Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

  The image changes. The creature has gotten hold of something else. It sees me falling.

  I often try to forget the date, but the creature’s cerebral strumming has brought it to the center of my consciousness—March 26, the spring following the Velvet Revolution. I am ten years old. That morning, my parents take the cable car from their Austrian hotel in the Alps to Mount Hoher Dachstein. This vacation is to provide them with much-needed alone time before my father’s trial for the role he took on as a ranking member of the Party, namely the torture of suspects during interrogations. My parents risk adding to the charges by violating the court order to stay in the country, but my father says that marriage should not be subject to the whims of judicial systems. As my parents enjoy the view of the Alps and, I assume, pretend that the virginal mountaintops can distract them from the dread of punishment ahead, I spend time in Středa with my grandparents. Grandpa takes me to the garden and we pick a basketful of sour apples, and some strawberries. I eat four apples, wash them down with a sip of cola, and finish with creamed strawberries for dessert. I collect spiders from the space underneath the rabbit coop and throw them to the vicious chickens, watch as they peck the arachnids apart leg by leg. Nobody wants to speak with me about the future. No one wants to tell me what will be done to my father, why my mother does not sleep and why her forehead sweat reeks of wine, when we can stop watching every news segment on every station as if the anchor’s hand could reach out at any moment and grab one of us by the throat. There is no space for my questions.

  On the Monday my parents are to return, Grandpa takes the early train to Prague with me and walks me to school. All day I fantasize about the Austrian chocolates and fancy salamis my parents will bring back.

  I wait in the school lobby, next to the doorman’s booth, for my parents to pick me up. At four o’clock, Mrs. Škopková approaches me, hands folded behind her back, lips pale. In a quiet voice, she tells me that there has been an accident. My parents cannot, presently, pick me up. When will they come? I ask. Mrs. Škopková apologizes to me, and I ask why, and she asks whether I need something. My grandfather will send a taxi to recover me. I’d like some chocolate, I say.

  She puts on her coat. Ten minutes later, she is back with a Milka bar in her hand. The label shows the picture of the purple Milka cow grazing in a pasture in front of the Alpine mountains. Mrs. Škopková apologizes again. The cable car collapsed, she says before she leaves. Your parents… The doorman glances at me over his crossword puzzle.

  The driver picking me up is an old man who smells of pancakes. His hands shake as he drives. He makes the two-hour trip to Středa, turning the radio volume up when I ask what he knows about a cable car falling down a mountain in the Alps. My grandfather awaits us in front of the gate. He gives the old man money and takes my suitcase. In my hand, I hold an empty chocolate wrapper. Grandpa’s gray whiskers reach to his lips. The skin sinks deeply into his cheeks, and his eyes are barely open. Inside the house, Grandma drinks slivovitz and smokes cigarettes at the table. I have never seen her smoke before. Šíma sleeps underneath her legs, wags his tail lightly when he sees me, but then again closes his eyes and exhales shallow breaths, like he knows this is no time for pleasure. Grandma kisses me on the lips. I go to the couch and lie down and their voices reach me through the rhythm of that damned clock, always nagging, asserting itself harshly over the tranquility of smoke.

  My grandparents take turns explaining. Earlier that morning, my parents boarded the cable car to get to the top of Mount Hoher Dachstein. I stare at the ceiling and remember my father’s enthusiastic lectures on the workings of cable cars. Aerial tramway ropes are made of dozens of individual steel strings with hemp running through the middle. I imagine my father’s lips moving behind the tram glass, re-explaining this to my mother as she admires the albino behemoths ahead, nearly lost in the morning mist. Somewhere down the line, a string pops. And another. And another. The tram is suspended in midair as Earth’s physics race to catch up. In my imagining of the event, influenced by watching Laurel and Hardy every night before the evening news, the car falls very slowly, and the bodies slide back and forth as they grab on to each other, until they are forced into a dying waltz, ladies and gentlemen locked arm in arm, exclaiming vintage expressions like “Oh dear” and “I never.” But this serenity of initial suspension—this antigravity waltz—is interrupted as the falling car gains speed. A gentleman accidentally touches a woman’s midriff, and she slaps him across the cheek with a leather glove. The car wobbles and its occupants hold on to each other’s ties and skirts, pulling off pants and wigs, the slapstick shenanigans of the silent film era. I’m not sure how these cast members die, whether their bones burst through their flesh, whether they die on impact, spines and skulls thrown over the sharp edges of black rock.

