ON A COLD morning in late November, I arrived at my physician’s office to discuss the results of my annual health exam. From the grim tone of the nurse who’d booked my visit and the dreams of abyss haunting me as of late, I knew to expect bad news, that the time had come at last to face the perilous consequences of my long years on Earth.

I came in early, hoping that old Dr. Škvoreček might see me before my appointment time so as not to risk being late for work. Alas, the room was already filled with a dozen patients, chattering about their aches and pains. Can u com in now?? my shift manager inquired in a text message as the nurse led me into the examination room one hour later. With no sense of urgency, Dr. Škvoreček poured me a cup of tea, leaned back in his chair, and revealed that an illness had taken root in my body. I was likely to die within a year, give or take a month. The doctor showered me with helpful leaflets on grief and offered to speak with my family to ease my burdens. A great poet of the macabre, Dr. Škvoreček described all the ways in which my body would devour itself—crumbling bones, renal failure, death by brain bleed or fungal infection—and I nodded with appreciation for his honesty as I watched the clock mark the beginning of my work hours.

Only as the doctor launched into a digression about the latest immortality research coming from America—as if suggesting I might be saved by some last-minute God pill—did I reclaim my time, thanking him for a life of service. Rumor had it that my workplace was planning to replace its employees with robots, I explained, and I’d vowed to become the perfect worker to show that I could compete with any machine. I took a polite sip of lukewarm tea, stuffed the leaflets into my purse, and rushed out of the office. The findings of my illness had come from tests mandated by insurance, invasive examinations I would’ve otherwise skipped. I felt no pain, no new sensations in my body aside from the mild nosebleeds. The abstract diagnosis of death lacked any physical urgency. My need for a paycheck, on the other hand, was concrete and immediate.

As I rushed out of the waiting room, the encouraging farewell of Dr. Škvoreček followed me out to the street: “Don’t trouble yourself, Ms. Slavíková! You’ve lived a beautiful life.”

MY NAME IS Adéla Slavíková. Join me on this usual path to work during the final winter of my mortal toil! An early, weeklong blizzard had taken our county hostage with a barrage of snow and hail, shutting down morning commutes, derailing trains, chilling the bones of the children and the old. I warmed my hands inside the pockets of my coat as I hastily shuffled my feet along the black slush covering the pavement of Louny, the northern Bohemian town to which I commuted for work.

My employer was Kaufland, a blockbuster chain of German hypermarkets. I had been a cashier for six years, hating the work but feeling content in knowing I could support myself, pay the bills, enjoy a few basic comforts until age left me dependent on retirement checks issued by a government grudgeful toward its “unproductive” senior populace. As with most jobs that require a name tag, mine also required a suspension of dignity. Shopping had become a religious experience in our country. Families would plan their weekends around trips to the hypermarkets, study the discount circulars for sales and coupons the same way scholars examine pillars of literature. I’d become a priestess of the hypermarket, a representative of the gods of consumption; when I dared to reject an expired coupon or declare items out of stock, my customers threatened me with lawsuits, violence, complete destruction of every facet of my “meaningless existence.” They felt that I stood between them and the deities in charge of their fates, deities that promised a life of ever-expanding abundance and convenience. If only the cashier did what she was told, eternal happiness would be possible for all.

I arrived at Kaufland and headed toward the locker room to put on my shirt and name tag. I stopped as I passed the checkout lines. My usual cash register, lucky number 12, had been transformed. All the old registers save two had been replaced overnight by tall thick slopes that resembled miniaturized airport towers, connected by running belts. Register 12 greeted the long line of customers with a voice provided by a world-famous footballer as the tower’s blinking red eye scanned the merchandise with a single flash of its lasers. Robotic claws inside the machine bagged the groceries. The footballer thanked the customers for their loyalty and wished them a productive day. The red eye didn’t expect them to gaze back, express gratitude. Its claws were at no risk of developing rheumatism or carpal tunnel.

