The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  So he dialed the payroll office at JSC and asked what he would need to do to change the direct deposit of his salary to a new bank account and found it was as easy as filing a sheet of paperwork that the payroll office would be glad to mail him.

  When the call was over he set the phone on the table and sat looking at it. Once again there was a silence in the room, in the house, perhaps in the whole cul-de-sac. He had seldom thought about himself as making decisions that were right or wrong—his work had not allowed for the attachment of such a moral compass—but now that was exactly where his mind went, into that gray tenuous area between one variable and the next. He did not know what Barb’s financial situation was in Atlanta. He had assumed she was living with her mother at her parents’ house but it was clear to him that there was no reason she should have access to his paycheck. Not anymore. She had left him; he had not left her, perhaps would never have left her even had he known about her affair. But was that even true? Once again he wondered if she had brought him into his house. Into the bed that was, even now, upstairs. Once again he wondered if Quinn had known this man. My god.

  In the late morning he dialed information and was given the address of a local branch of his bank and then slipped on his shoes and drove there. When he arrived he told the teller that he wanted to withdraw half of his savings and then changed his mind and withdrew all of it and closed what had been their joint account entirely, both checking and savings accounts. Then he took the bank’s cashier’s check and drove down the street until he saw a different bank and parked and entered and opened an account there and then deposited the check. Done. He did not want to feel guilty about the act, not this too, but the feeling was present nonetheless even though it was too late now to go back, this thought too filling him momentarily with self-loathing. What kind of weak man had he become? He wondered then how long it would be until she discovered the bank accounts had been closed, until she called him to complain. Hours? Days? Weeks? He had completely stopped thinking about painting the second coat of eggshell downstairs, let alone starting the upstairs, but he had managed to move his bank accounts. That was something people did when they divorced. It was something he needed to do and it was done and he had done it.

  The remainder of the day was spent making phone calls, none of which served to continue the promise of forward motion that the change of banks had engendered. He spoke with Jim Mullins but the conversation was circular and pointless. Mullins had told him to check in and he had done so but what more was there to say? When he told Mullins he was ready to return to work, Mullins’s only response was to ask if he had been keeping any regular phone appointments with his psychiatrist and if he was making any progress in that arena. Keith did not know how to answer such a question, could not even begin to imagine how an answer could exist at all. He had a phone appointment scheduled with Dr. Hoffmann within the hour but beyond that he had nothing to say and Mullins’s repeated urging to take care of himself only frustrated him further.

  He spent the time between the call with Mullins and the scheduled appointment with Hoffmann drinking beer and looking at engineering documents on his laptop, all of which he had already read. He could think of little else to do to fill the time. The truth was that he had been dreading the phone call with Hoffmann for most of the week and now that it was nearly upon him he had resigned himself to its inevitability the way one might be resigned to a tooth extraction. It would be unpleasant—he knew that much—but it was expected of him, apparently as part of what Hoffmann had called his “grieving process,” although it was also clear that any grieving process he was to have would be determined by others. Even this had been removed from his control as if he was a child or an imbecile.

  When the appointed hour arrived at last he dialed the number and Hoffmann’s secretary answered and then Hoffmann himself came onto the line. He started right in with the same huge and unanswerable questions he always asked: How have you been doing? What challenges have you had this week? What progress do you think you have made? And Keith answered the same way he always had, with the same short, clipped responses he always gave, not because he intended to be abrupt or obfuscating but rather because these were the only answers he could think of. Fairly soon after Keith had returned from the mission, the psychiatrist had told him that he was free to share anything with him and that the more information he shared the better equipped he would be to offer insight into his experience, and Keith had listened to him and had thought that he would try, that he would try to find better answers, and to offer more detail about what he had done and what he was doing, but then he had found there were no words for how he felt. There was an emptiness within him. It was not unlike space itself. Like one infinity containing another. What words could there be to express such an absence?

  Hoffmann asked him if there had been much contact with Barb and so Keith told him that she had filed for divorce and that he had gone to the bank soon after to change his accounts, effectively removing her access to his paycheck.

  “That must have been difficult,” Hoffmann said in response.

  “Difficult? Not really.”

  “No? How would you describe it then?”

  “Well, not difficult,” Keith said.

  “You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

  “It’s a logical outcome.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Yes, divorce.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”

  “I’m asking you how you feel about your wife filing for divorce.”

  “Confused.”

  Hoffmann was quiet on the other end of the phone, across those hundreds of miles of landscape. Then he said, “How so?”

  “I don’t know.” He paused. Then said, “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll wait,” Hoffmann said.

