I finished the terrible coffee. Shoe Man and Prime Minister Tůma, boyhood friends. Where did I fit between the two? I slammed down the cup and logged into my old student email account, knowing the university allowed these accounts to exist indefinitely without oversight. I pasted Radislav Zajíc’s email—his private information leaked by a vigilante hacker group—into the recipient field. Sure, it wasn’t likely he’d be checking it much, with the venom citizens were bound to send his way. But I had to find him. Before the day I died, I would look Shoe Man in the face and ask my questions. What had he done? This was the first step.
I considered soliciting one of the students around me for a cigarette or a swig from their flask to calm me. Given the ban on caffeine during training and the mission itself, the single cup of coffee was already affecting me with a vengeance—making my hands shake and causing a variety of typos that prolonged the writing of only a few simple sentences:
You offered me gum and I said no.
You took our house. Stalin’s pigs, oink oink.
My grandfather died in a twin bed from IKEA. My grandmother died in a hospital bed after eating cheap cabbage soup.
What else have you done?
I’m here.
I sent the email.
Beside me, a young woman with a thick book in her lap looked around conspicuously and poured from a silver flask into her coffee cup, and I leaned over to ask if I could impose in exchange for my silence on the contraband. She answered that I could have a little, and that blackmail is impolite, and I thanked her and drank down my own spiked cup as I stared at my email inbox. Refreshed, stared some more, massaged my stiff knees. Students began to depart, and as the young woman next to me left, the barista began to wipe the counters and I noted the café was to close in a few minutes. Refreshed, refreshed—once a known astronaut, now reduced to a customer overstaying his welcome to check email. The barista tapped me on the shoulder. My two hours had passed—I was welcome to return tomorrow morning.
I hovered my cursor over the browser window’s red X. It seemed more red than usual. The color of a stop sign. I hesitated. Behind me, the barista’s deep exhale.
A new subject line appeared. The preposition “Re,” bold, thick with life. I opened the email. The barista tapped on my shoulder again.
Little spaceman. If it is really you, call me.
I took a two-hundred-crown bill from my wallet and offered it to the barista for some paper, a pen, and whatever coins he had on him. He hesitantly accepted the bill and brought me a pencil and a napkin. I scribbled down the number Shoe Man had sent. The coffee and alcohol in my bloodstream made my heart knock against my rib cage. I shut off the computer and thanked the barista thrice as he locked the doors. He shrugged, and I ran to the end of the street.
I slammed twenty crowns into a pay phone around the corner. Where do the coins go? I wondered. The concept seemed like pure science fiction. Tossing a piece of metal into another contraption of metal, and voilà, hearing a voice.
I dialed the number as the sun outside descended, creating an array of shadows within the booth. Around me the city wound down, humans with their business concluded going about the pre-leisure rituals of getting dinner ingredients or hiding out in a bar. My headache and bloated stomach reminded me that I had been living on junk food and beer. But what was a body, after all? Why keep it pretty for the dirt?
On the other end of the line, a click, followed by hesitation. Then a voice I knew, as if I were still hearing it through the keyhole in the closed door to my grandparents’ kitchen.
“Let me hear your voice,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“It is you.”
“What have you done?” I said.
“You’re not dead. This is your voice. Unless—”
“Answer me.”
“I want to see you.”
“What if I kill you?” I said.
“Something your grandfather would say. The number you’re calling from, it’s Prague.”
“I’ll be by the statue they built. Tomorrow. Noon.”
“You used to study in that park. That’s why I asked them to build it there. But maybe I’m just talking to myself here,” Zajíc said. “Going mad. Is it you?”
“It might be better for you if it weren’t,” I said, and hung up.
I found shelter in a shuttered bakery shop offered for sale and ate a slice of cold pizza for dinner. Soon an entrepreneur would take the place over and give it a new mission. The floors were prewar, when stonemasonry was still an art. They were cool to the touch and I spread a tablecloth underneath myself, looking upon the withered and sagging signs advertising the former menu. Millennia ago, the earliest people found that they could pulverize grains of wheat to form a putty which, upon baking, would redefine the species. Even now, with culinary pleasures having gone global and the world offering complex delicacies, what comforted me as I rested in the bakery was the image of a simple roll, golden on the outside with pure white dough on the inside. The crack you make with your thumb as you rip into it.
The purpose of my newfound mission thrilled me. I couldn’t go back to Lenka, I didn’t belong in her world anymore. With the universe ever expanding, we could never circle back around to each other. But Shoe Man…
Radislav Zajíc. He defied these laws of physics. He had returned, somehow. He knew me. He knew Tůma. I’d always figured he knew of me, if only from the newspapers. I had counted on him watching my triumph. But his friendship with Tůma opened its own separate cosmos, one that did not begin with a random incident of energy exploding into being, but was carefully designed. As I fell asleep in the bakery, with mice bumping into my shoes, I was certain that everything that had happened was somehow his doing.
