The Infinite Tides (31 page)

Keith was smiling in the darkness, his head back on the sofa, eyes straight up and staring into the stars, Peter continuing to talk somewhere as if the voice was being narrated by someone who was no longer there, as if on the soundtrack of a film about this moment with two men in the darkness staring up into space, each in their own world and that world the same.

“And there is Main Astronomical Observatory there. Right there
in forest.” Peter paused, lifted his pipe again and Keith could see his face lit by the orange glow of his lighter and could hear him breathe in the smoke and hold it as the glow disappeared, once again a silhouette as if made of some darker matter than that of the universe around him, around them both. “I wish you could see this as I did. It is magnificent. Not like this little thing but beautiful thing with forest all around. You see what I am saying?” He paused and once again the orange glow of the lighter, the inhaling of smoke and holding, then the exhale. “A place you could dream about if you are like me and you spend your nights looking at books about stars and you read about stars and planets and you go to university to study. And then they give you job as assistant. And it barely pays but maybe you are not caring because you love.”

There was a long pause now, long enough that Keith lifted his head from the back of the sofa and looked over at Peter there, at his silhouette in the darkness. He wanted Peter to keep speaking if only because there was a story being told that was not his story and so did not involve the tiny cul-de-sac of his own life. There were other lives and other stories and he had forgotten this simple fact until this moment, in this night. “Must have been incredible,” he said and he hoped it would be enough because he did not want to speak; he only wanted to loll his head back on the sofa and drink his beer and feel the aftereffects of the painkillers as they mixed with the alcohol and drifted through him as he floated on the surface of Peter’s story like a man in a moonlit boat on a flat and silent sea.

“Yes, incredible,” Peter said. “The work was, but nothing else. We lived in apartment in Teremky, west of city. I took municipal bus to Golosiiv and sometimes this bus would not be there and I would have to walk mile to train. And pay is terrible. Luda was home whole time in apartment and she did not know what to do. Her family was across city. There was no car for us, so hard to get anywhere. Sometimes buses regular like clocks and other times they do not come, sometimes for days. You could walk under road in tunnel and you could
even take baby carriage up and down stairs but maybe not two of them. Not by yourself. So you cannot get anywhere then. Not by yourself with children.”

And Keith could see it: the tunnel under the road, graffiti covering the walls. The concrete stairs. The rush of people coming and going.

“I would go to university in day and then Golosiiv and would work there in night with astronomers and in beginning I’m helping only with putting data in computer. There is little office there with very old computer and some equipment. No windows even, but I do not care. Dr. Federov there was in charge of data and I work for him for year and they think I’m doing good job and I keep asking questions and learning always and taking classes in daytime. Dr. Vanekov sees and recommends me to Dr. Kuzmenko and so I am work then for him and it is with telescope then. That is what I wanted. Dr. Kuzmenko even publish paper and thank me by name in this paper.”

“That’s great,” Keith said.

“Yes, I was very proud. That was later, after I was there for long time already.” Peter puffed at his pipe again and then stood in the cricket-filled silence that was no silence at all. The stars spinning around them. “It is difficult thing to keep going to school and to work when you have two small children.”

“I can understand that.”

“Yes, very difficult. Impossible for me, I think.” Quiet then. Peter returned to the sofa and sat.

“You want a beer?” Keith said.

“Yes, I will have beer.”

Keith reached down and pulled a bottle from its cardboard container and handed it across to Peter and then sipped at his again and leaned his head back.

The sounds of Peter opening his own beer and drinking. Then: “They made some discoveries too when I was there. Things I helped with. Dr. Kuzmenko worked on very new galaxies and he found blue
dwarf galaxies, not very far away, and I helped him on finding that. Markarian 59 and 71. That is what they are called.”

He rested his head on the sofa again. The North Star high and Cassiopeia below its point but his eyes gazing straight up at the blaze of stars directly above. Peter’s life in the forest with the telescopes and dwarf galaxies that even now glow faintly somewhere in the night sky all around them. “So why did you leave?” he said at last.

