“Last time, then,” she said.
PERHAPS I ASSIGNED too much importance to this single moment. Perhaps not. But today, during our video chat, I was going to ask Lenka whether she felt the same way about our long silences and lack of humor. I would tell her how much I’d been thinking about the morning I rejected her ritual. I would ask whether she read the newspapers predicting the likelihood of my return. I would tell her that lately my nights (or periods of sleep, to be more precise, but Dr. Kuřák had recommended I hold on to the concept of day and night) had been filled with plates of bacon spitting grease, my tongue slithering in anticipation of carnivorous fulfillment. I wanted bacon on my Nutella sandwiches, my celery, my ice cream. I wanted crumbles of it sprinkled into my nose, my ears, between my thighs. I wanted to absorb it into my skin, revel in the busty pimples it would cause. During this call to Lenka, I needed to address my violation of the contract, beg for forgiveness. Never again would I refuse something she offered with her own two hands.
The call would reunite us. Kick-start a new wave of long-distance passion that would make the triumph of the mission that much more satisfying.
I entered habitat and nutrition data into the logs, leaving out my splurging on chocolate spreads and cider. I recalibrated Ferda the dust collector, ran internal diagnostics to ensure the filters were clean and ready for Chopra’s offering. Having completed my preparations, I killed some time reading Robinson Crusoe, a favorite of mine from childhood that Dr. Kuřák had recommended I bring to create “an association of comfort.” More obviously, Dr. Kuřák offered, I should take Crusoe as the perfect example of a man who embraces solitude and turns its crippling tendencies into opportunities for self-improvement.
Eventually, an alarm on the central computer announced it was five o’clock in Prague. I stripped into a black T-shirt, turned on my electric shaver, and ran it over my cheeks, chin, and neck as the machine collected and trapped the scruff. A stray hair follicle in zero gravity could be as dangerous as a bullet on Earth. The stress of the impending call with Lenka had pushed on my intestines all day, but I’d held out to make sure I wouldn’t have to go twice. I entered the toilet through Corridor 3 and activated the air purifiers. The fans soaked up the stale air and replaced it with a vanilla-scented conditioned breeze. I strapped myself to the toilet and pushed as its vacuum pulled at my ass hairs and transported the waste out of sight. I read more about Crusoe—after all, the toilet was where my love for the book had originated. As a child, I’d suffered from yearly bouts of the intestinal flu, putting me out of commission for two or three weeks at a time. While I shat water, weakened from a diet of bananas and rice soaked in pickle juice, over and over again I read about Crusoe’s solitude. Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it. This was the very same copy I’d read as a child, yellowed and torn, abused by the coffee stains of my great-grandfather, who had stolen the book from the house of a Nazi captain whose floors he was forced to scrub. Even through the vanilla scent, I caught the stink of an intestinal system grown discontent with irregular eating, stress, a diet of processed foods and frozen vegetables, and water that tasted of chlorine. I studied the unkempt bush of pubic hair that sprawled to the sides of my skinny legs. There used to be muscle there, definition carved by years of running and cycling, now lost to pale flab that my halfhearted cardio session on the treadmill couldn’t keep away. I wiped with wet disposable towels, pulled up my pants, and cleaned the sides of the toilet.
Afterward I dressed in a white button-up and a black tie, the same one I’d worn to my last romantic dinner on Earth. I removed the boxer briefs I’d been wearing for five days and exchanged them for a new pair. As an Earthman, I had always refused to go on a date without changing my underwear immediately before. I opened the compost chute and threw the underwear inside—another recent development in space travel, whereby a combination of bacteria and minor organic garbage was unleashed on the underwear, breaking them down until little remained. This ensured I did not have to sacrifice storage space or shoot my filthy knickers into the cosmos.
