Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“Fantastic,” he said, his voice ricocheting off blank walls and square angles.

Down the hall, Quinn’s bedroom door yawed open revealing a bare gray space: dirty carpet, a few tacks remaining in the walls, empty electrical sockets, phone cord dangling limply. A room he might have entered but which he did not, instead lingering in the doorway. There would be time to enter that room later. This was what he told himself. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later in the week. For the moment it would remain a room defined only by the fact that whoever had once lived in it no longer did and he was a man standing before a vacancy, holding only the dull colorless waste of his fatigue, an equation the sum total of which was zero.

He returned downstairs to the doorway, hefting the suitcases and mounting the stairs again and then setting the suitcases at the foot of the bed and opening his dresser drawers to extract clean socks and boxer shorts. Then he returned to the closet and pulled a pair of pants and a polo shirt from their hangers. There was a set of yellow towels under the sink in the master bath — at least a towel then — and he undressed and folded his shirt and slacks on the bed and coiled his belt and then turned the shower on. A half-used bar of soap remained and a bottle of nearly-empty shampoo and he waited for the water to move from frigid to warm and stood cold and shivering. For a moment he had thought she actually had had the foresight to turn off the water heater but the shower temperature began to turn and he entered it and stood for a long moment as the water scalded him. His mind felt soft. A dull ache behind his eyes.

When he returned downstairs he was wearing the tattered bathrobe he had found hanging on its hook in the closet and had retrieved the amber bottles of Vicodin and Imitrex from the smaller of the two suitcases. He swallowed each tablet with a handful of water from the kitchen sink. Then he removed a box of cereal from the pantry and opened the cabinet but like everything else the plates and bowls had been removed and when he reached into the box his motion was met with a flurry of tiny brown moths that fluttered up out of the dark and circled his head in a chaos of arcs and lines. No cereal, then. And upon opening another cabinet: no pots or pans either. A few chipped glasses and coffee mugs left behind. Had the walls been pale yellow when they had first purchased the house or had she painted them while he was away? There was an eye-level hole in the wall large enough to fit a finger and he wondered what had hung there, what they had owned that was large enough to require such a bolt-hole.

The sliding glass door: a black wall reflecting his ghost. An exhausted rag of a man in a sagging purple robe, clutching a coffee mug that he did not even remember removing from the cabinet. No astronaut but a patient escaped from some hospital. He straightened his back and faced the glass and stood at a kind of attention for a moment, shoulders square and legs tight together as if he might be preparing to salute, but the posture did nothing to make him look more like himself, the flat white glow of the kitchen rendering him a ruined silhouette.

Around him the walls blank and empty. A huge space where the dining room table once stood. The kitchen island in the middle of the room like a geologic formation.

Sleep like a promise. This the only clear thought he had.

He did not even remember lying down, instead opening his eyes to a bewilderingly bare room and remaining there, unmoving, prostrate on the mattress for a long silent moment. He had been dreaming of the ISS but had awakened into a sense of gravity so thick and heavy that he briefly wondered if it would be possible to move at all. Sunlight slanted through the windows, but whether it was early morning or early evening he could not tell. And there was a sound: the buzzing of his phone somewhere in the room, which paused just as he identified it and then started up again.

The third time the phone began to vibrate he sat up slowly and dropped his feet off the edge of the mattress but made no further press into motion, rubbing at his face and the back of his neck and continuing to listen as the buzzing continued in its short bursts — nine, ten, eleven — paused and then resumed once more. He leaned forward and lifted his crumpled pants from the floor and at last fished the phone from the pocket, lowering himself to sit at the edge of the bed as her voice came through the tiny speaker.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said.

He breathed. “Christ, Barb,” he said.

“You’re in a good mood,” she said.

“There’s not even a vacuum here.”

“Where?”

“At the house.”

“You’re at the house?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m fine,” he said again. “I was asleep.”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess it’s early there.”

“Probably,” he said. He pulled his fingers through his hair. Rubbed at one eye and then the other, then pressed his fingertips against tightly closed eyelids. Everything red for a brief moment.

“When did you get there?” she asked.

“Last night.”

“I thought you were maybe still in Houston.”

“We finished up a couple days ago.”

“Good.”

“I guess.”

He could hear her breath. “What do you want me to say, Keith?” she said at last.

“I don’t want you to say anything,” he said. “You called me.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Fair?” He breathed. Waited. Then he said, “What am I supposed to do here?”

“Just get your stuff and put the house up on the market.”

“It needs some work first. Cleaning at least. And probably paint.”

“The new owners can do that.”

“I don’t think it will sell like this.”

“Just sell it, Keith. OK? That’s all you have to do.”

“That’s all I have to do?” he said. “Really? That’s all?”

There must have been an edge in his response for when she spoke again her voice was high-pitched and soft. “Don’t be mean,” she said.

“You left the sofa here, Barb. Of all things, you left the sofa.”

“I couldn’t fit anything else in the U-Haul,” she said, the words wobbling on the verge of tears now. “I have to start over. I’m sorry. Just take your stuff and go.”

He sat for a moment in silence. Then he said, “Don’t cry. I just don’t know what you want me to do, Barb. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t care. Just sell it,” she said, breaking into full sobs now. “I can’t go back there. I just can’t.”

He listened to her weep, his voice making a quiet and automatic shhh into the phone. Her grief might have brought him to tears as well but in that moment there was only the simplicity of her distress and his automatic attempt to comfort her. He listened as her breathing slowed once again. “OK, OK,” he said, repeating it over and over. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks,” she said at last.

He stared at the blank white wall before him. The slashes of light through the window. Then he said, “I need to go.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

She broke into sobs again.

“Don’t cry, Barb. It’s OK. It’s fine. I’m just tired.”

The rasp of her breathing. “Tell me when you want to come out here and I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t know when that will be,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Keith.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“I know.”

“Listen, call the realtor, OK?”

“Yes, I’ll call a realtor,” he said.

She was quiet for a moment and then she said, “I’m glad you got back OK.”

“Thanks.”