  We occupy the living room, and Grandma sings a song I have not heard before about a young man leaving a hop farm to court a girl in the big city, winning her in the end by brewing miraculous beer made from hops his mother packed for the journey. Grandpa smokes, sucks from a warm bottle, coughs. Šíma whines for some food. I hold the Milka wrapper. Grandma speaks to me, but I cannot unseal my dry lips, cannot recall the sounds of our alphabet. I’m looking for my parents in all this snow. The ceiling cracks along the corners and a daddy longlegs crawls out.

  Two days pass, and I move only to urinate in the chamber pot Grandma has left next to the couch. I hear Šíma lapping from it when nobody’s looking. Grandma tries to feed me, but I can’t open my mouth. She wets my lips with water. Grandpa rubs my feet and my hands with his callused fingers, stained yellow. I hold the Milka wrapper. When my grandparents go to sleep, they pull a blanket over me and Šíma snores at my feet, his whiskers wet with urine. This makes me love him more. Grandpa stays up late to watch football and all the American movies the privatized channels can now show. He knows I watch from the corner of my eye, a brief distraction from my search for the bodies, and I angle my head to get a better look at the man in a fedora who whispers to the beautiful blonde. The glow around her hair, her refusal to look the man in the eyes, gives it away—she has a secret. Their lip movements do not match the Czech words they speak. Neighbors come by every day to speak of condolences and God, but Grandma keeps them at the doorstep and thanks them quietly. He was such a good boy, they say of my father. They don’t say he was a good man. I hold the Milka wrapper and I imagine standing among these Austrian mountains as frost causes phlegm to drip from my nose and sting my upper lip. My fingers are black and dead. The world is too vast and there are so many places where humans perish quietly. What good am I, a thin purse of brittle bones and spoiling meat? I can’t find my parents. On the fourth day, I smell like the couch, a mix of dog, detergent, and spilled coffee. My calves cramp and my stomach feels disemboweled. Grandma wears a black dress and blush on her cheeks. Her lips will not cease trembling to the rhythm of her shiny cross earrings. She does not like God but she loves the cross. Grandpa stands over me in a black suit jacket and slacks, a shocking variation on his usual wardrobe of muddy overalls and old army jackets. He holds a plate filled with rotisserie chicken, bread, and butter.

  “You need to get up and eat,” he says.

  My eyes are with the ceiling cracks, and my fingers are outstretched, wishing to peel back the layers of plaster. My right leg cramps. I grit my teeth and ignore it.

  “You don’t have to go to the funeral, but you have to eat,” he says.

  “They found the bodies?” I ask.

  “We never lost them. It took a while to get them here from Austria. I want you to think about whether you want to come with us. Nobody will be upset if you don’t.”

  My search for the bodies was pointless, then. He grants me a few minutes of silence, then forces my mouth open and shoves a piece of chicken inside. He takes the Milka wrapper from my hand and throws it inside the cold chamber of the stove. I chew, and the salt and flesh feel so good they make my eyes water.

  “You have to get up n
ow,” Grandpa says. “You have to be a person.”

  I resist, reject. The creature loses the thread of my life, and we return before Jan Hus. King Wenceslas no longer protects him—Hus has officially been declared a heretic by the church, a stigma as permanent as a birthmark. The Romans now consider Bohemia a nation of heretics. Hus wears a simple white robe and climbs atop a spotted, undernourished horse. Sigismund, king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown, has promised Hus a safe passage and lodgings if he attends a council of church leaders to explain his betrayal. Does Hus sense treachery ahead? It is hard to tell, for his eyes are always set forward, as if he sees wonders beyond reality, as if he can penetrate dimensions and pick at concealed truths. Hus arrives at Konstanz and lives, unharmed, in the house of a widow. Her long, dark hair reaches to her knees and her shoulders sink from the disappointment of dead love. She never looks Hus in the eyes, yet speaks to him sternly, as if addressing a misbehaving little boy. She makes thin vegetable soup for him, and Jan soaks his bread crust in it, careful not to soil his beard. He tells the widow that no earthly group can provide true salvation. His faith will not be prescribed or dictated. The books he loves and hates will not be burned. His nation will not be blacklisted on account of greed. Against orders from his hosts, Hus preaches in Konstanz—his conviction is a compulsion not subject to self-preservation. The widow kisses him before he is imprisoned. The men condemning him set a sign on his head: Heresiarch. Leader of heretics.

