HANUŠ SLIPPED from my hands. His legs detached, one by one, and dropped into the universe as if they had business of their own. He was nothing more than a small sack of skin whirring with the vibrations of the feeding Gorompeds, his eyes dead, his lips dark. Only after he had floated away did I realize that the Gorompeds, having leaked from his pores, were swarming around my arm, my shoulder, my helmet—and suddenly they were inside my suit, biting into the flesh of my armpit and groin. Hanuš was gone.
I screamed in pain as the gates of the Russian ship opened and from the inside emerged an astronaut clad in a suit so finely cut and fitting it must have been tailored to order. He grabbed me and pulled while the Claw retreated into its lair. The fierce biting around my privates ceased, but I felt the burn of the inflicted wounds. As the crawling sensation around my body faded, I looked at the finger of my glove, where a few Gorompeds exited the suit and disappeared as I tried to grab them. I allowed the astronaut to carry me, to push me wherever he liked. The chute closed and the decontamination fans hummed. I was sick with fever, nausea, my lungs burned at the exposure to fresh oxygen. The fashionable astronaut brought me out of the chamber, between sleek gray corridor walls showing no cables, no control panels, no guts of the ship, as if the vessel sailed on faith alone. Another astronaut approached, suit cut to match wide hips and short legs. Together they brought me into a small, dark room with a single sleeping bag, and unfastened my helmet. Greedily, I breathed, sweat pouring into my mouth.
“Ty menya slyshis?” a female voice inquired.
I tried to speak but couldn’t make a sound. I nodded.
“Ty govorish po russki?”
I shook my head.
“Do you speak English?”
I nodded.
The lights dimmed even more, the darkness became a grain, and some frames skipped, until I could see nothing at all. I tried to shout. I waved my arms, felt my back pushed firmly into the wall, my hands tied down, another set of straps pulled over my shoulder.
“Do you feel thirst?” the woman asked.
Desperately, I tried again to answer in speech, but no trembles resonated through my dry throat. I nodded angrily.
A straw scratched my lips, and I sucked and sucked. My suit was stripped from me, peeled from my scorching skin, and I drank all the while, until not a drop was left and I lost the strength to stay awake.
A tap on the shoulder. Her voice was robotic, distant, meaning she was speaking to me through her suit’s microphone. I was not awake enough to comprehend her words. She held something cold to my cheek. There was a sudden pressure in my mouth, my cheeks filled up, followed by the flavor of pasta, canned beef, and tomato sauce along my teeth and tongue. I chewed, swallowed, felt the heaviness of my eardrums.
“… real… food… toast… three days… do you know?” Her voice was in and out.
I tried to speak, and lost consciousness again.
When I opened my eyes, blurry shapes crept around the room. I could not feel my tongue. Something wet and substantial rested in my Maximal Absorption Garment.
Two thick silhouettes materialized in the doorway.
“Are you awake?” she said, still through her suit’s microphone.
I nodded.
They approached. I looked down to see that my starved body was clothed in nothing but a blue T-shirt and a diaper.
“You are ill. We don’t know what it is. Do you?” she asked.
I observed her companion through the visor of his helmet, broad-shouldered, with a round jawline shaved too cleanly and fat eyebrows merged into one by his insistent frown. I shook my head.
“We don’t know if it can spread to us. That is why we keep quarantine. Is this okay?” she said.
I lifted my hand and scratched air letters with an imaginary pen. She nodded and looked at the man. He left for a few minutes and returned with a notepad and pencil. The woman unstrapped my hands.
Home? I wrote.
“Yes, home. We are setting course for Earth now.”
My shuttle?
“Gone, in the cloud. We barely made it out ourselves. The dust, it finds its way under.”
Only the two of you?
“We have a third. But he rarely leaves his chamber. There has been… an incident.”
She looked down at my diaper, smiled awkwardly, and took the writing pad away. She placed it in the front pocket of my sleeping bag.
“You must rest,” she said, and floated back to the man waiting by the doorway. They drew sticks out of a box. The man drew the shorter stick. The woman left.
He unzipped my sleeping bag, leaving fastened the constraints that held my body to the wall. He pulled off the safety Velcro straps of my diaper, and began sliding it down. I put my hands on his shoulders in protest, but he pushed them away. I took the notepad and wrote furiously: Don’t, I can do
He shook his head and began to remove the diaper with a disgusted grimace. I slapped the top of his helmet. He grabbed my arm, thrust it to the side, and strapped it to the wall, then did the same with my left. The notepad and pen floated away. When I looked down at the straps on my chest and stomach, I realized that all of them were secured by a miniature padlock. I wasn’t too surprised—of course they had to quarantine me by force, in case I decided to take a tour of the ship during my feverish hallucinations. Whatever bacteria I might contaminate the corridors with would mutate unpredictably in the zero gravity environment, causing possible disaster for both the crew and the structural integrity of the vessel. Yet this confinement brought on unprecedented terror in me. I tried to scream, wriggled in my chains, turned my hips to the side, but nothing could end the violation. With flared nostrils, the man wrapped plastic around the diaper to prevent its contents from flowing around. He tied the bag three times and unwrapped four towels, which he used to wipe my groin, my thighs, and my rectum. I closed my eyes, counted, wished I could produce an auditory expression of my rage and shame, but I could do nothing. The man left without looking at me, as if he were somehow the punished dog.
I had no way to tell how long the Russians left me in solitary. I tried to count, but by the fifth minute, all numbers seemed alike, thirty the same as a thousand, and I could not guess how long a second lasted. Throughout these hours in the darkened room serving as my holding cell, I had only one thing to hold on to: the reality of my return to Earth, the possibility of living. Because if all that had happened had really happened—from the moment I stared into the fire as the Velvet Revolution sent my father and, eventually, the rest of us on the course of our punishment, through the time I first spotted the iron shoe in its monstrous efficiency, through the time I met Lenka by a sausage cart and a senator proposed that I fly to Space—if all was true (and I couldn’t be sure about anything in this room, not life or death, not dream or reality), then I was really on my way home, on my way to all the other futures I could create. The vision slowly returned to my right eye, and the burning around my forehead and chest subsided.
