The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  “Brownish red,” she said.

  “OK, brownish red, then. How long have you known?”

  “It’s always brownish red.”

  “Did you know that almost nobody can see that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only special people can see the colors.”

  “Well, that doesn’t seem fair,” she said.

  He smiled. “No, I guess not but it’s true.”

  “If they don’t have colors then what color are they?”

  “Just black. Like words in a book.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That seems dumb.”

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, it does.” He continued to look at her. “I can see the colors too,” he said. “And I know they have feelings.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “I don’t know anyone else who can,” he said. “Just you and me.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah, cool. You’re going to do great things, Quinny.”

  “So are you, Dad,” she said.

  He smiled again. “Yes, I am,” he said, still smiling. “You and me.” He paused a moment and then said, “Good night.”

  “Good night, Daddy,” she said.

  He rose and turned the light off and closed the door halfway but he did not get much farther than the hallway because she immediately called him back with a loud, “Daddy!” and he turned and reopened the door and found her sitting up in bed with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. He had already crossed the room to take her in his arms and crush her body against his own. She said something in response to his question, something choked through tears that he could not understand, so he asked her again and this time she said, more clearly, “I don’t want Grandpa to die.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I don’t either.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “I know.”

  “Can we go see him?”

  “We can’t do that now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we can’t.”

  She continued to weep against his chest and he held her until she grew quiet in that dark room. Until everything grew so very quiet. Until she had fallen asleep at last.

  The following day was Friday and he thought he might need to keep her home from school but when he offered this as an option she looked at him quizzically and told him that she was not sick. When he told her that sometimes people just needed to stay home and rest even if they felt fine she told him that was a silly thing to say and that she needed to go to school. He thought that he should probably keep her home anyway, that Barb would have kept her home, but he had no real plan of what he would do with her for those hours of the day and so he helped her get ready and made her lunch based on Barb’s carefully worded instructions (“Mayo: Not too much!”).

  When they reached school she burst out of the car, very nearly before it had altogether stopped. “Hey you,” he called. “No kiss?”

  She shook her head, exasperated, but came around to where he stood beside the driver’s door and kissed him quickly and then yelled, “Bye, Dad!” over her shoulder and was gone down the sloping asphalt to the morning-wet grass and then to the playground. He returned to the driver’s seat and sat watching the children through the window. Barb was the one who both delivered and picked up their daughter each day and as he sat there he felt a strange grip of terror in his chest that rendered him immobile even as other vehicles began to nose their way around his car. It did not seem possible to just leave her here, in the company of children he did not know and adults he could not even see except for one or two wandering the playground. Who were these people to care for his daughter?

  And yet she seemed quite comfortable with the entire situation. Of course she would be. It was only her school, after all: the place she went each weekday from eight in the morning until half past one. Even now she was in such frenetic motion that it was difficult to follow her amid the forms of the other children. She had not hesitated at all. In fact she had spent most of the morning pushing him to hurry up.

  “We have to go, Dad,” she had told him.

  “Mommy said you didn’t have to be there until eight.”

  “That’s when the bell rings,” she had answered. “But I need to get there earlier.”

  “Why?”

  “To play.”

  “Oh,” he had said. “Then we’d better get going.”

  He could not remember when he had really set upon math the way he eventually did, as a serious academic subject, although he knew that by junior high school he was spending far more time on homework and studying than his peers and the proof was in his grades and the praise his teachers gave him. He knew that the other students looked at him as some kind of weird brainiac, a definition that he did not much mind and even took some pride in even if they used or tried to use it as a kind of taunt. When he was, on rare occasion, invited to some social event—a birthday party or a get-together at the local skating rink—he would most often turn them down. He did not tell his parents about these events. When his mother once found an invitation crumpled in the trash, he told her that going to the skating rink did not interest him. His response apparently did little to assuage her concern as she continued to believe his apparent lack of friends was something akin to a dysfunction. It might well have been one. “Where were you, Corcoran?” they would sometimes ask and he would have some excuse ready. He had a sick aunt he had to visit. He was out of town. He was too busy. Of course the question itself was a taunt, meant to underscore the simple fact that he was not and never would be one of them.

  He told himself the same lie that he told his mother: that he was somehow beyond such childish gatherings, adding—this only to himself and not to her—that he did not want to be one of them, that they were crass and stupid and brutal. It was true that he preferred to remain home, working on engineering ideas, thinking about becoming an astronaut, already this a goal although not yet as concrete a goal as it would one day become. There were moments of loneliness, of course, at times so sharp and profound that he found it difficult to focus on anything else and even the numbers became a tedium, but the numbers always felt more comfortable than the roller-skating rink. The numbers were clear and beautiful and he understood them; the skating rink was endless circular motion with people he ultimately did not even like. It felt like an easy choice even though it was, at times, hardly as easy as he made it out to be.

