Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

  Kuřák: I don’t think you’re selfish.

  Lenka P: I appreciate that.

  Kuřák: Do you consider Jakub an idealist?

  Lenka P: Jesus Christ, what a question. He’s flying a spaceship to nowhere. What else would you call a man who does such a thing?

  [END]

  THAT EVENING, after I had listened to Lenka tell her truths to Dr. Kuřák, I determined that I must stay dead, hidden from the shocked, warm embrace of a nation that had built me statues and would surely smother me with cries of miracles. I had died for the country. They had no right to ask me for a resurrection. I discussed this with Petr until I unwittingly slipped out of consciousness. The next morning, I woke up with a pillow underneath my head. Petr and his wife, Linda, stood over me with mugs of coffee and a plan. It was clear that Linda now understood the identity of her guest, and that the plan was a team effort born of their sleepless night.

  Petr insisted that my body was devastated by zero gravity and in need of healing. He noted my swollen cheek, the result of my crudely extracted tooth. He noted my blocked sinuses and my slight limp. He explained that approximately 12 percent of my bone mass had vanished due to spaceflight osteopenia and that without therapy, I was looking at a lifetime of excruciating knee pain. Stomachaches, gas, gums swollen with gingivitis. I imagined those emaciated bones carrying my pounds of organs, flesh, and skin like an overloaded mule climbing a mountain.

  And so they convinced me. I would spend three weeks in Carlsbad, Bohemia’s famous town of healing, dip myself into the hot springs, and drink mineral water. I would lift weights to rebuild bone density, wearing Petr’s borrowed gray sweat clothes, whose elastic band had worn thin from an indeterminable amount of time holding in his girth. I would also submit to the dentist’s tools to rid me of infection, and I would let Petr drive over once a week and provide me with physical examinations. Petr assured me that no one was going to recognize me. It was because people don’t think of dead men as physical bodies, he said, but glorified concepts. Aside from that, I knew that no man, woman, or child could confuse my transformed cheekbones and sagging eyes with the fresh-faced hero of posters and television screens. After these three weeks, Petr promised, he would take me to Lenka himself, if that was what I wanted.

  When he dropped me off, Petr handed me a bag with eighty thousand crowns in it. Part of his severance package from the SPCR. I did not think about rejecting it for a single second. I was owed.

  DURING HIS RULE in the fourteenth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV blew off steam after a day’s work by hunting on horseback around the Ore Mountains. One day, his pack discovered a hot spring flowing from the earth, a miracle sent by God to heal the emperor’s injured leg. Charles IV experienced instant relief after dipping his majestic limb into the spring, and declared that it possessed divine healing powers. He granted city privileges to the settlements surrounding the springs and this new town was named Carlsbad, after its beloved founder. As the town grew, renowned physicians from around the world published papers about the effects of the spring, and by the nineteenth century, Carlsbad had seen the likes of Mozart, Gogol, and Freud. To build a proper social playground for these celebrities, architectural behemoths in the style of art nouveau were constructed around Carlsbad’s trees and fountains, turning the town into a man-made Eden if ever there was one. Colonnades, hot springs, parks named after rulers and composers, buildings with curves and edges so delicate only the devil himself could have carved them. And silence. The silence of serenity, the silence of human beings too content to speak.

  My room in Carlsbad wasn’t much bigger than the lounge area of JanHus1. By all standards, it was sufficient for a dead man. Its rough gray carpet itched my feet and there was a chair that smelled of chlorine and a table that creaked constantly for no apparent reason. The bed was magnificent just as fresh food was magnificent, just as humans walking around without a care were magnificent, their sheer existence a wonder for my starved senses. I ate all of my meals in this bed and shook the crumbs from the sheet out of the window before smoking a cigarette. Yes, since the pox-scarred driver had given me one of his menthols, I had taken up smoking. I hated the smell of cigarettes, the taste, even the smoke I found aesthetically overrated, but I chain-smoked regardless in an effort to form a habit, to build a structure for my lonely days. I woke at nine in the morning sharp with a prebreakfast nicotine craving and I smoked my last stick around midnight, right after ingesting sleeping pills. Tobacco was a timekeeper, the tuner of my biological clock. A friend.

