“Too soon to tell,” my mother says.
“So many people, Markéta. The Party wanted to send the militia out to disperse them, but Moscow said no. You know what that means? It means we’re not fighting. The Red Army isn’t behind us anymore. We’re done. We should stay in the village, safe from the mobs.”
I go back outside to see Grandpa, who places a wheelbarrow in the middle of the yard. He loads it with dry logs and uses them to make a small fire. The dirt underneath our feet is soggy with organ blood. We slice bread and toast it to go with dinner as the sun sets.
“I wish Dad would talk to me,” I say.
“The last time I saw this expression on his face was when he was a kid and a dog bit his hand.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Don’t tell your father, Jakub, but this is not bad.”
“So the Party will lose?”
“It’s time for the Party to leave. Time for something new.”
“But then we will be imperialists?”
He laughs. “I suppose so.”
Above the trees lining our gate, a clear horizon of stars blankets our view, so much clearer when not obscured by Prague’s street lamps. Grandpa hands me a slice of bread with a burnt edge, and I accept it between my lips, feeling like a man on television. People on television eat slowly when faced with a new reality. Perhaps it is here that a pocket of new energy bursts through the firm walls of physics and singles out a life so unlikely. Perhaps here I lose the hope for an ordinary Earthling life. I finish the bread. It is time to go inside and hear my father’s silence.
“Twenty years from now, you will call yourself a child of the revolution,” Grandpa says as he turns his back to me and urinates into the fire.
As is usually the case, he is right. What he doesn’t tell me then, perhaps out of love, perhaps out of a painful naïveté, is that I am a child of the losing side.
OR PERHAPS NOT. Despite the discomfort of my spaceman’s throne, despite the fear, I was prepared. I served science, but I felt more like a daredevil on his dirt bike, overlooking the powerful gap of the world’s greatest canyon, praying to all gods in all languages before making the leap for death, glory, or both. I served science, not the memory of a father whose idea of the world had crumbled over the Velvet Winter; not the memory of pig’s blood upon my shoes. I would not fail.
I slapped the Tatranky crumbs from my lap. The Earth was black and golden, its lights spreading across the continents like never-ceasing pebbles of mitosis, pausing abruptly to give reign to the uncontested dominion of dark oceans. The world had dimmed and the crumbs began to float. I had ascended the phenomenon we call Earth.
The Spaceman’s World
WAKING TO THE OCCASION of my thirteenth week in Space, I unstrapped myself from the Womb and stretched, wishing I had curtains to spread or bacon to fry. I floated through Corridor 2 and squeezed a pea of green paste onto my blue toothbrush, courtesy of SuperZub, a major distributor of dental supplies and mission sponsor. As I brushed, I ripped the plastic off yet another disposable towel, courtesy of Hodovna, a major chain of grocery megastores and mission sponsor. I spit into the towel and looked closely at my gums, pink as a freshly scrubbed toddler, and the bleached molars, a result of my country’s top dental artistry and a meticulous oral hygiene routine aboard the ship. Though I had resolved that I would no longer do so, I felt with my tongue around one of the molars, and a familiar pain intensified. Despite the high marks I had received from my dentists before takeoff, this tingling of decay appeared during my first week in Space, and I had kept it secret ever since. I was not trained for tooth extraction, and where could I find a good Space dentist? Would he bring his own nitrous oxide, or would he gather it from Earth’s polluted atmosphere? I grinned to myself but refused to laugh. Never laugh out loud at your own jokes, Dr. Kuřák had advised. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating mind.
Perhaps the most jarring part of the mission was how quickly I’d adjusted to the routines. My first week in Space had been an exercise in uninterrupted expectation, as if I were sitting in an empty movie theater, waiting for the hum of a projector to light up a screen and chase away all thought. The lightness of my bones, the functions of my machines, the creaks and thuds of the ship as if I had upstairs neighbors, they all seemed exciting, worthy of wonder. But during week two, the desire for something new was already setting in, and the act of spitting toothpaste into a disposable towel instead of an earthly sink lost its novelty. By week thirteen, I had forever abandoned the cliché of treasuring journey over destination, and in the daily tedium I found two methods of comfort: the thought of reaching the dust cloud to harvest its onerous fruits, and speaking to Lenka, her voice a reassurance that I still had an Earth to come back to.
