Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

  “Skinny human, at this moment I am in great need of your attention,” the creature said.

  “Vanish.”

  “I am a scholar, or rather, an explorer, like the great Columbus of your people.”

  “Columbus wasn’t so great.”

  Speaking to the creature felt more appropriate while my face was concealed. I was only a man mumbling to himself under the blanket, a thing no less common than singing in the shower. So what if something spoke back?

  “What is it you’re exploring?” I asked.

  “I have been circling your orbit. Learning the secrets of humanry. For example, the commitment of dead flesh to the underground. I would like to bring such tales for the amusement and education of my tribe.”

  “I’ve really gone past the breaking point.”

  “The cardiovascular organ managing your biological functioning is setting off irregular vibrations—a bad sign, I think. I will leave you to rest, skinny human, but tell me, does the ship’s pantry have ova of the avian kind? I have heard great things, and I would delight in consuming them.”

  I shut my eyes aggressively. In the videos I had watched in training, a retired Chinese cosmonaut said that falling asleep on Earth was never the same after he returned. In Space, sleep is the natural state of being. Because the environment is unresponsive to human action—the vacuum has little patience for attempts at conquest—life becomes a specific trajectory of very basic tasks, aimed at bare survival. In Space, we submit reports, repair machinery, struggle with dirty underwear. There are no sexual interests, no work presentations to dread the next morning, no car accidents. The closer we are to the stars, the more controlled and boring our routines become. The old astronaut said that being in Space meant sleeping like a toddler once again. So unburdened, one was tempted to suck one’s thumb.

  But sleep would not come. I reached into an inside pocket of the Womb and removed a bottle of Sladké Sny, powerful sleeping drops developed by Laturma, major pharma manufacturer and mission sponsor. Their use was restricted to bouts of insomnia threatening to interrupt the astronaut’s lifestyle cycle—frequent use would lead to dizziness, confusion, and addiction. Since I was already suffering from the first two symptoms and couldn’t care less about the third, I took a triple dosage, spreading the bitter liquid along my tongue and swallowing with a brief choke. Within seconds, the tips of my fingers felt numb and my thoughts lost focus. As I hibernated, I could still sense it out there, a tension around my temples keeping tabs even when the creature could not see me. Though I blamed the awareness on the chemistry affecting my brain, it couldn’t be denied—for a moment just before my loss of consciousness, I was glad. Glad that the creature was with me, real or not, searching the kitchen for eggs.

  I AWOKE TO the darkness of the Womb, but I could not move a single limb. I was acutely aware of my spine, the snake of vertebrae holding me together, and I imagined what it would be like if someone peeled it off like a layer of string cheese, whether my bones would burst out of my flesh and the idea of self would collapse into a pile of perfectly unraveled parts. Did people with actual paralysis perceive their spines in the same way? I felt horror for them. The creature was strumming again, bringing about thoughts without my consent, but there was nothing I could do but take it, take it until the paralysis subsided and I would be, once again, protected by slumber.

  The creature found it. The moment that had propelled me upwards.

  Seven years into my marriage, I published my findings on particles within the rings of Saturn, the first tangible payoff for my lifelong obsession with cosmic dust. I toured Europe to lecture, and I was offered tenure at Univerzita Karlova for an assistant professorship in astrophysics. Four years into my somewhat satisfying tenure, Senator Tůma summoned me to his office to “make an offer.” I arrived in a black tie and a new sweater-vest, certain that the government intended to recognize my achievements with a grant or an award.

  Tůma was from the new generation of senators. While the old boys wore ill-fitting suits to disguise beer guts, combatted balding by wearing bigger eyeglasses, and blamed their public alcoholism on stress-related illness, Tůma was a dedicated vegetarian, a weight lifter, and a skilled rhetorician. The day the senator spoke to me was also the day he had first caught the attention of the media. Earlier that morning, the minister of the interior had been arrested for corruption and the coalition government had been attacked by the opposition for attempting to bury the scandal by buying off witnesses. Being a member of one of the coalition parties, Tůma made a statement on the stairs of Prague’s district court while pouring coal ashes over his own head. This was a vintage gesture, appealing to those Czechs who favored conventional wisdom over the uncertainty of progress, symbols over factual integrity. With the gray specks covering his shoulders, hair, and cheeks, Tůma declared that Czech politics had become those of individual interest, catering to whoremongers, greedy swine, and common thieves. Hand over heart, Tůma pledged to shake up the coalition from within. I did not much care for politics.

