“Hi.”
He stood there in silence, looking at her. “What?” he said at last.
“I just wanted to know what you thought.”
“Of ?”
“Our construction project.” She nodded in the direction of the vacant lot, of the tractors, the freshly cleared earth there.
He looked at the lot and then back at her again. “What I think?” he said.
“Walt and I decided to forge ahead,” she said, as if not hearing him. “It’s just been sitting there and we’re getting a great deal on the contractor.”
“You’re telling me you own that lot?”
“We bought that lot with this one. And one other on Creekside but that one got built and rented out.”
“OK.”
She smiled. Her teeth a perfect white arc. “Anyway, sorry you won’t be able to sit out there and do whatever it is you do with your friend. Don’t ask; don’t tell. That’s my policy. Anyway, it’s an investment and the time is now.” Her eyes flicked from his face to the construction site and back again. Bright and wide as if crazed. No, not crazed. Not that. Triumphant. “Just wanted to let you know,” she said.
“That you’re building a house?”
“Yep.”
“OK. You’re building a house.” He looked down the cul-de-sac to the field. The earth flat and dead and empty apart from the two tractors.
“This could have worked out differently, you know,” she said.
“How so?”
“You know.”
He looked at her again. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Really? You really can’t figure this out?”
It was quiet. Then he said: “You’re doing this as some kind of punishment?”
“Oh, come on, neighbor. You’re not that important.”
“The house is sold, Jennifer. I’m moving anyway.”
“Good for you.”
He threw up his hands. “Well, OK,” he said. “Good for me. Good for you. Good for everyone.”
She stared at him in silence, her eyes slowly brimming with tears. “Asshole,” she said at last. She swiveled around and began to walk back across the street quickly. Halfway across she turned back toward him and shouted, “You’re such an asshole,” and then swiveled back again and continued until she reached the door of her house, wrenching the door handle, and then stepping back to pound that flat surface with her clenched fist. Even from across the street, he could hear her words clearly: “Nicole, you unlock this goddamned door right now, young lady. Unlock the door this instant or you will be grounded! Do you hear me? Grounded!” She continued to bang on the door, a dull thunking sound that reverberated and echoed through the subdivision, each report met and repeated by a second and third so that the sound of it seemed a poorly executed drum roll, Keith watching her all the while from the frame of the empty garage. Incredulous. Dumbfounded.
Work on the vacant lot continued all the next day and the day after, the earthmovers replaced with backhoes to dig out the foundation area. Gravel trucks arrived to dump their loads and workmen began putting together the forms for the foundation. The basic footprint of the house was already roughed out with stacks of boards ready to be propped and staked into the various shapes necessary for the pouring of concrete. After that, the solidity of the structure would begin to rise.
In the early evening he opened the garage door and stepped through it and looked out at that scene. The area where the sofa had once rested now carried the rudiments of a foundation and there was a layer of gravel extending across it. He supposed they could walk the telescope over the various impediments and could stand out there or could even bring some metal lawn chairs to sit upon but such an attempt would be a weak substitute. What once had been was already gone and it was likely best to accept that and move on, a lesson he knew to be one he was loath to learn but which kept arriving at his doorstep like a dead bird delivered by a pet cat. Here it was again. He found himself wondering if he could find information on the Internet on hot-wiring a tractor. Perhaps the termites had weakened the structure of his house enough that he could push the whole thing over. That would be something, indeed.
Sally Erler called him in the early afternoon, clearly relieved that he had agreed to the tenting of the house and telling him that the young couple who were buying the place remained interested, assuming the termite damage was dealt with. An hour later, Sally Erler herself arrived with some documents for him to sign, indicating that the sale would continue pending the repairs. The escrow closed in just over a month, which meant the contractor would have to work quickly to finish during that window. Keith knew he was agreeing to pour a substantial amount of money into the house and that it was money he would be essentially throwing away. He would have had to have split any profits with Barb, had there been any, but he had no doubt that the losses would be solely his to bear. Somehow he would have to pay.
Mullins called again soon after Sally Erler and again he let the call go to voice mail. He could not have explained why he did not want to take the call but knew he did not want to talk to Mullins or Eriksson or anyone from NASA, at least not until the house was tented and he knew what he was doing next. He imagined that they were dismantling his office, pulling out the furniture for the next astronaut to occupy, that they had already reclassified him into some other position that would require him to move to a different building entirely. Such were his nightmares. He wondered how far he had fallen and he did not want to know. Not yet. He would have to be out of the house starting tomorrow or the next day, depending on when they tented the house and filled it with poison. He knew he should call the home office but there was also a sense of irritation at the phone calls. They had ejected him from Houston; let them wait a few days for his return call. He had trained himself to think only of the future, had started that training on his own when he was in grade school and he thought he had actually reached the future he had been made for. And maybe he had, at least for that brief moment. The cold fact was that each time Mullins or Eriksson called he thought not of the future but of the past and there was nothing there but his failed marriage and Quinn’s death.