I floated on through Corridor 3, unfastened the pantry door, and slathered a chunk of Nutella on a white pita. I flipped it up and watched it quiver through the air, like a pizza maestro spinning his dough. Food was my silent co-conspirator on this flight away from home, an acknowledgment of sustenance and thus the rejection of death. The ship burned its fuel and I burned mine, the chocolate-flavored protein blocks and the dehydrated chicken cubes and oranges, sweet and juicy inside the freezer. Times had changed since astronauts relied on a diet of powders as rich and enjoyable as expired packets of Tang.
As I ate, I knocked on the dead-eyed lens of the sleek surveillance camera provided by Cotol, major manufacturer of electronics and mission sponsor. One of the dozen broken cameras on the ship, failing one by one as the mission went along, causing the company embarrassment and heavy losses in the stock market. No one could figure out what had gone wrong with the devices—the company even put three of their best engineers on a conference call to guide me through a repair process, broadcasting the video feed online in hopes of reestablishing their brand. No luck. Of course, I did not disclose the presence of insistent scratching that resonated throughout the ship whenever one of the cameras went offline, skittering away quickly as I approached from beneath the corner. Such hallucinatory sounds were to be expected, Dr. Kuřák claimed before the mission, because sound is a presence of something earthly, a comfort. No need to chase ghosts. Besides, I did not mind that the cameras no longer observed my every step—I could enjoy violations of my strict nutritional guidelines with sweets and alcohol, I could skip workouts, I could move my bowels and enjoy onanism without worrying about my guard dogs watching. There was great pleasure in being unseen, and perhaps it was best that the world’s collective imagination was teased by the denial of a 24/7 video feed of their Spaceman in sweatpants.
The day ahead was to be a pleasant one. After finishing a few usual menial tasks—testing Ferda, the cosmic dust collector and the tech star of my mission; engaging in a halfhearted cardio session; and running diagnostics on my oxygen water tank—I was to have a few hours of peace and reading before dressing myself for a video call with my wife. Afterward, I was to enjoy a glass of whiskey to celebrate being only four weeks away from my destination, cloud Chopra, the gassy giant that had altered Earth’s night skies and escaped our attempts to study it. After penetrating the cloud, I was to gather samples with the help of Ferda, the most sophisticated piece of Space engineering to ever come from Central Europe, and study them inside my custom-designed lab on my way back to Earth. This was the reason the Space Program of the Czech Republic had recruited me, a tenured professor of astrophysics and accomplished researcher of space dust at Univerzita Karlova. They had trained me for spaceflight, basic aerospace engineering, and suppression of nausea in zero gravity. They asked if I would take the mission even if there was a chance of no return. I accepted.
Thoughts of death visited me only as I fell asleep. They came as a slight chill underneath the fingernails, and left when I lost consciousness. I did not dream.
I wasn’t sure whether I was more anxious about reaching the mysteries of Chopra or about the upcoming conversation with Lenka. Conducting an Earth/Space marriage through these weekly vid
eo feeds felt like watching an infection claim healthy flesh inch by inch while making plans for next summer. After these thirteen weeks, I noticed that there was a steady rhythm to human longing.
Monday, raw stage: God, babe, I miss you. I dream of your morning breath on my wrists.
Tuesday, reflective nostalgia: Remember when the Croatians stopped us at the border and tried to confiscate our schnitzel sandwiches? You unwrapped one and started eating it, shouted at me to eat too, shouted that we would eat them all before crossing and show those fascists what’s what. I knew I’d marry you then.
Wednesday, denial: If only I wish it just right, I’ll be back in our bedroom.
