Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“Peter,” Keith said.

“You hear her? Like Golosiiv? You know there is no Golosiiv here. Only this empty place. So we find another empty lot but this one is mine to come to. Fucking shit.”

Keith could not understand Luda’s subsequent response nor Peter’s and in his inebriated state it took him several minutes to realize that the conversation had shifted to Ukrainian, their voices rising in intensity and volume and speed, and when he realized this he lifted his head from the sofa and coughed. “Uh, hey,” he said, the Earth drifting under him, “I can’t understand Ukrainian.”

They both fell silent instantly. There were cricket sounds but they were distant. Peter was a dark shape by the telescope.

“We are being rude for your friend,” Luda said. Peter answered in Ukrainian and Luda shook her head. “I tell him come home to talk but he will not do this,” she said.

“I am not coming home,” Peter said, in English now. His voice was a sharp angle in the night air. “You go home to kids.”

Luda stood abruptly and said something to him in Ukrainian and Peter did not answer. “I try to help you but you do nothing,” she said. “Only complain.”

“Because here is nothing.”

“There is more here than Ukraine.”

“No,” he said. “That is not true.” His voice cracked over these last words and a long trembling hush descended upon the three of them, Keith apparently forgotten on the sofa, his head resting in the crater of padding.

“What do you want to do?” she said at last.

“I want to go home,” Peter said. His voice shook. A faint glimmer of tears streaked his face. “I only want to go home.”

“Then we go home.”

“I want to go home to Ukraine.”

“Is that what you really want?” she said.

From far away, over the houses and roads came the constant shush of cars from the interstate, shuffling over the endless courts and dead ends that enmazed the landscape all around them. Keith quiet, the triangle sandwich held in his frozen hand, not even breathing, the sofa rocking slowly under him as if moving over a gentle sea.

“I do not know what I want,” Peter said, his voice a hollowness floating in that static.

“If you really want, then we go back,” Luda said.

Peter did not answer.

“You are my husband,” she said.

“You would do that?”

“Of course I would do that.”

He said something in Ukrainian again.

“We do what is best for family.”

“But you think America is best for this family.”

“America is best for this family,” she said. “But this family is you too.”

Peter did not respond for so long that Keith had begun to wonder what had happened. Then he realized that Peter was crying, a quiet sound at first and then breaking in heavy waves through his frame and he covered his hands with his face in the darkness and Keith finally understood that he should not be there, that he should have left almost immediately and he shifted his weight to stand but then Luda rose from the sofa and went to her husband and embraced him. “Petruso,” she said.

He whispered some tiny words in the darkness, words that might have been in any language and which Keith could not hear.

“Shhh,” she said, her hand stroking his short-cropped hair, his arms coming around her body and holding her in that darkness.

Drunk, stoned, depressed, mildly confused, his mind sloshing from side to side, Keith Corcoran stumbled to his feet. He tried to lift the box of empty bottles but almost fell over in doing so and decided to leave them. “I’m going to go inside,” he said, taking a step forward around the sofa and then letting the momentum continue to move him back toward the bright edge of the cul-de-sac.

Neither Peter nor Luda answered him, nor did they watch him half-stumble over the sidewalk and into the street and turn finally toward his house. In his drunkenness he grabbed the two white plastic trash bins as he passed, one in each hand, and entered the house through the empty garage, dropping the bins into the gap they had left at the end of the kitchen counter before stumbling up the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail all the while.

He undressed and lay back on the bed. Against his skin: the cool of the night air. The feeling of erasure that had come upon him earlier that evening had returned and the loneliness that fell upon his shirtless chest was profound and biting.

Perhaps he might have wondered at the marriage of Petruso and Ludmila Kovalenko. Perhaps he might have wondered at the sense of hope and love and caring that he had witnessed. Perhaps it might have engendered within him a similar sense that all might be made right once again. But in the sheer descent of his drunken loneliness he had already forgotten about being outside at all. Instead, the bed spun slowly in the center of that empty house and he fell into that rhythm and faded at last into a dreamless oblivion that was not unlike the night he had just clambered out of: a darkness alone and so, so very silent.

He was mildly hung over for much of the following day and, as every headache made him wonder if a migraine was approaching, he took two extra painkillers. The result was a drowsiness deep enough for him to sleep away most of the daylight hours. Over the days to follow he reentered the normalcy of his recent routine as best he could, returning to Starbucks each morning and reading the newspaper. He stopped by the warehouse-size bookstore midweek and, in the throes of what was an increasingly familiar sense of self-pity, found himself thumbing through the thick, heavy mathematics books there without much real interest or attention. He tried to imagine what kind of math Quinn might have been interested in had she continued with her studies, these thoughts like ghost images superimposed over the stark reality of thick paper and ink, all such ideas mere abstractions cast forward into a universe that seemed increasingly without meaning or purpose.

On his way out he glanced through the books on the sale table near the exit doors. There was a thick hardcover volume on astronomy amidst the various titles and he picked it up and paged through it. He had seen similar photographs before, Hubble telescope images of nebulae and star clusters and distant galaxies, but he had never really looked at them with any interest. Now, though, the pages brought to mind the stars he had seen in similar clarity from the end of the robotic arm, of the intensity of feeling that had struck him, that weird mixture of helplessness and awe and wonder and silence. The end of the numbers. Their immediate silence. Or no not their silence but something else. And then he knew that it had not been the numbers that had fallen silent in the moment; it had been himself, the sensation he had experienced at the end of the robotic arm he had designed and built had fallen into some kind of interval, a gap, and no matter what measurement applied — time or light or space or something else — there would be no concrete answer because the experience itself had no solution. There was no language to describe what he had felt. Not even the numbers.

He purchased the book and brought it with him to Starbucks and sat there sipping at his coffee, reading the first paragraph of text and then paging through the volume at random, looking at the photographs and reading an occasional caption as he did so. Hubble Deep Field a black rectangle populated by myriad efflorescent galaxies. Lupus with its scores of multicolored stars. The Tarantula Nebula a blur of blazing orange light. If he had seen these same objects through the lens of Peter’s telescope he did not remember and he knew they certainly would not have appeared in such vivid detail. Perhaps they were invisible to all but the most sophisticated instruments. The Hubble. Golosiiv. Something else.