He thought that he should just find some deep recess in the house somewhere—the attic or the crawl space under the stairs—and let them tent the house around him, an idea that left him with a sense of outrage that shivered through him like an electric knife, leaving him raging in silence at the kitchen table, the shadow of the idea remaining under his tongue like a sharp and terrible stone.
He stood and opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the concrete patio under the blazing late-afternoon sun and waited for the feeling of unease to pass. His heart beat heavy in his chest and indeed there was the faint whine of his migraine now, the first time he had heard that sound in several weeks, his eyes already clamping shut against the light of the sun as he scuttled back through the sliding glass door sideways like a crab.
At the sink he swallowed a pill and drank from one of the chipped mugs Barb had left behind, and after a time he leaned into the sink itself and splashed cold water against his face. His heart continued to thump in his chest but perhaps not as insistently as it had only a few minutes before. The whine more distant? He was not sure. He thought he should probably get out of the house for a few hours, if for no other reason than to stop staring at the same blank walls, but when he finally looked at the cover of the newspaper he immediately sat at the kitchen table and all thoughts of the house and the poison and the termites flooded out of him all at once.
There it was at last: the earthbound comet on the front page.
Shit.
He had watched its approach through the columns of newsprint, its great parabola of gravitational motion swinging it back and forth through the pages, sometimes disappearing altogether and then appearing in some back section, once even in the Sunday magazine that nestled amid the full-color advertisement inserts. And now here it was on the cover, with a photograph and a block h
eadline at the top of its column reading: “Comet to Hit Earth?” It was a headline as if from a tabloid. He wondered where Peter was right now, if he yet knew that the comet had finally become real news. Surely he was well aware already.
He read the column and flipped to the next page where the story continued. A one-in-a-million chance of strike. A greater chance of winning a major metropolitan lottery jackpot. One scientist quoted as calling the whole thing a knee-jerk reaction to something astronomers see all the time: objects moving in various trajectories all over the solar system. Difficult to track them all. With the proper funding they could dedicate more time and effort to it, but the economy was terrible. A call for additional funding for tracking and various technologies. Peter had intimated that Keith might know more about the capabilities of NASA to ward off a comet strike but if there were missiles that could explode any object that came blasting through the outer planets on its trajectory toward Earth, he did not know about them. He could likely create the math for this kind of scenario but beyond that there was little he could do.
If the comet’s impact had any sense of urgency beyond the talking of politicians and occasional scientists he also had no idea. He wondered if there was any talk of it at NASA, if the people he knew there were joking about it as they went about their daily work, the regular public being at some disconnect from the realm of scientists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, astronauts. The universe a mechanism with more moving parts than could ever be calculated but the chance of any given part colliding with any other given part infinitesimal. His greatest achievement had been the robotic arm. What good was that against the actual universe?
Nineteen
The morning had returned to the firestorm of heat that he thought had ended a month previous, the air humid and stagnant and lying upon the cul-de-sac as if to press everything to a motionless stop. The whining sound of the previous day had ceased at some point during the night, apparently obliterated by slumber and painkillers. What remained was only exhaustion: his mouth a burning, cotton-filled hole and his body creaking in the late-morning sunlight.
He lifted the newspaper from the step and stood in the doorway, glancing at the headline and noting that there was no further mention of the comet, at least not on the front page. The lack of news was disappointing if only because the comet had become a momentary excitement, now apparently already over.
The two suitcases had been repacked with the same clothes he had taken on his mission and these sat at his side in the doorway. The remainder of his clothes had already been packed into two cardboard boxes and had been stowed in the trunk of the rental car. As for the rest of it: he did not know what he would do with the bed but he would likely leave the cheap table and chair behind or take them out to the curb for whoever might happen by. Perhaps they would travel to the location of the sofa and some family would eat their cereal at the table each morning. The thought gave him some sense of pleasure.
On the street before him, various workers from the pest company were busy removing equipment from the trucks and vans lined up along the cul-de-sac. He had been told that the tenting process would take three days, after which the contractor would return to give him a proper estimate for repairing the damage. For now, he would stop in at Starbucks with his newspaper and then would drive across the freeway to the long string of hotels. He would rent a room for three days; beyond that period stretched an infinite field of blank space. He could return to the house, of course, but it would be undergoing major reconstruction to repair the termite damage, and once that was complete the escrow would be over and the new owners would move in. It made more sense to simply remain in a hotel. Somewhere. Maybe it was time to fly out to Atlanta and look at his daughter’s grave, but what purpose could that possibly serve? Her name engraved on a stone. An immaculate expanse of green lawn. What else? Silence everywhere on Earth.
