The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  “I don’t know how I’m doing. I wake up, get a cup of coffee, wander around town. At night I sit around with my Ukrainian neighbor and drink beer. That’s all.”

  “All right,” Eriksson said. “Look, buddy, I’m worried about you. That’s all.”

  “Yeah, I appreciate that.”

  They were both silent then and in the gap Keith thought that, if he could find the words to do so, he would tell Eriksson exactly how he was actually doing because Eriksson was perhaps the only substantial friend he had. They had spent so much time together, training and working and then the mission itself. After Quinn was dead and Barb was gone, it had been Eriksson who had kept him working when he could work and had cleared the schedule when he could not. That had meant everything. Without it he did not know what he would have done. And so he thought that he would tell him that there was no end to the equation in which he now found himself and that he did not know what he should be doing anymore or what velocity he would need to reach to escape whatever orbit he was in.

  But then Eriksson said, “Look, let’s switch gears on this,” and Keith said nothing, only listening as Eriksson continued and the moment was gone: “There are some people here with me and we’re trying to figure something out and you’re the only guy I know who might know the answer.”

  “OK.”

  “You’re gonna laugh,” Eriksson said. “We can’t figure out the code for the MSS arm files.”

  “The access code?”

  “Yeah. We should have it on file here somewhere but we can’t find it.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s what you need to know?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What do you need those for?”

  “We don’t really. But IT is doing an audit here and it came up as something that needs to be in the backups.”

  “I have it backed up and it’s probably on the mainframe too.”

  A pause. “Yeah … well, look, we still have to have access to it.”

  “Sure, the backups don’t have password protection so you can run them from there into the main server.”

  “I don’t think you’re quite hearing me, Chip.”

  “I don’t think you’re asking me the right question.”

  “You’re going to make this hard.”

  “Am I?” A second low rumble. The windows shaking. “Christ,” he said. “Hang on.” The voice on the other end of the phone speaking but what words were being said lost in the volume outside on the street. “Hang on. Hang on,” he repeated, the rumble fading to a hum that pulsed in heavy waves outside past the house. He could hear Eriksson’s voice continuing somewhere in the din. “Hold on,” Keith said. “There was a truck. What did you say?”

  It was silent for a moment and then Eriksson said, “When are you coming back to Houston?”

  “That’s up to Mullins.”

  “How so?”

  “He told me to take some time off so I’m doing what I’m told.”

  “All right, all right,” Eriksson said. “I get it.”

  “You get what?”

  “Well, we miss you here.”

  He did not know how to respond to this statement and so he said nothing for a long time, both of them silent now, their breathing reverberating down the phone lines. Then he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, buddy.”

  “Am I still an astronaut?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Erikkson said. There was the sound of laughter in his voice, as if Keith was making a joke of some kind.

  “I’m either an astronaut or I’m not.”

  “Oh come on, Chip. You’re a superstar around here and you know it.”

  Keith said nothing.

  “You’re ten times smarter than anyone else in the building.”

  “Quinn was smarter,” Keith said. Just that.

  There was no sound from the phone now. Outside, the roar of big engines continued beyond the window. Muffled.

  “Christ, buddy,” Eriksson said.

  “She was.”

  “OK.” Eriksson’s voice was quiet. Almost a whisper. Then he said, “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry about your daughter. We all are. And we could use you back here. That’s for sure.”

  “I don’t know if I can come back there right now.”

  “You want me to talk to Mullins?”

  He paused for a long moment. Then he said, “I don’t know.” He sat down again, the little chair squealing under the weight of his body. All he could think of was the desire to be back in microgravity again, in that low orbit aboard the space station where there was no perceptible weight, where everything in his life—the physical objects—would suspend indefinitely in midair until he retrieved them, where he would sleep attached to the wall of his closetlike living quarters. That was what he wanted, not to be back in Houston but to be up in space. And then he realized something he had never thought of before, that his desire to return to the ISS had less to do with working with the numbers and more to do with the feeling of being there, of seeing Earth unscroll beneath him, the tan mass of Africa and the blue ocean and the white swirl of clouds moving across the sphere of Earth as the day flashed to night and the universe itself was unveiled all around him. He wanted to see that again, to experience that again. Even if there were no numbers with which to make sense of it. More than anything, that was what he wanted.

  “Look, I’m sorry but we’re going to need that access code,” Eriksson said.

  In the low-frequency hum of the trucks outside he thought he could hear the thin whine of his migraine but he could not be sure. He could hear their engines where they revved and roared. Not delivery trucks. Something else.

  “Yeah,” he said. There was a long pause but he could think of nothing that would convince Eriksson to include him in whatever work was ongoing and so he spoke the access code slowly into the phone, a long string of letters and numbers, and Eriksson read it back to him and he confirmed it and then Eriksson said, “Hold on,” and he could hear the sound of typing and then Eriksson said, “OK, that worked.”

