The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

“What am I doing? Nothing,” he said.

  “You look sick. Are you sick?”

  “I have a migraine.”

  “Oh, a migraine. My mom has migraines when she’s having her period.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “She gets grumpy too. We just have to leave her alone.”

  “OK.”

  “My dad’s home.”

  “Yeah, I met him today.”

  “His name is Walter but people call him Walt. They had a fight but he’s home now.”

  He leaned against the doorframe and covered his eyes with his hand.

  “You probably want me to leave you alone just like my mom,” she said.

  “Yeah, I think so.” There was another pause. Keith’s eyes were clamped closed. The rectangle of the open door he stood in was like an airlock opening directly onto the changeless and agonizing surface of the sun.

  “I just wanted to say hi,” Nicole said at last.

  “OK,” he said. He looked down at her to say good-bye and in doing so saw that Walter Jensen was walking toward them both from across the street, his face in an easy smile, his hand already half outstretched to shake his hand again. Fantastic.

  “Hey neighbor,” Walter Jensen said.

  They shook, Walter Jensen wrenching his palm into a series of shock waves that ran up his arm and into his head like a small jackhammer ramming at the meat behind his eyes. Everything red and blurred. He thought he might be sick. If he did he hoped he would have the strength to vomit into Walter Jensen’s face.

  “Listen, did you give any more thought to that extra furniture we have?” Walter Jensen said. “We can get it over here right away if you want it.”

  “Oh, I think … ,” Keith said. He paused. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “Jesus, are you OK, buddy? You look pale. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Oh, I’m real sorry to hear that. Listen, if there’s anything you need from us just ask. Really, I mean that. We neighbors have to stick together. Hell, there aren’t that many of us that speak English if you know what I mean.”

  Keith looked at him blankly.

  “Listen, I’ll let you get some rest but really let us know if you need anything.”

  Again, he said nothing, only staring. He wondered how it would feel to punch Walter Jensen in his perfect white teeth. But even the thought of it made the pain wobble in his skull.

  Nicole peered up at him from the doormat with a look of concern that was touching and comical at the same time.

  “Come on, Nicole,” her father said.

  “Thanks,” Keith said.

  “Don’t mention it, neighbor,” he said. He took Nicole by the hand and they both turned together.

  “Can Captain Keith have dinner with us again?” Nicole said to her father as they moved away.

  “Again?” Walter Jensen said.

  Then the door swung closed and the outside world was silent.

  He stumbled upstairs. Already the zigzagging lines had begun to blur across his vision and his head thrummed with the rhythm of his blood. He stopped at the thermostat, knowing he intended to do something there—adjust the temperature up or down or something else—but he could not focus and instead moved past it into the bedroom and pulled his shirt over his head and then fumbled with his pants and removed them as well and fell sideways onto the bed. There were still bright slashes of light burning through the blinds and after a moment he pulled the blankets back and slid under them and pressed his head into the pillow as he slid the darkness up and over until it enveloped him.

  He reached for the numbers in their empty spaces but they were difficult to find now, seeming to jerk and twitch, to scatter like frightened birds at his approach. A few fives and sevens, a flock of threes and nines, a pair of ones and a similar pair of twos, and then the symbol of the aleph he had once spoken with Quinn about, naming the idea she had been fascinated by, that symbol eclipsing all others as he relaxed into the cool of the bed, the temperature already shifting upward until he began to sweat and even then he did not move but lay there, one arm over his face, the other still clutching the edge of the blanket where he had lifted it nearly to the headboard. The zigzags appeared even with his eyes closed, his mind a collection of glass shards that turned and ran their jagged edges against each other in a constant and terrifying shifting and the aleph floating in the midst of that chaos of dark motion like a beacon or a sentinel.

  . . .

  Within an hour the full agony had come upon him and he dissolved into a pain both shattering and inexplicable, his body already a wreck of exhaustion and the pain continuing to crest toward its magnificent and destructive apex. He felt as if he was caught in some eventide between sleeping and waking, and in this gray semidarkness his mind seemed to fall toward the memory of Quinn, gravitating toward her as if her memory held within it a specific density greater than all others, the pull so strong and real that he felt an immediate impulse to rush into her room, as if now in the pain that was his crushed mind there was a chance that he could reach her. But Quinn was dead and nothing would change that. His eyes locked closed in the black heat under the sweat-soaked sheet and blanket and in the red darkness that was his pain.

  During the long, impossible night even the undulating wave of chirping crickets had entered his mind and he closed the window and folded the pillow over his ears to muffle that sound but even then he was still able to feel it, a physical pressure just behind his eyes as if the sound was a grinding stone that had entered him and spun there against the front of his brain as he drifted into and out of consciousness, never sleeping but passing through a kind of gloaming that was memory and hallucination all at once, his vision, even with eyes closed, a collection of black and white zigzagging lines that covered everything, that covered even his thoughts until the final aleph of his pain was the form of a single question that repeated endlessly: Where was she now? Where was she now?