I looked myself over in the mirror. The formerly well-fitting button-up hung from my thin shoulders like a poncho. The tie saved it, kind of, but nothing could make my scarecrow arms and collapsed chest look particularly healthy. The thinness of my frame responded to the ache in my bones. The circles under my eyes spoke of the nightmares interrupting my sleep and fleeting visions of long, arachnid legs creeping within the darkened corridors, a secret I kept from my reports and therefore from Dr. Kuřák’s thirst for madness. According to Central, I was doing fine. Good heartbeat, great results on psychological tests, despite the verbal dialogues I was having with myself before bed. Central knew best.
I floated into Corridor 4, an improvised lounge, and strapped myself to a seat facing the source of my connection and entertainment—the Flat, its large sleek screen responding flawlessly to touch, its Internet connection provided through satellite SuperCall (major provider of wireless services and mission sponsor). It boasted a database of ten thousand films, from The Maltese Falcon to Ass Blasters 3. I had limited access to social networking—all communication with the outside world had to go through Central, of course, then public relations, then the office of the president, then back to public relations—but I had the rest of the Web at my disposal, with its magnificent power to entertain any brain on any subject anywhere it could reach its omniscient fingers. I had to wonder: if we could only give a simple laptop to all the starving and the overworked, blanket the globe in the warmth of unlimited Wi-Fi, wouldn’t the starving and the overworking be so much more pleasant, unlimited streaming for all? In my darkest hours on JanHus1, when my eyes hurt too much to read and I was certain something was stalking me whenever I turned my back, I watched dozens of videos of Norman the Sloth, a lazy, always-smiling creature whose owner had the ingenious idea to dress him up in boot-cut jeans and a cowboy hat. I grinned at Norman’s sloth shenanigans and spoke to him under my breath. Norman.
Above the Lounge rested one of the last functioning surveillance cameras on the station, its blue dot of consciousness radiating proudly and watching me live.
Thirty minutes until connection time. I played solitaire, ran my hand over my cheeks to confirm I hadn’t missed a spot. I imagined Lenka getting dressed for me, pulling the smooth tights over her coffee & cream–colored legs, stopping just below the half-moon dimple on her lower back. I practiced my greeting:
Ahoj lásko.
Or, Čau beruško?
Perhaps casual, Ahoj Leni?
I spoke the words in different intonations—higher, lower, gruff, sensitive, semiwhisper, imitation of my own morning voice, Darth Vaderesque, childlike. None of it sounded right. What could I say next?
I love bacon now. I want to feed it to you with my fingers while we sit on a beach in Turkey or Greece. Nothing tastes quite right in Space. I crave the taste of you.
I would remind her of our best days. Of the day we drove out to the lake, smoked pot underneath oak trees, spoke about the places we would travel. We made out in the car and returned home just in time to eat chocolate croissants and fall asleep on a bed filled with crumbs, our chins stained with wine and saliva. Bodies sun-drained and calves coated in rough sand.
Or the day we snuck into the astronomical clock tower and fucked so hard we defaced a national treasure.
Or the evening we married, in the middle of a Moravian vineyard, buzzed and barefoot. We didn’t have to work for happiness then. It simply existed.
This was the one. A break to the streak of our distant, alien conversations. I just knew it. Maybe she’d even close the call booth privacy curtain again. Let me see the reflection of jazz club blue.
A shadow of hairy, arachnid legs peeked from beneath the Lounge counter.
“Not now,” I said, my voice shaking.
The legs disappeared.
Two minutes
until the call. I closed all other windows and glared. Would she call early? Even a few seconds would amount to an endless stretch of hope. One minute. She would have to call first. I couldn’t seem desperate. Ten seconds late. I couldn’t give in. Car trouble? One minute late. I breathed deeply, the heart rate statistics on my wristwatch hastened. Two minutes. Fuck. I pressed the dial button.
Someone answered. The expected face of my wife morphed into a gray, stained privacy curtain pulled all the way behind an empty chair.
“Well?” I said to no one.
A large hand, knuckles sprouting patches of red hair, gripped the curtain. It hesitated. No body yet, but I knew this was Petr.
“Hi, yes, I’m waiting,” I said.
