The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  Such were his thoughts as he drove out of that same silent cul-de-sac yet again, scowling into the early-morning traffic and even cursing periodically under his breath, thinking of Jennifer and wondering why he was somehow unable to simply enjoy what had happened, why there was, instead, a strong and unshakable sense of unease and disappointment, the equation continuing to roll out in front of him in a faded ghost scrawl impossible to read. His work, the only part of his life that had always maintained within it a sense of clarity, had faded into that equation as well. He was a mathematician, an engineer, an astronaut, but whatever meaning or significance these terms had once held had become as obscure as everything else.

  The two parking spaces directly in front of Starbucks were taken up by a light brown sedan that slung across both spaces diagonally so he pulled the rental car into a space slightly farther away and parked. He grabbed his laptop bag from the passenger seat and stepped out into a morning already unbearably hot and humid despite the relatively early hour, the sun a flat white disc above him, his head no longer throbbing but tender and fuzzy. It occurred to him that he did not even know what day it was.

  He was just stepping past the sedan when he saw the blonde barista, Audrey. She stood by the door of the coffeeshop and another young woman, also in the green apron of her employment, stood at her side. Both stared at him intently as he rounded the hood of the car. “Oh thank god!” Audrey said. Her eyes did not leave him.

  Before them, in a wire chair next to the door, slumped a man who Keith at first did not recognize, the table before him tilted to lean against a jumbled collection of chairs as if to match the position of the sedan parked just in front of it.

  The barista Keith did not know had been holding a phone to her ear and snapped it shut as he stepped onto the sidewalk. “He still won’t pick up,” she said.

  “Thank god you’re here,” Audrey said, apparently to Keith. “This is the astronaut guy I was telling you about,” she told the other girl.

  The response: “Cool.”

  “He passed out,” Audrey said.

  “Yeah, we can’t wake him up,” the other girl said.

  “We don’t know what to do,” Audrey said.

  “I called my boyfriend but he’s not answering,” the other girl said.

  They had spoken in a nearly unceasing outrush of words and now they both paused as if waiting for him to say something in response. He glanced down at the man in the chair, at the top of his close-cropped scalp. The man snored loudly.

  “It’s Peter,” Audrey said.

  “Who?” He looked more closely at the man now—a thick wrecked frame in the wire chair like some rare breed of ox that had passed into unconsciousness—and with a shock he realized that it was, once again, the loud Ukrainian man. Fantastic. “Hey,” he said. He leaned in and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Peter.” He tried to remember his last name but it would not come to him. “Hey,” he said again. He leaned closer: Peter’s breath so awful smelling that he actually jolted back from it as from a snake or a spider, the stench making his own stomach churn. “He’s passed out drunk,” Keith said.

  “Wow,” Audrey said.

  “What should we do?” the other girl said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. After a moment he looked up and saw that both of them were staring at him. “What?”

  “He was really weird,” Audrey said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was stumbling around telling Auds how much he loved her,” the other said.

  Audrey did not respond.

  “You OK?” Keith said.

  “Yeah,” Audrey said.

  “Then he went outside and sat down and fell asleep or passed out or whatever,” the other girl said.

  Keith stood there looking at them both. A woman crossed in front of him, dragging two children by their hands and eyeing him with suspicion. She reached the door and released one of the children’s hands long enough to open it and then disappeared inside the coffeeshop.

  “What are you gonna do?” Audrey said.

  Keith looked at her and then looked back at Peter again. “What am I going to do?”

  “You know what to do, right?” the other said. “I mean, you’re an astronaut and everything.”

  He looked at her, at the confused sense of fear in her eyes and at the man slumped in the wire chair. Then he said, “Do you know his phone number or anything?”

  The other barista was smiling, likely excited that something separate from her regular work routine was happening. “No number,” she said.

  “He lives near me somewhere,” Keith said.

  “Maybe I should call the police? That seems like a good idea,” the other girl said.

  “No,” Audrey said. “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?” the other said. “We can’t just leave him here. This is a place of business.”

  Audrey took a step toward Keith, her hands gently wringing her apron strings. “David’s not answering either,” she said. “He’s the manager. He’s supposed to deal with this kind of thing. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Everything will be fine,” Keith said. “Calm down.” He knew that he should tell her to call the police and have them pick Peter up and take him home, but he did not. Instead he looked at the man asleep in the wire chair. He thought momentarily of his migraines: those he had suffered on the space station during the mission and those after his return to Earth. Then he leaned in and placed his hand on Peter’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, Peter,” he said. “Wake up, Peter. Wake up.”

  “Wow, he’s really out,” Audrey said. She leaned forward to look at him. She might have appeared older when she was behind the counter in her apron and was responding to orders and firing up the espresso machine—perhaps that was what Peter saw—but now she looked like what she was: maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. Only a girl. Beautiful, but only a girl.

  “Yeah, he’s out all right,” Keith said.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “He’s, like, superloaded,” the other girl said.

