Spaceman of Bohemia

Astronaut Dies for Country

HANUŠ SLIPPED from my hands. His legs detached, one by one, and dropped into the universe as if they had business of their own. He was nothing more than a small sack of skin whirring with the vibrations of the feeding Gorompeds, his eyes dead, his lips dark. Only after he had floated away did I realize that the Gorompeds, having leaked from his pores, were swarming around my arm, my shoulder, my helmet—and suddenly they were inside my suit, biting into the flesh of my armpit and groin. Hanuš was gone.

I screamed in pain as the gates of the Russian ship opened and from the inside emerged an astronaut clad in a suit so finely cut and fitting it must have been tailored to order. He grabbed me and pulled while the Claw retreated into its lair. The fierce biting around my privates ceased, but I felt the burn of the inflicted wounds. As the crawling sensation around my body faded, I looked at the finger of my glove, where a few Gorompeds exited the suit and disappeared as I tried to grab them. I allowed the astronaut to carry me, to push me wherever he liked. The chute closed and the decontamination fans hummed. I was sick with fever, nausea, my lungs burned at the exposure to fresh oxygen. The fashionable astronaut brought me out of the chamber, between sleek gray corridor walls showing no cables, no control panels, no guts of the ship, as if the vessel sailed on faith alone. Another astronaut approached, suit cut to match wide hips and short legs. Together they brought me into a small, dark room with a single sleeping bag, and unfastened my helmet. Greedily, I breathed, sweat pouring into my mouth.

“Ty menya slyshis?” a female voice inquired.

I tried to speak but couldn’t make a sound. I nodded.

“Ty govorish po russki?”

I shook my head.

“Do you speak English?”

I nodded.

The lights dimmed even more, the darkness became a grain, and some frames skipped, until I could see nothing at all. I tried to shout. I waved my arms, felt my back pushed firmly into the wall, my hands tied down, another set of straps pulled over my shoulder.

“Do you feel thirst?” the woman asked.

Desperately, I tried again to answer in speech, but no trembles resonated through my dry throat. I nodded angrily.

A straw scratched my lips, and I sucked and sucked. My suit was stripped from me, peeled from my scorching skin, and I drank all the while, until not a drop was left and I lost the strength to stay awake.

A tap on the shoulder. Her voice was robotic, distant, meaning she was speaking to me through her suit’s microphone. I was not awake enough to comprehend her words. She held something cold to my cheek. There was a sudden pressure in my mouth, my cheeks filled up, followed by the flavor of pasta, canned beef, and tomato sauce along my teeth and tongue. I chewed, swallowed, felt the heaviness of my eardrums.

“… real… food… toast… three days… do you know?” Her voice was in and out.

I tried to speak, and lost consciousness again.

When I opened my eyes, blurry shapes crept around the room. I could not feel my tongue. Something wet and substantial rested in my Maximal Absorption Garment.

Two thick silhouettes materialized in the doorway.

“Are you awake?” she said, still through her suit’s microphone.

I nodded.

They approached. I looked down to see that my starved body was clothed in nothing but a blue T-shirt and a diaper.

“You are ill. We don’t know what it is. Do you?” she asked.

I observed her companion through the visor of his helmet, broad-shouldered, with a round jawline shaved too cleanly and fat eyebrows merged into one by his insistent frown. I shook my head.

“We don’t know if it can spread to us. That is why we keep quarantine. Is this okay?” she said.

I lifted my hand and scratched air letters with an imaginary pen. She nodded and looked at the man. He left for a few minutes and returned with a notepad and pencil. The woman unstrapped my hands.

Home? I wrote.

“Yes, home. We are setting course for Earth now.”

My shuttle?

“Gone, in the cloud. We barely made it out ourselves. The dust, it finds its way under.”

Only the two of you?

“We have a third. But he rarely leaves his chamber. There has been… an incident.”

She looked down at my diaper, smiled awkwardly, and took the writing pad away. She placed it in the front pocket of my sleeping bag.

“You must rest,” she said, and floated back to the man waiting by the doorway. They drew sticks out of a box. The man drew the shorter stick. The woman left.

He unzipped my sleeping bag, leaving fastened the constraints that held my body to the wall. He pulled off the safety Velcro straps of my diaper, and began sliding it down. I put my hands on his shoulders in protest, but he pushed them away. I took the notepad and wrote furiously: Don’t, I can do

He shook his head and began to remove the diaper with a disgusted grimace. I slapped the top of his helmet. He grabbed my arm, thrust it to the side, and strapped it to the wall, then did the same with my left. The notepad and pen floated away. When I looked down at the straps on my chest and stomach, I realized that all of them were secured by a miniature padlock. I wasn’t too surprised—of course they had to quarantine me by force, in case I decided to take a tour of the ship during my feverish hallucinations. Whatever bacteria I might contaminate the corridors with would mutate unpredictably in the zero gravity environment, causing possible disaster for both the crew and the structural integrity of the vessel. Yet this confinement brought on unprecedented terror in me. I tried to scream, wriggled in my chains, turned my hips to the side, but nothing could end the violation. With flared nostrils, the man wrapped plastic around the diaper to prevent its contents from flowing around. He tied the bag three times and unwrapped four towels, which he used to wipe my groin, my thighs, and my rectum. I closed my eyes, counted, wished I could produce an auditory expression of my rage and shame, but I could do nothing. The man left without looking at me, as if he were somehow the punished dog.

I had no way to tell how long the Russians left me in solitary. I tried to count, but by the fifth minute, all numbers seemed alike, thirty the same as a thousand, and I could not guess how long a second lasted. Throughout these hours in the darkened room serving as my holding cell, I had only one thing to hold on to: the reality of my return to Earth, the possibility of living. Because if all that had happened had really happened—from the moment I stared into the fire as the Velvet Revolution sent my father and, eventually, the rest of us on the course of our punishment, through the time I first spotted the iron shoe in its monstrous efficiency, through the time I met Lenka by a sausage cart and a senator proposed that I fly to Space—if all was true (and I couldn’t be sure about anything in this room, not life or death, not dream or reality), then I was really on my way home, on my way to all the other futures I could create. The vision slowly returned to my right eye, and the burning around my forehead and chest subsided.

Home. I focused on the concept intensely so my thoughts would not wander to questions I may not want answered. For instance, why a Russian ship had come to cloud Chopra without anyone knowing. Or whether Gorompeds bred somewhere inside me, bound to consume me from within as they had with Hanuš.

Hanuš. His body slipping away. The ache around my temples I would never feel again.

The female astronaut came to me in the midst of these thoughts, bearing another tube of spaghetti. She allowed me to feed myself. I grunted without shame, lapped at the tomato sauce like a feral dog, ignoring the excruciating pain of my rotted tooth. I studied her through the visor. Her sunken eyes, brown with golden nebulas shooting from the middle, indicated a lack of sleep, and a thick scar snaked along her round cheek.

When I was done with the meal, she took the empty tube and handed me an e-tablet.

“Your obituary,” she said, and smiled.

I looked at the date and time of the article, which had been written by Tůma and published a few hours after Central lost contact with JanHus1:

My hand trembled. I became aware of my lachrymal ducts—dried out, burning, empty.

Without pain. A barefaced lie.

I handed the tablet over.

“You want to see pictures of funeral?” she asked.

No. Maybe later. How long has it been?

“A week. They are building statue. There are many candles still in this square, and pictures of you. Paintings.”

What is your name?

“Klara. Your fever is coming down. We fear superbacteria. That is why there is quarantine. But you seem better.”

Yes. Better. Why are you here?

She studied something on my forehead. The silence felt long, even excruciating.

“We are part of phantom program. Have you heard of this?”

Myth, I thought?

“A myth, yes. No one knows exactly how many have died being shot into Space quietly. At least technology makes odds bigger now. We are a phantom mission. There was one before us, shortly after cloud appeared, even before Germans sent the monkey. It was one-man mission, like yours, and the man—Sergei, I knew him well, good person—he never returned. And so we come, bigger ship, more crew, we launched couple of weeks before you but came off course when Vasily… well, there was the incident. And so we arrive late, after you, and you were a floating man. I am telling you this because you have to know, Jakub, that my government will never admit to phantom programs, especially now that we have Chopra dust, we have this advantage, what world wants. And if we do not exist, then your rescue does not exist. You do not exist. Do you understand?”

You gathered it? Chopra?

“Yes, we have dust. But do not think of it anymore. You will never see it.”

I looked away. She apologized under her breath and I waved her off. She too was a soldier. Home felt much less certain now. What could the future of a rescued phantom dead man be? Life under surveillance in a Belarusian village? A Russian prison? Would they hold me until the fact of my rescue could somehow be used to political advantage, or until a whistle-blower agile enough to penetrate a century of state-sanctioned lies revealed that the phantom program of the USSR was alive and well, a wild conspiracy theory sure to kill at any cocktail party?

You said incident? With your third?

“Yes, Vasily. He hasn’t been himself.”

What happened?

She studied the strap on her glove, quiet, frowning.

You don’t have to say

“I will tell you because it is nice to talk. These two with me, they will not talk. Do you know what it is like when you speak and no one listens? You do, Jakub. They sent you all on your own, your people. It was three months into our mission. Vasily looked into my bunk, pale, breathing heavy. Yuraj and I, we asked him for two hours, what is wrong? And he said nothing, only drank the milk and looked into distance. And then, finally, he put his hands like this”—she crossed her arms on her chest—“and said, I hear monster. It speaks in darkness, like a dog’s growl, and it scratches on walls. And this monster, he said, it spoke inside his head, asked about Earth, asked about Russia. And he just sat, his hands like that, saying like, C’mon, druz’ya, you tell me I’m wrong, I won’t agree, I know what I heard. We never told him anything, never said, Vasily, you are probably little crazy from Space. Still he always put his hands like that, like we wanted to take the truth away from him. We reported what he said to tsentr, but they never told us what they did, if anyone talked to him. And so, after that day, he does research on his own, and he eats his meals on his own, and we are worried, but what can we do? We are tired too. We too can’t be taking care of someone’s head.”

I tapped the pen on my forearm.

A monster

“Yes. A dog’s or wolf’s growl.”

Could I talk to Vasily?

“Maybe if you get better and he agrees to come here. We cannot let you out of room.”

How much longer?

“We are expected to be on Earth in three months.”

Are you scared?

“Of?”

Going home

She took the pad from my hands and slid it back inside the front pocket of my sleeping bag, then zipped me up to the neck, and rested the forefinger of her glove on my cheek. “You should sleep,” she said. “Fever is coming down—maybe we can unstrap you soon, if you promise to not come out to the ship.”

She floated away, stopped in the entry, but did not turn around.

“Silence drives us crazy,” she said. “But we are afraid we will miss the silence. Bozhe, it is hostile up here, but it is easy. Routines and computers and food in plastic. Yes, I wonder, can I ever share life with people again. I think about refilling my car with oil and I want to be sick to my stomach.”

She left.

I pulled the cocoon of the sleeping bag over my head so I would not hear the subtle creaks of the ship. Even the most sophisticated structures cannot avoid the sighs of life. Materials copulate, clash, grasp for air. I felt strong, the blood flowing through my extremities, and thus I slept. Once, I caught myself stretching my fingers toward the rabbit’s eyes so I could drop them to the quarreling chickens. Rain escaped through holes in the gutter and woke cats snoozing on the bench. The modest sandals of the doppelgänger Jan Hus struck the cobblestone path as he was led to his trial, and he grunted quietly as he was hoisted onto the wooden platform where he was to burn.

I have never been clear on my first memory. It could be one of my father holding me nude on his bare chest, my clumsy hands grabbing at his curled chest hair. But it could also be that this is no real memory at all, that I wish so desperately to remember this moment because of the ragged black-and-white photo my mother kept on her nightstand. My father’s jaw was still fleshy with youthful fat, not yet sharpened by age and unfulfilled desires. I knew nothing except this man’s warm hands nearly as big as my body, his odor that would one day become mine, the warmth, the light. Is the question of whether I remember this moment more important than the empirical evidence proving it actually happened? I hope the memory is real. I hope the sensation, the phantom of my father holding me that closely, isn’t manufactured, but is based in the animalistic instinct of grasping at those moments in which we are protected. The instinct in the animal named Jakub.

I DIDN’T KNOW how long I had slept after the last feeding break when Klara and Yuraj came to unstrap me. Klara told me that three weeks had passed and the quarantine was over. I floated around the room, stretching out my muscles, my joints, smiling at the pleasure of motion. My voice had come back to me, at first a hoarse whisper, then a guttural tone I didn’t recognize. My throat still ached whenever I spoke more than one short sentence. I studied Klara, who was no longer cautious around me, only kind. Even Yuraj shot me a quick smile, though he maintained an air of masculine indifference. They had laid out the rules: I’d promise not to leave the room under any circumstances without being accompanied, and in exchange they would uncover the small window. I agreed. When I asked about my future, about their instructions from Russia, they became tight-lipped and irritated, and so I ceased to inquire about the matter altogether. I was too happy to have human companions, to hear language travel through its usual channels, to smell someone else’s sweat. We were headed to Earth. I missed Hanuš, more than I could attempt to describe, yet I could not speak of him at all.

Klara seemed to like talking to me, especially now that I was healthy and thus offered no bacterial threat. She would come into my room without her space suit, sometimes with her hair braided, revealing a slender neck I could not avert my eyes from, other times with her hair untamed and frizzed, a lion’s mane surrounding her cranium. Eventually, I couldn’t prevent thoughts of kissing her slender neck, of zipping the two of us inside my spacebag and feeling the touch of human skin along mine. Perhaps strangely, these thoughts never arrived outside our conversations. Her insights and her memories rekindled the seemingly dead impulses within me, the impulses I had pledged to forever limit to Lenka. I made no indication of my lust to Klara. I wanted her to keep coming back. The simple comfort of her companionship as the dreaded day of our return to Earth approached was worth more than any physical gratification.

“I have been reading about you,” she said once over our lunch, “about your father. Not too many things left around the ship to do, so I think, I will know more about our guest.”

“Okay.”

“Did you love him?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s the curse of family.”

“I hoped you’d say this. Have you heard of Dasha Sergijovna?”

“I haven’t.”

“She was my mother. She too was phantom. Is this surprising?”

She wore a sports bra and loose sweatpants, the postworkout sweat staining the smooth edges of her clavicle, belly button, lip line. She seemed as comfortable as a human being could be, and I envied her.

“It is.”

“When I was small, the military people told me that she went to be spy at British embassy, and was killed by this imperial diplomat. Three bullets to her back, bam, they said, by West. But when I entered the air force, they finally told me some of this truth. A heavy brown file. She was second woman to travel to Space, ever, with another cosmonaut. The space program thought they could make it to moon and back, but this was so far before such things were possible, only one year after Gagarin. The Party was thirsty to do everything before the Americans. And so my mother went up, with this man, and I was told SSP lost hearing two hours into the mission. Probably, they made it to the moon and crashed, or they choked because of oxygen coming out. Either way, this death was quick and like heroes, they said.”

“Kind assurance,” I said.

The room was hot. A malfunction caused by the Chopra dust that couldn’t be fixed, Klara had told me. At night, I would wake, thinking I had a high fever, and at last I was to die. But then Klara would arrive in the morning to deliver breakfast, and I was glad for another day.

“Well,” she said, “then this man from ministry of interior fell in love with me, and I suppose I wanted to see how things go. And one evening, after we went to kino and he was drunk, he told me that he could get this file in secret for me—a file containing truths. I made love to him that night from the excitement of possibility. I thought my mother’s heroism would, at last, take good shape. And so he brought the file, and I read it under candlelight on night when electric went out.”

She wasn’t looking at me now. She stretched out her fingertips, as if the file still rested there, and she was feeling along its edges.

“And the truth was different,” I said.

