Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

Keith stood alone in the hall, the muffled sounds of television and mother and daughter murmuring around him. Then he turned and walked down the stairs in the darkness. The lower floor quiet. He stood at the foot of the stairs, the silence complete, and then stepped forward through the plaster arch and into the living room. The sofa and the television like giant creatures that had fallen into a deep slumber. Knickknacks on the mantel cast into a collection of angles and shadows. Everything in the house had a place and each place had been chosen not for utility but for display: towels in the bathroom that could not be used, floral soaps that would never be unwrapped from their unbleached paper wrappers, pillows on the bed that could not be slept on. An entire life organized based upon the notion of being watched, of being monitored and judged by neighbors, by friends, perhaps even by himself, and here he stood in the quiet, shadowed and frozen as if part of it somehow: a man from one house in the darkness of another.

“What are you doing?”

The voice startled him and he spun around abruptly. She was standing behind him on the last stair, holding the neck of her bathrobe in one hand, the other still gripping the banister.

“Oh,” he said. He looked into the darker shadows of the living room. “I was … I’m not doing anything.”

“And?” she said. There was an edge to her voice.

“And I’ll see you later,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

He turned toward her, toward the door, and she stared at him as he passed. There was no pleasure or joy in her eyes. He opened the door and turned the lock on the handle as he had been told and stepped outside. He thought she would say something to him before the door closed, a simple parting word or words, but she did not and he pulled the door closed.

There was a brightness to the sounds outside. The humming streets beyond the roofline of darkened houses. From the field: crickets. The brush of the air against his face was just barely cool and he looked across the street at his own bleak house. Nothing there. No one home. Never anyone home. It occurred to him that he had been summarily dismissed from Jennifer’s house but he found himself more surprised than irritated or angered. Maybe it was the second time, when they had sex in the shower; maybe he had been too insistent. But then he knew he had not been too insistent, that it had actually been Jennifer who had instigated that second time and indeed had instigated the first. What was it then?

He stepped across the street toward his house but then swiveled and moved instead toward the dark streetlamp at the farthest edge of the cul-de-sac. It was akin to the end of the world, the light fading out. He looked into that emptiness for Peter and it was not until he took his first tentative step past the sidewalk and into the thistle-lined path that he realized he was disappointed that he could neither see nor hear him. No one in the field but himself and no telescope to justify the night.

( c Δ t ) 2= (Δ r ) 2

(Δ s ) 2= 0

It had always been part of his plan to make captain before resigning for a position with NASA and it worked out as he knew it would, although that first position would not be at Johnson Space Center as he had hoped. The head researchers there told him they were very interested in his skills and qualifications but that there were few positions open and none that he was particularly suited for. It was disappointing, but he knew there were advantages to coming into the astronaut program from some other NASA facility. And so he settled on Dreyfuss Research Center, a smaller facility but an important one. The position there was a perfect match for his mathematics and engineering skills and would extend the kind of work he had been doing at Wright-Patterson during his time in the air force: low-energy / high-power propulsion and guidance systems. There was the further incentive that the research at Dreyfuss fed exclusively into various ongoing missions and this meant, at long last, that his work would be going directly into space.

A month before his start date at Dreyfuss he flew out to look at neighborhoods in the vicinity of his new employment, touring the endlessly sprawling metropolitan area on the arm of a realtor. Barb’s opinions had always been strong in regards to house styles, floor plans, shopping proximity, school districts, and the like and now those opinions saw the three of them — he and Barb and Quinn, the latter sullen and quiet in the backseat, angry at having to move away from her friends in Ohio — driving in seemingly endless circles, farther and farther from the research center until they finally happened upon a suburb that met her standards. It was a relatively new neighborhood across from a small park but what made this area different from any of the other twenty or so neighborhoods they had already driven through he could not begin to understand and he argued against the location with some vigor even though he knew that he would ultimately lose. With traffic, the commute to Dreyfuss would be a full hour and a half in each direction on four lanes of freeway blacktop through an endless maze of chain stores and parking lots, and through five apparently separate but identical communities. He told himself he was unconcerned with the tedium of the drive, but each evening on his way home he would pass a freeway sign that read: “If you lived here you would be home by now.” It was savage irony that the community the sign advertised appeared to be exactly like the one in which they had settled.

The lone upside was that they were close to a high school for gifted students, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. At least Quinn would have some place to study, a school that might match her talents and which would push her forward on her own unbound vector, the magnitude of which had yet to be measured. She had been examined for the gifted program at the end of her fourth-grade year — the earliest she could at the grammar school she had attended in Ohio — and had tested at the tenth-grade level in math.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Barb had told him then.

“Ideas about what?” he answered

“You’re going to try to turn her into a math geek or something. I just know it.” Her tone was playful and she was smiling, proud of her daughter, of their daughter.

“I think she’s already a math geek,” he said.

She looked at him. “Well, don’t make it worse.”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I won’t.”

Of course she excelled in her math classes. It was what he expected of her. And she had a gift for it so how could it be any different? Was she not her father’s daughter? Sometimes, when he arrived home early enough in the evening for her to still be awake, he would watch her do her homework, watch the numbers she wrote down and the numbers she did not, the gaps in the process that nonetheless led to accurate answers: her tiny girl’s hands skipping along the page, answering another problem, moving on to the next. Her pencil like a butterfly alighting here and there: a symbol, a number, a variable, and then, finally, the answer. He had not been so adept at her age. She was better than he was and she would go further. This was what he had decided, but there had been few classes at her school to develop her gift. Her last teacher had given up entirely on having her follow the curriculum, instead bringing a college algebra textbook from home and having her work through those problems during class time.

And yet when he brought up the academy to Quinn her immediate response was to call it “nerd school.”

“Oh come on,” he said. “What does that even mean?”

They were at the dinner table now and Quinn did not even look up from her plate, stirring green mushy peas around the outer edge, slowly, as if working out a problem or a design of some kind. “It means it’s nerd school.”