the entrance—assumedly to keep people from driving into the field—and Keith watched Peter step over it and stump off into the night darkness. Keith found himself wondering if whatever that great dark bird had been feeding on was still present in the field. Some desiccated tangle of bone and sinew.