Home. I focused on the concept intensely so my thoughts would not wander to questions I may not want answered. For instance, why a Russian ship had come to cloud Chopra without anyone knowing. Or whether Gorompeds bred somewhere inside me, bound to consume me from within as they had with Hanuš.
Hanuš. His body slipping away. The ache around my temples I would never feel again.
The female astronaut came to me in the midst of these thoughts, bearing another tube of spaghetti. She allowed me to feed myself. I grunted without shame, lapped at the tomato sauce like a feral dog, ignoring the excruciating pain of my rotted tooth. I studied her through the visor. Her sunken eyes, brown with golden nebulas shooting from the middle, indicated a lack of sleep, and a thick scar snaked along her round cheek.
When I was done with the meal, she took the empty tube and handed me an e-tablet.
“Your obituary,” she said, and smiled.
I looked at the date and time of the article, which had been written by Tůma and published a few hours after Central lost contact with JanHus1:
In the search for brilliance, sovereignty, and a better future for its children, every country must occasionally face a dark hour. One of these moments descends upon our hearts today, as we mourn the loss of a man who accepted the most significant mission our country has ever embarked on. Though books could—and will—be written on this man’s service and role in advancing both our humanity and our technology, we are all already familiar with Jakub Procházka the Hero. What I’d like to write about now is Jakub Procházka the Human.
Jakub’s father chose to align himself with a specific current of history, one he considered righteous but which turned out to be monstrous. Jakub’s willingness and determination to overcome this…
My hand trembled. I became aware of my lachrymal ducts—dried out, burning, empty.
… his last moments, before we lost contact, Jakub told me a story of a time he almost drowned, and the symbolism of a burning sun…
… so as a great personal friend of Jakub’s, I feel deep sorrow in my every cell, and consider it a small but significant consolation that he expired without pain, fulfilling a lifelong dream…
Without pain. A barefaced lie.
The service will be held at the Prague Castle, and the nation is invited to join the procession that will travel to a service organized in the St. Vitus Cathedral, and conclude outside the castle walls, where vendors will provide free food and beverages to celebrate Jakub’s life. Arrive early, as the event is expected to become one of the biggest mass gatherings…
… and to go against what I set out to do earlier, I would like, once again, to return to Jakub Procházka the Hero, and remind us all of the famous words of a poet who captured the meaning of the Chopra mission: “With JanHus1 lie our hopes of new sovereignty and prosperity, for we now belong among the explorers of the universe, the guardians of the frontier. We look away from our past…”
I handed the tablet over.
“You want to see pictures of funeral?” she asked.
No. Maybe later. How long has it been?
“A week. They are building statue. There are many candles still in this square, and pictures of you. Paintings.”
What is your name?
“Klara. Your fever is coming down. We fear superbacteria. That is why there is quarantine. But you seem better.”
Yes. Better. Why are you here?
She studied something on my forehead. The silence felt long, even excruciating.
“We are part of phantom program. Have you heard of this?”
Myth, I thought?
“A myth, yes. No one knows exactly how many have died being shot into Space quietly. At least technology makes odds bigger now. We are a phantom mission. There was one before us, shortly after cloud appeared, even before Germans sent the monkey. It was one-man mission, like yours, and the man—Sergei, I knew him well, good person—he never returned. And so we come, bigger ship, more crew, we launched couple of weeks before you but came off course when Vasily… well, there was the incident. And so we arrive late, after you, and you were a floating man. I am telling you this because you have to know, Jakub, that my government will never admit to phantom programs, especially now that we have Chopra dust, we have this advantage, what world wants. And if we do not exist, then your rescue does not exist. You do not exist. Do you understand?”
You gathered it? Chopra?
“Yes, we have dust. But do not think of it anymore. You will never see it.”
I looked away. She apologized under her breath and I waved her off. She too was a soldier. Home felt much less certain now. What could the future of a rescued phantom dead man be? Life under surveillance in a Belarusian village? A Russian prison? Would they hold me until the fact of my rescue could somehow be used to political advantage, or until a whistle-blower agile enough to penetrate a century of state-sanctioned lies revealed that the phantom program of the USSR was alive and well, a wild conspiracy theory sure to kill at any cocktail party?
You said incident? With your third?
“Yes, Vasily. He hasn’t been himself.”
What happened?
She studied the strap on her glove, quiet, frowning.
You don’t have to say
“I will tell you because it is nice to talk. These two with me, they will not talk. Do you know what it is like when you speak and no one listens? You do, Jakub. They sent you all on your own, your people. It was three months into our mission. Vasily looked into my bunk, pale, breathing heavy. Yuraj and I, we asked him for two hours, what is wrong? And he said nothing, only drank the milk and looked into distance. And then, finally, he put his hands like this”—she crossed her arms on her chest—“and said, I hear monster. It speaks in darkness, like a dog’s growl, and it scratches on walls. And this monster, he said, it spoke inside his head, asked about Earth, asked about Russia. And he just sat, his hands like that, saying like, C’mon, druz’ya, you tell me I’m wrong, I won’t agree, I know what I heard. We never told him anything, never said, Vasily, you are probably little crazy from Space. Still he always put his hands like that, like we wanted to take the truth away from him. We reported what he said to tsentr, but they never told us what they did, if anyone talked to him. And so, after that day, he does research on his own, and he eats his meals on his own, and we are worried, but what can we do? We are tired too. We too can’t be taking care of someone’s head.”
I tapped the pen on my forearm.
A monster
“Yes. A dog’s or wolf’s growl.”
Could I talk to Vasily?
“Maybe if you get better and he agrees to come here. We cannot let you out of room.”
How much longer?
“We are expected to be on Earth in three months.”
Are you scared?
“Of?”
