… so as a great personal friend of Jakub’s, I feel deep sorrow in my every cell, and consider it a small but significant consolation that he expired without pain, fulfilling a lifelong dream…
Without pain. A barefaced lie.
The service will be held at the Prague Castle, and the nation is invited to join the procession that will travel to a service organized in the St. Vitus Cathedral, and conclude outside the castle walls, where vendors will provide free food and beverages to celebrate Jakub’s life. Arrive early, as the event is expected to become one of the biggest mass gatherings…
… and to go against what I set out to do earlier, I would like, once again, to return to Jakub Procházka the Hero, and remind us all of the famous words of a poet who captured the meaning of the Chopra mission: “With JanHus1 lie our hopes of new sovereignty and prosperity, for we now belong among the explorers of the universe, the guardians of the frontier. We look away from our past…”
I handed the tablet over.
“You want to see pictures of funeral?” she asked.
No. Maybe later. How long has it been?
“A week. They are building statue. There are many candles still in this square, and pictures of you. Paintings.”
What is your name?
“Klara. Your fever is coming down. We fear superbacteria. That is why there is quarantine. But you seem better.”
Yes. Better. Why are you here?
She studied something on my forehead. The silence felt long, even excruciating.
“We are part of phantom program. Have you heard of this?”
Myth, I thought?
“A myth, yes. No one knows exactly how many have died being shot into Space quietly. At least technology makes odds bigger now. We are a phantom mission. There was one before us, shortly after cloud appeared, even before Germans sent the monkey. It was one-man mission, like yours, and the man—Sergei, I knew him well, good person—he never returned. And so we come, bigger ship, more crew, we launched couple of weeks before you but came off course when Vasily… well, there was the incident. And so we arrive late, after you, and you were a floating man. I am telling you this because you have to know, Jakub, that my government will never admit to phantom programs, especially now that we have Chopra dust, we have this advantage, what world wants. And if we do not exist, then your rescue does not exist. You do not exist. Do you understand?”
You gathered it? Chopra?
“Yes, we have dust. But do not think of it anymore. You will never see it.”
I looked away. She apologized under her breath and I waved her off. She too was a soldier. Home felt much less certain now. What could the future of a rescued phantom dead man be? Life under surveillance in a Belarusian village? A Russian prison? Would they hold me until the fact of my rescue could somehow be used to political advantage, or until a whistle-blower agile enough to penetrate a century of state-sanctioned lies revealed that the phantom program of the USSR was alive and well, a wild conspiracy theory sure to kill at any cocktail party?
You said incident? With your third?
“Yes, Vasily. He hasn’t been himself.”
What happened?
She studied the strap on her glove, quiet, frowning.
You don’t have to say
“I will tell you because it is nice to talk. These two with me, they will not talk. Do you know what it is like when you speak and no one listens? You do, Jakub. They sent you all on your own, your people. It was three months into our mission. Vasily looked into my bunk, pale, breathing heavy. Yuraj and I, we asked him for two hours, what is wrong? And he said nothing, only drank the milk and looked into distance. And then, finally, he put his hands like this”—she crossed her arms on her chest—“and said, I hear monster. It speaks in darkness, like a dog’s growl, and it scratches on walls. And this monster, he said, it spoke inside his head, asked about Earth, asked about Russia. And he just sat, his hands like that, saying like, C’mon, druz’ya, you tell me I’m wrong, I won’t agree, I know what I heard. We never told him anything, never said, Vasily, you are probably little crazy from Space. Still he always put his hands like that, like we wanted to take the truth away from him. We reported what he said to tsentr, but they never told us what they did, if anyone talked to him. And so, after that day, he does research on his own, and he eats his meals on his own, and we are worried, but what can we do? We are tired too. We too can’t be taking care of someone’s head.”
I tapped the pen on my forearm.
A monster
“Yes. A dog’s or wolf’s growl.”
Could I talk to Vasily?
