The Infinite Tides (42 page)

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.

Again, the children giggled. One of them yelled something back to him in Ukrainian that sounded like “please,” but with such a thick accent that Keith was not sure if the boy was asking for something or answering his question.

A moment later, Peter came bursting from the inside of the house. “Astronaut Keith Corcoran, my friend,” he bellowed.

“Peter.” Again he mustered a smile.

“You are good friend to me, Astronaut Keith Corcoran.” Peter reached through the open window and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Well, thanks.”

“You got me interview with NASA.”

“Oh yeah. I should have asked you how that went.” He glanced over his shoulder at the house now, did so without thinking. It looked just as it always had. He wondered how long it would take before the tent obliterated it from view, and then how strange it would look to have that monstrous tent in the cul-de-sac. As if some evil circus had come to town.

“You could have asked but I did not know how well this goes until today. Just this morning. Today they call me and say they want second interview to meet director of research center. This is good news, I think.”

Keith sat blinking, cool air roaring against his face. He reached out and turned the knob down and looked back at Peter. “Are you serious?” he said.

“I am so very serious. I am so very serious.”

“My god, that’s great news,” he said and despite the darkness of his mood he found himself smiling broadly.

“This is true. Great, great news.”

“Peter, they only do that when they’re going to offer you the job.”

“Yes, this is same Mr. Tom Chen tells me on telephone. He calls this formality.”

Peter was leaning in the window of the car and after a moment Keith said, “Let me get out,” and Peter stepped back and Keith opened the door and stood and extended his hand and Peter’s smile was great and luminous and there were tears in his eyes. They shook hands and Peter drew Keith into a one-armed embrace and into Keith’s ear he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you, my friend.”

“Damn good news.” He clapped Peter on the back and Peter followed suit and then the embrace ended and they both stood on the sidewalk between the two cars, the children standing off to one side watching them. The sound of high, rhythmic beeping came from the cul-de-sac. A truck backing into position.

“That’s fantastic,” Keith said.

“Yes, to hell with Target and its boxes.”

“To hell with Target,” Keith said. “When’s the second interview?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I gather the first interview went really well.”

“They ask me technical questions. Many technical questions. But I know this even though I have not been working big telescope for some years. The same questions I would answer in Golosiiv. Nice to be asked about this again.”

“Haven’t lost your mind working for Target?”

“No, I still have my mind,” Peter said, laughing.

“That must be a relief.”

“Yes.” There was a pause. “Today we go to beach to celebrate.”

“Day off?”

“Yes. Never work on Thursday.”

“How far away is that?”

“You have not been to beach?”

Keith shook his head.

“Not so far,” Peter said. “Two hours maybe. A long day and we are slow to leave. So much stuff Luda takes with us. Like we go to live there forever.”

“Yeah, it can be like that.”

“You see our field?” Peter motioned toward the cul-de-sac. “Already looks totally different.”

“I keep thinking we should hot-wire one of the tractors and push my house down.”

“My nephew can probably do this. The one I tell you about.”

“Maybe I’ll have you call him.”

“Maybe not.”

“You’re probably right.” Keith said. “It’s in bad shape though. They’re putting a tent around it to fumigate for the next three days. Termite infestation.”

“Shit,” Peter said. “You will be out of house for three days then. Where to go?”

“Hotel. And maybe for longer than that. Once the fumigation is done they’ll do the repairs.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Back to NASA maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“Complicated still?”

“Yeah.”

Peter stood looking at him. Then he glanced at the children. They had grown tired of watching the adults talk and were now chasing each other around Peter’s car, bounding through the two open doors and across the backseat. Peter said nothing to stop them and after a brief moment he said, “Just one moment, please,” as if he was talking on the phone and had put Keith on hold. Then he walked toward the house and disappeared inside.

Keith stood there and watched the children in their game, wondering if he should sit in the car where it was cool. Then Peter reappeared from inside, Luda just behind him. “Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said as he approached, “we would like you to come with us to beach today.”

Keith moved his eyes from Peter to Luda and back again. Both of them smiled at him. The children stopped their running and stood just behind their parents now, staring. “Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“We insist,” Peter said. “Unless you are busy with some astronaut work. Then we do not insist. But this would be an honor for us including you in our family. You have three days to be out of house. You spend first day with our family, if this is good for you.”

Luda said nothing but continued to smile and nod. She looked beautiful there, shining with a kind of radiance that he had not seen in her before. All the sadness that had been in her eyes when he had first seen her was gone, replaced now by a deep and expansive joy. It felt to Keith as if that first meeting, when he had appeared at her door with Peter passed out drunk in his car, had been years ago. How long had it been? Two months?

“Is there room for me?” Keith said.

“You sit up front with Peter and I will sit in back with children,” Luda said.

“There you are,” Peter said. “There is room.”

Keith stood on the sidewalk by the rental car in silence. Again he felt as if he should look at his own house again, one final time, another final time, but instead he said, simply: “OK.”

Peter clapped his hands. “Excellent! You will do this,” he said. “I am very pleased.”

Luda moved forward and touched Keith’s arm and then leaned over and said nothing but kissed him on the cheek and Keith felt heat rise to his face and he wondered if he was blushing.

Peter laughed. “She is very happy for you.”

“Yes,” Luda said. Then again: “Very much, yes.”

They were only able to exchange a few furtive words about the earth-bound comet as they embarked, Peter asking him what he knew in a whisper, perhaps expecting some inside NASA information that, of course, Keith did not have. “This is one-in-a-million chance,” Peter said to him, still whispering, “but still good to know.”

“Sure,” Keith said. “I was surprised it made the front page.”

Peter put a finger to his lips and then pointed to the backseat. It was unclear if he meant to indicate the children or Luda or all of them. “Not much news, I think,” Peter whispered. “Otherwise maybe not so important for front page.”

“I hope so,” Keith said.

“It is good to pray,” Peter said.

“It is always good to pray,” Luda said from the backseat.

Peter was quiet. Then he said, still in a whisper, “Maybe we talk about these things later.”

“OK,” Keith said.

“They put in gate,” Luda said from the backseat.

He nearly asked her what she meant but then he saw them: a crew of construction workers at the entrance to the development, finally installing the promised gate that would separate the Estates from the rest of the earth. Sealing it off. That was what he imagined. As if an airlock was being closed.

The car pulled through the strip of giant parking lots and then the interstate scrolled out before them, uniformly gray and endless. As they drove his mind returned to the comet. He knew its orbit would likely be some huge ellipsis, eccentricity perhaps pushing toward the parabolic, this side of the vast curve hooking through the Hill sphere of the sun, the other flung into the far distance beyond the edge of the solar system, such an orbit turning again and again and again over millions of years, the radius of apoapsis and periapsis unwatched and unmonitored until this moment when the line of one orbit happened to intersect with the line of another. A one-in-a-million chance but still a chance, the mathematics of which could hardly be believed. Two heliocentric orbits, one of which spun, perhaps, on a temporal cycle counted in millions of years, and the two actually intersecting. Even now he could feel the numbers shifting about in the darkness inside of him, filling in along the imaginary lines, circles within circles, parabolas and ellipses hooking and looping as the numbers arrayed themselves dimly along their shadowed paths.

He wondered what the variables would look like. Would Eriksson know anything about it? Maybe he would call him once they reached the beach.