This is what we need, pleasure, abandon, not scheduled mating, not calendars and tests and doctors asking about our “sex angles.” My scalp burns from her nails digging into my skull. This is the pain we’ve been looking for. My jaw is numb, I cannot breathe, and I decide that this is how I would like to die someday, smothered in her lap, her body trembling with lust under my fingertips. Lenka pulls me up and unbuttons my jeans, encourages me with whispered begging, and in our fury we stumble to the side and bump into poor Saint Andrew. With the cross still tightly clutched to his chest, the apostle plummets from his grid, and after he crashes to the stone ground, his head rolls off into the distance. Andrew has withstood centuries featuring the Black Death, the Crusades, two world wars, termite assaults, communism, capitalism, and reality television, but he is no match for two clumsy lovers. But as Lenka spreads my cum over her inner thigh, an act of rebellion against the purpose of the cloudy substance, I do not grieve for having defaced a national treasure. We’ve made our mark on history, done what no woman or man has done before, proved that we are here to live before death, and to have a bit of fun while doing so.
They killed them all, skinny human. If I do not show you, there will be no witness left. They came to eradicate us. This is the Gorompeds’ only purpose. Our destruction.
Hanuš is now fully grown, his body exactly as I know it. A new ring of eggs circles the green planet, not nearly as plentiful as during Hanuš’s birth. Along with his kin, Hanuš patrols the ring. On the horizon, a swarm appears. An army the size of an asteroid. Hanuš asks his Elders for guidance, for help, as do all the others of his tribe. For the first time, the Elders are silent.
They run, leaving the young behind. The Gorompeds crack the shells of the tribe’s future, feasting greedily on the embryos. Hanuš runs across galaxies and the swarm follows, a black hole swallowing everything in its path. The Elders are slow and falling behind, and the siblings who stay to protect them are doomed. Run, the Elders order, run and never stop, you might be the last of us, and soon Hanuš does not look back, he simply flies through the gates of the cosmos as quickly as his body allows, and the hiss of the swarm weakens along with the collective hum of his siblings, until at last he looks back and sees that no sibling remains. The world feels empty, he is alone, and so he stops and waits for the Gorompeds to find him, as there is no life without his tribe. But the Gorompeds do not come, and Hanuš sleeps from exhaustion and again wakes in a place he has not encountered before, a place known by its inhabitants as the Milky Way, and he is alive, alive though he knows the Gorompeds are bound to find him, whether tomorrow or in two million years. The certainty given to him as a birthright begins to vanish just as he hears the first echoes of voices and minds occupying planet Earth. He understands nothing.
Stay with Lenka and me, Hanuš. Only good thoughts now.
Lenka and I will always remember this moment—she slides to the floor, her back against the cool stone wall, hair tangled in her mouth, and I follow. Neither of us is concerned with the smell, the sweat covering our faces and limbs. We believe that we can fix our marriage. We know that the world operates on a whim, a system of coincidences. There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war.
The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, “How unlikely! Yet here we are,” and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.
I want to share these thoughts with Lenka but I’m afraid of the noise of words. I am happy you can see her, Hanuš, because I could hardly describe it. She looks at me as if I am the first thing in the world she has ever seen. Is it possible I am misreading her adoration, or romanticizing a normal postcoital look of carnal satisfaction? I don’t think so. I think that at this moment Lenka’s physical capacity for love has reached its apex. Dopamine crashes its way through her frontal cortex, breaking down its membrane walls. Norepinephrine overwhelms the chamber of her cerebellum, burns it down, and feeds on the ashes. Her brain is soaked with blood, it has become a love sponge, an organ of complete biological devotion—this brain of hers, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known to exist. I feel the same as she does. This moment will never be cheapened, as other moments are after love fades. It will always be perfect. We will always be fools.
We are more than our ability to conceive a viable fetus. We are lovers. We are the greatest contradiction of the universe. We go against it all. We live for the pleasure of living, not for the sake of evolutionary legacy. Today, at least, we’d like to think so.
And there, Hanuš, is where I want to leave you. Hold the moment. I feel you slipping away. Are you still here? Feel it, Hanuš. Feel the afternoon in May, with the sunrays peeking through and the smell of sex sharp in the air. Hanuš?
How unlikely! Hanuš said. Yet here we are.
Then he was gone.
A VERY BRIEF INTERMISSION
MASTER JAN HUS did not burn to death. In fact, he spent his last days in the warm bed of a widow, his thoughts at peace with God and love.
Hanuš unearthed these truths in a long-abandoned archive sealed by the keepers of history. Thirty-two days into his imprisonment and torture, Hus received a guilty visit from King Sigismund, who offered a pardon under a simple condition. Hus would travel secretly to the edge of the Christian lands, where no one could recognize him, and live out the rest of his life in exile. At first, Hus refused. He predicted that his public death would cause the desired uprising in the Bohemian lands. This was to be his part in God’s plan for Europe’s rebellion against the Catholic Church.
Then entered the widow. She ran her fingers along the bruises and cuts on Hus’s ribs, cheeks, hands—those he had received from his tormenters. She said she saw the love of God in him. She said that one of God’s sons had already died and caused the world a great sorrow. Soon, Hus and the widow were on their way to a quiet Moldavian village. They baked bread, bathed with each other, began to sleep with each other as husband and wife. Hus no longer felt compelled to preach. The torture had broken him—after the suffering, he was ready to die or to take on another life. A simple life—one that did not force him to become a symbol.
Of course, the necessity for symbols did not disappear with Hus. The king hoped that the master’s crimes would simply be forgiven, but the church leaders would not let go of the despised heretic, and demanded his return. They smelled blood and spectacle. The king sent three dozen of his best men to seek a villager who resembled Hus. They found a few, and of these few, a man dying of consumption agreed to take on the role of Hus. In return, the wife and child he left behind would benefit from the king’s generous coin. The man grew out his beard and took a few beatings to look even more like his doppelgänger before marching onto the platform and burning at the stake. The mob, blind with rage, could not tell the difference. Neither could the church leaders cel
ebrating the death of their dissident.
Following Hus’s death, the people of Bohemia rebelled and a civil war broke out between the Hussites, avengers of their beloved philosopher, and the monarchs, representatives of the dreaded church. Hus told the news of the impending conflict to his widow over tea with milk—calmly, as if the wars were happening in a world he’d never visited. The widow asked him whether he would go back and fight alongside his countrymen. Hus declined.
His death, whether it was his or someone else’s, had unleashed the revolution Bohemia needed to free itself. No amount of fighting he could have done as a living man would have achieved the impact of his death at the stake. He had served his part in history.
Now, Hus could truly live.
PART TWO
FALL
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 Gorom
peds 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:
In the search for brilliance, sovereignty, and a better future for its children, every country must occasionally face a dark hour. One of these moments descends upon our hearts today, as we mourn the loss of a man who accepted the most significant mission our country has ever embarked on. Though books could—and will—be written on this man’s service and role in advancing both our humanity and our technology, we are all already familiar with Jakub Procházka the Hero. What I’d like to write about now is Jakub Procházka the Human.
Jakub’s father chose to align himself with a specific current of history, one he considered righteous but which turned out to be monstrous. Jakub’s willingness and determination to overcome this…
My hand trembled. I became aware of my lachrymal ducts—dried out, burning, empty.
… his last moments, before we lost contact, Jakub told me a story of a time he almost drowned, and the symbolism of a burning sun…
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 17
