“That’s fantastic,” Keith said.
“Yes, to hell with Target and its boxes.”
“To hell with Target,” Keith said. “When’s the second interview?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I gather the first interview went really well.”
“They ask me technical questions. Many technical questions. But I know this even though I have not been working big telescope for some years. The same questions I would answer in Golosiiv. Nice to be asked about this again.”
“Haven’t lost your mind working for Target?”
“No, I still have my mind,” Peter said, laughing.
“That must be a relief.”
“Yes.” There was a pause. “Today we go to beach to celebrate.”
“Day off?”
“Yes. Never work on Thursday.”
“How far away is that?”
“You have not been to beach?”
Keith shook his head.
“Not so far,” Peter said. “Two hours maybe. A long day and we are slow to leave. So much stuff Luda takes with us. Like we go to live there forever.”
“Yeah, it can be like that.”
“You see our field?” Peter motioned toward the cul-de-sac. “Already looks totally different.”
“I keep thinking we should hot-wire one of the tractors and push my house down.”
“My nephew can probably do this. The one I tell you about.”
“Maybe I’ll have you call him.”
“Maybe not.”
“You’re probably right.” Keith said. “It’s in bad shape though. They’re putting a tent around it to fumigate for the next three days. Termite infestation.”
“Shit,” Peter said. “You will be out of house for three days then. Where to go?”
“Hotel. And maybe for longer than that. Once the fumigation is done they’ll do the repairs.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Back to NASA maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Complicated still?”
“Yeah.”
Peter stood looking at him. Then he glanced at the children. They had grown tired of watching the adults talk and were now chasing each other around Peter’s car, bounding through the two open doors and across the backseat. Peter said nothing to stop them and after a brief moment he said, “Just one moment, please,” as if he was talking on the phone and had put Keith on hold. Then he walked toward the house and disappeared inside.
Keith stood there and watched the children in their game, wondering if he should sit in the car where it was cool. Then Peter reappeared from inside, Luda just behind him. “Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said as he approached, “we would like you to come with us to beach today.”
Keith moved his eyes from Peter to Luda and back again. Both of them smiled at him. The children stopped their running and stood just behind their parents now, staring. “Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“We insist,” Peter said. “Unless you are busy with some astronaut work. Then we do not insist. But this would be an honor for us including you in our family. You have three days to be out of house. You spend first day with our family, if this is good for you.”
Luda said nothing but continued to smile and nod. She looked beautiful there, shining with a kind of radiance that he had not seen in her before. All the sadness that had been in her eyes when he had first seen her was gone, replaced now by a deep and expansive joy. It felt to Keith as if that first meeting, when he had appeared at her door with Peter passed out drunk in his car, had been years ago. How long had it been? Two months?
“Is there room for me?” Keith said.
“You sit up front with Peter and I will sit in back with children,” Luda said.
“There you are,” Peter said. “There is room.”
Keith stood on the sidewalk by the rental car in silence. Again he felt as if he should look at his own house again, one final time, another final time, but instead he said, simply: “OK.”
Peter clapped his hands. “Excellent! You will do this,” he said. “I am very pleased.”
Luda moved forward and touched Keith’s arm and then leaned over and said nothing but kissed him on the cheek and Keith felt heat rise to his face and he wondered if he was blushing.
Peter laughed. “She is very happy for you.”
“Yes,” Luda said. Then again: “Very much, yes.”
They were only able to exchange a few furtive words about the earth-bound comet as they embarked, Peter asking him what he knew in a whisper, perhaps expecting some inside NASA information that, of course, Keith did not have. “This is one-in-a-million chance,” Peter said to him, still whispering, “but still good to know.”
“Sure,” Keith said. “I was surprised it made the front page.”
Peter put a finger to his lips and then pointed to the backseat. It was unclear if he meant to indicate the children or Luda or all of them. “Not much news, I think,” Peter whispered. “Otherwise maybe not so important for front page.”
“I hope so,” Keith said.
“It is good to pray,” Peter said.
“It is always good to pray,” Luda said from the backseat.
Peter was quiet. Then he said, still in a whisper, “Maybe we talk about these things later.”
“OK,” Keith said.
“They put in gate,” Luda said from the backseat.
He nearly asked her what she meant but then he saw them: a crew of construction workers at the entrance to the development, finally installing the promised gate that would separate the Estates from the rest of the earth. Sealing it off. That was what he imagined. As if an airlock was being closed.
The car pulled through the strip of giant parking lots and then the interstate scrolled out before them, uniformly gray and endless. As they drove his mind returned to the comet. He knew its orbit would likely be some huge ellipsis, eccentricity perhaps pushing toward the parabolic, this side of the vast curve hooking through the Hill sphere of the sun, the other flung into the far distance beyond the edge of the solar system, such an orbit turning again and again and again over millions of years, the radius of apoapsis and periapsis unwatched and unmonitored until this moment when the line of one orbit happened to intersect with the line of another. A one-in-a-million chance but still a chance, the mathematics of which could hardly be believed. Two heliocentric orbits, one of which spun, perhaps, on a temporal cycle counted in millions of years, and the two actually intersecting. Even now he could feel the numbers shifting about in the darkness inside of him, filling in along the imaginary lines, circles within circles, parabolas and ellipses hooking and looping as the numbers arrayed themselves dimly along their shadowed paths.
He wondered what the variables would look like. Would Eriksson know anything about it? Maybe he would call him once they reached the beach.
Peter related the interview with Tom Chen in painstaking detail, even going back over the individual sentences and filling in nuance and implication, so much so that a half hour of interview time was rendered into an hour-long description and despite the repetition and convolution of the story Keith found that he continued to be interested. The sound of Peter’s voice made him feel calm and normal and the children in the backseat with their handheld games and occasional explosions of boredom and fatigue were welcome diversions from the long inward turn that had been most of Keith’s time since returning from space, since Quinn’s death, since returning to gravity. Five minutes into the drive the children had begun to ask when they would arrive but now were settled and quiet in the backseat and Luda would periodically bring out little toys from a bag at her feet to settle them during those moments when they became bored with whatever they had been doing.