The Infinite Tides (13 page)

“Yeah, a little like brownish red.”

“But not orange.”

“No way José, not orange.”

The television continued its sounds. He was staring at the screen now, not looking at her, the sense of what she had said flooding through him all at once.

“What about nine?” he asked.

“Yellow.”

“Two?”

“Blue two. It rhymes.”

“Three?”

“Kind like blue and green together. Like water.”

“Four?”

“Jeez, are you gonna ask me all of them?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Probably.” But he already knew all the answers she could possibly give. The colors all the same. The colors exactly the same as his own.

This was how it would start. He knew that now, in the house in the cul-de-sac, his hands ever-flecked with paint. He knew that this had been the moment to dictate everything to come after. But he also knew—had already known—that Quinn was similar to him in some essential way, Barb even making that a household joke, laughing when their daughter’s responses were so blunt and direct, without preamble or thought or concern. “She’s just like you,” Barb would say to him.
“Exactly.” He would merely shrug in response and Quinn would peer back at them both, exasperated, as if she knew there was some kind of joke between her parents but she would not deign to acknowledge it. But he knew it was true. Even as a very young child she had displayed a sense of logic and analytic skill. It was the same language Keith spoke, not the language of numbers—that would come later—but rather a language of simplicity and directness. Perhaps it would have been the same with any child, that his own tendency to speak with blunt efficiency, to cut right to the point, mirrored the way children communicated. But then this was not any child; this was his own and she was so much like him that it sometimes felt as if, finally, he had found someone he could communicate with who gave no quarter to pretense or confusion.

She shared, as well, his ability to focus on whatever task was at hand, silently and efficiently. When she had been four or five it had been building elaborate structures with Lego blocks. Much later, it would be her homework. Sometimes, in the years to follow, he would stand in the doorway to her room and watch her at work, her back to the door, and if he was quiet enough he could watch her there for a long time, her silence, the intensity of her progress. It reminded him of being alone in his office with his pencil and calculator and his numbers and with no one to disturb him. He could think of no place on Earth, no situation he enjoyed more. The only questions that existed in that room were ones he directed himself and all such questions, no matter how complicated, could be answered and in this too, he imagined, she was like him.

In the weeks following Barb’s father’s death, he had already decided that the numbers would provide a trajectory for her, a way for her to move forward, not just ahead of her peers but away from them because she had the gift. She shared the same secret and inviolable sense of numbers that he did, their personalities and their colors immutable. At first he had been too surprised—shocked, even—to think of anything beyond the moment they were in because what she had
said in passing, casually, in front of the television, was something he had thought private: that the numbers themselves held within them a sense of relationship. He had known this as early as the second grade, when he had told the class that three did not like seven and that seven and eight only got along when they were seventy-eight and otherwise did not want to be neighbors at all, that this was clear from their colors alone. The other students had laughed at him and the teacher praised him faintly for his overactive imagination and Keith stared back at them, dumbfounded, his eyes not tearing up but rather only opening wide to mark his sense of incredulous confusion. What he had told them was fact, something he understood as intimately as he knew his own mother and father, perhaps even more so. He did not understand the reaction the other students had toward him. He did not understand it at all.

By the time he reached junior high school, he had learned that he had an ability that his peers lacked, for the numeric relationships he intuitively understood had made the numbers akin to friends. But perhaps even more than that, in the burning and disconsolate sexuality of his young self the numbers provided a sense of intimacy. He would not have identified it as sexual—in fact would have denied this with a vehemence fraught with embarrassment—but there was no other word to describe the clear and secret detail in which he knew and understood them. The numbers and symbols and functions were beings unto themselves and while they were often represented as stark and concrete and unchangeable forms in textbooks and on chalkboards, he never saw them that way. Even as a child, he could see them the way he believed they actually were: as part of the three-dimensional space in which they existed as genuine and independent objects that were not alive and yet were possessed of all the manifest and unmistakable indicators of that state of being, of life itself. He could see the relationships between them and could hold those individual relationships in his mind, as if they had become physical structures which floated within an infinite empty container, and he could zoom into
or out of those structures as if possessed of some enormous and all-encompassing lens. Entire equations could be worked out that way: solved a piece at a time by developing the relationships between sections, for in the end they were not even equations but rather collections of personalities that could be classified and understood the way one might understand the structure of a family: in conflict or harmony or some state between and their solutions the logical endpoint of those relationships.

The strength of that feeling faded with time, replaced later with a simpler and no less profound sense of familiarity. He did not think of them as having personalities now, although he could still see their colors. Instead, what he had felt about them as a child had given way to the sense that they were actively functional and representational. And yet even now he could feel them slotting into their locations with grace, perhaps even with longing, because they needed to complete their tasks. He had learned that much from them. He owed them that much. That was why he had chosen to become an astronaut, had worked toward that singular goal for so many years, because he owed the numbers for everything he was and anything less than pushing the practical limits of human knowledge would have been a betrayal of that trust. He never could have put this obligation into words and, if pressed, likely would have denied that any obligation existed at all and yet it was there nonetheless, a kind of counterweight to balance those things he would never understand. That was his gift and it was his obligation.

Even so many years later when he was alone in the empty house in the weeks and months after Barb had left him and Quinn had gone into the ground, after everything he had come to think of as having permanence had disappeared from his grasp, did the numbers not remain? In the chaos of everything that had come, did they not remain his constant companions even in the endless gloaming of his days in the cul-de-sac? The numbers were clear and precise and when he aligned them they told the truth, always, without question or innuendo and that truth had provided a path for him to follow. He had thought that
Quinn could follow much the same path. That she could be like he was. That she could be just like he was.