Going home
She took the pad from my hands and slid it back inside the front pocket of my sleeping bag, then zipped me up to the neck, and rested the forefinger of her glove on my cheek. “You should sleep,” she said. “Fever is coming down—maybe we can unstrap you soon, if you promise to not come out to the ship.”
She floated away, stopped in the entry, but did not turn around.
“Silence drives us crazy,” she said. “But we are afraid we will miss the silence. Bozhe, it is hostile up here, but it is easy. Routines and computers and food in plastic. Yes, I wonder, can I ever share life with people again. I think about refilling my car with oil and I want to be sick to my stomach.”
She left.
I pulled the cocoon of the sleeping bag over my head so I would not hear the subtle creaks of the ship. Even the most sophisticated structures cannot avoid the sighs of life. Materials copulate, clash, grasp for air. I felt strong, the blood flowing through my extremities, and thus I slept. Once, I caught myself stretching my fingers toward the rabbit’s eyes so I could drop them to the quarreling chickens. Rain escaped through holes in the gutter and woke cats snoozing on the bench. The modest sandals of the doppelgänger Jan Hus struck the cobblestone path as he was led to his trial, and he grunted quietly as he was hoisted onto the wooden platform where he was to burn.
I have never been clear on my first memory. It could be one of my father holding me nude on his bare chest, my clumsy hands grabbing at his curled chest hair. But it could also be that this is no real memory at all, that I wish so desperately to remember this moment because of the ragged black-and-white photo my mother kept on her nightstand. My father’s jaw was still fleshy with youthful fat, not yet sharpened by age and unfulfilled desires. I knew nothing except this man’s warm hands nearly as big as my body, his odor that would one day become mine, the warmth, the light. Is the question of whether I remember this moment more important than the empirical evidence proving it actually happened? I hope the memory is real. I hope the sensation, the phantom of my father holding me that closely, isn’t manufactured, but is based in the animalistic instinct of grasping at those moments in which we are protected. The instinct in the animal named Jakub.
I DIDN’T KNOW how long I had slept after the last feeding break when Klara and Yuraj came to unstrap me. Klara told me that three weeks had passed and the quarantine was over. I floated around the room, stretching out my muscles, my joints, smiling at the pleasure of motion. My voice had come back to me, at first a hoarse whisper, then a guttural tone I didn’t recognize. My throat still ached whenever I spoke more than one short sentence. I studied Klara, who was no longer cautious around me, only kind. Even Yuraj shot me a quick smile, though he maintained an air of masculine indifference. They had laid out the rules: I’d promise not to leave the room under any circumstances without being accompanied, and in exchange they would uncover the small window. I agreed. When I asked about my future, about their instructions from Russia, they became tight-lipped and irritated, and so I ceased to inquire about the matter altogether. I was too happy to have human companions, to hear language travel through its usual channels, to smell someone else’s sweat. We were headed to Earth. I missed Hanuš, more than I could attempt to describe, yet I could not speak of him at all.
Klara seemed to like talking to me, especially now that I was healthy and thus offered no bacterial threat. She would come into my room without her space suit, sometimes with her hair braided, revealing a slender neck I could not avert my eyes from, other times with her hair untamed and frizzed, a lion’s mane surrounding her cranium. Eventually, I couldn’t prevent thoughts of kissing her slender neck, of zipping the two of us inside my spacebag and feeling the touch of human skin along mine. Perhaps strangely, these thoughts never arrived outside our conversations. Her insights and her memories rekindled the seemingly dead impulses within me, the impulses I had pledged to forever limit to Lenka. I made no indication of my lust to Klara. I wanted her to keep coming back. The simple comfort of her companionship as the dreaded day of our return to Earth approached was worth more than any physical gratification.
“I have been reading about you,” she said once over our lunch, “about your father. Not too many things left around the ship to do, so I think, I will know more about our guest.”
“Okay.”
“Did you love him?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s the curse of family.”
“I hoped you’d say this. Have you heard of Dasha Sergijovna?”
“I haven’t.”
“She was my mother. She too was phantom. Is this surprising?”
She wore a sports bra and loose sweatpants, the postworkout sweat staining the smooth edges of her clavicle, belly button, lip line. She seemed as comfortable as a human being could be, and I envied her.
“It is.”
“When I was small, the military people told me that she went to be spy at British embassy, and was killed by this imperial diplomat. Three bullets to her back, bam, they said, by West. But when I entered the air force, they finally told me some of this truth. A heavy brown file. She was second woman to travel to Space, ever, with another cosmonaut. The space program thought they could make it to moon and back, but this was so far before such things were possible, only one year after Gagarin. The Party was thirsty to do everything before the Americans. And so my mother went up, with this man, and I was told SSP lost hearing two hours into the mission. Probably, they made it to the moon and crashed, or they choked because of oxygen coming out. Either way, this death was quick and like heroes, they said.”
“Kind assurance,” I said.
The room was hot. A malfunction caused by the Chopra dust that couldn’t be fixed, Klara had told me. At night, I would wake, thinking I had a high fever, and at last I was to die. But then Klara would arrive in the morning to deliver breakfast, and I was glad for another day.
“Well,” she said, “then this man from ministry of interior fell in love with me, and I suppose I wanted to see how things go. And one evening, after we went to kino and he was drunk, he told me that he could get this file in secret for me—a file containing truths. I made love to him that night from the excitement of possibility. I thought my mother’s heroism would, at last, take good shape. And so he brought the file, and I read it under candlelight on night when electric went out.”
She wasn’t looking at me now. She stretched out her fingertips, as if the file still rested there, and she was feeling along its edges.
“And the truth was different,” I said.
