He whispered some tiny words in the darkness, words that might have been in any language and which Keith could not hear.
“Shhh,” she said, her hand stroking his short-cropped hair, his arms coming around her body and holding her in that darkness.
Drunk, stoned, depressed, mildly confused, his mind sloshing from side to side, Keith Corcoran stumbled to his feet. He tried to lift the box of empty bottles but almost fell over in doing so and decided to leave them. “I’m going to go inside,” he said, taking a step forward around the sofa and then letting the momentum continue to move him back toward the bright edge of the cul-de-sac.
Neither Peter nor Luda answered him, nor did they watch him half-stumble over the sidewalk and into the street and turn finally toward his house. In his drunkenness he grabbed the two white plastic trash bins as he passed, one in each hand, and entered the house through the empty garage, dropping the bins into the gap they had left at the end of the kitchen counter before stumbling up the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail all the while.
He undressed and lay back on the bed. Against his skin: the cool of the night air. The feeling of erasure that had come upon him earlier that evening had returned and the loneliness that fell upon his shirtless chest was profound and biting.
Perhaps he might have wondered at the marriage of Petruso and Ludmila Kovalenko. Perhaps he might have wondered at the sense of hope and love and caring that he had witnessed. Perhaps it might have engendered within him a similar sense that all might be made right once again. But in the sheer descent of his drunken loneliness he had already forgotten about being outside at all. Instead, the bed spun slowly in the center of that empty house and he fell into that rhythm and faded at last into a dreamless oblivion that was not unlike the night he had just clambered out of: a darkness alone and so, so very silent.
Seventeen
He was mildly hung over for much of the following day and, as every headache made him wonder if a migraine was approaching, he took two extra painkillers. The result was a drowsiness deep enough for him to sleep away most of the daylight hours. Over the days to follow he reentered the normalcy of his recent routine as best he could, returning to Starbucks each morning and reading the newspaper. He stopped by the warehouse-size bookstore midweek and, in the throes of what was an increasingly familiar sense of self-pity, found himself thumbing through the thick, heavy mathematics books there without much real interest or attention. He tried to imagine what kind of math Quinn might have been interested in had she continued with her studies, these thoughts like ghost images superimposed over the stark reality of thick paper and ink, all such ideas mere abstractions cast forward into a universe that seemed increasingly without meaning or purpose.
On his way out he glanced through the books on the sale table near the exit doors. There was a thick hardcover volume on astronomy amidst the various titles and he picked it up and paged through it. He had seen similar photographs before, Hubble telescope images of nebulae and star clusters and distant galaxies, but he had never really looked at them with any interest. Now, though, the pages brought to mind the stars he had seen in similar clarity from the end of the robotic arm, of the intensity of feeling that had struck him, that weird mixture of helplessness and awe and wonder and silence. The end of the numbers. Their immediate silence. Or no not their silence but something else. And then he knew that it had not been the numbers that had fallen silent in the moment; it had been himself, the sensation he had experienced at the end of the robotic arm he had designed and built had fallen into some kind of interval, a gap, and no matter what measurement applied — time or light or space or something else — there would be no concrete answer because the experience itself had no solution. There was no language to describe what he had felt. Not even the numbers.
He purchased the book and brought it with him to Starbucks and sat there sipping at his coffee, reading the first paragraph of text and then paging through the volume at random, looking at the photographs and reading an occasional caption as he did so. Hubble Deep Field a black rectangle populated by myriad efflorescent galaxies. Lupus with its scores of multicolored stars. The Tarantula Nebula a blur of blazing orange light. If he had seen these same objects through the lens of Peter’s telescope he did not remember and he knew they certainly would not have appeared in such vivid detail. Perhaps they were invisible to all but the most sophisticated instruments. The Hubble. Golosiiv. Something else.
The phone rang when he was looking at an image labeled “Lagoon Nebula Detail,” a luminescent turquoise field obscured by darkly glowing clouds. On the phone’s tiny screen was a local number he did not recognize. “Keith Corcoran,” he said.
“Captain Corcoran, it’s Tom Chen at Dreyfuss.”
“Tom,” Keith said, surprised. “How are you?”
“I’m well. And you?”
“Good, good.”
“Nice work on the last mission,” Chen said.
“Oh,” Keith said. “Thanks.”
“I know you’re busy so let me get right to the point. I got that e-mail about your friend from Ukraine.”
“Oh, yeah.” He sat up abruptly, knocking the table with his knee, coffee sloshing onto its surface.
“Well, listen, if you think this guy is for real I’d like to see his résumé if you can send it over.”
“Really?”
“We might have something. It’s not much but we have a kind of work overflow here and need someone to just kind of keep things moving. I called the NAS at Golosiiv and spoke with some people there just to find out who we were talking about and the people there think your friend walks on water.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, he must really be something. Anyway, I don’t know if this position will be too simple for him but it’s a way to get him in here. But I need to see the résumé. Maybe you can give me his phone number and I can talk to him directly about it.”
“I’ll need to get the phone number off the résumé,” Keith said, “but I will. I’ll have him get in touch with you right away.”
“That would be great. This position has been officially open for two weeks and it closes tomorrow. I would have contacted you earlier but things got backed up here. This isn’t usually how we do things.”
“I appreciate it.”
“So I’d need the résumé and contact info today or tomorrow morning at the very latest. Actually today would be best because I’d likely have to do some kind of interview in the next day or so just to make sure we’re on the official schedule. Anyway, I thought maybe I’d poke around about the guy a bit first before calling you. Just to make sure. I know you’re busy.”
“Yeah, well, that’s good.”
“I’m assuming you think he’d fit here.”
“I think so. He’s really dedicated to the kinds of things you’re doing there. The astronomy side of it. That’s where his head is.”
“That’s great. That’s totally what we’re looking for. And we’re trying to avoid just getting someone right out of school. A couple of years on the job is better than the degree, at least for this. Cheaper too.”
“Sure.”
“Hey, listen, since I have you on the phone I wanted to say that I’m real sorry about your daughter.”
“Thank you.”