  Seventy-three days he spends in a castle dungeon, his arms and legs chained, eating bread gray with mold. When he is questioned, the councilmen spit and ask him to recant, but he will not. A man is free, he shoots back. Man is free under God.

  The sentence is death.

  The executioners have a hard time scaling up the fire—simply put, Hus’s body hesitates to burn. In an attempt to help, an old woman from the audience throws a handful of brushwood on the pile, blows a little at the impotent flames. “Sancta simplicitas!” Hus cries out from the stake as his feet redden. Holy Simplicity. At forty-four degrees Celsius, the proteins within the series of cells known as Jan Hus begin to break down. As the temperature rises, the initial layers of skin peel back like those of a kielbasa. The thicker dermal layer shrinks and splits, and a yellow fatty paste leaks out and burns with a low squeal. Muscles become dry and contract. Bone burns stubbornly, though, as if the solid foundation of man were not the soul (nowhere to be seen), but this brittle framework. Here is Jan Hus, and he is dead. A space shuttle will someday carry his name.

  The creature has ahold of me once again. I am on the couch; my grandparents are dressed for a funeral. I hold the plate my grandfather has given me, and I eat the chicken and dip bread in the grease, then wet my fingers and pick at the crumbs.

  “I’ll stay here,” I say.

  Grandpa takes the plate away and picks me up. He squeezes so hard I can feel the food moving through my body. He puts me down on my feet, and Grandma kisses me with lips tasting of lard and alcohol.

  The silence in the living room changes during the hours of their absence. I am alone. Šíma is in the yard, sniffing out mice. The clock ticks obediently, mechanical and dead. The steel strings pop one by one and the tram halts suspended in the air for one long second before it begins to fall. I turn the TV on, six o’clock news. Small business grows, the communists are long gone, and we are free to live as we like. Free to travel, free to kiss, free to remain silent as the tram falls down and down until we are free to die. Free to be as we like. My grandparents come home at seven and I sit in the same chair, and I don’t remember how I got here, and I don’t know what I plan to do next—until suddenly I am no longer the sole inhabitant of JanHus1, and I am left sweating and looking upon my visitor.

  “Sancta simplicitas!” the creature says. “You are what I’m looking for.”

  The Secrets of Humanry

  SKINNY HUMAN,” THE CREATURE said. I ignored it and stared at the empty whiskey bottle.

  The words didn’t travel through my ear canal or vibrate through my eardrum, didn’t fill my skull as a human voice would. The sound was a dull ache, a mild brain freeze.

  I turned my back and pushed forward. Pressure around my temples forced green and blue stains into my vision. Had I been using my legs, I surely would’ve stumbled from wall to wall, feeling my way around like a drunkard or a blind man. But the lack of gravity allowed for flawless transportation, and without looking back, without acknowledging the scratching and breathing behind me, I made my way back to the Lounge and strapped myself down into the Flat chair. I watched, transfixed, as whiskey slithered up and down my cosmic glass, a shape engineered to resemble spaceship fuel tanks: sharp edge around the bottom, round on top, almost, just almost resembling the human heart. The liquid traveled inside the container in undisciplined blotches until I sucked it out and released it into my bloodstream.

  The liquor burn fueled my anger, a spinal tap—I was a slave unshackled, bent to seize the reins of JanHus1, this magnificent steel beast, and plunge it into the planet that had spawned me. The labor, the isolation, the physical deterioration, all endured so that my wife could simply disappear. I plotted an apocalypse: somehow I would turn JanHus1 into a sentient meteorite, turn it around, and drive it directly into the Earth. Somehow I would cut off the influence of physics over the shuttle, crash it through the atmosphere, and set the planet ablaze. My charred body would come back to life just so I could seek out Lenka. I would sit her down for a cup of coffee amid the end of civilization and ask her what it had felt like when she woke up one morning knowing she wanted out, whatever that meant.

