The Infinite Tides
Page 36
“Come!” Peter called to them, to her.
She looked back to the surf. “OK,” she called back. The wind blew the dark hair from her face and she smiled, the sun on her skin, on her body. She sat forward and pulled the T-shirt over her head and pulled down her shorts, standing there before him in her bathing suit, her body smooth and curved and he looked from the shape of her to her face where it floated above him in the sunlight. “This is what I choose,” she said to him. She smiled. “Not what I have to do, but what I choose. Is that not what we have?”
He squinted up at her, into the brightness of the sun, the beautiful dark eclipse of her face. Then she turned and walked down toward the water, her form straight and tall and the curve of her hips and the black of her bathing suit, her skin the color of snow. She tiptoed into the sea slowly and Peter thrashed out of the water to meet her there like some thick-bodied oceanic god come out of the coral to meet his goddess at last, and he held her hands in his and drew her into the water slowly, the children leaping around them in a circle, jumping into and out of the water, returning to the beach, then to the water again.
The day had become warmer and after a time he indeed drew a towel around himself and changed into the swimming trunks Peter had brought for him and removed his shirt and lathered the remainder of his body with sunscreen. He stood for a moment contemplating the sea and then adjusted the shade umbrella. “Come in, Keith Corcoran,” Peter called to him.
“Soon,” he called back. Peter waved to him. Luda’s head bobbed from farther out in the ocean, then disappeared under the surface, reappeared again, the children crawling about on the sand like crabs. After a moment, they came running up the beach and rummaged in one of the bags for some plastic pails and shovels.
“We dig,” Marko said to him.
“Good idea,” Keith said. “The tide is coming in.”
“Good,” Marko said.
They both ran back down to the surf and sat just a few feet above the line of foam where the sand was yet dry and began to dig.
Keith turned his phone back on and after it was done powering up it vibrated and he looked at the screen. Eight missed calls, seven from various numbers at Houston and one number that came through as “unknown.” He dialed his voice mail. There were only two messages, the first from Jim Mullins, asking him to call back with a sense of urgency that was surprising: “Keith, I really, really need to hear from you right away. Right away. Please. As soon as you get this, please call.” He wondered momentarily what the emergency could be, thought that they were moving the things out his office and somehow needed his authorization to do so. Then he skipped to the next message.
“Chip, Eriksson here,” the message began, the voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Listen, I don’t know where you are, but we need you here at Houston right now. I’m serious. Call me right away. Or Mullins. Get here right now. It’s important.”
There were no more messages and Keith clicked the phone off and set it quietly on the blanket in the sand and sat looking at it, the beer still in his hand. Then he set that too on the blanket and looked at them both as if they might hold some secret message that he could decode if only he stared long enough.
Out at sea, Peter bobbed in the water, Luda nearby, the two children on the beach now, digging their hole in the sand with pieces of driftwood. Everything had grown silent, the surf continuing to roll in but only as some distant faded hush.
He looked up at the sky. The burning sun above them all, its motion as if it were rotating around the earth. And then he could see himself in the Destiny Module again, the planet scrolling below him through the round porthole window, his head clear and his eyes bright and shining as he watched the blue swirl of an ocean that he knew was this ocean and was somehow also this moment, because everything else had dissolved: the measurement of distance in units of time or light or space or via some other methodology he did not know. There was no future. There was only where he had been and where he was now, and such locations were not measurable by any method but that of humanity itself.
“Astronaut Keith Corcoran!” Peter called to him.
He looked again toward the water, not moving now, frozen in his borrowed black-and-white trunks, barefoot on the multicolored beach blanket. In his imagination he could see the white shining stripes of pure blazing light where they came raining through that same blue dome of the distant atmosphere, the tiny shards of ice and dust and rock flashing to the infinite trembling moment that is this one and is already gone, and he could see where that blinding arc would become the flash of impact against the distant non-horizon of the ocean and the sky as the sea vaporized around the burning mass and then Peter and Luda and the children and the others along the beach, and everyone on Earth in their cars on the road and in parking lots, and looking through the windows of the megastores, and at Starbucks, and even the workers tenting his empty house, and those building a new empty house at the end of the cul-de-sac, and Jennifer and Nicole and Walter Jensen, and yes even Barb: all looking briefly and finally toward the sea, toward that still soundless flash, and wondering. He could feel another set of eyes too, staring from some other place he could neither see nor recognize and he said her name but of course she did not answer him and never would. And then the flat slap of the explosion.
Before him the incoming surf had filled the children’s sand hole and they screamed and began digging in earnest. He walked toward the water and when he reached the children he squatted next to them, turning briefly to look back up the beach, back to the umbrellas and chairs above the high-tide line and then returning his attention to the hole they had dug in the sand, its basin filled with chocolate brown water as Marko and Nadia dragged their plastic pails through it, babbling incoherently in a language Keith would never understand.
The driftwood paddles they had used to begin the pit were still there in the sand and he reached for one and began to build up a wall on the ocean side of the pit and the children watched him for a moment and then turned their attention to the same task.
I tell you now: There are no epiphanies. The place where you sit reading these words is the same place you have always been, your life ever-arrowing to the moment that is this moment and this one. And this. An infinite set spiraling in brightness, without magnitude, cardinality, sum, or number.
The water hissed up the beach.
“Here comes the tide,” he said. And so it came.
Acknowledgments
Many fine and patient individuals contributed valuable information during the research phase of this novel, amongst them Anthony Barcellos, Ph.D.; Scott Bonnel, MFT; Kristine and Major Scott Dunning, USAF; Kim Failor, Ph.D.; NASA Astronaut Ron Garan; J. Matthew Gerken; Dale Hayashida, PharmD.; Shane Lipscomb; and Shi-Wen Young, Ph.D. Any and all inaccuracies or misrepresentations herein are mine alone. Warm thanks to those who read and commented, sometimes on many different drafts: Lois Ann Abraham, Katie Henderson Adams, Michael Angelone, Kate Johnson, Jason Sinclair Long, Jefferson Pitcher, Jason Roberts, Harold Schneider, Nat Sobel, Karin Stevens, and especially to Michael Spurgeon, without whom I likely would not have begun writing this novel at all.
Eleanor Jackson was instrumental in many, many ways, offering a sympathetic and critical read and being the book’s champion when it needed championing. Thanks to the book’s copy editor Miranda Ottewell, and warm appreciation to everyone at Bloomsbury, in particular Nate Knaebel, Rachel Mannheimer, and especially the book’s editor, Anton Mueller, who helped me put it in its final form. To all: my gratitude.
But most of all, I would like to thank my family for their continuous patience and understanding and my wife for her help in shaping this character and this novel.
A Note on the Author
Christian Kiefer earned his Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California, Davis, and is on the English faculty of American River College in Sacramento. His poetry has appeared in various national journals, including Antioch Review and Santa Monica Review. He i
s an accomplished songwriter and recording artist and lives in the hill country northeast of Sacramento with his wife and five sons.
Copyright © 2012 by Christian Kiefer
This electronic edition published in July 2012.
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Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Kiefer, Christian, 1971–
The infinite tides : a novel / Christian Kiefer.—First U.S. edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-60819-810-8
1. Astronauts—Fiction. 2. Immigrants—Fiction. 3. Ukrainians—United States—Fiction. 4. Male friendship—Fiction. 5. Suburban life—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.I443I54 2012
813'.6—dc23
2011045534
ISBN: 978-1-60819-815-3
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