WAKING TO THE OCCASION of my thirteenth week in Space, I unstrapped myself from the Womb and stretched, wishing I had curtains to spread or bacon to fry. I floated through Corridor 2 and squeezed a pea of green paste onto my blue toothbrush, courtesy of SuperZub, a major distributor of dental supplies and mission sponsor. As I brushed, I ripped the plastic off yet another disposable towel, courtesy of Hodovna, a major chain of grocery megastores and mission sponsor. I spit into the towel and looked closely at my gums, pink as a freshly scrubbed toddler, and the bleached molars, a result of my country’s top dental artistry and a meticulous oral hygiene routine aboard the ship. Though I had resolved that I would no longer do so, I felt with my tongue around one of the molars, and a familiar pain intensified. Despite the high marks I had received from my dentists before takeoff, this tingling of decay appeared during my first week in Space, and I had kept it secret ever since. I was not trained for tooth extraction, and where could I find a good Space dentist? Would he bring his own nitrous oxide, or would he gather it from Earth’s polluted atmosphere? I grinned to myself but refused to laugh. Never laugh out loud at your own jokes, Dr. Kuřák had advised. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating mind.
Perhaps the most jarring part of the mission was how quickly I’d adjusted to the routines. My first week in Space had been an exercise in uninterrupted expectation, as if I were sitting in an empty movie theater, waiting for the hum of a projector to light up a screen and chase away all thought. The lightness of my bones, the functions of my machines, the creaks and thuds of the ship as if I had upstairs neighbors, they all seemed exciting, worthy of wonder. But during week two, the desire for something new was already setting in, and the act of spitting toothpaste into a disposable towel instead of an earthly sink lost its novelty. By week thirteen, I had forever abandoned the cliché of treasuring journey over destination, and in the daily tedium I found two methods of comfort: the thought of reaching the dust cloud to harvest its onerous fruits, and speaking to Lenka, her voice a reassurance that I still had an Earth to come back to.
I floated on through Corridor 3, unfastened the pantry door, and slathered a chunk of Nutella on a white pita. I flipped it up and watched it quiver through the air, like a pizza maestro spinning his dough. Food was my silent co-conspirator on this flight away from home, an acknowledgment of sustenance and thus the rejection of death. The ship burned its fuel and I burned mine, the chocolate-flavored protein blocks and the dehydrated chicken cubes and oranges, sweet and juicy inside the freezer. Times had changed since astronauts relied on a diet of powders as rich and enjoyable as expired packets of Tang.
As I ate, I knocked on the dead-eyed lens of the sleek surveillance camera provided by Cotol, major manufacturer of electronics and mission sponsor. One of the dozen broken cameras on the ship, failing one by one as the mission went along, causing the company embarrassment and heavy losses in the stock market. No one could figure out what had gone wrong with the devices—the company even put three of their best engineers on a conference call to guide me through a repair process, broadcasting the video feed online in hopes of reestablishing their brand. No luck. Of course, I did not disclose the presence of insistent scratching that resonated throughout the ship whenever one of the cameras went offline, skittering away quickly as I approached from beneath the corner. Such hallucinatory sounds were to be expected, Dr. Kuřák claimed before the mission, because sound is a presence of something earthly, a comfort. No need to chase ghosts. Besides, I did not mind that the cameras no longer observed my every step—I could enjoy violations of my strict nutritional guidelines with sweets and alcohol, I could skip workouts, I could move my bowels and enjoy onanism without worrying about my guard dogs watching. There was great pleasure in being unseen, and perhaps it was best that the world’s collective imagination was teased by the denial of a 24/7 video feed of their Spaceman in sweatpants.
The day ahead was to be a pleasant one. After finishing a few usual menial tasks—testing Ferda, the cosmic dust collector and the tech star of my mission; engaging in a halfhearted cardio session; and running diagnostics on my oxygen water tank—I was to have a few hours of peace and reading before dressing myself for a video call with my wife. Afterward, I was to enjoy a glass of whiskey to celebrate being only four weeks away from my destination, cloud Chopra, the gassy giant that had altered Earth’s night skies and escaped our attempts to study it. After penetrating the cloud, I was to gather samples with the help of Ferda, the most sophisticated piece of Space engineering to ever come from Central Europe, and study them inside my custom-designed lab on my way back to Earth. This was the reason the Space Program of the Czech Republic had recruited me, a tenured professor of astrophysics and accomplished researcher of space dust at Univerzita Karlova. They had trained me for spaceflight, basic aerospace engineering, and suppression of nausea in zero gravity. They asked if I would take the mission even if there was a chance of no return. I accepted.
