The ship crashed into the water and the window glass exploded, its particles biting into my exposed face before the onrush of water washed them away. My body was at the mercy of Earth’s elements now, much more savage than the calculating hostility of Space. The stream threw me against the cabin door, and Vasily landed on me, grasping at my arms as the entire cabin flooded and the water separated us. I swam toward the window, toward life, then gestured at Vasily to follow. I gave Yuraj, pale and unconscious and possibly dead, a final acknowledging look, and grabbed Klara’s arm to haul her up. She clawed at me and bit my hand, bubbles escaping her nostrils, and I noticed that her arm was trapped underneath the seat, which had been slammed against the wall by the pressure of the water. Her elbow was oddly twisted, surely dislocated, perhaps broken, but Klara gave no sign of pain. Her eyes—deadly, determined—were focused on mine. She was doing her best to kill me with her one free hand and her teeth. I could not last much longer. I let go of her and searched for Vasily, who floated above Yuraj’s corpse, grinning from ear to ear, his apostle mission fulfilled. No, he was not coming, and perhaps it was better. A broken man had a right to leave this world. I too had made that decision once.
Again I tugged at Klara’s arm, and she sank her teeth so deeply into my thumb I thought she would rip it off. I could feel her teeth breaking. I pulled back, freed my bleeding flesh, and swam out of the observation window, swam upwards along the capsizing body of a ship that had saved me. NashaSlava1, the pride of the Russian people, though the Russian people weren’t aware of its existence—a phantom looming above their heads, protecting them from enemies, delivering scientific glory and advanced warfare. A cumbrous blend of metals designed to enhance humanity with an inflated sense of importance, wisdom, and progress, but now subject to Earth’s judgment, as we all were, and drowning like a bag of unwanted felines.
When I emerged, I threw my arms about, swam so quickly I thought my veins were going to pop open and bleed dry. I reached land, dragged myself onto the shore, spit and coughed, grabbed at the cold moist dirt under me, and I remembered—Earth. I licked the mud. I kissed it, cackled, emitted sounds that terrified me, sounds of pleasure that went beyond my comprehension, the pleasure of insanity. At last the pain of the winter around me overcame the initial adrenaline, and Russia’s frost bit into the skin underneath my soaked clothes. I rubbed my body in the dirt, now fully understanding why Louda the pig considered mud digging the highest form of living. The friction warmed me and I bit at the chunks of mud as if it were cake. It tasted of roots, compost, vegetable skins. I spit it back out. Behind me the lake that had welcomed me home expanded across a wide plain until it met a brown forest covering the horizon.
The broken surface of the icy lake gargled as the ship was digested along with the bodies and the samples of cloud Chopra, which now seemed a banal prize of the mission. I wished to sit and wait for Klara, Vasily, and Yuraj to emerge, healthy and well, before running around the frozen grassland and making my way through the woods. But the response team would swarm the lake any minute now, and I could no longer be subject to larger schemes, concepts, countries. I ran and I spit out leftovers of mud and I wept, wept for Klara, my savior, for her thirst to claw the life out of me. I expected at any moment the sound of helicopters, German shepherds, sirens speeding along the plains, chasing me down to throw me into a Saint Petersburg catacomb for torture and starvation. But there were no rotors, no barks. I reached the forest to the sinister silence of nature.
By nightfall, I had reached a village. I could not understand anyone’s words, but they took me in, bathed me with water heated over a fire, clothed me, and put me into a reasonably soft bed. Spasibo, I kept saying, spasibo, calmly and generously, hoping this would prevent the villagers from thinking I was insane.
Outside, the night sky glowed with purple. Chopra was still alive, still tantalizing, but I would never again reach it. I longed for the black skies of old.
I woke in the middle of the night, held down by strong hands, with the taste of rusty metal in my mouth. I could not close it, or bite down. A pair of pliers shimmered in the dark. The pincer clamped firmly on my tooth and out it came, the blood pouring into my throat as this kind, crude dentistry was completed. The brown, puss-filled bastard was set next to my face like a trophy. I screamed, choking on the mixture of blood and liquor applied to my wound.