He opened the trunk and dropped the black suitcase and its matching overnight bag into the vacancy beside the cardboard boxes of his clothes. There rested all the possessions he would retain. He might have needed a moving truck had he simply opened his mail and paid the storage unit bill but of course he had not done so. And there had been only one box in the storage he had any real desire to open or possess anyway and it was the only one he could never replace.
For the next hour he drifted through the house, each room just as empty as on the day he first returned from the mission, the only significant change being that blotchy single coat of eggshell, pale yellow leaking through, and the holes in the walls from the recent termite search. He wandered upstairs and stood for a moment in the doorway to Quinn’s room and then entered that gray cube but he could not hear her voice or feel her hand or touch her face.
Nearly every time they spoke, Hoffmann had said he sounded angry and each time he had left their conversations perplexed. But he knew now that what he felt was indeed anger, or had been anger, and that there was a reason for it because what he had been ever orbiting in his thoughts had not been Quinn’s death after all but rather his own utter and complete failure to be what she needed him to be, what he needed himself to be. Because the decisions he had made, again and again, had been wrong and now he could not go back and fix them. It was too late for that. It may have been too late from the moment he had decided to follow the absurd impossible equation of his life through to the absurd impossible place in which he had come to find himself: not as an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician but as a man who had failed as a father, as a husband, perhaps even as a human being. Hoffmann had told him the goal was to move through his experiences. He did not know if this was what he meant, but he certainly did not feel angry now. Only disappointed, lonely, and sad.
He moved through the hall and down the stairs, shouldering the laptop bag and stepping outside at last. The foreman from the pest company stood by his company truck and Keith told him he was leaving and they shook hands.
“Maybe you won’t even have to pay for this,” the foreman said.
“How so?”
“Comet.”
“Right,” Keith said. “The comet.”
“Maybe it’ll just fall on the credit card company.”
“Maybe.”
His house was a flurry of activity now: the door wide open as workmen in blue jumpsuits carried their fans and equipment inside, the thick vinyl of the tent itself unrolled all around the perimeter. At the end of the cul-de-sac, construction workers in hard hats were starting their day of labor in the dirt. The cement truck had arrived and was backing into position to pour the foundation, the rest of the crew standing with their various implements at ready as if warriors preparing to fill in some mass grave, their faces masks of resignation.
He set the laptop bag in the trunk and when he turned back momentarily to look at the cul-de-sac he saw Jennifer in the upstairs window of her house across the street watching him, the blinds pulled open. She was framed in the bare window, the sunlight cresting across her face from the east so that she was half consumed in shadow. He expected her to turn away when he looked up but she did not do so and after a moment he raised his hand in a gesture that was somewhere between a wave and a salute. She did not move at first and then her hand rose and pressed against the glass and whether it was meant as a greeting or was simply an involuntary movement he did not know.
There was nothing holding him but for a long time he did not drive away from the empty house, remaining in the rental car and watching, through the greasy sunbaked film of the windshield, the scene before him. He had thought once that the landscape was some failed attempt at perfection, as if the manifestation of some Euclidian ideal, an equation that was both solvable and tangible with predictability built into it as a standard. Perhaps that was why Barb had chosen this place: because it promised to be eternally the same, never aging, always new, always clean, always perfect. But what they had come to was a landscape branching endlessly into a vinculum of zeros. The only visible differences between one point and the next
being vacancy and absence: empty homes, empty lots. At some point even these would be filled in. Then every cul-de-sac the same. This house. Some other house. Every house a box containing a family dreaming their lives within a closed loop, always repeating. And yet Peter and Luda were here with their children, from halfway across the world. And Jennifer and Walt and Nicole, with their own lives and their own problems. Each cast into a landscape constructed of sameness and yet each dream unique unto itself.
And there stood his own. He had told himself—and kept telling himself—that the house had no meaning to him at all; he had barely lived there in the days before the mission and in fact had spent more time in its empty shell than he ever had when it had been occupied by his family. He knew he had exchanged more words during the past year with anonymous grade-school students on the station’s shortwave radio than he had with his own daughter in this house. And yet he did not leave. It was as if the shape of the container held a resonance, the whole of the structure gently cradling the idea of what might have been despite the fact that he had not a single concrete memory of its contents except for the days of endless unpacking when they had first moved and that final conversation with Quinn. Even now what images he could form of her in the house were as spectral as the waking memories of his dreams and his ability to recall himself within those same walls, at least from the time before the mission, failed in equal measure. But despite this insubstantiality there remained a sense of attachment to the idea of the place, this box that should have been filled with memories but was filled instead with loss and guilt and emptiness.
The Infinite Tides Page 33