Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“Oh, I won’t,” he said. “Dessert works just fine.”

Nicole’s voice came from across the street: “Mom, we’re going to be late!”

“See you tonight, then.” Then she turned and her thin, muscled frame moved back across the street. In a moment, her red sports car passed and Nicole’s hand waved at him as the car roared around the corner and out of sight.

It occurred to him that he should be running more often.

He was just out of the shower when his phone began to vibrate. He lifted it from the dresser, the heat of his hand steaming the surface in a brief disappearing arc. The tiny screen read “Barb”. Seeing her name there made him think of Jennifer and a sharp lurch of guilt ran through him yet again. Shit. He let it ring through to voice mail and then finished drying himself. A moment later there was the chime tone indicating a new message and when he had finished dressing he dialed into his voice mail and listened.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said. Then a pause. “Listen, I wanted to tell you this in person. I mean not on a voice mail. But you’re not there.” Another pause, a longer one this time. He thought that she might have hung up the phone but then her voice came again, with a sense of resolve and finality that he had not anticipated: “I wanted to tell you that I filed divorce papers,” she said. “So someone will come to serve you papers. Officially, I mean. OK? All right. Bye then.”

The background hiss of the message ended and the computer voice indicated that there were no additional messages. And so there went his marriage, with a voice mail not even a full minute in length. Over and gone. A zero sum. He looked at the phone as if it were some inexplicable life form he had never encountered before and then slowly lowered himself to the edge of the bed. He had known she was not going to return. She had told him as much. And yet it now felt as if some equation of finality had scrolled out before him and had been solved in the only way it could ever have been solved. He had simply failed to reach that solution.

He did not know how long he sat there but he did not move until he had reached the next part of the same equation. He had been staring through the window into the neighboring yard where a patch of yellowed, dead grass was boxed in by a fence only a few years old, and when he came to the next variable his solution was not meant to be vindictive or malicious, or at least he did not think of his actions in those terms, but rather was a simple act of logic. She did not live with him anymore. She had made the decision to have an affair and to move out and to leave him in this empty house and he was simply following out the logical endpoint of the equation she had formed. She had called to tell him she had filed for divorce. She had solved for one variable; he would solve for another.

So he dialed the payroll office at JSC and asked what he would need to do to change the direct deposit of his salary to a new bank account and found it was as easy as filing a sheet of paperwork that the payroll office would be glad to mail him.

When the call was over he set the phone on the table and sat looking at it. Once again there was a silence in the room, in the house, perhaps in the whole cul-de-sac. He had seldom thought about himself as making decisions that were right or wrong — his work had not allowed for the attachment of such a moral compass — but now that was exactly where his mind went, into that gray tenuous area between one variable and the next. He did not know what Barb’s financial situation was in Atlanta. He had assumed she was living with her mother at her parents’ house but it was clear to him that there was no reason she should have access to his paycheck. Not anymore. She had left him; he had not left her, perhaps would never have left her even had he known about her affair. But was that even true? Once again he wondered if she had brought him into his house. Into the bed that was, even now, upstairs. Once again he wondered if Quinn had known this man. My god.

In the late morning he dialed information and was given the address of a local branch of his bank and then slipped on his shoes and drove there. When he arrived he told the teller that he wanted to withdraw half of his savings and then changed his mind and withdrew all of it and closed what had been their joint account entirely, both checking and savings accounts. Then he took the bank’s cashier’s check and drove down the street until he saw a different bank and parked and entered and opened an account there and then deposited the check. Done. He did not want to feel guilty about the act, not this too, but the feeling was present nonetheless even though it was too late now to go back, this thought too filling him momentarily with self-loathing. What kind of weak man had he become? He wondered then how long it would be until she discovered the bank accounts had been closed, until she called him to complain. Hours? Days? Weeks? He had completely stopped thinking about painting the second coat of eggshell downstairs, let alone starting the upstairs, but he had managed to move his bank accounts. That was something people did when they divorced. It was something he needed to do and it was done and he had done it.

The remainder of the day was spent making phone calls, none of which served to continue the promise of forward motion that the change of banks had engendered. He spoke with Jim Mullins but the conversation was circular and pointless. Mullins had told him to check in and he had done so but what more was there to say? When he told Mullins he was ready to return to work, Mullins’s only response was to ask if he had been keeping any regular phone appointments with his psychiatrist and if he was making any progress in that arena. Keith did not know how to answer such a question, could not even begin to imagine how an answer could exist at all. He had a phone appointment scheduled with Dr. Hoffmann within the hour but beyond that he had nothing to say and Mullins’s repeated urging to take care of himself only frustrated him further.

He spent the time between the call with Mullins and the scheduled appointment with Hoffmann drinking beer and looking at engineering documents on his laptop, all of which he had already read. He could think of little else to do to fill the time. The truth was that he had been dreading the phone call with Hoffmann for most of the week and now that it was nearly upon him he had resigned himself to its inevitability the way one might be resigned to a tooth extraction. It would be unpleasant — he knew that much — but it was expected of him, apparently as part of what Hoffmann had called his “grieving process,” although it was also clear that any grieving process he was to have would be determined by others. Even this had been removed from his control as if he was a child or an imbecile.

When the appointed hour arrived at last he dialed the number and Hoffmann’s secretary answered and then Hoffmann himself came onto the line. He started right in with the same huge and unanswerable questions he always asked: How have you been doing? What challenges have you had this week? What progress do you think you have made? And Keith answered the same way he always had, with the same short, clipped responses he always gave, not because he intended to be abrupt or obfuscating but rather because these were the only answers he could think of. Fairly soon after Keith had returned from the mission, the psychiatrist had told him that he was free to share anything with him and that the more information he shared the better equipped he would be to offer insight into his experience, and Keith had listened to him and had thought that he would try, that he would try to find better answers, and to offer more detail about what he had done and what he was doing, but then he had found there were no words for how he felt. There was an emptiness within him. It was not unlike space itself. Like one infinity containing another. What words could there be to express such an absence?