Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

Earlier that night he had told Peter about the mini storage, about how his failure to pay the bill had resulted in an auctioning off of its contents. He had managed to slough off the few consumer items he had retained: the television that he had dropped down the stairs, the sofa, and then, through simple inaction, everything else he owned all at once. It occurred to him during some point of the evening that he should have already made a series of frantic phone calls to the mini storage company. Perhaps he could coerce someone there into giving him the auction information. He had been told that the contents had been removed immediately and that they would be parceled out for resale, but perhaps the man on the phone had been wrong. If it was true, he knew that Quinn’s schoolwork would simply be tossed into a dumpster somewhere. Very likely it already had been. How he wanted to crawl through the city landfill on his hands and knees to find each sheet of paper but he knew such a search would be futile. He had allowed the whole of her to slip through his fingers. Everything she had been or would ever be. What a fool he was.

“Hello?”

They both started simultaneously at the voice, half-sitting and then twisting around to look back toward the cul-de-sac. A woman was standing in the halo of the streetlight. She held something in her hands — a plate of some kind — and as they watched she stepped forward toward them and into the dirt of the vacant lot. Keith sat there, unmoving, too bewildered to do anything else. He thought for a moment that it could be Jennifer and wondered briefly what she could want but it was not Jennifer. He did not recognize her in the silhouetted light and sat confused and disoriented, his body and mind continuing to drift.

“Luda,” Peter said. He stood and said something in Ukrainian and set his pipe on the sofa carefully.

“Oh,” Keith said. He looked at Peter and then turned and looked over his shoulder again, over the back of the sofa and into the lit space beyond. Luda’s shadow a strip of darkness bearing out toward the sofa and the twin slumbering beasts that were the tractors. He could not make out her face at all.

“Very hard to see,” she said.

Peter stood and stepped around the sofa and took his wife’s arm and Keith could hear a few muffled words he could not understand. They stopped for a long moment there beyond him and Keith wondered if he should say something and then did say, “Hi,” loud enough for both of them to hear and Luda’s voice came back, “Hello,” and then he could hear Peter whispering to her again and could not make out the words be they Ukrainian or English or some other language entirely.

He turned back to the stars, returning his head to the sofa. Whatever Peter and his wife were discussing was no business of his and he would not have understood their words even if it had played out right in front of him, although he gathered from Peter’s tone that he was irritated by his wife’s arrival.

After a moment it was quiet again and then he could hear their soft footsteps in the dirt behind him. “My wife Luda is here,” Peter said.

“Luda,” Keith said. He smiled, his hand outstretched and she took it, a soft, insubstantial thing in his palm.

“Hello,” she said. “I brought something to eat.”

“Really?” Keith said.

Peter was holding a plate in his hand. “Please,” he said. He held the plate out and Keith could make out triangular sandwiches lining it and he took one and bit into it and realized that he actually was hungry. Had he eaten? He could not even remember. “Thank you,” he said, his mouth chewing. Peter pulled the plate away and Keith said, “Wait a minute,” and Peter brought it back and Keith took another and set it on his knee. “It’s good,” he said.

“I am glad you are enjoying this,” Luda said. “I apologize for coming here. I did not mean for intrusion.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Keith said. “Come and sit.”

“I have to get back to children. They are asleep but who knows. They maybe wake up and I am not there.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “You should go back home.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine for a minute or two,” Keith said. “Come and sit. Have a beer.”

Luda looked at him. “I should go.”

“It’s OK to stay,” Keith said. He hardly knew what he was saying now and had he looked at Peter he might have seen a look of irritation on his face but he did not or could not and Luda stood in silence. “Have a beer,” Keith said. “The sofa will be gone any day and there will be a house here and that’ll be the end of it.”

Luda looked at her husband and he smiled, perhaps resigned to the situation, and motioned to the sofa. She nodded and said, “OK, but not so long,” and sat next to him. Peter stood by the telescope, watching them, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands like some errant waiter.

Keith reached down and pulled a beer out of the cardboard box and handed it to her and she took it and unscrewed the cap in one quick motion and, to Keith’s surprise, flung it toward one of the tractors and actually hit it, the bottle cap ringing out against the metal machine like a silver coin and then zinging off into the darkness.

“Well done,” Keith said, smiling.

“I am sorry for tractors,” she said.

“She means she is sorry for me because of these tractors,” Peter said.

“Yes, that is right,” Luda said. “I am sorry for Peter that tractors come. And you also too.”

“Well, thanks. Not much we can do.”

“Yes, but bad news for you,” she said.

“We’re not very happy about it,” Keith said.

“My Peter is very sad,” Luda said.

“Luda,” Peter said.

“You are very sad,” she said, looking at him now.

Peter did not move from his station by the telescope, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands. “Our friend maybe does not want to hear this talk,” he said.

Keith waved his free hand in the air. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m pissed off about it too.”

“Maybe you find some other place to set up telescope?” Luda said.

“Probably,” Keith said.

“Not the same,” Peter said.

“Not same but maybe even better,” Luda said.

“You keep saying that to me but you don’t know,” Peter said.

“Maybe bigger field with no lights anywhere,” Luda said. “Like Golosiiv.”

“You know nothing about this,” Peter said. He said something in Ukrainian under his breath and at the sound of it Luda sucked in her breath and muttered something in return.

It was quiet now, husband and wife there in the darkness, Keith looking back and forth between them as if trying to discover something otherwise unspoken, his mind already drifting from what had been said in whatever language it had been said, drifting from their silence. Had he been sober he likely would have excused himself from the field and would have returned to the quiet emptiness of his house. But he was not sober so instead he cleared his throat and said, “Give me another one of those little sandwiches.”

Peter handed him the plate and then reached over next to Luda and retrieved his pipe and the little black bag and returned to his position by the telescope and lit it and smoked. Luda said nothing, watching him.

“These are good sandwiches,” Keith said.

“Thank you,” Luda said. She continued to stare at her husband.

“How are the kids?” he said.

“Good. Sleeping.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

Peter’s voice came abruptly: “You think you know what this is but you know nothing.”

Keith looked up at him, still chewing. “What?” he said.

“I am trying to help you,” Luda said.

“Yes, you try to help me but you do not know how to help me. Then you say ‘like Golosiiv,’ but you do not know what you say when you say this. There is no like Golosiiv. There is only Golosiiv and nothing else.”