Thoughts of death visited me only as I fell asleep. They came as a slight chill underneath the fingernails, and left when I lost consciousness. I did not dream.
I wasn’t sure whether I was more anxious about reaching the mysteries of Chopra or about the upcoming conversation with Lenka. Conducting an Earth/Space marriage through these weekly video feeds felt like watching an infection claim healthy flesh inch by inch while making plans for next summer. After these thirteen weeks, I noticed that there was a steady rhythm to human longing.
Monday, raw stage: God, babe, I miss you. I dream of your morning breath on my wrists.
Tuesday, reflective nostalgia: Remember when the Croatians stopped us at the border and tried to confiscate our schnitzel sandwiches? You unwrapped one and started eating it, shouted at me to eat too, shouted that we would eat them all before crossing and show those fascists what’s what. I knew I’d marry you then.
Wednesday, denial: If only I wish it just right, I’ll be back in our bedroom.
Thursday, sexual frustration and passive aggression: Why aren’t you here? What is it you do with your days as I spit into a blue towel—courtesy of Hodovna, mission sponsor—and count the hours separating me from gravity?
Friday, slight insanity and composition of songs: A scratch you can’t itch. A scratch you can’t itch. Love is that scratch you can’t itch. Scratch you can’t itch, oh oh.
During the first few weeks of my deployment, Lenka and I would overstep the conversation limit of one hour and thirty minutes allotted by the space program. Lenka would close the dark blue privacy curtain and take her dress off. The first time, she wore brand-new lingerie she had just picked up that morning, black lace underwear and a black bra with pink edges. The second time, she wore nothing at all, her body clothed only in the gentle blue hue reflecting along her skin. Petr, the mission operator, allowed us to take as much time as we needed. There wasn’t much logic to the limitations, anyway—I could chat with Lenka all day long and the automatic trajectory of the shuttle would go on uninterrupted. But the world needed this narrative, Mr. and Mrs. Spaceman’s tragic separation. What kind of hero gets to chat on the phone?
During the past few calls, however, I had become thankful for the time limits. Lenka would grow desperately quiet before our first hour had expired. She would speak softly and call me by my first name, instead of the variety of pet names we had devised over the years. There was no discussion of nudity or physical longing. We did not whisper our wet dreams. Lenka scratched the edge of her right ear as if she was having an allergic reaction, and didn’t laugh at any of my jokes. Always tell jokes to an audience, never to yourself, Dr. Kuřák had advised. Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness. Good advice, though difficult to practice in a vacuum. Lenka was the only audience I cared about. The emptiness of Space could not match the despair I felt when her laughter gave way to static silences.
Searching for the source of this decay, I’d been obsessing over my last night and morning on Earth with Lenka as I performed the menial tasks aboard JanHus1. I tested filtering systems, looking to squash any bacteria that might mutate unpredictably within the cosmic conditions and infect me with a vengeance unknown on Earth. I studied data to ensure the smooth recycling of oxygen (provided by a tank of water I often wished to dip myself into, like a careless vacationer plunging his body into the sea of a sunnier country), and I recorded the depletion of supplies. Around me, the shuttle hummed and cooed in its droning baritone, unaware, carrying me to our joint destination without asking for advice. I checked needlessly for deviations from the trajectory—the computer was a better explorer than I could ever be. If Christopher Columbus, that celebrated phony, had possessed a GPS as sophisticated as mine, he could have reached any continent he desired with wine in hand and feet elevated. Clearly, the thirteen weeks of the mission had offered much spare time to obsess over my marriage.
Three days before my deployment, Lenka and I had gone to Kuratsu, a favorite Japanese restaurant of ours in the Vinohrady district. She had worn a summer dress with yellow dandelions and a new kind of perfume, the scent of cinnamon and oranges soaked in red wine. I wanted to crawl under the table and nuzzle my face in her lap. She said that my sacrifice was noble and poetic, fitting these abstractions between powerful chews of her tuna tartare. Our lives were to become a symbol. I squeezed lime over my noodles and nodded at her words. Her voice spoiled the ecstasy of my cosmic exploration—I wasn’t sure whether the entirety of the universe was worth leaving her behind, with her morning rituals and her perfumes and her violent outbursts of panic in the middle of the night. Who would wake her to say that she was okay, that the world was still whole? A camera flash blinded us. The spices burned along the edges of my tongue and for the first time, I did not know what to tell my wife. I dropped the fork. I apologized to her.
