Then another episode during the six weeks of physical therapy at JSC and then nothing, a kind of respite from the pain long enough that he had begun to think the condition had disappeared altogether. But now here it was again and the tears that streamed from his eyes were not the diamonds of his orbit but rather the slick heavy liquid of gravity. How many episodes did that make? He had lost count, or rather had never actually counted, and although it was true that his mind worked in numbers, there were some things that were uncountable, or that equated, in the end, only to a single symbol which was prime and central and represented the start and end of everything that was or could ever be: inescapable and impossible to manipulate and glowing with a radiance that only served to underscore its position, the aleph-null of his consciousness indeed eclipsed by the ever-unfolding infinities to follow.
There had been a life he had led before and a life he would lead after and those two states had been broken along a line stretched between two points on a single plane. What remained was something hollow and ancient and vacant and he realized then that it was simply loneliness and it was everywhere around him and inside of him and there was no one he could call to his side, not on Earth and not in space. He was alone. He would never go into space again. He would never again be an astronaut. His eyes closed to the zigzagged darkness and the blanket over his head, the room itself dark and the early evening shading into night as the whole of Earth spun into its own shadow and Keith Corcoran, former astronaut, lay shivering in that multilayered black night darkness, weeping now, the pain not even reaching its apex yet, that still two hours away at least. Time itself slowing and slowing and slowing in his agony until it seemed as if it had stopped altogether and he was held there as if within a sphere. All things silent for an instant: the empty house, the cul-de-sac, Jennifer and her husband and Nicole as well, even the crickets pausing in their vigil in the vacant lot, Peter and his wife and his children all pausing, perhaps the whole endless interlocking subdivision complex and parking lots and businesses, all traffic lights blinking to red for a single moment and all conversations falling to silence. Can you feel now how memory itself would well up in such a moment? How it would be like a tide that had flowed out long ago and now rushed down into the pools, cupping the rocks and sand and circling the dunes and the waving razor grass? And how we would be alighted upon by a memory, you and I, to fill that silence, to rush into those empty pools? That memory was of her tiny hand curling into his own. Her tiny little girl’s hand on the day of ice cream when Barb’s father was dying or already dead. Ohio glowing everywhere with red and yellow and orange light. How could such a thing be gone and gone forever? How could the universe he had seen give him such a memory only to take her away from him?
When at last he opened his eyes into the empty room, the sense of drifting, of being back in the microgravity orbit, disappeared all at once, replaced with a sense that he had just tumbled back into his own body once again, the delirium of his pain rising to a sharp jagged point. He was sitting up now, although he had no recollection of doing so, his heart hammering in his chest and the jumbled collection of metal and glass tumbling in the dry socket of his skull. He knew he was going to vomit and managed to stumble across the room, the zigzags of his vision overlaying everything in his path, and crashed to the floor of the bathroom and heaved the contents of his stomach into the toilet in a weak stream like water from a burbling garden hose. His stomach turned again and again until he was coughing and choking on emptiness, a thin stream of drool extending from his mouth to the swirling waters of the bowl.
Then he stumbled back to the mattress, the shape of his body outlined in the pool of sweat he had left behind, and tumbled to its surface, trembling for a long, quiet moment before falling, at last, into sleep.
Thirteen
The stars as impossible and quixotic as they had ever been. For three days he felt as if his mind had become an empty box containing nothing but his fatigue and the day that followed was slow and quiet as he staggered through the exhaustion of his recovery. Then another night. He had come to expect the recovery period, the two or sometimes three days of weakness afterwards, but his weakness had stretched into five days now, continuing to feel as if he had just returned to Earth’s gravity, the specific and precise and quantifiable density of his body as it dragged from the kitchen to the bedroom, from downstairs to upstairs. He wished to god that he had a television so he could at least watch the mindless moving images of cooking shows and nature documentaries but alas there was no god who would deliver a television to him, regardless of his weakness or his pain.
During these slow days he found himself thinking often of Quinn and now, sprawling upon the sofa under those dark and meaningless and cruel stars, he continued to think of her. NASA had sent a camera crew to the funeral and the DVD of that footage had been in his mailbox when he arrived in Houston and he had watched it even though he did not want to do so. Barb and her mother and a group of anonymous figures Keith did not know or did not remember ever meeting all in a row as if croaked down from the boughs of huge and leafless trees. A priest or pastor he did not know talking endlessly about things that did not matter. No one he knew or cared about. A woman who had betrayed him. A polished box holding the crushed body of his daughter. A poem he could not understand read by someone he had never seen. Then that same box being lowered into the ground. Christ. Why would any father want to see such a thing? And yet he had watched it, mostly because Dr. Hoffmann had insisted it would be good for him to do so. Even now he did not know how any funeral could be good for anyone and yet the memory of it returned to him in his quiet exhausted solitude, not the memory of watching the recorded images but rather the memory of the funeral itself as if images recorded by the camera were the sight of his own eyes, as if he had felt the faint cool breeze as it filtered through the pale green leaves, as if he himself had cast the first shovelful of dirt down onto the box that cradled his daughter into the earth. My god. Tell me about your cheerleading competitions now and I promise I will listen like no other father has ever listened to a daughter. Not now nor ever to be. All promises falling to the bleak law of gravity, like a skein of gray smoke pulling backwards into the fire from which it came.
He sat there for an hour, alone on the sofa, and by the time Peter appeared he had downed two beers in quick succession and was sipping the third. He said very little as Peter set up the telescope and focused on various stars, the blur of a galaxy, a sliver of moon, the smeared color of a nebula, and when Peter told him to look he rose from the sofa to do so, not because he was particularly interested but because he did not know what else to do. He had been waiting for Peter to arrive and now he had and Keith did not know what he had been waiting for.
“Here is something beautiful to see. Come and look,” Peter said and he did so once and again and then a third time, each time looking at — what exactly? — a smudge, a star that looked like a star and hence was little different from what he could see when looking straight up into the night sky from his position on the surface of Earth, a scant blaze of color.
The fourth time he refused to rise: “Thanks, but I don’t want to see anything else,” he said. “Not tonight. Just let me sit here.”
“You are frustrated,” Peter said. “I know. It will make you feel better, maybe, to look.”