My Maximal Absorption Garment moistened. Cool water soothed my skin. I was thirsty. I felt discomfort around my abdomen, but the nausea hadn’t arrived yet. Ahead loomed the menacing haze of Venus, blood seeping through its craters, and I was grateful that I would not come any closer. The Chopra core rested over it like a calm, dedicated moon. Everywhere around me raged the sandstorm of dust, but the ring in which I made my way toward Hanuš offered the simplicity of vacuum. Floating through it wasn’t much different than spending the night in a long field, away from city lights—a latitude of darkness, with sparkling photographs of overwhelmingly plentiful dead stars. Only there was no hard soil under me, no grass, no dung beetles pushing their feces along like Sisyphus. Ending my existence here would be so simple. I would leave no flesh behind, nothing for hazmat cleaners to dispose of. There would be no funerals, no heavy stones with generous lies inflicted upon them in golden lettering. My body would simply vanish, burn out in Venus’s atmosphere, cause the smallest belch of an eruption. And along with my body would go everything else—the sensations, pleasures, and worries that I could not stop from unfolding in my mind: people I have loved, breakfasts served as dinners and dinner cocktails served as breakfasts, changes in weather patterns, fresh chocolate cake, my hair growing gray, Sunday crosswords, science fiction films, an awareness of the world consumed by financial collapse or environmental disaster or a flu named after yet another harmless animal. Death would be so much easier to dance with if it weren’t surrounded by the clutter of civilization. I reached Hanuš.
“Skinny human,” he said, “I wish to experience the ash of your ancestor.”
I felt the outline of the cigar box inside my pocket. This was the time. Nothing could make it clearer but the universe speaking it aloud. I removed the box from my pocket and opened it and looked inside the silk pouch. There rested the powdered calcium of bones that once held my grandfather together, along with bits of magnesium and salt, the very last chemical remnants of a body that had farmed and drunk beer and thrown punches with the verve of a Slavic god. Behind me, Hanuš studied the powder with all of his eyes.
“May I?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He delicately reached a leg over my shoulder and submerged the sharp tip inside the pouch.
“The magic of fire,” he said. “A human mystery I find difficult to understand. How do you feel about this, skinny human? Are you fond of fire?”
“It releases us from the constraints of the body.”
“We do not view bodies as prisons.”
“That’s magic too,” I said.
Hanuš removed his leg. I turned the pouch inside out and watched the immortal powder slip out, the specks divided and floating in all directions until they created a new pretend galaxy, the first one made by man, the first one made of man. A tomb worthy of Emil Procházka, perhaps the last Great Man of Earth, who, were he present to witness this dispersion of his own remains, would light a cigarette and shake his head and say, Jakub, all this foolishness, should’ve just put me in the ground so the worms could have a snack, but I knew that he would love me for it, that he would understand my need for the grand gesture. An honest good-bye. What kind of resting place purchased on Earth with my hero’s salary could ever match the silence and dignity of Space? The grains of dust floated toward the purple core until they vanished.
“This is the Beginning,” I told Hanuš.
“It is the Beginning I know,” he said. “Perhaps there was one before it, perhaps not.”
“Are we headed there?”
“Yes. But ask the question that is on your mind first.”
“Rusalka. Can you find it?”
Hanuš closed his eyes, and a faint, popping sound of the opera resonated within my mind. Occasionally, the recording was interrupted by random voices, snippets of pop music, the deep, dark voices of demons, the sighs of copulating lovers, sirens, dial-up modems, but Hanuš kept the recording clean enough to soothe my nausea, and to give me the kind of peace experienced on a Sunday morning among soft sheets and drawn curtains.
“What is it like, your death?” I said.
“Sooner or later, the Gorompeds of Death consume all. They have come for me.”
He lifted one of his legs. In the space where the leg attached to his torso, there were enormous transparent blisters, diseased and foreign. They were filled with a phosphorescent yellow liquid in which swarms of what looked like ticks floated from one side to another in perfect synchrony. There must have been thousands of them. One of the blisters popped, and the liquid leaked onto Hanuš’s belly as the miniature critters scattered into his pores.