  Tůma entered the office and brushed the ashes off his suit with a handkerchief. His assistant brought him a wet towel and a can of diet cola. With his eyebrows still wet and his suit pale, he looked me over. I laughed at him when he told me that the country was building a space program. He laughed too, and poured me a bit of cola, asking whether I’d like rum or fernet in it. I declined.

  Tůma walked to a table by the office window, and tugged at a curtain covering something tall and slim. The cloth fell to the ground and there it was: three thick cylinders connected by flat panels, a dozen solar wings extending to the sides, a beautiful dark blue finish. The entire model resembled an insect one might expect to find in the era of the dinosaurs, when nature was at once more creative and more pragmatic. Emblazoned on the middle cylinder was the country’s flag—a blue triangle for truth, and two horizontal lines: red for strength and valor, white for peace—and next to it rested those words: JanHus1. I asked if I could touch it. Tůma nodded with a smile.

  “Surely we can’t afford this,” I said.

  But we could. Tůma named the long line of corporate partners willing to burn capital on mission sponsorship. He was to present the mission to the Parliament the following day. The Swiss were prepared to sell an unfinished spacecraft they no longer needed.

  “You want us to try to reach the Chopra cloud,” I said.

  “Of course I do.”

  “You want us to go first. Even if we might not come back.”

  “But Gregor made it back, and look how well he’s doing!”

  Tůma traced the edges of the cylinders with his finger, studying me as I took the spacecraft in. A child’s voice inside me encouraged me to pick it up, run outside the office, and find a quiet room in which I could admire it alone.

  Tůma sat back behind his desk and cleared his throat.

  “We pushed against the Austro-Hungarians when they tried to burn our books and ban our language. We were an industrial superpower before Hitler took us for serfs. We survived Hitler only to welcome the economic and intellectual devastation by the Soviets. And here we are, breathing, sovereign, rich. What next, Jakub? What is the vision for us, what will define us in the future?”

  “I heard that milk prices will be through the roof next year,” I said.

  “Ha, a skeptic! I love skeptics. They keep a democracy honest, but they don’t always think big. Think bigger. What makes a country great? Wealth, army, healthcare for all?”

  “I leave that to the professionals.”

  “The greatness of a nation is not defined by abstracts, Jakub. It’s defined by pictures. Stories that carry by mouth, by television, immortalized by the Internet, stories about a new park being built and the homeless being fed and bad men being arrested for stealing from good men. The greatness of a nation is in its symbols, its gestures, in doing things that are unprecedented. It’s why the Americans are falling behind—they built a nation on the idea of doing new things, and now th
ey’d rather sit and pray that the world won’t make them adapt too much. We won’t be following the Americans to that place. We won’t be following anyone. We’re going to take this spacecraft and send it to Venus. A nation of kings and discoverers, yet the child across the ocean still confuses us with Chechnya, or reduces us to our great affinity for beer and pornography. In a few months, the child will know that we are the only ones with the stones to study the most incredible scientific phenomenon of this century.”

  I remained expressionless. I did not want him to know he had me, not yet.

  “You think the public will agree?” I said.

  “What do our people want the most right now? They want to know we aren’t the puppets of the EU, or the Americans, or the Russians. They want to know that politicians are making decisions on their behalf, not on the behalf of businessmen and foreign governments. This is the growth they crave. We defeated the communists decades ago, Jakub. We can’t ride that wave forever. The republic will never have the agriculture of Latin America or the natural resources of Ukraine. We don’t have America’s megamilitary or the fish monopoly of the Scandinavians. How do we get ahead in this world? Ideas. Science. This country needs a future, and I will not lie comfortably in any deathbed until I get it.”

