Rusalka

THE CIGAR BOX was made of solid cedar and weighed exactly two kilograms and thirty grams. For the past few nights, after Hanuš and I finished our conversation and he nestled in his usual corner, just outside my sleeping chamber, I had removed it from the storage chest and run my hands over its matte yellow cover hailing Partagas—Hecho en Cuba. I would slide the cover off and pull out the silk pouch holding the ashes of my grandfather. I allowed the pouch to float around the cabin for a while, like a mother guiding her child on a first swim.

I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather’s actual body and how it would fare in Space, his short legs, stout enough to support a belly holding sixty full years of enthusiasm for brew, his thick arms tattooed with a blue jay and a fading cowboy, his bullish face covered with gray stubble and his thin hair permanently plagued with dandruff, all of this mass suspended in the air and calmly measuring the universe outside, occasionally wheezing and roaring with smoker’s cough and asking for a Marlboro to soothe it. I knew he would’ve liked the peace and quiet of Space to read the newspaper and write in his journals, but his hands would crave livestock and gardening in the midst of all the idleness, the waiting. No, I supposed, my grandfather would not have the patience for stargazing and matter expansion. He was not a man who could stare into darkness and wonder. Yet, I had brought him with me, hoping at last to discover his final resting place after having held on to the box containing his ashes for years. Every day, after breakfast and again before sleep, I wished to put the box into the dispenser and shoot it out into the cosmos. Every day, I could not bring myself to do it. Today was the day. Venus was so close now it made up the majority of the panorama. Within hours, I would make contact with cloud Chopra.

I returned to the Lounge, where Hanuš witnessed the approaching dust storm through the observation window. Over the past few hours, the patterns photographed by JanHus1’s lenses had been analyzed by Central, and Petr’s team had concluded that the cloud’s seemingly calm demeanor was a disguise for a storm raging within its borders, as if the thicker core held gravitational powers causing the dust to swirl around it, like a cyclone. The concerns about my safety were unspoken but clear on Petr’s face during our video calls.

Hanuš’s legs hung loosely beneath him. He was all shadow against the explosions of light ahead. A thick cloud of purple tainted the map of dying stars in front of us, like a swarm of buzzards raiding a can of paint. Over the course of my mission, the cloud had shrunk to half its original size, but it had not moved an inch, establishing a baffling relationship with Venus’s gravitational influence. I was so close now I could see the movement of its particles, snowflakes inside a freshly shaken globe. The swarming dust was phosphorescent, glowing around the edges and darkening until reaching the purple core, a mass so thick I could not see through it. The speed of the particles as measured by photographic analysis was deemed safe enough for entry. The excitement for the mission that I had lost now loomed around the edges of my mind again. Whatever Hanuš was, he wasn’t mine to possess, not even mine to understand. His presence was soothing, but his existence incomprehensible. The cloud ahead, however—behaving in a way we’d never seen a phenomenon of its kind behave, measurable, unable to run—was mine to own. The cloud ahead could be put under a microscope. It could be understood.

Hanuš turned toward me. Black liquid dripped from the corner of his mouth and formed miniature bubbles dancing around the Lounge.

“When I was young I caught these grains on my tongue, skinny human. This dust holds the beginning to all things.”

“It’s impossible to know where things began,” I said.

“Yet you want to believe so badly. I insist, skinny human—these grains were present when the universe exploded into being. They were the first to Be and they will be the last.”

Hanuš grinned as widely as I had ever seen. Central’s call came from the Flat. I strapped myself down, ran my hand over my freshly shaved skull, and accepted the call.

On the screen appeared the main operations room of the Space Institute, a U-shaped auditorium stuffed with monitors and bodies. The crew of this room, thirty engineers with Petr in the lead, was responsible for the entire mission, from running the automatic functions of JanHus1 to analyzing my stool. Today the room was hosting a much bigger sampling of the country’s finest, along with bottles of champagne, cocktail servers, and tables holding shrimp and tea sandwiches. Next to Petr stood Dr. Kuřák, a notebook in his hand ready for note-taking, along with members of the board of trustees, CEOs of partner companies, Senator Tůma (tanned, slim, ready to become prime minister) with other members of the House I’d seen on television, and, ahead of them all, President Vančura himself. These important men and women, together with the members of the press loyally snapping pictures and recording video, formed the core of a larger circle of the institute’s employees, engineers and bureaucrats alike, all applauding for me. Behind the Flat monitor, out of view of the camera transmitting my likeness to Earth, was Hanuš. The greatest discovery in human history was about five feet away from becoming a reality to the rest of Earthlings. My role was to sit and pretend he wasn’t there.