“Soon,” he said, “they will weaken me enough to consume my flesh. But I will not let them. I will enter the Beginning with you, skinny human. Death cannot reach us there.”
“You’re dying?”
“Yes. I have been for some time now.”
“Hanuš. Does it hurt?”
“I feel it, this fear of yours. I hesitate to depart. If our Elders knew, they would strike me down with sharongu spears. To fear a truth! Blasphemy! Alas, fear is what I’ve found, here within the brilliance of Earthlings.”
“There’s nothing to fear anymore.”
I saw myself there, a boy in an itchy tuxedo, my rat tail cut off for the occasion, sitting on a red seat inside the State Opera, consuming the mint suckers my grandmother had snuck in. Three years after the death of my parents, not long after we move to Prague, we go to see the opera on my mother’s birthday, purchasing an additional empty seat next to us. I am hopelessly in love with this Rusalka, a wild-haired beauty dressed in the muted colors of the forest. She is a water nymph in love with a prince, and she gladly drinks the witch’s potion to become human and capture his attention. The prince takes Rusalka to his castle, but of course, as I guessed, the square-jawed scumbag betrays her, casts my Rusalka aside for a foreign princess. I wish the opera would never end, I am captivated, I wipe the snot off my upper lip. During the third act all seems to be lost. The echoing voices of the forest spirits sing sad songs for Rusalka, who, abandoned by the prince, is now forever destined to lure young men to the lake, let them use her body, then drown them and keep their souls in porcelain cups. I want to jump onstage and save her, carry her away, this lovesick ghost trapped within the confines of a lake made of papier-mâché and a kiddie pool. In my future, there would be only one other woman I’d love as much as Rusalka.
“Yes. I feel it with you, skinny human.”
Through the echoes and through the darkness, the prince rides looking once again for Rusalka, realizing now that he cannot live without her. He calls, and she appears, and he asks for a kiss, knowing that touching Rusalka will cost him his soul. The lovers kiss, and the prince collapses on the stage. Now Rusalka’s father, the feared water goblin, emerges from his pool, and his voice soars: All sacrifices are futile.
Hanuš sang it. He sang the line and for the first time in my life, I understood it, just as it came out of the alien’s mouth.
“It is not yet the end,” Hanuš said.
“No.”
Rusalka weeps with gratitude, for she now knows human love. She gathers the prince’s soul, and instead of adding it to her father’s cup collection, she releases it to God, allows it to ascend to the heavens. Both lovers are now apart but free. As a child, I found this to be a bad ending. The prince, in heaven or not, was still dead, and Rusalka was alone, left with her beastly father and a chorus of whiny forest ghosts. Love didn’t seem worth all this trouble, especially if in the end the lovers were torn apart. But now, hearing Rusalka in Space for one last time, I saw that the water goblin’s declaration was wrong. There was no futility in me, in Hanuš, in Lenka, in the SPCR, in the stubborn human eye always looking beyond, under, next to, below. In the atoms composing air and planets and buildings and bodies, puttering around and holding up an entire dynasty of life and anti-life. Futility nowhere to be found.
I looked ahead to the core. There was someth
ing to it after all. Perhaps my death would mean more than my life. I couldn’t come up with anything else I had to offer the universe. I was a selfish husband. I had not produced a genius child, given the world peace, or fed the poor. Perhaps I was among the men who needed to die to make anything of life.
“This is not a bad place to end things,” I said.