  I sipped on the cola and looked around the office. Not a single item was out of place, as if no one ever walked around and picked up the hockey trophies, the pictures of his wife, no one ever napped on the leather sofa underneath the window overlooking downtown Prague. The office was arranged as neatly as the man’s life.

  “And what do you need from me? Counsel?”

  “From what I understand, in front of me sits perhaps the most qualified cosmic dust researcher in Europe. You discovered a brand-new particle of life! That must feel extraordinary.”

  His assistant entered the room with a bowl of garlic soup and a plate of blood sausage, fried potato croquettes, and aromatic horseradish. The senator cut into the sausage and some grease landed on his ashy tie.

  “Sure, sure, counsel is good, Jakub, but we are looking for more.” He set his utensils down and took his time chewing, swallowing all of his food and smirking at the impatient hand tapping my knee. “We want you to be the first Czech to see the universe,” he said.

  I felt light-headed. I drank some of the cola, regretting I hadn’t asked for alcohol.

  “You’re a vegetarian,” I said.

  “In my office, I’m a man. I trust you’ll keep the secret. I trust we’ll trust each other. What do you think of my proposition?”

  “It’s hard to believe a single word.”

  “Extraordinary, Jakub, is not only your discovery on Saturn. I know who you are. You and I, we need to do this together. Your father was a collaborator, a criminal, a symbol of what haunts the nation to this day. As his son, you are the movement forward, away from the history of our shame. Jakub Procházka, the son of a loyal communist, the glowing example of a reformed communist (you’re not still a communist, are you? Good, good). A man who grieved through the death of his parents, who grew up in a humble village on the humble retirement pay of his grandparents, and despite all odds unleashed his brilliance upon the world, becoming a heavyweight best in his field. The embodiment of democracy and capitalism, while also a humble servant to the people, a seeker of truths. A man of science. I want to put a Czech in Space, Jakub, and that Czech will be you. Europe will scoff at us, burdened taxpayers will cry out in skepticism. But there is a future here, meaning for the country, and we can sell it as such with you on the packaging. The spaceman of Prague. The transformed nation embodied, carrying our flag into the cosmos. Can you see it?”

  I saw it. I saw it and I bent over as something groaned deep within my gut.

  The senator’s canines once again sank into the pork as horseradish sweat broke out on his forehead. He was so different from his television appearances, animated, loud, uncontrolled, ruddy-cheeked, and I thought, here is a man who devises a different identity every time he enters a room, and I shouldn’t trust such a man. But I did anyway.

  I straightened my shoulders and cleared my throat, steadying a shaky hand on my knee, heavy with the destiny this stranger had just offered. Deepening my voice to match the seriousness of the moment, I said, “Well, shit.”

  The government had approved the mission almost unanimously within the next three days. Within the week, I was seeing the skeleton of JanHus1, its side still marked by the Swiss white cross in its sea of red. I shook the hand of the man with an Iron Maiden tattoo. Within two months, the world knew who I was and where I was headed. The shuttle had been completed. Lenka wore a black dress to the unveiling party and shook hands with the president. She gracefully carried on the conversation when I ran to a bathroom stall to retch. And within six months, I was waking up aboard JanHus1.

  I UNZIPPED THE WOMB and made my way to Corridor 2, where the dreaded treadmill awaited. I didn’t hear the creature moving around in any of the corridors, and thought that perhaps I had really slept it off. Central required that I exercise two hours a day to slow down bone loss, but lately I had been devoting less and less time to the hamster wheel, preferring to spend it in the lab. I pulled at the harness attached to the wall and slid the straps around my shoulders, grounding myself on the small gray pad underneath my feet. That was the sole benefit of the machine—it made me feel as though I was walking on Earth’s sidewalks again. I started with a warm-up walk, then adjusted the speed. Strain cut into my weakened calves, and I breathed out loudly so that I would no longer ponder the creature, the disappeared hallucination. I sprinted to the point of nausea so that I wouldn’t think of Lenka, so that I couldn’t recall the exact shape of her nose. I ran for an hour and removed the harness. My eyes stung from the sweat, and my sweat reeked of whiskey. I made my way back to the Sleeping Chamber to wash off and change.

