The Infinite Tides (2 page)

The third time the phone began to vibrate he sat up slowly and dropped his feet off the edge of the mattress but made no further press into motion, rubbing at his face and the back of his neck and continuing to listen as the buzzing continued in its short bursts—nine, ten, eleven—paused and then resumed once more. He leaned forward and lifted his crumpled pants from the floor and at last fished the phone
from the pocket, lowering himself to sit at the edge of the bed as her voice came through the tiny speaker.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said.

He breathed. “Christ, Barb,” he said.

“You’re in a good mood,” she said.

“There’s not even a vacuum here.”

“Where?”

“At the house.”

“You’re at the house?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m fine,” he said again. “I was asleep.”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess it’s early there.”

“Probably,” he said. He pulled his fingers through his hair. Rubbed at one eye and then the other, then pressed his fingertips against tightly closed eyelids. Everything red for a brief moment.

“When did you get there?” she asked.

“Last night.”

“I thought you were maybe still in Houston.”

“We finished up a couple days ago.”

“Good.”

“I guess.”

He could hear her breath. “What do you want me to say, Keith?” she said at last.

“I don’t want you to say anything,” he said. “You called me.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Fair?” He breathed. Waited. Then he said, “What am I supposed to do here?”

“Just get your stuff and put the house up on the market.”

“It needs some work first. Cleaning at least. And probably paint.”

“The new owners can do that.”

“I don’t think it will sell like this.”

“Just sell it, Keith. OK? That’s all you have to do.”

“That’s all I have to do?” he said. “Really? That’s all?”

There must have been an edge in his response for when she spoke again her voice was high-pitched and soft. “Don’t be mean,” she said.

“You left the sofa here, Barb. Of all things, you left the sofa.”

“I couldn’t fit anything else in the U-Haul,” she said, the words wobbling on the verge of tears now. “I have to start over. I’m sorry. Just take your stuff and go.”

He sat for a moment in silence. Then he said, “Don’t cry. I just don’t know what you want me to do, Barb. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t care. Just sell it,” she said, breaking into full sobs now. “I can’t go back there. I just can’t.”

He listened to her weep, his voice making a quiet and automatic
shhh
into the phone. Her grief might have brought him to tears as well but in that moment there was only the simplicity of her distress and his automatic attempt to comfort her. He listened as her breathing slowed once again. “OK, OK,” he said, repeating it over and over. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks,” she said at last.

He stared at the blank white wall before him. The slashes of light through the window. Then he said, “I need to go.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

She broke into sobs again.

“Don’t cry, Barb. It’s OK. It’s fine. I’m just tired.”

The rasp of her breathing. “Tell me when you want to come out here and I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t know when that will be,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Keith.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“I know.”

“Listen, call the realtor, OK?”

“Yes, I’ll call a realtor,” he said.

She was quiet for a moment and then she said, “I’m glad you got back OK.”

“Thanks.”

They said their goodbyes, her voice feeble and quiet and far far away. Then a sharp click and the line was dead.

He set the phone on the mattress beside him. He had slept in his clothes, for he had found no bedding in the house apart from a half-size child’s blanket featuring Mickey Mouse’s grinning face and he had used that for what he could, bunching it around his neck to create an illusion of comfort.

Above him the ceiling fan rotated slowly in the cool morning air. If there was some appropriate emotional response to the phone conversation he could not find it now. Instead there was only the ever-present sense of fatigue, the heaviness of his body that he had felt so keenly since returning to Earth’s gravity six weeks ago. Nothing else. And as he lay there the only thought he could muster was a vague confusion as to what he was to do next. It had never been his intention to stay at the house for any significant length of time. The garage was likely filled with whatever she had decided was his. His personal effects, whatever they were. Maybe he could simply leave the sofa and the bed and his dresser and the little television all behind and he could move into a hotel, at least for the next few weeks or months or whatever it turned out to be. The real estate listing could read: “Three-year-old house, comes with leather sofa and mattress. Random other pieces. Stale cereal a bonus! Canned yams! Mystery garage!” The sofa, of all things. That had a sting that could not have been accidental.

