“Well, that’s what you wanted to do.”
“Do how?”
“You wanted to go back to what you were doing in Ukraine.”
“Not same thing,” Peter said. Then he said, “Well, maybe same thing.” He lifted his pipe to his mouth as if he was going to light it but then he did not do so, instead holding it there poised before his lips in the darkness. “Maybe I am too much like them I think,” he said.
“I doubt it,” Keith said. “Wanting to go back to working in your field is different than wanting to go back to a life of crime.”
Peter did not answer. At last he lit the pipe and sucked at it for a moment. A hush over everything. Keith found himself wondering if all the crickets had been crushed into dust by the tractors, if their desiccated husks were everywhere underfoot.
“If comet comes it will not matter who wants to go back and who does not,” Peter said.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Yes, true. I do not think any comet is coming but still true.”
“It’s not front-page news yet.”
“Maybe they keep this from front page so we are not afraid of end.”
“Maybe.” He took another swallow of beer.
“The world is always coming to end,” Peter said. “Comet is coming or is not coming. So this does not matter.”
“Very philosophical,” Keith said.
“Not philosophy. True. Stars and galaxies are being born and dying. This is what you see when you look through telescope. Things sometimes crash into other things. Galaxies absorb other galaxies. These things happen. The world is always coming to end.”
Keith paused. Then he said, “Let’s party like it’s 1999.”
Peter was quiet for a moment and then started to giggle. “I know this song,” he said. He giggled again and then was caught up in the moment and laughed long and hard. Keith smiled, watching as Peter caught his breath and then exploded into laughter again. “You are funny man, Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said at last.
“Apparently,” he said.
Peter took another pull at the pipe and then came and sat next to Keith on the sofa. “I can’t think of what to look at now,” he said. “I have forgotten what I was doing.”
“You’ve been smoking a lot.”
“Is that so?”
“It is,” Keith said. “I’m going to have to finish the whole six-pack to keep up with you.”
“You should take up pipe. Not healthy for you to drink so much.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
They were silent. Then Keith said, “Let me try that.”
Peter handed him the pipe and the lighter and Keith lit the small bud in the bowl and sucked at the smoke and held his breath as he had seen Peter do many times. His throat burned and he wanted to cough but held back until he could no longer do so, erupting into a long dry series of choking, gasping coughs that doubled him over. “Christ,” he said when it was over.
“You need practice.”
“I need a beer.” He handed the pipe back to Peter and then finished his beer and reached into the cardboard box for another. “You want?” he said.
“Not for me,” Peter said. “When I drink and smoke at same time I end up at Starbucks making myself into fool.”
“Yeah, we don’t want that to happen again.”
“No,” Peter said. “I am being fool.”
“Past history.”
“Yes, but still true.”
They did not speak for a time and Keith felt himself drifting, the alcohol and the single lungful of marijuana mixing with his daily painkillers, a sensation that had begun to feel familiar to him and one he relished during these nights on the sofa. He could feel gravity loosening its hold, the sofa dissolving into a weightless object beneath him so that his body seemed to pull away from its overstuffed cushions, a tiny gap, two small for measure, opening between his body and the sofa. As if he was escaping gravity by degrees. As if he had begun, just barely, to rise.
His head lolled against the back of the sofa, eyes staring into space, tracing fake constellations absently. A fish. A box, slightly askew and desperately empty. A series of triangles, the angles of which resolved into numbers. He superimposed Quinn’s face amidst the stars and tried to resolve it into a constellation but the best he could do was a lopsided and dented oval. And yet he could still see her face in his mind. There was no conception of heaven that he could place her into. Lost, then.
Earlier that night he had told Peter about the mini storage, about how his failure to pay the bill had resulted in an auctioning off of its contents. He had managed to slough off the few consumer items he had retained: the television that he had dropped down the stairs, the sofa, and then, through simple inaction, everything else he owned all at once. It occurred to him during some point of the evening that he should have already made a series of frantic phone calls to the mini storage company. Perhaps he could coerce someone there into giving him the auction information. He had been told that the contents had been removed immediately and that they would be parceled out for resale, but perhaps the man on the phone had been wrong. If it was true, he knew that Quinn’s schoolwork would simply be tossed into a dumpster somewhere. Very likely it already had been. How he wanted to crawl through the city landfill on his hands and knees to find each sheet of paper but he knew such a search would be futile. He had allowed the whole of her to slip through his fingers. Everything she had been or would ever be. What a fool he was.
“Hello?”
They both started simultaneously at the voice, half-sitting and then twisting around to look back toward the cul-de-sac. A woman was standing in the halo of the streetlight. She held something in her hands—a plate of some kind—and as they watched she stepped forward toward them and into the dirt of the vacant lot. Keith sat there, unmoving, too bewildered to do anything else. He thought for a moment that it could be Jennifer and wondered briefly what she could want but it was not Jennifer. He did not recognize her in the silhouetted light and sat confused and disoriented, his body and mind continuing to drift.