  Every morning at ten, I had my physical therapy. A kind-eyed woman named Valerie helped me submerge in a blue tub filled with hot mineral water. During our first session, she asked me where I came from, whether I was married. Prague, I said. I didn’t answer the second question. She got the implication of my brief answers and began talking about herself instead. Her father used to work in a factory that manufactured weapons for the Nazis. Near the end of the war, he and a few other workers decided to sabotage the guns—to damage magazine springs so the ammo wouldn’t feed, or to pack the ammo with too much powder in order to cause explosions and the loss of fingers. The inspector, a German, was a drunk, always loaded on slivovitz during his shifts, and it was easy to distract him enough for the weapons to pass through undetected. By the time these weapons were put into circulation, the Germans were retreating, and Valerie’s father never found out whether his rebellion had much of an effect. But he would walk around town for the rest of his life, chest puffed out, receiving free beer in exchange for his story of great sabotage, cutting those magazine springs with pliers, slicing his hands, bleeding with pride over those fascist tools of murder.

  “My father never did anything else after that,” Valerie said. “Mostly, he became a drunk. But a man only needs one thing to be proud of. It will carry him through the rest of his life.”

  Once, she ran her hand over the burn scar on my calf. She asked how it had happened.

  “My father is responsible,” I said.

  “Hmm,” she answered.

  DURING THE SECOND WEEK of my stay in Carlsbad, Petr took me to a dentist’s office. A woman wearing a white mask set a tube over my mouth. The gas was dense and sweet, like kettle corn in Wenceslas Square during a hot summer. I didn’t feel the tools scraping the rot away. I woke up expecting pain, but all I could feel was a gap, another piece of my body gone. “It’s done,” the woman reassured me. I consumed a pill the size of a locust.

  Back in my room, I woke to a strange scratching coming from the air-conditioning vent. It began with hesitance, a creature feeling its way around a new environment. After a few minutes, the scratching gained a rhythm—shka shka shkashka shka shkashka—the rhythm of work that some small rodent figured would bring it to freedom. Consistency. Work without interruption, work with intensity. Surely, working at a steady peace, without breaks, the creature could reach its goal. I listened to my companion, refusing to take away its dignity by opening the vent. It took twenty minutes for the rhythm to reach its climax—shkakakakashkakakakashkakakaka, now with true desperation, as the rodent beat at the world to convince it of its worth, not a plea but a demand: Hear me! Let me out! I am here! I decided it was time for relief for the both of us, and when I stood up I saw a small brown nose peeking through the bars, two black eyes fixed on mine. I unscrewed the cover with a coin. When I opened it, a small tail was peeking from a dark corner deep in the shaft. It was hiding from me. It would not be rescued. I tried to reach the tail without any luck. I sat on my bed with the vent uncovered for an hour, waiting for my new friend to come out. It didn’t. I put the cover back on, and while I was fastening the last screw, the nose appeared again, followed by the laborious scratching. Work will save me. Diligent, patient, never-ending. It must.

  I put a coat on and walked outside.

  A yellow hue spilling from the windows of a hotel facing the Smetana Park spread across the last bits of dried, frozen oak leaves paving the road. The fountain ahead glowe
d red, which made the statue of a nude woman pouring water from a vase seem mischievous, in cahoots with the devil. I removed my shoes and stepped into the grass, then leaned on the fountain and massaged my right knee, observing the lightless sky, which an upcoming storm appeared to have coated in tar, masking even the effect of Chopra. I was grateful for the darkness. Stars didn’t seem the same anymore—to me they did not invite fantasies, did not symbolize aspiration, did not arouse curiosity. They were dead images of things for which I had no use.

  Inside the fountain, a black, sleek thing splashed around. It seemed too large to be a snake or a cat. The red lights dimmed. I looked closer, reached toward the swimmer, and then he rose, lifted himself on eight bamboo legs and extended a pair of human lips toward the naked woman’s vase, lapping up the cascading water without giving me a single glance with his many eyes.