  Keith stared into the vacant space before him. The eggshell paint on the walls. The kitchen island with its clear plastic wrapper. “OK, well, I felt good about changing the bank account because it seemed like something I could do without her. But also I felt, I don’t know, a little guilty about it. Like I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s my wife. Was my wife, anyway.”

  “The term you’re looking for is ex-wife,” Hoffmann said.

  “Ex-wife,” Keith said. The words sounded strange to him. “OK.”

  “She is your ex-wife now,” Hoffmann said. “Or she will be soon enough. Legally, I mean. She’s filed to legally dissolve your marriage. Is that confusing?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s the term you used.”

  “It just feels weird. Her moving on. But it makes sense.”

  “Moving through.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means it might be more helpful if you thought of moving through your experiences rather than moving on. It’s not like you’re going to forget the time you spent with her or the experiences you shared with her or with your daughter. Those will always be a part of who you are.”

  Keith did not respond.

  “Anyway, congratulations,” Hoffmann said.

  “For what?”

  “For taking charge of your situation and doing something about it. It’s a good step forward.”

  “A step forward toward what?”

  “Toward moving through this experience.”

  He did not respond for a long moment. Then he said, “This is the kind of thing you say that I never understand.”

  “Oh?” Hoffmann said. He sounded genuinely surprised and concerned. “I didn’t know you were having trouble understanding. What part of it are you having trouble with?”

  “The whole thing. Moving through my experience? What does that mean?”

  “Well, it’s going to mean different things to different people. To me it might mean figuring out what’s going to be next and taking some positiv
e steps toward it. Or developing some new goals and working toward them. That sort of thing.”

  “My goal is going back to work.”

  “That’s a professional goal, yes, but there are personal goals as well.”

  Keith did not answer for a moment. Already he had said more than he was comfortable with, the conversation wobbling out onto some uncharted plane the structure of which he could not determine. “I know that,” he said at last. “I guess I just don’t think in terms of personal goals.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my professional goals have been the ones that I’ve needed to work on. The personal stuff just happens. It’s not something that you work toward. There’s not even an endpoint.”

  “I disagree.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “What about your grieving process?”

  He could not help but sigh audibly into the phone. “What about it?” he said.

  “That could be a goal.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s an example of an experience you’re moving through.”

  “You mean with the steps or stages or whatever they are?”

  “That’s one way, yes. Do you think that would be useful?”

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Because I don’t need someone else’s steps to work through. I’m sad that she’s gone. I wish she was still here but she’s not. She’s never going to be. I don’t need a twelve-step program to help me realize that.”

  “That might be true,” Hoffmann said. “People deal with grief differently. There’s no right way. Some studies suggest that many people are resilient and come through loss on their own and are fine. Others need a more structured approach to it.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Keith said. He was irritated now, bordering on real anger, and even as he spoke he could feel part of him quietly urging himself to calm down, knowing that losing his temper would not help anything. But it was too late for that. “You think you have it all programmed but it’s not like that. There’s no sequence to it so there can’t be any goddamn steps. So we talk and you act like you’re reminding me that my daughter’s dead and my marriage is over and then you ask me how I feel. I feel sad. All the goddamned time. So why do you keep asking me?”

  “Because you don’t sound sad to me,” Hoffmann said. “You sound angry.” In contrast to Keith’s elevating volume, his voice displayed the same calm composure it always had.

  “I am angry. What’s the goddamned point of this? What’s the point of dragging up everything again and again and again?”

  “The point is not being angry anymore,” Hoffmann said.

  Keith was silent, silent for a long time. He could feel gravity pulling him toward the center, toward the iron center of the planet. One hand held the telephone to his face; the other trembled against his chest.

  “I can hear that you’re upset,” Hoffmann said, “and I know this is difficult. But there’s a concrete goal here. There really is.”

  When Keith spoke again his voice was quiet, nearly a whisper: “All I want to do is get back to work,” he said. “That’s what I miss. If you want to help me then help me do that.”

  “That’s what I’m doing,” Hoffmann said.

  Keith said nothing. He wanted to simply hang up the phone but did not do so. The conversation had turned in on itself like an endless loop and he knew that no matter what he said it would simply swing back around to him again. It was maddening and reminded him of just how much he disliked these kinds of interactions. Personal conversations of any kind were like numeric fields that appeared to be equations but which were impossible to solve and were therefore no equations at all, the algorithm looping back upon itself once more. “OK,” he said, “then what do I have do for you to give Mullins a clean bill of health?”

  “That’s not something I do.”

  “Then you’re not helping me.”