  Love could turn us all into war criminals. The Flat came to life and showed three email notifications, one of which was a reminder that my live blogging Q&A session with selected Earthlings was to begin in an hour. The feeds of my conversations with everyday citizens: children wearing T-shirts with my likeness silk-screened on them, women who couldn’t stop referring to my wife as “so lucky,” people who asked the simple questions, as in, was I allowed to have a beer, and how did I cope without a shower? Video technicians smoothed out my space-worn facial features, so painfully emphasized by the crisp image of high definition, by applying airbrushes and filters, making me look fresh and tight-skinned, because what is a hero who loses his looks really worth?

  Not doing it, I replied to Petr’s reminder.

  “Skinny human, you have already acknowledged my existence,” the creature said. “It is unreasonable for you to ignore it once again.”

  I let the whiskey bottle hover, a gesture much less satisfying than smashing it against the wall.

  “I am sorry about your female partner. For what it is worth, the sociocultural rituals of your society seem to be in conflict with biological reality.”

  I looked up at it. The voice was high-pitched, childlike, yet a deep growl accompanied every word, like a malfunctioning radio. Its teeth were frozen in a cramped grin, and all of its eyes blinked at the same time.

  “What was that?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “What were you doing to me? I felt it.”

  “I am a traveler,” it said.

  “Dr. Kuřák is going to love this,” I said. “This plays exactly into his expectation. Reliving traumas, personification of fears, that son of a bitch.”

  “How would you respond?” it said.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Yes. Your mind is riddled with nonanswers. River dams that trap the wild joy of water for the sake of practicality. A poet human said that.”

  “I’m gassy. Exhausted.”

  “It is of utmost importance that we speak to each other.”

  “I need to sleep you off. Like a stomachache.”

  I floated off the chair, down Corridors 3, 2, and 1, back into my personal chamber, where the Womb spacebag awaited. Many Czech children on Earth had their own replica in their rooms, only horizontal, resting safely atop their beds. I glanced behind me a few times to see the creature follow, al
l eight of its legs smoothly rowing back and forth, back and forth, like the paddles of an ancient ship on its way to war. It seemed to be able to adjust its position and altitude regardless of the vacuum, as if it weren’t subject to physics. For a moment, I observed its anatomy in detail, pondered the size of the joints set along the legs, the roundness of the belly, the dark irises of the eyes all focused in the same direction—could they do otherwise, did the nervous system provide individual control over each? The eyes were directed toward me, always toward me, and I shook my head and pleaded with myself to cease this study of an imaginary being.

  Dr. Kuřák was an expert on hallucinations—in fact, he had admitted that the concept made him giddy. He was very careful to explain the distinction between hallucinations—a perception in the absence of stimuli that nevertheless holds the qualities of real perception—and delusional perceptions in which a correctly sensed stimulus, or, one could say, a real thing, is given some additional, twisted significance. For delusional perceptions, Dr. Kuřák chuckled, see Kafka. While Freudian theories proposed that hallucinations were the manifestation of subconscious wishes, perversions, even self-flagellation, newer waves of less ego-obsessed psychologists suggested that hallucinations had to do with metacognitive abilities, or “knowing about knowing.” Dr. Kuřák was a bona fide Freudian, thus insisting that should a crisis occur during my time on JanHus1, the entire mythos of my childhood would come pouring out, filling the darkened halls of the ship with visions of horror, fear, pleasure, the naked body of my mother and erect phallus of my father, dreams of misdirected violence, and yes, perhaps even a “friend.” Whatever the theory, my predicament was the same. Kuřák’s predictions of madness seemed to be coming true.

  The thing to do, of course, was to touch the creature. Hallucinations cannot be touched without dissipating. But what if I took the thin hairs on its legs between my fingertips and felt them, rough and long, or perhaps smooth and warm, felt them and thus had to declare them real? Was I, Jakub Procházka, ready to acknowledge an extraterrestrial without losing the last bits of control over my psyche? The consequences of this finding—existential, cosmic, unprecedented in the history of man—were too large for my one person. I slipped inside the sleeping bag and fastened the straps around my legs and shoulders. I turned down the light dial and the yellow hue of the room changed to a deep dark blue. Even the little bit of light that remained irritated my eyes and I pulled the zipper over my face, sighing at the darkness.