Hoffmann had asked him repeatedly about Quinn and about his disintegrated marriage, but he had little to say about these subjects. It was as if he had remained in space or rather that Quinn and, to a lesser extent, Barb were separated from him by the atmosphere itself and he could not reach them and therefore he need not think of them in any way that breached the miles between orbit and Earth. Something had changed during those last months in space after Eriksson had told him of Quinn’s death; between the migraines and the medication, whatever idea of grief there had been congealed into a glaucous and impenetrable distance, his mind turning or trying to turn back toward the ratiocinative, the discursive, the direction from which he had always found his way forward.
At first it must have been the pain that had caused them to question his ongoing ability to function as an astronaut. The migraines had certainly affected him during the mission; there was no denying that fact. But when the crew returned to Earth, the pain did not come with him. At least that was what he had thought. Then, during the fourth week in gravity, he had had his first earthbound episode. It had begun in the late morning during his physical therapy session in the pool. He had just completed a fifty-yard lap, clocking in just at the minute mark, and the trainer was congratulating him on his progress. But he was not listening. Instead, he could hear the whining sound deep in his skull and then the dull thrumming in the center of his brain. Dr. Yasbek had told him to immediately notify her if another migraine was coming on and so he clambered out of the pool and told their trainer that the flight surgeon needed him. He could sense the rest of them watching from the water as he grabbed his towel and his robe and walked back to the locker room and changed, his heart beating in his chest, on the verge of panic. He slipped into his shoes and returned to his room and dialed Dr. Yasbek’s office. There was no answer. He left a stammering message and lay back on the bed and then rose again and closed the blinds. And so it began.
He knew at least that the pain would be extraordinary but that it would end. The previous episodes had taught him that much. And here he would be able to vomit into a toilet that actually flushed, an improvement over vomiting in the microgravity where escaped droplets would float trembling in the air before him like tiny burnt-orange planets both pearlescent and grotesque. After three hours in his room, trembling and sweating and yes even weeping under the blankets in the darkness, he did indeed vomit into the toilet in his quarters and, as was always the case, the pain began to dissipate soon afterward. He thought Eriksson might have visited him at some point but then those hours had been reduced to a kind of weird blur of ghosts and motion and the zigzagging lines that obscured and overlaid everything with an erratic violence that could not be avoided no matter how tightly he closed his eyes. He thought too that he had spoken to Quinn in that bloodred agony, as if she had somehow reached him through the conduit of his pain.
The feeling that she had sat at his bedside during the night was slow to dissipate and the following day he was in his office again with that feeling still clinging to him, as if her ghost was seated across from him, staring at him bleakly throughout the day and in response he did the only thing he could think to do, which was to pour himself into his work like a man jumping into a dark sea.
Mullins visited him in the early afternoon: an official or unofficial check-in, he did not know which. Yes, he was feeling much better. Thank you. Yes, he would talk to Yasbek later in the day. Yes, he would be able to complete his physical rehabilitation appointment. Everything was fine. No need to worry. Everything was fine.
There were still two weeks of physical therapy as their trainer and NASA medical personnel worked to bring their gravity-weak bodies back to their pre-mission selves. Most of his fellow crew members came in for the appointments and then went home to be with their families. Occasionally he would see Tim Fisher or Petra staying an hour or two to look at the medical data but that was all. But Keith was different. He would return to his office after showering and would sit at his desk and work and rework his equations. Hours would pass without notice. And he hardly thought of Quinn, her face swimming out of the darkness only in those last few minutes before he drifted off to sleep. Barb’s nightly phone calls upon his return to Houston had not served to alter the anesthetized quality of his days and nights. She had even asked him to put the house on the market when and if he returned, as if her request served to underscore the finality of their dissolved marriage, and he had agreed. And of the conversation he had had with Quinn, the final argument: he had managed to will himself into a steady forgetfulness that was akin to ignorance. It had never happened so there could be no guilt and so he did not think of it at all.
The night they were released from the physical rehabilitation program, the crew went to a local bar to celebrate. All of them were taking brief vacations with their families, all returning home. There had been a time when Keith too might have voiced similar anticipation but that time now felt distant and alien to him. They all knew that his wife had left him, that she had told him she was not returning to the house, that her own “vacation” to her mother’s home in Georgia was not a vacation but something else entirely.
At the celebratory beer-drinking, Eriksson took him aside and invited him to stay with him and his family near Houston, told Keith that they had room and would be glad to have him. The offer was so unexpected that Keith was rendered silent. But then he told Eriksson that he would be fine, that he appreciated it but he would be fine. Eriksson slapped him on the back and told him that he thought he would say that but that he was serious and the offer was there.
It occurred to him now that some part of him must have already known, that Eriksson’s words must have resonated in him somewhere so that he could feel the ending of it, the crew in its last moments of being a crew, an understanding that this might be the only crew he would ever be a part of.
They returned to their corner table and toasted everything they could think of: the ISS itself, the shuttle, the ground crew in general, the ground crew by name, their replacement crew, the CAPCOM, NASA, their waitress, the bartender, the bar itself, the city, the country. The beer became tequila and whiskey and the evening blurred and blurred and blurred.
When they left the bar, he embraced each of them in turn and they disappeared into their separate worlds and he drove his weaving car back to JSC, returning to his office and sitting again at his desk. If he was aware at all that his crew members had come to feel responsible for him, it was not a conscious awareness, although now, sitting on the floor of Quinn’s empty room in the cul-de-sac, the fact seemed obvious. They thought he was coming off the rails. Perhaps they were correct.
But there was no such self-awareness then, only the desire to return to his office and continue the work he had already started, if only for an hour or two as a way to clear his head before returning to the crew quarters and sleep. The multiple pitchers of beer and various shots of tequila and whiskey had thinned him at the edges and there was a sense of confusion in his thoughts, a shaking or trembling amidst the field of logic he had constructed or reconstructed. He thought again of being at the end of the robotic arm and what he felt was a strange and inexplicable feeling of panic, as if his boots had broken loose of the foot restraint and his body was adrift in the infinite reaches of space. The panic was the same when he recalled the vague half memory of Quinn somehow visiting him during his migraine weeks before. The whole of his thoughts had come to reflect a reality he did not want to acknowledge, a reality wherein he might shatter all at once into the brittle unannealed shards of a grief he had managed so effectively to avoid.