Thursday, sexual frustration and passive aggression: Why aren’t you here? What is it you do with your days as I spit into a blue towel—courtesy of Hodovna, mission sponsor—and count the hours separating me from gravity?
Friday, slight insanity and composition of songs: A scratch you can’t itch. A scratch you can’t itch. Love is that scratch you can’t itch. Scratch you can’t itch, oh oh.
During the first few weeks of my deployment, Lenka and I would overstep the conversation limit of one hour and thirty minutes allotted by the space program. Lenka would close the dark blue privacy curtain and take her dress off. The first time, she wore brand-new lingerie she had just picked up that morning, black lace underwear and a black bra with pink edges. The second time, she wore nothing at all, her body clothed only in the gentle blue hue reflecting along her skin. Petr, the mission operator, allowed us to take as much time as we needed. There wasn’t much logic to the limitations, anyway—I could chat with Lenka all day long and the automatic trajectory of the shuttle would go on uninterrupted. But the world needed this narrative, Mr. and Mrs. Spaceman’s tragic separation. What kind of hero gets to chat on the phone?
During the past few calls, however, I had become thankful for the time limits. Lenka would grow desperately quiet before our first hour had expired. She would speak softly and call me by my first name, instead of the variety of pet names we had devised over the years. There was no discussion of nudity or physical longing. We did not whisper our wet dreams. Lenka scratched the edge of her right ear as if she was having an allergic reaction, and didn’t laugh at any of my jokes. Always tell jokes to an audience, never to yourself, Dr. Kuřák had advised. Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness. Good advice, though difficult to practice in a vacuum. Lenka was the only audience I cared about. The emptiness of Space could not match the despair I felt when her laughter gave way to static silences.
Searching for the source of this decay, I’d been obsessing over my last night and morning on Earth with Lenka as I performed the menial tasks aboard JanHus1. I tested filtering systems, looking to squash any bacteria that might mutate unpredictably within the cosmic conditions and infect me with a vengeance unknown on Earth. I studied data to ensure the smooth recycling of oxygen (provided by a tank of water I often wished to dip myself into, like a careless vacationer plunging his body into the sea of a sunnier country), and I recorded the depletion of supplies. Around me, the shuttle hummed and cooed in its droning baritone, unaware, carrying me to our joint destination without asking for advice. I checked needlessly for deviations from the trajectory—the computer was a better explorer than I could ever be. If Christopher Columbus, that celebrated phony, had possessed a GPS as sophisticated as mine, he could have reached any continent he desired with wine in hand and feet elevated. Clearly, the thirteen weeks of the mission had offered much spare time to obsess over my marriage.
Three days before my deployment, Lenka and I had gone to Kuratsu, a favorite Japanese restaurant of ours in the Vinohrady district. She had worn a summer dress with yellow dandelions and a new kind of perfume, the scent of cinnamon and oranges soaked in red wine. I wanted to crawl under the table and nuzzle my face in her lap. She said that my sacrifice was noble and poetic, fitting these abstractions between powerful chews of her tuna tartare. Our lives were to become a symbol. I squeezed lime over my noodles and nodded at her words. Her voice spoiled the ecstasy of my cosmic exploration—I wasn’t sure whether the entirety of the universe was worth leaving her behind, with her morning rituals and her perfumes and her violent outbursts of panic in the middle of the night. Who would wake her to say that she was okay, that the world was still whole? A camera flash blinded us. The spices burned along the edges of my tongue and for the first time, I did not know what to tell my wife. I dropped the fork. I apologized to her.
“Sorry,” was how I put it. Just like that, a single word thrown in her general direction. It echoed through my mind afterward. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She stopped eating too. Her neck was slender and her lips so ambitiously red. This wasn’t my sacrifice—it was ours. She was allowing me to go. She who had napped on my shoulder while I pored over astrophysics textbooks and tests from my students. She who had ecstatically dropped her cell phone into a fountain when I told her I had been selected for the mission. Mortality was not discussed, only the opportunity, the honor. She did not comment on the negative pregnancy tests filling our wastebasket while I spent my days getting used to the lack of gravity in the SPCR training pool, coming home with muscles cramped and speech reduced to “Hungry, sleep.”
