The Infinite Tides

by Christian Kiefer

  He did not clearly know where he had been when she had careened into the oak tree in his car. In orbit, somewhere, above Earth. He had occupied some stretch of fluid miles, but what did such a location mean? He had been on the surface during most of her cheerleading activities and had failed to attend a single event. Perhaps this was the true calculus, here as everywhere: the calculus of location and the understanding that the numbers themselves were possessed of a fundamental gravity comprised not of fluid motion but of fixedness. He had simply not been here, even when he was. He had formed an equation that had shaped his life and that equation had offered a solution that seemed, at the time, as clear and precise as any he had ever worked to solve. And yet it had not been the right solution. It had been no solution at all. And when he had come home at last it had been to emptiness. His family had lived here, here in this house, and it was the final location where this statement would ever be true. And where had he been?

  He was on the verge of tears when he put the car into drive at last and pulled into a wide U-turn and moved out to where the court connected to Riverside. He might have looked in the rearview mirror at the receding shape of the termite-ridden structure but he could not bear to do so, instead continuing straight ahead, staring at the road, then at Peter’s house, where Luda and the two children were outside. He actually managed to smile and wave to her as the car rolled by and when Luda saw him she motioned frantically for him to stop and he pulled over to the left side of the street and his window hummed down. “Wait,” she said. Her eyes were wide and her mouth curled up into a smile. “I will get Peter.”

  She said something to the two children in Ukrainian and they both stood there staring at Keith as she disappeared inside the house. He sat there behind the wheel, breathing in the air conditioner’s cold exhalant. There was an immediate urge to swivel around and look once more at his own house but he did not do so. “Hello, kids,” he said.

  They both giggled, their hands up at their mouths as if to hide some secret joy.

  The doors to Peter’s car were all wide open and there was the top of a bag visible from the open trunk. A few pastel-colored towels. “You guys going somewhere?” he said.

  Again, the children giggled. One of them yelled something back to him in Ukrainian that sounded like “please,” but with such a thick accent that Keith was not sure if the boy was asking for something or answering his question.

  A moment later, Peter came bursting from the inside of the house. “Astronaut Keith Corcoran, my friend,” he bellowed.

  “Peter.” Again he mustered a smile.

  “You are good friend to me, Astronaut Keith Corcoran.” Peter reached through the open window and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “You got me interview with NASA.”

  “Oh yeah. I should have asked you how that went.” He glanced over his shoulder at the house now, did so without thinking. It looked just as it always had. He wondered how long it would take before the tent obliterated it from view, and then how strange it would look to have that monstrous tent in the cul-de-sac. As if some evil circus had come to town.

  “You could have asked but I did not know how well this goes until today. Just this morning. Today they call me and say they want second interview to meet director of research center. This is good news, I think.”

  Keith sat blinking, cool air roaring against his face. He reached out and turned the knob down and looked back at Peter. “Are you serious?” he said.

  “I am so very serious. I am so very serious.”

  “My god, that’s great news,” he said and despite the darkness of his mood he found himself smiling broadly.

  “This is true. Great, great news.”

  “Peter, they only do that when they’re going to offer you the job.”

  “Yes, this is same Mr. Tom Chen tells me on telephone. He calls this formality.”

  Peter was leaning in the window of the car and after a moment Keith said, “Let me get out,” and Peter stepped back and Keith opened the door and stood and extended his hand and Peter’s smile was great and luminous and there were tears in his eyes. They shook hands and Peter drew Keith into a one-armed embrace and into Keith’s ear he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you, my friend.”

  “Damn good news.” He clapped Peter on the back and Peter followed suit and then the embrace ended and they both stood on the sidewalk between the two cars, the children standing off to one side watching them. The sound of high, rhythmic beeping came from the cul-de-sac. A truck backing into position.

  “That’s fantastic,” Keith said.

  “Yes, to hell with Target and its boxes.”

  “To hell with Target,” Keith said. “When’s the second interview?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I gather the first interview went really well.”

