The Infinite Tides (32 page)

Sometimes he thought of Peter’s résumé, but only when he was out on the sofa in the dark, listening to Peter explain the story behind the discovery of some feature of the night sky. He had long since come to the conclusion that Peter was indeed an intelligent man, too intelligent to be working at Target, and he knew he could at least send the résumé to someone who might read it, someone at NASA or at one of the many independent scientific organizations he had worked with. But when he was inside during the day he did not think about the résumé at all. The pages remained on the kitchen island, buried now amidst the pile of bills and a variety of unopened mail. Looking at it would mean he would need to call NASA and he did not
want to do so. Not yet in any case. Perhaps he was afraid of what they would tell him about his own future. Perhaps he was afraid that what he had already decided about that future was true. That it was over.

His phone rang when it was still early, a JSC number. He flipped the phone open and said, “Hello,” and as he did so the sound of a truck came from the front of the house, a loud, rumbling that shook the windows and sent a huge, low-frequency sound wave through the room so that even the milk in his cereal bowl burst into concentric rings. Whatever voice came from the other end of the line he could not hear apart from a sharp tinny sound. “Hang on,” he yelled into the tiny grill. He could hear the sound of air brakes, the squeak and hiss, the windows actually shaking as the engine outside sputtered for a moment and then roared again and moved past the front of his house at last, the rumble fading then to a hum that continued but was at least quiet enough for him to hear the voice on the phone now.

“Hello? Hello?”

“What’s going on over there?”

“No idea,” he said. “Who’s calling?”

“Forgot the sound of my voice already?”

“Eriksson,” Keith said.

“Your friendly mission commander.”

“I didn’t recognize the number.”

“Yeah, I’m in a different office.”

“You’re at JSC?”

“Yeah, the paperwork never stops. Just wait until you’re a mission commander. The paperwork will kill you.”

“I’m sure,” he said. The rumble faded to a dull hum that continued somewhere out toward the end of the cul-de-sac near the empty lot.

“So how are you doing?”

“OK.”

“Getting through it?” Eriksson said.

“Yeah, I’m getting through it,” Keith said. He stood from the increasingly rickety kitchen table and set his cereal bowl in the sink. He could still hear the hum of the truck down at the end of the cul-de-sac. A delivery truck perhaps. Dropping off a package for someone. Not for him.

“Barb?”

“Long gone.”

“Damn. Sorry to hear that, buddy.”

“Yeah, well. She’s filling my in-box with angry e-mails. That’s something to look forward to.”

“I’m sure.”

“How’s the family?”

“All good. Little guy is in swimming lessons. Boring to watch but fun anyway.”

“That’s good then.”

“So you’re doing OK?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Seeing the doctor and all that?”

“Yeah I’m seeing the doctor and all that.”

“Psych doing anything for you?”

“Not really,” he said. “So this is a checkup call?”

“Come on, Chip. We’ve logged a lot of time together. Can’t I call to find out how you’re doing?”

“You can,” he said, “but that’s not what this is.”

“That
is
what this is.”

“OK.”

“You can really be a pain in the ass,” Eriksson said.

“What do you want me to say?” Keith said.

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just asking how you’re doing.”

“I don’t know how I’m doing. I wake up, get a cup of coffee, wander around town. At night I sit around with my Ukrainian neighbor and drink beer. That’s all.”

“All right,” Eriksson said. “Look, buddy, I’m worried about you. That’s all.”

“Yeah, I appreciate that.”

They were both silent then and in the gap Keith thought that, if he could find the words to do so, he would tell Eriksson exactly how he was actually doing because Eriksson was perhaps the only substantial friend he had. They had spent so much time together, training and working and then the mission itself. After Quinn was dead and Barb was gone, it had been Eriksson who had kept him working when he could work and had cleared the schedule when he could not. That had meant everything. Without it he did not know what he would have done. And so he thought that he would tell him that there was no end to the equation in which he now found himself and that he did not know what he should be doing anymore or what velocity he would need to reach to escape whatever orbit he was in.

