The Infinite Tides (37 page)

He had not yet asked Peter what constellations and astronomical features lay in his new view but realized with some surprise that he was actually looking forward to doing so. He wondered if this was a mark of how far his mind had slipped, that he sat on a sofa in the dark and sought distraction in the names of the distant stars and did so with little care for the work he might have been doing. There was a time when he at least would have thought of angles and distances and energy and light. At least that. But now he felt content simply looking up into the sky and listening to Peter’s discourse. The stars patterned in a way he would never truly understand but which was magnificent
in its beauty. The distinction might have troubled him, but at the moment he did not feel troubled at all.

They talked at some length about Golosiiv again, about the kind of work Peter had done, about the landscape outside Kiev: horse-drawn carts and fields tilled by hand, lines of men and women bent over their work, each swinging the blade of a hoe and walking slowly backward in an ancient rhythm.

“Sounds brutal,” Keith said.

“But so beautiful,” Peter said. “Not like this.” He pointed over Keith’s shoulder at the cul-de-sac and then turned his hand and waved it generally around, encompassing everything around them. “So beautiful I cannot even describe. You would need being poet.”

Keith said nothing. He opened another beer and then settled back into the sofa. Peter took a moment to relight his pipe and puffed at it, the coal glowing red as he sucked at the smoke and then fading as Peter held and then exhaled.

“Where do you buy that?” Keith said.

“The smoke? From my nephew. He is … how do I say … kind of bad.”

“Kind of bad?”

“Mmm … I’m not clear. He does things that would be bad to talk about. Maybe not to talk about them, I think. That was not good English sentence. I apologize.”

“OK,” he said, chuckling. “Probably not a question I should ask anyway.”

“No, this is fine to ask question. I am not clear.” He paused a moment. “Some of my family, the young boys from my wife’s brother, they are like Mafia. They buy and sell sometimes things that are not for buying and selling. It was this way in Ukraine so this is what they know to do here.”

“At least they found a way to make money.”

“Yes, maybe true. I worry police will take them away.”

“What are we talking about here? Serious stuff?”

“I am not sure. They are seventeen and nineteen, the two of them. They have money to buy cars and fancy clothes. Too much money for little boys. I think this will not end well for them.”

“Maybe they’ll be fine.”

“Maybe,” Peter said. “They are stupid boys. They come to America and go back to what they are doing in Ukraine. This makes no sense to me.”

“Well, that’s what you wanted to do.”

“Do how?”

“You wanted to go back to what you were doing in Ukraine.”

“Not same thing,” Peter said. Then he said, “Well, maybe same thing.” He lifted his pipe to his mouth as if he was going to light it but then he did not do so, instead holding it there poised before his lips in the darkness. “Maybe I am too much like them I think,” he said.

“I doubt it,” Keith said. “Wanting to go back to working in your field is different than wanting to go back to a life of crime.”

Peter did not answer. At last he lit the pipe and sucked at it for a moment. A hush over everything. Keith found himself wondering if all the crickets had been crushed into dust by the tractors, if their desiccated husks were everywhere underfoot.

“If comet comes it will not matter who wants to go back and who does not,” Peter said.

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Yes, true. I do not think any comet is coming but still true.”

“It’s not front-page news yet.”

“Maybe they keep this from front page so we are not afraid of end.”

“Maybe.” He took another swallow of beer.

“The world is always coming to end,” Peter said. “Comet is coming or is not coming. So this does not matter.”

“Very philosophical,” Keith said.

“Not philosophy. True. Stars and galaxies are being born and
dying. This is what you see when you look through telescope. Things sometimes crash into other things. Galaxies absorb other galaxies. These things happen. The world is always coming to end.”

Keith paused. Then he said, “Let’s party like it’s 1999.”

Peter was quiet for a moment and then started to giggle. “I know this song,” he said. He giggled again and then was caught up in the moment and laughed long and hard. Keith smiled, watching as Peter caught his breath and then exploded into laughter again. “You are funny man, Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said at last.

