Lenka P: I need to go. I need to buy things for dinner.
Kuřák: Go. Have dinner. Think.
[END]
THE GOROMPED HAD BECOME an important part of my daily routine in Carlsbad. I smoked my morning cigarettes inside, and found that if I let a bit of smoke inside the jar, the creature would become momentarily paralyzed. While it lay on the bottom of the jar, I stuck the burning cigarette against its hard belly and heard a faint, high-pitched whistle that came along with a headache. I lifted the cigarette. The Goromped’s shell had turned red. It took about five minutes for its natural hue to return, and a few more for the creature to buzz around the jar in rabid circles once again.
After my afternoon excursions around Carlsbad’s streets and attractions, I attempted other methods. Filling the jar with water did nothing. In fact, the Goromped simply kept moving in circles as the liquid engulfed its body, as if it didn’t even notice the change. When I sprayed it with insecticide, it plunged itself into the puddle and somehow absorbed all of it, lapped it up like a dog until the glass was dry. What truly seemed to bother it was laundry detergent. After I poured it inside the jar, the Goromped shot directly upwards and smashed into the lid until it bent. And again, and again. Quickly, I transferred the creature to a clean jar.
As I observed the creature, I tried to decide whether I was angry with Dr. Kuřák. There was eagerness in his support for Lenka’s leaving, but he did seem to treat her with understanding and kindness. I could not be furious with a man who was good to her when she needed it. What truly haunted me were my alleged crimes of ignorance, outlined within the session recordings as clearly as the opening arguments of prosecution. How could I so deeply misunderstand something I cared about? Those small moments in which I had wronged Lenka were now cruelly apparent. When I was in Space, I manufactured moments in my head during which I had asked whether she would allow me to go on the mission, but really these questions never came up. All was decided by me from the start. I wondered whether I had behaved like this all my life, whether such disregard for a loved one was yet another genetic legacy I carried, representing my father’s traits in full denial.
The Goromped experiments began to keep me shut inside the room for most of my days, which made the recovery seem slower, more painful. Suddenly I was aware of the soreness in my cheeks, my inability to walk without a slight limp. Outside, the sunshine touched upon the shoulders of women and men who seemed so without worries, a city of strollers without a destination. I too craved motion, but not that of a casual stroller—I wanted the thrilling speed of the Goromped.
I shrouded the jar with a black handkerchief and went outside. For the first time I made my way to the residential parts of town, the ones that belonged to neither patients nor tourists, and there I noticed a blue Ducati motorcycle leaning against a shabby house. A reasonable price tag hung around its neck. I hurried home to withdraw some money from the bag Petr had given me and I purchased the Ducati in cash, along with a helmet, from a man exposing his rotten teeth as he counted the cash. I rode out of Carlsbad and into the hills, past the forest filled with men reinforcing their winter wood supply, past teenagers sitting around a van without wheels, sniffing either paint or glue. The road was rough, filled with potholes, and I liked the vibrations it gave off. It felt as though I was working against something, making an effort. I rode through villages, caught the disapproving glares of old women sitting in front of their houses, the lustful envy of village boys working in the fields after school to afford a Ducati of their own. I escaped bewildered dogs snapping at my ankles, zoomed along miles and miles of bare potato fields, wheat fields, cornfields, the postseason desolation of the countryside. The landscape elicited a raw sense of survival: wood prepared, food hoarded, and now it was time to stay inside and drink liquor to warm the belly until the winter passed. After a full day’s ride I returned to Carlsbad, feeling hungry and already missing the smell of burning petrol.
The next day, I rode an hour outside Carlsbad, to Chomutov County. I stopped in front of the church in the village of my grandmother’s birth, Bukovec. In the cemetery out back, my grandmother’s gravestone rested underneath a willow tree. She’d always told me stories about this tree—she had been afraid of it when she was a little girl but grew to love it as she matured and its sagging shape transformed from monstrous to soothing, like the blur of moving water. When her appetite for cabbage soup—another comfort of her girlish years—at the hospital had lessened, and it came time for us to say our last words, she told me how much she hated leaving me. I asked what I could do, how I could repay the lifelong adoration she had given me, how I could show my love, and she said if there was a space anywhere near that damn tree, I should put her there.
