“I want to know more about your theory. This robotic communism.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “You go to university. You’re determined to deconstruct my ramblings, to align me with a theory. And you are so clean-shaven. All you student boys shave so carefully, yet your idols were all bearded men!”
“I study astrophysics. Though, today, I’m not sure why.”
“A good day to ask questions,” she says, and finishes the sausage.
The policemen have at last nabbed the vendor, and they load him into the back of a police car. They leave, ignoring the overturned cart, the mess, until soon it becomes just a part of the evening crowd frenzy, pedestrians stepping over without a second thought about its origin.
“I’m still hungry,” Lenka says.
I open my bag and remove Bivoj’s schnitzel sandwich along with a bottle of dirty moonshine. “And thirsty?” I say.
“You are a resourceful man.”
We eat, though I ensure that there’s plenty left for Grandma’s dinner feast. The neon burns the eyes now, drowning out the soft beauty of the Gothic street lamps. We sit for twenty minutes or so, not saying much of anything, until I decide I haven’t much to lose. I ask whether I can see her again, whether we can share more food and more drink, because there has been a clamor inside my head drowning out everything else, but when she speaks, I can hear clearly, and I listen with pleasure. She agrees to meet for coffee on Friday, and we part.
And on Friday we sip cappuccino on Kampa Island. And the following week we go to the Matějská fair and shoot laser guns. She visits me every day on breaks between classes and brings strudel and beer. Lenka. The name comes from Helena, meaning torch or light. Jakub comes from the Hebrew for holder of the heel. My name destines me for always walking upon the Earth, attached to dirt and pavement, while hers destines her for burning and rising into the skies. This makes no difference. We move together like we’ve always known we’d be here someday. We are loners, and thus the fact that we are deciding to be with each other over the safe cradle of solitude says everything we need to know.
Three weeks after our introduction, I tell her about my grandfather’s death, and she insists I must see a place that is important to her. A secret place that could become important to me too.
When we meet, once again by our bench in Wenceslas Square, she’s smoking a cigarette and wearing, for the first time, the yellow summer dress with dandelions, the same dress she will later wear for our last night together on Earth. She does not waste time with a hello.
“Let’s go,” she says.
“Where?”
“To the moon, of course. Is school making you this dense?”
Briskly, we fight a path through the thick cloud of bodies, kicking shopping bags and elbowing the heads of children as we go. I hear a hiss behind us. The light evening breeze coming all the way from the Atlantic, trapped between these hills of Bohemia, is a stark contrast to the recent scorching days. Everyone is layered tonight, mysterious. The sounds of Jay Z, flowing from the boom box of some resting break-dancers, clash with the orchestra of clarinets and flutes spitting awful folk music at old-school pubs. We take a turn into Provaznická, and the sudden silence causes my ears to pop.
The lines of apartment buildings ahead have been untouched by time, war, and regimes. Some blue, some brown, all crowded underneath fading red tiled roofs. Many of these Old Town apartments used to be the bounty of Party officials. Now they belong to citizens with fat wallets. Change is relative. I am six blocks away from the apartment I grew up in, secured by my father’s loyal work.
Lenka leads me to a yellow building, where she presses eight different doorbells. A man’s voice barks a question over the intercom. We are quiet. She rings more doorbells, until the door buzzes and we hurry inside.
“Can’t believe that worked,” I say.
“There is always a person expecting someone who won’t come.”
We make our way up the twisting stairwell, dodging a man who is missing a nose and a woman dragging two fat Dalmatians. These strangers must think of us already as a couple—the revelation hastens my steps. Is Lenka taking me to her apartment? Impossible, otherwise she would have the keys. Is this a trap? She stumbles into me, whispering an apology, my fingertips graze her exposed thigh and she grabs my side for support. At last, we face the attic access, a battered door leaking light around the edges. She jerks the knob and I grimace at the hysterical creak. The attic has all the expected signs of neglect: hesitant light seeping through small windows, migrating globs of dust, a bicycle belonging to a dead child, boxes. A black curtain separates one of the far corners. Lenka leads me to it.