  “That’s my project,” he said.

  “I know that.” Eriksson said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Hang on a minute,” and there was the shuffling of motion from the other end of the phone. Then his voice again, quieter, closer than before: “Listen, between you and me, there’re some big rumors coming down the pipe. Stuff you’ll want to be in on and stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with being active flight or not.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “I’m not kidding, buddy. Get well and get back here.”

  “Yeah, OK,” Keith said. “I’ll do that.”

  The conversation ended and Keith sat there in the empty house at the kitchen table, looking at the phone where it lay before him on the laminated wood-grain surface. The trucks continued to hum and rumble outside and after a long moment there at the table he rose and rummaged through the stack of bills and unopened mail and papers until he found the résumé that Peter’s wife had given him and then he sat again at the table and read through it carefully. It was a generic résumé that listed every possible facet of Petruso Kovalenko’s education and work experience, from menial jobs to the highly skilled work he had done at the Golosiiv observatory. There were references listed, good ones by the look of it, the scientists and engineers that Peter had mentioned during their conversations in the vacant lot: Federov and Kuzmenko and even Vanekov, the man who apparently ran the entire observatory compound. The last two sheets in the packet were photocopied letters from Kuzmenko and Federov, letters written in English on official letterhead festooned with Ukrainian characters.

  He removed his laptop from its bag and opened it and looked through his address book and sent out two e-mails, the first to the head of Dreyfuss Research Center and the second to the head of personnel at Johnson Space Center. Apart from the greeting, the two e-mails were identical in content, each asking if the recipient would be willing to look a
t a résumé if he sent one over, that he knew a man who was an amateur astronomer who had worked with some of the big names in Ukraine and was looking for employment in the United States, that the man was intelligent and well qualified but had no official degree. He listed Peter’s name and the names of the references he listed at Golosiiv and a few points about the résumé. He knew it was likely that nothing would come of the e-mails but he had at least tried. Perhaps he would never hear anything. Perhaps his own name was such that an unsolicited e-mail from him would curse Petruso Kovalenko’s employment possibilities forever.

  “A little early isn’t it?” Keith said.

  “Have you seen what has happened?” Peter said.

  “To what?”

  “Come and see. It is terrible, I think.” Peter’s eyes were glassy with tears.

  “Christ, are you OK?”

  “Come and see,” he said again.

  Keith’s first thought was that Peter was drunk and that they would have some replay of the scene in front of Starbucks. The telescope was nowhere to be seen and the sun low but still present in the sky.

  Keith checked that his keys were in his pocket and stepped outside. Peter led him toward the street to the sidewalk and started to point but his eyes were already there. He had not been out of the house since his conversation with Eriksson and had ceased to notice the rumble of what he had assumed to be trucks in the cul-de-sac; those sounds had faded into the background and with them had faded the threat of a migraine. But now he found himself wishing he had listened more closely, for it had not been trucks he had ignored for most of the day; it had been tractors.

  The vacant lot at the end of the cul-de-sac had been crisscrossed repeatedly, the thistle and debris cleared so that most of the lot was flat and bare. In the distant corner, a mountain of fresh dirt rose up in a huge brown cone and closer, flanking the leather sofa as if guarding it, two huge yellow machines: one with a thick, heavy scoop in the front, the other a backhoe equipped with a curved bucket lined with square teeth.

  “Terrible thing,” Peter said.

  “Shit,” Keith said.

  “They do not touch sofa.”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Keith said. “Building.”

  “Building what?”

  “Another house, I guess.”

  He stepped toward the end of the cul-de-sac and Peter followed almost as a child might follow a parent, always keeping one step behind as if Keith could somehow shield him from whatever evil lay before them.

  “It does not even look like same place,” Peter said. “Just terrible. Catastrophe.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Keith said.

  Peter did not answer. They stopped at the end of the sidewalk. The thistle was flattened there and a few feet farther in it was gone altogether, only dirt remaining. The thistle and weeds had partially obscured the sofa from the street but now in the bare field it seemed alien and incongruous, tufts of dry undergrowth surrounding the lumpy shape like the frayed edges of some weird throw rug.

  “We should take sofa back into your house,” Peter said. “Yes?”

  Keith shook his head. “I don’t want that thing.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “They will take sofa, though.”

  “They will,” he said. “Do you want it?”

  Peter did not answer and Keith thought he was likely thinking it over but when he glanced over at him there were fat tears sliding down his face. “Fucking shit,” Peter said. “I am embarrassed.” He wiped at his tears, tried for a moment to control himself and then sobbed violently.

  Keith looked back at the vacant lot again. The tractors like awkward insects that had descended there from some planet of yellow metal. “You can find somewhere else,” he said. “There are still vacant lots around somewhere.”

  “This one was mine,” Peter said. “I am sorry to be like a girl with crying. I am stupid man.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Fucking shit. I hate this country.”

