Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

Keith paused and turned back toward him and nodded.

“This is NASA on shirt?” the Russian man said.

“Yes, I work for NASA,” Keith said.

“What is work you do?”

He froze there with one hand on the door. Then he said, “I work for the Astronaut Office.”

“For Astronaut Office is being astronaut?”

Again silence. Then he said, “Yes, I’m an astronaut.”

“You joke on me I think,” the man said.

Keith shrugged, thinking momentarily of Eriksson. “Not likely,” he said. Then, “I have to go. Good talking with you.” Before the man could say anything else he stepped through the door and let it swing closed, continuing off the curb then and into the heat of the parking lot, half closing his eyes until his sunglasses were in place. Two old men sat in wire chairs in front of the store, one of them wearing a ball cap embroidered with the words “US Navy Retired,” the other in a battered leather flight jacket covered in patches. Their conversation ceased as Keith passed and a moment later he was too far away to hear if it resumed.

The heat thick and heavy. He returned to the car with sweat cascading into his eyes and sat for a long moment with the vents blowing upon his face. Huge cars everywhere around him, all of them shimmering with sunlight.

When he turned onto the street again, he drove in the general direction of the hotels near the interstate but then pulled into a retail lot and slipped the gearshift into park and stepped once again outside. Moments later he was a solitary shape amidst quiet shoppers with bright red plastic carts, trying to recall the last time he had gone shopping for anything. When he had been training in Houston he had rented a tiny apartment, flying back and forth between it and home whenever there was a break, but it remained unfurnished apart from a cot and an alarm clock and he subsisted entirely on takeout and the JSC cafeteria. Before that, in those few instances when he had tried to help Barb with the household duties, he would end up buying the wrong item and she would later have to return it anyway, his attempt to lighten her workload only resulting in making things more difficult. Now he seemed to be moving ever against the general flow of traffic, red carts coming towards him no matter which side of any aisle he rolled down and him muttering, “Sorry,” under his breath in a kind of slow loop as he found himself repeatedly in the way of other shoppers.

The simplicity of his ineptitude was irritating and he found himself once again thinking of his office in Houston. They had asked him to take a vacation but did they understand that this was how it would be, that the only thing he really needed was to remain at his office? Did they expect him to go sit on a beach somewhere and contemplate the sunset? Did they know him no better than that when all he had ever wanted was to be in space and now all he wanted was to return? He had thought that they understood him but he had been wrong. Somehow they believed that being away from his office was the best thing for him, a concept that made so little sense he could not even ascertain the shape of the equation.

He circled the store at least a dozen times and the only thing in his cart was a coffeepot. He did not even know what he would need. A rudimentary particleboard furniture section. Would he remain long enough to need furniture? Again he did not know. When he passed the laundry detergent he realized he had not yet opened the door to the laundry room and did not even know if he had a washer or dryer, then wondered if he would be doing his laundry at a Laundromat. He would be an astronaut doing laundry at a Laundromat. That would be fantastic.

He found a garbage can that was plain and white and plastic and then filled it with ten frozen microwaveable dinners and later found the linens aisle and selected a pillow and a set of white sheets and dark blue blankets. An alarm clock. A cheap set of pots and pans. A table to eat at and a chair of some kind would wait until he determined what he was going to do next.

The parking lots connecting one after another. He managed to snake his way through them and onto the main artery again, the names of various subdivisions flashing by the window: the Stables, Willow Glen, and then, finally, his own: “The Estates” emblazoned in white letters across a low stone wall attached to one of two tall stonework pillars. It had been intended as a gated community, that had been one of the selling points for Barb, but although two pillars flanked the entryway, no gate swung open and closed between them; whatever any such gate would have enclosed or excluded flowed freely through the entrance. Astronauts. Maniacal shoppers. Soccer moms.

By the time he reached his cul-de-sac, the sky was flat and white with haze and the landscape had taken on a feeling of desolation: heaps of dirt and half-completed homes and naked foundations spaced between finished homes with their dwarfish trees and shrubs. His own court no different. He looked into the sky momentarily for the bird he had seen but there was nothing.

He unloaded the trunk of the car into the kitchen and piled the boxed dinners into the freezer, thinking now that he should have bought a radio of some kind. Something to fill the silence all around him. He turned to place the trashcan at the end of the counter but then paused. Not only was there a trashcan already in place but as he looked from one to the other he realized that he had purchased exactly the same kind. It might have been funny but it was not. His breath a long exhausted sigh. He set the new trashcan next to the other and began unpacking the coffeepot.

Such was his homecoming.

It had been just at the moment of his greatness. Of course it had. Were the intersection of vectors to coincide with some other moment, some other instant that was here and then past, would anything have changed? Even now there was no way of knowing what she had been doing when any one of those pinpoints fled, the long spiral unscrolling ever upward and away. This one: when Eriksson’s radio voice sounded in his ear, “A-OK, Corcoran?” and his own response came, “OK here.” And another: when they tethered themselves to the body of the ISS, their motions clumsy in the stiffly pressurized space suits. And yet another: when the airlock turned and opened in absolute silence and he moved through the black porthole and into the darkness of space and at last into the field of numbers that he had imagined all his life. She might have just arrived at the party then, perhaps had been handed something to eat or drink, perhaps was talking to someone. A boy? Someone else? But of course it was impossible to know. And he did not think of her anyway, not then, because he was already outside, already floating in the dazzling contrast of blazing light and the incomparable distance of the stars. Eriksson’s voice again: “Mission Control, we are clear of Quest and are proceeding to the MSS.”

“ISS, you are clear to proceed,” came the response.

He could see Eriksson’s helmet where it appeared over the edge of the truss: a black orb framed in white, his face invisible. Behind him the solar arrays glowing like dark, angular eclipses and beyond that only space itself: black and infinite and stretching out forever.

They would need to reach the base of the robotic arm, the arm he had designed himself and which had been installed on the previous spacewalk a month ago and now would be used to exchange the nitrogen tanks. He would be attached to the nether end of the arm by his feet and would be moved bodily in a huge arc across the whole of the station, from one end of the truss to the other, holding the empty tank in his gloved grip, stowing it on the far side of the station and then bringing a full tank back the same way, performing that long parabolic arc twice. That was the task, but first they would need to reach the base of the arm, and so they moved, hand over hand, the process like crawling sideways over the exterior of a submarine or an enormous floating propane tank, and then to the dark crisscrossing beams of the truss, that structure stretching away beyond him in both directions and the round tubes of the modules in which they lived and worked already below him, toward Earth. He moved slowly, without speaking, his breath a rhythmic and repeating hiss as he moved and each task a focused act: the flexing of his hands inside the huge white gloves, the way in which they curled around the metal handles, the silence of the tether as it slid along with him, the repetition of his breath in the helmet. Each honeycombed panel memorized. The round rivets. The aluminum shield. Everything here named and numbered. The diameter of the moment: two thousand and thirty two millimeters. Fifteen-point-five-eight-three feet, the three extending into some forever of thirds and curving into those thirds as the robotic arm came into view, its structure collapsed into a loose stack of overlapping angles as if some thick white straw had folded in upon itself, the terminal end nearly touching the outer skin of the Kibo Module. Before him, the white base of Eriksson’s boots waved in parallel like floating quotation marks as he pulled himself forward over the curve of the Unity Node and across the trussworks, hand over hand, the tether following, up through the white padded girders where the dark interior of the truss opened in shadow like the hidden superstructure of a skyscraper.