The next morning, I found a couple of men who spoke English. They were traveling to Estonia with sensitive cargo, they said. They could take me along if I promised to help guard their livelihood. I agreed.
The journey was rigidly scheduled, allowing for no breaks. We pissed into a bucket nailed down in a corner of the truck’s cargo space. When Russian soldiers stopped us looking for a “dangerous fugitive,” I hid under blankets and behind a mountain of Spam and bean cans containing twenty kilos of heroin. The driver gave the Russian lieutenant half a kilo of heroin for his trouble and oversight. We continued on.
Across the border, in Estonia, I shook hands with my accomplices. We were brothers now.
“I owe you,” I said.
“No need,” they said, “no need.”
In Estonia, I jumped a freight train and rode to the coastal city of Pärnu. When night watchmen discovered me, I ran from the dogs snapping at my heels. With a painful bite on my unscarred calf, I entered the port and roamed from ship to ship, asking the sailors for a job, any job, which would take me closer to home. On my sixth attempt, a gangly Pole laughed wheezily and advised me that the captain was looking for someone to clean the bathrooms. The captain was a very clean man, he said. He couldn’t stand the crew’s crimes upon the ship’s facilities, and would accept anyone willing to keep them presentable.
For weeks, I spent my days running among the three bathrooms, scrubbing each seat, each bowl. I bleached them and scrubbed them with such dedication I sometimes wished to lick them to prove my diligence, my commitment to the cause. I replaced soap and I provided oversized rolls of rough toilet paper. Some nights, the sailors got too drunk during their card games and their liquids and solids missed the bowls by miles. These were my emergency calls, apologetic voices waking me from uneasy sleep. I welcomed them. I had a purpose here. A simple one.
When we arrived in Poland, the gangly Pole offered to pay for my train ticket if I would keep him company until we reached Kraków. He spoke of his mother, who would welcome him with homemade smoked pork and garlic potatoes. He in turn would greet her with a surprise belated birthday gift he had saved up for with his wages—a new mattress and a certificate for weekly massages for her bad back. That’s all he’d ever wanted to do, he said. Make enough money to ease his mother’s life.
When he asked about my family, I asked if we could play some cards. He understood.
That night in Kraków, I flagged down a man with a pox-scarred face. He smelled of smoke and cheese puffs, but he was fond of reading philosophy and had published some poetry.
“It inspires you, the road,” he said. “In life, you should travel as far as you possibly can, get away from everything you were ever taught. What do you think?” And he coughed, the same smoker’s roar as my grandfather.
“What if everything you love is right where you are?” I asked.
“Then you find new things to love. A happy person must be a nomad.”
“You haven’t loved, then,” I countered. “If what you love gets away from you, in the end you are only walking in a labyrinth with no exits.”
Within six hours, we had arrived in Prague. The man offered no parting words, but he gave me the gift of intoxication. I drank his Staropramen. The sun rose. I tipped the bottle three times, splashing brew upon the ground. An offer for the dead.
I walked into a phone booth and searched for Petr’s name in the book chained to a broken telephone. That Petr resided in Zličín was the one personal detail I knew about him. Thankfully he was the only Petr Koukal in the city. I walked.
A tall brunette with a Ukrainian accent and gauged ear
s opened the door of a small but beautiful house. She told me that her husband was at the pub, of course. So Petr had a wife. I smiled at the long-awaited pleasure of resolving one of his mysteries. He knew what Lenka meant to me, after all.
I found him playing Mariáš with a group of old-timers, all of them collecting empty shot glasses and pints around the mess of cards. His beard was overgrown and resembled a rusted wire brush. He’d gotten a few more tattoos, and there was a hole in his T-shirt around the armpit.
When he saw me, he dropped his cards and tilted his head sideways. I quietly counted and at around the twelfth second he pointed at me and said to his Mariáš foes, “That man. Is he there?”