  Keith said nothing now, the words meaningless, the sun continuing its descent toward the houses to the west of them, the cul-de-sac already in shadow. Both of them quiet and the distant and constant hiss of the freeway and the million parking spaces being filled and unfilled by a million shoppers the only sound until Peter spoke again. “Look,” he said.

  “At what?”

  “There.” He pointed a finger above them at the sky and Keith followed the line and there it was. Far up above them, above the tractors and the sofa and the cul-de-sac and the endless sprawl, floating there in the last light before the sun crested those endless houses to the west and dipped out past the edge of the earth itself was the great dark bird.

  “Oh,” Keith said, not a word but an inrush of breath, his eyes wide.

  “Your big bird, I think.”

  “Yes,” Keith said. “Yes.”

  “Not eagle, I think,” Peter said. “Vulture.”

  “Vulture?”

  “What they call it. Um …” Peter paused and then said, “Buzzard.”

  “Buzzard?”

  It was no eagle, no bird of prey at all but rather a scavenger. Shit. Fantastic. Even now it turned above them, perhaps peering down at the empty lot, the tractors and the sofa and the two men standing there looking back at it and perhaps it regarded them all as inconsequential to its welfare. There was nothing to eat and so there was no reason to descend. Perhaps it would never change its infinite circle. Perhaps now it would never come down.

  “A vulture,” Keith said. “That’s just fantastic.”

  Peter said nothing. The two of them stood in much the same aspect as they had for those nights under the stars, side by side, heads tilted back, staring up into the dome of the atmosphere as if it might reveal something of itself that had been held in secret.

  “Shit,” Keith said after a moment.

  “Shit,” Peter said in response.

  Then both of them were silent.

  Interval: Space

  (cΔt)2 < (Δr)2

  (Δs)2 > 0

  He had been flying back and forth to Houston, staying during the week in a small apartment he had rented there and returning home for weekends when he was able. At times he was so busy with the training that even sleeping at the apartment became a rare event. There were weeks of flight training aboard a supersonic jet that mirrored the controls of the space shuttle and then a long period of survival training in Maine, in between which he flew home. At first he had attempted to do so each weekend. In the revisionism of his later days he told himself that he had done so in an attempt to maintain his connection with Quinn and to keep her, as gently as he could, on the right path to foster her gift and to continue the conversations they had been having about math and science, but the probable reality was that he simply felt obligated to return home when it was convenient to do so, at first every weekend, then three times per month, then every other week. Soon he was lucky to make it back once in three weeks. He tried not to think about it in too much detail. He was being trained as an astronaut, after all, and was that not the most important possible activity in his life?

  By the time the summer returned, he had finished the flight training and had been strapped into his first space suit and had begun to familiarize himself with the full-scale ISS model submerged in the enormous neutral buoyancy pool at JSC. Maybe he should have recognized the signs that Quinn was already changing, for when he spoke with her on the phone or occasionally in person when he was home she told him she was spending most of her days at the city pool and, in her words, “hanging out.” He talked to her about math from time to time as well but mostly she seemed to be in a great hurry to do something else, always on the way to the mall or the pool or the movie theater so that she was most often gone from the house during the daylight hours and sometimes well into the evenings, even though his own visits home were increasingly rare.

  Of cou
rse when he did see her, when she was home for dinner or was lingering in the kitchen on some rare afternoon when she was not busy with her friends, she would ask him about his training, about what he was doing in Houston and what kinds of technology he had been able to work with. Had he any concern at all, these moments might have assuaged them. But there was no real concern, for he did not think about her changing, not in any specific or quantifiable way. Instead, he thought about his training and when he returned home he continued to think about his training. After all the long years of study and graduate school and the air force and the exhausting labor of his mind he was becoming an astronaut at last.

  In any case, he felt she would soon enough be in good hands, for she had finally agreed to attend the Academy of Arts of Sciences, at least for a year, even though she continued to call it “Nerd School” and spoke of it with a kind of mirthful derision. He did not know if he had simply worn her down or if she now actually agreed with him that the school would provide the best place for her to continue her studies. The reason did not matter because he knew that she would blossom there and that the first year would turn into a second and a third.

  If anything it was Barb who was more strongly opposed to the school. “She’s not like you,” she told him when he first brought up the idea, Quinn in seventh grade then.

  “You’ve been telling me for years that she’s exactly like me,” he had answered.

  “Not the way you think,” she said. “You think you’re going to turn her into an astronaut or something. She’s not like that.”

  “OK,” he said. “What’s your point?”

  “The point is that she’s happy at the regular school.”

  “She’s happiest when she has a challenge to work on,” he said.

  She just looked at him then, incredulous, saying nothing.

  “Anyway, she wants to go.”

  “She wants to go because you want her to go,” Barb said. “Jesus, Keith. Give her a break. She’s just a little girl.”

  “This is important, Barb.”

  “To who?” She turned toward him, to where he stood unmoving in the center of the bedroom.