The sound of gentle flutes filled the hollow spaces of JanHus1, followed by English horns. This was the cue.

“What is this sound, skinny human?” Hanuš asked.

“Rusalka,” I replied. “It’s an opera. I chose it to announce this moment.”

Hanuš nodded, and already Petr had begun to perform the rehearsed lines that public relations had given us:

“JanHus1, confirm functionality of filtering systems. Countdown to contact begins: twenty-nine minutes, three seconds. Report…”

I tuned in to TV Nova’s live stream of the Petřín Hill festivities, and here, on the hill where the nation had witnessed my ascent four months earlier, the people once again gathered with brews and fast food in hand. This time their attention was turned toward a magnificent IMAX screen installed on top of the hill, courtesy of Tonbon, major operator of the country’s largest cinemas and mission sponsor. A trio of streams appeared on the display: one of my face, its imperfections processed by airbrushing wizards, so large that I saw the sweat upon my earlobes; one that cut between the main operations room, containing the politicians and scientists responsible for the triumph, and Czech actors, singers, and reality stars giving interviews from their own exclusive podium on Petřín Hill; and a third showing the footage captured by JanHus1, which closely resembled what Hanuš and I were seeing from the observation window, with the contrast adjusted and some kind of special effects glow added to emphasize a science fiction experience. All three streams were intercut for internationally televised programming interrupted briefly by commercials from all mission sponsors. If only there were a way to contact the mysterious government agent now, ask him to run over to Lenka’s apartment and peek through her window, see if she was glued to the television, eager to partake in my triumph.

It was nighttime in Prague, and though the massive stadium lights surrounding the hill massacred much of the horizon, on the crowd’s screen Chopra announced itself in the form of a watercolor hue melting into the atmosphere. But on my screen, the coloring, so distant and so foreign, looked like an ominous stain. It seemed much more befitting that cloud Chopra would attach itself to Venus and remain there forever, keep away from our home and cease to alter the comforting nighttime darkness that humans had embraced for centuries. Panic seized me. I looked around the Flat panel, seeking the button that would instantly parachute me back to Earth, directly to my bed four or five years ago, when stipend cash was enough to pay for spaghetti, and Lenka and I had little but our sex and our books and a small world that seemed knowable and kind. A time when the universe was black and glossy on the pages of overpriced textbooks.

Rusalka continued to play, a series of violins and horns, reminding me of the gentle comfort of music playing on elevators, inside shopping malls, hotel lobbies. I touched the sleek material of the desk before me, tightened my chair straps such that I could truly feel the support pushing into my back. Panic gave way to momentary bliss. The megalomania of the possible discoveries that lay ahead, even the simple act of witnessing, overshadowed everything else. I had leaped over the canyon on a motorcycle. I was about to land, and the rush of blood into my ears and eyes blocked out the audience, strangers and loved ones, their applause and chants, the explosive piping of eagles flying above our heads, the roar of a teased engine and the crashing of my bones against gravity, it gave me three, four, five seconds of complete detachment from what the world asks and what it provides, making the fact of living purely physical, a soaring of the body through the elements. I was grateful.

The cloud would make contact any minute now.

“Last remote analytic data coming in,” Petr said. A close-up of his face split my screen in two, taking attention away from the festive panorama of chattering politicians. “You are at one hundred percent, JanHus1.” He paused to chew on his mustache. “Jakub, are you ready?”

Ready. What a question. A smooth American astronaut would have given a thumbs-up and shown a row of bleached teeth. I closed my eyes and exhaled and nodded.

“I have never experienced humanry being this quiet, skinny human,” Hanuš said. “For the first time, I cannot hear the hum of Earth.”

Hanuš and I observed the collision quietly. I saw the images of the cloud reflected in the eyes of Petr. The politicians grew mute, newly filled glasses of Bohemia Sekt suspended in midair. For a moment, I wondered whether they had all forgotten that I existed. Hanuš too turned his attention away from me, did not search my mind for reactions, his body rising and falling in front of the observation glass.

