The Infinite Tides (38 page)

“These are good sandwiches,” Keith said.

“Thank you,” Luda said. She continued to stare at her husband.

“How are the kids?” he said.

“Good. Sleeping.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

Peter’s voice came abruptly: “You think you know what this is but you know nothing.”

Keith looked up at him, still chewing. “What?” he said.

“I am trying to help you,” Luda said.

“Yes, you try to help me but you do not know how to help me. Then you say ‘like Golosiiv,’ but you do not know what you say when you say this. There is no like Golosiiv. There is only Golosiiv and nothing else.”

“Peter,” Keith said.

“You hear her? Like Golosiiv? You know there is no Golosiiv here. Only this empty place. So we find another empty lot but this one is mine to come to. Fucking shit.”

Keith could not understand Luda’s subsequent response nor Peter’s and in his inebriated state it took him several minutes to realize that the conversation had shifted to Ukrainian, their voices rising in intensity and volume and speed, and when he realized this he lifted his
head from the sofa and coughed. “Uh, hey,” he said, the Earth drifting under him, “I can’t understand Ukrainian.”

They both fell silent instantly. There were cricket sounds but they were distant. Peter was a dark shape by the telescope.

“We are being rude for your friend,” Luda said. Peter answered in Ukrainian and Luda shook her head. “I tell him come home to talk but he will not do this,” she said.

“I am not coming home,” Peter said, in English now. His voice was a sharp angle in the night air. “You go home to kids.”

Luda stood abruptly and said something to him in Ukrainian and Peter did not answer. “I try to help you but you do nothing,” she said. “Only complain.”

“Because here is nothing.”

“There is more here than Ukraine.”

“No,” he said. “That is not true.” His voice cracked over these last words and a long trembling hush descended upon the three of them, Keith apparently forgotten on the sofa, his head resting in the crater of padding.

“What do you want to do?” she said at last.

“I want to go home,” Peter said. His voice shook. A faint glimmer of tears streaked his face. “I only want to go home.”

“Then we go home.”

“I want to go home to Ukraine.”

“Is that what you really want?” she said.

From far away, over the houses and roads came the constant shush of cars from the interstate, shuffling over the endless courts and dead ends that enmazed the landscape all around them. Keith quiet, the triangle sandwich held in his frozen hand, not even breathing, the sofa rocking slowly under him as if moving over a gentle sea.

“I do not know what I want,” Peter said, his voice a hollowness floating in that static.

“If you really want, then we go back,” Luda said.

Peter did not answer.

“You are my husband,” she said.

“You would do that?”

“Of course I would do that.”

He said something in Ukrainian again.

“We do what is best for family.”

“But you think America is best for this family.”

“America
is
best for this family,” she said. “But this family is you too.”

Peter did not respond for so long that Keith had begun to wonder what had happened. Then he realized that Peter was crying, a quiet sound at first and then breaking in heavy waves through his frame and he covered his hands with his face in the darkness and Keith finally understood that he should not be there, that he should have left almost immediately and he shifted his weight to stand but then Luda rose from the sofa and went to her husband and embraced him. “Petruso,” she said.

He whispered some tiny words in the darkness, words that might have been in any language and which Keith could not hear.

“Shhh,” she said, her hand stroking his short-cropped hair, his arms coming around her body and holding her in that darkness.

Drunk, stoned, depressed, mildly confused, his mind sloshing from side to side, Keith Corcoran stumbled to his feet. He tried to lift the box of empty bottles but almost fell over in doing so and decided to leave them. “I’m going to go inside,” he said, taking a step forward around the sofa and then letting the momentum continue to move him back toward the bright edge of the cul-de-sac.

Neither Peter nor Luda answered him, nor did they watch him half-stumble over the sidewalk and into the street and turn finally toward his house. In his drunkenness he grabbed the two white plastic trash bins as he passed, one in each hand, and entered the house through the empty garage, dropping the bins into the gap they had left at the end of the kitchen counter before stumbling up the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail all the while.