  The creature was there, accompanied by the unusual odor. My clothing hung around its legs, as if it were a living coatrack; its face and one leg were buried in my closet, rummaging through, scratching.

  “Stop,” I said.

  It turned around, its lips closed, eyes fidgeting between me and the contraband on its legs. The creature put my shirts and sweatpants back into the closet.

  “I became so enthralled by the search that I forgot to monitor your movement. I am ashamed, skinny human.”

  “I thought you were gone. Cured by sleep.”

  “Do you intend for me to depart?”

  “I don’t know. What are you doing?”

  “I am looking for it. The ash of your ancestor.”

  “You were… studying me again. I felt it.”

  “I apologize. I could not help myself. A researcher cannot escape his subject, can we agree? But I’d like your permission, skinny human. Permission to study you.”

  “What’s in here doesn’t belong to you. I don’t want you to do it anymore.”

  Petr’s voice sounded through the intercom. “We need to talk,” he said with some distress.

  I muttered gratitude for the interruption and left the creature behind, floating into the Lounge and strapping myself down in front of the Flat. I picked up Petr’s call.

  “Hey,” he said, “people from PR are miffed about you canceling the video session. Lot of civilians lined up to talk to you.”

  “I couldn’t do it. Not today.”

  “I told them I’d take the hit for it. With Lenka, and all. But there’s something else—the air filters are detecting a foreign substance. Unable to determine what it is. Do you see anything unusual in Corridor 3? Or anywhere else?”

  I glanced toward the filter shaft in the corridor, then at the creature floating toward the kitchen.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Okay, well, we’re going to purify, as a safety measure. You know the drill.”

  I made my way to the lab. To avoid contamination of the samples, the room ran on a separate filter, and thus provided a safe haven during emergency cleansings. I passed the kitch
en and saw the creature’s face buried in the freezer, rifling through Popsicle packets. I considered whether I should give it a warning. Didn’t it already know what was about to happen?

  I closed the lab door and ran the filter analysis on my e-tablet. No foreign substances found. I pulled up the call with Petr on the screen.

  “Can I ask you for a favor?” I said.

  “We’re sealing you off. Cleaning in two. What?”

  “Can you have someone track her down? I want to know she is safe.”

  “Minute and a half. Listen, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. She needs some time.”

  “Hell, I can’t just not know where she is, what she’s doing. She couldn’t even stand to talk to me, Petr.”

  “Thirty seconds. I don’t know, Jakub. Give it some time. Once we start poking around, people will talk. Before you know it, this is a scandal on the front pages of gutter magazines.”

  He was right, but being humiliated by the nation’s notorious gossip rags seemed worth knowing how Lenka was doing. Why in the hell she had left me to wonder and agonize.

  “I can’t be up here without knowing anything. You need to figure something out for me.”

  I looked around the lab. On the left wall, drawers of Space dust particles already analyzed and cataloged, brought for comparison to the new dust gathered from Chopra. Highly processed pieces of the cosmos, containing H2, magnesium, silicon, iron, carbon, silicon carbide, often mixed with asteroid and cometary dust, the latter always carrying hope, as comets are the universe’s dumpster divers, vagrants pushing their carts of intergalactic junk tirelessly over the centuries. It was in those carts that we were most likely to discover new organic particles hinting at traces of other life within the universe, substances that would clarify the formation of planets and the structures of other solar systems, perhaps even a touch of what had occurred during the Big Bang. But all of these samples were old news, offered no stimuli for my imagination. On the right side of the room awaited empty glass and titanium containers, sterile, expertly shined, ready to be filled with the pieces of interstellar dust that had come to us from the unknown.