“It does not even look like same place,” Peter said. “Just terrible. Catastrophe.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Keith said.
Peter did not answer. They stopped at the end of the sidewalk. The thistle was flattened there and a few feet farther in it was gone altogether, only dirt remaining. The thistle and weeds had partially obscured the sofa from the street but now in the bare field it seemed alien and incongruous, tufts of dry undergrowth surrounding the lumpy shape like the frayed edges of some weird throw rug.
“We should take sofa back into your house,” Peter said. “Yes?”
Keith shook his head. “I don’t want that thing.”
“No?”
“No.”
“They will take sofa, though.”
“They will,” he said. “Do you want it?”
Peter did not answer and Keith thought he was likely thinking it over but when he glanced over at him there were fat tears sliding down his face. “Fucking shit,” Peter said. “I am embarrassed.” He wiped at his tears, tried for a moment to control himself and then sobbed violently.
Keith looked back at the vacant lot again. The tractors like awkward insects that had descended there from some planet of yellow metal. “You can find somewhere else,” he said. “There are still vacant lots around somewhere.”
“This one was mine,” Peter said. “I am sorry to be like a girl with crying. I am stupid man.”
“It’s OK.”
“Fucking shit. I hate this country.”
Keith said nothing now, the words meaningless, the sun continuing its descent toward the houses to the west of them, the cul-de-sac already in shadow. Both of them quiet and the distant and constant hiss of the freeway and the million parking spaces being filled and unfilled by a million shoppers the only sound until Peter spoke again. “Look,” he said.
“At what?”
“There.” He pointed a finger above them at the sky and Keith followed the line and there it was. Far up above them, above the tractors and the sofa and the cul-de-sac and the endless sprawl, floating there in the last light before the sun crested those endless houses to the west and dipped out past the edge of the earth itself was the great dark bird.
“Oh,” Keith said, not a word but an inrush of breath, his eyes wide.
“Your big bird, I think.”
“Yes,” Keith said. “Yes.”
“Not eagle, I think,” Peter said. “Vulture.”
“Vulture?”
“What they call it. Um …” Peter paused and then said, “Buzzard.”
“Buzzard?”
It was no eagle, no bird of prey at all but rather a scavenger. Shit. Fantastic. Even now it turned above them, perhaps peering down at the empty lot, the tractors and the sofa and the two men standing there looking back at it and perhaps it regarded them all as inconsequential to its welfare. There was nothing to eat and so there was no reason to descend. Perhaps it would never change its infinite circle. Perhaps now it would never come down.
“A vulture,” Keith said. “That’s just fantastic.”
Peter said nothing. The two of them stood in much the same aspect as they had for those nights under the stars, side by side, heads tilted back, staring up into the dome of the atmosphere as if it might reveal something of itself that had been held in secret.
“Shit,” Keith said after a moment.
“Shit,” Peter said in response.
Then both of them were silent.
Intervaclass="underline" Space
(cΔt)2 < (Δr)2
(Δs)2 > 0
He had been flying back and forth to Houston, staying during the week in a small apartment he had rented there and returning home for weekends when he was able. At times he was so busy with the training that even sleeping at the apartment became a rare event. There were weeks of flight training aboard a supersonic jet that mirrored the controls of the space shuttle and then a long period of survival training in Maine, in between which he flew home. At first he had attempted to do so each weekend. In the revisionism of his later days he told himself that he had done so in an attempt to maintain his connection with Quinn and to keep her, as gently as he could, on the right path to foster her gift and to continue the conversations they had been having about math and science, but the probable reality was that he simply felt obligated to return home when it was convenient to do so, at first every weekend, then three times per month, then every other week. Soon he was lucky to make it back once in three weeks. He tried not to think about it in too much detail. He was being trained as an astronaut, after all, and was that not the most important possible activity in his life?
By the time the summer returned, he had finished the flight training and had been strapped into his first space suit and had begun to familiarize himself with the full-scale ISS model submerged in the enormous neutral buoyancy pool at JSC. Maybe he should have recognized the signs that Quinn was already changing, for when he spoke with her on the phone or occasionally in person when he was home she told him she was spending most of her days at the city pool and, in her words, “hanging out.” He talked to her about math from time to time as well but mostly she seemed to be in a great hurry to do something else, always on the way to the mall or the pool or the movie theater so that she was most often gone from the house during the daylight hours and sometimes well into the evenings, even though his own visits home were increasingly rare.
Of course when he did see her, when she was home for dinner or was lingering in the kitchen on some rare afternoon when she was not busy with her friends, she would ask him about his training, about what he was doing in Houston and what kinds of technology he had been able to work with. Had he any concern at all, these moments might have assuaged them. But there was no real concern, for he did not think about her changing, not in any specific or quantifiable way. Instead, he thought about his training and when he returned home he continued to think about his training. After all the long years of study and graduate school and the air force and the exhausting labor of his mind he was becoming an astronaut at last.
In any case, he felt she would soon enough be in good hands, for she had finally agreed to attend the Academy of Arts of Sciences, at least for a year, even though she continued to call it “Nerd School” and spoke of it with a kind of mirthful derision. He did not know if he had simply worn her down or if she now actually agreed with him that the school would provide the best place for her to continue her studies. The reason did not matter because he knew that she would blossom there and that the first year would turn into a second and a third.
If anything it was Barb who was more strongly opposed to the school. “She’s not like you,” she told him when he first brought up the idea, Quinn in seventh grade then.
“You’ve been telling me for years that she’s exactly like me,” he had answered.
“Not the way you think,” she said. “You think you’re going to turn her into an astronaut or something. She’s not like that.”
“OK,” he said. “What’s your point?”
“The point is that she’s happy at the regular school.”
“She’s happiest when she has a challenge to work on,” he said.
She just looked at him then, incredulous, saying nothing.
“Anyway, she wants to go.”
“She wants to go because you want her to go,” Barb said. “Jesus, Keith. Give her a break. She’s just a little girl.”