The Infinite Tides (28 page)

It might have seemed comical had he not been so terribly embarrassed. Sally Erler had screamed and then had turned immediately and had herded her two clients out the door, down the stairs, and out of the house like some crazed farmer frantically trying to direct a flock of chickens away from a predator. Jennifer had only laughed—indeed it was as if she had wanted to be caught in the act—and, before he could even so much as say her name, had returned to him with a gusto that had finished him off inside of a minute, leaning away from him in the moment of release so that his seed spilled onto the carpeted bedroom floor. Then she leaned in, took him in her mouth one last time and returned his now red and pulsing member to his underwear, snapping his waistband as she did so.

“That doesn’t really seem all that complicated. Does it, Astronaut?” she said, rising to her feet.

“Christ, Jennifer,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I’ll call you and let you know where we can meet.”

He retrieved his pants from where he had dropped them onto the floor and slid them over his legs awkwardly, tottering, and then he sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re really something,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say.

“You’re right about that, Astronaut,” she said.

He sat looking at her. Then he said, “We can’t keep doing this.”

“Oh really?” she said. Her voice was quiet but there was instantly an edge to it, the edge that had been present when she had dismissed him from her home earlier in the week, and Keith knew that this could easily devolve into an argument, which he simply did not have the strength for. The distant whining was well established now and already in the deep core of his mind there was a singular white arc of pain.

He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed at being walked in on
but it was obvious that this was not the case. He felt ashamed somehow but could think of no words to articulate that condition either and so he said the only thing he could think of: “You’re married, Jennifer.”

“So what? I’m married. You’re married. Who cares?”

“I’m not willing to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re overthinking the whole thing,” she said.

“I’m not overthinking anything,” he said. “I’m just not doing it.”

She stood and looked at him, hands on hips. “You’ve just been using me,” she said at last.

“I’ve been using you?”

“Yes, you’ve been using me.”

“I didn’t ask you to come over here.”

“Is it a game to you? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“That’s how you’re acting. Like you have all the answers and I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“OK,” he said.

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was silent and she shook her head. Her face was flushed. “All you men are exactly the same,” she said at last. “You’re all a bunch of … fucking faggots.” She stood there for a moment longer, her face moving from carefully controlled rage to disgust to simple disappointment and at last she said, “Fuck you,” and then turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

“Jennifer,” he said, but the room was empty. He could briefly hear her on the stairs and then the opening and closing of the front door signaled her exit.

That was it, then. He sat on the bed, looking at the white pearls of fluid on the carpet, thinking that he should probably get a towel and clean them up but making no move to do so. He listened for further movement in the house but all was silent and after a time he stood and
buttoned his pants and finally took the Imitrex tablet and then walked downstairs, hoping more than anything that the silence was real and that Sally Erler had left the house and had driven away and that he would not have to speak to her about what she had seen.

Indeed the downstairs was as empty as it had been when he had first returned to the cul-de-sac those weeks ago, or even emptier now that the sofa was gone.

“She made it worse when she came outside,” Sally Erler said now over the phone. When he asked her what she meant, she told him that Jennifer appeared on the sidewalk when the realtor was trying to placate the young couple and that she had said “some very negative things” about him, said them directly to the potential buyers and then had stormed off across the street and back into her own house, a house that Sally Erler had acted as selling agent on three years before, a point she made with no small sense of irony.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“Let’s just call it water under the bridge,” she said. “So there’s good news. That’s why I’m calling. It’s a good-news call.”

“Good news?”

“Yep, yep, good news,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s unbelievable but it’s true. They made an offer anyway.”

“Those same people who were here in the morning?”

“Those same people. They made an offer and it’s right in line with what we talked about so it looks like it’s a go.”

He was at the little kitchen table. They discussed the dollar figures and it turned out he would break even on the sale, an almost astounding concept as he was certain that, given the crashing of the economy, he would lose money. He was smiling now despite the whining and the distant pain. Every day the newspaper had more statistics on local foreclosures and yet someone wanted to buy the house. It was possible that happening in on the blow job had been a good selling point after all. Perhaps realtors should hire prostitutes and porn stars and astronauts to perform sex acts for viewing by potential buyers as an industry-wide
standard. Once again, he had beaten the odds. And the painting had never been completed. Nor the cleaning. The place was a pigsty; there was no denying it. Fresh stains on the bedroom carpet and yet there had been an offer. Incredible. There was still magic, even if small and inconsequential.

He verbally accepted. There would be paperwork to sign, after which the house would be in escrow for sixty days. Two months to figure out what to do and where to go. There would be time enough for that. Right now he could not even begin to work on such an equation. Instead he closed his eyes and rubbed absently at his temples. He had managed to get through the blazing sun of midday by closing all the blinds in the house and was relieved that if the migraine was going to hit him, it would do so in the relative cool and dark of the evening. If he could just get through the next hour or so of daylight he could cocoon himself in his bed, turn the air conditioner temperature down and hide in the darkness. He knew it would still be a terrible ordeal but there was some relief in a quiet room, in his bed, in the cool of the humming air conditioner.

He managed to take a short nap. When he woke he padded immediately to the bathroom and swallowed yet another painkiller, the fat white tablet resting in the palm of his hand for a brief interval before he popped it into his mouth, took a brief swig of water, and swallowed. How many had that been? Four? Five? An Imitrex in the morning and another a few hours ago. A man whose life was numbers and he could not recall the count. He thought of calling the flight surgeon but he did not do so. What would it matter now?