What else rested within the contours of ever-expanding matter? What mysteries other than bamboo-legged extraterrestrials and volatile clouds of intergalactic gas and debris awaited me? Rusalka sang her joys and sorrows. Petr and his engineers and politicians gazed upon their many screens. (I had to wonder whether any of these men and women felt jealousy—as children, we had all wanted to be here, lone spacemen upon a distant planet, yet they ended up wearing ties and making promises they couldn’t keep for a living. I also couldn’t help but speculate about whether my mentor from university, Dr. Bivoj, was watching from the village house to which he had retired, whether he was ecstatic or enraged that his pupil had surpassed by light-years his most significant accomplishments.) Hanuš focused all of his eyes—thirty-four, as I had recently counted—on the cloud as if he too had never seen anything so unfamiliar. The fact that my extraterrestrial companion could still be in awe of these purple particles confirmed that whatever other life flourished in the universe had some level of cluelessness and thus a capacity to be genuinely curious. A trait proudly claimed by humans that could, in fact, be universal.

I held on to the restraints cutting into my chest and stomach, took a few deep breaths. Hanuš stirred. Petr finally turned his attention back to me, wiping sweat from his forehead. The dust particles rolled past in waves, poured over the observation window like shavings of wood flying off a chain saw blade. The contact was soundless, but JanHus1 trembled nonetheless. The trajectory of the spacecraft changed left to right, up and down, as its burning fuel struggled against Chopra’s chaotic influence. Petr instructed me to shut off the engines, and I did, now simply gliding along the rotating patterns around the thick core. On Earth, the Petřín Hill crowds raised their Staropramens and cheered the old adage: The golden Czech hands! I embraced the kitsch. Those raised beers were all for me.

How would Jan Hus feel about this encounter? Would he take it as a reaffirmation of his all-powerful deity? I wanted to think that his brilliant mind would embrace it as a token of complexity of the universe, a clue that the definition of deity goes beyond the abstract definitions of scripture.

“We are here,” I would tell Hus, “the only humans. Every time we venture out farther in thought or time or space (and isn’t it all the same, master?), we are giving your God a steel-bound handshake. You did it and now I did it too, even if my God is the microscope.”

I ran my fingertips along the panel and activated Ferda the dust collector. The control interface displayed the filter as it slid out of its protective shell and began to collect the dust particles. No, the belly of my ship would not go hungry. Already Ferda’s scanners displayed the structure of the crystals it had gathered. Lapping them all up like a dog’s thirsty tongue.

“The core is bringing you in,” Petr said. “It looks like it has its own mild gravitational influence. Feeling good up there?”

“Feeling great. How much time before I reach the core?”

“At this pace, about twenty minutes. Let’s allow ten more for collection, then activate the propulsion engines and shoot you out of there. We’ll stabilize your trajectory back to Earth remotely. After that, you get those golden hands in the lab.”

“Roger.”

I looked around and realized Hanuš had gone away. I did not feel his presence in my temples. An echo of sandpaper scratching upon metal spread through the ship. I listened to locate its source, but it seemed to be everywhere, a merciless grinding. The speed at which I spun was increasing quickly. The core seemed too close. Solid, like a piece of rock. Impenetrable.

The lights above me flickered, as did the Flat monitor. A rush of cool air chilled my shoulders.

“Something funny with your power source,” Petr said.

The scratching turned into a steady hiss. The lights flickered at more prolonged intervals. The ship was no longer merely trembling—massive vibrations rocked it back and forth, and the purple dust crashing against my window had become so thick that I could no longer see Venus.

“It’s speeding up,” Petr said, his voice cracking. He pinched his beard and pulled a few hairs out.

Senator Tůma stood next to him, a foolish smile frozen on his face, champagne glass now empty. The hired help all watched the screens, mouths agape.

The light bulbs above me exploded, their tiny, sharp pieces crashing against the protective plastic ensuring the shards wouldn’t float around the cabin. The blue emergency lights kicked in, powered by a generator disconnected from the main circulation, the same generator powering the Flat. A sharp emergency ring interrupted the gentle symphony of Rusalka. I focused all of my thoughts on Hanuš, hoping he would come back.

“Jakub, the mainframe is down. Visual diagnostics?”

I unstrapped from the chair and pulled myself toward the Corridors, relieved to be free of the rough vibrations now that I wasn’t attached to any surface. All seemed normal in zero gravity. Just as I was about to leave the Lounge to inspect the mainframe, I noticed a few purple grains making their way in between the thin bars of a filter vent. I leaped back toward the Flat.

“The dust is penetrating the ship,” I told Petr.

“Fuck, what?” he said. Seconds later, the video feed to the IMAX screen on Petřín Hill faded, leaving a paralyzed herd of onlookers squinting at the crude stadium lighting. Secret service agents ushered the politicians and journalists outside the Control Room while Petr barked orders at his engineers.