The hand pulled the curtain aside and finally I could see the entirety of Petr, mission leader, in his usual black T-shirt, the faded Iron Maiden tattoo on his forearm, a shaved head shiny with perspiration, a biker’s beard extending well to his chest. He sat down and closed the privacy curtain behind him. My pointer finger twitched.
“Jakub, looking sharp. How’s things?” he said.
“Fine. Lenka ready yet?”
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s in the report. Where is she? Today is Wednesday, right?”
“Yes, it’s Wednesday. How’s the nausea? Are the meds working?”
“It feels like you should be hearing me,” I said, arms folded. Petr tapped on the desk with his knuckles. For a while, we were silent.
“Okay,” Petr said, “all right. I’m an engineer. I’m not really trained for this. It’s chaos around here. We’re still trying to figure out what happened.”
“Happened?”
“So, Lenka came in a few hours early today. She fidgeted a lot, wore sunglasses inside. We put her in the break room with some coffee. A few of us tried to talk to her and she just kind of nodded at everything. Kuřák spoke with her for a bit too. And then, twenty-five minutes before your call, she just got up and walked out, walked to the lobby, and our guy down there chased after her, asking what was going on, did she forget something, and she put a cigarette in her mouth and said she needed out.”
“She doesn’t smoke anymore,” I said. “Never mind. When is she coming back?”
“I don’t know. She jumped in her car. I went after her. She locked the doors and then the car wouldn’t start. So I just stood there, she fidgeted with the key, the car coughed, stalled. So she rolls down the window and asks me if I could give her a jump. I told her I couldn’t, I took the bicycle to work today, but I could grab one of the guys from upstairs. And then she just cried, and she told me she couldn’t handle any of this, that she didn’t know why she thought she could, that she couldn’t believe you left the life you had. She punched the steering wheel and turned the key again and the car started. Then she sped off, almost ran over my foot.”
I looked into the blue eye of my webcam, the last working lens capturing my likeness on the ship. Should I name it? It studied me so loyally. I tapped on it in acknowledgment.
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I don’t either, Jakub. Maybe she’s going through some things? I’ve got people calling her number on a loop. I’ve got a guy calling her mother. We’ll call some friends. But she just ran off. I guess that’s what I’m telling you. She just ran out of that lobby like Beelzebub was chasing her.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She knows how much I need to hear her.”
“Look, we’ll find her. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”
“She didn’t say anything else to you?”
“No.”
“You promise? I fucking swear if you’re lying, or if this is some kind of joke—”
“Jakub, your vitals are a mess. You need to try to focus on the mission right now, stuff you can control. We’ll find her. She’s just having a moment. It’s going to be all right.”
“Don’t tell me what I need right now.”
“Stay with the structure. What were you going to do after the call? Dinner?” Petr said.
“I was going to masturbate and read,” I said.
“Okay, well, I didn’t need to know all of that, but you should proceed with your day. Keep a clear mind.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Have a protein bar. Do some cardio. That always helps m—”
I ended the call and unfastened myself from the chair. I slid the tie off my neck and let it flicker down Corridor 3, then unbuttoned my shirt and ripped it off my back. Petr’s voice sounded through the intercom, the last resort of forced access into my world.
“You’re on a mission, Jakub. Focus. It’s not easy for Lenka. Let her do what she needs.”
I pressed the intercom button to reply.
“I survive on these calls. I sleep thanks to them. Now she can’t do it anymore? What does that mean?”
I craved Mozart, gummy bears, rum cake, the curve underneath Lenka’s breast where I could slide my fingers for warmth. The closest comfort on the ship was the remaining three bottles of whiskey the SPCR had reluctantly allowed me to bring on board. I tilted one of the bottles and dipped a finger inside, then spread the flavor along my tongue.
“Through these months and through these miles, Petr, I can’t shake the vulgar sense that somehow I got fucked on this.”
He was silent.