Unaccountably, I found myself wondering where Shoe Man was, and whether he was well. Whether he would remember me if he saw a story in the newspaper—Astronaut dies for country, body lost in Space. He would put down his newspaper and announce to no one in particular: “Little spaceman.” He would finally stuff the repugnant old shoe inside the garbage can, where it had always belonged, and allow it to rot on the heaps of landfill trash with all the other useless artifacts of human memory. Cruel images invaded my brain. I saw Shoe Man in my bedroom, sliding his tongue along Lenka’s light stomach fuzz, his fingers pushing gently on the inside of her thighs. While the iron shoe rests on our living room table, freshly shined, he turns Lenka around and she looks straight at me as she comes, silently, suffocating her screams in a pillow that still smells of my hair and saliva. Age has not affected the hairline or skin of Shoe Man over the years, but he has grown a thick black beard, and from the beard, black ink, or blood, or simply some liquid evil drips onto our cream-colored sheets, seeps into them like petroleum. As Lenka falls asleep, overwhelmed by the intensity of the superior orgasm this stranger has given her, the man looks at me, a silent observer, and pours himself a glass of steaming milk. As he drinks, the milk turns the color of licorice, and I wait for the ink to make its way through his blood, to poison his heart, rip it to shreds. He sets the empty glass down and goes back to bed. Lenka wraps her thighs around him.
Perhaps Shoe Man did not exist at all anymore. Or perhaps, with my father’s line now extinguished, he would drop dead and dissolve as soon as I died.
I opened my wrist panel and checked the oxygen level gauge. The clock’s hand quivered in the same way my grandfather’s clock used to when he smoked cigarettes in front of it. In its generous approximation, I had forty-two minutes to live.
Hanuš offered one of his legs. I held it. Together we entered the core of cloud Chopra.
Prague in Spring
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to state precisely when my grandfather’s lungs begin to fail, but Grandma swears that he took his very last breath during the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth seconds of the sixteenth minute of the third morning hour of the second day of the last week in spring. I’m staying at my grandparents’ apartment for the weekend, trading KFC lunches and the funk of a broken sewage pump at the graduate student dorms for pillows expertly fluffed by my grandmother’s hands and noodles baked with lard and ham. My grandmother wakes me and I rush into their bedroom to find my grandfather convulsing and heaving, his head firmly planted in Grandma’s lap. She asks me to get some water. I cannot remember where any of the glasses are, how to turn on the faucet, how to turn it off, how to walk with only one foot at a time, how to open the door, and again I am standing in my grandparents’ bedroom extending the glass, not sure how I got there, and my grandfather is dead. I stand there motionless, still offering the glass, until strange men in uniform enter the apartment and Grandma takes the glass from my hand.
A week later, I ride Prague’s B train and crave the breakfast sandwich I saw in a commercial before leaving the apartment. The smell of morning breath and commuter armpit sweat spreading through the train reminds me of rancid sausage. At least I’m sitting. Guiltily, though: an old woman stands a few inches away from me, fixing the frizz in her white hair with a trembling hand. At last it is spring, and blooming trees canvas the city in white and red, though the season also plunges Prague into a perpetual state of sexual frustration as young men and women, citizens and tourists alike, become minimalist in their wardrobe choices and eyefuck each other across store aisles, buses, streets. We are a hub of tanned stomachs, muscled arms, full lips clinching cigarettes, there among the sweating seniors dragging their groceries and the bulge-gutted beer lovers stuffed into suits, those apostles of capitalism with their clean-shaven chins buried in the business sections of newspapers. I wonder which group I belong to. Can I be with the youth, the hedonists turning Prague into a playground of the Old Continent? Or does my destination, the science department of Univerzita Karlova, put me in with that other dreaded group, the adults, those who get up in the morning and know exactly how their day will unravel, those who live on the exchange system of work, awaiting their grave with quiet politeness?
My body is young, but today I feel old. Too old to become exceptional. I’ve spent the past week listening to my grandmother weep over loud television, episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger pitched at earsplitting levels, with Chuck Norris dubbed by an actor who used to be an avid Party member. I’ve spent the week boiling water for tea and apologizing to my grandmother over and over again about nothing in particular.
It is hard to see why we are here, inside a tin machina carrying us toward whatever places we have chosen. It is hard to see why we are here until we are not. I wish I could make sense of these thoughts and whisper them to the old woman with frizzy hair, who has seen history unfold from one day to the next and who must know so much about grief and about asking the gods for a sign.