  “They ask me technical questions. Many technical questions. But I know this even though I have not been working big telescope for some years. The same questions I would answer in Golosiiv. Nice to be asked about this again.”

  “Haven’t lost your mind working for Target?”

  “No, I still have my mind,” Peter said, laughing.

  “That must be a relief.”

  “Yes.” There was a pause. “Today we go to beach to celebrate.”

  “Day off?”

  “Yes. Never work on Thursday.”

  “How far away is that?”

  “You have not been to beach?”

  Keith shook his head.

  “Not so far,” Peter said. “Two hours maybe. A long day and we are slow to leave. So much stuff Luda takes with us. Like we go to live there forever.”

  “Yeah, it can be like that.”

  “You see our field?” Peter motioned toward the cul-de-sac. “Already looks totally different.”

  “I keep thinking we should hot-wire one of the tractors and push my house down.”

  “My nephew can probably do this. The one I tell you about.”

  “Maybe I’ll have you call him.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You’re probably right.” Keith said. “It’s in bad shape though. They’re putting a tent around it to fumigate for the next three days. Termite infestation.”

  “Shit,” Peter said. “You will be out of house for three days then. Where to go?”

  “Hotel. And maybe for longer than that. Once the fumigation is done they’ll do the repairs.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Back to NASA maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Complicated still?”

  “Yeah.”

  Peter stood looking at him. Then he glanced at the children. They had grown tired of watching the adults talk and were now chasing each other around Peter’s car, bounding through the two open doors and across the backseat. Peter said nothing to stop them and after a brief moment he said, “Just one moment, please,” as if he was talking on the phone and had put Keith on hold. Then he walked toward the house and disappeared inside.

  Keith stood there and watched the children in their game, wondering if he should sit in the car where it was cool. Then Peter reappeared from inside, Luda just behind him. “Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said as he approached, “we would like you to come with us to beach today.”

  Keith moved his eyes from Peter to Luda and back again. Both of them smiled at him. The children stopped their running and stood just behind their parents now, staring. “Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “We insist,” Peter said. “Unless you are busy with some astronaut work. Then we do not insist. But this would be an honor for us including you in our family. You have three days to be out of house. You spend first day with our family, if this is good for you.”

  Luda said nothing but continued to smile and nod. She looked beautiful there, shining with a kind of radiance that he had not seen in her before. All the sadness that had been in her eyes when he had first seen
her was gone, replaced now by a deep and expansive joy. It felt to Keith as if that first meeting, when he had appeared at her door with Peter passed out drunk in his car, had been years ago. How long had it been? Two months?

  “Is there room for me?” Keith said.

  “You sit up front with Peter and I will sit in back with children,” Luda said.

  “There you are,” Peter said. “There is room.”

  Keith stood on the sidewalk by the rental car in silence. Again he felt as if he should look at his own house again, one final time, another final time, but instead he said, simply: “OK.”

  Peter clapped his hands. “Excellent! You will do this,” he said. “I am very pleased.”

  Luda moved forward and touched Keith’s arm and then leaned over and said nothing but kissed him on the cheek and Keith felt heat rise to his face and he wondered if he was blushing.

  Peter laughed. “She is very happy for you.”

  “Yes,” Luda said. Then again: “Very much, yes.”

  They were only able to exchange a few furtive words about the earth-bound comet as they embarked, Peter asking him what he knew in a whisper, perhaps expecting some inside NASA information that, of course, Keith did not have. “This is one-in-a-million chance,” Peter said to him, still whispering, “but still good to know.”

  “Sure,” Keith said. “I was surprised it made the front page.”

  Peter put a finger to his lips and then pointed to the backseat. It was unclear if he meant to indicate the children or Luda or all of them. “Not much news, I think,” Peter whispered. “Otherwise maybe not so important for front page.”

  “I hope so,” Keith said.

  “It is good to pray,” Peter said.

  “It is always good to pray,” Luda said from the backseat.

  Peter was quiet. Then he said, still in a whisper, “Maybe we talk about these things later.”