“All right, we’re calling it. Run the propulsion engines. Get the hell out of that thing.”

I checked the Ferda collection levels. Only about 6 percent filled—not nearly enough. “Another minute,” I said, “just one more.”

“The dust is eating through your ship, Jakub. The electrical cables are already eroded. Get out. I’d override your controls if it still worked.”

“I need just another minute,” I said.

“Do as you’re told. Propulsion in three—”

“I’ve spent four goddamn months,” I said. “My tooth is rotting, my wife left me, and now he’s gone too. One more minute.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“Just a bit of time, Petr.”

I took out my earpiece. A bit of time. I figured it would make me wiser, that one minute. Make me understand something about the universe, or myself. Perhaps I believed Hanuš that Chopra held the key to the beginning. Perhaps I was daring myself to die. See what the fuss was about.

Wisdom did not arrive at the minute’s conclusion. Within thirty seconds, the blue emergency lights melted into darkness, as did the Flat.

I hadn’t realized just how loud JanHus1 was when operating. Without the hum of filters and air-conditioning and screens, all I could hear was the ceaseless grinding. The purple phosphorescence provided only a fragment of light. I heard a quiet voice and felt around the desk for the earpiece.

“… ammit, JanHus1, respond, fuck…”

“Petr?” I said.

“Jakub. I can’t see you. Report.”

The vibrations ceased. The vision of the core covered the rest of my universe. It seemed I was so close that I could touch it. The layer of the cloud I found myself in was free of dust, free of any debris, like an atmosphere that had rejected everything else but me. The core no longer pulled. JanHus1 was perfectly still within this sphere of nothingness.

“I’m close,” I said, “but the gravitational influence has weakened.”

“Comms are the only thing that’s working. Not a single sensor in the ship is functional.”

Something landed on my cheek. I wiped it with my finger and found purple smeared on my fingertip. The flakes surrounded me now, falling from crevices in the ceiling. The air was stale and hard to breathe.

“Petr,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I think the oxygen tank is out.”

I recovered a flashlight from the desk drawer and made my way through the Corridors. The electronic door panel leading to the mechanical bay was not functional, and I had to pull the levers and push with all my strength to open the hatch. I passed the engine control bay and entered the oxygen room, where a trio of massive gray barrels rested on the floor. As long as an electrical current ran through these tanks, allowing them to separate hydrogen and oxygen, they were perhaps the most crucial parts of the ship. Now they were simply three useless water towers tossed on their bellies like pigs about to be slaughtered. No fresh oxygen was being pumped into my world, just as the carbon dioxide was not being filtered out.

I informed Petr.

“Tell me when you start to feel dizzy,” he said. “And get your ass to the mainframe panel. Let’s fix this. Let’s get you out.”

I took comfort in his orders. Someone was in charge. As long as Petr was providing clear steps to follow, things could still be okay. I didn’t need to think about anything else.

I turned off the earpiece. “Hanuš!” I shouted into the Corridors. “Hanuš!”

The mainframe panel was cold and dark. At Petr’s instructions, I removed the panel cover and checked the wires inside. They were untouched, disturbingly clean just as they were when the ship was assembled. I took the panel apart, looking for burned-out motherboards, misplaced plugs. Everything was just as it should’ve been. I gave Petr a chance to say it before I did, but he was silent.

“Either the solar panel wiring got eaten through,” I said, “or the solar panels are gone.”

“Go put your suit on,” Petr said.

“The suit?”

“I don’t want you fainting when the oxygen drops. Put it on. I have to… I have to brief the people upstairs.”

The line went quiet.

I dressed first in the cooling garment, a sophisticated onesie that circulated water through a hose system to regulate body temperature, then pulled the thick mass of my space suit over my body. It smelled faintly of thrift stores and burning coal. On Earth, tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of humans were gasping at their televisions, obsessively refreshing the front pages of media blogs, their minds attuned to a single thought: what would become of their spaceman? Yes, it was more than likely that my journey on JanHus1 had captivated the imagination of all of humanity, well beyond my countrymen standing on Petřín Hill and groaning at the dark screen ahead. Show must go on, even when it is not seen.

While I trapped myself inside the suit, I did not worry, as the task of living remained methodical—pulling at straps, placing the Life Support System on my back, securing the helmet, greedily inhaling fresh oxygen. My toothache pulsed brutally along the right side of my jaw, now that my senses were renewed. Once the suit was on, however, I found myself without tasks. I shone the flashlight into the ship’s dark corners, almost expecting a daddy longlegs to crawl out.