“Maybe if you get better and he agrees to come here. We cannot let you out of room.”
How much longer?
“We are expected to be on Earth in three months.”
Are you scared?
“Of?”
Going home
She took the pad from my hands and slid it back inside the front pocket of my sleeping bag, then zipped me up to the neck, and rested the forefinger of her glove on my cheek. “You should sleep,” she said. “Fever is coming down—maybe we can unstrap you soon, if you promise to not come out to the ship.”
She floated away, stopped in the entry, but did not turn around.
“Silence drives us crazy,” she said. “But we are afraid we will miss the silence. Bozhe, it is hostile up here, but it is easy. Routines and computers and food in plastic. Yes, I wonder, can I ever share life with people again. I think about refilling my car with oil and I want to be sick to my stomach.”
She left.
I pulled the cocoon of the sleeping bag over my head so I would not hear the subtle creaks of the ship. Even the most sophisticated structures cannot avoid the sighs of life. Materials copulate, clash, grasp for air. I felt strong, the blood flowing through my extremities, and thus I slept. Once, I caught myself stretching my fingers toward the rabbit’s eyes so I could drop them to the quarreling chickens. Rain escaped through holes in the gutter and woke cats snoozing on the bench. The modest sandals of the doppelgänger Jan Hus struck the cobblestone path as he was led to his trial, and he grunted quietly as he was hoisted onto the wooden platform where he was to burn.
I have never been clear on my first memory. It could be one of my father holding me nude on his bare chest, my clumsy hands grabbing at his curled chest hair. But it could also be that this is no real memory at all, that I wish so desperately to remember this moment because of the ragged black-and-white photo my mother kept on her nightstand. My father’s jaw was still fleshy with youthful fat, not yet sharpened by age and unfulfilled desires. I knew nothing except this man’s warm hands nearly as big as my body, his odor that would one day become mine, the warmth, the light. Is the question of whether I remember this moment more important than the empirical evidence proving it actually happened? I hope the memory is real. I hope the sensation, the phantom of my father holding me that closely, isn’t manufactured, but is based in the animalistic instinct of grasping at those moments in which we are protected. The instinct in the animal named Jakub.
I DIDN’T KNOW how long I had slept after the last feeding break when Klara and Yuraj came to unstrap me. Klara told me that three weeks had passed and the quarantine was over. I floated around the room, stretching out my muscles, my joints, smiling at the pleasure of motion. My voice had come back to me, at first a hoarse whisper, then a guttural tone I didn’t recognize. My throat still ached whenever I spoke more than one short sentence. I studied Klara, who was no longer cautious around me, only kind. Even Yuraj shot me a quick smile, though he maintained an air of masculine indifference. They had laid out the rules: I’d promise not to leave the room under any circumstances without being accompanied, and in exchange they would uncover the small window. I agreed. When I asked about my future, about their instructions from Russia, they became tight-lipped and irritated, and so I ceased to inquire about the matter altogether. I was too happy to have human companions, to hear language travel
through its usual channels, to smell someone else’s sweat. We were headed to Earth. I missed Hanuš, more than I could attempt to describe, yet I could not speak of him at all.
Klara seemed to like talking to me, especially now that I was healthy and thus offered no bacterial threat. She would come into my room without her space suit, sometimes with her hair braided, revealing a slender neck I could not avert my eyes from, other times with her hair untamed and frizzed, a lion’s mane surrounding her cranium. Eventually, I couldn’t prevent thoughts of kissing her slender neck, of zipping the two of us inside my spacebag and feeling the touch of human skin along mine. Perhaps strangely, these thoughts never arrived outside our conversations. Her insights and her memories rekindled the seemingly dead impulses within me, the impulses I had pledged to forever limit to Lenka. I made no indication of my lust to Klara. I wanted her to keep coming back. The simple comfort of her companionship as the dreaded day of our return to Earth approached was worth more than any physical gratification.
