Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

  TWO WEEKS BEFORE the landing, I decided. It was time to discover Vasily. I had avoided him to forget my grief for Hanuš, but I needed to hear about his visions while we were still trapped in the same quarters together. Vasily had abandoned his sleeping chamber, they told me, and had set himself up in one of the ship’s three laboratories. Klara no longer visited him; Yuraj made a visit every two days, officially to deliver snacks and mission updates, and unofficially (he’d say in a smiling whisper) to ensure that the “cookie fawk” was still alive. For the past few days, I had been monitoring Klara’s and Yuraj’s movements, looking for the small but certain overlap in their sleeping habits.

  Finally, I had found it. During their nap time I slipped out of my cabin and made my way past their chambers and into the lab corridor, where the Russians (I guessed) studied the cosmic effects on bacteria, and how these mutations could be used in biological warfare. (Whether this was exaggerated Cold War paranoia, understandable distrust of the occupier, or a simple acceptance of the real world, I couldn’t be sure. After all, what would my country have done with the Chopra samples? Look for any way to get ahead in the race of nations, or at least sell them to the highest bidder, the most convenient ally, before the spies of the world descended upon Prague’s streets to find out for themselves?) I arrived at the last laboratory door, delighted at the comforts of floating freely in Yuraj’s sweatpants, which slid off my hips regularly but which I was grateful for nonetheless. Finding the observation window covered and the access panel to the lab smashed, I knocked.

  “Ostavit' yego tam,” the man inside hollered.

  “What?” I said.

  “You are not Yuraj,” he said in English.

  “No. But you are Vasily?”

  “Are you him? The dead man?”

  I did not respond.

  Several anxious minutes passed. I looked toward the entry corridor. Silent, but soon I could be discovered.

  At last the door slid open. Behind it was a greased blob of a man, stuffed inside a white tank top and a pair of briefs. His hair had been reduced to a sweat-soaked pierogi at the center of his skull. In his left hand, he held a rigged remote for the door. Bare wires extended from the small box of the control panel to his side. His right hand was wrapped from the tips of his fingers all the way to his shoulder with gauze. His teeth were gray.

  He nodded, as if knowing that I could not speak to him until gandering at the sty he had made out of a state-of-the-art research facility. Filthy underwear, microscope lenses, empty ration packets, pencil caps, crumpled pieces of paper, and individual potato chips floated around the room in an odd hoarder ballet, like an art show one might see at the National Museum as yet another condemnation of materialism. An unidentifiable yellow substance stained the lab chair, and the lab computer had been split in two with a hard steel pipe. At first, I thought that the walls were covered in twisted wires, but a closer inspection revealed countless pieces of paper with drawings. Every single one of them offered the same subject. A mess of dark shadows connected in a semicircular shape. From these black clouds erupted words written in an insidiously red Cyrillic.

  The man, Vasily, uncrossed his arms. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly.

  “I do. You’ve heard him.”

  His eyes widened. He grabbed me by the neckline of my shirt, his breath sour upon my chin. “You are the prophet, then,” he said, “you. It could have been me, but do you know what I did when the god visited me? I thought it was a demon. I closed my eyes and I prayed him away. I haven’t been to the church since my grandmother died, yet there I was, my eyes closed for hours, and I begged for the god to be gone. Finally, he listened.”

  Vasily’s English was nearly impeccable, only a slight hint of an accent. His bottom lip trembled. He picked at the gauze on his arm, tearing off small pieces and rolling them into balls before putting them on his tongue.

  “You saw,” I said.

  “I did not see. Only heard. Heard a voice from the corners.”

  “And the voice told you of me.”

  “He told me to wait for you. The prophet.” Vasily caught a potato chip and offered it. I shook my head. With visible disappointment, he returned it to its orbit, then strapped himself into the stained chair. I noticed that the microscope lenses were shattered, and braced myself for the possible glass particles swirling around, waiting to be inhaled.

