Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“Oh, this is true,” Peter said. The telescope somewhere behind them. Then: “Your girlfriend is watching us, I think,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your pretty neighbor.”

Keith looked at the house. Again he could see her figure in the window: the cut of her shape in a nightgown against the lit interior of the house. “Her daughter thinks it’s weird that we’re out here,” he said.

“It is weird,” Peter said.

“You’re probably right.”

“I am right. Before it was just me with telescope. Now we have Astronaut Keith Corcoran. And sofa. That is weird part.”

“Me or the furniture?”

“Both I think, but mostly sofa.”

“Well, it’s a comfortable sofa.”

“It is,” Peter said, falling then into a long silence. Then, loud enough to make Keith’s eyes jerk open with a start: “Fucking shit!”

And Keith actually chuckling and then laughing and Peter: “What? Laughing at me? What?” and then starting to chuckle himself, both of them in their various states: stoned and drunk and laughing in that bleak darkness under a million wheeling stars.

Days and nights, not of eclipse but akin to a perpetual twilight that seemed to bathe everything in a thin and insubstantial dimness as if his eyesight had shifted so subtly that he did not even know he was squinting, not only the far distance blurred but the whole of his experience covered in a wispy film of half-light so that clarity itself became a kind of abstraction. He knew that some of the medications he had been taking were meant to treat depression and he had continued to take them not because he thought they had any real effect on his body or his mind but rather because he did what the doctor told him to do as if it were a military order, which indeed it somewhat resembled, but his mind continued to cast itself against the rocks over and over again despite the constant flow of pills. If he was being treated for depression it had become clear that such treatment was no longer working if it had ever worked at all.

And so the same sense of quiet that had settled over him upon first returning to the cul-de-sac had now been met with a kind of gloaming. He had updated his phone number at JSC and with Sally Erler and the latter’s call represented the only time his phone actually rang, the realtor calling with a further confirmation of the young couple buying the house. There was paperwork to be signed and he suggested they meet at Starbucks rather than at the house and she breathed a long sigh of relief and agreed. When they met, she ran through the offer in detail and he signed and signed and signed the various lengthy and incomprehensible pages. He was surprised to see that Barb’s signatures were already in place, a feat accomplished via overnight mail, and so with his last signature all required parties had signed. Two months. Slightly less than that now. Then he would need to be gone.

She had arranged a variety of inspections and he had a duplicate key made and then purchased a welcome mat so that he could leave the key beneath it at the front door, thereby ensuring that he need not be home for the inspections to continue. A business card on the kitchen island from Buddy’s Termite Service was the only evidence he saw that any inspections had occurred. If there were other inspections besides this one, he was unaware.

He still had not spoken to Barb since changing his mobile number but her e-mails were frequent, waffling between angry diatribes and calm pleas for some access to Keith’s paycheck. He did not respond. The only reason to be in any contact whatsoever was related to the impending house sale and he had decided that Sally Erler could handle that herself and obviously she already had.

Peter was not always in the field after dark but he had taken to stopping by Keith’s door and knocking gently when he was passing and Keith would be inside waiting for the knock, listening for it, had even begun to be disappointed when it did not come. Of course there were nights when Peter was busy inside his own furnished home with his two children and his wife but most evenings Peter would knock and Keith would step outside with him, a six-pack of beer under his arm. Together they would trudge out into the field, Keith collapsing into the sofa as Peter set up the telescope. They would look at a few stars. Nebulae. Clusters. Planets. Sometimes they would talk about their lives. Other times they would sit in silence, each to his own quiet thoughts.

Keith realized that he could actually identify a handful of constellations now and, even in his state of increasingly perpetual self-pity, the fact filled him with some sense of pride. He had added the rest of Ursa Major to the less-distinguished pot of the Big Dipper and could find Cepheus between Polaris and Cassiopeia, all the while Peter patiently spooning him information. Names of stars that, when repeated the following night, had begun to achieve a sense of familiarity in Keith’s mind so that he had just begun to understand that the mass of stars and nebulae and galaxies and perhaps universes, all of which spun above him on the axis of Polaris which was the axis of Earth itself, could be comprehended, that the whole of it had order even if it did not have rationale, even though he knew that he was not looking at a flat plane of stars but rather a three- and even four-dimensional space that moved far beyond them all and into the ever-retreating and isotropic distances that far outstripped the mechanical eyes of any telescope. Whole universes out there in the deeper luminous black beyond. And he had seen them. At the end of the robotic arm he had seen into that distance and it had gone on forever and would never stop. Everything out there fractal, infinite, beautiful.

Sometimes he thought of Peter’s résumé, but only when he was out on the sofa in the dark, listening to Peter explain the story behind the discovery of some feature of the night sky. He had long since come to the conclusion that Peter was indeed an intelligent man, too intelligent to be working at Target, and he knew he could at least send the résumé to someone who might read it, someone at NASA or at one of the many independent scientific organizations he had worked with. But when he was inside during the day he did not think about the résumé at all. The pages remained on the kitchen island, buried now amidst the pile of bills and a variety of unopened mail. Looking at it would mean he would need to call NASA and he did not want to do so. Not yet in any case. Perhaps he was afraid of what they would tell him about his own future. Perhaps he was afraid that what he had already decided about that future was true. That it was over.

His phone rang when it was still early, a JSC number. He flipped the phone open and said, “Hello,” and as he did so the sound of a truck came from the front of the house, a loud, rumbling that shook the windows and sent a huge, low-frequency sound wave through the room so that even the milk in his cereal bowl burst into concentric rings. Whatever voice came from the other end of the line he could not hear apart from a sharp tinny sound. “Hang on,” he yelled into the tiny grill. He could hear the sound of air brakes, the squeak and hiss, the windows actually shaking as the engine outside sputtered for a moment and then roared again and moved past the front of his house at last, the rumble fading then to a hum that continued but was at least quiet enough for him to hear the voice on the phone now.

“Hello? Hello?”

“What’s going on over there?”

“No idea,” he said. “Who’s calling?”

“Forgot the sound of my voice already?”

“Eriksson,” Keith said.

“Your friendly mission commander.”

“I didn’t recognize the number.”