I arrive at the offices of the university’s science department and walk into Dr. Bivoj’s office. Before I set my backpack down, I reach inside to ensure the cigar box is still there. Dr. Bivoj is at his desk, bending over one of his books and eating an apple like a rabbit, using his front teeth to shave off tiny bits. I don’t take outside lunches during my workdays because watching him eat delights me—his unawareness, the generosity with which he presents his childish features despite being a man well into his fifties.
He looks up at me with a bit of apple skin caught on his mustache. “Ah, you are here. Truthfully, I don’t know what to say to you.”
I remove the cigar box from my bag. Before my father traveled to Cuba as a representative of the Party to demonstrate Czechoslovakia’s solidarity with Castro’s struggle against the Imperialist, he asked my grandfather to name the most exotic gift he could think of. “A Cuban monkey,” Grandpa said, his first choice. “We can get it a job in government.” My father did not laugh. “Hell, ask the bearded lunatic for some cigars” went over much better. Grandpa would smoke the cigars while he fed his chickens, slaughtered pigs. He would bring them to the pub and blow smoke in the faces of his poker foes. Once the contents ran out, he kept the empty box underneath his bed, and on several occasions I caught him sniffing the inside.
Grandma and I could not afford an urn. The box seems like the next best alternative to contain my grandfather. For now.
“He’s in here,” I say. “I touched it last night. It’s softer than campfire ash.”
“You know you can take the day off.”
“I’ve nothing to do.”
On my desk, significantly smaller than Dr. Bivoj’s, is a pile of astrophysics journals to read, most of them in English. On Tuesdays, I go through the journals and write out any passages that may be related to our research of cosmic dust. I have created dozens of scrapbooks filled with data, cutout photos, graphs. I capture events indiscriminately, anything related to our field, significant or not, and at night I like to think that what I have assembled is the most elaborate and complete collection of its kind in Europe, if not the world.
On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I catalog the cosmic dust samples sent to us by European universities, by private collectors, and by a few companies contracted by our modest departmental budget. I unpack the samples and store them in glass slides until Dr. Bivoj moves his enormous behind onto the slight laboratory stool and gathers his instruments. Often, he invites me to look through the lens of his microscope, but I am not allowed to touch. You can replace me on this chair someday, he says, but it will not be until I am demented or dead.
On Fridays, Dr. Bivoj takes out his bottle of slivovitz and
pours for two, leans back on his creaking chair, pulls on the suspenders cutting into his soft academic belly, and loudly fantasizes about placing his future Nobel Prize on a handcrafted shelf he will order from an Austrian carpenter.
Though Dr. Bivoj is one of the most respected experts in a field that I would, someday, like to become the king of, I cannot call him my hero. His belief in the work has overshadowed everything else in his life, and the peace of his soul depends entirely on success or failure in science, a field more unpredictable than the moods of Olympian gods. Dr. Bivoj’s lifelong obsession with cosmic dust is unbreakable, a cult of one. He is convinced that he can find new life within it, organic matter carried as a result of dissolving, faraway stars, meteors, and comets. His entire life has been about these journals crowding my desk, publishing in them and going to conferences where colleagues will buy him shots and some impressed intern—male, female, he isn’t picky—will blow him in the bathroom because his wife “doesn’t do that anymore.” Day by day, Dr. Bivoj sits in this office, lurks and farts and eats schnitzel sandwiches, his faithful chair sagging more and more every day under the weight of his self-neglect. He reads, he takes notes, he types his findings into an ancient document on a dusty Macintosh with a cracked screen. Twice a day he lumbers to the classroom one floor above and teaches future masters and doctors about galaxies and rotational patterns—a tribute, this teaching, the dues he must pay to keep the office and the Macintosh. Dr. Bivoj is convinced that before he dies, he will discover alien cells of life within the dust specks we study. His genius is humble and methodical. He takes no issue with the darkness of his office, the stale air, the hum of an old computer. When he returns home from work, his idea of relaxation is more work or, in rare moments of intellectual sloth, watching the Discovery Channel. He is the rare man whose work discipline single-handedly sustains him through life. He makes no further demands. This is what I know about him.
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