In the morning, I woke early. I rode to Vyšehrad, a fort overlooking the River Vltava. There the ghosts of the old kings kept guard over alleys and fountains, towers and shops, the souls of children dragging themselves to school and tired adults jumping onto the tram. Perhaps the ghosts watched over me too. More than a thousand years ago, Princess Libuše had stood on the hill of Vyšehrad and looked across the River Vltava, where she declared, “I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars.” She instructed her men to travel to the settlement and find a peasant constructing the threshold of a house. Atop this threshold, Libuše claimed, was where the Prague Castle should be built. “And because even the great noblemen must bow low before a threshold, you shall give it the name Praha.” Threshold. Práh. The founding of Prague depended on such staggering duality. Across the river, Libuše had seen a vision of a thousand towers extending up to the skies, towers so high they could be seen from Istanbul, from Britannia, perhaps from God’s own divine throne. And yet the name of this city of glory was based on the humblest part of any structure: a threshold, a line marking entry and exit, a symbol no person considers twice. Was this duality—the humble name and the contrasting vision of grandeur borne out when Přemysl the plowman, a simple villager, married Princess Libuše and became the first ruler of the Bohemian lands—the reason Prague had survived civil wars, the Austro-Hungarian cultural purging, and occupations by fascists and Bolsheviks? Perhaps the world is enslaved to its own dualities, a humble beginning with an impossible dream attached. Libuše’s vision across the river was the beginning. I am the end. With me, Prague had touched the skies at last, and fulfilled the prophecy that Libuše bestowed upon its cradle. Never mind that the Holy Roman Emperor once resided in the Prague Castle, or that the first council of Bohemia had congregated within its walls. It was with me that the history of the city had finally come full circle.
I rode to New Town and parked my motorcycle a few blocks from Charles Square, which had been a home to me during my first university years. It had changed quite a bit. No longer did students loiter around with their heavy bags. They had been replaced by headlong tourists consulting their maps and agendas. I roamed the streets around the square and took part in the city that had given me life. I
handed money to a group of three actors performing Shakespeare on top of a parked van. I ate hot dogs and paid bathroom attendants to hand me carefully folded toilet paper. Church bells tolled in the distance, and a small boy dropped ice cream at my feet, his parents lamenting in Italian. I walked into an alleyway that turned into a pop-up bookshop, with young people rummaging through boxes of literature and paintings. The street ended in a homeless commune of tents and piles of clothes, the outpost secured by a vigilant street dog. I fed the dog the remnant of my frankfurter wrapped in a napkin—in Prague, the likelihood of running into a dog, feral or domesticated, was high, and I liked to be prepared—and the guardian of the commune’s treasures licked my fingers.
At eleven o’clock, I returned to the square, its grass dark and littered with wandering birds. The square was surrounded by walls of trees that sheltered its inhabitants from the city life around it. There, in the middle of the plaza, stood the spaceman’s statue, dead eyes of carved stone, a nose much smaller than mine, helmet in his right hand, left hand over his heart, a gesture to the people. The base, towering above me as if it held the weight of an emperor, was decorated with a sign of pure gold, whose letters had been carved by the same stonemason who had curated the main stairwell of the National Museum. Part of the etched name was concealed by growing vines.
Beyond the statue I encountered a group of middle school children on a field trip. They frolicked under the supervision of a frowning teacher, and their youthful twittering carried an eerie song to my ears. Impossible, I thought, but no, I had heard them correctly. They were singing of the dead spaceman, of being just like him someday.
No other sound would ever force the tune out of my head. It would return without invitation for a lifetime to come, like the flu or the scent of lovers. I stood there in the flesh and observed the children, my attention unreturned, while the stoic, bloodless version of me placed a few meters away earned the praise of their song.
I sat on a bench across from the statue. Noon was a few minutes away. My nausea, the tightness in my knuckles, the violence of the moment, the fear forced me to lean forward. The man who’d banished my family was on his way over. In this earthly life once again resumed, he was now all that mattered.
One minute late. Was he coming?
A figure emerged between the trees. He made his way toward the children and put his hand on the teacher’s shoulder. The two spoke and the newcomer pointed toward me. The teacher nodded.
Radislav Zajíc walked briskly toward me. He stopped some fifteen meters away, his arms awkwardly limp at his sides, like a boy told not to pick his nose. He seemed shorter than I remembered, but it was his face, marked by those same pox scars and gray scruff. His suit, the body armor, was smooth and perfect at every crevice, as if it were another layer of fresh skin.
“I asked that teacher if he saw you sitting here,” Zajíc said, “and he said yes.”
I rose and walked up to Shoe Man. I was taller than he was. “You see me,” I said.
“I do. Jakub. You are here. And you look like your father.”
He knew me. He had recognized me instantly. This man was the last living remnant of my early history. A proof that those childhood days weren’t a mirage. Against my will, the anger and nausea dissipated. Shoe Man soothed me.
