An occasional word from Eriksson to Mort Stevens inside the station and the CAPCOM in Houston but otherwise silence. Silence everywhere. Only the sound of his breathing and the occasional click as Eriksson’s microphone activated and deactivated. The curves and angles of the structure over which he moved. Perhaps the whole compass still turned in its twisting helix, yet to find its northpoint, all possibilities fluxing out into the darkness around him.
That had only been a season ago and yet was gapped now by a distance he could hardly believe, the curved glass of his helmet replaced by the curved glass of the rental car’s windshield so that, instead of the clean compact functionality of the ISS, his current view was of the back of the car that preceded him. He had been home for two days and had awakened with a familiar feeling of weightlessness, a feeling that faded almost immediately but the memory of which continued to cling to him. Even now, parking the car and entering a vast hardware store, he could feel its shape in his mind: a sphere, a lit globe, a clear sparkling star that floated amidst the endless aisles of gray industrial shelving, fading slowly until it was gone.
He returned home with a single five-gallon bucket of satin finish eggshell white and all the related supplies necessary to begin painting the living room and kitchen, a project he began immediately, taping off the cabinetry and the kitchen window and sink. His progress was slow and meticulous but soon the window and the bottom edge of the kitchen cabinets were framed in bright, almost luminescent blue. Then the kitchen island: he unrolled a sheet of clear plastic to drape over that surface and sealed it by taping the circumference of the plastic to the linoleum floor.
The activity was meant to keep himself occupied but already he could feel his mind wandering, not to his memory of the International space station or to engineering tasks but rather to Barb and, yes, to Quinn. In the midst of such wandering thoughts he would pull free the last strip of tape he had placed and would reposition it or would physically grasp the refrigerator to wheel it out or back a few additional inches and then would return to the task before him, each track as defined and precise as a line on a graph: this singular ray pushing out along a trajectory that mapped the edge of one plane against another, the line of blue tape marking out a set of answers clear and simple and predictable, all things reduced to numbers, angles, vectors, equations.
The cabinets rose nearly to the ceiling but there was a short space above them of bare wall too high to reach and so he returned to the hardware store and bought a folding aluminum ladder and several additional rolls of tape and plastic sheeting, placing all these items in the trunk of the car, the ladder extending a foot or more from its interior so that he had to reenter the hardware store once more to retrieve a scrap of plastic string to tie down the trunk lid.
Across the parking lot he could see the green awning of Starbucks. He knew he had passed at least one similar awning nearer his house and it might have been that he had passed many more. The mathematics repeating. Everything here identical to itself, a grandeur of sameness framed by the black asphalt of parking lots and the lighter gray of sidewalks, all things within his sight enormous and clean and new as if the whole of the scene had been here forever and had never changed. No history. No passage of days. Indeed time itself an abstraction the meaning of which had dissolved so that each moment slipped into the next without distinction, change, or possibility.
. . .
When he arrived home he sat for a long moment behind the wheel looking up at the flat front of the empty house. It was difficult now to understand why any of them had ended up here, in this neighborhood that was a plane ride away from his office in Houston, but then he knew that part of the reason, or perhaps all of it, had been his own belief that Quinn’s life would be much the same as his, that she would excel in the same way that he had. Was that not an equation the solution of which had function and meaning and importance? Was that not what every father would want for his daughter?
At last he turned off the motor and opened the door and as he did so the garage across the street began to hum open. To his left stood the closed square door of his own garage, a space he still had not entered even though the central reason he had returned to the cul-de-sac was to remove his own belongings from the house. He knew such items were in the garage, boxed and waiting for him, and that he should be loading them into a U-Haul and driving back to Houston to find someplace to rent or buy but he had not done so, instead remaining to paint the house and watch over its sale, although he knew these efforts were not necessary. He knew he should just walk away from the whole thing and leave the empty container behind. That was what Barb had done, after all. And yet he remained, a proposition baffling even to himself, the idea of opening the garage and sorting out its contents something he simply did not yet want to address.
A red sportscar had emerged from the dark interior of the open garage across the street and as Keith turned toward his own house the driver’s voice came: “Hey there, neighbor.”
He turned back toward the street. The temperature had risen five or ten degrees since he had left the hardware store and the air was thick with heat. “Hey there,” he called in return.
She might have been in her mid-forties, oversized black sunglasses and a broad friendly smile framed in the open window of the sports-car, brown hair pulled back from her face. He expected the car to drive away but then she called out to him again: “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said. “Jennifer. I live, well, I live right there.” She motioned to the house.
“Good to meet you,” he said in return. She did not drive away and he stood awkwardly, waiting, and then set the laptop bag on the hood of the rental car and stepped forward into the street. When he arrived at her car she extended a hand out the window and he took it.
“I’m Keith Corcoran,” he said.
She smiled and removed her sunglasses and hooked them into the front of her top. Keith found his gaze following them into her cleavage and when he snapped his eyes back to her face she smiled more broadly as if to acknowledge that she had noticed this wayward glance. “You’re all moved in?” she said.
“Not really,” he said. “Mostly getting it set up to sell.” He paused, wondering briefly how much she might already know and what to say next. Then he said, “You probably met my wife, Barb. She was living here before.”
She stopped smiling for a moment, staring at him, and the silence that ensued was long enough that he began to wonder what he had said to bring the brief conversation to a stop.