When he opened the front door he thought the blinding light might set off another migraine. Despite the medication, the thin keening
whine of that condition floated somewhere in the back of his mind. He tried not to think of it, tried to will the moment away, all the while knowing that neither force of will nor ignorance could divert the tide of pain if such a tide was indeed coming to claim him. He briefly pawed at his shirt for his sunglasses before remembering that they were in the rental car, and then stood for a long silent moment, his eyes staring at the blank square of the garage door as the feeling of pain or of panic wobbled and at last faded. There remained a sense of unease in his chest, a feeling that had been present upon waking as if he had been delivered out of some obscure and mysterious and already forgotten dream, the trappings of which still clung to him everywhere in thin silvery strands.

He wanted more than anything to be back in the microgravity of the ISS, back in that series of interconnected oxygen-filled tubes, but the mission was over and there was nothing he could do about that now. At least they might have simply left him alone to work at his desk in Houston. During the weeks after returning from the mission he had become involved in a variety of projects at the Space Center. But in the end the Astronaut Office could not even allow him that. The only question remaining was when he could return and what he was to do in the meantime.

Around him, the cul-de-sac appeared much as it had when he had left for the launch, as if it had become frozen upon his departure. Diagonally across the street, a skeleton of two-by-four boards framed the shape of a house, the surrounding lot overgrown with weeds. Next to that ghost, directly across from him, was a home so complete and perfect it might have been an advertisement for the American suburban lifestyle. Slightly farther away, the nether end of the cul-de-sac opened into a completely empty lot mottled with golden grasses and the light green of thistle. Yet more distant, an endless flow of rooftops swung over the low hills and disappeared into the fractal maze of freeways and subdivisions beyond.

He stumped past his neighbor’s house—apparently empty, the
lawn yellowed and dead—and followed the curve of the sidewalk, his body like a lead block being dragged through water. When he reached the edge of the vacant lot he stopped, peering across its thistled expanse to where the land curled out of sight into a drainage ditch and then rose again to meet a cinderblock wall that broke up out of the earth, dividing that vacancy from the backyards and rear walls of houses lining some other cul-de-sac. The walk from his front door to where he now stood was only twenty or thirty yards and it did nothing to lessen his feeling of density and weight. The more pressing problem was the faint high-pitched whine that had resumed deep behind his eyes. He felt at his collar for his sunglasses and once again failed to find them there.

And then, all at once, an explosion of movement so unexpected that he leapt backwards in surprise, his voice making a sharp, quick noise comprised entirely of vowels. Even then his mind did not register what it could be, its size and upward motion impossible. And then he saw it more clearly: a huge black bird that rose out of the field not twenty feet away, its wings pounding up out of the dry grass and thistle, already past the rooflines and rising into the flat blue of the sky and then its wings extending into a single flat plane as it began to spiral upwards in slow lazy circles.

He did not know how long he stood watching it, but the circles it described continued, the dark shape so wholly unmoving in its rotation that it appeared as if a shadow cut from darkness or a bird-shaped hole in the sky revealing that black space beyond the color of the sun, that point shrinking so quickly that when he momentarily glanced down to the field and then looked up again he could no longer find it. It was as if the bird had risen into the atmosphere or beyond and was itself in some kind of low orbit. He continued to stand there for a long while, scanning the sky, but now he did not even know what he was looking for. A speck of movement. But nothing would be revealed. The only evidence anything had occurred at all was the quick, rhythmic beating of his heart.