He undressed and lay back on the bed. Against his skin: the cool of
the night air. The feeling of erasure that had come upon him earlier that evening had returned and the loneliness that fell upon his shirtless chest was profound and biting.

Perhaps he might have wondered at the marriage of Petruso and Ludmila Kovalenko. Perhaps he might have wondered at the sense of hope and love and caring that he had witnessed. Perhaps it might have engendered within him a similar sense that all might be made right once again. But in the sheer descent of his drunken loneliness he had already forgotten about being outside at all. Instead, the bed spun slowly in the center of that empty house and he fell into that rhythm and faded at last into a dreamless oblivion that was not unlike the night he had just clambered out of: a darkness alone and so, so very silent.

He was mildly hung over for much of the following day and, as every headache made him wonder if a migraine was approaching, he took two extra painkillers. The result was a drowsiness deep enough for him to sleep away most of the daylight hours. Over the days to follow he reentered the normalcy of his recent routine as best he could, returning to Starbucks each morning and reading the newspaper. He stopped by the warehouse-size bookstore midweek and, in the throes of what was an increasingly familiar sense of self-pity, found himself thumbing through the thick, heavy mathematics books there without much real interest or attention. He tried to imagine what kind of math Quinn might have been interested in had she continued with her studies, these thoughts like ghost images superimposed over the stark reality of thick paper and ink, all such ideas mere abstractions cast forward into a universe that seemed increasingly without meaning or purpose.

On his way out he glanced through the books on the sale table near the exit doors. There was a thick hardcover volume on astronomy amidst the various titles and he picked it up and paged through it. He had seen similar photographs before, Hubble telescope images of nebulae and star clusters and distant galaxies, but he had never really looked at them with any interest. Now, though, the pages brought to mind the stars he had seen in similar clarity from the end of the robotic arm, of the intensity of feeling that had struck him, that weird mixture of helplessness and awe and wonder and silence. The end of the numbers. Their immediate silence. Or no not their silence but something else. And then he knew that it had not been the numbers that had fallen silent in the moment; it had been himself, the sensation he had experienced at the end of the robotic arm he had designed and built had fallen into some kind of interval, a gap, and no matter what measurement applied—time or light or space or something else—there would be no concrete answer because the experience itself had no solution. There was no language to describe what he had felt. Not even the numbers.

He purchased the book and brought it with him to Starbucks and sat there sipping at his coffee, reading the first paragraph of text and then paging through the volume at random, looking at the photographs and reading an occasional caption as he did so. Hubble Deep Field a black rectangle populated by myriad efflorescent galaxies. Lupus with its scores of multicolored stars. The Tarantula Nebula a blur of blazing orange light. If he had seen these same objects through the lens of Peter’s telescope he did not remember and he knew they certainly would not have appeared in such vivid detail. Perhaps they were invisible to all but the most sophisticated instruments. The Hubble. Golosiiv. Something else.

The phone rang when he was looking at an image labeled “Lagoon Nebula Detail,” a luminescent turquoise field obscured by darkly glowing clouds. On the phone’s tiny screen was a local number he did not recognize. “Keith Corcoran,” he said.

“Captain Corcoran, it’s Tom Chen at Dreyfuss.”

“Tom,” Keith said, surprised. “How are you?”

“I’m well. And you?”

“Good, good.”

“Nice work on the last mission,” Chen said.

“Oh,” Keith said. “Thanks.”

“I know you’re busy so let me get right to the point. I got that e-mail about your friend from Ukraine.”

“Oh, yeah.” He sat up abruptly, knocking the table with his knee, coffee sloshing onto its surface.

“Well, listen, if you think this guy is for real I’d like to see his résumé if you can send it over.”

“Really?”

“We might have something. It’s not much but we have a kind of work overflow here and need someone to just kind of keep things moving. I called the NAS at Golosiiv and spoke with some people there just to find out who we were talking about and the people there think your friend walks on water.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, he must really be something. Anyway, I don’t know if this position will be too simple for him but it’s a way to get him in here. But I need to see the résumé. Maybe you can give me his phone number and I can talk to him directly about it.”

