The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  Then another episode during the six weeks of physical therapy at JSC and then nothing, a kind of respite from the pain long enough that he had begun to think the condition had disappeared altogether. But now here it was again and the tears that streamed from his eyes were not the diamonds of his orbit but rather the slick heavy liquid of gravity. How many episodes did that make? He had lost count, or rather had never actually counted, and although it was true that his mind worked in numbers, there were some things that were uncountable, or that equated, in the end, only to a single symbol which was prime and central and represented the start and end of everything that was or could ever be: inescapable and impossible to manipulate and glowing with a radiance that only served to underscore its position, the aleph-null of his consciousness indeed eclipsed by the ever-unfolding infinities to follow.

  There had been a life he had led before and a life he would lead after and those two states had been broken along a line stretched between two points on a single plane. What remained was something hollow and ancient and vacant and he realized then that it was simply loneliness and it was everywhere around him and inside of him and there was no one he could call to his side, not on Earth and not in space. He was alone. He would never go into space again. He would never again be an astronaut. His eyes closed to the zigzagged darkness and the blanket over his head, the room itself dark and the early evening shading into night as the whole of Earth spun into its own shadow and Keith Corcoran, former astronaut, lay shivering in that multilayered black night darkness, weeping now, the pain not even reaching its apex yet, that still two hours away at least. Time itself slowing and slowing and slowing in his agony until it seemed as if it had stopped altogether and he was held there as if within a sphere. All things silent for an instant: the empty house, the cul-de-sac, Jennifer and her husband and Nicole as well, even the crickets pausing in their vigil in the vacant lot, Peter and his wife and his children all pausing, perhaps the whole endless interlocking subdivision complex and parking lots and businesses, all traffic lights blinking to red for a single moment and all conversations falling to silence. Can you feel now how memory itself would well up in such a moment? How it would be like a tide that had flowed out long ago and now rushed down into the pools, cupping the rocks and sand and circling the dunes and the waving razor grass? And how we would be alighted upon by a memory, you and I, to fill that silence, to rush into those empty pools? That memory was of her tiny hand curling into his own. Her tiny little girl’s hand on the day of ice cream when Barb’s father was dying or already dead. Ohio glowing everywhere with red and yellow and orange light. How could such a thing be gone and gone forever? How could the universe he had seen give him such a memory only to take her away from him?

  When at last he opened his eyes into the empty room, the sense of drifting, of being back in the microgravity orbit, disappeared all at once, replaced with a sense that he had just tumbled back into his own body once again, the delirium of his pain rising to a sharp jagged point. He was sitting up now, although he had no recollection of doing so, his heart hammering in his chest and the jumbled collection of metal and glass tumbling in the dry socket of his skull. He knew he was going to vomit and managed to stumble across the room, the zigzags of his vision overlaying everything in his path, and crashed to the floor of the bathroom and heaved the contents of his stomach into the toilet in a weak stream like water from a burbling garden hose. His stomach turned again and again until he was coughing and choking on emptiness, a thin stream of drool extending from his mouth to the swirling waters of the bowl.

  Then he stumbled back to the mattress, the shape of his body outlined in the pool of sweat he had left behind, and tumbled to its surface, trembling for a long, quiet moment before falling, at last, into sleep.

  Thirteen

  The stars as impossible and quixotic as they had ever been. For three days he felt as if his mind had become an empty box containing nothing but his fatigue and the day that followed was slow and quiet as he staggered through the exhaustion of his recovery. Then another night. He had come to expect the recovery period, the two or sometimes three days of weakness afterwards, but his weakness had stretched into five days now, continuing to feel as if he had just returned to Earth’s gravity, the specific and precise and quantifiable density of his body as it dragged from the kitchen to the bedroom, from downstairs to upstairs. He wished to god that he had a television so he could at least watch the mindless moving images of cooking shows and nature documentaries but alas there was no god who would deliver a television to him, regardless of his weakness or his pain.

  During these slow days he found himself thinking often of Quinn and now, sprawling upon the sofa under those dark and meaningless and cruel stars, he continued to think of her. NASA had sent a camera crew to the funeral and the DVD of that footage had been in his mailbox when he arrived in Houston and he had watched it even though he did not want to do so. Barb and her mother and a group of anonymous figures Keith did not know or did not remember ever meeting all in a row as if croaked down from the boughs of huge and leafless trees. A priest or pastor he did not know talking endlessly about things that did not matter. No one he knew or cared about. A woman who had betrayed him. A polished box holding the crushed body of his daughter. A poem he could not understand read by someone he had never seen. Then that same box being lowered into the ground. Christ. Why would any father want to see such a thing? And yet he had watched it, mostly because Dr. Hoffmann had insisted it would be good for him to do so. Even now he did not know how any funeral could be good for anyone and yet the memory of it returned to him in his quiet exhausted solitude, not the memory of watching the recorded images but rather the memory of the funeral itself as if images recorded by the camera were the sight of his own eyes, as if he had felt the faint cool breeze as it filtered through the pale green leaves, as if he himself had cast the first shovelful of dirt down onto the box that cradled his daughter into the earth. My god. Tell me about your cheerleading competitions now and I promise I will listen like no other father has ever listened to a daughter. Not now nor ever to be. All promises falling to the bleak law of gravity, like a skein of gray smoke pulling backwards into the fire from which it came.

