The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  He poured wine into the two glasses and looked at the label but he knew little of wine and noted only that the name was French and that the bottle was three years old. He sniffed at it and started to take a sip but then thought that it would be more polite to wait for her and so he did.

  After a moment he could hear her on the stairs and then she reappeared in the room again. She was barefoot. He did not recall if she had been barefoot before or if she had taken off her shoes when she was upstairs.

  “I poured the wine,” he said.

  “Good thinking.”

  He handed her one of the glasses and she took it.

  “To new friends,” she said.

  “To new friends,” he repeated. They clinked the two glasses together.

  Keith sipped his wine. It was fruity and slightly bitter and left his tongue dry.

  “When do you go back to being an astronaut?” she said.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Taking some time?”

  “Maybe. A little break, I guess.”

  “That’s a good idea. You need time.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just trying to get the house sold now. Then we’ll see what happens next.”

  “No big plans?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Oh,” she said. There was a silence in the room, a softness that descended over them. Then she said quietly: “So how are you doing?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She actually reached out and placed her hand on his arm. It was a warm thing there, and soft. Then she pulled it away again. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m being really forward.”

  “It’s OK,” he said.

  “I’m a really physical person,” she said. “I can’t help it. You looked sad.”

  “Did I?”

  She blushed. Had he said something to make her blush? “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m not sad right now,” he said.

  “Well, good then.” She seemed to shake off whatever had entered her thoughts because she was smiling again. “Like I said, if you need anything just let me know. Even if it’s just a good home-cooked meal.”

  “I’ll do that. I can always eat.”

  “I can see that.” She smiled at him. “Stop me if I’m being too personal,” she said. “I like to know what’s going on.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “We looked you up on the Internet today. For Nicole’s report. That’s all I really know about you.”

  He said nothing. Her eyes locked to his. “My daughter’s name was Quinn,” he said at last.

  “Quinn,” Jennifer said. “I remember seeing her a few times. Coming and going.”

  “They went off to my mother-in-law’s. She was driving back from some teen party out there. And she apparently went off the road on her way home. They think she was going eighty miles an hour. Hit a tree in someone’s yard in the middle of the night. Coming back from the party.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said. There were actual tears in her eyes.

  The information felt abstract to him, even now, as if he was relating the plot of a film he had seen and had there been any instinct in him to acknowledge the folly of this abstraction it was quelled in the moment he looked at her. Her hand had left his arm and had not returned but he could feel a sense of the warmth it left behind. He knew he should say something, should try to steer the conversation away from his sense of tragedy, but his mind was empty.

  She suggested they move to the couch and they did so and she curled her legs under her body and sipped at the wine and at some point he rose and retrieved the bottle—the second bottle—and refilled the glasses. He was not sure how many glasses of wine he had drained, but he had taken a painkiller earlier that day and the combination had set the room to tilting slowly as if the house had become awash on a gently rocking sea.

  She asked him about his work for NASA and when he asked if she was not already tired of hearing about that subject, she told him that she wanted to hear about it for herself and he tried to tell her what it had been like at the end of the robotic arm looking down at the space station, but his memory of it could not be put into words. He told her it had been beautiful, so very beautiful. What could he say? He had opened upon an infinity and it had become an infinity of loss.

  When she leaned forward to kiss him his mouth was closed and she slid her tongue between his lips and he thought, in actual words: Well, OK then. It was in a voice that was his own sober voice still in his head and it did not tell him to stop and so he kissed her back and she pressed her hand against his chest and his arms went around her.

  “I’m pretty drunk,” he said.

  “Shhh,” she said. “No more talking.”

  Her force was something to be reckoned with almost immediately, as if he had uncorked a bottle that had been no bottle at all but was a dam that uncorking had pressed to bursting and she climbed astride him, her face somewhere between anger and joy, determined and feral. A wild creature.

  It felt as if it had been an eternity since he had touched a woman and he thought of nothing else, his hands on her beautiful tan breasts, encircling them and feeling her breath suck in just as he had imagined it would. When she lifted her arms so that the tight fabric slid up over her and away and he looked at her and leaned in and took one of her pink nipples in his mouth, his own breath was pulled away with hers, his heart thumping in his chest like an ancient, enormous machine that had been resurrected after so many years of forgetting.

  They stumbled to the bed, practically at a dead run, his drunken feet staggering up the stairs and then their twin bodies crashing sideways onto the mattress, clothes awkwardly strewn about them, she much more adept than he at undressing under alcohol although who could say how drunk she was in comparison. How many times had he refilled his glass? He could not recall and indeed it mattered little. All that mattered was the thought that there are moments like this in real life, and he was amazed by the realization, as if there was another world inside of this one that was hidden in plain view and then her mouth was on his belly and then his chest and then finding his mouth at last and clamping onto it. Her body was something amazing to him: a hard and muscled creature that for reasons he could not even begin to understand had allowed him to take possession of it even as he grasped her around the waist and threw her over to her back and she moaned, her teeth clamped together in a kind of sneer surrounded by full red lips.

