The Infinite Tides (17 page)

He paused there in the darkness of the street, still facing her house, the street tilting beneath his feet. Above, the dim stars cast upward from the horizon of rooflines and into their dome of pinpointed light and he staggered below them in the center of the street. Up there somewhere was the ISS with the retinue of astronauts who had replaced
him: Yoshida and Eichhorn, both of whom had been part of his ASCAN group. Who else? Jones. Collins too. Someone else, but he had forgotten. Why have a daughter only to be told of her death two hundred and seventeen miles above the surface of Earth? Why have a wife at all if the end result is a house without furniture? Why become an astronaut only to end standing in a cul-de-sac in the darkness?

A black ocean above him. Stars cut into that false firmament. And Keith Corcoran standing there, drunk, maybe even smiling, the ring of the cul-de-sac and the lit orbit of streetlamps circling him, and when he stumbled forward toward the dark edge of the sidewalk he did so without conscious thought, only with a drunken sense of curiosity or perhaps not even that. Perhaps instead only the drift, the alternating sense of heavy stumble and high floating that drew him back and forth across the concrete. He nearly lost his balance stepping over the chain that blocked the empty lot from the sidewalk but did not fall, moving forward into the shadows, his feet crunching the thistle and stumbling some on the uneven ground. “Shit,” he said as he regained his footing, his voice a hollow in the slow flat darkness of the field.

When he was a few dozen feet beyond the chain he stopped and stood. It was as if he was in a pool of black emptiness. A vacuum. In the distance he could see the angular shapes of the houses where they stood against the thick depths of the low dark sky, their windows cutting squares of soft sharp brightness into those silhouettes and the streetlight near the end of the cul-de-sac illuminating that bight of sidewalk where it circled a patch of round colorless asphalt like a lopsided equator circling a globe, the world it depicted one devoid of all possible physical features: bleak and empty and meaningless. Even the intersecting lines and angles and rays of that landscape described only themselves.

If there had been a reason he had wandered out into the field he
had already forgotten it. “Shit,” he said, his breath exhaling into the night. Then more quietly: “Shit.” His body drifted in the ebb and flow of the tides, the million billion stars wheeling above him in their abstruse and recondite darkness.

Shit.

He awoke with his ears ringing and a sickening feeling in his gut that he feared might resolve itself into vomiting and when he opened his eyes into the harsh angular light of early morning his head was pounding. For a long while he simply lay in bed, the blankets and sheets awash around him like flotsam cast upon some geographically improbable shoreline. It was not yet seven o’clock and he hoped that sleep would return and that the pain in his head would dissolve but after a time he reconciled himself to the knowledge that sleep would not return and so he rose groggily and struggled into his bathrobe and descended to the kitchen. He did not think he could keep any real food down but he poured himself a bowl of cereal anyway and stood at the plastic-wrapped island and ate, the sound of crunching in his ears alarmingly abrasive. To his surprise he found that the breakfast helped settle his stomach some, although his head continued to pound in rhythm with his pulse. It was a different sensation entirely from the
migraines and yet it served to remind him of their ongoing threat and so when he shook the Vicodin into his palm he included a second tablet.

Through the dirty upstairs window he could see the closed blinds of Jennifer’s bedroom windows across the street. He thought she was likely still asleep although he could not recall how much wine she had actually drunk. He had certainly had too much but perhaps she was not hung over. Looking at those twin covered rectangles, he could hardly believe any of it had happened. He had stumbled into a moment that sounded like the setup for an adult film. The sexy neighbor lady across the street. The astronaut, recently single and lonely. Incredible. And now he stood in the same empty room he had occupied the morning before, as if it had been some dream from which he had awakened, finding himself once again in the container he had occupied since awakening from that other dream of being in space and of his wife and of his daughter. Dreams within dreams, although of course in reality there was nothing from which to awaken, all objects unrelenting in their harshly lit yellow lucidity.

