“Well, so I was just checking in on something,” he began. He cleared his throat. “I spoke to Eriksson today. Anyway, I was looking for that box of files I asked the office to send.”
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “Hang on.” There was a pause and Keith could hear muffled movement and the sound of a door closing. Then Mullins returned to the line. “I can’t send anything like that out of the building. It’s in the regulations. National Security. You understand.”
“But we all work from home sometimes.”
“Even when that happens no official materials are supposed to leave the building.”
“But they do.”
“That’s not official policy,” Mullins said.
“So where does that leave me?”
“I’m sorry, Keith. I just can’t send you anything. I wish I could. Believe me.” A lull and then Mullins added, “So is there anything else?”
Keith said nothing for a long moment. Then, simply: “I guess not.”
“How’s your time off?”
“It’s fine,” Keith said. “You know I have clearance.”
“It’s not the clearance. There’s just no way I can do it.”
“Maybe I could sign something.”
“You’re not hearing me on this.”
“I’m hearing you but you don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” Mullins said. “It’s policy though so my hands are tied.”
Keith had walked down the stairs during the conversation and had retrieved another beer from the refrigerator and was returning to the second floor now. He cracked open the can and paused on the landing and took a long drink.
“So you’re doing OK?” Mullins said.
“Fine.”
“Mind if I ask what you’ve been up to?”
“Do I mind? I don’t know. I guess not.” He was irritated but his tone was flat and even and Mullins did not respond. “I’ve been trying to get my house ready to sell. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
“That’s working for you?”
“It’s working fine.” Keith said. “So how long am I out?”
“What do you mean?”
“On vacation. Or leave. Or whatever it is.”
“I guess that’s something you should decide.”
“So I can come back to the office anytime?”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“What would you say then?”
Mullins exhaled. “You need to take a little time and take care of yourself,” he said.
“I’ve taken a week.”
“Look, Corcoran, I’m just not sure you’re ready to come back yet. The thing that happened … I just …” He trailed off, then added: “Look, a week doesn’t seem like very long.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve been through this already, haven’t we?”
“I don’t think so,” Keith said.
“Well,” Mullins said, “I don’t know what you want me to say here.” He sighed audibly. “I checked the logs, Keith. You did eighty-four hours the last week you were here. Seventy-nine the week before. Almost ninety the week before that. Do you want me to go on here?”
“Yes, I want you to go on.”
Keith could hear Mullins’s breath through the phone. The rhythm of it was like a circle.
“Look,” Mullins said at last, “when one of my astronauts is working himself to death that’s a problem I need to deal with.”
“I’m not working myself to death.”
“Look, Keith, you’ve gone through a significant trauma and I’d be lying if I told you I was following some kind of protocol here. There’s no protocol for this. The loss of a child — that alone is significant — but with you up on the ISS …” Again his voice trailed off. Then he said, “Look, I’m trying to help.”
“Crap,” Keith said. There were more words he wanted to say but he would not say them. Instead he said, “This is …,” and then paused and then said, finally, “This is a crappy deal.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Captain,” Mullins said.
“So am I.”
“What does the flight surgeon say?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Why would I know?”
“She doesn’t say anything other than that she doesn’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Silence on the line.
“What if she gives me a clean bill of health?” Keith said.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. The first step is you take some time off. That’s true of any mission, not just this one. After that we’ll talk about your flight status.”
“My flight status?”
“Well, yeah, of course.”
He said nothing. He had been walking through the upstairs slowly during the conversation, looking at the walls he had yet to paint, looping into and out of the various rooms, sipping at the beer as he did so, and now found himself in the bedroom that had been Quinn’s, in that room at last, and he stood and stared out the window to the street below. He could see to the end of the cul-de-sac but no farther. Nothing past the chain that divided the sidewalk from the vacant lot.
“You know you’re important around here,” Mullins said. “You must know that.”
Again, Keith did not respond.
“Take some time to take care of yourself,” Mullins said. “Go see a national park or something.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ll do that.” He breathed. No movement out there in the night. He was angry and he knew that his tone likely reflected that anger but he could not change that now.
“Call me when you know what you’re doing,” Mullins said.
“I don’t even know what you’re asking me.”
“I’m asking you to keep me informed.”
“OK,” Keith said.
“Take care.”
He did not answer, instead clicking the phone closed and standing in the empty room for a long moment. After a time he leaned his back against the wall and let gravity pull him to the floor. His eyes closed. He pressed his fingertips against them.
The room around him was a gray and silent cube. He had not entered it a single time since he had returned from the mission. Not once. And now that he was within its walls, he realized that it was likely he had never actually stood in the room at all, instead hovering in the doorway during their conversations, Quinn herself answering from within. This room, he reminded himself. This room: the same space in which she had spent some small portion of her life and which was now an empty gray cube of intersecting planes. What significance could such a location have if only to symbolize the absence of those who had departed? He could recall the words he had said and the way she had peered up at him. But how could that matter now?
The sum total felt as if some part of him had crumbled or rather had simply ceased to be, the indomitable engine of his ever-forward motion blinking out all at once and his longing for that box of files from his office in Houston appeared to him now exactly as it actually was: an absurd and pointless clinging to an image of himself that already did not exist. They thought of him as damaged, had ordered him out of Houston, out of his office. He had lost his flight status and might never regain it. But then perhaps he still did not fully accept it for what it was, sitting with his back against a gray wall in a room that he knew had been Quinn’s room but which was also not Quinn’s room, which was no one’s room and thinking, of all things, not of Quinn but of his job. My god.
He was an engineer and a mathematician and he had done everything they had asked of him and more because that was who he was and he knew that his experiences during the mission had been unique and so he would be studied and tested and tabulated and recorded. He understood that and had expected it to be so and so it was. He had endured. And when he returned to Earth he had continued to endure the only way he had ever known, which was to work because work was how he had accomplished everything and after the mission that work had come to feel like the only tether still capable of tying him to some semblance of normalcy and was therefore the only tangible method of continuing his ever-forward motion.