I made my way into the Sleeping Chamber and I reached inside a drawer, feeling around underneath the sweatpants and underwear. I removed the cigar box and slid it inside the pocket of my suit. More than likely, this was the end, and I had to keep my grandfather close. Briefly, I considered hiding inside the spacebag, using the same invisibility cloak that had protected me from monsters in the night when I was a boy. I did not.

The Life Support System on my back was to give me three hours of oxygen, and those hours seemed like a lifetime. So much could be done. Within three hours, wars could be declared, cities annihilated, future world leaders planted within their mothers’ wombs, deadly diseases contracted, religious faiths obtained or lost. I returned to the mainframe and tugged at cables, kicked at the dead panels, saliva dripping from the corner of my mouth and soiling my helmet glass. Finally, a voice came back to me, but it was not Petr’s.

“Jakub,” Senator Tůma said. “Can you hear my words?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m speaking to you on behalf of the president and your country. I have taken this unfair burden from Petr. I sent you on the mission, Jakub. It is only right that we have this conversation together.”

“You sound calm,” I said.

“I am not. Maybe what you hear is how much I believe in your mission. In your sacrifice. Do you still believe?”

“I think so. It’s hard to think about a higher purpose during decompression. You’re a diver. You know the strange ache in your lungs.”

Tůma told me that sensor readings captured seconds before the ship’s power source had failed showed twenty different points of damage in the ship’s internal wiring, and two of four solar panels were disabled. The dust had cut through them like a saw. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he finished.

I let go of the mainframe cables and hung my arms loosely along my body. “Yes.”

Replacing all the damaged wiring would take approximately twenty hours, he said, for which I had neither the oxygen nor the supplies. And more damage could have been done after the ship had shut down. Comms could fail at any minute—the independent battery powering it was also damaged and wouldn’t last much longer. “Do you understand?” he repeated.

“Senator. Of course I understand.”

My chest felt hollow. It was a strange sensation, the opposite of anxiety or fear, which to me was always heavy, like chugging asphalt. Now I was a cadaver in waiting. With death so near, the body looks forward to its eternal rest without the pesky soul. So simple, this body. Pulsing and secreting and creaking along, one beat, two beats, filling up one hour after another. The body is the worker and the soul the oppressor. Free the proles, I could hear my father saying. I almost cackled. Tůma breathed quietly. Don’t lose it on me now, I heard from a distance.

“Jakub. I could not be more sorry.”

“Senator. What happens now?”

“Tell me what it feels like up there, Jakub.”

“Is my wife there, senator?”

“She is not, Jakub. I’m sure she’s thinking of you. She will be there when I declare you the nation’s hero. She will be there when I establish a holiday in your name, along with scholarships for brilliant young scientists.” His words were interrupted now and then by echoes, scratching, an occasional mute pause. “I will make sure these people don’t forget your name for the next thousand years, Jakub. Tell me what it’s like up there. Pretend I’m a friend and you’re telling me about a dream you can’t forget.”

Tůma’s voice was terribly nice, I decided. Like silk wrapped around a stone. A soothing timbre that could break empires. Not bad to die to. Yes, the word at last came out. Die die die die, I whispered. Tůma ignored it.

I made my way to the observation window. In front of the purple core floated a torso of fur and sagging legs. Like a worshipper kneeling at the stairs of a shrine, begging for entry. He looked back at me, all thirty-four eyes glowing. His irises did not change when illuminated by the flashlight.

“It reminds me of a time I almost drowned,” I said. “I looked up through the murky water and saw the sun. And I thought, I am drowning, and yet the star of light and warmth is burning itself up to keep me alive. Now I’m thinking the sun too looked purple back then. But who knows?”

“That sounds good, Jakub. I’ll tell it to all the people outside who wish they could hear from you.”

“Tell it to Lenka. Tell her how glad I am that I didn’t drown back then. So I could go on living and meet her in the square.”

“Go to… Sleeping Chamber. I need… give… thing,” the senator said. The transmission was so weak now that I could hear only every other word.

I floated into the Sleeping Chamber, wound up the flashlight lever, and shone it into the corners, expecting to find something new.

“… emove… sleep… small hook…”

I removed the sleeping bag from its hinges and let it float away. I would not be in need of sleep anymore. There, just as Tůma had said, a seemingly random hook was placed in the midst of the sleek wall, an apparent design flaw. I pulled at it, and a book-size box slid out.

“… bite down… immediate…” Tůma said.