“Ah, because of Luda and children.”

“She asked you to?”

“No, she would not do this. But I knew this is better. First university I had to stop because it took all daytime and then job at Golosiiv was not really job. It was like … how do you say … like assistant or something.”

“An internship?”

“Yes, like internship. But I knew I was good at this and I knew more than most who might have been hired there, but still they could not really hire me and then when they found out that I had quit university they could not keep me there anymore. So that was end of Golosiiv as well.”

“Shit,” Keith said.

“Yes, shit,” Peter said. “That is what this was. Fucking shit.”

“Fucking shit,” Keith repeated.

“Yes,” Peter said, as if considering. “They liked me there, I think. Dr. Kuzmenko tried to keep me on but this needed to be official. He could not change rules for me. I had no diploma for working. So someone else came in and works there for me.”

“That hurts,” Keith said.

“This is fucking shit.”

Keith laughed.

“Funny maybe,” Peter said.

“Fucking shit,” Keith said.

“Yes,” Peter said. A pause. Then: “Luda has brother with idea to come to America. Then her mother. Then finally Luda. And it seemed
like maybe it would be better idea than whatever was in Ukraine. America is dream place for us. Like this. In my dream, things could happen like in Golosiiv. The scientists there wrote me letter of introduction to astronomers at American university so I thought there would be job waiting for me here. They told me that there was.”

“Who told you?”

“University here. Better pay than at Golosiiv and same kind of work. Laboratory assistant position and I can take classes for free. So I tell Luda that we will move to United States and she and her mother and her brother all are very happy to hear this. I am happy too because this looks like I have job at university.” His voice trailed off. Stopped. Silence now. Keith in his drunken, painkiller haze, head drifting against the sofa. Peter silent somewhere. The stars in their places. The stars everywhere.

“No job?” Keith said at last.

“What?”

“No job at the university?”

Peter quiet for a moment. Then: “No job.” A pause. “It is not so good here as we thought maybe. The economy like Ukraine. Lots of people losing jobs. Some of it good for us. We got here and we think it is very good because houses are cheap and they are everywhere for sale. Very good. But it is not good. It is same as Ukraine maybe. So many people with no jobs. The university does not hire me. University does not hire anyone.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, shit. That is right. Shit for me. So Luda’s brother gets job and so we do not even live by university anyway. We live here because Luda’s brother is dishwasher in restaurant and he has work here but he cannot even get me job washing dishes because there are no jobs now for anyone. Miracle maybe he has any job.”

“You wouldn’t want a job washing dishes anyway.”

“Maybe not but more money than Target.”

“I guess.”

“This is true. And he cleans up tables too and gets money for this.”

“Tips.”

“Yes, tips. That is money right into your pocket.”

Keith sipping at his beer. How many? He had lost count. “What about the college?”

“What about it?”

“You take classes there?”

“I take English there and I take all astronomy classes, but they do not have much.”

“No, I imagine it’s not like the telescope in Kiev.”

“They do not have telescope. Just this.” He pointed to the telescope: a collection of sharp angles against the deep blue sky. “They let me take this home because I take so many classes. But it is like toy really. Not real telescope. But I should not complain. At least I have this.”

“I guess so.”

“How do they say it? Beggars can’t be choosers? You have heard this?”

“Yes.”

“That is my life story. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Maybe that’s not true,” Keith said, his eyes closed now, so drunk that his voice came as a slurring, blurred mess of syllables, the consonants with their long flattened-out shapes, the vowels like the moaning of ghosts.

“Oh, this is true,” Peter said. The telescope somewhere behind them. Then: “Your girlfriend is watching us, I think,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your pretty neighbor.”

Keith looked at the house. Again he could see her figure in the window: the cut of her shape in a nightgown against the lit interior of the house. “Her daughter thinks it’s weird that we’re out here,” he said.

“It is weird,” Peter said.

“You’re probably right.”

“I am right. Before it was just me with telescope. Now we have Astronaut Keith Corcoran. And sofa. That is weird part.”

“Me or the furniture?”

