And so he had returned to his office. He had discovered a problem in the calculation of the orbit paths, a problem in the system itself, and had set himself to repairing that problem, to writing a better equation and a better program and he sat down at his desk again to continue that work and thought momentarily of the offer Eriksson had made, and then realized he was weeping, alone in his office, his crew members all around him fading like nebulae, their various colors off-gassing into the darkness. The chair across from his desk remained empty.
When he woke in the morning it was to a voice: “Captain Corcoran. Hey, Keith, time to wake up.” It was Jim Mullins. Of course it was. Mullins who closed the door and then sat across from him, the desk between them with its scattered papers and wet patch of drool. Mullins who explained to him that the office was concerned about his behavior, that he was working too much, that it was time to take some days off.
“It’s not appropriate,” Mullins had told him and when Keith had asked what that meant Mullins had said, “Appropriate for the grieving process.” He called it PTSD, actually used that term, as if he was a war veteran of some kind, although even Keith knew that the operative initial was for trauma, that they saw him as being a victim of a trauma. What he could not understand was how they failed to see how much work he was getting done. Why did they not see that? Why had they decided that they would be better off without him?
And he had told Mullins, point-blank, that he did not want to leave and what had Mullins said in return? That he would be willing to make it official by putting Keith on some kind of medical leave. That Keith needed time to grieve. As if Mullins somehow knew what he needed.
So it had gone. He had packed up his personal items from the crew quarters the next day and NASA arranged a flight to take him home.
No voice-mail messages and like a fool he had continued to dial in every day, as if someone would call him with a question or a project. Some equation that could not be solved. Some engineering issue that needed his particular expertise. Eriksson had only called twice and his offer to let Keith stay with him and his family seemed a weird joke now. What could he hope to accomplish by offering such a thing?
He rose from his seat on the floor then, the beer can empty, and stood at the window. His headache was becoming increasingly impossible to ignore and his body felt heavy, so very heavy, the emptiness around him palpable, as if the air had solidified and he had become locked within it like an insect caught forever in a droplet of amber, the empty house a vacuum sucking everything he ever thought he knew into the black of space. Dark matter. The curvature of light. His empty house. His daughter gone and never to return. His absent wife. And his apparently failed career. How does one work for so many years to become an astronaut and have it be like this?
He walked back down the hall to the master bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet there and retrieved the little bottle of pain pills and the blister packs of Imitrex and swallowed the tablets with a handful of water. Then he showered and put on his bathrobe, returning to the bed and propping the single pillow against the headboard and reclining there with his finger on the remote control. The images on the television were of faces and bodies in motion, their expressions like false mirrors. They thought he had lost it somehow. He could not imagine how any of this could be true and yet his phone had been silent. Voice mail empty. E-mail in-box empty save for human resources circulars regarding open enrollment for health insurance.
After a few moments he rose and retrieved another beer from the refrigerator downstairs even though he knew he was already well on his way to being drunk, and opened it as he returned to the bedroom, stepping past the dropcloth he had left in the stairwell. Then a heavy slump onto the bed. He clicked the television remote again. Talking faces and gesturing bodies and occasional cartoon figures and commercials. How many times had he flashed through the stations in their endless loop already? Twice? Three times?
Drive-by shootings in towns he had never heard of. The usual economic terror. Foreclosures everywhere. Apparently the entire country was suddenly unemployed. A small plane crashing into the freeway. There were forests somewhere according to the news, but they were all aflame. Where were these places? And floods somewhere else. A kind of biblical mayhem then. The earthbound comet again.
Inexplicably, he thought of his neighbor, Jennifer, who was probably across the street even now, and actually felt himself rise to the thought of her. He went through the channels once more, hoping in some distant part of himself that there might be some adult channel somewhere that he had missed but he found nothing and after an additional trip through the stations he dropped the remote to the bed again and then tried to adjust the pillow behind him but nothing he could do was particularly comfortable. The giant sofa remained downstairs, a piece of furniture he hated and had not wanted to buy but which now felt like a beacon. There had been a huge flat-screen television in the corner across from it at one point, another purchase Barb had made, but of course that was gone with everything else. It occurred to him that he could certainly move this television downstairs, a prospect that immediately seemed a logical solution to the current problem of his aching body and mind and his general state of anger and boredom and frustration.
In some other moment than this he might have thought the action through, or least might have considered it more carefully than he did now but this was not such a moment. Instead he downed the remainder of the beer and rose from the bed, his head fuzzy from the mixture of painkillers and alcohol, and shifted the armoire away from the wall with some effort and unplugged the television and the cable jack and then stepped back and wrapped his arms around the television itself and lifted it. Like the armoire itself, the television was much heavier than it looked and the smooth angles made for tentative purchase. He jogged it in his hands for a better grip, his mind aching from the effort, and then started for the doorway leading to the hall and then the stairs, his bathrobe flapping at his calves as he moved. Who did they think he was? Who the hell did they think he was? He banged the corner of the television against the wall, staggered back a step and shifted his hands for a better grip. “Crap,” he said aloud.
He managed the first run of stairs to the landing and momentarily leaned the corner of the television against the wall, using the angle to reposition his hands again, the box square but with smoothed angles and rounded corners so there was little to hold with any confidence. Then he leaned away from the wall and turned and began to step forward again, his back aching and his arms already like rubber.
Had he been less exhausted or more sober he might have remembered the dropcloth that remained in the stairwell. But of course that was not the case. When his feet went out from under him he reacted with self-preservation, pushing the heavy object in his hands away from him with explosive force as his body dropped all at once to a sitting position, the impact driving sharp needles of pain through the back of his skull. And there he sat, watching, as if in slow motion, as the television rocketed end-over-end down the remainder of the stairs, his arms remaining outstretched in front of him as if he could somehow will the flying plastic and glass box back into his grip. But then it was already over, the television slamming into the far wall between the entryway and the living room and knocking a triangular hole through the freshly painted drywall with a resounding crack.