“Yes. The mission was suicide from beginning. The SSP wanted to see if a new vehicle could make full distance to Mars, unbroken, while keeping life. My mother knew this, the man knew this, and they volunteered, and they kissed their different children good-bye and they went off forever. Two hours into the mission, all is well, and suddenly, her partner starts to speak crazy. He said he could hear God in waves of universe, and he knew the world would end soon. And this God of waves was sending him and my mother to Mars to become new Adam and Eve, to begin again on different planet. He was certain this was their fate. My mother tried to talk with him, the engineers talk to him, even Khrushchev stopped by to tell him some words before complete crisis. But the man would not stop raving, and he was looking at my mother like some beast, and so she took a can opener and she sticked him somewhere, maybe throat, she would not tell tsentr, SSP, but they heard the man choking on blood, and so they guessed. After this, my mother spoke of the things she could see. She asked why so many things in whole universe were circles. Planets and stardust and atoms and asteroids. A softness to so many things. Then she choked to death. They recorded it on manuscripts. She choked so far away from Mars, still so close to Earth. Do you know how they wrote this? For this man she killed, he choked as this: kchakchakchachchchchch, and so on. Sudden bursts, like heartbeats, you know. But my mother, hers was more slow: eghougheghougheghough. They really paid attention to how many times she did this. Of course, her ship crashed, or perhaps it is still out in universe somewhere, who knows. And that was phantom mission number two.”

“But here you are. An astronaut.”

“I haven’t had to kill a man. Not yet.”

“You think of her often.”

“I think about what made her go, and what made me go. I decide this brand of madness must be in the blood. Do you ask? I bet what brings you to the sky was same duty as your father’s: that final—no, that terminal decision to serve. I find comforting there. The idea of being, I don’t know, like there is no choice, you have to be a certain person, the instinct put into DNA. It seems honest.”

I imagined Klara’s mother, the two of them perfect look-alikes, and her wonder at her crewmate’s blood spilling out like soap bubbles. The first murder of the cosmos. Perhaps she killed the man and then anticipated redemption on Mars. An alien creature assuring her, “You did what had to be done.”

Wasn’t all life a form of phantom being, given its involuntary origin in the womb? No one could guarantee a happy life, a safe life, a life free of violations, external or eternal. Yet we exited birth canals at unsustainable speeds, eager to live, floating away to Mars at the mercy of Spartan technology or living simpler lives on Earth at the mercy of chance. We lived regardless of who observed us, who recorded us, who cared where we went.

“It is hot,” I told Klara.

“Yes.”

Quietly, we ate.

DURING THE LAST MONTH of our journey, the crew of NashaSlava1 blessed me with magnificent meals. It turned out that the spaghetti I had initially been fed during my illness was the worst food on board, something they were willing to waste on a potentially dying man. Now that it was clear I would live, they brought different meals every day. General Tso’s chicken, borscht, beef stroganoff topped with sour cream, tiramisu, and bacon—that glorious memento of Lenka. These were all microwaved meals, but to a man starved down to nearly two-thirds of his original size, it didn’t matter.

Klara explained that these meals were meant as weekly treats for the crew, small interruptions to their otherwise impeccably healthy diets. Since the food reserves were too plentiful for three people and Vasily refused to eat any of the cheat meals, Klara and Yuraj had decided to make the remainder of the mission a celebration of gluttony, and had challenged themselves to empty the reserves as we reached Earth. I was happy to help, so happy that the constant pain of an infected tooth crippling half my face presented no challenge to my newfound appetite—for the food, for the Japanese tea, for the bottles of American bourbon, of Russian vodka, of Japanese beer. I spent the week eating, breathing, and looking out the observation window, making a list of everything I wanted from life. Of everything I felt I was owed.

I wanted to see the hairy belly of my friend one last time, a legless corpse.

I wanted to see God touch the universe, reach his hand through the black curtain and shake the strings on which the planets loom. A proof.

I wanted to witness giant cosmic lovers, two larger-than-life figures holding hands, picnicking on the surface of Mars, in love with craters and barren landscapes. They were so made for each other that they looked exactly alike, their sexes blurred out, indistinct.

I wanted to see Earth crack at its core, split into shards, and confirm my theory—that it is simply too fragile to earn its keep. A proof.

I wanted to see the dead bodies of all phantom astronauts. To bring them back to Earth and keep them embalmed in glass cases inside Lenin’s mausoleum.

I wanted Valkyries to soar through dimensions and caress the dead souls of African orphans. I wanted all the mythical beasts the human mind has created to pile on top of one another and fuck and give birth to a hybrid so perverse it would unite us all. I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters? I wanted cosmic dust to gather around clay nests with the aggression of hornets, to breed and evolve and merge and form its own planet occupied by its own humanlike figures driving their own carlike cars. Perhaps if such a world of gray shadows existed—a reflection, a mimicry of the entire human experiment—we could finally watch and learn. A proof.

I wanted someone to tell me they know what they’re doing. I wanted someone to claim authority. I wanted to leap into the Vltava and taste its toxicity, to recognize that somewhere along the slush of runoff there was real water. I wanted to live on both sides. I wanted to touch every cube brick on France’s roads. I wanted to drink English tea without milk. I wanted to enter the filthiest American diner in the dustiest city and order a burger and a milk shake. The way the word rolls off the tongue—buRrRgeRrR. I wanted to lose myself among the suits of New York City and feel cocaine residue on toilet seats. I wanted to hang off the edge of a whale skeleton. I wanted proof of the chaos. I wanted it so badly I didn’t want it at all. I wanted what every human wants. For someone to tell me what to choose.

Yes, Lenka was right. I would return as a changed man, she would return as a changed woman. Some parts switched out, our casings the same. Who said these two brand-new humans couldn’t love each other?

TWO WEEKS BEFORE the landing, I decided. It was time to discover Vasily. I had avoided him to forget my grief for Hanuš, but I needed to hear about his visions while we were still trapped in the same quarters together. Vasily had abandoned his sleeping chamber, they told me, and had set himself up in one of the ship’s three laboratories. Klara no longer visited him; Yuraj made a visit every two days, officially to deliver snacks and mission updates, and unofficially (he’d say in a smiling whisper) to ensure that the “cookie fawk” was still alive. For the past few days, I had been monitoring Klara’s and Yuraj’s movements, looking for the small but certain overlap in their sleeping habits.

Finally, I had found it. During their nap time I slipped out of my cabin and made my way past their chambers and into the lab corridor, where the Russians (I guessed) studied the cosmic effects on bacteria, and how these mutations could be used in biological warfare. (Whether this was exaggerated Cold War paranoia, understandable distrust of the occupier, or a simple acceptance of the real world, I couldn’t be sure. After all, what would my country have done with the Chopra samples? Look for any way to get ahead in the race of nations, or at least sell them to the highest bidder, the most convenient ally, before the spies of the world descended upon Prague’s streets to find out for themselves?) I arrived at the last laboratory door, delighted at the comforts of floating freely in Yuraj’s sweatpants, which slid off my hips regularly but which I was grateful for nonetheless. Finding the observation window covered and the access panel to the lab smashed, I knocked.

“Ostavit’ yego tam,” the man inside hollered.

“What?” I said.

“You are not Yuraj,” he said in English.

“No. But you are Vasily?”

“Are you him? The dead man?”

I did not respond.

Several anxious minutes passed. I looked toward the entry corridor. Silent, but soon I could be discovered.

At last the door slid open. Behind it was a greased blob of a man, stuffed inside a white tank top and a pair of briefs. His hair had been reduced to a sweat-soaked pierogi at the center of his skull. In his left hand, he held a rigged remote for the door. Bare wires extended from the small box of the control panel to his side. His right hand was wrapped from the tips of his fingers all the way to his shoulder with gauze. His teeth were gray.

He nodded, as if knowing that I could not speak to him until gandering at the sty he had made out of a state-of-the-art research facility. Filthy underwear, microscope lenses, empty ration packets, pencil caps, crumpled pieces of paper, and individual potato chips floated around the room in an odd hoarder ballet, like an art show one might see at the National Museum as yet another condemnation of materialism. An unidentifiable yellow substance stained the lab chair, and the lab computer had been split in two with a hard steel pipe. At first, I thought that the walls were covered in twisted wires, but a closer inspection revealed countless pieces of paper with drawings. Every single one of them offered the same subject. A mess of dark shadows connected in a semicircular shape. From these black clouds erupted words written in an insidiously red Cyrillic.

The man, Vasily, uncrossed his arms. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly.

“I do. You’ve heard him.”

His eyes widened. He grabbed me by the neckline of my shirt, his breath sour upon my chin. “You are the prophet, then,” he said, “you. It could have been me, but do you know what I did when the god visited me? I thought it was a demon. I closed my eyes and I prayed him away. I haven’t been to the church since my grandmother died, yet there I was, my eyes closed for hours, and I begged for the god to be gone. Finally, he listened.”

Vasily’s English was nearly impeccable, only a slight hint of an accent. His bottom lip trembled. He picked at the gauze on his arm, tearing off small pieces and rolling them into balls before putting them on his tongue.

“You saw,” I said.

“I did not see. Only heard. Heard a voice from the corners.”

“And the voice told you of me.”

“He told me to wait for you. The prophet.” Vasily caught a potato chip and offered it. I shook my head. With visible disappointment, he returned it to its orbit, then strapped himself into the stained chair. I noticed that the microscope lenses were shattered, and braced myself for the possible glass particles swirling around, waiting to be inhaled.

“One must be lower than the prophet when the prophet is addressed,” Vasily said. “The god returned to me again, yes, a few hours before we found you. He said I would not hear him again, no, but he would send a son in his name, and that is you! And he said we must rescue the son. I told Klara we must wait a few more minutes before leaving. We plucked you up, hmm, right before you perished…”

In front of me, then, sat a man who may have truly also known Hanuš, however briefly, the final proof I sought since I met him so long ago. I became immediately impatient with Vasily’s tics, his muddled speech.

“He must have told you things about me, then. My name, who I am.”

“Hmm, da. He did. Did I do good, prophet? I could have been you, you know. But I proved myself not worthy. At least I believe. You believe that I believe, prophet? I will spill blood, if need be.”

From the depths of his sweatpants pockets Vasily produced a screwdriver and set it upon his neck. I stroked forward, seizing his wrist just as the tip broke the skin. I took the screwdriver out of Vasily’s hand as he observed the tiny spheres of his own blood with childish delight. He poked at them with his finger.

“I need you to tell me everything the god told you about me, Vasily. So I’ll know you are truly an apostle.”

“Oh, prophet,” Vasily said, “you are testing me. I haven’t been told of your origins, because I am too lowly to know. I only have my mission. I will deliver you to Earth. And I will tell you the last words the god asked me to pass on to you.” Vasily grinned, and now his fingers fully unraveled the gauze on his other hand and wrist, displaying a multitude of deep, infected cuts, wounds that would surely cost Vasily his arm.

I decided. Vasily and others like him were the reason Hanuš could never come to Earth. They couldn’t cope with a vastness that was so outside their established knowledge of existence, even if they had seen Space up close. They would project their desperations, fears, and looming insanities onto types of intelligence incomprehensible to them. I had done so too, after all, when I nearly plunged a blade into Hanuš to satisfy my cult of the scientific method, hoped that somewhere within rested an answer to my unrest. I was ashamed.

The thought of hearing Hanuš’s words to Vasily exhausted me and thrilled me at the same time. I took a few breaths to avoid impatience with the ill man.

“The god’s message,” Vasily said. “The prophet must not submit his spirit. He will find happiness in silence, seeking freedom, prayer, and he will know, know more than any other human, or any other… oh, now I am confusing words… the answer is in heaven.”

Vasily looked around with panic, stuck his hands in his pockets, and from the ugly, twisted grimace on his face, I deduced he was looking for another weapon to hurt himself with. I asked him to keep his arms down. Hanuš would never have spoken of prayers, of prophets, certainly not of heaven. The hint of kinship I had felt with Vasily left me. He was a madman. I was not. I couldn’t be.

I felt anger toward this man. He had been given a mission the same as me, and he had failed to retain his sanity, despite the luxuries of his ship and the benefit of other human company.

Or had I once been close to becoming Vasily? Had Hanuš saved me from this exact madness? Suddenly, mercy seemed necessary.

“Apostle,” I said to Vasily, “you’ve done perfectly. You passed the test.”

Vasily sobbed like a small boy, his hand on mine. “Now I get to go home,” he said. “Take me from here now. It is too quiet. I miss the hum of mosquitoes above the lake.”

I was glad. He didn’t know Hanuš, I was the only human who’d ever truly know this cosmic secret. I did not want to share it.

He unstrapped himself and pushed me aside, leaping toward his sketch collection, and ripped off the page closest to him. He opened his mouth wide, crumpled the paper, and stuffed it inside. He chewed, swallowed, and stuck out his tongue to show me there was nothing left. He picked up the next page and did the same, occasionally murmuring, “It should have been me, the prophet.”

Klara appeared in the door, just as Vasily consumed his last sketch. “You are bleeding,” she said.

“A nonbeliever may not enter the shrine!” Vasily yelled, shooing Klara away with his hands. She gestured for me to follow. As I floated toward her, Vasily grabbed at my hand and kissed my knuckles, my fingertips, and I was too sick to speak, to look at the beastly grimace on the apostle’s face. We exited his lair, the door slamming behind us. Klara crossed her arms.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t—”

“I told you the man was not well,” she said sternly.

“I had to hear about the—”

“His monsters? No, Jakub. You will stay inside your room from now. You never exit, only to use bathroom with permission. And if I find you out again, I will strap you to the wall and I will let you starve until Earth. Yes?”

I returned to my holding room. Vasily’s words crawled through my ears, spun around the cranium. No, he couldn’t have known Hanuš. Or did Hanuš appear and speak to Vasily, the former church boy, in a language he knew would have a real effect on a God-fearing man? I didn’t want to believe it. Hanuš was mine.

FOR THE FIRST TIME since I boarded NashaSlava1, I could not rest. Klara came to me ten days before our estimated arrival on Earth. She said she had some things to tell me. First, she had sent a message to tsentr after seeing on her own the horrific state of Vasily’s body and living quarters. She received a message back that Vasily was to be left alone unless he posed immediate danger to the crew or the ship. He was part of a separate mission ordered by the interior to study the effects of spaceflight on certain mental health issues.

I asked Klara why she would tell me this.

“Because I am tired of despicable men who rule empires,” she said, “and because as soon as I return to Earth, I will move West and never think of this again. And because of the last thing I have to tell you. A friend of mine from tsentral told me what they will do with you. She said you will go to Zal Ozhidaniya. It is a place for special political prisoner, people who used to be spies, those sorts. And I feel responsible for this. Jakub, I want you to know, I have to bring you, I have to give you to them, but we are friends, still. I trust you. I want you to know this before they take you away. I would do something if I could, I swear.”

“Will you kiss me on the cheek?” I said.

“Jakub.”

“It doesn’t mean anything. I just have not felt it in so long. I want to remember it.”

Klara kissed my cheek, right next to my lips, and for a moment the dread of her revelation didn’t matter. I asked her to leave before the elation expired.

I SPENT THOSE last two weeks on the ship hiding from the Russians, staying in my cabin and asking Klara to leave me alone. She said she understood. I pondered what life in a luxury political prison was like, how I would bear never seeing my country or Lenka again. The things I might have to do to free myself. Before we initiated the approach protocols inside the landing chamber, Yuraj wanted to strap me down, but Klara convinced him not to. She repeated that I could be trusted.

The universe deceives us with its peace. This is not a poetic abstraction or an attempt at twopenny wisdom—it is a physical fact. The four layers of Earth’s atmosphere rest in their respective places like a four-headed Cerberus, guarding our precious skins from the solar poison thrown in our direction every second of each day. They are stoic guardians, as invisible as they are unappreciated by everyday thought.

As we prepared for reentry, I sat next to Vasily, who filled out a crossword on his tablet and paid no mind to our shuttle burning swiftly toward Earth. Klara and Yuraj sat in the front and handled the controls while speaking cheerfully in Russian to their mission command. As the shuttle flipped onto its belly, I looked out the deck window to see for the last time what we officially classify as outer space: the final frontier until a new frontier beyond it is discovered. It stared back, as always, with its insistent flickering, emptiness, lack of understanding for me or the necessity of my being.