I opened the box. A clear packet containing two black pills entered free zero gravity space, along with a small printed leaflet issuing a stern warning: Consumption strictly forbidden without permission from Central.

I gave a loud exaggerated laugh to ensure Tůma heard me. “Thank you, senator. I have a better way.”

The communication stream faded. I wasn’t sure whether Tůma had heard my last words. Outside the Sleeping Chamber, Hanuš awaited, his eyes turned toward me in anticipation. Yes, there was a better way. I would have to breathe pure oxygen for another hour to eliminate all nitrogen in my body. I imagined the gas bubbles inside of me dissolving like a sodium tablet in a glass of water. After the hour, I would join Hanuš in Deep Space, and hand the ashes of my grandfather over to the cosmos before I too would be consumed. I floated to the kitchen, removed the last remaining jar of Nutella, and put it inside my pocket. The hour would be long. I waited, thinking of the first days at the Space Institute, the weight loss, the constant chewing of gum, the pain.

These faint memories of spacewalk training brought back my old sour stomach, like a fingernail probing its way around my abdomen. My body trapped by a heavy underwater suit, my mouth stuffed with an oxygen propellant, the training pool stinking of bleach and illuminated by azure bulbs. Along its one-mile circumference paced men who recorded my progress in yellow notepads. The first time I retched, the mask slipped out of my mouth and I released bile and peanuts into the water, immediately gasping for breath and receiving in exchange a liter of pool water in my throat. Coming up for air felt like rock climbing, muscles and veins fat with blood, the surface concealed by the play of shadows.

We tried many things—antinausea medication, different masks, relaxation exercises, a multitude of diets—but every training session had the same ending. It wasn’t that I feared enclosed spaces. Mine was a unique breed of claustrophobia. The training pool wasn’t a dark closet, it was thousands of dark closets lined up, with no door one could open to escape. I could only swim, and swim, and swim, with every foot the same silence and loneliness, the same sense of abandonment. I couldn’t take it. Or, perhaps, I got sick simply because of the physical strain of diving. We couldn’t be sure. In the end, after rapid weight loss and a decrease in my cardio performance, we ended the spacewalk training a week early. It was extremely unlikely that I would go outside anyway, they said. I was okay with it.

I wondered now why I still feared these endless closets, the vacuum outside that would remind me of those bleached diving pools. It was all to end there. But no one was watching anymore, no one would think worse of me. The end was up to me, and yet the nausea held on.

Hanuš interrupted these thoughts. “You are to join me soon,” he said.

“It looks that way.”

“Your tribe has abandoned you.”

“Something like that.”

“Do not worry, skinny human. I am an accomplished explorer. Together we shall explore the Beginning.”

I let go of the flashlight and floated to the air lock door, located below Corridor 4. I did this slowly, patting the walls of JanHus1, memorizing its dead, lightless crevices and feeling guilt, as if I had somehow drained the life out of this spacecraft entrusted to me. The incubator that had carried me and kept me warm, fed, clean, and entertained for four months was now a shell of useless materials. An overpriced casket. But it had gotten me to Chopra and I could not fault it for failing against the unknowable forces of other worlds. I closed the compression door behind me. I opened the hatch leading into the universe.

My tether slid along the side of the ship as I shifted outside, and the unfiltered vacuum tightened around me like bathwater. In the distance, Hanuš was a silhouette within the purple storm. I was not afraid of anything except the silence. My suit was built to eliminate the hiss of oxygen release, and thus all I heard were the faint vibrations of my own lungs and heart. The noise of thought seemed sufficient in theory, but it offered no comfort in physical reality. Without the background racket of air conditioners, the hum of distant engines, the creaks of old houses, the murmur of refrigerators, the silence of nothingness became real enough to make any self-professed nihilist shit his pants.

I waited to reach the length of the tether before detaching from the ship, if only to tell the cosmos I remained a believer in small odds. The chance of rescue, be it JanHus1 miraculously coming back to life or a top secret American drone swooping in to carry me home, was astronomically low, and yet there was some chance, and where there was a chance there remained a desire to gamble. At last I unsnapped the tether and I was free, floating toward Hanuš. Like him, I was now a piece of debris sailing through Space until meeting its end, as most things do, inside a black hole or the burning core of a sun. I could reach into the darkness of eternity and grasp at nothing.

