Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

For the next hour he drifted through the house, each room just as empty as on the day he first returned from the mission, the only significant change being that blotchy single coat of eggshell, pale yellow leaking through, and the holes in the walls from the recent termite search. He wandered upstairs and stood for a moment in the doorway to Quinn’s room and then entered that gray cube but he could not hear her voice or feel her hand or touch her face.

Nearly every time they spoke, Hoffmann had said he sounded angry and each time he had left their conversations perplexed. But he knew now that what he felt was indeed anger, or had been anger, and that there was a reason for it because what he had been ever orbiting in his thoughts had not been Quinn’s death after all but rather his own utter and complete failure to be what she needed him to be, what he needed himself to be. Because the decisions he had made, again and again, had been wrong and now he could not go back and fix them. It was too late for that. It may have been too late from the moment he had decided to follow the absurd impossible equation of his life through to the absurd impossible place in which he had come to find himself: not as an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician but as a man who had failed as a father, as a husband, perhaps even as a human being. Hoffmann had told him the goal was to move through his experiences. He did not know if this was what he meant, but he certainly did not feel angry now. Only disappointed, lonely, and sad.

He moved through the hall and down the stairs, shouldering the laptop bag and stepping outside at last. The foreman from the pest company stood by his company truck and Keith told him he was leaving and they shook hands.

“Maybe you won’t even have to pay for this,” the foreman said.

“How so?”

“Comet.”

“Right,” Keith said. “The comet.”

“Maybe it’ll just fall on the credit card company.”

“Maybe.”

His house was a flurry of activity now: the door wide open as workmen in blue jumpsuits carried their fans and equipment inside, the thick vinyl of the tent itself unrolled all around the perimeter. At the end of the cul-de-sac, construction workers in hard hats were starting their day of labor in the dirt. The cement truck had arrived and was backing into position to pour the foundation, the rest of the crew standing with their various implements at ready as if warriors preparing to fill in some mass grave, their faces masks of resignation.

He set the laptop bag in the trunk and when he turned back momentarily to look at the cul-de-sac he saw Jennifer in the upstairs window of her house across the street watching him, the blinds pulled open. She was framed in the bare window, the sunlight cresting across her face from the east so that she was half consumed in shadow. He expected her to turn away when he looked up but she did not do so and after a moment he raised his hand in a gesture that was somewhere between a wave and a salute. She did not move at first and then her hand rose and pressed against the glass and whether it was meant as a greeting or was simply an involuntary movement he did not know.

There was nothing holding him but for a long time he did not drive away from the empty house, remaining in the rental car and watching, through the greasy sunbaked film of the windshield, the scene before him. He had thought once that the landscape was some failed attempt at perfection, as if the manifestation of some Euclidian ideal, an equation that was both solvable and tangible with predictability built into it as a standard. Perhaps that was why Barb had chosen this place: because it promised to be eternally the same, never aging, always new, always clean, always perfect. But what they had come to was a landscape branching endlessly into a vinculum of zeros. The only visible differences between one point and the next being vacancy and absence: empty homes, empty lots. At some point even these would be filled in. Then every cul-de-sac the same. This house. Some other house. Every house a box containing a family dreaming their lives within a closed loop, always repeating. And yet Peter and Luda were here with their children, from halfway across the world. And Jennifer and Walt and Nicole, with their own lives and their own problems. Each cast into a landscape constructed of sameness and yet each dream unique unto itself.

And there stood his own. He had told himself — and kept telling himself — that the house had no meaning to him at all; he had barely lived there in the days before the mission and in fact had spent more time in its empty shell than he ever had when it had been occupied by his family. He knew he had exchanged more words during the past year with anonymous grade-school students on the station’s shortwave radio than he had with his own daughter in this house. And yet he did not leave. It was as if the shape of the container held a resonance, the whole of the structure gently cradling the idea of what might have been despite the fact that he had not a single concrete memory of its contents except for the days of endless unpacking when they had first moved and that final conversation with Quinn. Even now what images he could form of her in the house were as spectral as the waking memories of his dreams and his ability to recall himself within those same walls, at least from the time before the mission, failed in equal measure. But despite this insubstantiality there remained a sense of attachment to the idea of the place, this box that should have been filled with memories but was filled instead with loss and guilt and emptiness.

He did not clearly know where he had been when she had careened into the oak tree in his car. In orbit, somewhere, above Earth. He had occupied some stretch of fluid miles, but what did such a location mean? He had been on the surface during most of her cheerleading activities and had failed to attend a single event. Perhaps this was the true calculus, here as everywhere: the calculus of location and the understanding that the numbers themselves were possessed of a fundamental gravity comprised not of fluid motion but of fixedness. He had simply not been here, even when he was. He had formed an equation that had shaped his life and that equation had offered a solution that seemed, at the time, as clear and precise as any he had ever worked to solve. And yet it had not been the right solution. It had been no solution at all. And when he had come home at last it had been to emptiness. His family had lived here, here in this house, and it was the final location where this statement would ever be true. And where had he been?

He was on the verge of tears when he put the car into drive at last and pulled into a wide U-turn and moved out to where the court connected to Riverside. He might have looked in the rearview mirror at the receding shape of the termite-ridden structure but he could not bear to do so, instead continuing straight ahead, staring at the road, then at Peter’s house, where Luda and the two children were outside. He actually managed to smile and wave to her as the car rolled by and when Luda saw him she motioned frantically for him to stop and he pulled over to the left side of the street and his window hummed down. “Wait,” she said. Her eyes were wide and her mouth curled up into a smile. “I will get Peter.”

She said something to the two children in Ukrainian and they both stood there staring at Keith as she disappeared inside the house. He sat there behind the wheel, breathing in the air conditioner’s cold exhalant. There was an immediate urge to swivel around and look once more at his own house but he did not do so. “Hello, kids,” he said.

They both giggled, their hands up at their mouths as if to hide some secret joy.

The doors to Peter’s car were all wide open and there was the top of a bag visible from the open trunk. A few pastel-colored towels. “You guys going somewhere?” he said.