At last he returned to the car and pulled into the street and to the end of the court and then turned onto the farther street beyond and turned again. Another court amidst more stunted trees and the occasional empty lot and he followed the curve of that cul-de-sac and exited only to find himself approaching the rounded sidewalk of yet another court. The lawn beyond the windshield: a yellow waste of dead grass. It is true that things turn out this way. One moment you are an astronaut floating high above a space station at the end of a robotic arm of your own design, the next you are driving through an endless suburb. He again swung the car around and cursed to himself. Grass-covered squares and rectangles. Seemingly identical cul-de-sacs appearing and disappearing as he passed, different only in their state of completion: a perfect model home, then the skeletal structure of a wooden frame, then a patch of bare dirt holding an unfinished foundation. Between these states: a fractal landscape of courts and ways that turned inward upon themselves, thin and many-legged spiders that had, in death, curled into their own bulbous bodies, clutching the empty, still air between perfectly manicured lawns.

He found a Starbucks and parked. In contrast to the absurd blinding brilliance and slowly rising heat of the parking lot, it was cool and dark inside and he lifted the bag that contained his laptop and approached the counter as his eyes adjusted to the change in light.

“What can I get started for you?” the girl at the counter said.

He looked up at the menu on the wall behind the counter and as he did his phone began to vibrate in his pocket.

“Just a cup of coffee,” he said quickly. He looked at the phone. A Houston area code but a number he did not recognize. “Hello?” he answered.

“What size?” the girl said.

“Chip,” the voice said through the phone. “Bill Eriksson.”

“Eriksson,” Keith said. Then: “How are you?” And then, to the girl: “A medium is fine.”

“I’m doing good,” Eriksson said. “Doing good. But I’m calling to find out how
you’re
doing.”

“What?” Keith said.

“I want to know how you’re doing,” Eriksson said again.

“No,” Keith said. “Hang on. I’m at Starbucks.” Then to the girl at the counter: “What?”

She told him the price again and he fished out his wallet. “Sorry about that,” he said into the phone.

“Hey, no problem,” Eriksson said. “So how you doing?”

“Fine. Grabbing a cup of coffee.” He handed the girl his credit card and she pulled it through the edge of the register and then handed him the card and the receipt.

“Yeah? You been home?”

“Home,” Keith said. “Well, yeah.”

“And?”

“And I’m getting the house ready to sell.”

“Is that what you decided?”

“Yes, that’s what I decided.” She handed him a paper cup and he took it and mouthed a thank you and then cradled the phone awkwardly against his ear with his shoulder and carried his bag and coffee to a padded chair at the back of the room.

“She there?”

“Barb?”

“Yeah, Barb. Who else?”

“OK,” Keith said. “No, she’s definitely not here.”

“That’s too bad.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Keith said, “She really emptied me out.”

“How so?”

“There’s nothing in the house at all. The whole place is empty.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Well, I’m looking for a realtor.”

“Any chance of counseling?”

“Marriage counseling? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Is that something you want?”

“I want to sell the house. That’s what I want.”

“All right then,” Eriksson said.

A pause. Then Keith said, “Yeah. That’s about it. Get the house sold.”

“Then vacation somewhere?”

He looked at his coffee and then stood and walked to the small table near the counter and poured creamer and a packet of sugar into the cup. “Maybe,” he said.

“No maybes. Take a break, Keith. We all earned one. Especially you.”

“You said that before.”

“Yeah, but I feel like you’re not really hearing me.”

“I hear you.”

“All right. All right. Just looking out for the crew.”

“Mission’s over.”

“It’s over when I say it’s over,” Eriksson said. “So how’s the processor?”

“Funny. How’s yours?”

“Same sense of humor,” Eriksson said, not without irony. “Listen, the offer still stands, you know. You’re always welcome here.”

“I need to get this house thing done. I appreciate it, though.”

Keith could hear a child’s voice in the distance of the phone and Eriksson said, “Hang on,” and then, muffled, “Daddy’s on the phone. I’ll be off in just a second. No, you cannot have a Pop-Tart. Just wait a second until I’m off the phone.” And then, to Keith: “Sorry about that.”