“Yes. The mission was suicide from beginning. The SSP wanted to see if a new vehicle could make full distance to Mars, unbroken, while keeping life. My mother knew this, the man knew this, and they volunteered, and they kissed their different children good-bye and they went off forever. Two hours into the mission, all is well, and suddenly, her partner starts to speak crazy. He said he could hear God in waves of universe, and he knew the world would end soon. And this God of waves was sending him and my mother to Mars to become new Adam and Eve, to begin again on different planet. He was certain this was their fate. My mother tried to talk with him, the engineers talk to him, even Khrushchev stopped by to tell him some words before complete crisis. But the man would not stop raving, and he was looking at my mother like some beast, and so she took a can opener and she sticked him somewhere, maybe throat, she would not tell tsentr, SSP, but they heard the man choking on blood, and so they guessed. After this, my mother spoke of the things she could see. She asked why so many things in whole universe were circles. Planets and stardust and atoms and asteroids. A softness to so many things. Then she choked to death. They recorded it on manuscripts. She choked so far away from Mars, still so close to Earth. Do you know how they wrote this? For this man she killed, he choked as this: kchakchakchachchchchch, and so on. Sudden bursts, like heartbeats, you know. But my mother, hers was more slow: eghougheghougheghough. They really paid attention to how many times she did this. Of course, her ship crashed, or perhaps it is still out in universe somewhere, who knows. And that was phantom mission number two.”
“But here you are. An astronaut.”
“I haven’t had to kill a man. Not yet.”
“I think about what made her go, and what made me go. I decide this brand of madness must be in the blood. Do you ask? I bet what brings you to the sky was same duty as your father’s: that final—no, that terminal decision to serve. I find comforting there. The idea of being, I don’t know, like there is no choice, you have to be a certain person, the instinct put into DNA. It seems honest.”
I imagined Klara’s mother, the two of them perfect look-alikes, and her wonder at her crewmate’s blood spilling out like soap bubbles. The first murder of the cosmos. Perhaps she killed the man and then anticipated redemption on Mars. An alien creature assuring her, “You did what had to be done.”
Wasn’t all life a form of phantom being, given its involuntary origin in the womb? No one could guarantee a happy life, a safe life, a life free of violations, external or eternal. Yet we exited birth canals at unsustainable speeds, eager to live, floating away to Mars at the mercy of Spartan technology or living simpler lives on Earth at the mercy of chance. We lived regardless of who observed us, who recorded us, who cared where we went.
“It is hot,” I told Klara.
“Yes.”
Quietly, we ate.
DURING THE LAST MONTH of our journey, the crew of NashaSlava1 blessed me with magnificent meals. It turned out that the spaghetti I had initially been fed during my illness was the worst food on board, something they were willing to waste on a potentially dying man. Now that it was clear I would live, they brought different meals every day. General Tso’s chicken, borscht, beef stroganoff topped with sour cream, tiramisu, and bacon—that glorious memento of Lenka. These were all microwaved meals, but to a man starved down to nearly two-thirds of his original size, it didn’t matter.
Klara explained that these meals were meant as weekly treats for the crew, small interruptions to their otherwise impeccably healthy diets. Since the food reserves were too plentiful for three people and Vasily refused to eat any of the cheat meals, Klara and Yuraj had decided to make the remainder of the mission a celebration of gluttony, and had challenged themselves to empty the reserves as we reached Earth. I was happy to help, so happy that the constant pain of an infected tooth crippling half my face presented no challenge to my newfound appetite—for the food, for the Japanese tea, for the bottles of American bourbon, of Russian vodka, of Japanese beer. I spent the week eating, breathing, and looking out the observation window, making a list of everything I wanted from life. Of everything I felt I was owed.
I wanted to see the hairy belly of my friend one last time, a legless corpse.
I wanted to see God touch the universe, reach his hand through the black curtain and shake the strings on which the planets loom. A proof.
I wanted to witness giant cosmic lovers, two larger-than-life figures holding hands, picnicking on the surface of Mars, in love with craters and barren landscapes. They were so made for each other that they looked exactly alike, their sexes blurred out, indistinct.
I wanted to see Earth crack at its core, split into shards, and confirm my theory—that it is simply too fragile to earn its keep. A proof.
I wanted to see the dead bodies of all phantom astronauts. To bring them back to Earth and keep them embalmed in glass cases inside Lenin’s mausoleum.
I wanted Valkyries to soar through dimensions and caress the dead souls of African orphans. I wanted all the mythical beasts the human mind has created to pile on top of one another and fuck and give birth to a hybrid so perverse it would unite us all. I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters? I wanted cosmic dust to gather around clay nests with the aggression of hornets, to breed and evolve and merge and form its own planet occupied by its own humanlike figures driving their own carlike cars. Perhaps if such a world of gray shadows existed—a reflection, a mimicry of the entire human experiment—we could finally watch and learn. A proof.
I wanted someone to tell me they know what they’re doing. I wanted someone to claim authority. I wanted to leap into the Vltava and taste its toxicity, to recognize that somewhere along the slush of runoff there was real water. I wanted to live on both sides. I wanted to touch every cube brick on France’s roads. I wanted to drink English tea without milk. I wanted to enter the filthiest American diner in the dustiest city and order a burger and a milk shake. The way the word rolls off the tongue—buRrRgeRrR. I wanted to lose myself among the suits of New York City and feel cocaine residue on toilet seats. I wanted to hang off the edge of a whale skeleton. I wanted proof of the chaos. I wanted it so badly I didn’t want it at all. I wanted what every human wants. For someone to tell me what to choose.
Yes, Lenka was right. I would return as a changed man, she would return as a changed woman. Some parts switched out, our casings the same. Who said these two brand-new humans couldn’t love each other?
TWO WEEKS BEFORE the landing, I decided. It was time to discover Vasily. I had avoided him to forget my grief for Hanuš, but I needed to hear about his visions while we were still trapped in the same quarters together. Vasily had abandoned his sleeping chamber, they told me, and had set himself up in one of the ship’s three laboratories. Klara no longer visited him; Yuraj made a visit every two days, officially to deliver snacks and mission updates, and unofficially (he’d say in a smiling whisper) to ensure that the “cookie fawk” was still alive. For the past few days, I had been monitoring Klara’s and Yuraj’s movements, looking for the small but certain overlap in their sleeping habits.
