The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  For a long time he was still and alone. Again he felt like lifting the television and smashing it to the concrete. But instead he turned woozily toward the empty house and opened the door and stepped into the dull flat light of the drifting entryway.

  Interval: Time

  (cΔt)2 > (Δr)2

  (Δ s)2 < 0

  She was atop the slide, smiling, the other children swarming the playground equipment around her, periodically peeling away to charge across the grass and asphalt to their waiting parents. Keith stood amongst them but he did not call out her name, not yet, instead standing and watching her as she shot down the polished metal slide and turned, trailed by two or three other children, apparently her friends, and clambered to the top once again, sliding down, then giving up on the slide altogether to begin running around the playground equipment. The children were playing tag or something like it, and he could hear the high-pitched screeches and laughter even from across the grass and asphalt, all the way to the edge of the parking lot. His daughter’s laughter. The laughter of her second-grade friends. And yet each time she moved too far away from them or they from her he could feel his heart seize in his chest, the moment in which she was alone there on the playground stretching out before him, time no arrow but a wobbling series of loops like yarn sprung loose of its bundle. But the children she was playing with returned to her again and again, and even as one and then two of them were called away by their parents, they would be replaced by others and he came to realize that she was not joining their game, that they were joining hers, that she was the center of their play, an idea that he found so surprising and which he embraced with a sense of relief that very nearly brought him to tears.

  She did not see him until there were no longer enough children remaining for the game to keep going. It was only then that she glanced toward the parking lot and saw him there, the other parents mostly gone now, a few continuing to arrive.

  She waved toward the playground, one or two children returning the gesture, and then sprinted up the hill toward him, her face a bright smile and her tiny backpack flapping behind her like a weird single wing.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said when she had arrived at his side.

  “Quinny Quinn Quinn,” he said.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “She had to go out so I told her I’d pick you up.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Grandpa’s sick so she went to see him.”

  “Sick how?”

  “He has cancer.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means he’s really sick,” he said. He was looking at her, at her tiny self, her tiny being. “Do you have all your stuff?”

  “Yeah, let’s go,” she said.

  “OK, bossy pants,” he said.

  In the car, she asked him again how sick her grandfather was and he told her, bluntly and without preamble, that it was likely he would die. He had not even speculated what her response would be because he had not thought his way through the conversation they would have. Barb’s father had already gone through a full cycle of chemotherapy treatments the previous year, but two months ago it had been revealed that the cancer had returned and had spread throughout his body. He had deteriorated rapidly, and when Barb’s mother had called to tell her daughter that her father was in hospice she had booked the first available flight and called Keith at work to tell him that it was time. He bundled a thick sheaf of papers into his bookbag and returned home in time to drive her to the airport. She had not spoken in the car, clutching his hand and staring forward out the windshield, and when they arrived at the airport she did not release her grip for some minutes, continuing to stare straight ahead as various travelers crossed and recrossed the walkway before them. He did not say anything to her then, turning from her face to the windshield and there they remained until at last she broke the silence by telling him that she had left a list with Quinn’s schedule and that there were some things in the freezer he could reheat for dinners. He told her he would be fine. She would call him from Atlanta when she knew more. He told her he loved her and she did the same.

  “So Mommy’s with Grandma and Grandpa?” Quinn asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked at her in the backseat. He could not read any emotional response there at all.

  “Is Grandma OK?” she said.

  “Yeah, Grandma’s fine.”

  “OK,” Quinn said. “When’s Mommy coming home?”

  “I don’t know. It might be a couple of days. Might be longer than that. She’s making sure Grandpa’s OK.”

  “But Grandpa’s going to die?”

  “Yes, he’s going to die.”

  “Then how is she going to make him OK?”

  “She just wants to be there with him. To make him feel better.”

  “But he’s still going to die,” Quinn said. It was not a question.

  “Yes,” he said. “He’s still going to die.”

  She did not speak for a few moments. Then she said, “Could you turn the radio on?”

  “Sure can,” he said.

  He did so. When he looked at her again, at that part of her he could see in the rearview mirror, she displayed no emotion whatsoever. He knew already that Barb would likely be irritated with him for telling Quinn the truth of what was happening or at least for telling her on his own without Barb at his side, but Quinn had asked him and he had answered and as far as he could tell she was handling it well enough.

  “When’s Mommy coming home?” she said again.

  “I don’t know exactly,” he said, turning the radio down. “Maybe a couple of days. Maybe a little longer than that.”

  “I want her to come home.”

  “She will.”

  “I want her to come home now,” she said.

  He looked at her in the rearview mirror. She continued to stare out the window. “We can call her tonight,” he said.

  “OK,” she said. She did not look at him.