My Maximal Absorption Garment moistened. Cool water soothed my skin. I was thirsty. I felt discomfort around my abdomen, but the nausea hadn’t arrived yet. Ahead loomed the menacing haze of Venus, blood seeping through its craters, and I was grateful that I would not come any closer. The Chopra core rested over it like a calm, dedicated moon. Everywhere around me raged the sandstorm of dust, but the ring in which I made my way toward Hanuš offered the simplicity of vacuum. Floating through it wasn’t much different than spending the night in a long field, away from city lights—a latitude of darkness, with sparkling photographs of overwhelmingly plentiful dead stars. Only there was no hard soil under me, no grass, no dung beetles pushing their feces along like Sisyphus. Ending my existence here would be so simple. I would leave no flesh behind, nothing for hazmat cleaners to dispose of. There would be no funerals, no heavy stones with generous lies inflicted upon them in golden lettering. My body would simply vanish, burn out in Venus’s atmosphere, cause the smallest belch of an eruption. And along with my body would go everything else—the sensations, pleasures, and worries that I could not stop from unfolding in my mind: people I have loved, breakfasts served as dinners and dinner cocktails served as breakfasts, changes in weather patterns, fresh chocolate cake, my hair growing gray, Sunday crosswords, science fiction films, an awareness of the world consumed by financial collapse or environmental disaster or a flu named after yet another harmless animal. Death would be so much easier to dance with if it weren’t surrounded by the clutter of civilization. I reached Hanuš.

“Skinny human,” he said, “I wish to experience the ash of your ancestor.”

I felt the outline of the cigar box inside my pocket. This was the time. Nothing could make it clearer but the universe speaking it aloud. I removed the box from my pocket and opened it and looked inside the silk pouch. There rested the powdered calcium of bones that once held my grandfather together, along with bits of magnesium and salt, the very last chemical remnants of a body that had farmed and drunk beer and thrown punches with the verve of a Slavic god. Behind me, Hanuš studied the powder with all of his eyes.

“May I?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He delicately reached a leg over my shoulder and submerged the sharp tip inside the pouch.

“The magic of fire,” he said. “A human mystery I find difficult to understand. How do you feel about this, skinny human? Are you fond of fire?”

“It releases us from the constraints of the body.”

“We do not view bodies as prisons.”

“That’s magic too,” I said.

Hanuš removed his leg. I turned the pouch inside out and watched the immortal powder slip out, the specks divided and floating in all directions until they created a new pretend galaxy, the first one made by man, the first one made of man. A tomb worthy of Emil Procházka, perhaps the last Great Man of Earth, who, were he present to witness this dispersion of his own remains, would light a cigarette and shake his head and say, Jakub, all this foolishness, should’ve just put me in the ground so the worms could have a snack, but I knew that he would love me for it, that he would understand my need for the grand gesture. An honest good-bye. What kind of resting place purchased on Earth with my hero’s salary could ever match the silence and dignity of Space? The grains of dust floated toward the purple core until they vanished.

“This is the Beginning,” I told Hanuš.

“It is the Beginning I know,” he said. “Perhaps there was one before it, perhaps not.”

“Are we headed there?”

“Yes. But ask the question that is on your mind first.”

“Rusalka. Can you find it?”

Hanuš closed his eyes, and a faint, popping sound of the opera resonated within my mind. Occasionally, the recording was interrupted by random voices, snippets of pop music, the deep, dark voices of demons, the sighs of copulating lovers, sirens, dial-up modems, but Hanuš kept the recording clean enough to soothe my nausea, and to give me the kind of peace experienced on a Sunday morning among soft sheets and drawn curtains.

“What is it like, your death?” I said.

“Sooner or later, the Gorompeds of Death consume all. They have come for me.”

He lifted one of his legs. In the space where the leg attached to his torso, there were enormous transparent blisters, diseased and foreign. They were filled with a phosphorescent yellow liquid in which swarms of what looked like ticks floated from one side to another in perfect synchrony. There must have been thousands of them. One of the blisters popped, and the liquid leaked onto Hanuš’s belly as the miniature critters scattered into his pores.

“Soon,” he said, “they will weaken me enough to consume my flesh. But I will not let them. I will enter the Beginning with you, skinny human. Death cannot reach us there.”

“You’re dying?”

“Yes. I have been for some time now.”

“Hanuš. Does it hurt?”

“I feel it, this fear of yours. I hesitate to depart. If our Elders knew, they would strike me down with sharongu spears. To fear a truth! Blasphemy! Alas, fear is what I’ve found, here within the brilliance of Earthlings.”

“There’s nothing to fear anymore.”