Finally, I had found it. During their nap time I slipped out of my cabin and made my way past their chambers and into the lab corridor, where the Russians (I guessed) studied the cosmic effects on bacteria, and how these mutations could be used in biological warfare. (Whether this was exaggerated Cold War paranoia, understandable distrust of the occupier, or a simple acceptance of the real world, I couldn’t be sure. After all, what would my country have done with the Chopra samples? Look for any way to get ahead in the race of nations, or at least sell them to the highest bidder, the most convenient ally, before the spies of the world descended upon Prague’s streets to find out for themselves?) I arrived at the last laboratory door, delighted at the comforts of floating freely in Yuraj’s sweatpants, which slid off my hips regularly but which I was grateful for nonetheless. Finding the observation window covered and the access panel to the lab smashed, I knocked.
“Ostavit' yego tam,” the man inside hollered.
“What?” I said.
“You are not Yuraj,” he said in English.
“No. But you are Vasily?”
“Are you him? The dead man?”
I did not respond.
Several anxious minutes passed. I looked toward the entry corridor. Silent, but soon I could be discovered.
At last the door slid open. Behind it was a greased blob of a man, stuffed inside a white tank top and a pair of briefs. His hair had been reduced to a sweat-soaked pierogi at the center of his skull. In his left hand, he held a rigged remote for the door. Bare wires extended from the small box of the control panel to his side. His right hand was wrapped from the tips of his fingers all the way to his shoulder with gauze. His teeth were gray.
He nodded, as if knowing that I could not speak to him until gandering at the sty he had made out of a state-of-the-art research facility. Filthy underwear, microscope lenses, empty ration packets, pencil caps, crumpled pieces of paper, and individual potato chips floated around the room in an odd hoarder ballet, like an art show one might see at the National Museum as yet another condemnation of materialism. An unidentifiable yellow substance stained the lab chair, and the lab computer had been split in two with a hard steel pipe. At first, I thought that the walls were covered in twisted wires, but a closer inspection revealed countless pieces of paper with drawings. Every single one of them offered the same subject. A mess of dark shadows connected in a semicircular shape. From these black clouds erupted words written in an insidiously red Cyrillic.
The man, Vasily, uncrossed his arms. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly.
“I do. You’ve heard him.”
His eyes widened. He grabbed me by the neckline of my shirt, his breath sour upon my chin. “You are the prophet, then,” he said, “you. It could have been me, but do you know what I did when the god visited me? I thought it was a demon. I closed my eyes and I prayed him away. I haven’t been to the church since my grandmother died, yet there I was, my eyes closed for hours, and I begged for the god to be gone. Finally, he listened.”
Vasily’s English was nearly impeccable, only a slight hint of an accent. His bottom lip trembled. He picked at the gauze on his arm, tearing off small pieces and rolling them into balls before putting them on his tongue.
“I did not see. Only heard. Heard a voice from the corners.”
“And the voice told you of me.”
“He told me to wait for you. The prophet.” Vasily caught a potato chip and offered it. I shook my head. With visible disappointment, he returned it to its orbit, then strapped himself into the stained chair. I noticed that the microscope lenses were shattered, and braced myself for the possible glass particles swirling around, waiting to be inhaled.
“One must be lower than the prophet when the prophet is addressed,” Vasily said. “The god returned to me again, yes, a few hours before we found you. He said I would not hear him again, no, but he would send a son in his name, and that is you! And he said we must rescue the son. I told Klara we must wait a few more minutes before leaving. We plucked you up, hmm, right before you perished…”
In front of me, then, sat a man who may have truly also known Hanuš, however briefly, the final proof I sought since I met him so long ago. I became immediately impatient with Vasily’s tics, his muddled speech.
“He must have told you things about me, then. My name, who I am.”
“Hmm, da. He did. Did I do good, prophet? I could have been you, you know. But I proved myself not worthy. At least I believe. You believe that I believe, prophet? I will spill blood, if need be.”
From the depths of his sweatpants pockets Vasily produced a screwdriver and set it upon his neck. I stroked forward, seizing his wrist just as the tip broke the skin. I took the screwdriver out of Vasily’s hand as he observed the tiny spheres of his own blood with childish delight. He poked at them with his finger.
“I need you to tell me everything the god told you about me, Vasily. So I’ll know you are truly an apostle.”
“Oh, prophet,” Vasily said, “you are testing me. I haven’t been told of your origins, because I am too lowly to know. I only have my mission. I will deliver you to Earth. And I will tell you the last words the god asked me to pass on to you.” Vasily grinned, and now his fingers fully unraveled the gauze on his other hand and wrist, displaying a multitude of deep, infected cuts, wounds that would surely cost Vasily his arm.
I decided. Vasily and others like him were the reason Hanuš could never come to Earth. They couldn’t cope with a vastness that was so outside their established knowledge of existence, even if they had seen Space up close. They would project their desperations, fears, and looming insanities onto types of intelligence incomprehensible to them. I had done so too, after all, when I nearly plunged a blade into Hanuš to satisfy my cult of the scientific method, hoped that somewhere within rested an answer to my unrest. I was ashamed.
The thought of hearing Hanuš’s words to Vasily exhausted me and thrilled me at the same time. I took a few breaths to avoid impatience with the ill man.
“The god’s message,” Vasily said. “The prophet must not submit his spirit. He will find happiness in silence, seeking freedom, prayer, and he will know, know more than any other human, or any other… oh, now I am confusing words… the answer is in heaven.”
Vasily looked around with panic, stuck his hands in his pockets, and from the ugly, twisted grimace on his face, I deduced he was looking for another weapon to hurt himself with. I asked him to keep his arms down. Hanuš would never have spoken of prayers, of prophets, certainly not of heaven. The hint of kinship I had felt with Vasily left me. He was a madman. I was not. I couldn’t be.
I felt anger toward this man. He had been given a mission the same as me, and he had failed to retain his sanity, despite the luxuries of his ship and the benefit of other human company.