  And as if in answer he could hear Barb’s voice somewhere in the room: “Can you hear me?” she said.

  And his own voice responding as if it came from some other place entirely, as if he was someone else: “I can hear you,” he said.

  “Oh, I can see you.”

  He could feel himself floating, as if the bed and the room had dissolved around him. “I can see you too,” his voice said, somewhere. A pause. Then: “How … how are you?”

  “I’m OK,” she said. Tears were already streaming down her face.

  “It’ll be OK, Barb. We’ll be OK,” he heard himself say, his voice in the darkness speaking into his memories as if she could hear him. And so she could.

  “I wish you were here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “When can you come back?”

  “I don’t know. They’re trying to get me down.”

  “But when?”

  “I don’t know yet. They’re trying. It’s hard to get back.”

  There was the laptop with her face, the screen tilted at a slight angle. “I wish you weren’t there at all,” she said, sobbing. “None of this would have happened if you were here.”

  There was a hollow space inside him, a vacancy, an abyss that was not filled with stars or with dark matter or with anything at all but was more like a black hole that had already drawn into itself the accumulated mass of whatever he was or had been or would be. Pain everywhere. He did not even know where he was anymore. In the empty bedroom? In his sleeping quarters on the ISS? His location shattered to the staggering electric wire of his pain.

  “I want you to come home,” she said.

  “I know you do,” he said. Silence from the screen. “Do you know any more about what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice a high-pitched keening. “She was going too fast. She went to a party and she was going too fast on the way home.”

  “Was she … had she been drinking or … anythin
g?”

  “No. They said no. Do you think she would do that?”

  “I don’t know what she would do.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t,” she said.

  He said nothing. Floating but not floating. He could see her face on the laptop and the walls of his sleeping quarters and yet he could also see himself in the bed, a shattered agony drenched in sweat, stationary below him at the base of the room as if his form huddled in silence at the bottom of a cardboard box.

  “Was it raining?” he said at last.

  “Was it raining? I don’t know. No, it wasn’t raining. Why do you want to know if it was raining? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know. You were there. I wasn’t there.” He breathed out, his carbon dioxide flowing into the tiny space of his sleeping quarters and into the vents and then being scrubbed back into oxygen again via the nitrogen tank he had installed. Recycling their breath again and again, forever. “She was my daughter too,” he said. The empty room in the house in the cul-de-sac was drifting through the microgravity now, was not drifting, was anchored to Earth, was loose of it again. My god.

  “I know that,” she said.

  “I want to know what happened.”

  “I told you what I know.”

  “What car was she driving?”

  “Yours,” she said.

  “Mine,” he said. It was not a question.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Oh.” The station’s dull and constant hum around him. Then: “She hit a tree?”

  “A big tree in someone’s yard.”

  “What kind of tree?”

  “What? I don’t know what kind of tree.”

  A long pause as he listened to the constant erratic engine of her breath. “What happened, Barb?”

  “What do you want me to say, Keith?”

  “I want you to tell me what happened.”

  “I am telling you what happened,” she said. “The car hit the tree. She went through the windshield. She’s dead. She’s dead, Keith. Our baby’s dead. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus,” her voice devolving into an inarticulate moan.

  He floated in front of the laptop in silence. There were no tears. There was no feeling, only that sense of hollowed-out emptiness. The woman on the screen might have been anyone: a stranger, a distant relative, someone he had known long ago but had since forgotten.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “Everything’s going to be OK.”

  “How can you say that?” she said.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said. “They’re working on it. I’ll be there soon.”

  “Please get here,” she said. “I need you here.”

  “They’re trying.”

  Her face silent on the screen, her eyes staring at him, mascara smeared into a gray blur. She started to speak again, her mouth moving, but the sound came in jagged bursts, cutting in and out so that he could hear only bits and pieces, single syllables, the image on the screen freezing and then moving and then freezing again, like a collection of still images strung together. “Barb, I can’t hear you,” he said. “Can you still hear me?”

  There was no answer from her save the syllabic bursts of sound. Her face continued its broken, jerking motion and he floated in the room before it, watching her face as it spluttered into digital chaos and then froze altogether.

  “We’ll try to reconnect,” Mission Control said from the intercom.

  “No need,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. We’re done.”

  A few more words and then silence and he drew the curtain closed across the narrow doorway to his compartment and thought that he should probably weep, that this would be the time to do so, but no such tears would come to him and so he floated in the quiet half darkness of the sleeping compartment, staring at the blank screen of the laptop and then at the blank emptiness of the fabric wall.

  . . .

  His first migraine had occurred three days after that call with Barb, three days after he had learned of Quinn’s death. Apart from the silence that seemed to cling to him, the intervening days were as regular and normal as any other. His fellow crew members said almost nothing to him that was not directly related to the various experiments and projects they were working on, but he busied himself with his work, with the specific manipulation of numbers and metal and electricity, turning objects over in the microgravity and recording the data in the journal on his laptop and sending that information down to the ground, no one interrupting him, no one talking to him at all.