I kneeled at the grave and brushed the dried catkins from the sleek stone. I was sorrowful that I hadn’t been able to release her ashes in Space along with my grandfather’s. But this had been her wish. At the end of his life, my grandfather wanted to become dust, to have all trace of the body destroyed so the soul could be free. My grandmother had an agreement with nature. She wanted her body to be buried whole, to become one with the soil, with the tree, with air and rain. With a heavy heart, I had separated them, but I knew that if any remnant of cosmic justice existed, they were already together again in another life, another reality. I stayed at the grave into the night, told my grandmother of Hanuš, as I knew she would’ve asked him many questions. I returned to Carlsbad as the sun began to rise.
PETR SAID THAT my recovery was coming along as well as it could. I had regained some muscle, my limp was not as severe, I even slept for a full evening here and there. My healing weeks were coming to their conclusion and I started asking the question forbidden to me until now: Where is she? “In time, Jakub,” Petr would say, “in time.”
During my last therapy session, Valerie ran her fingers along my leg scar. She was an older woman with deep wrinkles alongside her eyes, and a voice so deep she must have spent her life smoking tobacco and drinking vodka to numb (or enhance?) her desires. Her stories were almost erotic in their precision and in her desperation to narrate the truth without a word one could deem unnecessary. She was the only woman who had touched me since my return. She was Earth’s presence upon my body, made me feel as though she could be simultaneously a lover and a mother. Her fingernails teased my scar.
“I’ve come to love your silence,” she said. “You’re a blank canvas. I can imagine upon you any kind of life. Like a man from old folk stories.”
I kissed Valerie on the cheek. She allowed it. I put on my underwear, pants, and shirt and walked out of the spa whistling. I realized too late it was the tune of an Elvis song.
On that last Sunday in Carlsbad, I purchased a gallon of liquid detergent with added bleach and quickly tipped the Goromped’s holding jar into the plastic container. A frenzied sibilance brought me to my knees, but I held the cap on the bottle firmly to withstand the Goromped’s attempts at freedom. The bottle cracked along the edges, the liquid inside it warming. I clamped my fingers along the sides, desperate to hold it together and smother the cosmic vermin cunt in the one substance it couldn’t withstand, until finally the bottle exploded all over the room, spewing plastic shrapnel that carved a shallow cut into my cheek. Mountain-scented goo covered everything—the bed and carpet and ceiling and my clothes. I touched the walls, searching without success for a sign of a corpse, until at last I thought to pick over my shirt and face, and there in my beard I found the smallest remnants of dead legs and a particle of shell. The Goromped had split in half in the eruption. I spit on the remains, threw them in the toilet, and flushed. Yes, I took pleasure in its killing, science be damned. For a brief moment, my scientific convictions were loose enough to let me believe that Hanuš was watching from some kind of afterlife, grinning with satisfaction at this last act of revenge.
I left a seven-thousand-crown tip for the cleaning service. Removal of the havoc caused by the Goromped’s detergent grenade would take considerable w
ork. At the downstairs shop, I purchased a box of chocolates and wrote, For Valerie. Her kindness had been unconditional. Her life consisted of welcoming men, women, and children in pain, some temporary, some chronic; she attended to people waiting for death, to humans praying that their despair and bodily imprisonment could be eased somehow, lifted, and Valerie effectuated this with her hands, her voice, stories, with a determination to find good in every word and every movement of a weakened limb. Valerie was an unknowing force. Leaving her chocolates seemed banal and almost insulting, but she didn’t need to be the victim of my glorification of her, idolatry in itself a certain kind of death.
WE LEFT BEFORE DAWN, the world still dark. Petr offered to carry the bag of clothes he had lent me downstairs, but I refused. When he opened the passenger door to his Citroën, I pointed at my Ducati and strapped on my helmet.