The men looked at me, then at Petr. He extinguished his cigarette and stumbled backwards as he stood. The men reached out to support him, but he waved them away. They groaned and grabbed at him, asking him to keep playing, but Petr no longer saw them. He put his arm around my shoulders carefully, as if expecting his hand to pass through me.
“This guy?” a toothless man said as he nudged me with his elbow.
In the silence, the man sized me up, as if now in doubt himself. He wiped the beer foam from his whiskers.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “I’ll say he’s there.”
No Penelope
THE STORY I GAVE Petr took the length of four pints of pilsner.
“You know when you wake up,” he said, “and the second before opening your eyes you think you’re somewhere else? In an old childhood bedroom, or inside a camp tent. And then you look around, and for a moment you don’t remember which life you’re living.”
“That’s very poetic for an engineer.”
“Jakub. That’s your voice.”
“You recognized me. No one else seems to. I don’t recognize myself.”
“I’ve been seeing you everywhere. You can’t be here. I must be hallucinating. Dreaming, maybe. But it’s nice. It’s nice to be with you again.”
I did not mention Hanuš, my encounter with the core, how I had landed and found my way home. I told him that I had stepped into the vacuum to die honorably on the frontier and that a crew of Russian phantoms had saved me as I choked. He intuited that I was omitting things but understood he had no right to ask. By the time we returned to his house, his wife had gone to work. Petr told me he had retired early and was now making a record with his heavy metal band while his severance from the SPCR and his wife’s work paid the bills. In the bathroom I shaved my neck and trimmed my beard, careful not to touch the spot where the infected wound of my former tooth rested on the side of my cheek. When I emerged and walked into the living room, I saw no reason to wait any longer. I asked about Lenka.
“Another beer?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Where is she now?”
Petr sat down and pulled a joint from underneath the couch cushion. He lit it with a burning candle. “I’m not sure if you’re ready.”
I slapped the cannabis out of his hand. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“I have something you need to hear. Don’t ask about Lenka until you do.”
I nodded, and Petr walked away. The joint was burning a hole in the carpet. I considered letting it turn into a full flame. I extinguished it with my shoe.
When Petr came back, he was holding a silver USB drive and a stack of disconnected pages. He handed them over.
“Listen to this. Then read the manuscript. I found these when I was clearing out the offices. Kuřák held sessions with Lenka. She needed someone to talk to, and didn’t want you to know. Maybe these will have what you need.”
I held the drive between my fingertips. It was light, too light for what it held. The manuscript pages were supposedly an early draft of Dr. Kuřák’s biography of Jakub Procházka. So the man would make his fame as planned. Petr gestured me into a den, where a laptop rested next to a guitar and a piano.
“Have you listened to this?” I asked.
“Yes,” Petr said. “I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. Take your time.”
Four hours’ worth of sound files. As I listened through earphones, Petr brought me a glass of water and a bowl of ramen soup. He touched my shoulder as if I might disappear, then lingered in the doorway. I heard him strum an acoustic in the next room. Outside, the sun was setting.
After these four hours, I ejected the USB drive. I walked into the bathroom and washed my face, ran my fingers through the wiry, curled hairs of my beard, the dry skin underneath. My eye sockets seemed hollow, detached from their mooring, as if my eyes were eager to retract and hide inside my skull. My lips were the color of vegetable oil, chapping in the middle. I had come too close to death ever to look young again. But there was something about the way my cheekbones protruded, creating lines I hadn’t seen before. There was something about their color, how the faded sunburn from my spacewalk had left behind a healthy hint of brown, which seemed somehow fitting on my otherwise pale skin. Whatever form I now occupied, I could grow to like it. I threw the flash drive in the toilet and I flushed.
“I’m so sorry,” Petr said. “I deserve the punishment, we failed you, we failed the mission, but I still have to ask that maybe you don’t bring the whole story to the media.”
“Petr,” I said, “don’t you understand? I don’t care. I just want my old life back.”
EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW of subject Lenka P., Session One:
Kuřák: So these concerns, they came to you only after the mission started? Or did you feel this contempt before Jakub left?