  He sat there for an hour, alone on the sofa, and by the time Peter appeared he had downed two beers in quick succession and was sipping the third. He said very little as Peter set up the telescope and focused on various stars, the blur of a galaxy, a sliver of moon, the smeared color of a nebula, and when Peter told him to look he rose from the sofa to do so, not because he was particularly interested but because he did not know what else to do. He had been waiting for Peter to arrive and now he had and Keith did not know what he had been waiting for.

  “Here is something beautiful to see. Come and look,” Peter said and he did so once and again and then a third time, each time looking at—what exactly?—a smudge, a star that looked like a star and hence was little different from what he could see when looking straight up into the night sky from his position on the surface of Earth, a scant blaze of color.

  The fourth time he refused to rise: “Thanks, but I don’t want to see anything else,” he said. “Not tonight. Just let me sit here.”

  “You are frustrated,” Peter said. “I know. It will make you feel better, maybe, to look.”

  “No more.”

  “Yes, no more.” Peter leaned to the telescope and turned it on its tripod and then looked through the lens and then with his bare eye and then to the lens again, adjusting and readjusting. He looked and moved, looked and moved again. Occasionally he would say something to himself or to the telescope or to the stars themselves: “Oh” or “There you are” or “Beautiful” or “Where are you?”

  After a time Peter too had seen enough and he sat back on the sofa and pulled a small black bag from the larger bookbag at his feet and unzipped it and removed his small glass pipe and a Ziploc and filled the bowl of the pipe and then clicked his lighter into flame and applied it
to the bowl. The red glow rose and fell in light as he inhaled. Then the long, slow exhale. He leaned back against the sofa.

  “This is Cassiopeia,” he said. “This W shape there. See?”

  “You just don’t know when to quit,” Keith said.

  “Yes, true,” Peter said. “My apologies.”

  For a moment, Keith did not respond. Then he said, “OK, fine. Where’s the W?”

  Peter’s finger in the darkness. “Just above houses there,” he said, tracing a shape in the air directly in front of them, as if that shape was hovering close enough to touch in the night.

  “It’s all stars.”

  “Look for this. Like a wide W, stretched out some. You see? Just above houses. Almost on top of them.”

  A blur of stars everywhere and then yes he saw it: a jagged W as if scrawled by a child, the bottom points of which were nearly resting on the distant rooftops. “Shit,” he said, nodding. “I see it.” He sipped at his beer.

  “Yes, good then,” Peter said. “That is called Cassiopeia.”

  “I think I remember that from Boy Scouts.”

  “Good. If you know nothing else about sky, you know that at least.”

  “Cassiopeia the W,” Keith said. Then he added: “Shit.”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “Shit.” A pause. Then: “You know Big Dipper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  “I’m tired out, Peter.”

  “Come now,” Peter said. “Show me. If you know what it looks like, find it. Show to me this.”

  He sipped his beer, his eyes casting around the sky, the pinpoints of ever-twinkling stars like a veil. Where? He breathed out with a loud hiss and then rotated his head slowly, tracking from one side of the sky to the other, then again mumbling, “Shit,” and leaning back and there it was: the Big Dipper, tilted up on one end with the Little Dipper pouring into it. “There,” he said.

  “Yes, good. Pretty high up right now.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Yes, because all your life you have seen Big Dipper and you know where to look. Yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “You do know. You know more than you think.” Keith silent now.

  “And then bottom of cup of Dipper points up to handle of Little Dipper. That handle is Polaris.”

  “OK.”

  “It is star that never moves and it is north.”

  “The North Star.”

  “Yes. You already know this.”

  “Not really.”

  “You can see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can always find north.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  “It is always good to know where you are.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  He said nothing in response. Is it? Really? Another swallow of beer. He wished suddenly that he had something stronger, that he had a bottle of vodka or whiskey or something he could drink that would obliterate him, send him crawling home through a world spinning without control. But there was nothing like that in his house. Only beer. And he was already beyond driving.

  To their left, the cul-de-sac glowed yellow and quiet in the night like a movie set. Walter Jensen’s black sedan was gone. Jennifer’s car likely inside the garage. His own rental car across the street: an increasingly filthy sedan. Perhaps it was finally time to open his garage and start the process of sorting through whatever boxes of personal effects Barb had deposited there. The sofa like a boat on slowly moving waves, a quiet rolling beneath him.