Or had I once been close to becoming Vasily? Had Hanuš saved me from this exact madness? Suddenly, mercy seemed necessary.
“Apostle,” I said to Vasily, “you’ve done perfectly. You passed the test.”
Vasily sobbed like a small boy, his hand on mine. “Now I get to go home,” he said. “Take me from here now. It is too quiet. I miss the hum of mosquitoes above the lake.”
I was glad. He didn’t know Hanuš, I was the only human who’d ever truly know this cosmic secret. I did not want to share it.
He unstrapped himself and pushed me aside, leaping toward his sketch collection, and ripped off the page closest to him. He opened his mouth wide, crumpled the paper, and stuffed it inside. He chewed, swallowed, and stuck out his tongue to show me there was nothing left. He picked up the next page and did the same, occasionally murmuring, “It should have been me, the prophet.”
Klara appeared in the door, just as Vasily consumed his last sketch. “You are bleeding,” she said.
“A nonbeliever may not enter the shrine!” Vasily yelled, shooing Klara away with his hands. She gestured for me to follow. As I floated toward her, Vasily grabbed at my hand and kissed my knuckles, my fingertips, and I was too sick to speak, to look at the beastly grimace on the apostle’s face. We exited his lair, the door slamming behind us. Klara crossed her arms.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t—”
“I told you the man was not well,” she said sternly.
“I had to hear about the—”
“His monsters? No, Jakub. You will stay inside your room from now. You never exit, only to use bathroom with permission. And if I find you out again, I will strap you to the wall and I will let you starve until Earth. Yes?”
I returned to my holding room. Vasily’s words crawled through my ears, spun around the cranium. No, he couldn’t have known Hanuš. Or did Hanuš appear and speak to Vasily, the former church boy, in a language he knew would have a real effect on a God-fearing man? I didn’t want to believe it. Hanuš was mine.
FOR THE FIRST TIME since I boarded NashaSlava1, I could not rest. Klara came to me ten days before our estimated arrival on Earth. She said she had some things to tell me. First, she had sent a message to tsentr after seeing on her own the horrific state of Vasily’s body and living quarters. She received a message back that Vasily was to be left alone unless he posed immediate danger to the crew or the ship. He was part of a separate mission ordered by the interior to study the effects of spaceflight on certain mental health issues.
I asked Klara why she would tell me this.
“Because I am tired of despicable men who rule empires,” she said, “and because as soon as I return to Earth, I will move West and never think of this again. And because of the last thing I have to tell you. A friend of mine from tsentral told me what they will do with you. She said you will go to Zal Ozhidaniya. It is a place for special political prisoner, people who used to be spies, those sorts. And I feel responsible for this. Jakub, I want you to know, I have to bring you, I have to give you to them, but we are friends, still. I trust you. I want you to know this before they take you away. I would do something if I could, I swear.”
“Will you kiss me on the cheek?” I said.
“Jakub.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. I just have not felt it in so long. I want to remember it.”
Klara kissed my cheek, right next to my lips, and for a moment the dread of her revelation didn’t matter. I asked her to leave before the elation expired.
I SPENT THOSE last two weeks on the ship hiding from the Russians, staying in my cabin and asking Klara to leave me alone. She said she understood. I pondered what life in a luxury political prison was like, how I would bear never seeing my country or Lenka again. The things I might have to do to free myself. Before we initiated the approach protocols inside the landing chamber, Yuraj wanted to strap me down, but Klara convinced him not to. She repeated that I could be trusted.
The universe deceives us with its peace. This is not a poetic abstraction or an attempt at twopenny wisdom—it is a physical fact. The four layers of Earth’s atmosphere rest in their respective places like a four-headed Cerberus, guarding our precious skins from the solar poison thrown in our direction every second of each day. They are stoic guardians, as invisible as they are unappreciated by everyday thought.
As we prepared for reentry, I sat next to Vasily, who filled out a crossword on his tablet and paid no mind to our shuttle burning swiftly toward Earth. Klara and Yuraj sat in the front and handled the controls while speaking cheerfully in Russian to their mission command. As the shuttle flipped onto its belly, I looked out the deck window to see for the last time what we officially classify as outer space: the final frontier until a new frontier beyond it is discovered. It stared back, as always, with its insistent flickering, emptiness, lack of understanding for me or the necessity of my being.
We burned at a temperature of 1649 degrees Celsius, pushed through the mesosphere, the graveyard of dead stars and Earth’s shield against rogue meteors, with the nose of the shuttle angled up. The air was too slow to clear our path in time and thus eased our fall. With the engines disabled the ship was now more of a sophisticated hang glider, using Earth’s physics to slice through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. Deep below us, somewhere in Moscow, or perhaps in the surrounding towns, a handful of people were bound to hear the sonic boom, two claps less than a second apart, the drumroll announcing our return. They would dismiss it as construction noise and move on with their day, placated by the silence of their media stations, their government. The pronounced S momentarily disrupting their skyline view—the unavoidable signature of the phantom astronauts—would be simply another weather anomaly ignored during a workday.
For 130 kilometers, we fell. The mesosphere—the protector. The stratosphere—eerie, calm, stable, and dry, the place without climate. A purgatory, occupying the properties of Space and yet a part of Earth. A deceptive non-world, a no-man’s-land between the trenches. Then the troposphere, the last line of defense, from the Greek tropos, signifying change. The keeper of the world’s water vapors and aerosols, a place of chaos, rising pressures, weather patterns. Perfect as the layer closest to human contact. Humanity summarized in a single sphere.
The Earth rested. There was no sign of the billions of volatile souls thrumming on its surface. We were so close to its oceans, its continents that contained the country that contained the city that contained the hospital in which I had entered this world, nude and small. The hospital now torn down and replaced by the offices of a snack machine manufacturer. Would I ever get to visit the place again, see the patch of dirt on which I had come to be?