We burned at a temperature of 1649 degrees Celsius, pushed through the mesosphere, the graveyard of dead stars and Earth’s shield against rogue meteors, with the nose of the shuttle angled up. The air was too slow to clear our path in time and thus eased our fall. With the engines disabled the ship was now more of a sophisticated hang glider, using Earth’s physics to slice through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. Deep below us, somewhere in Moscow, or perhaps in the surrounding towns, a handful of people were bound to hear the sonic boom, two claps less than a second apart, the drumroll announcing our return. They would dismiss it as construction noise and move on with their day, placated by the silence of their media stations, their government. The pronounced S momentarily disrupting their skyline view—the unavoidable signature of the phantom astronauts—would be simply another weather anomaly ignored during a workday.

For 130 kilometers, we fell. The mesosphere—the protector. The stratosphere—eerie, calm, stable, and dry, the place without climate. A purgatory, occupying the properties of Space and yet a part of Earth. A deceptive non-world, a no-man’s-land between the trenches. Then the troposphere, the last line of defense, from the Greek tropos, signifying change. The keeper of the world’s water vapors and aerosols, a place of chaos, rising pressures, weather patterns. Perfect as the layer closest to human contact. Humanity summarized in a single sphere.

The Earth rested. There was no sign of the billions of volatile souls thrumming on its surface. We were so close to its oceans, its continents that contained the country that contained the city that contained the hospital in which I had entered this world, nude and small. The hospital now torn down and replaced by the offices of a snack machine manufacturer. Would I ever get to visit the place again, see the patch of dirt on which I had come to be?

The vision of my future life entered around my spine and made its way through the lower intestine, abdomen, lungs, and throat. Like a shot of bourbon traveling backwards. A Russian hostage, a man reduced to a state secret. And if I were, eventually, to return to my own country, what kind of life would await me? Dissected, intruded upon, loud. No peace in sight, no peace at all to continue my serene life with Lenka. I made eye contact with Vasily. He knew.

I couldn’t accept it. If I made it back to Earth, I had to be a free man. It had all been taken away. Personhood, physical health, perhaps my sanity. I didn’t know what happened to my wife. No further infringements would happen, at least not with my permission. Vasily’s god had advised me. I wouldn’t be a subject to Russian whims.

I unstrapped myself and jumped at the controls, shoved away Klara’s arms, and activated one of the ship’s engines. NashaSlava1 turned and leaped, like a gazelle with a thigh torn to pieces by predatory teeth. I fell backwards onto the ceiling. Klara shouted, Yuraj unstrapped himself and dropped onto me, then wrapped his forearm and elbow around my neck with staggering efficiency, bound not just to pacify me but to kill me, grunting with frustration pent up during these months of isolation. I flailed my arms; life had begun to leave me, when suddenly more weight landed upon us. All I could see was torn gauze and Vasily’s fists beating at the back of Yuraj’s head.

“…avariya posadka, ya povtoryayu…” Klara shouted into her microphone, and I wanted to shout in turn, I’m sorry, but how did you expect me to sit and wait?

Blood poured into my eye and I was no longer weighed down. Yuraj had released me, and off to my right he screamed and pawed at his neck as Vasily spit out a piece of skin and meat. He had struck a major artery, and Yuraj’s blood was pouring out heavily.

“The prophet will live,” Vasily said. “I am the apostle.”

The body must not be violated! I wanted to shout at Vasily, but it was too late. I had done this. It had to be finished.

The ship flipped back onto its belly, and Vasily and I crashed into the seats. Something cracked within Vasily’s body, but he made no verbal indication of pain. Yuraj, barely breathing, was bleeding to death.

Klara looked back while holding the yoke with both hands, veins cutting through her forearm muscles as she tried to steady it. “Jakub,” she said, as though she didn’t know to whom the name belonged. She had gotten to know and trust a fellow phantom but she couldn’t have guessed how much I wanted to come back home. I longed for the moment we had first sat over a meal together, the way I’d studied the sweat drops on her body and the way she’d pretended to ignore it. When we had thought only the best of each other.

Again I leaped toward the controls, beat at the keys, the screen, the panels, with my fists and cheeks and elbows. Klara dug her fingernails into any exposed piece of flesh she could reach, but she refused to unstrap herself, this genetically determined phantom astronaut trained for mission in the womb, and so I had a free rein. Once again NashaSlava1 spun around, and again, and through the glass whirled those green fields of Russia, towns separated by hundreds of square miles of agriculture and nothingness.

Klara’s fingers found their way into my mouth and she grabbed my tongue, eager to rip it out.

Vasily slapped her hand away from behind, his bloody teeth ready to strike again, and I shouted, “No, apostle, enough!”

He retreated back to appraise Yuraj, who was pale and barely moving. Vasily caressed Yuraj’s cheeks, whispering, “You too could have heard the god.”

I screamed at Klara to slow us down, pouring forth apologies and pleas and epithets. Earth’s surface was so close now that we would collide at high speed, surely killing us all. I recognized the shimmering blues of water, even as I felt Klara’s knuckles upon my back and forehead and eyes. She had finally unstrapped herself and was now unleashing her fury, perhaps in an effort to kill me before the landing killed us all. We collided.

The ship crashed into the water and the window glass exploded, its particles biting into my exposed face before the onrush of water washed them away. My body was at the mercy of Earth’s elements now, much more savage than the calculating hostility of Space. The stream threw me against the cabin door, and Vasily landed on me, grasping at my arms as the entire cabin flooded and the water separated us. I swam toward the window, toward life, then gestured at Vasily to follow. I gave Yuraj, pale and unconscious and possibly dead, a final acknowledging look, and grabbed Klara’s arm to haul her up. She clawed at me and bit my hand, bubbles escaping her nostrils, and I noticed that her arm was trapped underneath the seat, which had been slammed against the wall by the pressure of the water. Her elbow was oddly twisted, surely dislocated, perhaps broken, but Klara gave no sign of pain. Her eyes—deadly, determined—were focused on mine. She was doing her best to kill me with her one free hand and her teeth. I could not last much longer. I let go of her and searched for Vasily, who floated above Yuraj’s corpse, grinning from ear to ear, his apostle mission fulfilled. No, he was not coming, and perhaps it was better. A broken man had a right to leave this world. I too had made that decision once.

Again I tugged at Klara’s arm, and she sank her teeth so deeply into my thumb I thought she would rip it off. I could feel her teeth breaking. I pulled back, freed my bleeding flesh, and swam out of the observation window, swam upwards along the capsizing body of a ship that had saved me. NashaSlava1, the pride of the Russian people, though the Russian people weren’t aware of its existence—a phantom looming above their heads, protecting them from enemies, delivering scientific glory and advanced warfare. A cumbrous blend of metals designed to enhance humanity with an inflated sense of importance, wisdom, and progress, but now subject to Earth’s judgment, as we all were, and drowning like a bag of unwanted felines.

When I emerged, I threw my arms about, swam so quickly I thought my veins were going to pop open and bleed dry. I reached land, dragged myself onto the shore, spit and coughed, grabbed at the cold moist dirt under me, and I remembered—Earth. I licked the mud. I kissed it, cackled, emitted sounds that terrified me, sounds of pleasure that went beyond my comprehension, the pleasure of insanity. At last the pain of the winter around me overcame the initial adrenaline, and Russia’s frost bit into the skin underneath my soaked clothes. I rubbed my body in the dirt, now fully understanding why Louda the pig considered mud digging the highest form of living. The friction warmed me and I bit at the chunks of mud as if it were cake. It tasted of roots, compost, vegetable skins. I spit it back out. Behind me the lake that had welcomed me home expanded across a wide plain until it met a brown forest covering the horizon.

The broken surface of the icy lake gargled as the ship was digested along with the bodies and the samples of cloud Chopra, which now seemed a banal prize of the mission. I wished to sit and wait for Klara, Vasily, and Yuraj to emerge, healthy and well, before running around the frozen grassland and making my way through the woods. But the response team would swarm the lake any minute now, and I could no longer be subject to larger schemes, concepts, countries. I ran and I spit out leftovers of mud and I wept, wept for Klara, my savior, for her thirst to claw the life out of me. I expected at any moment the sound of helicopters, German shepherds, sirens speeding along the plains, chasing me down to throw me into a Saint Petersburg catacomb for torture and starvation. But there were no rotors, no barks. I reached the forest to the sinister silence of nature.

By nightfall, I had reached a village. I could not understand anyone’s words, but they took me in, bathed me with water heated over a fire, clothed me, and put me into a reasonably soft bed. Spasibo, I kept saying, spasibo, calmly and generously, hoping this would prevent the villagers from thinking I was insane.

Outside, the night sky glowed with purple. Chopra was still alive, still tantalizing, but I would never again reach it. I longed for the black skies of old.

I woke in the middle of the night, held down by strong hands, with the taste of rusty metal in my mouth. I could not close it, or bite down. A pair of pliers shimmered in the dark. The pincer clamped firmly on my tooth and out it came, the blood pouring into my throat as this kind, crude dentistry was completed. The brown, puss-filled bastard was set next to my face like a trophy. I screamed, choking on the mixture of blood and liquor applied to my wound.

The next morning, I found a couple of men who spoke English. They were traveling to Estonia with sensitive cargo, they said. They could take me along if I promised to help guard their livelihood. I agreed.

The journey was rigidly scheduled, allowing for no breaks. We pissed into a bucket nailed down in a corner of the truck’s cargo space. When Russian soldiers stopped us looking for a “dangerous fugitive,” I hid under blankets and behind a mountain of Spam and bean cans containing twenty kilos of heroin. The driver gave the Russian lieutenant half a kilo of heroin for his trouble and oversight. We continued on.

Across the border, in Estonia, I shook hands with my accomplices. We were brothers now.

“I owe you,” I said.

“No need,” they said, “no need.”

In Estonia, I jumped a freight train and rode to the coastal city of Pärnu. When night watchmen discovered me, I ran from the dogs snapping at my heels. With a painful bite on my unscarred calf, I entered the port and roamed from ship to ship, asking the sailors for a job, any job, which would take me closer to home. On my sixth attempt, a gangly Pole laughed wheezily and advised me that the captain was looking for someone to clean the bathrooms. The captain was a very clean man, he said. He couldn’t stand the crew’s crimes upon the ship’s facilities, and would accept anyone willing to keep them presentable.

For weeks, I spent my days running among the three bathrooms, scrubbing each seat, each bowl. I bleached them and scrubbed them with such dedication I sometimes wished to lick them to prove my diligence, my commitment to the cause. I replaced soap and I provided oversized rolls of rough toilet paper. Some nights, the sailors got too drunk during their card games and their liquids and solids missed the bowls by miles. These were my emergency calls, apologetic voices waking me from uneasy sleep. I welcomed them. I had a purpose here. A simple one.

When we arrived in Poland, the gangly Pole offered to pay for my train ticket if I would keep him company until we reached Kraków. He spoke of his mother, who would welcome him with homemade smoked pork and garlic potatoes. He in turn would greet her with a surprise belated birthday gift he had saved up for with his wages—a new mattress and a certificate for weekly massages for her bad back. That’s all he’d ever wanted to do, he said. Make enough money to ease his mother’s life.

When he asked about my family, I asked if we could play some cards. He understood.

That night in Kraków, I flagged down a man with a pox-scarred face. He smelled of smoke and cheese puffs, but he was fond of reading philosophy and had published some poetry.

“It inspires you, the road,” he said. “In life, you should travel as far as you possibly can, get away from everything you were ever taught. What do you think?” And he coughed, the same smoker’s roar as my grandfather.

“What if everything you love is right where you are?” I asked.

“Then you find new things to love. A happy person must be a nomad.”

“You haven’t loved, then,” I countered. “If what you love gets away from you, in the end you are only walking in a labyrinth with no exits.”

Within six hours, we had arrived in Prague. The man offered no parting words, but he gave me the gift of intoxication. I drank his Staropramen. The sun rose. I tipped the bottle three times, splashing brew upon the ground. An offer for the dead.

I walked into a phone booth and searched for Petr’s name in the book chained to a broken telephone. That Petr resided in Zličín was the one personal detail I knew about him. Thankfully he was the only Petr Koukal in the city. I walked.

A tall brunette with a Ukrainian accent and gauged ears opened the door of a small but beautiful house. She told me that her husband was at the pub, of course. So Petr had a wife. I smiled at the long-awaited pleasure of resolving one of his mysteries. He knew what Lenka meant to me, after all.

I found him playing Mariáš with a group of old-timers, all of them collecting empty shot glasses and pints around the mess of cards. His beard was overgrown and resembled a rusted wire brush. He’d gotten a few more tattoos, and there was a hole in his T-shirt around the armpit.

When he saw me, he dropped his cards and tilted his head sideways. I quietly counted and at around the twelfth second he pointed at me and said to his Mariáš foes, “That man. Is he there?”

The men looked at me, then at Petr. He extinguished his cigarette and stumbled backwards as he stood. The men reached out to support him, but he waved them away. They groaned and grabbed at him, asking him to keep playing, but Petr no longer saw them. He put his arm around my shoulders carefully, as if expecting his hand to pass through me.

“This guy?” a toothless man said as he nudged me with his elbow.

In the silence, the man sized me up, as if now in doubt himself. He wiped the beer foam from his whiskers.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I’ll say he’s there.”

No Penelope

THE STORY I GAVE Petr took the length of four pints of pilsner.

“You know when you wake up,” he said, “and the second before opening your eyes you think you’re somewhere else? In an old childhood bedroom, or inside a camp tent. And then you look around, and for a moment you don’t remember which life you’re living.”

“That’s very poetic for an engineer.”

“Jakub. That’s your voice.”

“You recognized me. No one else seems to. I don’t recognize myself.”

“I’ve been seeing you everywhere. You can’t be here. I must be hallucinating. Dreaming, maybe. But it’s nice. It’s nice to be with you again.”

I did not mention Hanuš, my encounter with the core, how I had landed and found my way home. I told him that I had stepped into the vacuum to die honorably on the frontier and that a crew of Russian phantoms had saved me as I choked. He intuited that I was omitting things but understood he had no right to ask. By the time we returned to his house, his wife had gone to work. Petr told me he had retired early and was now making a record with his heavy metal band while his severance from the SPCR and his wife’s work paid the bills. In the bathroom I shaved my neck and trimmed my beard, careful not to touch the spot where the infected wound of my former tooth rested on the side of my cheek. When I emerged and walked into the living room, I saw no reason to wait any longer. I asked about Lenka.

“Another beer?” he asked.

“No, thanks. Where is she now?”

Petr sat down and pulled a joint from underneath the couch cushion. He lit it with a burning candle. “I’m not sure if you’re ready.”

I slapped the cannabis out of his hand. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I have something you need to hear. Don’t ask about Lenka until you do.”

I nodded, and Petr walked away. The joint was burning a hole in the carpet. I considered letting it turn into a full flame. I extinguished it with my shoe.

When Petr came back, he was holding a silver USB drive and a stack of disconnected pages. He handed them over.

“Listen to this. Then read the manuscript. I found these when I was clearing out the offices. Kuřák held sessions with Lenka. She needed someone to talk to, and didn’t want you to know. Maybe these will have what you need.”

I held the drive between my fingertips. It was light, too light for what it held. The manuscript pages were supposedly an early draft of Dr. Kuřák’s biography of Jakub Procházka. So the man would make his fame as planned. Petr gestured me into a den, where a laptop rested next to a guitar and a piano.

“Have you listened to this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Petr said. “I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. Take your time.”

Four hours’ worth of sound files. As I listened through earphones, Petr brought me a glass of water and a bowl of ramen soup. He touched my shoulder as if I might disappear, then lingered in the doorway. I heard him strum an acoustic in the next room. Outside, the sun was setting.