“I have been reading about you,” she said once over our lunch, “about your father. Not too many things left around the ship to do, so I think, I will know more about our guest.”
“Okay.”
“Did you love him?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s the curse of family.”
“I hoped you’d say this. Have you heard of Dasha Sergijovna?”
“I haven’t.”
“She was my mother. She too was phantom. Is this surprising?”
She wore a sports bra and loose sweatpants, the postworkout sweat staining the smooth edges of her clavicle, belly button, lip line. She seemed as comfortable as a human being could be, and I envied her.
“It is.”
“When I was small, the military people told me that she went to be spy at British embassy, and was killed by this imperial diplomat. Three bullets to her back, bam, they said, by West. But when I entered the air force, they finally told me some of this truth. A heavy brown file. She was second woman to travel to Space, ever, with another cosmonaut. The space program thought they could make it to moon and back, but this was so far before such things were possible, only one year after Gagarin. The Party was thirsty to do everything before the Americans. And so my mother went up, with this man, and I was told SSP lost hearing two hours into the mission. Probably, they made it to the moon and crashed, or they choked because of oxygen coming out. Either way, this death was quick and like heroes, they said.”
“Kind assurance,” I said.
The room was hot. A malfunction caused by the Chopra dust that couldn’t be fixed, Klara had told me. At night, I would wake, thinking I had a high fever, and at last I was to die. But then Klara would arrive in the morning to deliver breakfast, and I was glad for another day.
“Well,” she said, “then this man from ministry of interior fell in love with me, and I suppose I wanted to see how things go. And one evening, after we went to kino and he was drunk, he told me that he could get this file in secret for me—a file containing truths. I made love to him that night from the excitement of possibility. I thought my mother’s heroism would, at last, take good shape. And so he brought the file, and I read it under candlelight on night when electric went out.”
She wasn’t looking at me now. She stretched out her fingertips, as if the file still rested there, and she was feeling along its edges.
“And the truth was different,” I said.
“Yes. The mission was suicide from beginning. The SSP wanted to see if a new vehicle could make full distance to Mars, unbroken, while keeping life. My mother knew this, the man knew this, and they volunteered, and they kissed their different children good-bye and they went off forever. Two hours into the mission, all is well, and suddenly, her partner starts to speak crazy. He said he could hear God in waves of universe, and he knew the world would end soon. And this God of waves was sending him and my mother to Mars to become new Adam and Eve, to begin again on different planet. He was certain this was their fate. My mother tried to talk with him, the engineers talk to him, even Khrushchev stopped by to tell him some words before complete crisis. But the man would not stop raving, and he was looking at my mother like some beast, and so she took a can opener and she sticked him somewhere, maybe throat, she would not tell tsentr, SSP, but they heard the man choking on blood, and so they guessed. After this, my mother spoke of the things she could see. She asked why so many things in whole universe were circles. Planets and stardust and atoms and asteroids. A softness to so many things. Then she choked to death. They recorded it on manuscripts. She choked so far away from Mars, still so close to Earth. Do you know how they wrote this? For this man she killed, he choked as this: kchakchakchachchchchch, and so on. Sudden bursts, like heartbeats, you know. But my mother, hers was more slow: eghougheghougheghough. They really paid attention to how many times she did this. Of course, her ship crashed, or perhaps it is still out in universe somewhere, who knows. And that was phantom mission number two.”
“But here you are. An astronaut.”
“I haven’t had to kill a man. Not yet.”
“You think of her often.”
“I think about what made her go, and what made me go. I decide this brand of madness must be in the blood. Do you ask? I bet what brings you to the sky was same duty as your father’s: that final—no, that terminal decision to serve. I find comforting there. The idea of being, I don’t know, like there is no choice, you have to be a certain person, the instinct put into DNA. It seems honest.”