  “One must be lower than the prophet when the prophet is addressed,” Vasily said. “The god returned to me again, yes, a few hours before we found you. He said I would not hear him again, no, but he would send a son in his name, and that is you! And he said we must rescue the son. I told Klara we must wait a few more minutes before leaving. We plucked you up, hmm, right before you perished…”

  In front of me, then, sat a man who may have truly also known Hanuš, however briefly, the final proof I sought since I met him so long ago. I became immediately impatient with Vasily’s tics, his muddled speech.

  “He must have told you things about me, then. My name, who I am.”

  “Hmm, da. He did. Did I do good, prophet? I could have been you, you know. But I proved myself not worthy. At least I believe. You believe that I believe, prophet? I will spill blood, if need be.”

  From the depths of his sweatpants pockets Vasily produced a screwdriver and set it upon his neck. I stroked forward, seizing his wrist just as the tip broke the skin. I took the screwdriver out of Vasily’s hand as he observed the tiny spheres of his own blood with childish delight. He poked at them with his finger.

  “I need you to tell me everything the god told you about me, Vasily. So I’ll know you are truly an apostle.”

  “Oh, prophet,” Vasily said, “you are testing me. I haven’t been told of your origins, because I am too lowly to know. I only have my mission. I will deliver you to Earth. And I will tell you the last words the god asked me to pass on to you.” Vasily grinned, and now his fingers fully unraveled the gauze on his other hand and wrist, displaying a multitude of deep, infected cuts, wounds that would surely cost Vasily his arm.

  I decided. Vasily and others like him were the reason Hanuš could never come to Earth. They couldn’t cope with a vastness that was so outside their established knowledge of existence, even if they had seen Space up close. They would project their desperations, fears, and looming insanities onto types of intelligence incomprehensible to them. I had done so too, after all, when I nearly plunged a blade into Hanuš to satisfy my cult of the scientific method, hoped that somewhere within rested an answer to my unrest. I was ashamed.

  The thought of hearing Hanuš’s words to Vasily exhausted me and thrilled me at the same time. I took a few breaths to avoid impatience with the ill man.

  “The god’s message,” Vasily said. “The prophet must not submit his spirit. He will find happiness in silence, seeking freedom, prayer, and he will know, know more than any other human, or any other… oh, now I am confusing words… the answer is in heaven.”

  Vasily looked around with panic, stuck his hands in his pockets, and from the ugly, twisted grimace on his face, I deduced he was looking for another weapon to hurt himself with. I asked him to keep his arms down. Hanuš would never have spoken of prayers, of prophets, certainly not of heaven. The hint of kinship I had felt with Vasily left me. He was a madman. I was not. I couldn’t be.

  I felt anger toward this man. He had been given a mission the same as me, and he had failed to retain his sanity, despite the luxuries of his ship and the benefit of other human company.

  Or had I once been close to becoming Vasily? Had Hanuš saved me from this exact madness? Suddenly, mercy seemed necessary.

  “Apostle,” I said to Vasily, “you’ve done perfectly. You passed the test.”

  Vasily sobbed like a small boy, his hand on mine. “Now I get to go home,” he said. “Take me from here now. It is too quiet. I miss the hum of mosquitoes above the lake.”

  I was glad. He didn’t know Hanuš, I was the only human who’d ever t
ruly know this cosmic secret. I did not want to share it.

  He unstrapped himself and pushed me aside, leaping toward his sketch collection, and ripped off the page closest to him. He opened his mouth wide, crumpled the paper, and stuffed it inside. He chewed, swallowed, and stuck out his tongue to show me there was nothing left. He picked up the next page and did the same, occasionally murmuring, “It should have been me, the prophet.”

  Klara appeared in the door, just as Vasily consumed his last sketch. “You are bleeding,” she said.

  “A nonbeliever may not enter the shrine!” Vasily yelled, shooing Klara away with his hands. She gestured for me to follow. As I floated toward her, Vasily grabbed at my hand and kissed my knuckles, my fingertips, and I was too sick to speak, to look at the beastly grimace on the apostle’s face. We exited his lair, the door slamming behind us. Klara crossed her arms.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t—”

  “I told you the man was not well,” she said sternly.

