Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

The airlock opened. He knew there would be no perceptible change in pressure but now that the moment had arrived he somehow expected the transition of atmosphere to be audible, for the brief symphony of thumps and clicks between the shuttle and the docking node to include the hiss or shush or sigh of oxygen exchange and yet, despite the absence of such a marker, the swing of the hatch felt to Keith like a sudden outrushing of the tide, a sensation that remained with him as he floated through the opening and entered the Harmony Module where the crew they had come to relieve all smiled expectantly back at him. It was a moment as glorious and transcendent as any he could have imagined and he would realize only later that it represented the single coordinate point in which he understood that he had done it, that at last he had entered the long incredible upward-turning arc that had been the trajectory of his life, and that he was, finally and undeniably, an astronaut.

In the days to follow he would try to describe the experience but what words were there for such a moment? He thought first of numbers, not of words, but then he always had. The seemingly infinite parallels that extended off the edges of the grid forever in their ongoing x and y coordinates had finally intersected on some z plane that he had thought about since his earliest days and yet had never been able to truly understand or plot or calculate. He had stared at it through the window of the shuttle on their approach: the interconnected tubes and the fanning wings of the solar arrays stretching out like some magnificent metal flower above the blue swirl of Earth. And even then he was thinking of the numbers: the average speed of 17,239 miles per hour in an orbit very nearly that of a perfect circle, the apogee and perigee perhaps ten kilometers in difference and inclining to 51.6459 degrees, the angle of its motion, the angle of its helixed continuance. The feeling of weightlessness itself so familiar and comfortable it was as if he had lived within that condition for the entirety of his life. And in many ways he had.

He would ask himself if this had been his destiny and each time he would answer yes. He would answer yes yes yes as if the weightlessness of his body was itself the vindication and proof that a life spent huddled over papers scratched through with the symbology of mathematics had indeed been the true vector, the numbers themselves extant in a universe that was this universe and no other: days and nights spinning past in forty-five-minute increments, continents and oceans and weather patterns unscrolling under the round porthole windows, the lit webwork of cities and roads on the black sphere of the planet below. And the flow of the numbers, his numbers, in everything, always.

In his memory, that moment of passing through the hatch would resolve itself into an unambiguous image of triumph. But there had been something else as well, a sensation so fast and intense and so quickly gone again that it had been easy to forget. There had been that feeling of pride, the rush of his success, of all the years of his labor coalescing into this finally solved equation, but for one instant there had also been the clutch of an impossible helplessness so complete and staggering that it seemed to seize at his heart. A flicker and then gone. In its wake only the after-echo of a distant high-pitched ringing that vibrated through him even as it returned to silence once again, as he stared into the smiling faces of the crew and told himself that yes he was meant to be here, that it had been his destiny to succeed and so he had succeeded, the sense of panic already replaced by the pride of his accomplishment, replaced so completely that he would not remember that flicker, would not allow himself to remember, even after everything else had happened. In his memory of that moment, he was an astronaut and they were welcoming him aboard the space station. And in his memory he was smiling.

Is this not what he was meant to do? Is the answer not as fixed and indisputable as any equation he might have been tasked to solve?

Watch them now: the numbers as if stretched upon a wire. The sixes stacked astride the decimal. The seven and three and zeroes behind them. Study them all your days and then ask yourself how any such equation could describe anything at all: the water rushing across the sand, the tiny stars, the way her hand curled into his. They could not even describe the way he felt about the numbers themselves, what they had meant to him, what they would continue to mean.

Such equations to imagine. Now watch them vanish into the spiraled lemniscate of what is to come. This the black firmament. This the dark matter flowing into and out of your heart.

There was no sound at all and what sense of movement he generated upon entering returned to him from every surface as if the house had become some kind of empty museum, his footfalls echoing off the tiles and the clunk of the closing door behind him so abrupt and alien that he actually shivered as he moved forward into the entryway, setting the two black suitcases by the door and flipping the light switch, the tiles and the carpeted room before him illuminating all at once: dull, white, empty. He stood there as if his delay might somehow undo what he had already seen but his hesitation only confirmed the silence and vacancy. She had left the coat hooks hanging by the door but the coats themselves were gone. Through the squared archway leading into the living room he could see the enormous sofa but there was no other furniture visible whatsoever. He had known this would be the case, that the house would be empty, and yet he had not expected the totality of it, the sofas singular presence there a grim and ironic goodbye in the guise of overstuffed gray leather.

Empty. Absolutely empty.

He moved through the downstairs with military precision, flicking on each light as he passed. The refrigerator continued to hum in the kitchen but he did not open its door. Instead, he went to the cabinets and inventoried each one in turn. A few boxes of cereal, undoubtedly stale, and various cans of odds and ends. Peaches and fruit cocktail. String beans. Canned yams. He did not even know who ate these things. Himself? His wife? His daughter? Items not worth moving or at least not worth moving for her. An extra key to the house on the countertop and a smaller gold key for what purpose he did not know. No note left behind; instead, canned yams.

How much of her had he simply and completely misread? The insistence and expression of her care for him, her interest in his career, and, later, her various moments of weeping and the desperation with which she had told him, finally, that she had moved out of the house and would not return: all of these now trembled upon the threshold of each empty room. She really had taken it all, and when he found that his bed their bed remained in the upstairs bedroom, although without sheets, blankets, or pillows, the sight struck him as such a feeble presentation of his former life that he actually laughed aloud. His dresser, and, in the corner, the small television in its wooden armoire. There were holes in the walls where pictures had hung but he could not recall what those pictures had been. Family photos or framed art or something else, and in the closet a single overhead bulb lighting a bleak arrangement of slacks, jeans, collared polos, and a handful of dress shirts, most light blue, all of which huddled against the left wall of the closet as if to underscore the emptiness of the opposite wall or the obvious fact that this was what remained.

Fantastic, he said, his voice ricocheting off blank walls and square angles.