  “Sometimes you just have to put yourself out there, Keith,” his mother told him. “I know it can be scary but it’s good to be with people.”

  He would answer her only in clipped, short sentences, careful even then not to reveal too much, wanting only for her to exit his room so that he could return to whatever book or article he had been reading, his columns of figures, the angles and materials of imagined machines he fantasized about one day building. He knew that she was right, or at least partially right, and he might have studied it as if it were a mathematics problem of some kind, searching for a solution. But he did not do so. Instead he poured himself into the numbers. This was what he had always done and this was what he continued to do on into high school and through college.

  And then he met Barb.

  He had acquired a job in a mid-level engineering firm, his first real job, which would have been utterly forgettable had he not met his future wife there. She had been wrestling with the soda machine and he had offered some replacement change for that which the machine had just taken and then fished into his pocket to find he had no coins to give. In his experience, that alone might have been the end of the conversation but Barbara Anderson had found his monotone response to the crisis—“I don’t have any change”—to be so funny that tears came to her eyes.

  He did not understand her reaction but something about her stuck with him the rest of the day, and apparently stuck with her too because she found his desk at f
ive o’clock and asked him to dinner. She was so beautiful; he could hardly believe his luck, but then there was also the sinking feeling that he had come to associate with virtually any experience that was not directly related to his work as an engineer. He would say the wrong thing or have the wrong response to something she said and that would be the awkward end to the evening.

  But it had not turned out that way. “Sweetheart,” she told him many years later, “you tried so hard to be charming and failed so miserably that it couldn’t help but be charming. It’s just simple mathematics. Two negatives make a positive, right?”

  His response had been to launch into a discussion of signs and sign functions, for while her statement was in essence true there were, of course, exceptions and complications. She had stopped him before he was through with the first sentence. “This is exactly what I mean,” she said, a thin smile on her face. “Best quit while you’re ahead. I love you but you can be overcharming sometimes.”

  She asked him on the second or third date what his goals were and he told her, point-blank and without preamble. He planned on going to graduate school at MIT or perhaps Caltech or Stanford. He would earn his Ph.D. and then would take a commission in the Air Force, where he would do research and advance through the ranks. After four years or so he would take a position with NASA at Johnson Space Center with the ultimate goal of becoming an astronaut.

  “You really have it all worked out,” she had said in response.

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “You think you can really do all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She was smiling but he was not and she held his gaze as her own smile faded. “Well, all right then,” she said at last. He thought that he might have lost her at last, that the bluntness of his answer had finally been too much for her and that he had crossed over some invisible line. But then she nodded and said simply, “That’s quite a plan,” and leaned across the table to kiss him.

  He wondered for a long time if she really understood that he was serious, that the plan was solid and that he could accomplish his goals because Barb seemed almost too good to be true. While they were dating she would sometimes bring him dinner when he worked late at the office and more than once they made love there on the desk or on the floor. In that way she seemed to understand that the goals he had set for himself took commitment and discipline. She was smart, too; not like he was but certainly capable enough to help him with the graduate school application process, his application for financial aid, and then, later, to take care of the day-to-day work of running the household, all of which freed him to focus on the larger goal of one day becoming an astronaut. And if she did not truly understand what numbers meant to him, that could be forgiven, for how could she possibly understand that?

  . . .

  There were so many tiny moments during those four days. He bought ice cream cones and they sat on a stone bench at the edge of the town’s main square and ate them. He had hardly known that the town even had a main square but she seemed quite familiar with it, even directing him to the location of the ice cream parlor. They went to the park then and he pushed her on the swing for a long time in silence and when she was done they walked back to the car and she reached up and put her tiny hand into his and he held that small thing, warm and soft, and they said nothing. A flock of birds drifted out of a tree as if a single cloud—sparrows or starlings or something else—and she pointed to them, saying nothing. He likely could have calculated the individual points they made in the sky, their flight in elliptic curves as they spun and wobbled and then returned, for reasons known only to birds, to the same tree from which they had, only moments before, taken flight. He could have calculated all of it, but the thought did not even come to him then. As if some moments were beyond such a reckoning. As if some moments were beyond any reckoning at all.

  In the evenings they ate reheated frozen dinners from their plastic compartmentalized trays and watched cartoons and silly comedies and movies featuring horses as prominent characters. Some of the horses talked. Some did not. He tried to talk to her further about the way she saw numbers but she was distracted by the television so her responses were all in fragments or she would forget to answer him entirely. What he learned was that she already could solve simple equations, even understood the function of a variable so that he could ask her to solve x plus four equals nine and she could answer five without apparent thought or effort.