“I’ll need to get the phone number off the résumé,” Keith said, “but I will. I’ll have him get in touch with you right away.”

“That would be great. This position has been officially open for two weeks and it closes tomorrow. I would have contacted you earlier but things got backed up here. This isn’t usually how we do things.”

“I appreciate it.”

“So I’d need the résumé and contact info today or tomorrow morning at the very latest. Actually today would be best because I’d likely have to do some kind of interview in the next day or so just to make
sure we’re on the official schedule. Anyway, I thought maybe I’d poke around about the guy a bit first before calling you. Just to make sure. I know you’re busy.”

“Yeah, well, that’s good.”

“I’m assuming you think he’d fit here.”

“I think so. He’s really dedicated to the kinds of things you’re doing there. The astronomy side of it. That’s where his head is.”

“That’s great. That’s totally what we’re looking for. And we’re trying to avoid just getting someone right out of school. A couple of years on the job is better than the degree, at least for this. Cheaper too.”

“Sure.”

“Hey, listen, since I have you on the phone I wanted to say that I’m real sorry about your daughter.”

“Thank you.”

“Anyway, let us know if there’s anything we can do. Of course, you know that.”

“Sure,” Keith said. “Will do.”

They exchanged a few pleasantries and the conversation ended. Keith sat at the back of the coffeeshop smiling broadly. He finished his coffee and then returned the astronomy book to his bag and tossed the newspaper onto a nearby table. Audrey was at the counter and she waved to him as he passed. He was still smiling. “You look happy today,” she said.

“I guess I am,” he said, and he was.

When he passed Peter’s house on his way home he stopped and walked to the door and knocked but there was no answer. He had been looking forward to telling Peter the news but now that he was unable to do so it occurred to him that he might just as well get Chen the résumé on his own.

He returned home with this in mind, retrieving the pages from the kitchen island and reading through them with careful attention. Perhaps he had underestimated Petruso Kovalenko’s talents; were he a personnel officer at a research center, Peter’s résumé might have
appeared impressive indeed and while there was too much detail in the résumé—it seemed to list every job Peter had ever held—the relevant material, especially the work he had done at Golosiiv, was interesting.

He continued to ruminate on this as he once again entered his car and drove to an office supply store and asked them to scan and e-mail the document directly to Tom Chen. As he waited, his phone began to buzz, but it was Jim Mullins and he did not feel the need to speak to him now. The voice mail he left was curt: “Keith, please call me at your earliest convenience.” He left the phone number, as if Keith might not have it. It was a call he would need to respond to at some point but it could wait.

When he returned home he sat in his car and watched as the big gray sofa was carefully loaded onto the back of a pickup truck by two men in powder blue denim shirts, men clearly on lunch break from their tractor work. The men eyed him with some level of suspicion but as he did nothing to stop them they continued without pause until the sofa was gently secured. The truck was dilapidated, the windows rolled down as the only defense against the summer heat and a moment later it drove away, the sofa longer than the bed of the truck so that it suspended a full foot over the moving asphalt. In the next instant it had rounded the corner and disappeared from view. The other workmen sat in the shadow of one of the tractors, eating their lunches, their conversation impossible to hear.

He was surprised when the doorbell rang a few hours later, the sound so foreign that it took him several moments to determine what it was, but he was even more surprised when he opened the door and Luda threw her arms around him and put her head on his shoulder, weeping. “Thank you. Thank you,” she said between her sobs.

His own arms embraced her as reflex and then relaxed to patting her back softly. “Whoa,” he said. “What’s going on?” He looked past her at Peter, who stood smiling in a button shirt and tie, a wrinkled sport coat stretched over his broad shoulders.

“You are sweet, sweet man,” Luda said. She leaned back from him and took his face in her hands and kissed his cheeks with a loud smacking sound. Her eyes continued to swim with tears.