After these four hours, I ejected the USB drive. I walked into the bathroom and washed my face, ran my fingers through the wiry, curled hairs of my beard, the dry skin underneath. My eye sockets seemed hollow, detached from their mooring, as if my eyes were eager to retract and hide inside my skull. My lips were the color of vegetable oil, chapping in the middle. I had come too close to death ever to look young again. But there was something about the way my cheekbones protruded, creating lines I hadn’t seen before. There was something about their color, how the faded sunburn from my spacewalk had left behind a healthy hint of brown, which seemed somehow fitting on my otherwise pale skin. Whatever form I now occupied, I could grow to like it. I threw the flash drive in the toilet and I flushed.

“I’m so sorry,” Petr said. “I deserve the punishment, we failed you, we failed the mission, but I still have to ask that maybe you don’t bring the whole story to the media.”

“Petr,” I said, “don’t you understand? I don’t care. I just want my old life back.”

THAT EVENING, after I had listened to Lenka tell her truths to Dr. Kuřák, I determined that I must stay dead, hidden from the shocked, warm embrace of a nation that had built me statues and would surely smother me with cries of miracles. I had died for the country. They had no right to ask me for a resurrection. I discussed this with Petr until I unwittingly slipped out of consciousness. The next morning, I woke up with a pillow underneath my head. Petr and his wife, Linda, stood over me with mugs of coffee and a plan. It was clear that Linda now understood the identity of her guest, and that the plan was a team effort born of their sleepless night.

Petr insisted that my body was devastated by zero gravity and in need of healing. He noted my swollen cheek, the result of my crudely extracted tooth. He noted my blocked sinuses and my slight limp. He explained that approximately 12 percent of my bone mass had vanished due to spaceflight osteopenia and that without therapy, I was looking at a lifetime of excruciating knee pain. Stomachaches, gas, gums swollen with gingivitis. I imagined those emaciated bones carrying my pounds of organs, flesh, and skin like an overloaded mule climbing a mountain.

And so they convinced me. I would spend three weeks in Carlsbad, Bohemia’s famous town of healing, dip myself into the hot springs, and drink mineral water. I would lift weights to rebuild bone density, wearing Petr’s borrowed gray sweat clothes, whose elastic band had worn thin from an indeterminable amount of time holding in his girth. I would also submit to the dentist’s tools to rid me of infection, and I would let Petr drive over once a week and provide me with physical examinations. Petr assured me that no one was going to recognize me. It was because people don’t think of dead men as physical bodies, he said, but glorified concepts. Aside from that, I knew that no man, woman, or child could confuse my transformed cheekbones and sagging eyes with the fresh-faced hero of posters and television screens. After these three weeks, Petr promised, he would take me to Lenka himself, if that was what I wanted.

When he dropped me off, Petr handed me a bag with eighty thousand crowns in it. Part of his severance package from the SPCR. I did not think about rejecting it for a single second. I was owed.

DURING HIS RULE in the fourteenth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV blew off steam after a day’s work by hunting on horseback around the Ore Mountains. One day, his pack discovered a hot spring flowing from the earth, a miracle sent by God to heal the emperor’s injured leg. Charles IV experienced instant relief after dipping his majestic limb into the spring, and declared that it possessed divine healing powers. He granted city privileges to the settlements surrounding the springs and this new town was named Carlsbad, after its beloved founder. As the town grew, renowned physicians from around the world published papers about the effects of the spring, and by the nineteenth century, Carlsbad had seen the likes of Mozart, Gogol, and Freud. To build a proper social playground for these celebrities, architectural behemoths in the style of art nouveau were constructed around Carlsbad’s trees and fountains, turning the town into a man-made Eden if ever there was one. Colonnades, hot springs, parks named after rulers and composers, buildings with curves and edges so delicate only the devil himself could have carved them. And silence. The silence of serenity, the silence of human beings too content to speak.

My room in Carlsbad wasn’t much bigger than the lounge area of JanHus1. By all standards, it was sufficient for a dead man. Its rough gray carpet itched my feet and there was a chair that smelled of chlorine and a table that creaked constantly for no apparent reason. The bed was magnificent just as fresh food was magnificent, just as humans walking around without a care were magnificent, their sheer existence a wonder for my starved senses. I ate all of my meals in this bed and shook the crumbs from the sheet out of the window before smoking a cigarette. Yes, since the pox-scarred driver had given me one of his menthols, I had taken up smoking. I hated the smell of cigarettes, the taste, even the smoke I found aesthetically overrated, but I chain-smoked regardless in an effort to form a habit, to build a structure for my lonely days. I woke at nine in the morning sharp with a prebreakfast nicotine craving and I smoked my last stick around midnight, right after ingesting sleeping pills. Tobacco was a timekeeper, the tuner of my biological clock. A friend.

Every morning at ten, I had my physical therapy. A kind-eyed woman named Valerie helped me submerge in a blue tub filled with hot mineral water. During our first session, she asked me where I came from, whether I was married. Prague, I said. I didn’t answer the second question. She got the implication of my brief answers and began talking about herself instead. Her father used to work in a factory that manufactured weapons for the Nazis. Near the end of the war, he and a few other workers decided to sabotage the guns—to damage magazine springs so the ammo wouldn’t feed, or to pack the ammo with too much powder in order to cause explosions and the loss of fingers. The inspector, a German, was a drunk, always loaded on slivovitz during his shifts, and it was easy to distract him enough for the weapons to pass through undetected. By the time these weapons were put into circulation, the Germans were retreating, and Valerie’s father never found out whether his rebellion had much of an effect. But he would walk around town for the rest of his life, chest puffed out, receiving free beer in exchange for his story of great sabotage, cutting those magazine springs with pliers, slicing his hands, bleeding with pride over those fascist tools of murder.

“My father never did anything else after that,” Valerie said. “Mostly, he became a drunk. But a man only needs one thing to be proud of. It will carry him through the rest of his life.”

Once, she ran her hand over the burn scar on my calf. She asked how it had happened.

“My father is responsible,” I said.

“Hmm,” she answered.

DURING THE SECOND WEEK of my stay in Carlsbad, Petr took me to a dentist’s office. A woman wearing a white mask set a tube over my mouth. The gas was dense and sweet, like kettle corn in Wenceslas Square during a hot summer. I didn’t feel the tools scraping the rot away. I woke up expecting pain, but all I could feel was a gap, another piece of my body gone. “It’s done,” the woman reassured me. I consumed a pill the size of a locust.

Back in my room, I woke to a strange scratching coming from the air-conditioning vent. It began with hesitance, a creature feeling its way around a new environment. After a few minutes, the scratching gained a rhythm—shka shka shkashka shka shkashka—the rhythm of work that some small rodent figured would bring it to freedom. Consistency. Work without interruption, work with intensity. Surely, working at a steady peace, without breaks, the creature could reach its goal. I listened to my companion, refusing to take away its dignity by opening the vent. It took twenty minutes for the rhythm to reach its climax—shkakakakashkakakakashkakakaka, now with true desperation, as the rodent beat at the world to convince it of its worth, not a plea but a demand: Hear me! Let me out! I am here! I decided it was time for relief for the both of us, and when I stood up I saw a small brown nose peeking through the bars, two black eyes fixed on mine. I unscrewed the cover with a coin. When I opened it, a small tail was peeking from a dark corner deep in the shaft. It was hiding from me. It would not be rescued. I tried to reach the tail without any luck. I sat on my bed with the vent uncovered for an hour, waiting for my new friend to come out. It didn’t. I put the cover back on, and while I was fastening the last screw, the nose appeared again, followed by the laborious scratching. Work will save me. Diligent, patient, never-ending. It must.

I put a coat on and walked outside.

A yellow hue spilling from the windows of a hotel facing the Smetana Park spread across the last bits of dried, frozen oak leaves paving the road. The fountain ahead glowed red, which made the statue of a nude woman pouring water from a vase seem mischievous, in cahoots with the devil. I removed my shoes and stepped into the grass, then leaned on the fountain and massaged my right knee, observing the lightless sky, which an upcoming storm appeared to have coated in tar, masking even the effect of Chopra. I was grateful for the darkness. Stars didn’t seem the same anymore—to me they did not invite fantasies, did not symbolize aspiration, did not arouse curiosity. They were dead images of things for which I had no use.

Inside the fountain, a black, sleek thing splashed around. It seemed too large to be a snake or a cat. The red lights dimmed. I looked closer, reached toward the swimmer, and then he rose, lifted himself on eight bamboo legs and extended a pair of human lips toward the naked woman’s vase, lapping up the cascading water without giving me a single glance with his many eyes.

“Hanuš,” I said.

He did not respond. He drank, coughed, spit, and drank some more with suckling greed. I stepped into the fountain, and the cold water soaked through my jeans. I reached for Hanuš, but before I could touch him, the statue came to life. Above us stood Lenka, her firm calves attached to the fountain. Her hair was tied into thick braids. My Lenka, she looked like a Bohemian queen. I touched the soft flesh of her calf, no longer interested in Hanuš, and a sharp pain stiffened my knees and knocked me backwards. I was submerged, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which way was up, the surface, the light, and which way was down, the depths, the darkness. The water stung my nose and eyes and at last I found my bearings and lifted myself up. I was alone in the fountain, alone with the statue. The stream of water from her vase landed on my chest and I lowered myself to have a drink. It tasted of copper, or maybe zinc. It tasted of things that weren’t alive. I wanted her so badly.

When I returned to my room, the mouse was on my bed. The air-conditioning vent was undamaged. The creature studied me, ready to leap. I went to the minifridge to get a Kolonada wafer for it, but when I returned, the mouse was gone. Had it stayed around to thank me for helping, or to emphasize it didn’t need help—see? I can take care of myself. There had been an escape route for the mouse the whole time. The vent was simply another obstacle to be overcome for the sake of overcoming. I ate the wafer, its hazelnut flavor melting on my tongue. We could make such great things. Smooth liquors, wafers melting on touch, statues so close to life.

The idea of Lenka’s calf, the feel of its skin, guided my hand below my waist. My body did not respond. I massaged, caressed, but the sensation was mechanical, devoid of pleasure. Desires used to come to me so easily.

Failing to achieve a climax, I stopped. My ear itched, something moved around my eardrum. I stuck my index finger inside and fished at the speck of dust bothering me. When I took my finger out, a small black creature hopped off onto the carpet. This was no dust. I leaped, upending the television set as the Goromped escaped my thumb, then I grabbed the carpet and hurled it into the air, my eyes locked on the small black dot bouncing up and falling back down. I caught it as it struck my cheek, held it between thumb and middle finger. My first instinct was to squeeze, to squash the beast and wash it off my hand with soap, but its outer shell was as hard and sleek as a stone. It gnawed at my friction ridges with its miniature teeth, and wriggled its legs to free itself. I seized an empty preserves jar and dropped the Goromped inside, then secured the lid as the creature jolted up and down, up and down at a frantic speed, its force almost tipping the jar over. I put a heavy book on top. Now there was nothing but tapping.

“I got you, you maleficent fuck. I got you.”

I gathered the pieces of the old television. Inside the jar, the Goromped spun like a helicopter rotor, emitting a mild whistle reminiscent of wind blowing through a small alley.

“Clever. Momentum theory won’t help,” I said. “You are mine.”

On and on through the room’s darkness and cold, the Goromped spun without pause.

THE GOROMPED HAD BECOME an important part of my daily routine in Carlsbad. I smoked my morning cigarettes inside, and found that if I let a bit of smoke inside the jar, the creature would become momentarily paralyzed. While it lay on the bottom of the jar, I stuck the burning cigarette against its hard belly and heard a faint, high-pitched whistle that came along with a headache. I lifted the cigarette. The Goromped’s shell had turned red. It took about five minutes for its natural hue to return, and a few more for the creature to buzz around the jar in rabid circles once again.

After my afternoon excursions around Carlsbad’s streets and attractions, I attempted other methods. Filling the jar with water did nothing. In fact, the Goromped simply kept moving in circles as the liquid engulfed its body, as if it didn’t even notice the change. When I sprayed it with insecticide, it plunged itself into the puddle and somehow absorbed all of it, lapped it up like a dog until the glass was dry. What truly seemed to bother it was laundry detergent. After I poured it inside the jar, the Goromped shot directly upwards and smashed into the lid until it bent. And again, and again. Quickly, I transferred the creature to a clean jar.

As I observed the creature, I tried to decide whether I was angry with Dr. Kuřák. There was eagerness in his support for Lenka’s leaving, but he did seem to treat her with understanding and kindness. I could not be furious with a man who was good to her when she needed it. What truly haunted me were my alleged crimes of ignorance, outlined within the session recordings as clearly as the opening arguments of prosecution. How could I so deeply misunderstand something I cared about? Those small moments in which I had wronged Lenka were now cruelly apparent. When I was in Space, I manufactured moments in my head during which I had asked whether she would allow me to go on the mission, but really these questions never came up. All was decided by me from the start. I wondered whether I had behaved like this all my life, whether such disregard for a loved one was yet another genetic legacy I carried, representing my father’s traits in full denial.

The Goromped experiments began to keep me shut inside the room for most of my days, which made the recovery seem slower, more painful. Suddenly I was aware of the soreness in my cheeks, my inability to walk without a slight limp. Outside, the sunshine touched upon the shoulders of women and men who seemed so without worries, a city of strollers without a destination. I too craved motion, but not that of a casual stroller—I wanted the thrilling speed of the Goromped.

I shrouded the jar with a black handkerchief and went outside. For the first time I made my way to the residential parts of town, the ones that belonged to neither patients nor tourists, and there I noticed a blue Ducati motorcycle leaning against a shabby house. A reasonable price tag hung around its neck. I hurried home to withdraw some money from the bag Petr had given me and I purchased the Ducati in cash, along with a helmet, from a man exposing his rotten teeth as he counted the cash. I rode out of Carlsbad and into the hills, past the forest filled with men reinforcing their winter wood supply, past teenagers sitting around a van without wheels, sniffing either paint or glue. The road was rough, filled with potholes, and I liked the vibrations it gave off. It felt as though I was working against something, making an effort. I rode through villages, caught the disapproving glares of old women sitting in front of their houses, the lustful envy of village boys working in the fields after school to afford a Ducati of their own. I escaped bewildered dogs snapping at my ankles, zoomed along miles and miles of bare potato fields, wheat fields, cornfields, the postseason desolation of the countryside. The landscape elicited a raw sense of survival: wood prepared, food hoarded, and now it was time to stay inside and drink liquor to warm the belly until the winter passed. After a full day’s ride I returned to Carlsbad, feeling hungry and already missing the smell of burning petrol.

The next day, I rode an hour outside Carlsbad, to Chomutov County. I stopped in front of the church in the village of my grandmother’s birth, Bukovec. In the cemetery out back, my grandmother’s gravestone rested underneath a willow tree. She’d always told me stories about this tree—she had been afraid of it when she was a little girl but grew to love it as she matured and its sagging shape transformed from monstrous to soothing, like the blur of moving water. When her appetite for cabbage soup—another comfort of her girlish years—at the hospital had lessened, and it came time for us to say our last words, she told me how much she hated leaving me. I asked what I could do, how I could repay the lifelong adoration she had given me, how I could show my love, and she said if there was a space anywhere near that damn tree, I should put her there.

I kneeled at the grave and brushed the dried catkins from the sleek stone. I was sorrowful that I hadn’t been able to release her ashes in Space along with my grandfather’s. But this had been her wish. At the end of his life, my grandfather wanted to become dust, to have all trace of the body destroyed so the soul could be free. My grandmother had an agreement with nature. She wanted her body to be buried whole, to become one with the soil, with the tree, with air and rain. With a heavy heart, I had separated them, but I knew that if any remnant of cosmic justice existed, they were already together again in another life, another reality. I stayed at the grave into the night, told my grandmother of Hanuš, as I knew she would’ve asked him many questions. I returned to Carlsbad as the sun began to rise.

PETR SAID THAT my recovery was coming along as well as it could. I had regained some muscle, my limp was not as severe, I even slept for a full evening here and there. My healing weeks were coming to their conclusion and I started asking the question forbidden to me until now: Where is she? “In time, Jakub,” Petr would say, “in time.”