  “I had to hear about the—”

  “His monsters? No, Jakub. You will stay inside your room from now. You never exit, only to use bathroom with permission. And if I find you out again, I will strap you to the wall and I will let you starve until Earth. Yes?”

  I returned to my holding room. Vasily’s words crawled through my ears, spun around the cranium. No, he couldn’t have known Hanuš. Or did Hanuš appear and speak to Vasily, the former church boy, in a language he knew would have a real effect on a God-fearing man? I didn’t want to believe it. Hanuš was mine.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since I boarded NashaSlava1, I could not rest. Klara came to me ten days before our estimated arrival on Earth. She said she had some things to tell me. First, she had sent a message to tsentr after seeing on her own the horrific state of Vasily’s body and living quarters. She received a message back that Vasily was to be left alone unless he posed immediate danger to the crew or the ship. He was part of a separate mission ordered by the interior to study the effects of spaceflight on certain mental health issues.

  I asked Klara why she would tell me this.

  “Because I am tired of despicable men who rule empires,” she said, “and because as soon as I return to Earth, I will move West and never think of this again. And because of the last thing I have to tell you. A friend of mine from tsentral told me what they will do with you. She said you will go to Zal Ozhidaniya. It is a place for special political prisoner, people who used to be spies, those sorts. And I feel responsible for this. Jakub, I want you to know, I have to bring you, I have to give you to them, but we are friends, still. I trust you. I want you to know this before they take you away. I would do something if I could, I swear.”

  “Will you kiss me on the cheek?” I said.

  “Jakub.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. I just have not felt it in so long. I want to remember it.”

  Klara kissed my cheek, right next to my lips, and for a moment the dread of her revelation didn’t matter. I asked her to leave before the elation expired.

  I SPENT THOSE last two weeks on the ship hiding from the Russians, staying in my cabin and asking Klara to leave me alone. She said she understood. I pondered what life in a luxury political prison was like, how I would bear never seeing my country or Lenka again. The things I might have to do to free myself. Before we initiated the approach protocols inside the landing chamber, Yuraj wanted to strap me down, but Klara convinced him not to. She repeated that I could be trusted.

  The universe deceives us with its peace. This is not a poetic abstraction or an attempt at twopenny wisdom—it is a physical fact. The four layers of Earth’s atmosphere rest in their respective places like a four-headed Cerberus, guarding our precious skins from the solar poison thrown in our direction every second of each day. They are stoic guardians, as invisible as they are unappreciated by everyday thought.

  As we prepared for reentry, I sat next to Vasily, who filled out a crossword on his tablet and paid no mind to our shuttle burning swiftly toward Earth. Klara and Yuraj sat in the front and handled the controls while speaking cheerfully in Russian to their mission command. As the shuttle flipped onto its belly, I looked out the deck window to see for the last time what we officially classify as outer space: the final frontier until a new frontier beyond it is discovered. It stared back, as always, with its insistent flickering, emptiness, lack of understanding for me or the necessity of my being.

  We burned at a temperature of 1649 degrees Celsius, pushed through the mesosphere, the graveyard of dead stars and Earth’s shield against rogue meteors, with the nose of the shuttle angled up. The air was too slow to clear our path in time and thus eased our fall. With the engines disabled the ship was now more of a sophisticated hang glider, using Earth’s physics to slice through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. Deep below us, somewhere in Moscow, or perhaps in the surrounding towns, a handful of people were bound to hear the sonic boom, two claps less than a second apart, the drumroll announcing our return. They would dismiss it as construction noise and move on with their day, placated by the silence of their media stations, their government. The pronounced S momentarily disrupting their skyline view—the unavoidable signature of the phantom astronauts—would be simply another weather anomaly ignored during a workday.

  For 130 kilometers, we fell. The mesosphere—the protector. The stratosphere—eerie, calm, stable, and dry, the place without climate. A purgatory, occupying the properties of Space and yet a part of Earth. A deceptive non-world, a no-man’s-land between the trenches. Then the troposphere, the last line of defense, from the Greek tropos, signifying change. The keeper of the world’s water vapors and aerosols, a place of chaos, rising pressures, weather patterns. Perfect as the layer closest to human contact. Humanity summarized in a single sphere.