  When the pain came it was Eriksson who suggested that he was having a migraine and it was Eriksson who helped him to his quarters and into his sleeping bag. He clicked off the blinding bar of light and pulled the curtains closed and there Keith floated, in and out of consciousness, trying to sleep, feeling like he was asleep but also in an agony he could hardly believe. Various members of the crew checked in on him during the first hour and at some point Keith discussed the matter with the flight surgeon on the ground in pained, broken phrases and there was an agreement amongst them that he was experiencing some combination of panic attack and migraine and Eriksson retrieved some additional medication and returned again and took a blood sample and then returned yet again and injected him with something. He was told later that it had been a combination of sedative and painkiller.

  He could hear everything: the humming and buzzing of the whole craft where it spun in its seventeen-thousand-miles-per-hour orbit path, two hundred miles above the surface, his vision warped with white and black zigzagging lines that drifted and shook and in the midst of that shaking he pulled himself once again into that otherworld of numbers, trying now to invent mathematical situations that might serve to bring him back from whatever edge he had come to but each time he was dragged right over that edge again, back into the pain. He concentrated, tried to concentrate, his heart’s thudding rhythm in his ears. Where was Eriksson? His eyes clenched like fists and somehow he managed to grasp hold of a single number—the light blue of number one—and then of one again and he placed a plus between them and then an equal sign and the zigzagging lines were everywhere now, even here, and he no longer understood what those symbols meant in his mind or what they were doing there or why he should be thinking about them at all. He could see Quinn then, her face before him in the darkness and her eyes shining out at him, her face as if caught in some eternal eventide, staring back at him as if waiting for him to speak and he opened his eyes. He thought he might have been speaking to her but his voice was a terrible silence that fell out of him into the capsule, was recycled, was breathed in once again.

  And now the tiny stars had returned, moving away from him as if in response to the whole of the universe, all points moving away from all other points and these too, these glowing stars in the darkness, reflecting the slit of light filtering in through the curtained opening. Once again he was weeping. He was weeping tiny diamond stars into the recycled atmosphere.

  He said her name but then he remembered once again that she was dead and would ever be so and it was not Quinn who was there but Eriksson and he was talking to him: “How are you doing?”

  “My head hurts so much,” Keith said.

  “Where?”

  He tried to look past him. Someone was just outside his quarters. Fisher? Someone else. “Everywhere,” Keith said.

  “I need you to be specific,” Eriksson said.

  “My head mostly but it radiates out.”

  “OK. They’re afraid you have a bleeder in your brain.”

  “An aneurism?”

  “Could be. Could be something else too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Keith said. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “You’ll be fine. Rest up. Plus, you’re giving our doctors something to do.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I’m serious. It’s the most excitement I’ve ever seen from those two. They’re in hog heaven. It’s like you w
ith a crazy math problem.”

  Keith said nothing in response and the two of them fell into silence.

  “You’ll have to call CAPCOM,” Keith said.

  “I already did.”

  “About the schedule. You’re going to have to clear my schedule.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s done.”

  “Goddammit,” Keith said.

  “I’m sorry, buddy.”

  “So am I.”

  Eriksson said nothing more for a long while. Then: “I’m going to take all your stats again. And I’ll need to do another blood draw.”

  “OK,” he said. But he did not move and after another moment of silence Eriksson unzipped the bag and freed his arm and he did not look, could not even feel the needle and a moment later Eriksson had finished, Keith’s blood floating somewhere in a vial in the microgravity and he was zipped back into the bag and his blood was off to the experiment racks in the Destiny Module.

  That had been the first but it was not the last. When the pain finally departed, he slept for ten hours and then woke and tried to resume some truncated version of his schedule but after three hours he could hear the sine wave again and Eriksson told him to go back to his quarters. The experience was much the same as the previous evening, this time with the anticipation of what was coming like being drawn slowly into a saw blade, unable to move, unable to even avert his eyes, but watching the blade come closer and closer until it tore into his flesh at last. And like the previous night—and this would be one of the aspects of his experience that would be consistent—he vomited and that seemed to indicate the end of the episode, his body relaxing and the pain subsiding again and he drifted into exhausted sleep at last. Each time Quinn came through the zigzagging darkness like the ghost she already was. He reached for her face, for the crushed remains of her broken body, but his fingers passed through that image as if moving through a cloud of steam. A vapor. Where are you now? Where have you gone now? And no answer from that darkness. He had missed the funeral, missed even listening to the audio feed. It had been recorded and they could play it for him later but what kind of answer could that possibly be?

  So it had been and so it would continue: migraine after migraine, sometimes with four or five days or even a full week between them. He knew Houston was trying to get him back to Earth but it was not to be. There were problems with weather and with logistics and technical problems and then problems with the mission itself so he did not take one of the emergency Soyuz capsules down—would not have taken one by himself anyway—and ground control attempted to get a shuttle up earlier and then later a relief crew on another Soyuz capsule but both were delayed and delayed until just a week before he and his crew members would have returned to Earth anyway.