  “I had a migraine a few days ago,” he said suddenly.

  “You keep having these migraine headaches?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should come and ask me and I will give you some of this and you will feel better,” Peter said. He tapped at the pipe.

  “You’re probably right,” Keith said. “They drug-test, though. I mean, not regularly but they could and that would be the end of that.”

  Peter made a sound, something like “Ach!” and waved his hands around in the air in front of him. “Fools, I think,” he said.

  “Maybe,” Keith said. “Shit. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “You have angry tongue tonight.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Not at me, I hope.”

  “No, not at you.”

  Silent for a moment. Then Peter: “Who then? The pretty lady across street maybe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Things not going so well with her?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. Peter was silent, perhaps waiting for him to continue, but he could find no words for the simple desperation that had settled into him. After the migraine he had come to feel like he was at the end somehow, that he had come to the end of some equation the answer of which he already knew he would never find for indeed there was no answer possible and yet he had continued to move through it as if there would be a solution, that the numbers would do what they had always done for him: they would provide a way forward. He had known that this idea was a fiction or a fantasy and yet somehow it had remained with him for those weeks since returning to Earth but now even that fiction had departed him. He could not fathom what was left. Perhaps nothing at all.

  They said nothing and after a time Peter set the pipe down and stood and began making adjustments to the telescope’s position. Night sounds around them. Occasionally the crunching or shuffling of an animal somewhere amidst the thistle. The crickets in their chirping. The more distant sounds of freeways and parking lots.

  “What are you looking for?” Keith said.

  “I do not know,” Peter said. “I was looking for Messier objects. But that is work for students. I do not know what to look for now.”

  “Can you find that comet yet?”

  “Not in this hemisphere.”

  “I saw it in the paper again this week.”

  “Bah,” Peter said. “Comet is not hitting Earth I think.”

  “Too bad,” Keith said.

  Peter stopped now, looked back at him. Keith could see only his silhouette. “Do not say this,” Peter said.

  “I’m kidding.”

  “It is not something to make jokes for.”

  “You keep saying it’s not going to hit Earth.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “I figure you know these things.”

  “Why? Because I have cheap telescope? I do not know anything. I work at Target. It’s not something to make jokes for.”

  “Christ, OK.”

  Peter said nothing, returning to the telescope, adjusting it, shifting the whole tripod slightly and then readjusting the base, leveling it. After a moment, he said, “I am sorry to speak to you like this. I apologize.”

  “Don’t apologize. Shit.”

  “I respect you too much to talk to you like this.”

  Keith shrugged. His eyes were increasingly bleary as he finished his fourth beer in quick succession and opened another, leaning back on the sofa, watching Peter move and manipulate the telescope and then drifting back to the stars again.

  Peter’s voice casting over those pinpoints of starlight: “Maybe I would have known something before, if I was still in Kiev at Golosiiv. I could not see this probably, but they would know about this. Not here.”

  “Who would?” Keith said, his voice moving out into those same stars. At drift. Drifting.

  “The astronomers at Golosiiv observatory. They would know.”

  “Are you still in touch with them?”

  “No.” There was a pause and then he added, “Not so much anymore. When I first was here in America, yes, but then not anymore.”

  “Lost touch?”

  “No reason to bother them. I was not help to anyone by calling. They are busy people. And I have nothing to add here.”

  “The telescope you worked with in Kiev was a big one?”

  “You do not know Golosiiv?”
Peter said, a hint of incredulity in his voice.

  “No,” he said. “Should I?”

  “I do not know.” He paused, then said, “Maybe not. It is famous for me, but I forget you are no astronomer but engineer.”

  “True,” Keith said.

  “Astronomy is important to me,” Peter said. “It’s most important thing that I can do. More important than stacking boxes at Target.”

  “Most things are.”

  “This is right, Astronaut Keith Corcoran.” Peter paused for a long time now, then looked through the eyepiece, then stepped back and looked up at the stars. “I went to university in Ukraine. I mean I have education.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Education but not degree. Luda came along and then Marko and then Nadia later. Hard then to keep going when there is feeding family.”

  “I’m sure,” Keith said. He sipped at his beer. The crickets chirped somewhere in the field. Everywhere.

  “There is famous observatory south of Kiev in Golosiiv Forest. Famous in Ukraine. Very beautiful forest with paths and trees. Most beautiful when night is coming and shadows are in trees. Everything so green and beautiful. And in winter when snow comes. Everything quiet then. Like bird comes and is over everything. Like white bird. Like whole forest is nest for white bird.”

  Keith was smiling in the darkness, his head back on the sofa, eyes straight up and staring into the stars, Peter continuing to talk somewhere as if the voice was being narrated by someone who was no longer there, as if on the soundtrack of a film about this moment with two men in the darkness staring up into space, each in their own world and that world the same.