Witnessing the machine’s work sickened me far more than the blood-and-guts diagnosis from Dr. Škvoreček. I counted as the next customer interacted with the machine. Twelve seconds, and the transaction was over. Such a pace was impossible to compete with. I continued into the locker room, unsure of what to do next. Marek, the manager, was already waiting to call me into his office. He closed the door, took a profound sip from his BELIEVE IN MAGIC coffee mug, and said I was fired. My job at register 12 had been taken by Register 12. Marek offered a small severance and a Kaufland fridge magnet as a token of appreciation for my years of service. Automation was the key to prosperity in our troubled Europe, he insisted with a bravado that suggested Kaufland’s prosperity should be the foremost moral concern of the century.

I had lived long enough not to take this dismissal personally, and yet I struggled to breathe. The shock was far worse than the mild inconvenience I’d felt at the doctor’s office. Marek offered me a glass of water, and I told him this was rather unfortunate timing, as I’d just received news of a terminal illness from my physician. Marek said he was very sorry to hear it, but putting the burden of my illness on him was emotional manipulation, gaslighting. His grandfather had passed away recently, and my talk of death renewed Marek’s traumas. Visibly shaken by the duress I had put him under, Marek quietly walked me out of the building and pressed into my hands a single piece of paper outlining my severance. Breathing the fresh air, I tried to convince myself this was for the best. Had it not been for Register 12’s coup, I would’ve spent my final days on Earth arguing over the price of ham.

Even the news of my impending death didn’t free me from the banality of schedules. I was trapped in Louny for the rest of the afternoon, as the train to my village of Hluboká didn’t come again until the evening. I wasn’t in the mood to waste money on a cab. Despite my shock, or maybe because of it, I decided to take advantage of my newfound freedom, to do something responsible citizens oughtn’t ever do: wander aimlessly. The end is coming; away with routines!

I headed to the winter market at the town center, the one place that was sure to bring me comfort. When I entered, it was teeming with Christmas shoppers browsing the goods, admiring the Christmas tree adorned with silver chains and blue lights. The smell of pine and hot rum made me salivate. The vendors offered ornaments, garlands, Advent calendars. I bought a cup of grog in which to dip my gingerbread, shaped like the star of Bethlehem. I had been raised without religion, but the kitsch of its symbols always appealed to me, especially in biscuit form.

I walked up to a water tank filled with carp whose heads and tails smacked at the surface and splashed at the laughing children. As steam rose from the water, I realized that next winter, these attractions would still be here—the same children, the same parents, the same one-eyed man pouring grog with unwashed hands—and yet I would be gone, and none of these strangers would know. They wouldn’t even miss me. I shook my head. Vanity. I wanted my death to mean something to everyone, to be mourned by the whole world at once, even as I found breaking-news stories about famous deaths absurd, puzzled by the authority of those who decided which deaths were a matter of public interest.

I scouted the water tanks for the carp specimen that looked the spunkiest. Some customers had the fish killed with a hammer to the head, while others took their catch alive to keep in the bathtub until Christmas Day. I hadn’t eaten the traditional Christmas carp, fried in beer batter and served with potato salad, since I was twelve years old. Back then, I’d named our Christmas fish Gandalf, for its wise eyes and unusually thick barbels, shaped like a wizard’s beard. But my father drank too much rum as he prepared to fillet Gandalf for dinner, and the killing turned into a two-hour ordeal as he chased the half-dead fish slipping and sliding all over the kitchen, its guts pouring from the knife wound in its side. I refused to have any part in my father’s barbarity and locked myself in my room.

The children around the tank seemed to have no such memories. They squealed and poked at the glittering fish scales. Policemen in balaclavas shouted at the children to settle down as they patrolled the market with semiautomatic rifles in hand. Above the market, a soft hum and blinking lights announced the hovering of surveillance drones. The terror level was set to red, permanently, with all Christmas markets in the country designated “soft targets.” The Russian regime had been recruiting the surviving mercenaries of its old wars to launch lone-wolf attacks on European cities. Unofficially, of course.