When the doorbell rang, he was still standing at the sink, leaning against it, and he continued to stand there for a long time, hoping that whoever was ringing would give up and go away but as the bell rang a third and then a fourth time he opened his eyes and moved out to the entryway and looked through the peephole. He could see
no one and then a moment later Nicole appeared in the window to the side of the door, peering through the glass, her face cupped in her hands. She was in much the same position as when he had first seen her at the sliding door and as she saw him she pulled one hand away from her face and waved. The motion reminded him again of Quinn but there was no longer any sense of shock or surprise; instead, that reaction had been replaced by a sense of vague and nostalgic beauty that floated just out of reach and would ever continue to do so.

He pulled the door open slowly and stood there, his eyes squinting, head whining steadily and with increasing violence. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi, Captain Keith,” she said, looking up at him. Her body had a faint glowing halo around it, an effect of the oncoming migraine and certainly not a positive indicator of his immediate future. “What are you doing?”

“What am I doing? Nothing,” he said.

“You look sick. Are you sick?”

“I have a migraine.”

“Oh, a migraine. My mom has migraines when she’s having her period.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “She gets grumpy too. We just have to leave her alone.”

“OK.”

“My dad’s home.”

“Yeah, I met him today.”

“His name is Walter but people call him Walt. They had a fight but he’s home now.”

He leaned against the doorframe and covered his eyes with his hand.

“You probably want me to leave you alone just like my mom,” she said.

“Yeah, I think so.” There was another pause. Keith’s eyes were clamped closed. The rectangle of the open door he stood in was like an
airlock opening directly onto the changeless and agonizing surface of the sun.

“I just wanted to say hi,” Nicole said at last.

“OK,” he said. He looked down at her to say good-bye and in doing so saw that Walter Jensen was walking toward them both from across the street, his face in an easy smile, his hand already half outstretched to shake his hand again. Fantastic.

“Hey neighbor,” Walter Jensen said.

They shook, Walter Jensen wrenching his palm into a series of shock waves that ran up his arm and into his head like a small jackhammer ramming at the meat behind his eyes. Everything red and blurred. He thought he might be sick. If he did he hoped he would have the strength to vomit into Walter Jensen’s face.

“Listen, did you give any more thought to that extra furniture we have?” Walter Jensen said. “We can get it over here right away if you want it.”

“Oh, I think … ,” Keith said. He paused. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Jesus, are you OK, buddy? You look pale. Are you feeling all right?”

“I think I’m coming down with something.”

“Oh, I’m real sorry to hear that. Listen, if there’s anything you need from us just ask. Really, I mean that. We neighbors have to stick together. Hell, there aren’t that many of us that speak English if you know what I mean.”

Keith looked at him blankly.

“Listen, I’ll let you get some rest but really let us know if you need anything.”

Again, he said nothing, only staring. He wondered how it would feel to punch Walter Jensen in his perfect white teeth. But even the thought of it made the pain wobble in his skull.

Nicole peered up at him from the doormat with a look of concern that was touching and comical at the same time.

“Come on, Nicole,” her father said.

“Thanks,” Keith said.

“Don’t mention it, neighbor,” he said. He took Nicole by the hand and they both turned together.

“Can Captain Keith have dinner with us again?” Nicole said to her father as they moved away.

“Again?” Walter Jensen said.

Then the door swung closed and the outside world was silent.

He stumbled upstairs. Already the zigzagging lines had begun to blur across his vision and his head thrummed with the rhythm of his blood. He stopped at the thermostat, knowing he intended to do something there—adjust the temperature up or down or something else—but he could not focus and instead moved past it into the bedroom and pulled his shirt over his head and then fumbled with his pants and removed them as well and fell sideways onto the bed. There were still bright slashes of light burning through the blinds and after a moment he pulled the blankets back and slid under them and pressed his head into the pillow as he slid the darkness up and over until it enveloped him.

He reached for the numbers in their empty spaces but they were difficult to find now, seeming to jerk and twitch, to scatter like frightened birds at his approach. A few fives and sevens, a flock of threes and nines, a pair of ones and a similar pair of twos, and then the symbol of the aleph he had once spoken with Quinn about, naming the idea she had been fascinated by, that symbol eclipsing all others as he relaxed into the cool of the bed, the temperature already shifting upward until he began to sweat and even then he did not move but lay there, one arm over his face, the other still clutching the edge of the blanket where he had lifted it nearly to the headboard. The zigzags appeared even with his eyes closed, his mind a collection of glass shards that turned and ran their jagged edges against each other in a constant and terrifying shifting and the aleph floating in the midst of that chaos of dark motion like a beacon or a sentinel.

.  .  .

Within an hour the full agony had come upon him and he dissolved into a pain both shattering and inexplicable, his body already a wreck of exhaustion and the pain continuing to crest toward its magnificent and destructive apex. He felt as if he was caught in some eventide between sleeping and waking, and in this gray semidarkness his mind seemed to fall toward the memory of Quinn, gravitating toward her as if her memory held within it a specific density greater than all others, the pull so strong and real that he felt an immediate impulse to rush into her room, as if now in the pain that was his crushed mind there was a chance that he could reach her. But Quinn was dead and nothing would change that. His eyes locked closed in the black heat under the sweat-soaked sheet and blanket and in the red darkness that was his pain.

During the long, impossible night even the undulating wave of chirping crickets had entered his mind and he closed the window and folded the pillow over his ears to muffle that sound but even then he was still able to feel it, a physical pressure just behind his eyes as if the sound was a grinding stone that had entered him and spun there against the front of his brain as he drifted into and out of consciousness, never sleeping but passing through a kind of gloaming that was memory and hallucination all at once, his vision, even with eyes closed, a collection of black and white zigzagging lines that covered everything, that covered even his thoughts until the final aleph of his pain was the form of a single question that repeated endlessly: Where was she now? Where was she now?