  When he entered her it was like falling into a memory: like a body flashing through the surface of a lake and disappearing under the surface, the surface itself remaining silent only for that final instant and then, almost imperceptibly, the slow undulation of ripples rolling out from that central point, the body itself already disappeared in some otherworld of muffled and dimly lit fishes and reeds. Then he was above her and her entire body tightened and loosened, her hips and her waist curving around him, her eyes half closed and then closed tight as she made her sounds and he above her looking down at her face, her shoulders, her breasts, the way her legs were wrapped around his hips, this woman who was not his wife, who was a woman he did not even really know.

  And when he came he actually shouted and she clamped her hand over his mouth and her voice too was a kind of cry that twisted up and out of her body. Her hand slipped from his mouth then and their breathing was heavy and whipped past their ears and slowed and quieted as he rolled to the side. She made no motion to cover herself and after a moment she said, “Fuck, I needed that.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Shower?” she asked at last.

  “OK,” he said.

  She rose and stood for a moment at the side of the bed, completely naked and looking more like a goddess than any mortal woman, her body a perfect thing that he had held in his hands. “Come on, then,” she said.

  “OK,” he said again.

  She stepped to the other side of the room and he h
eard the shower in the darkness. He could see the edge of the glass door from the bed and he closed his eyes and felt his own breath and after a moment he opened his eyes again and rose and walked through that tilting darkness. When he reached the shower door she emerged from the doorway of the bathroom and smiled at him. “Hello, neighbor,” she said.

  He smiled and said, “Hello.” She smiled at him again and he thought that she might kiss him or that he might kiss her. Perhaps he should kiss her. Perhaps that was what he should do. Instead he said, “I’m not sure what I should be doing now.”

  “In there,” she said, and she pulled the shower door open behind him and her hand was warm on his hip as she steered him through the door. She stood there, not speaking at first. Then she said, “Mind if I join you?”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  She shook her head but said nothing as she came through the door.

  The shower was not quite big enough for two so their bodies continued to bump against each other and he surprised himself by thinking that he would be able to make love to her yet again but then she stepped out of the shower and dried herself and returned from the closet wearing a terrycloth bathrobe. She handed him a towel and he dried himself. He found himself looking at her with a kind of longing that was already something like nostalgia. The room continued to slosh around him in its slow, drunken rhythm.

  He dressed in the clothes that were in the bedroom, his shirt and shoes downstairs somewhere, strewn about the house like a crumbtrail to the exit. “I didn’t expect this,” he said suddenly, more to himself than to her.

  “Neither did I,” she said.

  “Fun,” he said.

  “It was that,” she said.

  “I’m pretty drunk.”

  “So what?”

  “OK. So what,” he said. Then: “Let’s do this again sometime.”

  She laughed.

  “I didn’t just mean that. I meant having dinner. All of it.”

  She smiled. “Oh, you didn’t mean that? Not interested?”

  “No, I meant that too.”

  “You know where I live.”

  “Maybe you can come over to my place next time.”

  “You’d need furniture.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then: “Well, I have all the furniture we used.”

  She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Probably time for you to go now, Astronaut,” she said.

  He did not want to leave her bedroom but even through the increasing winedrunk drift he knew that he had arrived as a dinner guest and had shared her bed and her body and that now it was over. She led him downstairs and he stumbled much of the way and leaned heavily on the banister and then found his shirt and his socks and shoes and ran his hands through his wet hair. “You want a glass of water?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said, and then: “Wait, no, I think I’d better head out.”

  He half hoped that she might invite him to stay longer. Maybe the glass of water was just this invitation and he had missed it. The clock on the wall read ten: still early. “Well then, neighbor, it was nice to get to meet you,” she said. Her body was covered by the robe, but he could still make out the shape of her, a rare and wondrous thing that even now he could not believe he had held naked in his arms, a vision already fading from him as if a dream he had awakened from.

  “Thanks for dinner,” he said. He was not sure if he should kiss her.

  “My pleasure.”

  “Good night,” he said. He felt warm and wide awake and stared into her eyes for a moment longer and then he turned without touching her and moved in a slightly tilting path into the cul-de-sac and toward his own empty house. He wondered if Jennifer was still watching him from her door but when he turned and glanced back he saw that the door was already closed. The house so similar to his own and yet containing within it a woman, a girl, and furniture.