  Peter had gestured in the general direction of his home when Keith had seen him in the cul-de-sac the night he dropped the television, but there was no way to know which house was his. He thought it must have been on Riverside, the street that Keith’s cul-de-sac emptied onto, but beyond that all the houses were the same.

  “OK,” Keith said. “We need to get his address from his driver’s license. I’m going to try to roll him forward and you’re going to see if you can get his wallet.”

  “I’m not touching him,” the other girl said.

  Audrey did not look at him, keeping her eyes focused on Peter’s lumbering shape in the chair, his mouth open and a few gray teeth visible. “All right,” she said.

  Keith leaned in and slipped his arms under Peter’s and shifted him forward. Peter’s head lay gently on his shoulder. Apart from a slight shift in his breathing, Peter made no sound. It was as if they were involved in some lovers’ embrace, these two men, so tender that one had fallen asleep in the arms of the other.

  “What if he throws up on you?” the other girl said.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I need you to step back and be quiet,” Keith said.

  Then Audrey: “A little more. I can’t quite get it.”

  He shifted Peter’s body forward as far as he could, cradling most of the man’s weight against his chest and shoulder.

  “Got it!” Audrey said, her voice an excited giggle.

  Keith grunted and shifted Peter’s bulk into the chair again, his own stomach lurching from the effort, the hangover a rotten tumbling inside of him. He knew at some point he would need to get the man into his car. Unless he could get him at least partially awake he did not think he and these tiny girls could manage it.

  He held Peter’s sweating head in his hands for a moment and let it drop slowly back to a resting position. Audrey was smiling
and handed him the wallet. It was nearly empty—no credit cards or business cards or much of anything else—but his driver’s license was there. Petruso Kovalenko, 3444 Riverside Street.

  “Hi, George,” Audrey said.

  One of the regulars had come in from the parking lot: a gray man with a blue “U.S. Navy Retired” cap perched upon his head and a bent wooden cane gripped in one gnarled fist. “Young lady,” the man said. “What’s the situation?”

  “Ask him,” Audrey said.

  The man had extended his hand. “George Campbell, U.S. Navy retired,” he said.

  “Keith Corcoran.” He took the man’s hand and they shook.

  “You’re the astronaut,” Campbell said, his eyes flicking to Keith’s polo and back to his face again.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “USAF?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s this guy’s story?”

  “Long night.”

  “I can see that. What’s the plan then?”

  “Plan is to get him home.”

  “How are we gonna do that?”

  “Still working on it.” He looked up at Campbell. The old man’s eyes were wide, his cane held in his grip more like a weapon than a walking aid.

  The woman who had entered Starbucks earlier with her children now poked her head out of the door. “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Just one moment,” the second barista said.

  “How much longer?” the woman said.

  “One moment, ma’am,” Audrey said.

  The other barista rolled her eyes and the woman disappeared back through the door.

  “Go inside,” Keith said.

  The second barista looked at him as if to confirm the order was meant for her and then exhaled loudly. “I don’t see why I have to,” she said.

  Keith continued to look at her and a moment later she turned and did as he had asked.

  It was quiet then, the three of them surrounding Peter on the sidewalk in the ever-increasing heat of the morning. “I’m going to need to bring my car closer,” Keith said and both Audrey and George Campbell nodded in unison.

  He stepped out to the parking lot and slid behind the wheel of the rental car. Through the windshield the three of them were a comical group: George Campbell and Audrey looking expectant under the green awning and flanking the slumbering Ukrainian as if unlikely bodyguards. He put the car in reverse and backed up to the sidewalk so that the passenger door opened directly in front of Peter’s slumbering form. Then he exited the car again and returned to stand beside the inert body.

  “Think you can give me a hand with this?” Keith said.

  “I may be old but I’m not crippled,” Campbell said. “What say I lift some and you pull?”

  “He’s heavy,” Keith said.

  “I have no doubt of that,” Campbell said. He moved behind Peter’s chair and hooked the cane handle around an adjacent chair and slung his hands under Peter’s arms. “It didn’t occur to me this morning that by oh-eight-hundred I’d have my hands shoved into another man’s armpits,” Campbell said.

  Audrey giggled. More customers had begun to arrive, each eyeing them as they passed, but Audrey remained where she was on the sidewalk in front of the store.

  Campbell strained briefly against Peter’s armpits and then quit. “OK, so that didn’t work so well.”

  “Grab an arm,” Keith said. “We’ll pull him up.” Then, more loudly: “Peter, we’re going to put you in the car.” Then, quietly again: “Give him a push, Audrey,” and Audrey put her hands on Peter’s shoulders and the three of them managed to push and pull him at least partially to his feet, a tottering configuration of muscle and bone, his head lolling about in a kind of bewilderment, eyes half open and then drifting closed again. He mumbled something that might have been a question, his voice a slur of vowels and elongated consonants: English or Ukrainian or some other language entirely.

  A short journey punctuated by a dozen declarations of shit and whoa and hold on and finally they tipped him into the small passenger seat of the rental car. Not a car made for such a situation as this but they managed to fold and press him into it as if stuffing a series of springs into a box slightly too small to hold them all.