He called Barb right before Quinn went to bed and they spoke briefly and then he handed the phone to Quinn and said, “Tell Mommy good night,” and instead Quinn said, “Daddy says Grandpa is going to die.” Again he told her to say good night and this time she did so. He took the phone back without comment and said, “We miss you.”

“What in god’s name did you tell her?” she said.

“I told her the truth,” he said, and when she did not respond he said, “I thought she needed to know what was going on. She misses you.”

“I miss her too,” she said. “I miss you both.”

“We can come out there,” he said. “If you need us to.”

“There’s no reason to do that. It’ll just upset Quinn.”

“She can handle it,” he said.

She did not respond. In the silence, he wanted to somehow tell her that he had learned something about their daughter, that she had a gift, but he could think no way to express that now. He could find no words.

They talked for a few minutes longer and then he said good-bye and hung up the phone and looked to Quinn. “You know, that’s not a nice thing to say,” he said to her.

Quinn was seated on the bed in her pajamas. “What isn’t?” she said.

“Telling Mommy that I said Grandpa’s going to die.”

“But he is going to die.”

“She already knows that.”

“But she didn’t know that I know that.”

“That’s true,” he said. Then: “It’s time for bed.”

“Can we watch another show?”

“No.”

She was looking at him as if getting ready to make another request
but instead she simply said, “OK,” and let him tuck her into bed and kiss her good night and when she lay there, at last under the covers, he said, “How long have you known that four was red?”

“Brownish red,” she said.

“OK, brownish red, then. How long have you known?”

“It’s always brownish red.”

“Did you know that almost nobody can see that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Only special people can see the colors.”

“Well, that doesn’t seem fair,” she said.

He smiled. “No, I guess not but it’s true.”

“If they don’t have colors then what color are they?”

“Just black. Like words in a book.”

“Oh,” she said. “That seems dumb.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, it does.” He continued to look at her. “I can see the colors too,” he said. “And I know they have feelings.”

“Good,” she said.

“I don’t know anyone else who can,” he said. “Just you and me.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah, cool. You’re going to do great things, Quinny.”

“So are you, Dad,” she said.

He smiled again. “Yes, I am,” he said, still smiling. “You and me.” He paused a moment and then said, “Good night.”

“Good night, Daddy,” she said.

He rose and turned the light off and closed the door halfway but he did not get much farther than the hallway because she immediately called him back with a loud, “Daddy!” and he turned and reopened the door and found her sitting up in bed with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“What’s wrong?” he said. He had already crossed the room to take her in his arms and crush her body against his own. She said something
in response to his question, something choked through tears that he could not understand, so he asked her again and this time she said, more clearly, “I don’t want Grandpa to die.”

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t either.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“I know.”

“Can we go see him?”

“We can’t do that now.”

“Why not?”

“Because we can’t.”

She continued to weep against his chest and he held her until she grew quiet in that dark room. Until everything grew so very quiet. Until she had fallen asleep at last.

The following day was Friday and he thought he might need to keep her home from school but when he offered this as an option she looked at him quizzically and told him that she was not sick. When he told her that sometimes people just needed to stay home and rest even if they felt fine she told him that was a silly thing to say and that she needed to go to school. He thought that he should probably keep her home anyway, that Barb would have kept her home, but he had no real plan of what he would do with her for those hours of the day and so he helped her get ready and made her lunch based on Barb’s carefully worded instructions (“Mayo: Not too much!”).

When they reached school she burst out of the car, very nearly before it had altogether stopped. “Hey you,” he called. “No kiss?”

She shook her head, exasperated, but came around to where he stood beside the driver’s door and kissed him quickly and then yelled, “Bye, Dad!” over her shoulder and was gone down the sloping asphalt to the morning-wet grass and then to the playground. He returned to the driver’s seat and sat watching the children through the window. Barb was the one who both delivered and picked up their daughter
each day and as he sat there he felt a strange grip of terror in his chest that rendered him immobile even as other vehicles began to nose their way around his car. It did not seem possible to just leave her here, in the company of children he did not know and adults he could not even see except for one or two wandering the playground. Who were these people to care for his daughter?

And yet she seemed quite comfortable with the entire situation. Of course she would be. It was only her school, after all: the place she went each weekday from eight in the morning until half past one. Even now she was in such frenetic motion that it was difficult to follow her amid the forms of the other children. She had not hesitated at all. In fact she had spent most of the morning pushing him to hurry up.

“We have to go, Dad,” she had told him.

“Mommy said you didn’t have to be there until eight.”

“That’s when the bell rings,” she had answered. “But I need to get there earlier.”

“Why?”

“To play.”

“Oh,” he had said. “Then we’d better get going.”

He could not remember when he had really set upon math the way he eventually did, as a serious academic subject, although he knew that by junior high school he was spending far more time on homework and studying than his peers and the proof was in his grades and the praise his teachers gave him. He knew that the other students looked at him as some kind of weird brainiac, a definition that he did not much mind and even took some pride in even if they used or tried to use it as a kind of taunt. When he was, on rare occasion, invited to some social event—a birthday party or a get-together at the local skating rink—he would most often turn them down. He did not tell his parents about these events. When his mother once found an invitation crumpled in the trash, he told her that going to the skating rink
did not interest him. His response apparently did little to assuage her concern as she continued to believe his apparent lack of friends was something akin to a dysfunction. It might well have been one. “Where were you, Corcoran?” they would sometimes ask and he would have some excuse ready. He had a sick aunt he had to visit. He was out of town. He was too busy. Of course the question itself was a taunt, meant to underscore the simple fact that he was not and never would be one of them.