Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

Bob Marley was singing forever and would never stop.

Then there was an abrupt click on the line and a voice returned. “Mr. Corcoran?” it said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m sorry to inform you that your storage unit has been closed for lack of payment,” the man said. There was a faint hint of a Middle Eastern accent, but it was so subtle as to sound more like cultural refinement than ethnicity, as if the careful pronunciation of English words was exacted to the standards of a private university education.

“I don’t understand,” Keith said.

“The account was not paid for one hundred and twenty days. Even then we waited another thirty days after we sent the final notice. It’s not a free storage unit. It’s a business.”

“I understand that,” Keith said. “I’ve been out of town. I’d like to go ahead and pay the full bill now.”

“Sir, we appreciate that, but we have sent your account to the collection agency so you would need to speak with them about the eventuality of your payment.”

“OK,” he said. “Let me ask you this: How long before I can straighten this out and get my stuff out of the storage unit?”

“You misunderstand me, sir. There’s nothing in the unit anymore. Your account is closed and that unit is now occupied by a new renter.”

“Where’s my stuff, then?”

“Sir, I’m sorry to have to inform you that the items in the storage were auctioned.”

“Auctioned to who?”

“Sir, I cannot give you that information even if I had it, which I do not.”

He sat in the kitchen, blinking slowly.

“Sir, when nonpayment occurs the contents of the storage are auctioned off.”

“They got everything?”

“Sir, this is what I’m telling you. The whole unit is auctioned as a single item. What they do with the contents after that is up to them.”

“Christ,” he said.

“Sir, I’m sorry to have to give you this unsettling information.”

“Unsettling? Shit.”

“Sir, we made every attempt to contact you.”

“I’m sure you did,” he said. His voice was quiet now, slowing down. A weak thing. A dead bird. “When did the auction take place?” he said.

“Two weeks ago.”

“Christ. Is the stuff still in it?”

“Sir, the items sold at auction are required to be immediately removed from the unit upon payment by the winning bidder.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they removed everything from the unit so it could be utilized by a new renter.”

Keith was quiet.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the man said. “Would you like the number of the collection agency?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

He was given the number and he wrote it down on an envelope and the call ended. The room reentered its silence. He sat there at the kitchen table. There were no thoughts now, only a deep well of regret as if the entirety of his life had slipped away from him and what remained was not even a shell or a husk but something akin to a spindrift of thin and insubstantial and sifted dust.

“Well, Quinn,” he said to the empty room. “Here I am. What now?”

He stood again and returned to the stack of mail and looked for the termite inspection report but did not find it, instead bringing the mail to the table and proceeding to open each envelope and sorting the contents into piles. There were no bills he had not paid apart from the mini storage and a handful of magazine subscriptions that were Barb’s and these he threw into the trash pile and finally he stood and gathered that pile and dumped the whole of it into one of the two identical plastic trash bins and then lifted both and carried them through the doorway into the garage, clicking the button that opened the big door there and then waiting as that blank white square rattled open at last.

He ducked underneath when it was high enough to do so and stepped around the rental car to the trash bin outside and opened it and dumped each of the smaller plastic bins into its mouth. The heat outside a respite to the temperature of the garage but still blazing. The sun moving into the west but what did that matter now?

His phone buzzed in his pocket and he looked at the screen. It was Barb and he realized that in calling her moments before he had given her his new phone number. Shit. He sighed audibly and flipped open the phone to answer the call.

“Did you get the storage unit squared away?” she said.

“No,” he said. “You could have told me that’s what you did. Christ, Barb.”

“Don’t get mad at me,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

He sighed again but said nothing.

“Where did you think everything went?” she said.

“The garage, Barb. I thought everything was in the garage.”

“This whole time you never looked in the garage?”

He was silent. It sounded absurd and indeed it was.

“You need to call the storage,” she said.

“I know that.”

“And I left some of Quinn’s stuff in there for you too. It’s in a box by the door.”

“What? What did you say?”

“I said that some of Quinn’s stuff is in the storage by the door.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know. Stuff I thought you’d want. Quinn’s schoolwork that I was saving. And some photo albums.”

“Her schoolwork was in the storage?”

“Yeah, it’s in there in a box by the door. Don’t you want it?”

He was silent now, breathing, trying to breathe, the sun blazing upon his head. The construction at the end of the cul-de-sac long since complete for the day. No sound from the vacant lot. Nicole appeared from across the street, already jogging in his direction. “Barb,” he said into the phone.

“What?”

Then there was no air, only a terrible sense of void, of absence.

“What, Keith? What?” her voice came through the speaker, increasingly distant as he moved the phone away from his ear with a motion so slow it was almost imperceptible and then clicked it closed and stood there unmoving. A sense of sinking, of falling, flooded through him all at once.

“Captain Keith,” Nicole said, arrived now, panting.

“Hey,” he said.

“My dad’s out on another trip,” she said.

“OK.”

“My mom said you’d want to know.”

“Listen, I need to go in,” he said.

“They had a big fight,” she said, apparently ignoring him. “Your name was part of it.”

He looked down at her. She was smiling, although he did not know why. “That’s not good,” he said.

“Anyway, I guess my dad was mad that you had dinner over here. He probably wanted to meet you because you’re so famous. Anyway, he yelled a lot. Not as loud as my mom, though. She can yell really loud.”

The tractors were silent in the field but at some point the workmen had moved the sofa to the edge of the space at last so that it rested very near the sidewalk, looking like a bloated park bench, and he stood watching it as if it might move back to its more familiar location of its own accord but it did not do so. What was happening now? How had his life come to such fragments?

After a moment, his phone began to vibrate in his pocket again and he did not look at it and after a time it too was quiet once again. He looked down at the little girl who stood at his feet, a girl who reminded him in odd moments of Quinn, and saw her mouth moving but could not hear her and he looked up then, at the flat blue of the sky as it fell slowly toward the darker gloaming of twilight and then across the street to Jennifer’s house and again up to the end of the cul-de-sac and the field where the two tractors stood unmoving. My god. The world fading all around him or no not even that: the world steady and continuing ever and always and he the one dissolving into some endless and incomprehensible eventide.