“Back to Earth in style,” he said.
I asked Petr to put the bag of clothes in his trunk. We started our engines, destination Plzeň, where Petr would take me to Lenka’s apartment. I was not feeling the expected joy over our drive. Certainly I craved to see Lenka, so much that I could not bring myself to keep still. But our reunion would be tainted by the truths that her conversations with Kuřák had made me aware of. The various ways in which I had hurt her, ending with the suffering of my death, which would now be nullified. Everything about my return, the good parts and the bad, was extreme, painful, unprecedented. I couldn’t possibly know what she would say to me, what I would say back, or even how to begin to speak across the ever-widening gap of the universe between us. She was right. I had changed too much to feel like an Earthman. The intricacies of human emotion seemed incomprehensible, a foreign language. I could explain nothing of my journey, and I could not explain who I was now. What to make of such a homecoming?
Out on the road, the Ducati’s recoil shook my bones and filled my blood with chemistry. I was subject to velocity, a violator of the speeds at which the human body was allowed to travel. In Space, the speed of my ascent was masked by my vessel, but here physics was felt without mercy. This was my habitat, a planet I ruled with an iron will, a planet on which I could build a combustion engine and a set of wheels to carry me at the speed of two hundred kilometers per hour as I felt every jolt and every disturbance of the air particles struggling to get out of my path. Why go anywhere else? We’ve already done so much to the place.
I snapped at Petr’s heels, my wheel millimeters away from his bumper. We needed to go faster. To Lenka. Back to home. Back to life.
EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW of subject Lenka P., Session Five:
Lenka P: It keeps piling up.
Kuřák: Go on.
Lenka P: I keep thinking about the miscarriage, years ago. I didn’t even want to be pregnant, not yet. And one day I’m just on the treadmill and suddenly there’s blood everywhere, on my legs, on the running belt. For weeks after, Jakub just stayed at his office. He snuck in to change his clothes every so often and he gave me this look, like he was doing me a favor by staying away, like it was all his fault. Things were never really the same after that. We did have good days still—there was this one time we went to the astronomical clock tower together, and it almost felt like we were those kids in love again. But really, we weren’t. Jakub thought everything was fine, but we had lost parts of ourselves.
Kuřák: Do you think he chooses to be oblivious?
Lenka P: Jakub is smart. Brilliant. But he never understood the work it takes. He always thought, we fell in love, we had this story of us, and that would sustain us for the rest of our lives. It’s not that he didn’t put the work in. But he thought that just showing up, just being there, would be enough. He put his research first, poured himself into everything else. When it came to us, he thought the marriage could be fueled by nostalgia and physical presence. Sealed by having a child.
Kuřák: You sound like you’ve made up your mind about some things.
Lenka P: Well, I’ve been asking the right questions. What would things have been like had Jakub not agreed to go? Would we be together for much longer? How do I welcome him when he returns home? I’d want to feel his body on mine, of course, because I love him, but I’d also want to beat him over the head, shout at him.
Kuřák: Perhaps, if he hadn’t gone, you wouldn’t have the catalyst for these thoughts. You would have gone on, just living one day at a time, without tackling the things causing your unhappiness.
Lenka P: Well, the catalyst is here. Now I have to decide what to do with it.
Kuřák: And?
Lenka P: I want to take long walks without anyone expecting anything from me. I want to be blank. Ithaca no longer expects Penelope to sit and wait. She gets on a boat and sails toward her own wars. Is it so terrible for her to want her own life?
Kuřák: Not at all.
Lenka P: I love him. But I just don’t see the way ahead anymore. I’ve lost it.
Kuřák: It’s okay for human beings to change their minds. You can love someone and leave them regardless.
Lenka P: I keep thinking about his sweet face. His voice. How it will sound if I tell him any of this.
Kuřák: Waiting until he returns is an option.
Lenka P: I need to be away now. I need to leave Prague, leave these people who won’t stop calling, emailing, taking pictures of me without asking. Like I’ve done something special by getting left behind.
Kuřák: What will you do?