In the three days between dropping the television and his evening with Jennifer he had not resumed painting at all, his carefully planned daily schedule slipping away as if stolen from him in plain sight over and over again. Each day began with the thought that he would continue painting the house and each day he had instead returned to Starbucks and checked his e-mail and voice mail and surfed engineering websites and did little else, the hours washing away from him like a sand castle dissolving with the incoming tide.

He had been home for less than two weeks but already the still emptiness had become an expectation to him, as if this was what his life was to become, his life without wife or daughter, without furniture, perhaps without even a job, for indeed the forced vacation had begun to feel like a kind of exile. Each morning he would wake to the silence of the house, some mornings shaking off whatever memory of Quinn had visited him in the half-light of dawn, and he would
shower and dress and swallow his painkillers and step into the equally numbed silence outside. Each morning the same. Each identical to the one that had come before.

Such were his thoughts as he drove out of that same silent cul-de-sac yet again, scowling into the early-morning traffic and even cursing periodically under his breath, thinking of Jennifer and wondering why he was somehow unable to simply enjoy what had happened, why there was, instead, a strong and unshakable sense of unease and disappointment, the equation continuing to roll out in front of him in a faded ghost scrawl impossible to read. His work, the only part of his life that had always maintained within it a sense of clarity, had faded into that equation as well. He was a mathematician, an engineer, an astronaut, but whatever meaning or significance these terms had once held had become as obscure as everything else.

The two parking spaces directly in front of Starbucks were taken up by a light brown sedan that slung across both spaces diagonally so he pulled the rental car into a space slightly farther away and parked. He grabbed his laptop bag from the passenger seat and stepped out into a morning already unbearably hot and humid despite the relatively early hour, the sun a flat white disc above him, his head no longer throbbing but tender and fuzzy. It occurred to him that he did not even know what day it was.

He was just stepping past the sedan when he saw the blonde barista, Audrey. She stood by the door of the coffeeshop and another young woman, also in the green apron of her employment, stood at her side. Both stared at him intently as he rounded the hood of the car. “Oh thank god!” Audrey said. Her eyes did not leave him.

Before them, in a wire chair next to the door, slumped a man who Keith at first did not recognize, the table before him tilted to lean against a jumbled collection of chairs as if to match the position of the sedan parked just in front of it.

The barista Keith did not know had been holding a phone to her ear and snapped it shut as he stepped onto the sidewalk. “He still won’t pick up,” she said.

“Thank god you’re here,” Audrey said, apparently to Keith. “This is the astronaut guy I was telling you about,” she told the other girl.

The response: “Cool.”

“He passed out,” Audrey said.

“Yeah, we can’t wake him up,” the other girl said.

“We don’t know what to do,” Audrey said.

“I called my boyfriend but he’s not answering,” the other girl said.

They had spoken in a nearly unceasing outrush of words and now they both paused as if waiting for him to say something in response. He glanced down at the man in the chair, at the top of his close-cropped scalp. The man snored loudly.

“It’s Peter,” Audrey said.

“Who?” He looked more closely at the man now—a thick wrecked frame in the wire chair like some rare breed of ox that had passed into unconsciousness—and with a shock he realized that it was, once again, the loud Ukrainian man. Fantastic. “Hey,” he said. He leaned in and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Peter.” He tried to remember his last name but it would not come to him. “Hey,” he said again. He leaned closer: Peter’s breath so awful smelling that he actually jolted back from it as from a snake or a spider, the stench making his own stomach churn. “He’s passed out drunk,” Keith said.

“Wow,” Audrey said.

“What should we do?” the other girl said.

“I don’t know,” he said. After a moment he looked up and saw that both of them were staring at him. “What?”

“He was really weird,” Audrey said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was stumbling around telling Auds how much he loved her,” the other said.

Audrey did not respond.

“You OK?” Keith said.

“Yeah,” Audrey said.

“Then he went outside and sat down and fell asleep or passed out or whatever,” the other girl said.

Keith stood there looking at them both. A woman crossed in front of him, dragging two children by their hands and eyeing him with suspicion. She reached the door and released one of the children’s hands long enough to open it and then disappeared inside the coffeeshop.