  Her face held in profile within the rectangle of the mirror. Around that reflection unscrolled the world: an endless flow of cars on the southbound interstate, full neighborhoods lined with trees, distant farm fields just rolling into spring.

  The night went better than he thought it would. He knew Barb had been called in to the elementary school on several occasions over the previous year for what Quinn’s teachers had come to call their daughter’s “strong will,” a behavior that amounted to an ongoing problem according to the school but which Keith had seen little of during his time at home. Nonetheless, he knew it was not something Barb or Quinn’s teachers had invented. His daughter was, if nothing else, a little girl who expected to be treated like an adult, a facet of her personality that Keith was actually quite proud of but which Barb found annoying. And indeed he had to admit that, when Quinn asserted herself, her personality—her strong will—was more than either of them knew what to do with. If she decided she did not want to do what she had been told to do, she simply would not do it. She would throw no tantrums; she would simply refuse to do what was asked unless it was her will to comply.

  So he had been concerned that Quinn might be difficult that first evening but in actual fact she gave him no trouble, perhaps because he did not ask her to do anything she did not want to do. He was aware that he was not really parenting her but he simply did not see the need to adhere to the house rules Barb had set down for their daughter. Not now. He bathed her later than she was usually bathed and dressed her in pajamas and they sat on the couch for half an hour—this already an hour past her bedtime—and watched a cartoon about an animal Keith could not identify.

  “That’s dumb,” Quinn said at some point during the program.

  “What is?” he asked. He was not even really looking at the screen at all, instead was thinking of the project he had been working on the day before in his office, wondering how much of it he could complete tonight given the materials he had returned home with. Had he remembered the last set of drawings from dr
afting? He was not sure.

  “Four isn’t even that color really. It’s kinda more like red.”

  He felt his chest tighten. He had not been paying attention to the screen but he certainly was now. Had there been a number? He thought so. The number four. An orange number four. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “They didn’t do the colors right,” she said. “Four is red. Everybody knows that. Now it’s gonna be mad.”

  “Because it’s the wrong color?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He might have scolded her for her tone but he was not attentive to such things now. Instead he felt a turning inside of him, a kind of excitement.

  “The four was orange but it’s not really orange. It’s supposed to be red. It would be really mad if it was orange.”

  “It’s irritated because it’s the wrong color?”

  “Yeah, because it’s supposed to be more like red.”

  He paused and then said, “Red or more like brownish red?”

  “Yeah, a little like brownish red.”

  “But not orange.”

  “No way José, not orange.”

  The television continued its sounds. He was staring at the screen now, not looking at her, the sense of what she had said flooding through him all at once.

  “What about nine?” he asked.

  “Yellow.”

  “Two?”

  “Blue two. It rhymes.”

  “Three?”

  “Kind like blue and green together. Like water.”

  “Four?”

  “Jeez, are you gonna ask me all of them?”

  He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Probably.” But he already knew all the answers she could possibly give. The colors all the same. The colors exactly the same as his own.

  This was how it would start. He knew that now, in the house in the cul-de-sac, his hands ever-flecked with paint. He knew that this had been the moment to dictate everything to come after. But he also knew—had already known—that Quinn was similar to him in some essential way, Barb even making that a household joke, laughing when their daughter’s responses were so blunt and direct, without preamble or thought or concern. “She’s just like you,” Barb would say to him. “Exactly.” He would merely shrug in response and Quinn would peer back at them both, exasperated, as if she knew there was some kind of joke between her parents but she would not deign to acknowledge it. But he knew it was true. Even as a very young child she had displayed a sense of logic and analytic skill. It was the same language Keith spoke, not the language of numbers—that would come later—but rather a language of simplicity and directness. Perhaps it would have been the same with any child, that his own tendency to speak with blunt efficiency, to cut right to the point, mirrored the way children communicated. But then this was not any child; this was his own and she was so much like him that it sometimes felt as if, finally, he had found someone he could communicate with who gave no quarter to pretense or confusion.

  She shared, as well, his ability to focus on whatever task was at hand, silently and efficiently. When she had been four or five it had been building elaborate structures with Lego blocks. Much later, it would be her homework. Sometimes, in the years to follow, he would stand in the doorway to her room and watch her at work, her back to the door, and if he was quiet enough he could watch her there for a long time, her silence, the intensity of her progress. It reminded him of being alone in his office with his pencil and calculator and his numbers and with no one to disturb him. He could think of no place on Earth, no situation he enjoyed more. The only questions that existed in that room were ones he directed himself and all such questions, no matter how complicated, could be answered and in this too, he imagined, she was like him.