I imagined Klara’s mother, the two of them perfect look-alikes, and her wonder at her crewmate’s blood spilling out like soap bubbles. The first murder of the cosmos. Perhaps she killed the man and then anticipated redemption on Mars. An alien creature assuring her, “You did what had to be done.”
Wasn’t all life a form of phantom being, given its involuntary origin in the womb? No one could guarantee a happy life, a safe life, a life free of violations, external or eternal. Yet we exited birth canals at unsustainable speeds, eager to live, floating away to Mars at the mercy of Spartan technology or living simpler lives on Earth at the mercy of chance. We lived regardless of who observed us, who recorded us, who cared where we went.
“It is hot,” I told Klara.
“Yes.”
Quietly, we ate.
DURING THE LAST MONTH of our journey, the crew of NashaSlava1 blessed me with magnificent meals. It turned out that the spaghetti I had initially been fed during my illness was the worst food on board, something they were willing to waste on a potentially dying man. Now that it was clear I would live, they brought different meals every day. General Tso’s chicken, borscht, beef stroganoff topped with sour cream, tiramisu, and bacon—that glorious memento of Lenka. These were all microwaved meals, but to a man starved down to nearly two-thirds of his original size, it didn’t matter.
Klara explained that these meals were meant as weekly treats for the crew, small interruptions to their otherwise impeccably healthy diets. Since the food reserves were too plentiful for three people and Vasily refused to eat any of the cheat meals, Klara and Yuraj had decided to make the remainder of the mission a celebration of gluttony, and had challenged themselves to empty the reserves as we reached Earth. I was happy to help, so happy that the constant pain of an infected tooth crippling half my face presented no challenge to my newfound appetite—for the food, for the Japanese tea, for the bottles of American bourbon, of Russian vodka, of Japanese beer. I spent the week eating, breathing, and looking out the observation window, making a list of everything I wanted from life. Of everything I felt I was owed.
I wanted to see the hairy belly of my friend one last time, a legless corpse.
I wanted to see God touch the universe, reach his hand through the black curtain and shake the strings on which the planets loom. A proof.
I wanted to witness giant cosmic lovers, two larger-than-life figures holding hands, picnicking on the surface of Mars, in love with craters and barren
landscapes. They were so made for each other that they looked exactly alike, their sexes blurred out, indistinct.
I wanted to see Earth crack at its core, split into shards, and confirm my theory—that it is simply too fragile to earn its keep. A proof.
I wanted to see the dead bodies of all phantom astronauts. To bring them back to Earth and keep them embalmed in glass cases inside Lenin’s mausoleum.
I wanted Valkyries to soar through dimensions and caress the dead souls of African orphans. I wanted all the mythical beasts the human mind has created to pile on top of one another and fuck and give birth to a hybrid so perverse it would unite us all. I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters? I wanted cosmic dust to gather around clay nests with the aggression of hornets, to breed and evolve and merge and form its own planet occupied by its own humanlike figures driving their own carlike cars. Perhaps if such a world of gray shadows existed—a reflection, a mimicry of the entire human experiment—we could finally watch and learn. A proof.
I wanted someone to tell me they know what they’re doing. I wanted someone to claim authority. I wanted to leap into the Vltava and taste its toxicity, to recognize that somewhere along the slush of runoff there was real water. I wanted to live on both sides. I wanted to touch every cube brick on France’s roads. I wanted to drink English tea without milk. I wanted to enter the filthiest American diner in the dustiest city and order a burger and a milk shake. The way the word rolls off the tongue—buRrRgeRrR. I wanted to lose myself among the suits of New York City and feel cocaine residue on toilet seats. I wanted to hang off the edge of a whale skeleton. I wanted proof of the chaos. I wanted it so badly I didn’t want it at all. I wanted what every human wants. For someone to tell me what to choose.
Yes, Lenka was right. I would return as a changed man, she would return as a changed woman. Some parts switched out, our casings the same. Who said these two brand-new humans couldn’t love each other?
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 18