During my last therapy session, Valerie ran her fingers along my leg scar. She was an older woman with deep wrinkles alongside her eyes, and a voice so deep she must have spent her life smoking tobacco and drinking vodka to numb (or enhance?) her desires. Her stories were almost erotic in their precision and in her desperation to narrate the truth without a word one could deem unnecessary. She was the only woman who had touched me since my return. She was Earth’s presence upon my body, made me feel as though she could be simultaneously a lover and a mother. Her fingernails teased my scar.

“I’ve come to love your silence,” she said. “You’re a blank canvas. I can imagine upon you any kind of life. Like a man from old folk stories.”

I kissed Valerie on the cheek. She allowed it. I put on my underwear, pants, and shirt and walked out of the spa whistling. I realized too late it was the tune of an Elvis song.

On that last Sunday in Carlsbad, I purchased a gallon of liquid detergent with added bleach and quickly tipped the Goromped’s holding jar into the plastic container. A frenzied sibilance brought me to my knees, but I held the cap on the bottle firmly to withstand the Goromped’s attempts at freedom. The bottle cracked along the edges, the liquid inside it warming. I clamped my fingers along the sides, desperate to hold it together and smother the cosmic vermin cunt in the one substance it couldn’t withstand, until finally the bottle exploded all over the room, spewing plastic shrapnel that carved a shallow cut into my cheek. Mountain-scented goo covered everything—the bed and carpet and ceiling and my clothes. I touched the walls, searching without success for a sign of a corpse, until at last I thought to pick over my shirt and face, and there in my beard I found the smallest remnants of dead legs and a particle of shell. The Goromped had split in half in the eruption. I spit on the remains, threw them in the toilet, and flushed. Yes, I took pleasure in its killing, science be damned. For a brief moment, my scientific convictions were loose enough to let me believe that Hanuš was watching from some kind of afterlife, grinning with satisfaction at this last act of revenge.

I left a seven-thousand-crown tip for the cleaning service. Removal of the havoc caused by the Goromped’s detergent grenade would take considerable work. At the downstairs shop, I purchased a box of chocolates and wrote, For Valerie. Her kindness had been unconditional. Her life consisted of welcoming men, women, and children in pain, some temporary, some chronic; she attended to people waiting for death, to humans praying that their despair and bodily imprisonment could be eased somehow, lifted, and Valerie effectuated this with her hands, her voice, stories, with a determination to find good in every word and every movement of a weakened limb. Valerie was an unknowing force. Leaving her chocolates seemed banal and almost insulting, but she didn’t need to be the victim of my glorification of her, idolatry in itself a certain kind of death.

WE LEFT BEFORE DAWN, the world still dark. Petr offered to carry the bag of clothes he had lent me downstairs, but I refused. When he opened the passenger door to his Citroën, I pointed at my Ducati and strapped on my helmet.

“Back to Earth in style,” he said.

I asked Petr to put the bag of clothes in his trunk. We started our engines, destination Plzeň, where Petr would take me to Lenka’s apartment. I was not feeling the expected joy over our drive. Certainly I craved to see Lenka, so much that I could not bring myself to keep still. But our reunion would be tainted by the truths that her conversations with Kuřák had made me aware of. The various ways in which I had hurt her, ending with the suffering of my death, which would now be nullified. Everything about my return, the good parts and the bad, was extreme, painful, unprecedented. I couldn’t possibly know what she would say to me, what I would say back, or even how to begin to speak across the ever-widening gap of the universe between us. She was right. I had changed too much to feel like an Earthman. The intricacies of human emotion seemed incomprehensible, a foreign language. I could explain nothing of my journey, and I could not explain who I was now. What to make of such a homecoming?

Out on the road, the Ducati’s recoil shook my bones and filled my blood with chemistry. I was subject to velocity, a violator of the speeds at which the human body was allowed to travel. In Space, the speed of my ascent was masked by my vessel, but here physics was felt without mercy. This was my habitat, a planet I ruled with an iron will, a planet on which I could build a combustion engine and a set of wheels to carry me at the speed of two hundred kilometers per hour as I felt every jolt and every disturbance of the air particles struggling to get out of my path. Why go anywhere else? We’ve already done so much to the place.

I snapped at Petr’s heels, my wheel millimeters away from his bumper. We needed to go faster. To Lenka. Back to home. Back to life.

PLZENŇ. The town that served as a frontier to many Bohemian wars and produced a beer that soon became a worldwide sensation, featuring ads with half-naked women holding the ale above their heads like an ancient artifact, as if the green glass bottles contained the Fountain of Youth. Plzeň is colorful, with magnificent architecture of the Old World, but modest about the culture and history pulsing within the veins of its streets. A challenger to Prague in many ways, and no Bohemian says such things lightly.

This was Lenka’s new home. We arrived as the town woke up with the sun. Petr parked his car in front of a cake shop in Plzeň’s downtown. As I slid off the Ducati, I felt as though gravity might once again give up on me. Even the heavy cube bricks lining the street could not force the numbness from my calves.

“Her building is around the corner. Number sixty-five. Apartment two. It has a black roof—”

“Petr, I have to do this alone now.”

Hesitant, he handed over the bag of clothes. I turned to go but he grabbed at my sleeve, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a single hand. “You’re saying I won’t see you again,” he said.

“Don’t think about it anymore,” I said. “You did everything you could. I made my own decisions. I wanted to go.”

“What do you think will happen with her?”

“You know, on the bad days, I thought I made her up. This great love of mine. And you, frankly, and Central, and many other things. When you wake up in a room you don’t recognize, you feel lost, right? What about walking to an outhouse in perfect darkness, using only muscle memory. Chickens pluck at your feet. You walk until the senses catch on to familiar clues. Until you feel the spiderwebs upon the wooden door and the rabbits stirring as you interrupt their sleep. You walk into the darkness until something becomes familiar. I don’t know what should happen, Petr. Please keep me in your thoughts.”

Petr put his arms around my shoulders, then returned to his car and drove off.

I STOOD IN front of Lenka’s apartment door, lacquered in a brown similar to the color of my grandparents’ gate in Středa. There was no doormat, that usual square pancake serving to cleanse one of the dirt of cities before entering a sacred space. I knocked, listened, knocked again, waited with my cheeks hot and sweat soaking through my shirt. I leaned on the door, rested my forehead, knocked once more. What would Lenka say when she opened the door? Surely I looked appalling, perhaps unrecognizable even to her, in comparison to the man she’d married. I pushed myself off the door, straightened my spine. Maybe I wouldn’t need to say a word. Maybe she would be so ecstatic to see me alive that she wouldn’t expect a thing. No answer.

I reached above the doorframe, where Lenka had always left a key during our years together, terrified she would lose hers and lock herself out as she had done when she was a little girl, with her parents out of town and the streets full of unknowns. Under my fingers I felt the coldness of brass, took the key down, and slid it into the lock. I entered Lenka’s world.

It was a railroad apartment, four rooms locked together in a single line without doors. I walked into an office in which bookshelves held books that were only hers, novels from all over the world, while my nonfiction tomes of theories were gone. Even our literature proved that I’d wanted to conquer everything outside Earth, while she wanted to know every inch of the planet I desired to leave. I put my hands upon these books, remembering those nights of silence when our forearms had touched and we had read until sleep took us, the pages mixed between limbs and sheets.

The next room, her bedroom. The bed was not ours. It was hers, smaller, and a crater in the middle suggested that Lenka had slept comfortably without having to choose a side. The sheets were folded neatly, another morning ritual of hers. Above the bed was a painting I had never seen—cormorants rising over a river, a sunset with hues so orange the beams looked like napalm. Lenka’s signature in the corner.

What would happen if Lenka were to come back home, capture the poltergeist lurking in her space? How to explain that I had passed through the core that had seen the beginning of the world? That I had fallen through the atmosphere and crashed into a Russian lake. That I had come for her.

The third room was an undecided space. A yoga mat and weights lay in one corner, while the center was dominated by an easel supporting an unfinished painting on a large canvas. This new project was a night sky above Plzeň’s horizon. One star was particularly thick, glowing, with a tail behind it that suggested movement. This was how Lenka had seen me when I left, guessing at which of the moving reflections in the vast darkness could be her Jakub.

There was also a closet. I opened the doors and leaped into her clothing, sniffing at the familiar detergent, the armpits of blouses still holding traces of sweat mixed with deodorant, notes of her apricot perfume. As I put my face in the clothes, they began to fall, and soon I too fell to the ground, burying myself under the pile until I couldn’t breathe.

The final room was the kitchen, in which I could still smell all of Lenka’s favorites—fried eggs, bacon, the goddamn bacon, mushroom stew. There was a high bar table littered with a week’s worth of newspapers (was she still searching for articles about me, or embracing the new world without me in it?). Above the table stretched a framed photo of the sunset on a Croatian beach.

I walked back to the office at the front of the apartment. There weren’t any photos of me, no photos of our wedding. I considered rummaging through the closets to see if these items still existed, or whether Lenka had scrubbed her life clean of the reminders. Their absence wouldn’t upset me. It would bring clarity.

I exited the apartment and walked outside. If I kneeled down and put my ear to the sidewalk, would Plzeň speak to me, tell me where to search? I turned in all directions with my eyes closed and chose one at random, then embarked, knowing I would scour these streets day and night until I found Lenka.

As I stepped forward, faint music drifted from the direction of the River Radbuza. It came into sight and I realized that Lenka’s cormorant painting had been conceived at its shore. The music grew louder as I walked into the city’s historic center, where the Cathedral of Saint Bartholomew dominated the skyline. A mass of tents, stages, and food stands opened before me, organized into neat rows for the winter festival. A group of Roma musicians unleashed their soothing folk, accentuated by the smacks of steaming grog spilled upon the ground, the sizzle of onion, and above all the cheers of voices unified in the pagan ecstasy of human celebration. I entered the masses, searching above their heads. Lenka had to be here, with her love for ritual and for life. I bought a cup of grog, proof that I too belonged here, that I could still run with my kin, my species. Hours passed, the afternoon sun began to retreat, and the air grew cooler as I circled the square. Then, at a table ahead, a hand picked up a slice of bread smeared with goat cheese. The body belonging to the hand was concealed by the crowd. I tore through the mass, now seeing that those hands which had memorized my own body so thoroughly were not a mirage.

Lenka. Her sweet hands.

She paid the vendor and turned her back, the green tunic over her shoulders flowing in the wind like a queen’s robe. For a moment, the tunic slid off her right shoulder, and the few inches of bare skin inspired a lust that made me dizzy. I stumbled, but kept following nonetheless. What was the best way to approach her? I couldn’t put my hand on her shoulder before she saw me. She needed to see me first, recognize me, recognize the man who had so selfishly gone away from her to chase his own ambitions, the man who had returned now that she had made this new life to ask that she drop her solitude and, once again, change everything for him.

Lenka. Her sweet hands, the skin of her shoulders. Was I worthy of her still? I quickened my pace, pushed through the herd to get ahead of Lenka, and turned back into the lane in which she strolled. She was now walking toward me, thirty meters, twenty-five. But there were too many bodies obstructing us. My eyes sought hers, ten meters. For the first time since I had left Earth, I saw Lenka’s face clearly. Peaceful. Adoring every sight and every breath. As if the world had been her creation and she a carefree supervisor walking the floor on the seventh day of rest.

She was changed, happier than I’d ever seen her. Happier even than in our best days, our orgasmic slumber in the Orloj tower, the peak of our love. Five meters.

I froze in my steps. Lenka looked directly at me. No. She looked past me, with no sign of recognition, no acknowledgment of my material form. She walked past me. As though I were just another stranger in too large a crowd.

Could I be anything else, in the new world she had built for herself? She had to see me. There was no other way to begin anew. I cursed the enveloping masses.

I shadowed her, searching for a better opportunity as she ate boiled peanuts, purchased a few canvases, and made her way home with the setting sun. I was drunk by then, mostly on samples of liquors flowing across the border from the rest of Europe, belching menthol, caraway, and coffee from the earthy shots I had picked up as I stalked. My mind a warren of confusion, uncertain whether I belonged to Earth anymore at all. But my body ran on autopilot—where Lenka went, I went.

She retreated into her apartment and I sat on the pavement outside, down the block. The ground was cool to the touch, and the distant voices of people coming home from the festival, drunk on simple pleasures, encouraged me. The street lamps came on with their low buzz of static. A beautiful night. I imagined walking up to Lenka’s door and ringing the bell. She would have to see me then. The possibilities of her reaction terrified me, each of them bringing their own special sense of horror. If she touched me, put her arms around me, would my bones hold together? Or perhaps she would run, thinking me a corpse come to haunt her. This endless loop of thought kept me confined to the sidewalk. Her words to Kuřák replayed over and over. She wanted a life of her own, one that wasn’t overshadowed by my obsessions, my needs. And then I had seen her face in the crowd, serene and impassioned, and the lightness in her step.

Was she her happiest like this? I needed to leave Earth, pick at the particles of Space. What did Lenka need?

She walked back out of her building holding a large canvas bag, and I took cover behind a building at the end of the street. Lenka stepped toward the river. I followed her down the path, but still I kept my distance, still I could not bring myself to reenter her world. It was so easy, I had only to shout out her name, to run the short distance separating us and touch her. But with each passing moment I felt more and more like an intruder.

She set up an easel and began work on the unfinished painting of the night sky.

Her voice from Kuřák’s recording, counting up all the things I had done. Yes, the winter of 1989 was the Big Bang of my life. The guilt of my father’s servitude had followed me everywhere, leading us here.

She took a sip of something from a thermos. Coffee? Wine? All I had to do was ask.

The paint upon the easel, grains of powder and oil staining the cotton fibers, the solvent evaporating to leave a pigmented, dry oil to oxidize. This resinous film was now the new dimension of reality, confined within a rectangular cloth. A new world. A perspective. Lenka had painted the edges purple to allow for Chopra’s influence. She raised her hand to her head, and though I couldn’t see I was sure the purple on her fingers colored a streak of her hair. What if this reminder of a phenomenon so distant, yet one that uprooted our lives, remained there forever? Within the painting existed the sum of our lives. My decision to leave. My decision to put something else above Lenka. I chose the dust, I chose Space, I chose the trip to nowhere, I chose to live above humanity, I chose higher missions, I chose symbols, I chose to claw at redemption.

I didn’t choose Lenka. I failed our contract. Now she had made a life for herself. Of course, I could merge into this life. Rid myself of any ambition left, drop any designs for my future and simply live alongside Lenka in any way she wanted me to, do as she would tell me, cause no further disruptions. But such life didn’t seem worth consideration, not only because I would never be able to truly embrace it, but because Lenka would reject it as an insult to what life is supposed to stand for.

She rested the brush upon the ground and sat by the edge of the river. She rolled up her pant legs and dipped her feet into the water. Frogs dispersed with protesting croaks. The air grew chalky with smoke from a nearby bonfire. Lenka hummed and leaned back into the grass. Peaceful, alone. Looking out over the calm surface.

There was no space for me here. I took a step back. And another.

Lenka returned to her easel and began to disassemble it. The cup used to rinse the brush tipped over, the water marked by all colors of the palette spilling on the grass. Lenka leaned over and began to draw something into the stain with her finger. I had never been as curious about anything as I was at this moment about what Lenka was creating out of view. She was an unmatched engineer of these small moments. Embracing accidents and curiosities. She judged the work below and laughed to herself.

I couldn’t exist here. In the world that had come into being due to my absence.

Within me now lay the mystery of Hanuš, the violent rejection of Chopra, the bodies of the three humans whose deaths I was responsible for. Klara’s eyes wild with betrayal, her effort to murder me with a single arm, her teeth sinking into the meat of my thumb like fangs.

I had nothing to give anyone else. Not here.

I turned and ran back up the pathway. I jumped onto the Ducati and started it, throwing my helmet to the ground.