Lenka P: I tried not to think about it too much. He was getting sick all the time, you know? I could tell how happy and how horrified he was. I could tell how badly he wanted to leave a piece of himself with me. There was no room for me to feel contempt. But once he was gone… people become abstractions. And the things weighing on you become clear. That’s why people are so afraid to be away from each other, I think. The truth begins to creep in. And the truth is, I have been unhappy for a while now. Because of his expectation that we have a family, because of the guilt he carries around, because his life was always in focus more than mine. My struggles, my insecurities, they had always been mostly on the back burner. The project of our marriage has predominantly been to figure out Jakub. But I digress.
Kuřák: Tell me more.
Lenka P: Aren’t your questions supposed to guide me better than that?
Kuřák: Is this session irritating you?
Lenka P: I’m irritated about feeling these things. And I hate that I’ve agreed to these meetings. He would consider it a betrayal.
Kuřák: His contract bars both of you from seeking unapproved psychological help. He would understand that this is your only option…
Lenka P: Can I tell you something? Maybe it will make sense to your analytical mind, somehow. Jakub and I, we used to have this hiding place. A small attic in a building where I lived as a kid. It looks so different now than it did the last time Jakub and I came there. It used to be an old, dusty, mice-infested dump, you know? It was our dump, covered in fake stars and condom wrappers. Now, it’s a room where the residents hang their laundry. The walls are painted mint green, there’s a plastic window. To see if there was anything left behind, something I could collect and hold on to, I tore through the wet towels and sheets of the room, tore my way to our corner, and then I saw them. The first girl, in a bomber cap and shorts and a leopard-print shirt, holding a Polaroid camera. Haven’t seen one of those in forever. A few feet away from her, leaning against the wall, was another girl, completely nude, her back against the wall, hips sticking out. At their feet were hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures, all of them of this nude girl in different positions. I had so many questions, but I asked none. What I knew right away was that the girls were lovers, and this was their contract. They had a hiding place, a place of their own, where they explored their rituals. Tell me, can’t you recognize these contracts as soon as you see them? A man pours more wine for his wife than for himself. A contract. Lovers watch Friday night movi
es in the nude with containers of Chinese food on their laps, General Tso’s sauce dripping on their pubic hair, they cool each other’s bodies with bottles of beer. A ritual, a contract. Jakub and I spoke of these contracts often, the importance of their preservation.
Kuřák: You feel that there has been a violation.
Lenka P: It took me ten minutes after I left those girls to realize that the nude girl was Petra, the girl I used to play with in the attic as a child. And there she was, probably didn’t even recognize me, and yet she made me realize. Jakub and I, our contract declared that we were meant to knock around this world together, explore it, make it better or ruin it, live young for as long as we could. But then he left, and now every minute of my day I expect the call to let me know he is gone. Even if he returns, what kind of man will he be? The things he’s seeing, the loneliness, the sickness… you see, Jakub chose to become forever someone else. That is his right as a person, but it does not bode well for contracts. He’s the one flying away from me, but sometimes? Sometimes it feels like I’m in a spaceship too, and I’m soaring in the opposite direction. And there’s no chance we will ever collide again, not unless the universe is a loop, and that, Dr. Kuřák, is why I wake up standing next to my bed, arms limp by my sides. Like some sleepwalker of grief.
Kuřák: What would Jakub say of these contracts?
Lenka P: I don’t think Jakub has any idea. He thinks he’s going to come home to the same Lenka, the old Lenka, and he will be the same Jakub, and we’ll pick up where we left off, like those eight months aren’t very long. But it isn’t the time, it’s the distance, the likelihood of failure, the danger he’s put himself in. I’m no Penelope. I don’t want to wait around for a hero’s return. I don’t want the life of a woman in epic poetry, looking pretty as I stand on shore and scan the horizon for his ship once he’s finished conquering. Perhaps I sound awful. But what about my life, my hopes for myself? They can’t all be tied to Jakub. They just can’t.
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 20