“Are you going to sacrifice me to Satan?” I ask.
“Would that be okay?”
“If it’s you who does it, yes.”
She pulls down all the window shades until I can see nothing but the silhouette of her curves. With the scent of apricot and powder in tow, she passes me and casts the black curtain aside, inviting me in, and she turns on a small lamp in the corner, its shade covered in black sheer fabric. On black wallpaper, shapes of stars and moons shine in gold. Above us hangs a papier-mâché moon, its craters and creases emphasized with a pencil. At our feet rest Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, a cutout of the Milky Way, Apollo 1, the Millennium Falcon, faded gum packets, and a disemboweled rat.
Lenka kicks the rat aside and bends over and reaches underneath the gum wrappers. She holds up a figurine of a saluting NASA astronaut. “What do you think?” she says.
“I think I’d like to live here.”
“I used to come here as a kid and play with my best friend. We would take all this bubble gum up here and see who could chew the most. Petra, she made the moon. All her. It’s lucky people don’t pay attention to these attics, isn’t it? They throw their junk in here and forget about it. I haven’t been here for what, twelve years? Thirteen? So, I said to myself: Jakub, my astrophysicist, I’ll take him and see if my universe still exists. If it does, he can see it, and maybe it’ll make up for my silence over his grief, because grief is something I run from. And perhaps I won’t protest if he tries to kiss me, because I have not been in love for a while. Here we are. Things are unchanged, all these years later. I’m in my only hiding place. With you.”
Solar flares occur when magnetic energy is converted into kinetic energy—thus, the attraction of one element to another turns into a movement. What exactly causes this process, we are not sure. Be it the ejection of electrons, ions, and atoms into the universe, or a cocktail of pheromones infiltrating the olfactory receptors of a future lover, some of the most essential functions of reality remain a mystery. Lenka’s breath smells of cigarettes and Juicy Fruit. We lean gently against the wall and I thumb the outline of the cigar box, which I still carry in my bag. The bag slides off my shoulder. She takes my face in her hands and studies it, while I take a breath, take two important seconds to realize I am in love and living will never feel as it did before. The alteration to my future, a whole new fate stands here in the form of a slightly drunk beauty who has invited me to the greatest place I’ve seen. So much we can tell from a single surficial eruption. A flare to tear the sun apart. The flares are my fingertips feeling the inside of her thighs, her breath on my neck, her hands pulling up the hem of her dress, her eyes searching for my reaction to what I see underneath. The universe assigned the tasks of speaking and kissing to the lips because there is never a need to do both at the same time. We do not speak for hours. Soon most of the room is covered in our clothes. Our bodies pleasantly battered from the wooden floorboards.
Exhausted, we sit among the planets and talk about the foods we’d like to eat. She wants spaghetti; I crave an old-fashioned Spanish bird—thin beef rolled around bacon, egg, and a pickle. We concur that our best plan of action is to drink and walk well into the night.
Do my grandfather’s ashes belong here? Can I leave the box behind and feel happier once I walk out the door, or will I forever wonder whet
her the same cat that murdered the rodent will eat the contents of the box? Lenka asks what I’m thinking about. Everything. How to leave it behind. I carry my father’s curse and my grandfather’s dust. She does not understand what this means, not yet, and she doesn’t ask.
Instead, she tells me of her own father, who went to America before the revolution to work on a car assembly line in Detroit. A true worker’s paradise, he wrote back, declaring that Detroit would become the city of the future, a hub of industry and wealth. Each summer, he was supposed to arrive home, smuggle Lenka and her mother through the Berlin Wall, and take them to this new world. Each summer, instead he wrote that it wasn’t the right time, that he’d wait for another promotion, another bump in pay, so he could welcome his “queen and princess” with a mansion, an American car. By 1989, his letters came only biannually, coarse and bereft of affection or detail. When Lenka’s mother wrote to him that the country was free, that they could cross the newly opened borders in daylight, among the people, and come to him immediately, she received no response. With her father lost to her, Lenka often retreated to the attic, keeping clear of her mother’s devastation, the empty wine boxes collecting by the door. Only when the Internet began to connect disjointed lives around the globe did Lenka find a photo of her father. He stood on a Florida beach, beaming at the camera, one arm around his new son, the other around a new wife, a fully stocked cooler of some blue American beer at their feet. Lenka never spoke to her mother about this, and wasn’t sure whether her mother ever found out. They lived on.