She had loved me so well. I could never have asked for a better life as an Earthman.

Now I was a specter. Fragments of pasts, futures, gates through time and space. I was the series of particles released by Chopra’s core. My only destiny: motion. I rode at the highest speed. Away from Plzeň. Lenka had freed herself of the things haunting me. She was to remain free.

Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.

A Child of the Revolution

WITHOUT THE PURPOSE of finding Lenka, my time became an endless orbit on Earth’s concrete. Days ceased to have beginnings or endings as I rode my Ducati in circles on the highways surrounding Prague, teasing out ever higher speeds, much like the Goromped that had lived in my Carlsbad room. The singular purpose of motion. No schemes to it. No plans.

At a gas station, I purchased a clearance hooded sweatshirt sporting the colors of the national football team. I pulled it over my head, still nervous whenever a person stared at me for too long, afraid that in the correct light I might be recognized, despite the forever-altered facial structure, despite the sunken eyes, despite being severely underweight. I did not look strangers in the eyes, I turned my head so no one could ever see me fully in daylight. Now the hood made me feel slightly more invincible.

When I grew too tired to hold myself up on the motorcycle, I stopped at a trucker motel and ate vending machine chips on a rough bedspread. The TV set in my room would not turn on. I had almost convinced myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t need it, but I knew it’d be hours before I could sleep, and complete silence worsened my headaches. I asked the attendant downstairs for help, and with an abundance of loud sighs, he gave me a television set from another room. Victorious, I opened a beer and switched to a news station.

Milk prices rising. (I snickered, recalling my conversation with Tůma.) France, another country to leave the crumbling European Union. Then, suddenly, the faces of men I knew. Their hands cuffed.

Prime Minister Tůma himself, clothed in sweatpants, his hair unkempt, was being led out of his Barrandov villa by policemen. These images were from two days ago—history happening as I had been riding in circles.

Then, different footage from a different place appeared. This was downtown Prague, an office building modeled after a New York skyscraper. From within its depths the police led a man whose face I would have recognized in a lineup of millions. It was Him.

I felt my foot dampen and glanced down at the beer bottle I had dropped without knowing it.

According to the newscaster, the two men had been arrested, along with two other politicians and another businessman, for siphoning cash from phony government contracts. The media called them ringleaders of the scheme who, in the span of three years, had managed to steal seven hundred million crowns of taxpayer cash. Prime Minister Tůma, the self-professed savior of his nation, and the other man, supposedly a close childhood friend of Tůma’s and his phantom adviser throughout the years. The man, Shoe Man, whose Christian name was introduced to me for the first time through this cracked, dirty television screen—Radislav Zajíc.

I set the television on my knees as if I could reason with it to give me more detail. After their arrest two days earlier, the men had immediately posted bail and retreated to an undisclosed location. The image of their arrest flashed by again, and although there were signs of gray in the sleeked hair I had last seen as a child, it was him, inescapably. With all the cruelty of the modern news cycle, the story melted away and into a report on a new red panda born in Prague Zoo.

I ran downstairs and tossed the room key and cash for the spilled beer stain at the clerk. I rode back into the center of Prague, to the streets near my former university, a village of pubs and Internet cafés filled with intellectuals blowing off steam. How I used to fit in here—but now, as I entered one of their Wi-Fi lairs, the young minds of the future looked upon me with distrust, perhaps even with wrinkled noses. Did I smell? No time. Something was afoot, pieces of my life suddenly did not form a whole, or perhaps they fit together too tightly. I paid for two hours of computer time and sat down with a cup of coffee that cooled as I ignored it and stretched my fingers over the keys. A few taps, the humming of a processor, an instant name, social networking profiles, emails. Radislav Zajíc, his life laid out before me. A light breeze traveled through the café, scented with car exhaust and blooming trees.

Finally, I drank down half of the cold coffee. I wasn’t sure what to do with the name now. Perhaps I wanted to spend the rest of my life as an avenger, haunting Him, displacing Him. What else was there to do? Perhaps he was the only person who knew me anymore, who knew my life before the headlines, before my ascent and before death. Maybe I wanted to do nothing at all.

Business tycoon Radislav Zajíc and Prime Minister Jaromír Tůma: childhood friends, victims of communist persecution, post-revolution opportunists. Their focus had gone in different directions but they had remained close, Zajíc being Tůma’s number-one adviser and largest fund-raiser. Within one search, again I had a purpose on this Earth, a purpose contained inside a small white rectangle and its blinking cursor. The two men had built a lifelong coalition, with Zajíc working in his preferred shadow, raising capital through his investments in energy, real estate, and the importation of Western brands, while Tůma became the political apostle of the boundless market, his haircuts, silk ties, and influence paid for by Zajíc and his brethren. Now the shadows had been lifted by the ministry of interior, and the Internet was once again proving a court of the people, the Arena of Rome in which the crowds declared Thumbs down. The entire affair had already been summarized on Wikipedia, the apparatus of justice rushing ahead to imprison the men as people of the republic protested these high-level crooks in the streets of Old Town. I glanced outside. No protests at the moment, not currently revolutionary.

I finished the terrible coffee. Shoe Man and Prime Minister Tůma, boyhood friends. Where did I fit between the two? I slammed down the cup and logged into my old student email account, knowing the university allowed these accounts to exist indefinitely without oversight. I pasted Radislav Zajíc’s email—his private information leaked by a vigilante hacker group—into the recipient field. Sure, it wasn’t likely he’d be checking it much, with the venom citizens were bound to send his way. But I had to find him. Before the day I died, I would look Shoe Man in the face and ask my questions. What had he done? This was the first step.

I considered soliciting one of the students around me for a cigarette or a swig from their flask to calm me. Given the ban on caffeine during training and the mission itself, the single cup of coffee was already affecting me with a vengeance—making my hands shake and causing a variety of typos that prolonged the writing of only a few simple sentences:

I sent the email.

Beside me, a young woman with a thick book in her lap looked around conspicuously and poured from a silver flask into her coffee cup, and I leaned over to ask if I could impose in exchange for my silence on the contraband. She answered that I could have a little, and that blackmail is impolite, and I thanked her and drank down my own spiked cup as I stared at my email inbox. Refreshed, stared some more, massaged my stiff knees. Students began to depart, and as the young woman next to me left, the barista began to wipe the counters and I noted the café was to close in a few minutes. Refreshed, refreshed—once a known astronaut, now reduced to a customer overstaying his welcome to check email. The barista tapped me on the shoulder. My two hours had passed—I was welcome to return tomorrow morning.

I hovered my cursor over the browser window’s red X. It seemed more red than usual. The color of a stop sign. I hesitated. Behind me, the barista’s deep exhale.

A new subject line appeared. The preposition “Re,” bold, thick with life. I opened the email. The barista tapped on my shoulder again.

I took a two-hundred-crown bill from my wallet and offered it to the barista for some paper, a pen, and whatever coins he had on him. He hesitantly accepted the bill and brought me a pencil and a napkin. I scribbled down the number Shoe Man had sent. The coffee and alcohol in my bloodstream made my heart knock against my rib cage. I shut off the computer and thanked the barista thrice as he locked the doors. He shrugged, and I ran to the end of the street.

I slammed twenty crowns into a pay phone around the corner. Where do the coins go? I wondered. The concept seemed like pure science fiction. Tossing a piece of metal into another contraption of metal, and voilà, hearing a voice.

I dialed the number as the sun outside descended, creating an array of shadows within the booth. Around me the city wound down, humans with their business concluded going about the pre-leisure rituals of getting dinner ingredients or hiding out in a bar. My headache and bloated stomach reminded me that I had been living on junk food and beer. But what was a body, after all? Why keep it pretty for the dirt?

On the other end of the line, a click, followed by hesitation. Then a voice I knew, as if I were still hearing it through the keyhole in the closed door to my grandparents’ kitchen.

“Let me hear your voice,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“It is you.”

“What have you done?” I said.

“You’re not dead. This is your voice. Unless—”

“Answer me.”

“I want to see you.”

“What if I kill you?” I said.

“Something your grandfather would say. The number you’re calling from, it’s Prague.”

“I’ll be by the statue they built. Tomorrow. Noon.”

“You used to study in that park. That’s why I asked them to build it there. But maybe I’m just talking to myself here,” Zajíc said. “Going mad. Is it you?”

“It might be better for you if it weren’t,” I said, and hung up.

I found shelter in a shuttered bakery shop offered for sale and ate a slice of cold pizza for dinner. Soon an entrepreneur would take the place over and give it a new mission. The floors were prewar, when stonemasonry was still an art. They were cool to the touch and I spread a tablecloth underneath myself, looking upon the withered and sagging signs advertising the former menu. Millennia ago, the earliest people found that they could pulverize grains of wheat to form a putty which, upon baking, would redefine the species. Even now, with culinary pleasures having gone global and the world offering complex delicacies, what comforted me as I rested in the bakery was the image of a simple roll, golden on the outside with pure white dough on the inside. The crack you make with your thumb as you rip into it.

The purpose of my newfound mission thrilled me. I couldn’t go back to Lenka, I didn’t belong in her world anymore. With the universe ever expanding, we could never circle back around to each other. But Shoe Man…

Radislav Zajíc. He defied these laws of physics. He had returned, somehow. He knew me. He knew Tůma. I’d always figured he knew of me, if only from the newspapers. I had counted on him watching my triumph. But his friendship with Tůma opened its own separate cosmos, one that did not begin with a random incident of energy exploding into being, but was carefully designed. As I fell asleep in the bakery, with mice bumping into my shoes, I was certain that everything that had happened was somehow his doing.

In the morning, I woke early. I rode to Vyšehrad, a fort overlooking the River Vltava. There the ghosts of the old kings kept guard over alleys and fountains, towers and shops, the souls of children dragging themselves to school and tired adults jumping onto the tram. Perhaps the ghosts watched over me too. More than a thousand years ago, Princess Libuše had stood on the hill of Vyšehrad and looked across the River Vltava, where she declared, “I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars.” She instructed her men to travel to the settlement and find a peasant constructing the threshold of a house. Atop this threshold, Libuše claimed, was where the Prague Castle should be built. “And because even the great noblemen must bow low before a threshold, you shall give it the name Praha.” Threshold. Práh. The founding of Prague depended on such staggering duality. Across the river, Libuše had seen a vision of a thousand towers extending up to the skies, towers so high they could be seen from Istanbul, from Britannia, perhaps from God’s own divine throne. And yet the name of this city of glory was based on the humblest part of any structure: a threshold, a line marking entry and exit, a symbol no person considers twice. Was this duality—the humble name and the contrasting vision of grandeur borne out when Přemysl the plowman, a simple villager, married Princess Libuše and became the first ruler of the Bohemian lands—the reason Prague had survived civil wars, the Austro-Hungarian cultural purging, and occupations by fascists and Bolsheviks? Perhaps the world is enslaved to its own dualities, a humble beginning with an impossible dream attached. Libuše’s vision across the river was the beginning. I am the end. With me, Prague had touched the skies at last, and fulfilled the prophecy that Libuše bestowed upon its cradle. Never mind that the Holy Roman Emperor once resided in the Prague Castle, or that the first council of Bohemia had congregated within its walls. It was with me that the history of the city had finally come full circle.

I rode to New Town and parked my motorcycle a few blocks from Charles Square, which had been a home to me during my first university years. It had changed quite a bit. No longer did students loiter around with their heavy bags. They had been replaced by headlong tourists consulting their maps and agendas. I roamed the streets around the square and took part in the city that had given me life. I handed money to a group of three actors performing Shakespeare on top of a parked van. I ate hot dogs and paid bathroom attendants to hand me carefully folded toilet paper. Church bells tolled in the distance, and a small boy dropped ice cream at my feet, his parents lamenting in Italian. I walked into an alleyway that turned into a pop-up bookshop, with young people rummaging through boxes of literature and paintings. The street ended in a homeless commune of tents and piles of clothes, the outpost secured by a vigilant street dog. I fed the dog the remnant of my frankfurter wrapped in a napkin—in Prague, the likelihood of running into a dog, feral or domesticated, was high, and I liked to be prepared—and the guardian of the commune’s treasures licked my fingers.

At eleven o’clock, I returned to the square, its grass dark and littered with wandering birds. The square was surrounded by walls of trees that sheltered its inhabitants from the city life around it. There, in the middle of the plaza, stood the spaceman’s statue, dead eyes of carved stone, a nose much smaller than mine, helmet in his right hand, left hand over his heart, a gesture to the people. The base, towering above me as if it held the weight of an emperor, was decorated with a sign of pure gold, whose letters had been carved by the same stonemason who had curated the main stairwell of the National Museum. Part of the etched name was concealed by growing vines.

Beyond the statue I encountered a group of middle school children on a field trip. They frolicked under the supervision of a frowning teacher, and their youthful twittering carried an eerie song to my ears. Impossible, I thought, but no, I had heard them correctly. They were singing of the dead spaceman, of being just like him someday.

No other sound would ever force the tune out of my head. It would return without invitation for a lifetime to come, like the flu or the scent of lovers. I stood there in the flesh and observed the children, my attention unreturned, while the stoic, bloodless version of me placed a few meters away earned the praise of their song.

I sat on a bench across from the statue. Noon was a few minutes away. My nausea, the tightness in my knuckles, the violence of the moment, the fear forced me to lean forward. The man who’d banished my family was on his way over. In this earthly life once again resumed, he was now all that mattered.

One minute late. Was he coming?

A figure emerged between the trees. He made his way toward the children and put his hand on the teacher’s shoulder. The two spoke and the newcomer pointed toward me. The teacher nodded.

Radislav Zajíc walked briskly toward me. He stopped some fifteen meters away, his arms awkwardly limp at his sides, like a boy told not to pick his nose. He seemed shorter than I remembered, but it was his face, marked by those same pox scars and gray scruff. His suit, the body armor, was smooth and perfect at every crevice, as if it were another layer of fresh skin.

“I asked that teacher if he saw you sitting here,” Zajíc said, “and he said yes.”

I rose and walked up to Shoe Man. I was taller than he was. “You see me,” I said.

“I do. Jakub. You are here. And you look like your father.”

He knew me. He had recognized me instantly. This man was the last living remnant of my early history. A proof that those childhood days weren’t a mirage. Against my will, the anger and nausea dissipated. Shoe Man soothed me.

Probability theory examines mathematical abstractions of nondeterministic events. It also studies measured quantities that may either be single occurrences or evolve over time in an apparently random fashion. If a sequence of random events is repeated many times, patterns can be detected and studied, thus creating the illusion that human observers can truly know and understand chaos. But what if our existence itself is a field of study in probability conducted by the universe? Each of us a character, a mathematical abstraction set up with attributes copied from previous subjects, with a slight variation (switch Oedipal complex for Electra complex, exchange crippling social anxiety for narcissism), sent out with similar instincts—the fear of death, the fear of loneliness, the fear of failure. Our outcomes—poverty, starvation, disease, suicide, peaceful death on a bed plagued by shame and regret—being collected by a researcher above, a cosmic tally gathering the likelihood of happiness, likelihood of wholeness, likelihood of self-destruction. Likelihood of luck. Can a subject born impoverished and diseased finish in the upper luck bracket at the end of her life? Can a subject born into privilege and health crash and die in utter misery? We’ve seen it all. We’ve seen it all and yet where are these patterns, when will the universe publish its findings in a respected peer-reviewed journal? What is the ratio of probability for one cosmic event to occur over all others? How unlikely. Yet here we are.

Radislav Zajíc saw me. I raised my fist and slugged him across the jaw. He fell to the ground too easily, and I studied the spot on my wrist where something had cracked. My third knuckle collapsed, creating a darkened crater. Blood burst out. The schoolteacher hurriedly gathered the children and led them away from the square.

Zajíc stared up at me. Gone was the defiance he’d shown to my grandfather—he was not daring me; he was not baiting. He simply waited, looked on with gentle curiosity. If you decide to beat me to death, that is your business.

I extended my hand and pulled him to his feet. He walked to the statue, and I followed.