  “That was fast,” he said.

  “Easy.”

  “What do see when you’re thinking of the answer?” he asked her.

  “What do you mean?” she said. The purple horses on the television screen were trailing rainbows now. Some of them were apparently singing.

  “I mean, what do you see in your head?”

  “Just numbers and stuff.”

  “Where? Like in space or in a room or on a sheet of paper?”

  “Like in space,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s how I see math too. Like it’s floating in space. Do the colors help?”

  “Help what?”

  “Help you solve the problem?”

  “That’s silly,” she said. “The numbers all know where to go. It’s easy-peasy.”

  “What do you mean? What do you mean they know where to go?”

  “They just do. They just go where they’re supposed to go. I can’t make them go somewhere they don’t want to go.”

  He stood behind her in the kitchen, watching the back of her head. It all sounded like something he had thought long ago but would never have said aloud. Even now he would never say such a thing although it was true; he knew it was true. She saw numbers exactly as he did. Exactly. My god. And without effort. Like a natural process of her own mind. He wondered if he had possessed so much confidence at her age and then decided that he had not.

  Barb’s father died on Monday. She called him in the late morning after he had dropped Quinn off at school and told him simply, “He’s gone.” He could hear the emotion in her voice, how close she was to weeping.

  “I’m so sorry, Barb,” he said.

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “At least he can breathe now.”

  She asked about Quinn and he told her what they had done together but she did not seem to be listening to his response and after a few minutes she said she had to go and help her mother with something. She told him she would call back when she had information about the service. Then the conversation was over.

  It was quiet in the house. He could not think of a time when it had seemed so profoundly silent.

  He had been in his final year at Princeton when his own father had passed. He had worked for an insurance agency as a middle manager and had suffered a heart attack at home while dozing on the couch in front of the television. That was what his mother had told him. “Honey, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” she had said. “Your father had a heart attack. He’s dead, honey. I’m sorry.” The shock of the announcement sent him staggering backwards to his dorm room bed where he sat upon its edge trying to figure out a way not to believe the news. It was not that he had been particularly close to his father but still the man had been a constant presence in his life and now he was gone. Keith returned home for the funeral, standing by his mother at the gravesite and staring bleakly at the empty hole and the polished box that would ferry his father into the dirt. That night he sat in the room he had vacated for college and wept, not for the loss but because he realized that he was sitting in the room of a child and it was a room to which he could never return.

  Six months after the funeral, he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. Later that afternoon, he walked with his mother through the tree-lined neighborhoods and she told him how proud his father would have been. She did not tell him how proud she was or at least did not tell him then. Instead, she asked him if there were any parties he was going to later. He told her that there were a few he would pro
bably attend and in fact this was true. At Princeton there had been many more bright students than he had encountered in high school and he had formed a handful of friendships based on a shared interest in math and difficult engineering questions. “You know I can’t help but worry about you,” his mother told him.

  “I know,” he said, “but I’m OK.”

  “You always say that,” she said.

  “Because I always am.” He looked at her carefully. “I’m fine, Mom. I am.”

  “I know you are, honey,” she said. She patted him on the arm. “You’ve done a good job.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “One step closer to becoming an astronaut.”

  “One step closer,” she said.

  Three months later she told him she had breast cancer and three months after that she followed his father into the grave, her own plot of soil directly next to his. If there had been any question before about where he stood in relation to the world it had been clarified. He sold the house he had grown up in without any clear feeling of sadness, not because he lacked a sense of grief but because he was, even then, pragmatic. He did not want to live in the town he had grown up in, and now that he had the opportunity to stay he realized just how strongly he had come to hate it. There was not a single person there that he cared for now that his parents were gone, and when he thought of the people he had gone to school with for twelve years he could recall only generalized isolation and occasional embarrassment.

  He only regretted that his parents would never see him fulfill the goals he had made for himself, that they would not see him become an astronaut. He did not even really know if his mother had truly understood that his goals were real and tangible and achievable. Certainly his father had not. Keith had shared the man’s pragmatism but his father lacked ambition, settling into what was a mediocre career and riding it all the way to his grave. His mother had no concrete career of her own and whether she was satisfied with his father’s choices was something he would never know. At least she seemed to understand that college was useful and that grades had value; whenever he had talked to his father, the question was always where he would work, what kind of job he could get with this degree or that degree, or if it would be more useful to get working right away and eschew the degree altogether. “You could get pretty far in a company in four years. You’d be four years ahead of all those college kids just getting their first real job.”