I ask Lenka what she feels now. Rage?
No. Not here in the attic.
“When I was a child,” I say, “I used to sit in a car and pretend it was a spaceship. The cassette player was my deck computer. I wanted to turn the radio knob and blast off—fly away. But I didn’t know much about being alone back then.”
“Would you fly away now?” she says.
“Not anymore. Now that you’re here.”
“Now that we’re here. In our hiding place.”
In exactly two years, we will return. The attic won’t change—we will simply dip our feet into thicker dust. We will hide behind the curtain and I will ask her to marry me, voice shaking, knees so heavy I’ll wonder if the floor might collapse beneath us. At the wedding, my grandmother will dance like a woman half her age, telling me at the end of the night that she stayed alive to see me and Lenka on this day.
And my grandfather’s ashes will rest inside the cigar box in our closet, thought of with devotion, until I leave them at the mercy of the cosmos, a reminder that most everything dear to us is bound to become powder.
The Claw
I PASSED THROUGH the knot of time like sand slipping away inside an hourglass, grain by grain, atom by atom.
Time was not a line, but an awareness. I was no longer a body, but a series of pieces whistling as they bonded. I felt every cell within me. I could count them, name them, kill them, and resurrect them. Within the core, I was a tower made of fossil fragments. I could be disassembled and reassembled. If only someone knew the correct pressure point, I would turn into a pile of elements running off to find another bond, like seasonal farmhands journeying from East to West.
This is what elements do. They leap into darkness until something else catches hold of them. Energy has no consciousness. Force plots no schemes. Things crash into one another, form alliances until physics rips them apart and sends them in opposite directions.
The core offered no wisdom. It took away my senses. It made me live inside my own body, truly, made me a flash of matter without the power of reflection. I wasn’t a human. I was a stream of dust. What did you expect? the core asked me. No, I asked that of myself. Another projection. My desperation to ascribe personality and will to capricious outcomes of chaos. The true kings of the world, elements and particles, had no agenda except movement.
I regained sight just as the core ejected me, then my wits as I passed the core’s calm atmosphere and collided with the storm of raging dust. The core had ejected me back into the world at the speed of a launching shuttle. The spiraling dust particles cut into my gloves and chest, forced cracks into my visor. I set my hands upon the helmet’s lock, considering a swifter end.
Death in Space would be a brief affair. For ten seconds, I would remain conscious. During this time, gases in my lungs and digestive system would cause a painful expansion of organs, leading to a rupture of my lungs and the release of oxygen into my circulatory system. Muscles would bloat to twice their current size, causing stretch marks and bruising. The sun would burn blisters into my cheeks and forehead. Saliva would boil off my tongue. After these ten seconds of agony, my brain would asphyxiate and my consciousness would melt into the surrounding darkness. Cyanosis would turn my skin blue, my blood would boil, my mouth and nasal cavities would freeze until finally, the heart would cease to function, rendering me an exquisite corpse, a dry, gaseous Smurf at the altar of the Milky Way.
I was ready for this quick passage when I felt a tap on my back. Hanuš was soaring with me, his skin gray and shriveled, like a potato cooked in hot ashes. A blister appeared above his right lip. We were to move on together. I removed my hands from the helmet. Soon enough, the dust would cut through the suit far enough to depressurize it, and I could still have a cosmic death. I would use my ten seconds to remove the suit and follow the example set by Laika—allow for the vacuum to embalm me and preserve me as a wax figurine for future generations of explorers.
“The Beginning has rejected us,” Hanuš said.
“It seems that way.”