  He paused there in the darkness of the street, still facing her house, the street tilting beneath his feet. Above, the dim stars cast upward from the horizon of rooflines and into their dome of pinpointed light and he staggered below them in the center of the street. Up there somewhere was the ISS with the retinue of astronauts who had replaced him: Yoshida and Eichhorn, both of whom had been part of his ASCAN group. Who else? Jones. Collins too. Someone else, but he had forgotten. Why have a daughter only to be told of her death two hundred and seventeen miles above the surface of Earth? Why have a wife at all if the end result is a house without furniture? Why become an astronaut only to end standing in a cul-de-sac in the darkness?

  A black ocean above him. Stars cut into that false firmament. And Keith Corcoran standing there, drunk, maybe even smiling, the ring of the cul-de-sac and the lit orbit of streetlamps circling him, and when he stumbled forward toward the dark edge of the sidewalk he did so without conscious thought, only with a drunken sense of curiosity or perhaps not even that. Perhaps instead only the drift, the alternating sense of heavy stumble and high floating that drew him back and forth across the concrete. He nearly lost his balance stepping over the chain that blocked the empty lot from the sidewalk but did not fall, moving forward into the shadows, his feet crunching the thistle and stumbling some on the uneven ground. “Shit,” he said as he regained his footing, his voice a hollow in the slow flat darkness of the field.

  When he was a few dozen feet beyond the chain he stopped and stood. It was as if he was in a pool of black emptiness. A vacuum. In the distance he could see the angular shapes of the houses where they stood against the thick depths of the low dark sky, their windows cutting squares of soft sharp brightness into those silhouettes and the streetlight near the end of the cul-de-sac illuminating that bight of sidewalk where it circled a patch of round colorless asphalt like a lopsided equator circling a globe, the world it depicted one devoid of all possible physical features: bleak and empty and meaningless. Even the intersecting lines and angles and rays of that landscape described only themselves.

  If there had been a reason he had wandered out into the field he had already forgotten it. “Shit,” he said, his breath exhaling into the night. Then more quietly: “Shit.” His body drifted in the ebb and flow of the tides, the million billion stars wheeling above him in their abstruse and recondite darkness.

  Shit.

  Seven

  He awoke with his ears ringing and a sickening feeling in his gut that he feared might resolve itself into vomiting and when he opened his eyes into the harsh angular light of early morning his head was pounding. For a long while he simply lay in bed, the blankets and sheets awash around him like flotsam cast upon some geographically improbable shoreline. It was not yet seven o’clock and he hoped that sleep would return and that the pain in his head would dissolve but after a time he reconciled himself to the knowledge that sleep would not return and so he rose groggily and struggled into his bathrobe and descended to the kitchen. He did not think he could keep any real food down but he poured himself a bowl of cereal anyway and stood at the plastic-wrapped island and ate, the sound of crunching in his ears alarmingly abrasive. To his surprise he found that the breakfast helped settle his stomach some, although his head continued to pound in rhythm with his pulse. It was a different sensation entirely from the migraines and yet it served to remind him of their ongoing threat and so when he shook the Vicodin into his palm he included a second tablet.

  Through the dirty upstairs window he could see the closed blinds of Jennifer’s bedroom windows across the street. He thought she was likely still asleep although he could not recall how much wine she had actually drunk. He had certainly had too much but perhaps she was not hung over. Looking at those twin covered rectangles, he could hardly believe any of it had happened. He had stumbled into a moment that sounded like the setup for an adult film. The sexy neighbor lady across the street. The astronaut, recently single and lonely. Incredible. And now he stood in the same empty room he had occupied the morning before, as if it had been some dream from which he had awakened, finding himself once ag
ain in the container he had occupied since awakening from that other dream of being in space and of his wife and of his daughter. Dreams within dreams, although of course in reality there was nothing from which to awaken, all objects unrelenting in their harshly lit yellow lucidity.

  In the three days between dropping the television and his evening with Jennifer he had not resumed painting at all, his carefully planned daily schedule slipping away as if stolen from him in plain sight over and over again. Each day began with the thought that he would continue painting the house and each day he had instead returned to Starbucks and checked his e-mail and voice mail and surfed engineering websites and did little else, the hours washing away from him like a sand castle dissolving with the incoming tide.

  He had been home for less than two weeks but already the still emptiness had become an expectation to him, as if this was what his life was to become, his life without wife or daughter, without furniture, perhaps without even a job, for indeed the forced vacation had begun to feel like a kind of exile. Each morning he would wake to the silence of the house, some mornings shaking off whatever memory of Quinn had visited him in the half-light of dawn, and he would shower and dress and swallow his painkillers and step into the equally numbed silence outside. Each morning the same. Each identical to the one that had come before.