  “OK,” Keith said.

  “They put in gate,” Luda said from the backseat.

  He nearly asked her what she meant but then he saw them: a crew of construction workers at the entrance to the development, finally installing the promised gate that would separate the Estates from the rest of the earth. Sealing it off. That was what he imagined. As if an airlock was being closed.

  The car pulled through the strip of giant parking lots and then the interstate scrolled out before them, uniformly gray and endless. As they drove his mind returned to the comet. He knew its orbit would likely be some huge ellipsis, eccentricity perhaps pushing toward the parabolic, this side of the vast curve hooking through the Hill sphere of the sun, the other flung into the far distance beyond the edge of the solar system, such an orbit turning again and again and again over millions of years, the radius of apoapsis and periapsis unwatched and unmonitored until this moment when the line of one orbit happened to intersect with the line of another. A one-in-a-million chance but still a chance, the mathematics of which could hardly be believed. Two heliocentric orbits, one of which spun, perhaps, on a temporal cycle counted in millions of years, and the two actually intersecting. Even now he could feel the numbers shifting about in the darkness inside of him, filling in along the imaginary lines, circles within circles, parabolas and ellipses hooking and looping as the numbers arrayed themselves dimly along their shadowed paths.

  He wondered what the variables would look like. Would Eriksson know anything about it? Maybe he would call him once they reached the beach.

  Peter related the interview with Tom Chen in painstaking detail, even going back over the individual sentences and filling in nuance and implication, so much so that a half hour of interview time was rendered into an hour-long description and despite the repetition and convolution of the story Keith found that he continued to be interested. The sound of Peter’s voice made him feel calm and normal and the children in the backseat with their handheld games and occasional explosions of boredom and fatigue were welcome diversions from the long inward turn that had been most of Keith’s time since returning from space, since Quinn’s death, since returning to gravity. Five minutes into the drive the children had begun to ask when they would arrive but now were settled and quiet in the backseat and Luda would periodically bring out little toys from a bag at her feet to settle them during those moments when they became bored with whatever they had been doing.

  “You’re a good mother,” Keith said at one point, half turning to look at her.

  Luda smiled at him. “I am sorry if they are too loud,” she said.

  “They’re not too loud.”

  She blushed and smiled, averting her eyes in embarrassment.

  “You are right,” Peter said. “She is very good mother. Best mother.” He looked at his wife in the rearview mirror.

  Keith told them about the termites and the construction that would need to happen and that he did not know where he was going next or what he was going to do. As if in response, his phone buzzed and he glanced at the screen. Jim Mullins again. He might have been interested in chatting with Eriksson about the rumored comet but he was not interested in being lectured to. He let the call ring through to voice mail and then returned the phone to his pocket.

  “Tell us story about your being famous astronaut,” Peter said when the conversation slowed.

  “I don’t know,” Keith said hesitantly.

  “This is what you say but good time for story.”

  “Didn’t you get your fill of that yet?”

  “Not so much,” Peter said.

  “Maybe he does not want to talk now,” Luda said.

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. He paused a moment and then said, “What kind of story exactly?” All around them, the gray wastes of neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs and stores and parking lots continued along the interstate.

  “Something that everyone will enjoy,” Peter said.

  The kids stopped what they were doing and fell instantly silent. “Yes,” the little boy, Marko, said, his voice high and heavily accented. “Yes, please.”

  “Hmm,” Keith said. He thought for a long moment and although he knew they were asking him for something about space, the images that came to his mind were of Quinn’s funeral. “Let me think about it for a bit,” he said.

  “OK, you think,” Peter said.

  After a time the children took up their game in the backseat again and this time Peter joined in and they picked out colors in the landscape and the others guessed which color he was thinking of and Keith was silent in the front seat as Peter drove.

  The freeway had been hemmed by walls as if some ever-flowing concrete aqueduct but those walls fell away now, revealing endlessly sprawling neighborhoods and strip malls linked together by familiarly named giant storefronts in faux-Tuscan architecture with arches and olive branch motifs. Then gone again.