“We did not belong,” he said.
“You love your riddles.”
The terrorizing fury of Chopra’s dust turned to nothingness. We shot out of the cloud completely, once again subjects to the Zen of Deep Space. There could not be much time left now, but I refused to check my suit, refused to check the oxygen count. I focused on my friend. Suddenly, I feared boredom more than death. If my friend died before me, what was there to do with the rest of my time? With the entirety of the universe in front of me, without his voice I would have nothing to guide me as I choked. I reached for one of his legs and offered the jar of Nutella from my pocket.
“Yes, this will do,” he said.
I struggled to find words that were profound, some famous deathbed babble, but if existence could be so simply played out by language, why would we spend our lives trying to justify our right to breathe?
I changed my mind.
My words should not be profound. Instead, I called back to the quick village wisdom of my grandfather’s drinking buddies, eight liters of beer in, their heads closer to the table’s surface with each passing minute. Wisdom about chickens faring so well without heads, or about Grandmother’s strudel always having too many raisins and not enough apples, or about giving the middle finger to God’s hands so horny to grab the soul, or about Icelandic songs always sounding as though they were composed on whispering ships sailing through ice, or about the inside of the very planet we occupy burning as hotly as the surface of the sun yet here we complain about a scorching summer day, or about being so afraid to ask girls to dance as boys while being too brazen, even rude, to ask girls to dance as adults, the unifying postcoital feeling of thirst, when two spent bodies stinking and leaking with nature crave bread and, greedily, another orgasm to reaffirm the fragile chemistry of love. Had the pub closed and taken away this only method of socialization, these village miners and butchers would surely have taken to traveling the Earth like old-school philosophers, exchanging barfly wisdom for pork chops. How could I contribute to this phenomenon? Perhaps with the greatest wisecrack of them all, one that could keep me awake for so many nights—energy cannot be annihilated, and thus matter cannot be annihilated, and thus all we burn and destroy remains with us and within us. We are living dumpsters. We have run out of antimatter, and now the eternal game is one of Tetris—how do we organize the self so as not to choke? I laughed. Hanuš understood.
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br /> In the distance, flashes of red. Was the universe on fire? Was it all to end now, with me the fresh pub dialectician? A lovely thought. From the distance and the darkness, a dragon soared, its sharp nose sniffing for easy flesh. Perhaps this was death. I knocked on the hard plate covering my chest, felt the echo of the vibration in my lungs. If it was not death, and the last living dragon was slain by Saint Jiří so many lifetimes ago, there was only one other option. The nose belonged to a space shuttle, headed for me like the bayonet of a mad soldier. Its beacons saturated the universe like bordello light bulbs, flickering hellishly and seductively, tirelessly to a beat. I was an island, a bastard floating the river in a poorly woven basket, my umbilical cord having been crudely sliced with a pair of rusty shears. Surely, the colors of the spacecraft and the flag singed into its side along with a proud name were a fata morgana, a vision to keep me distracted upon the hour of my death.
“Do you see them?” I asked Hanuš.
“Rescuers,” he said.
NashaSlava1. The words rested next to the stripes of white, blue, and red painted onto its side. Russia. Hell. The grinning chancre of my history.
Instinctively, I swam forward, attempting to get away. Impossible. The ship approached silently and swiftly, easing its speed as it came near.
“You do not welcome the rescue,” Hanuš said.
“I want to be here. With you.”
A hangar door along the ship’s fat midsection opened, and something loomed in its darkness. A robotic arm slid out of its lair, smooth with the movement of muscle and joint. A cybernetic octopus seeking me with its eyeless gaze, as its fingers quivered like wheat awns in storm winds. As a child, I had run from my grandfather whenever he mowed the lawn, putting as much distance between me and the spinning blade as I could. I hid in the wooden shed, between stacks of freshly cut firewood, inhaling its sweetness and pulling splinters from my fingers. Now I had no earth to run on, no structures between which to hide. How I longed for firm ground, for the strain of muscle pulling resolutely toward the center of something, anything.
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