  “You misunderstand,” Hoffmann said. “It’s literally not something I do. That’s not part of why we’re talking and I wouldn’t give Jim Mullins that kind of information even if he asked. I’m just here to help you through your daughter’s death, your divorce, and yes some stuff related to work if that’s what we need to talk about. I’m trying to help you work through your experiences and I hope that will result in easing your migraines. That’s all I’m here for.” There was a pause and Keith wondered if Hoffmann was waiting for him to respond but before he could say anything the psychiatrist’s voice continued: “Look, Keith, I get a sense that you don’t want to do this anymore. You certainly have that right. But I want you to think about why you don’t want to do it. Is it just because it’s hard to talk about these things? Because avoiding talking about them isn’t going to make it any easier for you. So what do you really want to do?”

  Keith did not respond. He wondered what Mullins would say if he simply stopped making appointments with Dr. Hoffmann. He had dreaded the approach of each and every appointment and yet now that the specter of canceling his appointments permanently had been raised he found himself hesitating. It was as if he was on an EVA, stiffly moving in his space suit, and it had been suggested that he remove the tether that connected him to the body of the ISS and even though he knew he would not need to rely on it, the fact that it was present meant that he did not have to think about it at all. The tether was there so that it did not need to be considered. But then he did not know why he thought of this comparison now, for Hoffmann’s appointments were only a source of dread and irritation, a time each week when he knew Quinn would be discussed in the most stark and terrifying ways, with a bluntness that Keith still found jarring and troubling. And this time he himself had said the words: “My daughter’s dead.” He could not recall ever saying it before. Not like that. Not with that level of blunt clarity. He never wanted to hear such a thing. Not from himself. Not from Hoffmann. Not from anyone.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  “Good. So let’s talk about that next week.”

  “You want to have a counseling appointment about whether or not to have more counseling appointments?”

  “That’s exactly what I want to do,” Hoffmann said.

  Keith sat there for a moment with the phone to his ear. Then he said, “OK, then.”

  The phone call lasted a few more minutes and when it was done he clicked the phone closed and sat for a long stretch in the silence of the house. Maybe during the next conversation he would tell Hoffmann that he was through with the appointments but then he worried about the effect the cancellation would have on Mullins and the Astronaut Office and his ability to return to Houston and he was not sure he wanted to run that risk.

  The house a vacancy and his footfalls wearing a path through its carpeted spaces. He drank a beer from the refrigerator. Then another. He was going to see Jennifer that evening and he hoped more than ever that she would have sex with him again. But the clock moved so very slowly. His own motion a curved and distended zigzag drifting ever away. My daughter’s dead. Quinn. My god.

  Nine

  The sun had disappeared behind the houses on the hill beyond the vacant lot and the sky glowed with a furious spectral blue that cut all the corporeal things of the earth into individual black darknesses. Keith Corcoran too, stepping into that blue night of silhouettes. Whatever feeling of confusion or defeat or rage or frustration he felt or might have felt after the conversation with Hoffmann had faded into the anticipation of seeing Jennifer again, a feeling not unlike that of a child on Christmas Eve waiting for the multicolored promise of the dawn. This time, though, it had been dusk he had been awaiting and the present he hoped to open was not for any child. Now at last the time had arrived and there was Jennifer’s house across the street, the porch light glowing a pale yellow the color of the moon. His stomach felt light and the night air was still warm but moved against his face softly like a dark and gentle hand.

  And that was prec
isely the moment when Peter Kovalenko’s voice came booming out of the darkness at last: “Astronaut Keith Corcoran!”

  The voice was sudden enough to make Keith jolt in surprise. “Christ,” he said. His own voice sounded loud and flat in the open air of the night. He had stopped walking and peered in the direction of the voice, into the black emptiness that was the vacant lot.

  “Come, let me show you something,” the voice called to him.

  “I’m just heading out,” he called. He paused then, waiting, but there was no response. Had he been heard? He looked at Jennifer’s house again, then up the street. The streetlamps not yet activated and the field beyond the end of the cul-de-sac was a black pool. He had been expecting Peter to want to talk with him about what had happened and he knew there was little use in avoiding the interaction but how he wanted to. At least now it would be a short exchange. It would have to be. He would listen to the apology of Peter Kovalenko the Ukrainian. Then he would tell him, as graciously as possible, that he was glad to help and would do it again if such a situation were to arise. Is that not what an astronaut would do? Then the conversation would be over and he would continue on to Jennifer’s.

  He stood in the dusk-colored darkness, unmoving for a long moment, and then at last said, “Hang on,” and turned and moved up the cul-de-sac to where the concrete ended and he stepped over the chain there and into the dirt and the weeds. The field was a black emptiness of unresolved obstacles. “Christ, I can’t see anything,” he said.