He sat midway down the stairs as if that had been his intent all along, his vision already clear and the shock of pain subsiding into the fuzz that was his drunken mind. Crap. Crap crap crap. He closed his eyes and took one long breath. Then he opened them again and rose to his feet and kicked the dropcloth out of the way, descending to the television and shifting it out of the hole it had made in the wall. Tufts of pink insulation. Something else to repair and repaint. Fantastic. But surprisingly the television itself looked intact. He twisted it slightly so that it was propped up on one corner, shifting it into his grip and closing his eyes for a moment before rising to his feet with a loud grunt, the television cradled awkwardly in his arms. Every thought he had left was focused on lying down on the sofa and closing his eyes.
He entered the living room and managed to set the television in the empty space once occupied by the big flat-screen. There was no stand of any kind in the corner and the small television looked pathetic there on the carpet, the enormous gray leather sofa facing it as if the black box was something of grand importance.
At first nothing happened when he plugged it in and pressed the power button. Then, from somewhere far inside, a hissing and popping followed by the faint smell of burning plastic. He jerked the power cable out of the wall and sat there in front of the television on the floor as the whole house rocked woozily around him. The gray sofa lay in silence in the center of the room, a sofa he had told Barb he disliked when they first saw it at the furniture store but which she had purchased anyway after he had returned to Houston for more training. Now it was one of the few items she had left behind, a lumbering whale that had beached there in a room lined with blue masking tape and stinking of paint. The scene was enough to make him wonder why he had chosen to bring the television downstairs at all.
“Goddammit,” he said aloud. Then he said it again, loudly and drawn into a kind of angry howl, “Goddammit!”
He returned to the front door and opened it and stepped outside into the night, wheeling the big garbage bin from the side of the house to the front door and returning to retrieve the television. The pain in his mind was constant now despite the Vicodin and beer, as if his slip on the stairs had broken a glass jar inside his skull and the pieces were now free to rattle and scrape the raw red tissue there. He staggered outside with the set, attempting first to heave it into the open garbage container, but the television was simply too large to do much more than sit on the top and so he lifted it again and shuffled out toward the curb, the whole box slipping repeatedly in his grasp.
He might have thrown it against the concrete. There was certainly that urge. The screen would shatter. The sound of it would reverberate through the streets and houses and the vacant lot. But someone was moving down the street toward him and so he knelt and awkwardly lowered the box to the sidewalk, panting, his arms weak and his hands numb from the effort. For a brief moment he tried to stand but instead sat on the television itself, trying to catch his breath, his bathrobe slumping over him like a burial shroud.
The figure had been walking toward the end of the cul-de-sac and it stopped now. “That work?” A man’s voice.
Keith looked up. The face was mostly obscured in shadow. “No,” he said. Then he added, “I just dropped it down the stairs.”
“Maybe they can fix?” the man said.
There was a trace of an accent and the man’s face looked vaguely familiar, although Keith could not place it. “I doubt it,” Keith said. Then he added, “Have we met?”
The man looked at him and his white teeth shone in a broad grin. “You are famous astronaut Keith Corcoran,” he said. “I meet you at Starbucks.”
“Starbucks?” Keith said. There was a moment of silence and then he realized that it was the loud Ukrainian man. Fantastic.
“Peter Kovalenko,” the man said. He extended his hand and Keith took it and said his own name but did not rise, noticing for the first time what the man was carrying. It was a white telescope, a relatively large one with its tripod gripped under the man’s left arm and the telescope itself riding up across his shoulder and pointing skyward above his head.
“Yes, I know this,” Peter said, still smiling. “You live here?”
He thought briefly of telling a lie or at least a half-truth but instead he merely gestured vaguely behind him toward the empty house. “Yeah, here,” he said. He tried to relax his wrinkled brow and his tight, squinting eyes in the cool night air but it was difficult to do so.
“Amazing. We are neighbors, then,” Peter said. “My wife and the children are there.” He gestured similarly over his shoulder toward the main road that led, eventually, out of the cul-de-sac maze. “Very exciting. My neighbor is famous astronaut.”
Keith nodded. “Very exciting,” he said. It was quiet then but for the crickets and the constant hiss of distant freeway traffic. The sidewalk seemed to drift beneath him. So slowly.
“You are between space missions maybe?” Peter said.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What is meaning?”
Keith looked up at him. “It means I don’t know,” he said.
Peter looked back but said nothing. The smile did not falter. After a moment he said, “Less light here.” He gestured down the street to the end of the cul-de-sac and the empty lot that lay now in blue-black darkness. Keith did not answer. “For telescope,” Peter said after a time.
Keith nodded. He had caught his breath but still did not stand. Gravity seemed tilted slightly. How many beers had he consumed? He could not recall. Everything felt distant. The feeling was exactly the opposite of being in the microgravity orbit of the space station and he wished more than ever before that he was back there, right now. In the illogic of his current state he imagined pushing himself through the air and back inside, back into his bed.
“Maybe they can fix,” Peter said, gesturing at the television.
“No,” Keith said. “I dropped it down the stairs. It’s history.”
“Too bad.”
Again, a pause in the conversation, this one long enough to feel awkward and Keith was just ready to stand and return to the house when Peter said, “I’m pleased to meet famous astronaut.”
“Thanks,” Keith said, and there was bitterness in his voice that he could not disguise. “Good to meet you too.”
Peter smiled broadly. “Famous astronaut is my neighbor. I am lucky man,” he said.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Keith said abruptly. “I’m beat.”
“Of course,” Peter said. He extended his hand and Keith shook it again as he tried to stand. He stumbled a bit and Peter put a hand on his upper arm to steady him as he rose to his feet.
“OK,” Keith said. “I’m OK.”
“Yes, yes,” Peter said.
“I’m going in,” Keith said but he made no move toward his door.
After a long moment Peter said, “I am glad to meet you.” There was a quizzical, puzzled look on his face. “Good night,” he said. “Sorry about this television.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Keith said. He thought he should have probably taken the opportunity to tell him then that he was not an astronaut, that he had only been joking, but he would not do so, not even now. It was true and that meant it was true for everyone and that included this man and Jim Mullins and Eriksson and everyone. He was an astronaut. Fact.
“Good night to you,” Peter said. He did a little bow and Keith nodded and then Peter swiveled slightly on his heel and moved past him and into the darkness of the field beyond. There was a chain across the entrance — assumedly to keep people from driving into the field — and Keith watched Peter step over it and stump off into the night darkness. Keith found himself wondering if whatever that great dark bird had been feeding on was still present in the field. Some desiccated tangle of bone and sinew.