  “Now how are you gonna get him out of there?” Campbell said.

  “I’m not sure. He lives over by me. Maybe some of the neighbors will help.”

  “I’d better follow you in my truck,” Campbell said.

  Keith nearly told him that this further act of kindness was not necessary, but then he also knew that he could not get Peter to his front door in this state, not by himself. “OK,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Damn right it is. I’m a busy man. I have the whole day scheduled to sit here on my bony ass and listen to Frank Poole bullshit about the good old days. Let’s get out of here before that old windbag shows up.”

  “I thought you two were best friends,” Audrey said.

  “Friends of necessity, sweetheart. We’re the two oldest people alive. We’re like ancient moths both trying to fly toward the light at the same time and we got tangled up in each other’s bullshit on the way.”

  “You’re so funny,” Audrey said.

  “Don’t I know it. I’m a regular comedian,” Campbell said. “Let’s get out of here, Corcoran.”

  Keith closed the passenger door and swung around to the driver’s seat and they pulled out of the parking lot. Peter snored loudly from the passenger seat, his knee partially blocking the gearshift so that Keith had to push it out of the way every time a gear change was necessary. He realized that he had not even managed to get a cup of coffee. Nonetheless, the activity had cleared his head and the sense of immediate purpose had driven away the brooding guilt of his morning. In the rearview mirror was Campbell’s blue pickup truck, the U.S. Navy Retired cap upon the old man’s head and a look of purpose and determination on his face.

  They turned into the housing development and Keith pulled the driver’s license out of his shirt pocket and looked at it and then compared it to the nearest home that passed. Kovalenko. He looked at the card again. Kovalenko. There were no trees or shrubs tall enough to obscure the home numbers, each one a black sign moving by in even increments on nearly identical earth-toned homes: 3438, 3440, 3442, and finally 3444. He pulled his car to a stop at the curb and then changed his mind and backed up a few feet and pulled into the driveway. Campbell’s truck stopped in front of the house, the door swinging open and Campbell himself emerging, the cane clicking on the concrete, his movements as quick and fluid as a teenager’s.

  “Let’s see if anyone’s home,” Keith said.

  Campbell nodded and Keith approached the front door. It opened before he was able to knock. “Mrs. Kovalenko?” he said.

  She was about his age, perhaps slightly younger, with skin the color of paper and black hair curling in at her shoulders as if to frame her pale shining face and dark almond-shaped eyes. “Yes?” she said.

  “I have Peter in the car,” he said.

  She looked at him, confused.

  “He’s pretty drunk. He was passed out and I brought him back here.” His own head remained fuzzy and in this moment between exertions he felt weak and exhausted.

  “Oh,” she said. It was more an involuntary sound than a statement or question. She looked confused and for a moment Keith wondered if she understood English. Then she stepped outside. Behind her, a child’s voice said, “Mama?” and she said something in Ukrainian in the tone of a mother trying to quiet a worried child.

  She moved past him to the car, her eyes on the window. When she passed Campbell he said, “Good morning, ma’am,” and she looked at him briefly and without expression and then went to the passenger door and opened it carefully. Peter lolled back against the seat. “Petruso,” she said. She leaned in close to him and touched his face. “Petruso,” she said again. Peter mumbled something incomprehensible in response, his head rolling back and forth until she lay her hand upo
n his sweating brow and stilled it and then stood there for a long while, staring at him, and even from where he stood Keith could hear her softly whispering: “Shhh.”

  When her husband had calmed she stepped back from the car to where Keith stood at the edge of the concrete walkway. “Thank you from bringing him home,” she said. As soon as the last syllable had been spoken she turned toward her husband again.

  “It’s not a problem,” he said. He waited for her to say something else but there were tears in her dark-lashed eyes and no further words came. “We should bring him in,” he said at last.

  She leaned toward her husband. “Petruso,” she said again. She paused and then said something in Ukrainian, a whisper.

  Peter did not move at all. The only sign that he was alive was the sound of breath rushing into and out of his body.

  “We’ll get him,” Keith said.

  “Best clear a path for us,” Campbell said from his station by the truck. “He’s as heavy as a load of bricks.”

  Peter’s wife stepped away from them. She had closed the front door to the house when she had stepped outside but now it was open again and two children peered out from the shadows. She said something that Keith could not understand and both children disappeared into the house and she walked to the doorway and then turned toward Keith again. She looked like a war bride awaiting news of her returning husband, something from an old black-and-white film, beautiful and fragile and somehow resigned to the situation, a thin, elegant woman who stared out at them with her eyes curved slightly into a kind of desperate sadness. Keith wondered if Petruso Kovalenko often appeared in this condition and if she had grown accustomed to her husband’s wrecked body being dumped back into her home.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  He grasped Peter by the arms and together he and Campbell heaved the man onto his feet. Peter seemed somewhat more awake, for when they tipped him forward his legs actually took some of the weight, feet moving in jerking, stumbling steps even though his eyes remained closed and his head rolled back and forth against his chest.