“What are we talking about here? Serious stuff?”
“I am not sure. They are seventeen and nineteen, the two of them. They have money to buy cars and fancy clothes. Too much money for little boys. I think this will not end well for them.”
“Maybe they’ll be fine.”
“Maybe,” Peter said. “They are stupid boys. They come to America and go back to what they are doing in Ukraine. This makes no sense to me.”
“Well, that’s what you wanted to do.”
“Do how?”
“You wanted to go back to what you were doing in Ukraine.”
“Not same thing,” Peter said. Then he said, “Well, maybe same thing.” He lifted his pipe to his mouth as if he was going to light it but then he did not do so, instead holding it there poised before his lips in the darkness. “Maybe I am too much like them I think,” he said.
“I doubt it,” Keith said. “Wanting to go back to working in your field is different than wanting to go back to a life of crime.”
Peter did not answer. At last he lit the pipe and sucked at it for a moment. A hush over everything. Keith found himself wondering if all the crickets had been crushed into dust by the tractors, if their desiccated husks were everywhere underfoot.
“If comet comes it will not matter who wants to go back and who does not,” Peter said.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Yes, true. I do not think any comet is coming but still true.”
“It’s not front-page news yet.”
“Maybe they keep this from front page so we are not afraid of end.”
“Maybe.” He took another swallow of beer.
“The world is always coming to end,” Peter said. “Comet is coming or is not coming. So this does not matter.”
“Very philosophical,” Keith said.
“Not philosophy. True. Stars and galaxies are being born and dying. This is what you see when you look through telescope. Things sometimes crash into other things. Galaxies absorb other galaxies. These things happen. The world is always coming to end.”
Keith paused. Then he said, “Let’s party like it’s 1999.”
Peter was quiet for a moment and then started to giggle. “I know this song,” he said. He giggled again and then was caught up in the moment and laughed long and hard. Keith smiled, watching as Peter caught his breath and then exploded into laughter again. “You are funny man, Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said at last.
“Apparently,” he said.
Peter took another pull at the pipe and then came and sat next to Keith on the sofa. “I can’t think of what to look at now,” he said. “I have forgotten what I was doing.”
“You’ve been smoking a lot.”
“Is that so?”
“It is,” Keith said. “I’m going to have to finish the whole six-pack to keep up with you.”
“You should take up pipe. Not healthy for you to drink so much.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
They were silent. Then Keith said, “Let me try that.”
Peter handed him the pipe and the lighter and Keith lit the small bud in the bowl and sucked at the smoke and held his breath as he had seen Peter do many times. His throat burned and he wanted to cough but held back until he could no longer do so, erupting into a long dry series of choking, gasping coughs that doubled him over. “Christ,” he said when it was over.
“You need practice.”
“I need a beer.” He handed the pipe back to Peter and then finished his beer and reached into the cardboard box for another. “You want?” he said.
“Not for me,” Peter said. “When I drink and smoke at same time I end up at Starbucks making myself into fool.”
“Yeah, we don’t want that to happen again.”
“No,” Peter said. “I am being fool.”
“Past history.”
“Yes, but still true.”
They did not speak for a time and Keith felt himself drifting, the alcohol and the single lungful of marijuana mixing with his daily painkillers, a sensation that had begun to feel familiar to him and one he relished during these nights on the sofa. He could feel gravity loosening its hold, the sofa dissolving into a weightless object beneath him so that his body seemed to pull away from its overstuffed cushions, a tiny gap, two small for measure, opening between his body and the sofa. As if he was escaping gravity by degrees. As if he had begun, just barely, to rise.
His head lolled against the back of the sofa, eyes staring into space, tracing fake constellations absently. A fish. A box, slightly askew and desperately empty. A series of triangles, the angles of which resolved into numbers. He superimposed Quinn’s face amidst the stars and tried to resolve it into a constellation but the best he could do was a lopsided and dented oval. And yet he could still see her face in his mind. There was no conception of heaven that he could place her into. Lost, then.
Earlier that night he had told Peter about the mini storage, about how his failure to pay the bill had resulted in an auctioning off of its contents. He had managed to slough off the few consumer items he had retained: the television that he had dropped down the stairs, the sofa, and then, through simple inaction, everything else he owned all at once. It occurred to him during some point of the evening that he should have already made a series of frantic phone calls to the mini storage company. Perhaps he could coerce someone there into giving him the auction information. He had been told that the contents had been removed immediately and that they would be parceled out for resale, but perhaps the man on the phone had been wrong. If it was true, he knew that Quinn’s schoolwork would simply be tossed into a dumpster somewhere. Very likely it already had been. How he wanted to crawl through the city landfill on his hands and knees to find each sheet of paper but he knew such a search would be futile. He had allowed the whole of her to slip through his fingers. Everything she had been or would ever be. What a fool he was.
“Hello?”
They both started simultaneously at the voice, half-sitting and then twisting around to look back toward the cul-de-sac. A woman was standing in the halo of the streetlight. She held something in her hands — a plate of some kind — and as they watched she stepped forward toward them and into the dirt of the vacant lot. Keith sat there, unmoving, too bewildered to do anything else. He thought for a moment that it could be Jennifer and wondered briefly what she could want but it was not Jennifer. He did not recognize her in the silhouetted light and sat confused and disoriented, his body and mind continuing to drift.
“Luda,” Peter said. He stood and said something in Ukrainian and set his pipe on the sofa carefully.
“Oh,” Keith said. He looked at Peter and then turned and looked over his shoulder again, over the back of the sofa and into the lit space beyond. Luda’s shadow a strip of darkness bearing out toward the sofa and the twin slumbering beasts that were the tractors. He could not make out her face at all.
“Very hard to see,” she said.
Peter stood and stepped around the sofa and took his wife’s arm and Keith could hear a few muffled words he could not understand. They stopped for a long moment there beyond him and Keith wondered if he should say something and then did say, “Hi,” loud enough for both of them to hear and Luda’s voice came back, “Hello,” and then he could hear Peter whispering to her again and could not make out the words be they Ukrainian or English or some other language entirely.
He turned back to the stars, returning his head to the sofa. Whatever Peter and his wife were discussing was no business of his and he would not have understood their words even if it had played out right in front of him, although he gathered from Peter’s tone that he was irritated by his wife’s arrival.
After a moment it was quiet again and then he could hear their soft footsteps in the dirt behind him. “My wife Luda is here,” Peter said.