Probability theory examines mathematical abstractions of nondeterministic events. It also studies measured quantities that may either be single occurrences or evolve over time in an apparently random fashion. If a sequence of random events is repeated many times, patterns can be detected and studied, thus creating the illusion that human observers can truly know and understand chaos. But what if our existence itself is a field of study in probability conducted by the universe? Each of us a character, a mathematical abstraction set up with attributes copied from previous subjects, with a slight variation (switch Oedipal complex for Electra complex, exchange crippling social anxiety for narcissism), sent out with similar instincts—the fear of death, the fear of loneliness, the fear of failure. Our outcomes—poverty, starvation, disease, suicide, peaceful death on a bed plagued by shame and regret—being collected by a researcher above, a cosmic tally gathering the likelihood of happiness, likelihood of wholeness, likelihood of self-destruction. Likelihood of luck. Can a subject born impoverished and diseased finish in the upper luck bracket at the end of her life? Can a subject born into privilege and health crash and die in utter misery? We’ve seen it all. We’ve seen it all and yet where are these patterns, when will the universe publish its findings in a respected peer-reviewed journal? What is the ratio of probability for one cosmic event to occur over all others? How unlikely. Yet here we are.
Radislav Zajíc saw me. I raised my fist and slugged him across the jaw. He fell to the ground too easily, and I studied the spot on my wrist where something had cracked. My third knuckle collapsed, creating a darkened crater. Blood burst out. The schoolteacher hurriedly gathered the children and led them away from the square.
Zajíc stared up at me. Gone was the defiance he’d shown to my grandfather—he was not daring me; he was not baiting. He simply waited, looked on with gentle curiosity. If you decide to beat me to death, that is your business.
I extended my hand and pulled him to his feet. He walked to the statue, and I followed.
“You know, it’s been many years since someone’s hit me,” he said. “It has a sort of relief to it.”
“I’ve been saving it for a few decades.”
He put his hand on the base of the statue, brushed the vines from my name. “You should’ve seen it,” he said. “I’ve never witnessed something pass through the Parliament so quickly. People were outbidding themselves on how much we should spend on building this statue. They wanted to make it as tall as a tower. But I argued that you’d prefer something smaller, in a place that matters. I know you spent most of your time here as a student. Looking up at the sky and studying all night.”
“You and Tůma. You did this.”
“Yes and no. How did you do it, Jakub? How’d you make it back.”
“I flew, you son of a bitch. I flapped my goddamn wings and here I stand.”
Zajíc leaned against the statue, massaging his jaw.
“You sent me to Chopra. You put Tůma up to it. Say it.”
“I gave him your name, Jakub. There was nothing diabolical—”
“For what? To take the last Procházka off the Earth? I almost died. I lost her. For what.”
“It’s not the reason, Jakub. If I may.”
My hands trembled, and I put them inside my pockets. I could not show weakness. Not to him. “Yes,” I said.
“After you left Středa, I couldn’t let go of you. I’ve been married a couple of times, and each of my wives had caught me whispering your name in the dark, thinking you were a lover of mine. I watched you grow up, saw your grade reports, statements of purpose for university. I wanted to ensure they would admit you, but you didn’t need the help. I watched your grandfather’s funeral from a distance. I asked the vineyard where you and Lenka married to quote you a small rate and I paid for the difference. You’ve been a charm from the old life, and I wanted to see, always wanted to see—were you going to turn into a bastard? Was it in the blood? And you kept being good. Determined.”
“You’ve lost your mind. So what? You chose me for the suicide mission as some kind of restitution?”
“One night, when we were drunk, Tůma told me about his space program dream. I laughed at him at first, but he was serious, he grabbed me by the collar and swore it would happen. I used to think he was the man the country needed, you know? Before we became cynical together. He used to believe in feeding both the citizens’ stomachs and their souls. He believed in science and curiosity and books. He made me think of you. And so I gave him your name, Jakub. It seemed inevitable, the two of us in that moment. It was not to punish you or to reward you. It was a reaction to what seemed a cosmic calling. Tůma gave you the choice, and you decided to do something great, jus
t as I expected.”
“I’ve done nothing. I should’ve stayed with the things I knew. Certainties. You’ve never been anything but a sad, hateful man. You let my father win and you let him ruin us both.”
“Hmm,” he said, “yes, some of that is true. But you have done everything, Jakub. The mission was a failure but the country believes we can be great. You should have seen the funeral. The whole city was alive like I’ve never seen it. Dignitaries came from all over the world to pay their respects. And now you’re back—I don’t know how, I don’t know what you’ve had to do, but you are here, and we can bring you back to the nation. A hero’s return. They will go apeshit for it, Jakub. You will be a king. Whatever you think you have lost, you will get it back a thousandfold.”
I thought of it. The news headlines, the interviews, everything I had expected upon my return but intensified to a point of frenzy, endless questions, how is this possible, what brought me back? Would this resurrection mean the return of Lenka? The end to her peace.
No. I could not. I had given them everything. They had no right to ask for more.
“That won’t happen,” I said. “I stay dead. I’ve earned it.”
“You’re certain?”
“I am. I want the quiet life.”
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