  “Hanuš,” I said.

  He did not respond. He drank, coughed, spit, and drank some more with suckling greed. I stepped into the fountain, and the cold water soaked through my jeans. I reached for Hanuš, but before I could touch him, the statue came to life. Above us stood Lenka, her firm calves attached to the fountain. Her hair was tied into thick braids. My Lenka, she looked like a Bohemian queen. I touched the soft flesh of her calf, no longer interested in Hanuš, and a sharp pain stiffened my knees and knocked me backwards. I was submerged, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which way was up, the surface, the light, and which way was down, the depths, the darkness. The water stung my nose and eyes and at last I found my bearings and lifted myself up. I was alone in the fountain, alone with the statue. The stream of water from her vase landed on my chest and I lowered myself to have a drink. It tasted of copper, or maybe zinc. It tasted of things that weren’t alive. I wanted her so badly.

  When I returned to my room, the mouse was on my bed. The air-conditioning vent was undamaged. The creature studied me, ready to leap. I went to the minifridge to get a Kolonada wafer for it, but when I returned, the mouse was gone. Had it stayed around to thank me for helping, or to emphasize it didn’t need help—see? I can take care of myself. There had been an escape route for the mouse the whole time. The vent was simply another obstacle to be overcome for the sake of overcoming. I ate the wafer, its hazelnut flavor melting on my tongue. We could make such great things. Smooth liquors, wafers melting on touch, statues so close to life.

  The idea of Lenka’s calf, the feel of its skin, guided my hand below my waist. My body did not respond. I massaged, caressed, but the sensation was mechanical, devoid of pleasure. Desires used to come to me so easily.

  Failing to achieve a climax, I stopped. My ear itched, something moved around my eardrum. I stuck my index finger inside and fished at the speck of dust bothering me. When I took my finger out, a small black creature hopped off onto the carpet. This was no dust. I leaped, upending the television set as the Goromped escaped my thumb, then I grabbed the carpet and hurled it into the air, my eyes locked on the small black dot bouncing up and falling back down. I caught it as it struck my cheek, held it between thumb and middle finger. My first instinct was to squeeze, to squash the beast and wash it off my hand with soap, but its outer shell was as hard and sleek as a stone. It gnawed at my friction ridges with its miniature teeth, and wriggled its legs to free itself. I seized an empty preserves jar and dropped the Goromped inside, then secured the lid as the creature jolted up and down, up and down at a frantic speed, its force almost tipping the jar over. I put a heavy book on top. Now there was nothing but tapping.

  “I got you, you maleficent fuck. I got you.”

  I gathered the pieces of the old television. Inside the jar, the Goromped spun like a helicopter rotor, emitting a mild whistle reminiscent of wind blowing through a small alley.

  “Clever. Momentum theory won’t help,” I said. “You are mine.”

  On and on through the room’s darkness and cold, the Goromped spun without pause.

  EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW of subject Lenka P., Session Four:

  Kuřák: You sounded very urgent on the phone. Would you like to tell me about the incident?

  Lenka P: It’s not much of an incident. A freak-out, rather. It was when the Lifestyle magazine people came over. They took pictures of me sitting on the couch all by myself. They asked me how I was coping with the waiting. Whether I still slept only on one side of the bed. There was something about their questions that suggested I wasn’t whole, like they were interviewing a person who had half of their body removed. They want to sniff out my rituals of loneliness and parade them out for the world. I just don’t want to do it anymore. I want to… this is awful to say, but I just want to be separate, from the mission, from Jakub’s fame. I want to live how I choose. And I don’t want to entertain the world with my sadness.

  Kuřák: Do you blame Jakub for this unwanted attention?