Lenka P: I have a phone session with him this afternoon. I’m going to try to explain. Oh God, his voice, what this will do to it.
Kuřák: It will distress him. But it seems that leaving all of this behind is what is necessary for you now.
Lenka P: I’m surprised you’re not talking me out of it. For the sake of the mission and all.
Kuřák: The timing, admittedly, is not great. But such things cannot be avoided.
Lenka P: Such things?
Kuřák: Unhappiness. Wanting to do something about it. And you are now my patient, just as Jakub is. The context doesn’t matter—my work is to bring you to realizations that are the best for your well-being.
Lenka P: And Jakub’s well-being?
Kuřák: Our unique situation presents some conflicts of interest, of course. I’m doing my best to take care of Jakub, considering he will barely speak with me. To be honest, effects of your marriage worry me less than the memories he has buried. The old life he tries to outrun. I would like for him to liberate himself.
Lenka P: You are not a bad man. It is harder and harder for me to see why Jakub dislikes you so much.
Kuřák: I have a theory. Perhaps I remind him of someone he does not like to be reminded of. Or perhaps it is because I made him speak of things he’d rather not have spoken about.
Lenka P: He keeps his secrets.
Kuřák: Clutches them to his chest.
Lenka P: I tried. I am trying.
Kuřák: I know that. So does he.
[END]
PLZENŇ. The town that served as a frontier to many Bohemian wars and produced a beer that soon became a worldwide sensation, featuring ads with half-naked women holding the ale above their heads like an ancient artifact, as if the green glass bottles contained the Fountain of Youth. Plzeň is colorful, with magnificent architecture of the Old World, but modest about the culture and history pulsing within the veins of its streets. A challenger to Prague in many ways, and no Bohemian says such things lightly.
This was Lenka’s new home. We arrived as the town woke up with the sun. Petr parked his car in front of a cake shop in Plzeň’s downtown. As I slid off the Ducati, I felt as though gravity might once again give up on me. Even the heavy cube bricks lining the street could not force the numbness from my calves.
“Her building is around the corner. Number sixty-five. Apartment two. It has a black roof—”
“Petr, I have to do this alone now.”
Hesitant, he handed over the bag of clothes. I turned to go but he grabbed at my sleeve, then pu
lled out a cigarette and lit it with a single hand. “You’re saying I won’t see you again,” he said.
“Don’t think about it anymore,” I said. “You did everything you could. I made my own decisions. I wanted to go.”
“What do you think will happen with her?”
“You know, on the bad days, I thought I made her up. This great love of mine. And you, frankly, and Central, and many other things. When you wake up in a room you don’t recognize, you feel lost, right? What about walking to an outhouse in perfect darkness, using only muscle memory. Chickens pluck at your feet. You walk until the senses catch on to familiar clues. Until you feel the spiderwebs upon the wooden door and the rabbits stirring as you interrupt their sleep. You walk into the darkness until something becomes familiar. I don’t know what should happen, Petr. Please keep me in your thoughts.”
Petr put his arms around my shoulders, then returned to his car and drove off.
I STOOD IN front of Lenka’s apartment door, lacquered in a brown similar to the color of my grandparents’ gate in Středa. There was no doormat, that usual square pancake serving to cleanse one of the dirt of cities before entering a sacred space. I knocked, listened, knocked again, waited with my cheeks hot and sweat soaking through my shirt. I leaned on the door, rested my forehead, knocked once more. What would Lenka say when she opened the door? Surely I looked appalling, perhaps unrecognizable even to her, in comparison to the man she’d married. I pushed myself off the door, straightened my spine. Maybe I wouldn’t need to say a word. Maybe she would be so ecstatic to see me alive that she wouldn’t expect a thing. No answer.
I reached above the doorframe, where Lenka had always left a key during our years together, terrified she would lose hers and lock herself out as she had done when she was a little girl, with her parents out of town and the streets full of unknowns. Under my fingers I felt the coldness of brass, took the key down, and slid it into the lock. I entered Lenka’s world.
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