“Both I think, but mostly sofa.”

“Well, it’s a comfortable sofa.”

“It is,” Peter said, falling then into a long silence. Then, loud enough to make Keith’s eyes jerk open with a start: “Fucking shit!”

And Keith actually chuckling and then laughing and Peter: “What? Laughing at me? What?” and then starting to chuckle himself, both of them in their various states: stoned and drunk and laughing in that bleak darkness under a million wheeling stars.

Days and nights, not of eclipse but akin to a perpetual twilight that seemed to bathe everything in a thin and insubstantial dimness as if his eyesight had shifted so subtly that he did not even know he was squinting, not only the far distance blurred but the whole of his experience covered in a wispy film of half-light so that clarity itself became a kind of abstraction. He knew that some of the medications he had been taking were meant to treat depression and he had continued to take them not because he thought they had any real effect on his body or his mind but rather because he did what the doctor told him to do as if it were a military order, which indeed it somewhat resembled, but his mind continued to cast itself against the rocks over and over again despite the constant flow of pills. If he was being treated for depression it had become clear that such treatment was no longer working if it had ever worked at all.

And so the same sense of quiet that had settled over him upon first returning to the cul-de-sac had now been met with a kind of gloaming.
He had updated his phone number at JSC and with Sally Erler and the latter’s call represented the only time his phone actually rang, the realtor calling with a further confirmation of the young couple buying the house. There was paperwork to be signed and he suggested they meet at Starbucks rather than at the house and she breathed a long sigh of relief and agreed. When they met, she ran through the offer in detail and he signed and signed and signed the various lengthy and incomprehensible pages. He was surprised to see that Barb’s signatures were already in place, a feat accomplished via overnight mail, and so with his last signature all required parties had signed. Two months. Slightly less than that now. Then he would need to be gone.

She had arranged a variety of inspections and he had a duplicate key made and then purchased a welcome mat so that he could leave the key beneath it at the front door, thereby ensuring that he need not be home for the inspections to continue. A business card on the kitchen island from Buddy’s Termite Service was the only evidence he saw that any inspections had occurred. If there were other inspections besides this one, he was unaware.

He still had not spoken to Barb since changing his mobile number but her e-mails were frequent, waffling between angry diatribes and calm pleas for some access to Keith’s paycheck. He did not respond. The only reason to be in any contact whatsoever was related to the impending house sale and he had decided that Sally Erler could handle that herself and obviously she already had.

Peter was not always in the field after dark but he had taken to stopping by Keith’s door and knocking gently when he was passing and Keith would be inside waiting for the knock, listening for it, had even begun to be disappointed when it did not come. Of course there were nights when Peter was busy inside his own furnished home with his two children and his wife but most evenings Peter would knock and Keith would step outside with him, a six-pack of beer under his arm. Together they would trudge out into the field, Keith collapsing into the sofa as Peter set up the telescope. They would look at a few
stars. Nebulae. Clusters. Planets. Sometimes they would talk about their lives. Other times they would sit in silence, each to his own quiet thoughts.

Keith realized that he could actually identify a handful of constellations now and, even in his state of increasingly perpetual self-pity, the fact filled him with some sense of pride. He had added the rest of Ursa Major to the less-distinguished pot of the Big Dipper and could find Cepheus between Polaris and Cassiopeia, all the while Peter patiently spooning him information. Names of stars that, when repeated the following night, had begun to achieve a sense of familiarity in Keith’s mind so that he had just begun to understand that the mass of stars and nebulae and galaxies and perhaps universes, all of which spun above him on the axis of Polaris which was the axis of Earth itself, could be comprehended, that the whole of it had order even if it did not have rationale, even though he knew that he was not looking at a flat plane of stars but rather a three- and even four-dimensional space that moved far beyond them all and into the ever-retreating and isotropic distances that far outstripped the mechanical eyes of any telescope. Whole universes out there in the deeper luminous black beyond. And he had seen them. At the end of the robotic arm he had seen into that distance and it had gone on forever and would never stop. Everything out there fractal, infinite, beautiful.