  Lenka P: I guess so. Friends, family, they all ask me about him, treating me like a temporary widow. Like he’s my world and my world chose to depart. And you know, there is some truth to that. I am the spaceman’s wife. I can make my pancakes in the morning, go to work, come back home, go to the gym, run my five K, and do my squats, but at the end of the night, in bed, I’m the half of the marriage that’s been split apart by this mission to nowhere. I do ache for his touch—understand, I don’t need men, I never have, but I want Jakub, because I love Jakub, I love him and I have chosen him to share my Earthly life with. I ache for that serene sleep of his, the way he can wake me when I’m tossing too much and bring me a glass of pineapple juice, which somehow calms me. I ache for our magnificent fucking, and I ache for the days when I didn’t have to anticipate a call about his death, when his living was obvious, without interruption. But then, I don’t know if that Jakub can ever exist anymore. The Jakub existing now is the one who chose to leave.

  Kuřák: This is the most you have opened up in here.

  Lenka P: Is that all you have to say?

  Kuřák: Lenka, I can’t tell you what you want. You have to arrive there yourself.

  Lenka P: That’s not at all helpful.

  Kuřák: Therapists are mirrors.

  Lenka P: Whenever you say that, I want to hit you.

  Kuřák: I apologize for upsetting you. But my verdict remains the same.

  Lenka P: Fine. What I want is to get away from all of this. The reporters bugging me for interviews, my family looking at me like I should be getting ready to wear black and grieve. I want to get away from the fashion companies asking if they can pay me millions to be on their billboards. And I’m tired of looking at the face of the man I love, Dr. Kuřák, puffy from zero gravity, his voice raspy and sad, telling me those same terrible jokes he told on Earth but without the energy and flair that come with Jakub Procházka. I am tired of the doubt in his voice, betraying his thoughts—Does she still love me? When I am so far away? Does she expect the call announcing my demise so she can at last move on? I am whining, am I not? He is the one up there, and the cause is great and noble, don’t think I don’t realize that. It’s just that… Dr. Kuřák, the problem is, he never asked me. When he got the offer, he called me, and I dropped my phone into the fountain. He thinks it was out of excitement, but it was out of fear. I was paralyzed. He came home and we drank champagne. He made steak and played music for me. But the question never arose—Lenka, what do you think? Should I do this? What will it do to me, to you, to us, to the world we’ve built? Perhaps I would have said no. Perhaps he would have listened, stayed with me on this Earth, and I would have hated myself for it, but I would still have my husband. He turned me into Penelope. He made it about himself.

  Kuřák: So you would have chosen to stifle his dream in order to keep him in your—what did you call it before—your contract?

  Lenka P: Well, when you put it that way, I sound monstrous. Stifle.

  Kuřák: There are no monsters in this room.

  Lenka P: It goes back to the other things we’ve spoken about in here. He doesn’t ask. He never asked me if I wanted chil
dren—he just assumed I did because he does. It’s how he operates. He has this guilt from his childhood. He carries his father’s transgressions in a big bundle around his shoulders. He had to become an astronaut, of all things. It is noble, it’s lovely, but I don’t know if I’m willing to keep up with him while he chases redemption, like there’s some magic out there that will set him free. The resentment, it builds. And so I have to ask—I still have a good chunk of life ahead of me, and what do I want? Need. While Jakub chases his purpose and thinks She’ll just wait, always wait… what do I do?

  Kuřák: I think we have arrived at the root of this, Lenka. You said you wanted to get away.

  Lenka P: Yes. For a while.

  Kuřák: Why can’t you?

  Lenka P: Because I can’t leave him when he’s all alone, stranded, with me his strongest link to Earth.

  Kuřák: But what if you just… go.

  Lenka P: I can’t do that.

  Kuřák: But you are no Penelope.

  Lenka P: No.

  Kuřák: And yet you wait. In spite of yourself. Jakub freed himself. He said good-bye to Earth. Someone theatrical would say he went off to fulfill his destiny. Yet you aren’t allowed to do the same for yourself.

  Lenka P: It would kill him.

  Kuřák: With all due respect, that is nonsense. You are making yourself into a hostage.

  Lenka P: So, in your imagination, I just go. I go away.

  Kuřák: You go and you determine what it is you want for yourself.

  Lenka P: I can tell you’ve never loved anyone.

  Kuřák: I have. And I have always allowed them to do whatever it is they need. It is the very basis. Not trapping one another.