But then Eriksson said, “Look, let’s switch gears on this,” and Keith said nothing, only listening as Eriksson continued and the moment was gone: “There are some people here with me and we’re trying to figure something out and you’re the only guy I know who might know the answer.”

“OK.”

“You’re gonna laugh,” Eriksson said. “We can’t figure out the code for the MSS arm files.”

“The access code?”

“Yeah. We should have it on file here somewhere but we can’t find it.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s what you need to know?”

“That’s it.”

“What do you need those for?”

“We don’t really. But IT is doing an audit here and it came up as something that needs to be in the backups.”

“I have it backed up and it’s probably on the mainframe too.”

A pause. “Yeah … well, look, we still have to have access to it.”

“Sure, the backups don’t have password protection so you can run them from there into the main server.”

“I don’t think you’re quite hearing me, Chip.”

“I don’t think you’re asking me the right question.”

“You’re going to make this hard.”

“Am I?” A second low rumble. The windows shaking. “Christ,” he said. “Hang on.” The voice on the other end of the phone speaking but what words were being said lost in the volume outside on the street. “Hang on. Hang on,” he repeated, the rumble fading to a hum that pulsed in heavy waves outside past the house. He could hear Eriksson’s voice continuing somewhere in the din. “Hold on,” Keith said. “There was a truck. What did you say?”

It was silent for a moment and then Eriksson said, “When are you coming back to Houston?”

“That’s up to Mullins.”

“How so?”

“He told me to take some time off so I’m doing what I’m told.”

“All right, all right,” Eriksson said. “I get it.”

“You get what?”

“Well, we miss you here.”

He did not know how to respond to this statement and so he said nothing for a long time, both of them silent now, their breathing reverberating down the phone lines. Then he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, buddy.”

“Am I still an astronaut?”

“What kind of question is that?” Erikkson said. There was the sound of laughter in his voice, as if Keith was making a joke of some kind.

“I’m either an astronaut or I’m not.”

“Oh come on, Chip. You’re a superstar around here and you know it.”

Keith said nothing.

“You’re ten times smarter than anyone else in the building.”

“Quinn was smarter,” Keith said. Just that.

There was no sound from the phone now. Outside, the roar of big engines continued beyond the window. Muffled.

“Christ, buddy,” Eriksson said.

“She was.”

“OK.” Eriksson’s voice was quiet. Almost a whisper. Then he said, “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry about your daughter. We all are. And we could use you back here. That’s for sure.”

“I don’t know if I can come back there right now.”

“You want me to talk to Mullins?”

He paused for a long moment. Then he said, “I don’t know.” He sat down again, the little chair squealing under the weight of his body. All he could think of was the desire to be back in microgravity again, in that low orbit aboard the space station where there was no perceptible weight, where everything in his life—the physical objects—would suspend indefinitely in midair until he retrieved them, where he would sleep attached to the wall of his closetlike living quarters. That was what he wanted, not to be back in Houston but to be up in space. And then he realized something he had never thought of before, that his desire to return to the ISS had less to do with working with the numbers and more to do with the feeling of being there, of seeing Earth unscroll beneath him, the tan mass of Africa and the blue ocean and the white swirl of clouds moving across the sphere of Earth as the day flashed to night and the universe itself was unveiled all around him. He wanted to see that again, to experience that again. Even if there were no numbers with which to make sense of it. More than anything, that was what he wanted.

“Look, I’m sorry but we’re going to need that access code,” Eriksson said.

In the low-frequency hum of the trucks outside he thought he could hear the thin whine of his migraine but he could not be sure. He
could hear their engines where they revved and roared. Not delivery trucks. Something else.

“Yeah,” he said. There was a long pause but he could think of nothing that would convince Eriksson to include him in whatever work was ongoing and so he spoke the access code slowly into the phone, a long string of letters and numbers, and Eriksson read it back to him and he confirmed it and then Eriksson said, “Hold on,” and he could hear the sound of typing and then Eriksson said, “OK, that worked.”

“That’s my project,” he said.