“Apparently,” he said.

Peter took another pull at the pipe and then came and sat next to Keith on the sofa. “I can’t think of what to look at now,” he said. “I have forgotten what I was doing.”

“You’ve been smoking a lot.”

“Is that so?”

“It is,” Keith said. “I’m going to have to finish the whole six-pack to keep up with you.”

“You should take up pipe. Not healthy for you to drink so much.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

They were silent. Then Keith said, “Let me try that.”

Peter handed him the pipe and the lighter and Keith lit the small bud in the bowl and sucked at the smoke and held his breath as he had seen Peter do many times. His throat burned and he wanted to cough but held back until he could no longer do so, erupting into a long dry series of choking, gasping coughs that doubled him over. “Christ,” he said when it was over.

“You need practice.”

“I need a beer.” He handed the pipe back to Peter and then finished his beer and reached into the cardboard box for another. “You want?” he said.

“Not for me,” Peter said. “When I drink and smoke at same time I end up at Starbucks making myself into fool.”

“Yeah, we don’t want that to happen again.”

“No,” Peter said. “I am being fool.”

“Past history.”

“Yes, but still true.”

They did not speak for a time and Keith felt himself drifting, the alcohol and the single lungful of marijuana mixing with his daily painkillers, a sensation that had begun to feel familiar to him and one he relished during these nights on the sofa. He could feel gravity loosening its hold, the sofa dissolving into a weightless object beneath him so that his body seemed to pull away from its overstuffed cushions, a tiny gap, two small for measure, opening between his body and the sofa. As if he was escaping gravity by degrees. As if he had begun, just barely, to rise.

His head lolled against the back of the sofa, eyes staring into space, tracing fake constellations absently. A fish. A box, slightly askew and desperately empty. A series of triangles, the angles of which resolved into numbers. He superimposed Quinn’s face amidst the stars and tried to resolve it into a constellation but the best he could do was a lopsided and dented oval. And yet he could still see her face in his mind. There was no conception of heaven that he could place her into. Lost, then.

Earlier that night he had told Peter about the mini storage, about how his failure to pay the bill had resulted in an auctioning off of its contents. He had managed to slough off the few consumer items he had retained: the television that he had dropped down the stairs, the sofa, and then, through simple inaction, everything else he owned all at once. It occurred to him during some point of the evening that he should have already made a series of frantic phone calls to the mini storage company. Perhaps he could coerce someone there into giving him the auction information. He had been told that the contents had been removed immediately and that they would be parceled out for resale, but perhaps the man on the phone had been wrong. If it was true, he knew that Quinn’s schoolwork would simply be tossed into a
dumpster somewhere. Very likely it already had been. How he wanted to crawl through the city landfill on his hands and knees to find each sheet of paper but he knew such a search would be futile. He had allowed the whole of her to slip through his fingers. Everything she had been or would ever be. What a fool he was.

“Hello?”

They both started simultaneously at the voice, half-sitting and then twisting around to look back toward the cul-de-sac. A woman was standing in the halo of the streetlight. She held something in her hands—a plate of some kind—and as they watched she stepped forward toward them and into the dirt of the vacant lot. Keith sat there, unmoving, too bewildered to do anything else. He thought for a moment that it could be Jennifer and wondered briefly what she could want but it was not Jennifer. He did not recognize her in the silhouetted light and sat confused and disoriented, his body and mind continuing to drift.

“Luda,” Peter said. He stood and said something in Ukrainian and set his pipe on the sofa carefully.

“Oh,” Keith said. He looked at Peter and then turned and looked over his shoulder again, over the back of the sofa and into the lit space beyond. Luda’s shadow a strip of darkness bearing out toward the sofa and the twin slumbering beasts that were the tractors. He could not make out her face at all.

“Very hard to see,” she said.

