Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

He took a beer from the refrigerator and went to the slider and opened it, moving outside in his socks and brushing off one of the lawn chairs there and sitting down. He tried not to think of the conversation he had just had or had failed to have but of course it was impossible not to and he continued to feel irritated and, yes, disappointed, although this latter he still did not want to admit to himself. He opened his beer and took a long drink.

The coming evening surprisingly cool and the light filtering through the mulberry tree shuffled in the faint, thin breeze. A white glow, then green, then white again. The hum of a distant lawnmower. The voices of children somewhere.

The sun was lower in the sky when the slider shushed open behind him. He half turned to see Quinn in the doorway. “Can I sit out here with you?” she said.

“Of course,” he said.

“Can we not talk about stuff?”

“We don’t have to talk about anything.”

Her face showed no expression. She moved forward onto the concrete and pulled a second lawnchair beside his, close enough that it was almost touching, and sat next to him and they watched as the day ended and the light paled to chartreuse and then shifted into a deep radiant blue and then began to yellow into sunset.

They remained together like that for a long while, unmoving, not speaking. At some point he reached out his hand for her in that silence and her fingers wrapped into his own. Her hand so much bigger than he remembered it. Not the hand of a little girl now but becoming a young woman. And yet the gesture was the same and the feeling of her skin was the same. The air had become the color of night, the sun dropping beyond the mulberry, the light of the town all around them rendering the sky a dusty emptiness devoid of stars, as if some quiet blanket had been pulled over them.

He would have held that moment forever. She would have done the same.

A month later Quinn began her freshman year of high school. He knew that he could not have changed her mind and anything he would now say would simply result in her pulling further away from him. But it felt like a reversal of roles somehow, not between he and his daughter but between he and Barb as her parents, for her willfulness had seldom been directed against him. He remembered that span of days — it had turned out to be nearly a week — in which Barb had flown to Atlanta to attend to the death of her father and how he had been concerned that Quinn might prove difficult to manage. But that had not been the case. It was Barb and Quinn’s teachers who found her difficult to manage; he had always found her willing to accommodate most reasonable requests. He and Quinn had shared some kind of bond then, which he had thought to be permanent because it had been based upon their actual selves, their beings, the people they were, which had fit together with such fluidity that her talent, her gift of numbers, seemed like a natural progression. It was almost to be expected. And yet now she had made up her mind in a direction that made no sense to him, which indeed seemed counter to everything he cared about or desired or believed about her.

It was only her choice of schools and yet it was also much more than that. Indeed it seemed to him that the whole of her had changed while he was away at training and he hardly recognized the new tall brightly dressed teenager she had become. What bothered him even more was realizing that she had not signed up for any math classes whatsoever and hearing slightly later, from Barb, that Quinn had made the freshman cheerleading squad. He did not know that she had tried out or had even been interested in doing so. Barb had been a cheerleader but Quinn was not like her mother, although now he was not sure he knew his daughter very well at all. Indeed, it was as if the vacant rooms in that infinite hotel they had spoken about had somehow all been filled and no further expansion was possible, the sets of infinity eliminated, cardinality vaporizing all at once into a dull gray mist that drifted, became transparent, and was gone.

The plan had been that Keith would finish his training and when he was officially an active-duty astronaut Barb and Quinn would finally move to Houston and they would be a family again. He knew that Barb would not want to move, knew also that Quinn would be saddened by the decision but that she too would want to remain and continue her high school in the town where she had grown from a child into a young woman. Nonetheless when he was at last presented with the silver lapel pin indicating that the training period had ended and he had entered the roster of active-duty astronauts, he collected some information on relocating to Houston from the personnel office, a thick envelope of printed materials lauding the myriad cosmopolitan aspects of the city, and when he returned home he handed the entire packet to Barb and then watched, for a full week, as those pages remained on the kitchen counter, unread. He asked her if she had thought much about where she wanted to live or if she wanted him to poll those NASA employees he already knew who were living in Houston but her response was vague and he was left to wonder when the argument would come. When it finally did, it was exactly as he knew it would be. Barb maintained that he would be gone so often that it made little sense to move to Houston, particularly as Quinn was already established at her new high school.

“The only reason I was flying back and forth was because of the academy,” he had argued. “If she doesn’t want to go there I’m not going to make her, but there’s nothing keeping us from Houston now.”

“That’s not the only reason why we didn’t move,” she said. “You’re gone all the time. You’re still going to be gone all the time.”

He was silent. Incredulous.

“And Quinny has her friends,” Barb continued, “and she’s popular and she’s so beautiful. The boys are falling all over themselves for her.”

Silence, and then he said, “I can’t believe you talked her into this.”

“She talked me into this.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” he said, but he did believe it, immediately and completely, and the sensation was like a vast star collapsing all at once in his chest. It had not been his idea to commute back and forth to Houston but he had agreed to do so and in making this agreement had set a precedent that could not be undone. Perhaps he had thought he could shift her into the faster current, the current that he could see flowing under her feet but which, for reasons he still could not understand, was somehow invisible to her. Had he pushed too hard or had he not pushed nearly hard enough? But these were not even the right questions to ask. He had simply done what he had always done; he had fallen into the numbers like a man falling into his dreams and thought that somehow the people he left behind were locked into the orbit paths he had calculated for them and would continue to turn in those perfect paths, a radial distance forever matching the most simplistic articulation and needing no further calculation or concern.

Of course Barb won the argument; he did not even know why he tried to talk her out of it to begin with.

And so they did not move to Houston but they did move one last time. She brought him the brochure soon after he had been assigned his first mission — the only mission he would ever undertake — amongst the first of his ASCAN group. The group had been told that the order in which they were chosen for the mission schedule was no reflection of their individual capabilities but he could not help feeling that he had been chosen for precisely such a reason. He had taken over a project to replace the current robotic arm on the ISS with a longer, more mobile version and rather than approaching it as if it would be a new model of the existing arm, he threw out the original schematics, the notes and ideas of other minds who had worked on the project, and thought instead about basic and fundamental notions of functionality — motion, power, strength, dexterity, control. He poured himself into the project, the numbers fluid and sleek and beautiful, and when he had a full draft of the whole project he showed it to the main office and within days was presenting it to various members of the NASA staff. They checked his calculations again and again but he already knew he was correct. Over the subsequent year he would work on making the numbers a reality.