Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

The feeling that she had sat at his bedside during the night was slow to dissipate and the following day he was in his office again with that feeling still clinging to him, as if her ghost was seated across from him, staring at him bleakly throughout the day and in response he did the only thing he could think to do, which was to pour himself into his work like a man jumping into a dark sea.

Mullins visited him in the early afternoon: an official or unofficial check-in, he did not know which. Yes, he was feeling much better. Thank you. Yes, he would talk to Yasbek later in the day. Yes, he would be able to complete his physical rehabilitation appointment. Everything was fine. No need to worry. Everything was fine.

There were still two weeks of physical therapy as their trainer and NASA medical personnel worked to bring their gravity-weak bodies back to their pre-mission selves. Most of his fellow crew members came in for the appointments and then went home to be with their families. Occasionally he would see Tim Fisher or Petra staying an hour or two to look at the medical data but that was all. But Keith was different. He would return to his office after showering and would sit at his desk and work and rework his equations. Hours would pass without notice. And he hardly thought of Quinn, her face swimming out of the darkness only in those last few minutes before he drifted off to sleep. Barb’s nightly phone calls upon his return to Houston had not served to alter the anesthetized quality of his days and nights. She had even asked him to put the house on the market when and if he returned, as if her request served to underscore the finality of their dissolved marriage, and he had agreed. And of the conversation he had had with Quinn, the final argument: he had managed to will himself into a steady forgetfulness that was akin to ignorance. It had never happened so there could be no guilt and so he did not think of it at all.

The night they were released from the physical rehabilitation program, the crew went to a local bar to celebrate. All of them were taking brief vacations with their families, all returning home. There had been a time when Keith too might have voiced similar anticipation but that time now felt distant and alien to him. They all knew that his wife had left him, that she had told him she was not returning to the house, that her own “vacation” to her mother’s home in Georgia was not a vacation but something else entirely.

At the celebratory beer-drinking, Eriksson took him aside and invited him to stay with him and his family near Houston, told Keith that they had room and would be glad to have him. The offer was so unexpected that Keith was rendered silent. But then he told Eriksson that he would be fine, that he appreciated it but he would be fine. Eriksson slapped him on the back and told him that he thought he would say that but that he was serious and the offer was there.

It occurred to him now that some part of him must have already known, that Eriksson’s words must have resonated in him somewhere so that he could feel the ending of it, the crew in its last moments of being a crew, an understanding that this might be the only crew he would ever be a part of.

They returned to their corner table and toasted everything they could think of: the ISS itself, the shuttle, the ground crew in general, the ground crew by name, their replacement crew, the CAPCOM, NASA, their waitress, the bartender, the bar itself, the city, the country. The beer became tequila and whiskey and the evening blurred and blurred and blurred.

When they left the bar, he embraced each of them in turn and they disappeared into their separate worlds and he drove his weaving car back to JSC, returning to his office and sitting again at his desk. If he was aware at all that his crew members had come to feel responsible for him, it was not a conscious awareness, although now, sitting on the floor of Quinn’s empty room in the cul-de-sac, the fact seemed obvious. They thought he was coming off the rails. Perhaps they were correct.

But there was no such self-awareness then, only the desire to return to his office and continue the work he had already started, if only for an hour or two as a way to clear his head before returning to the crew quarters and sleep. The multiple pitchers of beer and various shots of tequila and whiskey had thinned him at the edges and there was a sense of confusion in his thoughts, a shaking or trembling amidst the field of logic he had constructed or reconstructed. He thought again of being at the end of the robotic arm and what he felt was a strange and inexplicable feeling of panic, as if his boots had broken loose of the foot restraint and his body was adrift in the infinite reaches of space. The panic was the same when he recalled the vague half memory of Quinn somehow visiting him during his migraine weeks before. The whole of his thoughts had come to reflect a reality he did not want to acknowledge, a reality wherein he might shatter all at once into the brittle unannealed shards of a grief he had managed so effectively to avoid.

And so he had returned to his office. He had discovered a problem in the calculation of the orbit paths, a problem in the system itself, and had set himself to repairing that problem, to writing a better equation and a better program and he sat down at his desk again to continue that work and thought momentarily of the offer Eriksson had made, and then realized he was weeping, alone in his office, his crew members all around him fading like nebulae, their various colors off-gassing into the darkness. The chair across from his desk remained empty.

When he woke in the morning it was to a voice: “Captain Corcoran. Hey, Keith, time to wake up.” It was Jim Mullins. Of course it was. Mullins who closed the door and then sat across from him, the desk between them with its scattered papers and wet patch of drool. Mullins who explained to him that the office was concerned about his behavior, that he was working too much, that it was time to take some days off.

“It’s not appropriate,” Mullins had told him and when Keith had asked what that meant Mullins had said, “Appropriate for the grieving process.” He called it PTSD, actually used that term, as if he was a war veteran of some kind, although even Keith knew that the operative initial was for trauma, that they saw him as being a victim of a trauma. What he could not understand was how they failed to see how much work he was getting done. Why did they not see that? Why had they decided that they would be better off without him?

And he had told Mullins, point-blank, that he did not want to leave and what had Mullins said in return? That he would be willing to make it official by putting Keith on some kind of medical leave. That Keith needed time to grieve. As if Mullins somehow knew what he needed.

So it had gone. He had packed up his personal items from the crew quarters the next day and NASA arranged a flight to take him home.

No voice-mail messages and like a fool he had continued to dial in every day, as if someone would call him with a question or a project. Some equation that could not be solved. Some engineering issue that needed his particular expertise. Eriksson had only called twice and his offer to let Keith stay with him and his family seemed a weird joke now. What could he hope to accomplish by offering such a thing?

He rose from his seat on the floor then, the beer can empty, and stood at the window. His headache was becoming increasingly impossible to ignore and his body felt heavy, so very heavy, the emptiness around him palpable, as if the air had solidified and he had become locked within it like an insect caught forever in a droplet of amber, the empty house a vacuum sucking everything he ever thought he knew into the black of space. Dark matter. The curvature of light. His empty house. His daughter gone and never to return. His absent wife. And his apparently failed career. How does one work for so many years to become an astronaut and have it be like this?