Peter stood and stepped around the sofa and took his wife’s arm and Keith could hear a few muffled words he could not understand. They stopped for a long moment there beyond him and Keith wondered if he should say something and then did say, “Hi,” loud enough for both of them to hear and Luda’s voice came back, “Hello,” and then he could hear Peter whispering to her again and could not make out the words be they Ukrainian or English or some other language entirely.

He turned back to the stars, returning his head to the sofa. Whatever Peter and his wife were discussing was no business of his and he
would not have understood their words even if it had played out right in front of him, although he gathered from Peter’s tone that he was irritated by his wife’s arrival.

After a moment it was quiet again and then he could hear their soft footsteps in the dirt behind him. “My wife Luda is here,” Peter said.

“Luda,” Keith said. He smiled, his hand outstretched and she took it, a soft, insubstantial thing in his palm.

“Hello,” she said. “I brought something to eat.”

“Really?” Keith said.

Peter was holding a plate in his hand. “Please,” he said. He held the plate out and Keith could make out triangular sandwiches lining it and he took one and bit into it and realized that he actually was hungry. Had he eaten? He could not even remember. “Thank you,” he said, his mouth chewing. Peter pulled the plate away and Keith said, “Wait a minute,” and Peter brought it back and Keith took another and set it on his knee. “It’s good,” he said.

“I am glad you are enjoying this,” Luda said. “I apologize for coming here. I did not mean for intrusion.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Keith said. “Come and sit.”

“I have to get back to children. They are asleep but who knows. They maybe wake up and I am not there.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “You should go back home.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine for a minute or two,” Keith said. “Come and sit. Have a beer.”

Luda looked at him. “I should go.”

“It’s OK to stay,” Keith said. He hardly knew what he was saying now and had he looked at Peter he might have seen a look of irritation on his face but he did not or could not and Luda stood in silence. “Have a beer,” Keith said. “The sofa will be gone any day and there will be a house here and that’ll be the end of it.”

Luda looked at her husband and he smiled, perhaps resigned to the situation, and motioned to the sofa. She nodded and said, “OK, but not so long,” and sat next to him. Peter stood by the telescope, watching
them, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands like some errant waiter.

Keith reached down and pulled a beer out of the cardboard box and handed it to her and she took it and unscrewed the cap in one quick motion and, to Keith’s surprise, flung it toward one of the tractors and actually hit it, the bottle cap ringing out against the metal machine like a silver coin and then zinging off into the darkness.

“Well done,” Keith said, smiling.

“I am sorry for tractors,” she said.

“She means she is sorry for me because of these tractors,” Peter said.

“Yes, that is right,” Luda said. “I am sorry for Peter that tractors come. And you also too.”

“Well, thanks. Not much we can do.”

“Yes, but bad news for you,” she said.

“We’re not very happy about it,” Keith said.

“My Peter is very sad,” Luda said.

“Luda,” Peter said.

“You are very sad,” she said, looking at him now.

Peter did not move from his station by the telescope, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands. “Our friend maybe does not want to hear this talk,” he said.

Keith waved his free hand in the air. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m pissed off about it too.”

“Maybe you find some other place to set up telescope?” Luda said.

“Probably,” Keith said.

“Not the same,” Peter said.

“Not same but maybe even better,” Luda said.

“You keep saying that to me but you don’t know,” Peter said.

“Maybe bigger field with no lights anywhere,” Luda said. “Like Golosiiv.”

“You know nothing about this,” Peter said. He said something in Ukrainian under his breath and at the sound of it Luda sucked in her breath and muttered something in return.

It was quiet now, husband and wife there in the darkness, Keith looking back and forth between them as if trying to discover something otherwise unspoken, his mind already drifting from what had been said in whatever language it had been said, drifting from their silence. Had he been sober he likely would have excused himself from the field and would have returned to the quiet emptiness of his house. But he was not sober so instead he cleared his throat and said, “Give me another one of those little sandwiches.”

Peter handed him the plate and then reached over next to Luda and retrieved his pipe and the little black bag and returned to his position by the telescope and lit it and smoked. Luda said nothing, watching him.