Listening to the ticks of the car shutting down, Vincent stood looking up at the crowd of stars. Ash-colored scrubs grew rabidly along the cabin, atop their widening tangles small ruby blooms that seemed like concessions to ugly beginnings. Inside he removed his boots and set them on a high driftwood shelf near a canvas bedroll, a worn pair of binoculars, and a fishing rod. His steps and adjustments were all economical, considered so as not to wake the woman on the couch. Squatting now he felt the things around her, the pale mug inside of a glass on the floor and the heels of her brocade slippers under the coffee table, trying to infer the shape of her day by the temperature of the things she had touched. He retrieved the blue-and-white quilt from where it had bunched at her toes and he spread it over her.
HIS WIFE HAD BEGUN TO complain about the dust as soon as they arrived. Elise had spoken of it without a name, like a domestic menace so familiar to the inhabitants it needed none. It sneaks in and changes things, she said.
While he was diving and spinning one Thursday—nailed to his seat by the negative gravity, the force of it tugging the skin of his jaw to his ears, calling on his calves and torso to make even the slightest adjustment to the controls, reaching the speed brake and watching the plates of metal bloom before the windshield—she was moving through their apartment on the base with a roll of duct tape around her wrist. She bit off stretches as long as her torso, applying them along the walls of the house with her head tilted.
He had leaned on the door, all the lightness he felt after flying replaced with an intestinal roil. The unclean ripping sound as the seal gave way, the jerks of its opening as the last bits of glue detached, were a warning he could not ignore. In moments like these he saw his father’s ossified pointer finger, the spill he had not cleaned, the grade that would not do. The open hand, the leather belt. Like his father, he saw things in two ways, acceptable and not.
Elise was silent, very much a piece of the dark, still room, upright at the dining table, fingering the silver roll she wore as a bracelet. Tape bordered the windows, the crack that grew up the bare east wall.
It did keep the dust out, she said, as though remarking on the finer aspects of a mediocre meal. He sat down across from her and pressed his palms together, waiting a minute to speak.
This won’t do.
The next day he’d entered the housing office, a box of three bowls and their framed wedding photo balanced on his hip, and told a version of the truth, alluding to health issues, mentioning the mountain air. He slid two bare keys across the grain of the desk. There was no protocol, no form to fill—no one ever chose not to live on the base, the name of which pilots across the country spoke very slowly—so the kid with the reddish crew cut just nodded, stunned. Elise, in the idling car, turned the radio knob every three seconds. On the dried-up lake beds shadows of planes appeared and vanished. They had driven through the blue day inside a silence that was calm but not happy. It had been six months.
BAREFOOT NOW, DONE LOOKING AT her, he killed the light and passed through the small, dark kitchen. In the bedroom the air was stiff, made up of her nail polishes and removers and perfumes, so he shoved open a window and went straight to sleep.