“I know that.” Eriksson said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Hang on a minute,” and there was the shuffling of motion from the other end of the phone. Then his voice again, quieter, closer than before: “Listen, between you and me, there’re some big rumors coming down the pipe. Stuff you’ll want to be in on and stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with being active flight or not.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I’m not kidding, buddy. Get well and get back here.”

“Yeah, OK,” Keith said. “I’ll do that.”

The conversation ended and Keith sat there in the empty house at the kitchen table, looking at the phone where it lay before him on the laminated wood-grain surface. The trucks continued to hum and rumble outside and after a long moment there at the table he rose and rummaged through the stack of bills and unopened mail and papers until he found the résumé that Peter’s wife had given him and then he sat again at the table and read through it carefully. It was a generic résumé that listed every possible facet of Petruso Kovalenko’s education and work experience, from menial jobs to the highly skilled work he had done at the Golosiiv observatory. There were references listed, good ones by the look of it, the scientists and engineers that Peter had mentioned during their conversations in the vacant lot: Federov and Kuzmenko and even Vanekov, the man who apparently ran the entire observatory compound. The last two sheets in
the packet were photocopied letters from Kuzmenko and Federov, letters written in English on official letterhead festooned with Ukrainian characters.

He removed his laptop from its bag and opened it and looked through his address book and sent out two e-mails, the first to the head of Dreyfuss Research Center and the second to the head of personnel at Johnson Space Center. Apart from the greeting, the two e-mails were identical in content, each asking if the recipient would be willing to look at a résumé if he sent one over, that he knew a man who was an amateur astronomer who had worked with some of the big names in Ukraine and was looking for employment in the United States, that the man was intelligent and well qualified but had no official degree. He listed Peter’s name and the names of the references he listed at Golosiiv and a few points about the résumé. He knew it was likely that nothing would come of the e-mails but he had at least tried. Perhaps he would never hear anything. Perhaps his own name was such that an unsolicited e-mail from him would curse Petruso Kovalenko’s employment possibilities forever.

“A little early isn’t it?” Keith said.

“Have you seen what has happened?” Peter said.

“To what?”

“Come and see. It is terrible, I think.” Peter’s eyes were glassy with tears.

“Christ, are you OK?”

“Come and see,” he said again.

Keith’s first thought was that Peter was drunk and that they would have some replay of the scene in front of Starbucks. The telescope was nowhere to be seen and the sun low but still present in the sky.

Keith checked that his keys were in his pocket and stepped outside. Peter led him toward the street to the sidewalk and started to point
but his eyes were already there. He had not been out of the house since his conversation with Eriksson and had ceased to notice the rumble of what he had assumed to be trucks in the cul-de-sac; those sounds had faded into the background and with them had faded the threat of a migraine. But now he found himself wishing he had listened more closely, for it had not been trucks he had ignored for most of the day; it had been tractors.

The vacant lot at the end of the cul-de-sac had been crisscrossed repeatedly, the thistle and debris cleared so that most of the lot was flat and bare. In the distant corner, a mountain of fresh dirt rose up in a huge brown cone and closer, flanking the leather sofa as if guarding it, two huge yellow machines: one with a thick, heavy scoop in the front, the other a backhoe equipped with a curved bucket lined with square teeth.

“Terrible thing,” Peter said.

“Shit,” Keith said.

“They do not touch sofa.”

“Not yet.”

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “Building.”

“Building what?”

“Another house, I guess.”

He stepped toward the end of the cul-de-sac and Peter followed almost as a child might follow a parent, always keeping one step behind as if Keith could somehow shield him from whatever evil lay before them.

“It does not even look like same place,” Peter said. “Just terrible. Catastrophe.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Keith said.

Peter did not answer. They stopped at the end of the sidewalk. The thistle was flattened there and a few feet farther in it was gone altogether, only dirt remaining. The thistle and weeds had partially obscured the sofa from the street but now in the bare field it seemed alien
and incongruous, tufts of dry undergrowth surrounding the lumpy shape like the frayed edges of some weird throw rug.