I never found out whether she accepted my apology. We picked up our forks again and finished our meal to the silent company of onlookers’ cameras collecting our likenesses. We kissed and drank sake and spoke of traveling to Miami after my return. Finally, we took our own picture of this last dinner on Earth, and posted it on Facebook. Forty-seven thousand likes in the first hour.
As soon as we arrived home that night, I loosened my tie and retched. The antinausea medications had worn off with the alcohol at dinner, and my body had returned to its natural state of revolt against the strains of training for spaceflight, fighting lack of gravity with ceaseless vomiting. While I dry-heaved over the toilet, my gut hollowed out, Lenka ran her fingers through my hair. I told her we needed to give it another try, right then, if she could only wait for me to brush my rancid teeth. She said it was okay. I knew it wasn’t. She waited in bed while I washed myself off, and with shaking arms I crawled on top of the bed and slid my tongue along her collarbone. She arched her back, grabbed at my hair, pushed herself toward me while I rubbed my palm along my flaccid cock. We caressed and twisted and sighed and in the end she gently pushed on my chest and said I needed sleep. I was sure the timing was perfect, maybe destined—husband and wife conceive; husband leaves for Space and discovers great things; husband returns to Earth with a month to spare to become a father. Lenka put lotion on her arms and said we’d get it right after I came back, without a doubt. See the doctor again. Solve the problem. I believed her.
The night’s disappointment wasn’t my main concern. It was the violation of a ritual I committed during my last morning with Lenka. When I was still an Earthman, I didn’t have much use for morning rituals. Why should one spend time staring out the window, sipping lip-burning liquids and cooking feasts on hot surfaces when the world outside was so fresh and ripe for the taking? But my wife loved these mornings. She wore a robe (why not get dressed?), made eggs, bacon, rolls, and tea (why not buy a doughnut and a cup o’ black before getting on the metro?), and talked about our hopes for the day (as long as we are not dead or bankrupt, three cheers) while I played along. But why shouldn’t I have allowed myself to be tied to this slice of domestic sentiment, to relax my thigh muscles and help scramble the eggs, to take occasional glances at her slim ankles as she danced through our home in her daily festival? Lenka fried up thick slices of bacon, not prepackaged but obtained from the corner butcher, the slabs still stinking of living beast. She presented them to me as an offering, a coercion into her leisurely morning attitude, knowing my ache to move, my eagerness to wrestle the world. She knew this was her power, slowing the pace of our living to a soothing dance, regulating my heartbeat through her touch
, her voice, her curves. Through pork grease spilling across porcelain. This was one of the many clauses in our contract, this bacon and grace exchanged for my compliance, and never once did I violate it. Until the last Earth breakfast with my wife.
I woke up that morning with the familiar nausea from the antigravity dive training, popped a few acetaminophens, and walked into the kitchen to find breakfast already waiting on the table. Lenka sipped from an oversized mug and cradled a laptop on her thighs, building a budget presentation. She closed it when I entered.
“It’s getting cold,” she said.
“Not today,” I said.
“What?” She crossed her arms.
“I don’t want it today. Not hungry.”
She opened up her laptop again, wordlessly, going against another contract of ours, a ban on screens whenever we sat over food together.
I sat and I drank some tea, pushing the plate away. I pulled up email on my phone, feeling no need to defend myself. I did not want to ritualize the morning that day. The way our lives were about to change, the pretense did not fit in. Perhaps I was too ill, or scared nearly to death, maybe unstable, but I broke a clause of our contract unpredictably and absolutely, a violation that never fully disappears from the record of life. After a few minutes, Lenka dumped my breakfast into the trash.
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 2