“Sorry,” was how I put it. Just like that, a single word thrown in her general direction. It echoed through my mind afterward. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She stopped eating too. Her neck was slender and her lips so ambitiously red. This wasn’t my sacrifice—it was ours. She was allowing me to go. She who had napped on my shoulder while I pored over astrophysics textbooks and tests from my students. She who had ecstatically dropped her cell phone into a fountain when I told her I had been selected for the mission. Mortality was not discussed, only the opportunity, the honor. She did not comment on the negative pregnancy tests filling our wastebasket while I spent my days getting used to the lack of gravity in the SPCR training pool, coming home with muscles cramped and speech reduced to “Hungry, sleep.”
I never found out whether she accepted my apology. We picked up our forks again and finished our meal to the silent company of onlookers’ cameras collecting our likenesses. We kissed and drank sake and spoke of traveling to Miami after my return. Finally, we took our own picture of this last dinner on Earth, and posted it on Facebook. Forty-seven thousand likes in the first hour.
As soon as we arrived home that night, I loosened my tie and retched. The antinausea medications had worn off with the alcohol at dinner, and my body had returned to its natural state of revolt against the strains of training for spaceflight, fighting lack of gravity with ceaseless vomiting. While I dry-heaved over the toilet, my gut hollowed out, Lenka ran her fingers through my hair. I told her we needed to give it another try, right then, if she could only wait for me to brush my rancid teeth. She said it was okay. I knew it wasn’t. She waited in bed while I washed myself off, and with shaking arms I crawled on top of the bed and slid my tongue along her collarbone. She arched her back, grabbed at my hair, pushed herself toward me while I rubbed my palm along my flaccid cock. We caressed and twisted and sighed and in the end she gently pushed on my chest and said I needed sleep. I was sure the timing was perfect, maybe destined—husband and wife conceive; husband leaves for Space and discovers great things; husband returns to Earth with a month to spare to become a father. Lenka put lotion on her arms and said we’d get it right after I came back, without a doubt. See the doctor again. Solve the problem. I believed her.
The night’s disappointment wasn’t my main concern. It was the violation of a ritual I committed during my last morning with Lenka. When I was still an Earthman, I didn’t have much use for morning rituals. Why should one spend time staring out the window, sipping lip-burning liquids and cooking feasts on hot surfaces when the world outside was so fresh and ripe for the taking? But my wife loved these mornings. She wore a robe (why not get dressed?), made eggs, bacon, rolls, and tea (why not buy a doughnut and a cup o’ black before getting on the metro?), and talked about our hopes for the day (as long as we are not dead or bankrupt, three cheers) while I played along. But why shouldn’t I have allowed myself to be tied to this slice of domestic sentiment, to relax my thigh muscles and help scramble the eggs, to take occasional glances at her slim ankles as she danced through our home in her daily festival? Lenka fried up thick slices of bacon, not prepackaged but obtained from the corner butcher, the slabs still stinking of living beast. She presented them to me as an offering, a coercion into her leisurely morning attitude, knowing my ache to move, my eagerness to wrestle the world. She knew this was her power, slowing the pace of our living to a soothing dance, regulating my heartbeat through her touch, her voice, her curves. Through pork grease spilling across porcelain. This was one of the many clauses in our contract, this bacon and grace exchanged for my compliance, and never once did I violate it. Until the last Earth breakfast with my wife.
I woke up that morning with the familiar nausea from the antigravity dive training, popped a few acetaminophens, and walked into the kitchen to find breakfast already waiting on the table. Lenka sipped from an oversized mug and cradled a laptop on her thighs, building a budget presentation. She closed it when I entered.
“It’s getting cold,” she said.
“Not today,” I said.
“What?” She crossed her arms.
“I don’t want it today. Not hungry.”
She opened up her laptop again, wordlessly, going against another contract of ours, a ban on screens whenever we sat over food together.
I sat and I drank some tea, pushing the plate away. I pulled up email on my phone, feeling no need to defend myself. I did not want to ritualize the morning that day. The way our lives were about to change, the pretense did not fit in. Perhaps I was too ill, or scared nearly to death, maybe unstable, but I broke a clause of our contract unpredictably and absolutely, a violation that never fully disappears from the record of life. After a few minutes, Lenka dumped my breakfast into the trash.
“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.”
“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.”