  The Earth rested. There was no sign of the billions of volatile souls thrumming on its surface. We were so close to its oceans, its continents that contained the country that contained the city that contained the hospital in which I had entered this world, nude and small. The hospital now torn down and replaced by the offices of a snack machine manufacturer. Would I ever get to visit the place again, see the patch of dirt on which I had come to be?

  The vision of my future life entered around my spine and made its way through the lower intestine, abdomen, lungs, and throat. Like a shot of bourbon traveling backwards. A Russian hostage, a man reduced to a state secret. And if I were, eventually, to return to my own country, what kind of life would await me? Dissected, intruded upon, loud. No peace in sight, no peace at all to continue my serene life with Lenka. I made eye contact with Vasily. He knew.

  I couldn’t accept it. If I made it back to Earth, I had to be a free man. It had all been taken away. Personhood, physical health, perhaps my sanity. I didn’t know what happened to my wife. No further infringements would happen, at least not with my permission. Vasily’s god had advised me. I wouldn’t be a subject to Russian whims.

  I unstrapped myself and jumped at the controls, shoved away Klara’s arms, and activated one of the ship’s engines. NashaSlava1 turned and leaped, like a gazelle with a thigh torn to pieces by predatory teeth. I fell backwards onto the ceiling. Klara shouted, Yuraj unstrapped himself and dropped onto me, then wrapped his forearm and elbow around my neck with staggering efficiency, bound not just to pacify me but to kill me, grunting with frustration pent up during these months of isolation. I flailed my arms; life had begun to leave me, when suddenly more weight landed upon us. All I could see was torn gauze and Vasily’s fists beating at the back of Yuraj’s head.

  “… avariya posadka, ya povtoryayu…” Klara shouted into her microphone, and I wanted to shout in turn, I’m sorry, but how did you expect me to sit and wait?

  Blood poured into my eye and I was no longer weighed down. Yuraj had released me, and off to my right he screamed and pawed at his neck as Vasily spit out a piece of skin and meat. He had struck a major artery, and Yuraj’s blood
was pouring out heavily.

  “The prophet will live,” Vasily said. “I am the apostle.”

  The body must not be violated! I wanted to shout at Vasily, but it was too late. I had done this. It had to be finished.

  The ship flipped back onto its belly, and Vasily and I crashed into the seats. Something cracked within Vasily’s body, but he made no verbal indication of pain. Yuraj, barely breathing, was bleeding to death.

  Klara looked back while holding the yoke with both hands, veins cutting through her forearm muscles as she tried to steady it. “Jakub,” she said, as though she didn’t know to whom the name belonged. She had gotten to know and trust a fellow phantom but she couldn’t have guessed how much I wanted to come back home. I longed for the moment we had first sat over a meal together, the way I’d studied the sweat drops on her body and the way she’d pretended to ignore it. When we had thought only the best of each other.

  Again I leaped toward the controls, beat at the keys, the screen, the panels, with my fists and cheeks and elbows. Klara dug her fingernails into any exposed piece of flesh she could reach, but she refused to unstrap herself, this genetically determined phantom astronaut trained for mission in the womb, and so I had a free rein. Once again NashaSlava1 spun around, and again, and through the glass whirled those green fields of Russia, towns separated by hundreds of square miles of agriculture and nothingness.

  Klara’s fingers found their way into my mouth and she grabbed my tongue, eager to rip it out.

  Vasily slapped her hand away from behind, his bloody teeth ready to strike again, and I shouted, “No, apostle, enough!”

  He retreated back to appraise Yuraj, who was pale and barely moving. Vasily caressed Yuraj’s cheeks, whispering, “You too could have heard the god.”

  I screamed at Klara to slow us down, pouring forth apologies and pleas and epithets. Earth’s surface was so close now that we would collide at high speed, surely killing us all. I recognized the shimmering blues of water, even as I felt Klara’s knuckles upon my back and forehead and eyes. She had finally unstrapped herself and was now unleashing her fury, perhaps in an effort to kill me before the landing killed us all. We collided.