“Luda,” Peter said. He stood and said something in Ukrainian and set his pipe on the sofa carefully.
“Oh,” Keith said. He looked at Peter and then turned and looked over his shoulder again, over the back of the sofa and into the lit space beyond. Luda’s shadow a strip of darkness bearing out toward the sofa and the twin slumbering beasts that were the tractors. He could not make out her face at all.
“Very hard to see,” she said.
Peter stood and stepped around the sofa and took his wife’s arm and Keith could hear a few muffled words he could not understand. They stopped for a long moment there beyond him and Keith wondered if he should say something and then did say, “Hi,” loud enough for both of them to hear and Luda’s voice came back, “Hello,” and then he could hear Peter whispering to her again and could not make out the words be they Ukrainian or English or some other language entirely.
He turned back to the stars, returning his head to the sofa. Whatever Peter and his wife were discussing was no business of his and he would not have understood their words even if it had played out right in front of him, although he gathered from Peter’s tone that he was irritated by his wife’s arrival.
After a moment it was quiet again and then he could hear their soft footsteps in the dirt behind him. “My wife Luda is here,” Peter said.
“Luda,” Keith said. He smiled, his hand outstretched and she took it, a soft, insubstantial thing in his palm.
“Hello,” she said. “I brought something to eat.”
“Really?” Keith said.
Peter was holding a plate in his hand. “Please,” he said. He held the plate out and Keith could make out triangular sandwiches lining it and he took one and bit into it and realized that he actually was hungry. Had he eaten? He could not even remember. “Thank you,” he said, his mouth chewing. Peter pulled the plate away and Keith said, “Wait a min
ute,” and Peter brought it back and Keith took another and set it on his knee. “It’s good,” he said.
“I am glad you are enjoying this,” Luda said. “I apologize for coming here. I did not mean for intrusion.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Keith said. “Come and sit.”
“I have to get back to children. They are asleep but who knows. They maybe wake up and I am not there.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “You should go back home.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine for a minute or two,” Keith said. “Come and sit. Have a beer.”
Luda looked at him. “I should go.”
“It’s OK to stay,” Keith said. He hardly knew what he was saying now and had he looked at Peter he might have seen a look of irritation on his face but he did not or could not and Luda stood in silence. “Have a beer,” Keith said. “The sofa will be gone any day and there will be a house here and that’ll be the end of it.”
Luda looked at her husband and he smiled, perhaps resigned to the situation, and motioned to the sofa. She nodded and said, “OK, but not so long,” and sat next to him. Peter stood by the telescope, watching them, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands like some errant waiter.
Keith reached down and pulled a beer out of the cardboard box and handed it to her and she took it and unscrewed the cap in one quick motion and, to Keith’s surprise, flung it toward one of the tractors and actually hit it, the bottle cap ringing out against the metal machine like a silver coin and then zinging off into the darkness.
“Well done,” Keith said, smiling.
“I am sorry for tractors,” she said.
“She means she is sorry for me because of these tractors,” Peter said.
“Yes, that is right,” Luda said. “I am sorry for Peter that tractors come. And you also too.”
“Well, thanks. Not much we can do.”
“Yes, but bad news for you,” she said.
“We’re not very happy about it,” Keith said.
“My Peter is very sad,” Luda said.
“Luda,” Peter said.
“You are very sad,” she said, looking at him now.
Peter did not move from his station by the telescope, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands. “Our friend maybe does not want to hear this talk,” he said.
Keith waved his free hand in the air. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m pissed off about it too.”
“Maybe you find some other place to set up telescope?” Luda said.
“Probably,” Keith said.
“Not the same,” Peter said.
“Not same but maybe even better,” Luda said.
“You keep saying that to me but you don’t know,” Peter said.
“Maybe bigger field with no lights anywhere,” Luda said. “Like Golosiiv.”
“You know nothing about this,” Peter said. He said something in Ukrainian under his breath and at the sound of it Luda sucked in her breath and muttered something in return.
It was quiet now, husband and wife there in the darkness, Keith looking back and forth between them as if trying to discover something otherwise unspoken, his mind already drifting from what had been said in whatever language it had been said, drifting from their silence. Had he been sober he likely would have excused himself from the field and would have returned to the quiet emptiness of his house. But he was not sober so instead he cleared his throat and said, “Give me another one of those little sandwiches.”
Peter handed him the plate and then reached over next to Luda and retrieved his pipe and the little black bag and returned to his position by the telescope and lit it and smoked. Luda said nothing, watching him.
“These are good sandwiches,” Keith said.
“Thank you,” Luda said. She continued to stare at her husband.
“How are the kids?” he said.
“Good. Sleeping.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
Peter’s voice came abruptly: “You think you know what this is but you know nothing.”
Keith looked up at him, still chewing. “What?” he said.
“I am trying to help you,” Luda said.