I saw myself there, a boy in an itchy tuxedo, my rat tail cut off for the occasion, sitting on a red seat inside the State Opera, consuming the mint suckers my grandmother had snuck in. Three years after the death of my parents, not long after we move to Prague, we go to see the opera on my mother’s birthday, purchasing an additional empty seat next to us. I am hopelessly in love with this Rusalka, a wild-haired beauty dressed in the muted colors of the forest. She is a water nymph in love with a prince, and she gladly drinks the witch’s potion to become human and capture his attention. The prince takes Rusalka to his castle, but of course, as I guessed, the square-jawed scumbag betrays her, casts my Rusalka aside for a foreign princess. I wish the opera would never end, I am captivated, I wipe the snot off my upper lip. During the third act all seems to be lost. The echoing voices of the forest spirits sing sad songs for Rusalka, who, abandoned by the prince, is now forever destined to lure young men to the lake, let them use her body, then drown them and keep their souls in porcelain cups. I want to jump onstage and save her, carry her away, this lovesick ghost trapped within the confines of a lake made of papier-mâché and a kiddie pool. In my future, there would be only one other woman I’d love as much as Rusalka.

“Yes. I feel it with you, skinny human.”

Through the echoes and through the darkness, the prince rides looking once again for Rusalka, realizing now that he cannot live without her. He calls, and she appears, and he asks for a kiss, knowing that touching Rusalka will cost him his soul. The lovers kiss, and the prince collapses on the stage. Now Rusalka’s father, the feared water goblin, emerges from his pool, and his voice soars: All sacrifices are futile.

Hanuš sang it. He sang the line and for the first time in my life, I understood it, just as it came out of the alien’s mouth.

“It is not yet the end,” Hanuš said.

“No.”

Rusalka weeps with gratitude, for she now knows human love. She gathers the prince’s soul, and instead of adding it to her father’s cup collection, she releases it to God, allows it to ascend to the heavens. Both lovers are now apart but free. As a child, I found this to be a bad ending. The prince, in heaven or not, was still dead, and Rusalka was alone, left with her beastly father and a chorus of whiny forest ghosts. Love didn’t seem worth all this trouble, especially if in the end the lovers were torn apart. But now, hearing Rusalka in Space for one last time, I saw that the water goblin’s declaration was wrong. There was no futility in me, in Hanuš, in Lenka, in the SPCR, in the stubborn human eye always looking beyond, under, next to, below. In the atoms composing air and planets and buildings and bodies, puttering around and holding up an entire dynasty of life and anti-life. Futility nowhere to be found.

I looked ahead to the core. There was something to it after all. Perhaps my death would mean more than my life. I couldn’t come up with anything else I had to offer the universe. I was a selfish husband. I had not produced a genius child, given the world peace, or fed the poor. Perhaps I was among the men who needed to die to make anything of life.

“This is not a bad place to end things,” I said.

Unaccountably, I found myself wondering where Shoe Man was, and whether he was well. Whether he would remember me if he saw a story in the newspaper—Astronaut dies for country, body lost in Space. He would put down his newspaper and announce to no one in particular: “Little spaceman.” He would finally stuff the repugnant old shoe inside the garbage can, where it had always belonged, and allow it to rot on the heaps of landfill trash with all the other useless artifacts of human memory. Cruel images invaded my brain. I saw Shoe Man in my bedroom, sliding his tongue along Lenka’s light stomach fuzz, his fingers pushing gently on the inside of her thighs. While the iron shoe rests on our living room table, freshly shined, he turns Lenka around and she looks straight at me as she comes, silently, suffocating her screams in a pillow that still smells of my hair and saliva. Age has not affected the hairline or skin of Shoe Man over the years, but he has grown a thick black beard, and from the beard, black ink, or blood, or simply some liquid evil drips onto our cream-colored sheets, seeps into them like petroleum. As Lenka falls asleep, overwhelmed by the intensity of the superior orgasm this stranger has given her, the man looks at me, a silent observer, and pours himself a glass of steaming milk. As he drinks, the milk turns the color of licorice, and I wait for the ink to make its way through his blood, to poison his heart, rip it to shreds. He sets the empty glass down and goes back to bed. Lenka wraps her thighs around him.

Perhaps Shoe Man did not exist at all anymore. Or perhaps, with my father’s line now extinguished, he would drop dead and dissolve as soon as I died.

I opened my wrist panel and checked the oxygen level gauge. The clock’s hand quivered in the same way my grandfather’s clock used to when he smoked cigarettes in front of it. In its generous approximation, I had forty-two minutes to live.

Hanuš offered one of his legs. I held it. Together we entered the core of cloud Chopra.