The vision of my future life entered around my spine and made its way through the lower intestine, abdomen, lungs, and throat. Like a shot of bourbon traveling backwards. A Russian hostage, a man reduced to a state secret. And if I were, eventually, to return to my own country, what kind of life would await me? Dissected, intruded upon, loud. No peace in sight, no peace at all to continue my serene life with Lenka. I made eye contact with Vasily. He knew.
I couldn’t accept it. If I made it back to Earth, I had to be a free man. It had all been taken away. Personhood, physical health, perhaps my sanity. I didn’t know what happened to my wife. No further infringements would happen, at least not with my permission. Vasily’s god had advised me. I wouldn’t be a subject to Russian whims.
I unstrapped myself and jumped at the controls, shoved away Klara’s arms, and activated one of the ship’s engines. NashaSlava1 turned and leaped, like a gazelle with a thigh torn to pieces by predatory teeth. I fell backwards onto the ceiling. Klara shouted, Yuraj unstrapped himself and dropped onto me, then wrapped his forearm and elbow around my neck with staggering efficiency, bound not just to pacify me but to kill me, grunting with frustration pent up during these months of isolation. I flailed my arms; life had begun to leave me, when suddenly more weight landed upon us. All I could see was torn gauze and Vasily’s fists beating at the back of Yuraj’s head.
“… avariya posadka, ya povtoryayu…” Klara shouted into her microphone, and I wanted to shout in turn, I’m sorry, but how did you expect me to sit and wait?
Blood poured into my eye and I was no longer weighed down. Yuraj had released me, and off to my right he screamed and pawed at his neck as Vasily spit out a piece of skin and meat. He had struck a major artery, and Yuraj’s blood was pouring out heavily.
“The prophet will live,” Vasily said. “I am the apostle.”
The body must not be violated! I wanted to shout at Vasily, but it was too late. I had done this. It had to be finished.
The ship flipped back onto its belly, and Vasily and I crashed into the seats. Something cracked within Vasily’s body, but he made no verbal indication of pain. Yuraj, barely breathing, was bleeding to death.
Klara looked back while holding the yoke with both hands, veins cutting through her forearm muscles as she tried to steady it. “Jakub,” she said, as though she didn’t know to whom the name belonged. She had gotten to know and trust a fellow phantom but she couldn’t have guessed how much I wanted to come back home. I longed for the moment we had first sat over a meal together, the way I’d studied the sweat drops on her body and the way she’d pretended to ignore it. When we had thought only the best of each other.
Again I leaped toward the controls, beat at the keys, the screen, the panels, with my fists and cheeks and elbows. Klara dug her fingernails into any exposed piece of flesh she could reach, but she refused to unstrap herself, this genetically determined phantom astronaut trained for mission in the womb, and so I had a free rein. Once again NashaSlava1 spun around, and again, and through the glass whirled those green fields of Russia, towns separated by hundreds of square miles of agriculture and nothingness.
Klara’s fingers found their way into my mouth and she grabbed my tongue, eager to rip it out.
Vasily slapped her hand away from behind, his bloody teeth ready to strike again, and I shouted, “No, apostle, enough!”
He retreated back to appraise Yuraj, who was pale and barely moving. Vasily caressed Yuraj’s cheeks, whispering, “You too could have heard the god.”
I screamed at Klara to slow us down, pouring forth apologies and pleas and epithets. Earth’s surface was so close now that we would collide at high speed, surely killing us all. I recognized the shimmering blues of water, even as I felt Klara’s knuckles upon my back and forehead and eyes. She had finally unstrapped herself and was now unleashing her fury, perhaps in an effort to kill me before the landing killed us all. We collided.
The ship crashed into the water and the window glass exploded, its particles biting into my exposed face before the onrush of water washed them away. My body was at the mercy of Earth’s elements now, much more savage than the calculating hostility of Space. The stream threw me against the cabin door, and Vasily landed on me, grasping at my arms as the entire cabin flooded and the water separated us. I swam toward the window, toward life, then gestured at Vasily to follow. I gave Yuraj, pale and unconscious and possibly dead, a final acknowledging look, and grabbed Klara’s arm to haul her up. She clawed at me and bit my hand, bubbles escaping her nostrils, and I noticed that her arm was trapped underneath the seat, which had been slammed against the wall by the pressure of the water. Her elbow was oddly twisted, surely dislocated, perhaps broken, but Klara gave no sign of pain. Her eyes—deadly, determined—were focused on mine. She was doing her best to kill me with her one free hand and her teeth. I could not last much longer. I let go of her and searched for Vasily, who floated above Yuraj’s corpse, grinning from ear to ear, his apostle mission fulfilled. No, he was not coming, and perhaps it was better. A broken man had a right to leave this world. I too had made that decision once.
Again I tugged at Klara’s arm, and she sank her teeth so deeply into my thumb I thought she would rip it off. I could feel her teeth breaking. I pulled back, freed my bleeding flesh, and swam out of the observation window, swam upwards along the capsizing body of a ship that had saved me. NashaSlava1, the pride of the Russian people, though the Russian people weren’t aware of its existence—a phantom looming above their heads, protecting them from enemies, delivering scientific glory and advanced warfare. A cumbrous blend of metals designed to enhance humanity with an inflated sense of importance, wisdom, and progress, but now subject to Earth’s judgment, as we all were, and drowning like a bag of unwanted felines.
When I emerged, I threw my arms about, swam so quickly I thought my veins were going to pop open and bleed dry. I reached land, dragged myself onto the shore, spit and coughed, grabbed at the cold moist dirt under me, and I remembered—Earth. I licked the mud. I kissed it, cackled, emitted sounds that terrified me, sounds of pleasure that went beyond my comprehension, the pleasure of insanity. At last the pain of the winter around me overcame the initial adrenaline, and Russia’s frost bit into the skin underneath my soaked clothes. I rubbed my body in the dirt, now fully understanding why Louda the pig considered mud digging the highest form of living. The friction warmed me and I bit at the chunks of mud as if it were cake. It tasted of roots, compost, vegetable skins. I spit it back out. Behind me the lake that had welcomed me home expanded across a wide plain until it met a brown forest covering the horizon.