“Yes, you try to help me but you do not know how to help me. Then you say ‘like Golosiiv,’ but you do not know what you say when you say this. There is no like Golosiiv. There is only Golosiiv and nothing else.”
“Peter,” Keith said.
“You hear her? Like Golosiiv? You know there is no Golosiiv here. Only this empty place. So we find another empty lot but this one is mine to come to. Fucking shit.”
Keith could not understand Luda’s subsequent response nor Peter’s and in his inebriated state it took him several minutes to realize that the conversation had shifted to Ukrainian, their voices rising in intensity and volume and speed, and when he realized this he lifted his head from the sofa and coughed. “Uh, hey,” he said, the Earth drifting under him, “I can’t understand Ukrainian.”
They both fell silent instantly. There were cricket sounds but they were distant. Peter was a dark shape by the telescope.
“We are being rude for your friend,” Luda said. Peter answered in Ukrainian and Luda shook her head. “I tell him come home to talk but he will not do this,” she said.
“I am not coming home,” Peter said, in English now. His voice was a sharp angle in the night air. “You go home to kids.”
Luda stood abruptly and said something to him in Ukrainian and Peter did not answer. “I try to help you but you do nothing,” she said. “Only complain.”
“Because here is nothing.”
“There is more here than Ukraine.”
“No,” he said. “That is not true.” His voice cracked over these last words and a long trembling hush descended upon the three of them, Keith apparently forgotten on the sofa, his head resting in the crater of padding.
“What do you want to do?” she said at last.
“I want to go home,” Peter said. His voice shook. A faint glimmer of tears streaked his face. “I only want to go home.”
“Then we go home.”
“I want to go home to Ukraine.”
“Is that what you really want?” she said.
From far away, over the houses and roads came the constant shush of cars from the interstate, shuffling over the endless courts and dead ends that enmazed the landscape all around them. Keith quiet, the triangle sandwich held in his frozen hand, not even breathing, the sofa rocking slowly under him as if moving over a gentle sea.
“I do not know what I want,” Peter said, his voice a hollowness floating in that static.
“If you really want, then we go back,” Luda said.
Peter did not answer.
“You are my husband,” she said.
“You would do that?”
“Of course I would do that.”
He said something in Ukrainian again.
“We do what is best for family.”
“But you think America is best for this family.”
“America is best for this family,” she said. “But this family is you too.”
Peter did not respond for so long that Keith had begun to wonder what had happened. Then he realized that Peter was crying, a quiet sound at first and then breaking in heavy waves through his frame and he covered his hands with his face in the darkness and Keith finally understood that he should not be there, that he should have left almost immediately and he shifted his weight to stand but then Luda rose from the sofa and went to her husband and embraced him. “Petruso,” she said.
He whispered some tiny words in the darkness, words that might have been in any language and which Keith could not hear.
“Shhh,” she said, her hand stroking his short-cropped hair, his arms coming around her body and holding her in that darkness.
Drunk, stoned, depressed, mildly confused, his mind sloshing from side to side, Keith Corcoran stumbled to his feet. He tried to lift the box of empty bottles but almost fell over in doing so and decided to leav
e them. “I’m going to go inside,” he said, taking a step forward around the sofa and then letting the momentum continue to move him back toward the bright edge of the cul-de-sac.
Neither Peter nor Luda answered him, nor did they watch him half-stumble over the sidewalk and into the street and turn finally toward his house. In his drunkenness he grabbed the two white plastic trash bins as he passed, one in each hand, and entered the house through the empty garage, dropping the bins into the gap they had left at the end of the kitchen counter before stumbling up the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail all the while.
He undressed and lay back on the bed. Against his skin: the cool of the night air. The feeling of erasure that had come upon him earlier that evening had returned and the loneliness that fell upon his shirtless chest was profound and biting.
Perhaps he might have wondered at the marriage of Petruso and Ludmila Kovalenko. Perhaps he might have wondered at the sense of hope and love and caring that he had witnessed. Perhaps it might have engendered within him a similar sense that all might be made right once again. But in the sheer descent of his drunken loneliness he had already forgotten about being outside at all. Instead, the bed spun slowly in the center of that empty house and he fell into that rhythm and faded at last into a dreamless oblivion that was not unlike the night he had just clambered out of: a darkness alone and so, so very silent.
Seventeen
He was mildly hung over for much of the following day and, as every headache made him wonder if a migraine was approaching, he took two extra painkillers. The result was a drowsiness deep enough for him to sleep away most of the daylight hours. Over the days to follow he reentered the normalcy of his recent routine as best he could, returning to Starbucks each morning and reading the newspaper. He stopped by the warehouse-size bookstore midweek and, in the throes of what was an increasingly familiar sense of self-pity, found himself thumbing through the thick, heavy mathematics books there without much real interest or attention. He tried to imagine what kind of math Quinn might have been interested in had she continued with her studies, these thoughts like ghost images superimposed over the stark reality of thick paper and ink, all such ideas mere abstractions cast forward into a universe that seemed increasingly without meaning or purpose.
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