“You know, it’s been many years since someone’s hit me,” he said. “It has a sort of relief to it.”

“I’ve been saving it for a few decades.”

He put his hand on the base of the statue, brushed the vines from my name. “You should’ve seen it,” he said. “I’ve never witnessed something pass through the Parliament so quickly. People were outbidding themselves on how much we should spend on building this statue. They wanted to make it as tall as a tower. But I argued that you’d prefer something smaller, in a place that matters. I know you spent most of your time here as a student. Looking up at the sky and studying all night.”

“You and Tůma. You did this.”

“Yes and no. How did you do it, Jakub? How’d you make it back.”

“I flew, you son of a bitch. I flapped my goddamn wings and here I stand.”

Zajíc leaned against the statue, massaging his jaw.

“You sent me to Chopra. You put Tůma up to it. Say it.”

“I gave him your name, Jakub. There was nothing diabolical—”

“For what? To take the last Procházka off the Earth? I almost died. I lost her. For what.”

“It’s not the reason, Jakub. If I may.”

My hands trembled, and I put them inside my pockets. I could not show weakness. Not to him. “Yes,” I said.

“After you left Středa, I couldn’t let go of you. I’ve been married a couple of times, and each of my wives had caught me whispering your name in the dark, thinking you were a lover of mine. I watched you grow up, saw your grade reports, statements of purpose for university. I wanted to ensure they would admit you, but you didn’t need the help. I watched your grandfather’s funeral from a distance. I asked the vineyard where you and Lenka married to quote you a small rate and I paid for the difference. You’ve been a charm from the old life, and I wanted to see, always wanted to see—were you going to turn into a bastard? Was it in the blood? And you kept being good. Determined.”

“You’ve lost your mind. So what? You chose me for the suicide mission as some kind of restitution?”

“One night, when we were drunk, Tůma told me about his space program dream. I laughed at him at first, but he was serious, he grabbed me by the collar and swore it would happen. I used to think he was the man the country needed, you know? Before we became cynical together. He used to believe in feeding both the citizens’ stomachs and their souls. He believed in science and curiosity and books. He made me think of you. And so I gave him your name, Jakub. It seemed inevitable, the two of us in that moment. It was not to punish you or to reward you. It was a reaction to what seemed a cosmic calling. Tůma gave you the choice, and you decided to do something great, just as I expected.”

“I’ve done nothing. I should’ve stayed with the things I knew. Certainties. You’ve never been anything but a sad, hateful man. You let my father win and you let him ruin us both.”

“Hmm,” he said, “yes, some of that is true. But you have done everything, Jakub. The mission was a failure but the country believes we can be great. You should have seen the funeral. The whole city was alive like I’ve never seen it. Dignitaries came from all over the world to pay their respects. And now you’re back—I don’t know how, I don’t know what you’ve had to do, but you are here, and we can bring you back to the nation. A hero’s return. They will go apeshit for it, Jakub. You will be a king. Whatever you think you have lost, you will get it back a thousandfold.”

I thought of it. The news headlines, the interviews, everything I had expected upon my return but intensified to a point of frenzy, endless questions, how is this possible, what brought me back? Would this resurrection mean the return of Lenka? The end to her peace.

No. I could not. I had given them everything. They had no right to ask for more.

“That won’t happen,” I said. “I stay dead. I’ve earned it.”

“You’re certain?”

“I am. I want the quiet life.”

“Well, I suppose it makes no difference to me. My trial is in a month. Unless I decide to flee the country, which I’m still considering. My own quiet life in the Caribbean. Either way, Jakub, it seems that the big missions of our lives are over.”

“What was yours?”

“Helping democracy with heaps of cash.”

“You’re a thief.”

“I became one, yes.”

“What do you think of my father now? You can’t think you are better than him, not anymore. This pain you’ve caused to get revenge on a dead man, the people you’ve ruined in the process. The point of it all.”

“May I show you something? It requires a short trip.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jakub. I’ve watched you grow up. I wish you no harm.”

What else was there to do? I did not want for this meeting to end, for this man who knew me, the last remnant of my life before the mission, to leave. I followed him through the grass field and between the trees, where we reentered the city and a suited driver opened a door to a black BMW. We sat on the leather seats and Zajíc offered a glass of Scotch. I drank it down without pause. Was it a betrayal to my grandfather that I sat next to this man, spoke to him? He couldn’t blame me for wanting to understand. To know every bit of influence that had gotten me here. The seat cooled my back, I poured another drink, wondering what it was like to be a man who lived such luxuries every day, molding them into a barrier shielding him from the terror of being ordinary. Zajíc studied me and all these decades later I still worried he could read me easily, the gestures of a frightened boy.

We arrived at a building in New Town. The chauffeur opened the door and I stood before a delicatessen storefront. The building was eight stories tall, made in the old republic, before the war and before the communist housing projects. Shoe Man gestured for me to come through the front door to the top of the stairwell. There he removed a set of keys from his pocket and opened a door made of metal. It creaked, and I noticed deep scratches upon it.

As I hesitated, Zajíc entered the room. The windows were covered in black paper, leaving the room concealed in shadow. Something clicked. Lamplight illuminated the room, and Shoe Man stood by a desk stained with blood, its drawers having been removed. The lamp—small, with a rusty neck and harsh, invasive light—and a green folder were the only items on the desk. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a wooden chair covered in thick deep cuts, pieces of duct tape sticking to its legs and back. The chair faced the blacked-out windows. On the dusty stone floor in front of it rested the artifact of my life’s history. The iron shoe.

“Is this real?” I said.

“When I met your father, the basement where the usual torture rooms were located was being fumigated for rats. The secret police kicked a few of the less important bureaucrats out of their offices, and made these provisional chambers. Can’t let vermin get in the way of interrogation.”

“This is it? This one?”

“This room. Your father’s feet walked upon this floor. Of course, by the time I bought the building, the space had been changed back into a nice office. I had them re-create the room as I knew it from memory. Don’t worry, the blood is fake. But the shoe I think you recognize.”

I pictured myself at nineteen years old, with baby fat still on my cheeks. Men I’ve never seen, never spoken to, coming into my university classroom and taking me away. Taking me here, blacking out the world beyond these windows, a separation like dirt tossed upon a coffin. Causing me pain, hurting me with the full conviction that they were on the right side of history, the moral side, the side of humanity. My father had done this for a living. He had done this and it had kept us in a nice apartment and in nice clothes and with secret Elvis records stashed away.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted you to see it, the place where I was born. The man I was before I knew this room—he was probably going to become a chemist. A scientist, like you. But once they kicked me out of university, took everything from my family, the only focus of my life became not ending up in this room again.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Don’t you want to know me?”

I turned to the wooden chair and sat down. My knee pain was returning, reminding me I hadn’t taken my medication all day. I removed the bottle from my pocket and swallowed a pill dry.

I slid my foot inside the iron shoe. “Tie it,” I said.

Zajíc bent over and pushed down on the safety, then pulled the heavy leather belt inside a loop.

I tried to lift my foot. I could not.

“That’s the most terrifying thing,” Zajíc said. “It grounds you. It makes you feel like, perhaps, you might never walk again.”

“It’s a comfort now. To be still. Bound.”

“How did you do it, Jakub? How did you come back?”

“We’re not going to talk about that now.”

He nodded and walked toward the window. He opened it, and the black paper ripped at the edges. Sun came into the room for the first time in many years. Without the darkness to lend it isolation, it seemed like a regular sad office keeping human beings away from living wildly, not unlike the office of Dr. Bivoj.

“You made me think I was a curse,” I said. “Like my whole existence was some kind of spiritual stain. The last remnant of Cain’s sperm. Those aren’t good thoughts for a child. For a man. I’ve wished you dead in so many different ways. Before I started shaving I fantasized about what I could do to you with a blade. Your voice has resonated through my head all these years, uninvited. I should throw you out that window, but I no longer see the point in it. I don’t know what to do after we leave this room. I don’t know. When I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Lenka, I thought that finding you would be another mission, the last possible way of living. But I look at you and I know that retribution is not life.”

He turned to face me. He bent low before me and unstrapped my foot. The brief suspension, the release from weight and pressure, felt again as though I was floating in Space, with Hanuš by my side, about to encounter a core that would take us to the beginnings of the universe.

“I’ve built a life around a couple of hours in a room with an unkind stranger,” Shoe Man said. “Jakub, it took me too long to realize it. Your father did what he did to me, but the decision to live as I have—it was still mine. For me, the catalyst was this room. For your father, the catalyst was the day he decided the world was full of his enemies. For you, the catalyst doesn’t need to be anger or fear or some feeling of loss. The significance of your life doesn’t rest with Lenka, or your father, or me. I’ve done heinous things, yes. I’ve watched you, asserted myself into your affairs, but the choices—those were all yours. You’re so much better than your father and I. You won’t let this cripple you. It doesn’t have to end for you like it ended for us.”

Shoe Man remained kneeling at my feet, and I saw that the man who’d walked into my grandparents’ house with a backpack had been gone for some time. The eyes looking at me from beneath these gray brows were dead, like windows leading into a deep, starless night; his limbs and features sagged—victims to both gravity and his lifetime of money.

“Now that you’ve been caught,” I said, “you feel sorry for yourself.”

“I wish it was as simple as that. Being in a room with you now, I’ve ceased even to wonder about my punishment. It seems clear. You are freed of imprisonment and I will face mine.”

“Now you’re a philosopher.”

“We understand each other, Jakub. You know it too.”

“A flash of the old life.”

“A flash of the old life.”

“I miss it. The flow of the river through Středa. It would carry me to the village limits and I would swim against the current to shore. I never wanted to leave there, not for a second.”

“I had a home like that too,” he said. “They took it.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do now,” I said. “She’s gone. I returned for her but I couldn’t bring myself to face her. I know I should chase after her, but I can’t. There’s a life for her outside all of this. Without me.”

“And for you too. There is something you could do, Jakub.”

“You’re advising me.”

“I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

“No. Advise me, Shoe Man.”

“Shoe Man? Is that what you call me?”

“All my life.”

“The house is still there, you know,” he said. “And it belongs to you. I always kind of knew that you’d come back for it.”

Still kneeling, Zajíc pulled a pair of keys out of his pocket. The originals, the same ones that had once rested inside my grandmother’s purse. The same ones she had used to lock the house after she ensured that my grandfather and I were safely in our beds.

He rested them on my palm. Much lighter now than when I was a child.

“I’ve gone so far, and back,” I said.

“I have too. Why live otherwise.”

“I hope you’ll take the punishment. Go to jail. Do what ought to be done.”

“I can’t promise it, Jakub. The one thing you and I have in common—we love being alive too much to get in line for what’s coming.”

Both of us noticed at the same time that my laces had come untied inside the iron shoe. Zajíc held them, one in each hand. He stopped and stared out the window, his cheeks ruddy, thought finally catching up with instinct, but he was already committed, and so he tied my shoelaces into a neat bow. The cloth of my trousers had ridden up a few inches, revealing a small part of the scar on my calf. Zajíc froze, rolled the cloth up just a bit more.

“Mine has faded,” he said. “You can no longer see the numbers. Just a single white line cutting across.”

When he stood up, he seemed old—ancient and small—subject to the crushing weight of conscience. The finely fitting suit, the reflective surface of his leather shoes, the diminishing gray hair—none of it could fool me any longer about the true state of his being. Zajíc was not a menace. He was a man displaced and looking for a new purpose.

Radislav Zajíc checked his watch and walked toward the door. He turned halfway, without looking at me.

“You haven’t asked what is in the green folder,” he said.

“Well?”

“It’s my poetry against the regime. I did write it, you know. Only as a joke, a dare of sorts, to impress someone I don’t remember anymore. But then my fellow pupils took it seriously, and spread it around. Suddenly I was a published revolutionary. You see. The slightest gesture makes up our history. And so I met your father. And so I met you.”

He left. The sound of his steps, larger than life, lingered for minutes, until at last the front door, eight stories down, thundered shut and I was alone with the afternoon sun. The rusting shoe defiantly eyed me with its mouth agape, as if in shock at being so suddenly abandoned by its loyal keeper. I picked it up and, once again, like so many years before, I considered whether any part of it still held genetic leftovers of my father, physical evidence of the encounter that had defined my family’s fate.

I cast the thing out the open window facing the courtyard, and it screeched hideously along the stone walls until it too faced the inevitability of being forgotten, its pieces split apart, guts disemboweled along the grass and dirt, the shoe finally drained of evil and rid of purpose. A fat pigeon hopped around with its brothers, searching for parts to satiate their instinctual greed. Finding nothing, the birds arose, bound to scavenge in greener pastures, but the fat one, which I imagined to be the flock leader, performed an elegant pirouette against the iron shoe’s corpse, and, as it soared away, dropped thick, cream-white phlegm, the liquid forming a petite dumpling that splattered with crude efficiency all along the metal scraps.

For a moment, the leap looked soothing. I could jump after the iron shoe and my aches would split apart like the shoe. No more thoughts of Lenka, no more knee pain, but the body must not be violated. The body was the most important thing, carrying within it the code to the universe, a part of a larger secret that was significant even if it was never to be revealed. If the body mattered to Hanuš, it mattered to me, and I would worship it as he had. I would never cause the body harm.

Pleased in some vulgar fashion over the shoe’s undignified demise, I walked back to Charles Square. Around me, Prague crooned: bike messengers darting along important routes; troopers of business big and small marching with those shining loafers and heels, one two, one two; children with colorful backpacks skipping their way home from the wisdom and enlightenment of institutions (and what disappointment awaited them!) to the safety of their homes. It was exhilarating, all of it—was existence alone not revolution? Our efforts to establish routines in the nature that forbade them, to understand depths we could never reach, to declare truths even as we collectively snicker at the word’s virginal piousness. What a mess of contradictions the gods created when they graced us with self-awareness. Without it, we could run around the woods like wild boars, dig in the dirt with our snouts to find worms, bugs, seeds, nuts. During breeding season, we could howl like wolves in December, alpha females pawing at the backs and ears of alpha males. We could mate for weeks and then toss aside the burdens of sex for the rest of the year. After this, we could hoard food in underground foxholes and sleep, sleep through Leden, Únor, Březen, Duben, no have to go to the office grocery shopping oh God is that person looking at me do I have something on my face my shoes are falling apart is North Korea threatening us again my back pains have returned do any massage parlors actually provide handjobs and are they open to servicing women otherwise that is sexism and I’ve had a stomachache for three years now, should I get it checked out but it is fear and stress and what will the doctor prescribe? There, in our underground paradise, shying away from God’s sun and his fucked-up curse of Eden, the cocktease heaven that never comes, we could be like Hanuš and his race, the floating connoisseurs who do not know fear despite the looming threat of Gorompeds.

Alas, we are what we are, and we need the stories, we need the public transportation, the anxiety meds, the television shows by the dozens, the music in bars and restaurants saving us from the terror of silence, the everlasting promise of brown liquor, the bathrooms in national parks, and the political catchphrases we can all shout and stick to our bumpers. We need revolutions. We need anger. How many times will the Old Town of Prague host the people who’ve been slighted bellowing for a change? And are the people truly speaking to the charlatans of Politik, calling to the bone and flesh of their leaders, or is this a disguised plea to the heavens? For fuck’s sake, either give us a hint or let us perish altogether.

I was not a part of the revolution. I was a slogan left on the side of an abandoned building, a mum witness to changes in weather patterns, moods. I was the statue of Jan Hus, with his sharply sculpted cheeks covered in a finely trimmed beard, his spine straight like a king’s and not like a scholar hunched over his books, quietly observing Prague with turmoil in his heart and peace in his soul, both of which conspired to get him killed. I was the work of Hanuš, the ticking timekeeper of the universe, a jester performing his trick dance again and again to fresh hordes of eager visitors. I was the lion of Bohemia drawn within the crest, the dark eagle of Moravia, the crown jewels resting in a display case inside the castle. I was organic matter transformed into a symbol. My existence would forever be a silent statement.