  He could not imagine an ocean being at the nether end of this epic suburbia but the fact of it was apparently true: there was an edge to the continent where the landmass lapped up against the sea and the shallows broke into the deeper blue of the ocean and while he had known in some dim part of himself that the ocean was a drivable distance from the empty house, it had never occurred to him to actually go there, as if there was some shift in physical dimension or desire that needed to be satisfied in order for the act to be undertaken at all, not in terms of motion but in terms of the idea itself.

  He had only been to the beach a half dozen times, all of these when he was doing his graduate work at Stanford and they would drive out Sand Hill Road and through Woodside to the cold Northern California ocean at Half Moon Bay and he and Barb would watch Quinn run back and forth across the surf and he would try to keep his daughter as dry as possible given the near-constant chill rolling in off the Pacific, an impossible goal set along that endless strip of gray sand. Those were the short days when they were still clearly a family, the three of them, parents with a child, a toddler quickly growing out of those years and unsteadily careening up and down the surfline on sturdy bowlegs. If anything
had ever been said between them, husband and wife, he could not recall, the memories mute and blissful and empty. All such memories now seemed spliced into the images of the funeral: the ocean lapping against the heels of the mourners, the tide spilling into the grave.

  Now in the front seat of Peter’s car with his wife and children in the backseat and Peter asking him to tell a story: What story was there to tell? Everything in his life had telescoped into guilt and bereavement and a kind of emptiness that he still did not entirely understand. What was there to understand in the end?

  Everything you have ever known will one day rise like smoke. The dreams and desires you have had or will have. Even now. This was no different. Nor could it be.

  “We want a story,” Marko said from the backseat.

  Keith could hear Luda’s voice quieting her son and a moment later the entire car fell silent. He thought he should tell them about how his marriage had failed without his notice, about how the decisions he had made had been the wrong ones, about how his daughter had been killed while he was floating in an oxygen-filled chamber two hundred and seventeen miles above the surface of Earth. He thought he should tell them that the moment he had worked so hard to achieve had only taught him what he could not understand, that the universe was beyond anything he could ever articulate, and that the one person who might have understood that idea was already gone. He thought he should tell them that he had failed her, that he had failed himself, that he had failed his team and NASA and so had failed everyone and there was to be no answer, instead only the thin burning whine and agony of his migraines and the long and unanswerable questions that would extend on before him forever and would never find an end.

  The children in the backseat silent and expectant and he could feel their eyes against the back of his head, waiting for him to begin even as his phone began to vibrate once more. He knew there was a story he could tell them—the same story he had told Nicole—but he knew it was not really the truth, at least not as he had experienced it.

  The mission had been wrapped into everything to come after but this was only because that was how he had placed it in his memory. The trajectory was simple indeed. But it had not been that way when he was actually there in orbit, when he had had no thoughts of family or of the things of the earth. When even the numbers had fallen silent. And when he simply was—an existence, a being, a man—and there had been nothing else, the situation of gravity falling away as a kind of abstraction. And then he knew he had felt that same way when he had come through the airlock into the space station for the very first time, a feeling of panic that flooded through him and then was gone so quickly that he had forgotten it had even come, forgotten it until this moment. And it had not been fear. Instead it had been the realization that he was finally entering the destiny he had always imagined for himself and yet he already knew that none of it could be described in the language he had spent his life studying. He could have calculated everything there, every physical object he encountered, but what would that tell him? How would that explain the sensation of simply being weightless, with Earth spinning below him as he crested forever into that endless fractal universe? There was no equation. There was simply no equation for such a moment even though all his life he had worked with the numbers in an environment just like this one: in a kind of weightlessness that was his own mind. He might have been able to tell the truth of this to Quinn but he did not know if she would have listened and who else could have understood it? Who else had ever understood him at all? My god. There was no equation for any of it. Not for the universe, not for his loss, not for the decisions he had made or for the feeling of her hand curling into his own.