  In the weeks following Barb’s father’s death, he had already decided that the numbers would provide a trajectory for her, a way for her to move forward, not just ahead of her peers but away from them because she had the gift. She shared the same secret and inviolable sense of numbers that he did, their personalities and their colors immutable. At first he had been too surprised—shocked, even—to think of anything beyond the moment they were in because what she had said in passing, casually, in front of the television, was something he had thought private: that the numbers themselves held within them a sense of relationship. He had known this as early as the second grade, when he had told the class that three did not like seven and that seven and eight only got along when they were seventy-eight and otherwise did not want to be neighbors at all, that this was clear from their colors alone. The other students had laughed at him and the teacher praised him faintly for his overactive imagination and Keith stared back at them, dumbfounded, his eyes not tearing up but rather only opening wide to mark his sense of incredulous confusion. What he had told them was fact, something he understood as intimately as he knew his own mother and father, perhaps even more so. He did not understand the reaction the other students had toward him. He did not understand it at all.

  By the time he reached junior high school, he had learned that he had an ability that his peers lacked, for the numeric relationships he intuitively understood had made the numbers akin to friends. But perhaps even more than that, in the burning and disconsolate sexuality of his young self the numbers provided a sense of intimacy. He would not have identified it as sexual—in fact would have denied this with a vehemence fraught with embarrassment—but there was no other word to describe the clear and secret detail in which he knew and understood them. The numbers and symbols and functions were beings unto themselves and while they were often represented as stark and concrete and unchangeable forms in textbooks and on chalkboards, he never saw them that way. Even as a child, he could see them the way he believed they actually were: as part of the three-dimensional space in which they existed as genuine and independent objects that were not alive and yet were possessed of all the manifest and unmistakable indicators of that state of being, of life itself. He could see the relationships between them and could hold those individual relationships in his mind, as if they had become physical structures which floated within an infinite empty container, and he could zoom into or out of those structures as if possessed of some enormous and all-encompassing lens. Entire equations could be worked out that way: solved a piece at a time by developing the relationships between sections, for in the end they were not even equations but rather collections of personalities that could be classified and understood the way one might understand the structure of a family: in conflict or harmony or some state between and their solutions the logical endpoint of those relationships.

  The strength of that feeling faded with time, replaced later with a simpler and no less profound sense of familiarity. He did not think of them as having personalities now, although he could still see their colors. Instead, what he had felt about them as a child had given way to the sense that they were actively functional and representational. And yet even now he could feel them slotting into their locations with grace, perhaps even with longing, because they needed to complete their tasks. He had learned that much from them. He owed them that much. That was why he had chosen to become an astronaut, had worked toward that singular goal for so many years, because he owed the numbers for everything he was and anything less than pushing the practical limits of human knowledge would have been a betrayal of that trust. He never could have put this obligation into words and, if pressed, likely would have denied that any obligation existed at all and yet it was there nonetheless, a kind of counterweight to balance those things he would never understand. That was his gift and it was his obligation.

  Even so many years later when he was alone in the empty house in the weeks and months after Barb had left him and Quinn had gone into the ground, after everything he had come to think of as having permanence had disappeared from his grasp, did the numbers not remain? In the chaos of everything that had come, did they not remain his constant companions even in the endless gloaming of his days in the cul-de-sac? T
he numbers were clear and precise and when he aligned them they told the truth, always, without question or innuendo and that truth had provided a path for him to follow. He had thought that Quinn could follow much the same path. That she could be like he was. That she could be just like he was.

  He called Barb right before Quinn went to bed and they spoke briefly and then he handed the phone to Quinn and said, “Tell Mommy good night,” and instead Quinn said, “Daddy says Grandpa is going to die.” Again he told her to say good night and this time she did so. He took the phone back without comment and said, “We miss you.”

  “What in god’s name did you tell her?” she said.

  “I told her the truth,” he said, and when she did not respond he said, “I thought she needed to know what was going on. She misses you.”

  “I miss her too,” she said. “I miss you both.”

  “We can come out there,” he said. “If you need us to.”

  “There’s no reason to do that. It’ll just upset Quinn.”

  “She can handle it,” he said.

  She did not respond. In the silence, he wanted to somehow tell her that he had learned something about their daughter, that she had a gift, but he could think no way to express that now. He could find no words.

  They talked for a few minutes longer and then he said good-bye and hung up the phone and looked to Quinn. “You know, that’s not a nice thing to say,” he said to her.

  Quinn was seated on the bed in her pajamas. “What isn’t?” she said.

  “Telling Mommy that I said Grandpa’s going to die.”

  “But he is going to die.”

  “She already knows that.”

  “But she didn’t know that I know that.”

  “That’s true,” he said. Then: “It’s time for bed.”

  “Can we watch another show?”

  “No.”

  She was looking at him as if getting ready to make another request but instead she simply said, “OK,” and let him tuck her into bed and kiss her good night and when she lay there, at last under the covers, he said, “How long have you known that four was red?”