Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“Anyway, my mom said you’d want to know that,” Nicole was saying, her voice rising slowly from that mute and soundless eclipse.

“Christ,” he said.

“You shouldn’t say that.”

“What?” he said suddenly, his eyes returning to her.

“You shouldn’t say that.”

He stood blinking, staring at her without comprehension.

“Were you even listening?” she asked him at last. “One-two-three, eyes on me.”

“I was listening.”

“What’s the last thing you heard me say?”

“What?”

“The last thing you heard me say is ‘what’? I didn’t even say that.”

“I’m going back inside now,” he said, but when he turned back toward the house again he was met by the huge and staggeringly empty rectangle of the open garage door and he froze again there, unmoving. He did not want to reenter that terrible vacancy. That much was certain.

“Do you want me to tell my mom something?”

He turned to her once more. “What do you mean?”

“She’ll ask me what you said.”

He looked across the street at Jennifer’s house again, realizing now that the little girl was asking him something and expected an answer and then wondering if he should answer her at all. Behind him the empty garage continued to loom out at him like some enormous well of gravity that had somehow managed to draw everything into a crushing void that was the cardinality of an empty set. How could he have been so stupid?

“So what do you want to tell her?” Nicole asked him.

He looked down at her and as he did so his phone once again began to buzz in his pocket. This time he looked at the screen. It was not Barb this time; instead, it was Jim Mullins calling from his JSC office. Christ. This too? He knew he should answer it but could not fathom talking to the office now so he waited for the call to ring through to voice mail as he watched the little screen that held his name.

“Anything?” Nicole said. She looked exasperated, hands on her hips and staring up at him.

“Tell her …,” he began, then stopped and looked at the two white plastic trash bins he had brought outside to dump, both of which flanked him now. Empty. Erased. “Tell her I’m sorry,” he said at last.

Nicole cocked her head sideways. “Sorry for what?” she said.

“Just sorry.”

“That’s weird.” She looked disappointed.

“Yes, it’s weird,” he said. Then he added, “Probably.”

“Well, OK.” She looked back at her house for a moment. If there was a signal from some quadrant there he did not see it. “I have to go,” she said. “Bye.”

She turned and ran to the sidewalk, looked up and down the cul-de-sac with ceremony lest some car come barreling down the asphalt, and then ran the rest of the way to her front door. He could hear her shout, “Mom!” as she opened the door and then it closed and what transpired therein he was not privy to and never would be.

He stood for a long time, staring off toward the street, the two white plastic trash bins on either side of him, as if waiting for something or someone to arrive but there was no traffic in the cul-de-sac. The twilight was approaching and he remained there until the sun reached the tops of the houses that stood on the ridge to the west and until the empty lot, now partially filled by the promise of construction, grew into a field of daggerlike shadows and then darkened and until the sky burned chrome and alizarin and then all at once flickered out and until all that remained were the uncountable pinpoints of light flickering against an atmosphere that ringed a further darkness that was the true color of the universe and ever would be. He did not know how long he stood there but he knew he was indeed waiting for someone, waiting with a gasping and terrible hope that verged on despair. He could not bring himself to reenter the empty house. Not now. Indeed in that moment he felt as if he would never be able to enter the empty house again, suspended between distal points so far away that their sources could no longer be ascertained. He stood there until at last the silhouette of the now-familiar figure rounded the corner of Riverside and entered the long bight of the cul-de-sac: the short, steady gait and the dark appendage of the telescope protruding up above him like a compass needle gone awry.

“What if the comet is actually coming?” Keith said.

Peter did not stop looking through the telescope. One hand reached up to the fine-focus control, turning it carefully and then hovering there, frozen. “This is real question you ask?” Peter said.

“Well, yeah,” Keith said.

“I do not know how to answer this question.”

Keith remained sitting for a moment and then rose and stood near the telescope. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

Peter stepped back from the eyepiece and Keith leaned in and pressed his eye to it and reached up to the focus control and turned it carefully and then turned it back again. A blurry disc. “So what’s this?” he said.

“M81,” Peter said. “A galaxy. Simple to find. Simple to see.”

“M81,” he repeated. He waited for Peter to resume speaking and when he did not he said, “Aren’t you going to tell me some story about it?”

“Why did you ask me about comet before?” Peter said.

“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking about it.”

“Yes,” Peter said, “it is something to be thinking about.”

The image in the circle of the telescope’s lens was an insubstantial blur of color. “I don’t know. What else is there to talk about?” he said.

“Yes, this is something,” Peter said. “You know more about these things than I do, I think.”

“I don’t know anything about it at all.”

“I mean about what might happen. They would send something into space to stop it maybe. Or missile. The technology parts of this you know about more than I do.”

“Yeah, my knowledge of that stuff doesn’t amount to much.”

“You know though how this works. NASA and government. Space agencies and how they work together.”

“Lots of meetings,” he said. “That’s how they work.”

“Yes, I know something of meetings,” Peter said. “This was so even at Golosiiv. Meetings and then meetings to make sure we have enough meetings. Never ending.”

“That’s how the world works.”

“We had Dr. Vanekov at least. He was one to move things forward. Meeting too long. This is what I decide. Next item.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes, good for meetings. Less good for those who are not agreeing with decisions. The scientists are angry sometimes. No, not angry. Wrong word.”

“Frustrated?”

“Yes, that,” Peter said. “Frustrated. Good word for this.”

Peter’s first words to him that evening had been to ask him for help moving the sofa back to its place in the center of the field and the simplicity of the request had done much to dispel his misery. They went immediately to the behemoth and hefted it across the bare dirt to the center between the two tractors and then dropped it roughly to the earth again, both of them collapsing into it simultaneously. Even the short walk had left them both winded and they sat there for a time in silence, having shared no words apart from the initial brief exchange. The two tractors flanked them on the north and south sides as if walls for some strange, open-air observatory, the big machines dim and blocky in the reflected light from the streetlamps at the end of the cul-de-sac. The simple act served to clear away the sickening feeling that had settled upon him and he realized that perhaps for the first time in his life he had grown to value human companionship and that the overarching feeling that had come to dominate his endless days and nights in the cul-de-sac was loneliness.