The nausea came with the usual urgency, as if an invisible hand squeezed my medulla and clawed at my stomach lining. She had left. She needed out, she said. Where was my wife, the woman I hallucinated about as I attempted to sleep vertically, the woman for whom I was to return to Earth? Where were the decades of dinners and illnesses and lovemaking and images of our coalescent lives? She had walked into the Space Program of the Czech Republic headquarters in her sunglasses and couldn’t stand to wait and talk to me. She had told a man she barely knew that she needed out. As if I no longer existed.
Lenka left me. The silences had led to this. I had read her exactly right.
She had left me once before, in those weeks around the anniversary of my parents’ deaths, when I hid out in my office for days at a time and left her alone after the miscarriage. But back then, my legs were bound by gravity and I was able to run after her to the metro station, to beg her in front of all the people waiting for their train, to tell her I’d never leave her alone again (yes, I saw the lie now, as I floated inside my vessel), and by the time the train arrived, she allowed me to kiss her hand and to take the suitcase, and we walked home, where we could begin the negotiation of repairing our battered union. There was no such possibility here. Every hour, I was thirty thousand kilometers farther away from her.
BY INSTINCT, I made my way to the lab chamber. Life made sense inside labs, it was measured and weighed and broken down to its most intimate essentials. I removed a plate of cosmic dust, an old sample, from its container, slid it underneath the microscope, and focused. It was the Space genome, the plankton of the cosmos, water turned to wine, and it whispered to me, revealed its content. Another sip of whiskey as I gazed at the milky crystal of silicates, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and that omnipresent vermin, H2O in solid form.
Yes, of course, this was why I had been put on Earth, to collect the pieces of universe and within them find something new, to throw myself into the unknown and bring humanity a piece of Chopra. What marriages I failed, what children I could not bring into being, what parents and grandparents I could not keep alive, it did not matter, for I was above all these earthly facts.
There was no consolation in it. I slid the dust plate back inside its container.
As I exited the lab, shirtless, again I spotted the shadow.
“Hey. You,” I said.
I wondered, not for the first time, why I was addressing an illusion.
The legs quivered, hesitated, then skittered around the corner. I pushed on. I heard the legs scratching along the ceiling, as if tree branches were scraping the
vessel’s windshield. Behind Corridor 4, the shadow rested. There was nowhere else to escape. I was unafraid, which frightened me. I swam forward.
The smell was distinct—a combination of stale bread, old newspapers in a basement, a hint of sulfur. The eight hairy legs shot out of the thick barrel of its body like tent poles. Each had three joints the size of a medicine ball, at which the legs bent to the lack of gravity. Thin gray fur covered its torso and legs, sprouting chaotically, like alfalfa. It had many eyes, too many to count, red-veined, with irises as black as Space itself. Beneath the eyes rested a set of thick human lips, startlingly red, lipstick red, and as the lips parted, the creature revealed a set of yellowing teeth which resembled those of an average human smoker. As it fixed its eyes on me, I tried to count them.
“Good day,” it said.
Then:
“Show me where you come from.”
A Very Deep Fall
THE ALIEN CREATURE RAKES through the confines of my mind, gently but resolutely. It is seeing me. It is studying me to the very core of my genetic code. The tips of its legs strum on threads of memory, a rhythmic twitching within my brain matter. It shuffles through the history of my heredity, the origins of my nation, what brought both me and the name Jan Hus to the cosmos. The feeling is not entirely unpleasant. Together, we see Hus, a man of God whose name is engraved upon my ship. He preaches the words of John Wycliffe from a small cathedra in the public square of Univerzita Karlova. God’s people, he says, are made up of his common children, all pre-elected to be saved—they are not the visibly identified members of the Catholic Church. God’s favor can be neither bought into nor spoken from the lips of a golden-plated old man. The organization of religion is self-defeating, a trap for sin. Hus does not speak with hatred, but with the soothing composure of a prophet—a man who knows. And the people listen. Students gather with quills in hand and their hearts are moved. Bohemia must be freed from the tyranny of religious institutions.
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 3