Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“This is good,” she said.

He was quiet. They both were. He tried to quiet the tears but they came nonetheless, running down his cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he muttered, smearing the tears across his face. “Shit.”

“Everything changes. This is life.”

“I guess.” He sipped at his beer again.

“Girls love their fathers always,” she said. “My father work for Russian government and everyone hate him for this. But I love him. Maybe he is good man. Maybe he is bad man. I don’t know. I love him always.”

There was a slight breeze off the sea that came in gentle puffs and ruffled at the shade umbrellas. “I wish I could have made her happy,” he said at last. “Before it was too late.”

“She decides what is happy for her, not for you.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Stop with maybe. You and Peter are same. Both never happy here and now. Only looking for the next thing to do. You don’t even know where you are and what you have.”

The children were taking turns climbing on their father’s shoulders in the low surf, Peter’s body jumping up out of the water and the children flying backwards, laughing, into the waves.

“What do you want from your life?” Luda said.

Keith sat and watched them in the ocean. All three of them laughing, their voices rising out of the static hiss of the water as it rolled in gentle waves against the sand. “I used to be able to answer that,” he said.

“You forget. Everyone forget sometimes. Peter forgets for years. But then you remember.”

He was silent, his beer cold and wet in his hand. “I wanted to go back to work. Now I don’t even know.”

“You go back to work then,” she said.

“It’s complicated.”

“You talk to me of complicated?” She did not smile and there was an edge to her voice. “I leave my whole country to come here. What is complicated for your work? This makes mountain of molehill again.”

Far out at the horizon the colors matched so that there was a continuous field of blue from earth to sky.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

Her hand fluttered in his direction as if brushing him off and so he said nothing more.

After a time Peter called up to them from the surf: “You two come!” He waved to them and Luda waved back.

“You know what I want, Astronaut Keith Corcoran?” she said at last. “Right now what I want?”

He turned to look at her and she smiled at him and their eyes met. “This,” she said and she continued to look at him but her hand extended out toward the sea, her husband and the two children out there in the surf at the edge of an ocean that stretched out forever to a horizon that was no horizon.

“Come!” Peter called to them, to her.

She looked back to the surf. “OK,” she called back. The wind blew the dark hair from her face and she smiled, the sun on her skin, on her body. She sat forward and pulled the T-shirt over her head and pulled down her shorts, standing there before him in her bathing suit, her body smooth and curved and he looked from the shape of her to her face where it floated above him in the sunlight. “This is what I choose,” she said to him. She smiled. “Not what I have to do, but what I choose. Is that not what we have?”

He squinted up at her, into the brightness of the sun, the beautiful dark eclipse of her face. Then she turned and walked down toward the water, her form straight and tall and the curve of her hips and the black of her bathing suit, her skin the color of snow. She tiptoed into the sea slowly and Peter thrashed out of the water to meet her there like some thick-bodied oceanic god come out of the coral to meet his goddess at last, and he held her hands in his and drew her into the water slowly, the children leaping around them in a circle, jumping into and out of the water, returning to the beach, then to the water again.

The day had become warmer and after a time he indeed drew a towel around himself and changed into the swimming trunks Peter had brought for him and removed his shirt and lathered the remainder of his body with sunscreen. He stood for a moment contemplating the sea and then adjusted the shade umbrella. “Come in, Keith Corcoran,” Peter called to him.

“Soon,” he called back. Peter waved to him. Luda’s head bobbed from farther out in the ocean, then disappeared under the surface, reappeared again, the children crawling about on the sand like crabs. After a moment, they came running up the beach and rummaged in one of the bags for some plastic pails and shovels.

“We dig,” Marko said to him.

“Good idea,” Keith said. “The tide is coming in.”

“Good,” Marko said.

They both ran back down to the surf and sat just a few feet above the line of foam where the sand was yet dry and began to dig.

Keith turned his phone back on and after it was done powering up it vibrated and he looked at the screen. Eight missed calls, seven from various numbers at Houston and one number that came through as “unknown.” He dialed his voice mail. There were only two messages, the first from Jim Mullins, asking him to call back with a sense of urgency that was surprising: “Keith, I really, really need to hear from you right away. Right away. Please. As soon as you get this, please call.” He wondered momentarily what the emergency could be, thought that they were moving the things out his office and somehow needed his authorization to do so. Then he skipped to the next message.

“Chip, Eriksson here,” the message began, the voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Listen, I don’t know where you are, but we need you here at Houston right now. I’m serious. Call me right away. Or Mullins. Get here right now. It’s important.”

There were no more messages and Keith clicked the phone off and set it quietly on the blanket in the sand and sat looking at it, the beer still in his hand. Then he set that too on the blanket and looked at them both as if they might hold some secret message that he could decode if only he stared long enough.

Out at sea, Peter bobbed in the water, Luda nearby, the two children on the beach now, digging their hole in the sand with pieces of driftwood. Everything had grown silent, the surf continuing to roll in but only as some distant faded hush.

He looked up at the sky. The burning sun above them all, its motion as if it were rotating around the earth. And then he could see himself in the Destiny Module again, the planet scrolling below him through the round porthole window, his head clear and his eyes bright and shining as he watched the blue swirl of an ocean that he knew was this ocean and was somehow also this moment, because everything else had dissolved: the measurement of distance in units of time or light or space or via some other methodology he did not know. There was no future. There was only where he had been and where he was now, and such locations were not measurable by any method but that of humanity itself.

“Astronaut Keith Corcoran!” Peter called to him.

He looked again toward the water, not moving now, frozen in his borrowed black-and-white trunks, barefoot on the multicolored beach blanket. In his imagination he could see the white shining stripes of pure blazing light where they came raining through that same blue dome of the distant atmosphere, the tiny shards of ice and dust and rock flashing to the infinite trembling moment that is this one and is already gone, and he could see where that blinding arc would become the flash of impact against the distant non-horizon of the ocean and the sky as the sea vaporized around the burning mass and then Peter and Luda and the children and the others along the beach, and everyone on Earth in their cars on the road and in parking lots, and looking through the windows of the megastores, and at Starbucks, and even the workers tenting his empty house, and those building a new empty house at the end of the cul-de-sac, and Jennifer and Nicole and Walter Jensen, and yes even Barb: all looking briefly and finally toward the sea, toward that still soundless flash, and wondering. He could feel another set of eyes too, staring from some other place he could neither see nor recognize and he said her name but of course she did not answer him and never would. And then the flat slap of the explosion.