“What are you gonna do?” Audrey said.

Keith looked at her and then looked back at Peter again. “What am
I
going to do?”

“You know what to do, right?” the other said. “I mean, you’re an astronaut and everything.”

He looked at her, at the confused sense of fear in her eyes and at the man slumped in the wire chair. Then he said, “Do you know his phone number or anything?”

The other barista was smiling, likely excited that something separate from her regular work routine was happening. “No number,” she said.

“He lives near me somewhere,” Keith said.

“Maybe I should call the police? That seems like a good idea,” the other girl said.

“No,” Audrey said. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” the other said. “We can’t just leave him here. This is a place of business.”

Audrey took a step toward Keith, her hands gently wringing her apron strings. “David’s not answering either,” she said. “He’s the manager. He’s supposed to deal with this kind of thing. What am I supposed to do?”

“Everything will be fine,” Keith said. “Calm down.” He knew that he should tell her to call the police and have them pick Peter up and take him home, but he did not. Instead he looked at the man asleep in
the wire chair. He thought momentarily of his migraines: those he had suffered on the space station during the mission and those after his return to Earth. Then he leaned in and placed his hand on Peter’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, Peter,” he said. “Wake up, Peter. Wake up.”

“Wow, he’s really out,” Audrey said. She leaned forward to look at him. She might have appeared older when she was behind the counter in her apron and was responding to orders and firing up the espresso machine—perhaps that was what Peter saw—but now she looked like what she was: maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. Only a girl. Beautiful, but only a girl.

“Yeah, he’s out all right,” Keith said.

“Wow,” she said.

“He’s, like, superloaded,” the other girl said.

Peter had gestured in the general direction of his home when Keith had seen him in the cul-de-sac the night he dropped the television, but there was no way to know which house was his. He thought it must have been on Riverside, the street that Keith’s cul-de-sac emptied onto, but beyond that all the houses were the same.

“OK,” Keith said. “We need to get his address from his driver’s license. I’m going to try to roll him forward and you’re going to see if you can get his wallet.”

“I’m not touching him,” the other girl said.

Audrey did not look at him, keeping her eyes focused on Peter’s lumbering shape in the chair, his mouth open and a few gray teeth visible. “All right,” she said.

Keith leaned in and slipped his arms under Peter’s and shifted him forward. Peter’s head lay gently on his shoulder. Apart from a slight shift in his breathing, Peter made no sound. It was as if they were involved in some lovers’ embrace, these two men, so tender that one had fallen asleep in the arms of the other.

“What if he throws up on you?” the other girl said.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“How do you know?”

“I need you to step back and be quiet,” Keith said.

Then Audrey: “A little more. I can’t quite get it.”

He shifted Peter’s body forward as far as he could, cradling most of the man’s weight against his chest and shoulder.

“Got it!” Audrey said, her voice an excited giggle.

Keith grunted and shifted Peter’s bulk into the chair again, his own stomach lurching from the effort, the hangover a rotten tumbling inside of him. He knew at some point he would need to get the man into his car. Unless he could get him at least partially awake he did not think he and these tiny girls could manage it.

He held Peter’s sweating head in his hands for a moment and let it drop slowly back to a resting position. Audrey was smiling and handed him the wallet. It was nearly empty—no credit cards or business cards or much of anything else—but his driver’s license was there. Petruso Kovalenko, 3444 Riverside Street.

“Hi, George,” Audrey said.

One of the regulars had come in from the parking lot: a gray man with a blue “U.S. Navy Retired” cap perched upon his head and a bent wooden cane gripped in one gnarled fist. “Young lady,” the man said. “What’s the situation?”

“Ask him,” Audrey said.

The man had extended his hand. “George Campbell, U.S. Navy retired,” he said.

“Keith Corcoran.” He took the man’s hand and they shook.

“You’re the astronaut,” Campbell said, his eyes flicking to Keith’s polo and back to his face again.