The broken surface of the icy lake gargled as the ship was digested along with the bodies and the samples of cloud Chopra, which now seemed a banal prize of the mission. I wished to sit and wait for Klara, Vasily, and Yuraj to emerge, healthy and well, before running around the frozen grassland and making my way through the woods. But the response team would swarm the lake any minute now, and I could no longer be subject to larger schemes, concepts, countries. I ran and I spit out leftovers of mud and I wept, wept for Klara, my savior, for her thirst to claw the life out of me. I expected at any moment the sound of helicopters, German shepherds, sirens speeding along the plains, chasing me down to throw me into a Saint Petersburg catacomb for torture and starvation. But there were no rotors, no barks. I reached the forest to the sinister silence of nature.
By nightfall, I had reached a village. I could not understand anyone’s words, but they took me in, bathed me with water heated over a fire, clothed me, and put me into a reasonably soft bed. Spasibo, I kept saying, spasibo, calmly and generously, hoping this would prevent the villagers from thinking I was insane.
Outside, the night sky glowed with purple. Chopra was still alive, still tantalizing, but I would never again reach it. I longed for the black skies of old.
I woke in the middle of the night, held down by strong hands, with the taste of rusty metal in my mouth. I could not close it, or bite down. A pair of pliers shimmered in the dark. The pincer clamped firmly on my tooth and out it came, the blood pouring into my throat as this kind, crude dentistry was completed. The brown, puss-filled bastard was set next to my face like a trophy. I screamed, choking on the mixture of blood and liquor applied to my wound.
The next morning, I found a couple of men who spoke English. They were traveling to Estonia with sensitive cargo, they said. They could take me along if I promised to help guard their livelihood. I agreed.
The journey was rigidly scheduled, allowing for no breaks. We pissed into a bucket nailed down in a corner of the truck’s cargo space. When Russian soldiers stopped us looking for a “dangerous fugitive,” I hid under blankets and behind a mountain of Spam and bean cans containing twenty kilos of heroin. The driver gave the Russian lieutenant half a kilo of heroin for his trouble and oversight. We continued on.
Across the border, in Estonia, I shook hands with my accomplices. We were brothers now.
“I owe you,” I said.
“No need,” they said, “no need.”
In Estonia, I jumped a freight train and rode to the coastal city of Pärnu. When night watchmen discovered me, I ran from the dogs snapping at my heels. With a painful bite on my unscarred calf, I entered the port and roamed from ship to ship, asking the sailors for a job, any job, which would take me closer to home. On my sixth attempt, a gangly Pole laughed wheezily and advised me that the captain was looking for someone to clean the bathrooms. The captain was a very clean man, he said. He couldn’t stand the crew’s crimes upon the ship’s facilities, and would accept anyone willing to keep them presentable.
For weeks, I spent my days running among the three bathrooms, scrubbing each seat, each bowl. I bleached them and scrubbed them with such dedication I sometimes wished to lick them to prove my diligence, my commitment to the cause. I replaced soap and I provided oversized rolls of rough toilet paper. Some nights, the sailors got too drunk during their card games and their liquids and solids missed the bowls by miles. These were my emergency calls, apologetic voices waking me from uneasy sleep. I welcomed them. I had a purpose here. A simple one.
When we arrived in Poland, the gangly Pole offered to pay for my train ticket if I would keep him company until we reached Kraków. He spoke of his mother, who would welcome him with homemade smoked pork and garlic potatoes. He in turn would greet her with a surprise belated birthday gift he had saved up for with his wages—a new mattress and a certificate for weekly massages for her bad back. That’s all he’d ever wanted to do, he said. Make enough money to ease his mother’s life.
When he asked about my family, I asked if we could play some cards. He understood.
That night in Kraków, I flagged down a man with a pox-scarred face. He smelled of smoke and cheese puffs, but he was fond of reading philosophy and had published some poetry.
“It inspires you, the road,” he said. “In life, you should travel as far as you possibly can, get away from everything you were ever taught. What do you think?” And he coughed, the same smoker’s roar as my grandfather.
“What if everything you love is right where you are?” I asked.
“Then you find new things to love. A happy person must be a nomad.”
“You haven’t loved, then,” I countered. “If what you love gets away from you, in the end you are only walking in a labyrinth with no exits.”
Within six hours, we had arrived in Prague. The man offered no parting words, but he gave me the gift of intoxication. I drank his Staropramen. The sun rose. I tipped the bottle three times, splashing brew upon the ground. An offer for the dead.
I walked into a phone booth and searched for Petr’s name in the book chained to a broken telephone. That Petr resided in Zličín was the one personal detail I knew about him. Thankfully he was the only Petr Koukal in the city. I walked.
A tall brunette with a Ukrainian accent and gauged ears opened the door of a small but beautiful house. She told me that her husband was at the pub, of course. So Petr had a wife. I smiled at the long-awaited pleasure of resolving one of his mysteries. He knew what Lenka meant to me, after all.
I found him playing Mariáš with a group of old-timers, all of them collecting empty shot glasses and pints around the mess of cards. His beard was overgrown and resembled a rusted wire brush. He’d gotten a few more tattoos, and there was a hole in his T-shirt around the armpit.
When he saw me, he dropped his cards and tilted his head sideways. I quietly counted and at around the twelfth second he pointed at me and said to his Mariáš foes, “That man. Is he there?”
The men looked at me, then at Petr. He extinguished his cigarette and stumbled backwards as he stood. The men reached out to support him, but he waved them away. They groaned and grabbed at him, asking him to keep playing, but Petr no longer saw them. He put his arm around my shoulders carefully, as if expecting his hand to pass through me.
“This guy?” a toothless man said as he nudged me with his elbow.
In the silence, the man sized me up, as if now in doubt himself. He wiped the beer foam from his whiskers.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “I’ll say he’s there.”