As I passed Old Town, the protesters gathered by the hundreds, loitering around the statue of Saint Wenceslas upon his horse, holding signs condemning Tůma and Zajíc, condemning all men of power sitting in rooms and designing the future of the world, chanting against systems, chanting for change, chanting for hope, and it was still early in the day and I wished that by nighttime the crowd would grow into the thousands, like in the days of the Velvet Revolution, when our nation was so alive that its outcry thundered across the globe, breaking free of the greed and exploitation of men who’d lost themselves. Every single one of these bodies who’d decided to cast aside the ceaseless distractions, who’d decided to put on shoes and take a sign and march around the cobblestones of the nation instead of watching a bit of television, was a single act of revolution, a single particle within the explosion of the Big Bang. I felt confident in leaving the fate of this world in their hands.

I left the revolution behind me. The way horse hooves echo on the cube bricks of the main square. The way languages sing together over beer and coffee with whipped cream. The shivering visitors of the winter markets, their gloves soaked with grog spilling over the edge of a flimsy cup. The excited shouts of boys about to try absinthe ice cream. The bringers of change, actors in their own destinies. Those who love Prague, have always loved Prague, those who stroll every weekend around the same street and project holograms of history onto its physical reality. Those who dream. Those who lean on the statue of Christ crucified and kiss and grope each other with the hunger of dying beasts. Those who hope to die by jumping into the River Vltava, and fail. Those who use the free subway newspaper to wipe the sweat off their brows inside the sweltering train. The massive history, this metropolis of kings, of dictators, of book burning, of bloodstained tanks standing still in indecision. Through it all the city is here, its pleasures small and large cast upon the daily walkers rushing to offices and shops to participate in their habitual existence. They will not quit. God, they’ll never quit, and though I had to leave them, I loved them all the way to hell and back, through peace and through turmoil.

Even the Sun Burns

I RETURNED TO STRŘEDA, the village of my ancestors.

The houses that used to thrive had been scarred by winters, their walls cracking open and rooftops sagging. The old distillery was boarded up, gagged, sprayed over with the bawdy truths of graffiti. As the motorcycle engine sliced through the disturbing serenity of the main road, curtains behind windows opened, eyes on the intruder—a man coming home, perhaps, but they had no idea where he’d been. The old convenience store was shuttered and a few houses away a brand-new Hodovna supermarket stood out like an empty plastic bottle in a field of daisies. Ahead, the sky was morose and sable, and the sour smell of an impending rain shower crawled underneath my helmet. The scar on my leg itched, and I could not scratch it.

Half the gate of my home had collapsed and rotted through, a spongy mess of black bugs and dirt. The other half stood tall, faded brown, a welcome memory of my grandfather coughing and cursing as he painted over the judgments cast upon us by our countrymen. I let the Ducati fall into the dirt and stepped over the ruins, into a field of tall grass covering every inch of the front yard, including the sandbox and a tub of green still water. The walls of the house were cloaked in vines and the front doormat was topped with a generous pile of dried cat shit.

The backyard. Feathers and brittle, dull bones of chickens were scattered in the mud. No flesh, no skin, all eaten away by the elements and by felines. Inside the rabbit cages, bits of fur stuck to the ceiling. The coney skeletons recalled Sunday afternoon feasts, haunches and loins slowly roasted with bacon and paprika, with Grandma presiding over the crockpot and muttering to herself, Almost, almost there. Everywhere lay engorged worms, dead gluttons that had reached nirvana, having stuffed themselves with game until they burst and dried out. Mixed with the mud, the remains of the farm had become mush, a porridge that pulled on my shoes like quicksand. The strings on which my grandfather had suspended the rabbits after execution swung in the breeze. I looked closely, marveled at the resilience of the simple material through storms and scorching summers. It had wanted to remain as much as the vestiges of things that used to be alive. The outhouse smelled of nothing at all—the pounds of excrement underneath it had long ago become soil, and perhaps the outhouse could be taken down and the few square meters it occupied turned into a strawberry field. I wished for a cigarette. The piercing smell of my grandfather’s tobacco smoke hit me, as if he were right there puttering around, working and cutting, presiding over his own piece of the world.

The garden. A mess of groundhog piles and dirt bike tracks—the local youth had found a good place to blow off some steam. The apple tree had been ripped out of the earth and was covering the potato patch, just as my grandmother had always predicted during storms—Someday that damned tree will ruin our entire harvest—the claw of its root menacingly curled toward the skies. Names and hearts were carved into the bark. I was not angry. The space was here. It existed without a claimant. It belonged to these vandals as much as to me.

I stomped in this graveyard, crunched it underneath my boots. I’ll rent it to some nice Prague folks, Shoe Man had promised once. And then he’d left it all to die.

I inserted the house key into the lock before realizing that the front door was open. Scratches around the handle suggested many attempts at picking the lock before the intruders had succeeded. I entered to a smell of mildew. Thick layers of mold had colonized sections of the carpet like hair on an old man’s back. It had seeped through the walls too—stains of it had metastasized wherever the rain had managed to circumvent the decrepit structure, wherever the drunken vandals had chosen to piss.

I left the hall and stepped into the living room. With blood thumping into my fingertips, I stumbled toward the kitchen counter, my eyes open wide and searching for ghosts. The faint haze of leftover cigarette smoke thickened the room’s ozone; the smell of tobacco overpowered even the musk of fungi. Where was he, the shape of my grandfather, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspapers well into his death? Was his passing a lie too? But this doubt dissolved as soon as I spotted the Monument of the Vandals. Where the living room table had once rested now stood a pyramid, nearly as tall as I was, composed of beer bottles at the base, on top of which rested pounds upon pounds of cigarette butts, all burned to their very nubs, all Camels, the brand my grandfather despised. The squatters had left the monument as a reeking flag of their presence, much like the first men on the moon, a statement of ownership of this forgotten land, this house of no one.

What did my arrival mean to their conquest? Did it erase their authority, or was I the squatter, my presence nothing but a haunting in need of exorcism?

I kicked the pyramid. It fell apart, spilling forth like the gushing blood of a pig. The stink of stale tobacco and saliva put me on the verge of retching, and I retreated into the hall to embrace the much more pleasant aroma of withering. I chose to ignore the bathroom and pantry for now—no good things could await there.

Then there were the bedrooms. In the room that had been mine was a single bed littered with rags stained with semen and blood, and spent condoms dry and shriveled. I pulled the rags off. And there, on the mattress beneath, were the two small stains from my boyhood nosebleeds, along with a bigger, darker blotch from the feverish, salty sweat of my back. This was my bed. The small form of my child self was imprinted on the fabric like a postnuclear shadow. The bed had been gnawed on by mice and burned with lighters, but it was unmistakably mine, surrounded still by collapsed shelves holding my grandmother’s history books, also marked by rodents. I sat down on the mattress, not at all concerned whether the juices of teen carnage had seeped onto it through the rags.

Above me, a giant hole in the ceiling and roof provided a direct view of the clouded heavens. The cave-in must have happened a long time ago, as there was no sign of rubble.

From underneath the pile of half-eaten books emerged a daddy longlegs, its torso fat and dragging on the floor—so rich was the house with insects for it to feast on. It made its way toward me without any hesitance, then stopped a few feet away from the bed. I felt its eyes upon me. I felt at home.

“Is it you?” I asked the spider.

It didn’t move.

“Lift a leg if it’s you.”

Nothing. But it was there, its gaze upon me consistent. Interested.

“Stick around,” I pleaded. “I’ll be back. You stay.”

I walked outside, leaned the Ducati against the cracked wall of the house. I had no knowledge of what time it was—it seemed that it was still early in the day, a good time for the errands ahead, but with the village streets so empty, I couldn’t be sure. I followed the main road, no longer comforted by the hallucinogenic speed of an engine. Gravity reached from beneath the concrete and clawed at my ankles, keeping me slow but steady.

An old woman whose face I didn’t recognize waved at me from a bench in front of her house. She puffed on a pipe, pulled her skirt up to expose legs colored with black-and-blue veins. How soothing the winds flowing from the east must be to the pain of aging. I waved back, asked after the time.

“Haven’t owned a watch in thirteen years,” she responded, toothless.

I made my way to the new market. In my basket, I collected potato chips, bacon, eggs, milk, brownie ice cream, deodorant, a loaf of fresh sourdough, smoked mackerel, two jelly doughnuts, lard, a cooking pan, and a jar of Nutella. The stuff of Earth. I held a newspaper in my hand before putting it back on the shelf. Too much.

With my filled plastic bags, I circled around the market and down the gravel path next to the closed distillery. I reached what we the children of the village used to call the Riviera, a beach of rough sand and grass patches flanking the river. The currents ran wild and deep as they reached past the distillery, and there we used to hold on to the thick wooden poles hammered into the river’s mud that emerged above the surface. The water would wash over our shoulders, and we’d play to see who could hold on the longest before the current loosened their grip and took them away around the bend. I’d almost always won.

It was obvious the Riviera hadn’t seen swimmers in a while. Half-buried newspapers and plastic bottles peeked from the sand. A black snake slithered from the bushes and vanished underneath the water’s surface. I considered taking my clothes off and following its example, but the water would be too cold for at least another couple of months. Setting the bags down, I rolled up my pants just below my knees and entered, shivering momentarily as my skin touched the ice-cold river. I stood there until the feeling of cold dissipated and the mud beneath my toes became warm. Everything had changed except for the water. Whenever I got in its way, it simply poured around me and continued on. It welcomed me for a swim and cared not when I left again. Even its attempt on my childhood life had been without evil intent. So close I’d been to my life ending early, to perishing here and never knowing Lenka, or Hanuš, to never seeing the golden continents of Earth from above. But again and again I had come to the shore, clawed myself onto it, and lived.

I left the Riviera’s desolation behind and walked to Boud’a’s house on the main road. The door was shuttered, the windows broken, the front garden that had formerly been so meticulously kept by Boud’a’s mother now filled in by concrete. Leaning against the side of the house were four planks of wood covered by plastic. I looked around the empty main road, then threw the planks over my shoulder. I studied the door a bit longer, hoping an old friend might still emerge, another human who might recognize my face.

On my way back, I asked the old woman without a watch about the fate of Boud’a’s family. They had fled to the city, she said, as most people had, fled to the city for jobs and for supermarkets the size of circus tents, where you could choose between tomatoes from Italy and tomatoes from Spain. I stopped myself from asking if she knew what Boud’a was now doing with his life, fearing the answer could be something like banking. I imagined instead that Boud’a had stuck to his desire to own a restaurant that served mussel pizza. He’d eaten mussel pizza in Greece once, and after that, all he wanted was to grow up and make the best mussel pizza on Earth. The old woman asked if I needed anything else, and I waved good-bye.

I returned to the house and carried the planks inside, in case of rain, then went to the bedroom to check on the spider. It was gone. In the kitchen, I chopped up one of the planks and filled the stove. As the fire grew, I spread lard along the new pan and laid out eight slices of bacon. Within ten minutes, the odor of cigarette butts had been dominated by pure animal. Saliva dripped from the corners of my mouth—I could not contain it. The plan was to cook up some eggs too, but I couldn’t wait to eat as I cleaned the small pan for another round. I ripped a hunk of bread from the loaf and separated the soft middle from the crust. Over the middle, I cracked a raw egg. I stuffed the bacon inside the crust. I fell upon the improvised sandwich like a beast, tasting blood from my gums as it seeped into the food, but I chewed with greed, without a concern for dignity, with the carnal pleasure of an unsupervised animal. I lost track of time. As I finished, the sun, concealed by clouds to begin with, crept somewhere behind the horizon.

The shed still held all of its tools—rusty, sure, with some of the wooden handles having rotted, but in the fading light I found a hammer and nails, some of which still seemed factory fresh. I dragged the ladder from the shed, checked each step for damage. So much of my grandfather’s kingdom had been preserved here—with some additional tools, I could again convert the shed into a powerhouse factory. Make a new table, new bookshelves, encase the single bed with a fresh wooden frame. I could rip out the molding carpets and bathroom tile, smash the piss-soaked walls, replace electrical cables, install indoor plumbing. I did not lack time. I did not lack patience. I would remove every organ, haul it to the garbage dump by the ton. I would be an artist restoring his own painting—rejuvenating colors I had once known to be radiant. I would be the plastic surgeon of history. Retain the ghosts and refresh their facade.

Yes, I could do it. It could be my life. Jan Hus had died for country and lived for himself. If only he could live in our age, become my phantom brother. We would attend Dr. Bivoj’s village festivals of small pleasures, drink the tainted hooch. We would visit Petr and learn to play the guitar. Hus would tell me of his widow and I would tell him of my Lenka, what used to be.

I walked out of the shed, tools in hand, and looked over the reclaimed backyard. Here again, animals would roam. I could raise a Louda, scout the Internet for a flintlock pistol to employ in executions. I could scythe the fields of grass behind the village every morning, carry piles of it on my back, allow it to dry beneath noon sunshine, and feed it to rabbits. I could obtain chickens for the harvest of yolk and the carnal sincerity of their nature. Small dinosaurs. I could keep a few guinea pigs, perhaps a ferret. Creatures of routine to look after.

And the garden beyond? I would resow every crop. I would grow my grandfather’s carrots, potatoes, peas. My grandmother’s strawberries, tomatoes, celery. After caring for the animals, I would pull on my galoshes and get ahold of the shovel. Whistle songs of the past as I tended my earth.

Yes. This life awaited. I saw children’s feet marking the fall mud in the backyard. My daughters and sons picking their first tomatoes off the vine. The children of my children digging for potatoes when my knees were too old for bending. And there was Lenka, silver-haired, watching the bursting life grow around us. Somehow I’d gotten her back. Somehow we’d found each other again.

For a moment, Lenka’s face transformed into the face of Klara. Her hair so thick I couldn’t stop running my hands through it. She had never died, she’d run away with me and we’d become phantom lovers.

In this future, we were free of systems. Other humans went on to become symbols, sacrificed their lives to serve. Other humans handled the torture, the coups, the healing. We simply sowed, harvested, and drank a bit before dinner. No one tried to take what was ours. We had too little. We were invisible, and in this slower life we were our own gods.

Yes, there were things left in this world. I had traveled through Space, I had seen truths unparalleled, but still, in this Earthly life, I had barely seen anything at all. Something rests in the mortal soul, hungry to feel anything and everything in its own boundless depths. As boundless and ever-expanding as the universe itself.

Back inside the house, I pushed the bed to the wall, where it used to rest when I was a child, and leaned the ladder against the interior wooden frame of the roof. I climbed, and I set each plank against the frame, nailing them in until I had finished the first layer. As I worked, the night map of the universe above was startlingly clear, as if once again trying to lure me. It looked exactly the same as it had on the day my grandfather and I sat by a fire and spoke of revolutions. The purple glow of Chopra still remained, though it was weakening, collapsing in on itself and saying its last good-bye to the Earthlings dying to know its secrets. I appreciated this gesture, yet I could not bring myself to leave even the smallest gap between the planks to stargaze. I needed the intimacy of an enclosed house. A structure to trap me.

The patch created a nearly perfect darkness. I slowly made my way down the ladder, lit a match, and held it over a candlewick. The silence infiltrated my muscles and spread their fibers apart, inducing soreness and serene warmth. The only force present was a small flame. I had built a dam to deter the murmur of the cosmos.

From the kitchen pantry, I retrieved the jar of Nutella. I lay on the bed, opened it, and scooped some out with my fingers. Spread it along my tongue.

The darkness overtook me. I woke up sometime later to the faintest tapping on my skin. On my forearm rested the daddy longlegs.

“Is it you?” I asked.

I smeared some Nutella on my wrist, right next to the arachnid. Taste. You loved it.

No movement. Its fat belly remained lodged on my forearm hairs.

“Are you still afraid?” I said.

The weight is nice. What would the world be without it. Nothing but fear and air. Yes, the weight is nice.

Is it you?

Because it is me. I can promise you, I am here.

It is me. The spaceman.