I was still learning not to panic at such changes, as I had never gotten used to how quickly the world progressed and regressed. In my lifetime I’d seen the resurgence of Russian aggression threatening my continent, an internet-fueled resurrection of global fascism, and the American Reclamation, each upheaval a catalyst for extremism. I’d contributed my years of caring and biting my fingernails and it would now be someone else’s turn to worry about the whims of geopolitics. I tried to focus on the things that were simple, lasting—the smell of grog, the sweet spice of gingerbread, the Czech holiday traditions that endured through the centuries.

I asked the fishmonger to choose the carp that splashed the most, fought the hardest against its fate. The man raised his hammer and I said no, I wanted the fish alive. He put the carp inside a webbed bag and handed it over. The fish flapped its tail inside the bag, smacked at my thigh. I turned to leave and whispered a bittersweet goodbye to the market. I began to plead with myself. Perhaps this wouldn’t be my last time here, despite my diagnosis. Dr. Škvoreček was seventy-six years old and refused to retire, he was becoming forgetful, and all of this could be a big misunderstanding. I tried to soothe the carp with pats on its flapping fins as I headed back to the train station to seek a bit of quiet. I waited for the train home, keeping my new friend alive by giving it baths in the station’s lavatory sink.

Shortly after sunset I returned to our house in Hluboká, the ancestral home built by my great-grandfather, sitting atop a hill that cut away from the main road where most of the other village properties stood. The walls had begun to split apart due to the brutal winters, most of the grass covering the front yard had been dead for years, the garden in which my father used to grow cucumbers and strawberries was now a battleground for weeds and moles. My son, Roman, hoped to restore the house someday, make it look new and formidable for the next generation. Though I doubted this would ever happen, given his past struggles, I was happy nonetheless that my child still believed in our family’s future.

I stepped into the dark, quiet hallway. My mother, Babi, was already asleep in her room. Roman was on his way to Austria, delivering goods in a refrigerated truck. The real implications of the day’s events began to sink in. Without work, I would no longer be able to contribute to the household. Roman and Babi would cover our bills with their wages and retirement checks, respectively, but with little to spare. I had officially become a burden to my family.

But the matter of finances wasn’t nearly as dire as the immediate question of how to share the news of my illness. Should I break my family’s hearts over dinner, with food half chewed in their mouths? Should I give them the leaflets from my purse, repeat the platitudes from my doctor? My dearest, my beloved, my fortuitous act of living has come to its end.

I stepped into my bedroom to change before putting the carp in the bathtub. The dark blue carpet that had been in my room since I was a child gave way like quicksand and let out a wet belch. I looked back into my bedroom for the source of a low-pitched whistle and found the radiator pipe leaking water in a steady stream. Every part of the room had been flooded in my absence.

I removed my shoes, walked to the radiator, and cut off the water supply. Still in my work clothes, I went into my bathroom to fill the tub and release the carp. At first the fish made no motion except for the pucker of its lips. But soon the carp rejoiced at the influx of life and began to swim back and forth, exploring its new home. I was glad to have a confidant sharing in this crisis with me. Within seconds the fish would forget any trauma it had undergone. As far as it was concerned, it had lived its entire life happily in this very bathtub. The blessings of beastly amnesia—though sometimes I wondered whether the memory of animals was the memory of nature, without limits, seeing and knowing all, in ways humans could never understand.

I stripped off my work clothes, relieved this was the last time I’d have to wear a uniform, and wrapped myself in layers of robes as the broken radiator hissed with a mischievous glee. The cold crept around my toes. This bedroom had been mine since I was a child. When I was young, I never expected I would be the kind of person to return to her parents’ house well into old age. I had been eager to explore the world, to run far from the place of my birth. But the Prague apartment where I’d raised Roman had become unaffordable decades ago, as city rents skyrocketed and the job market for people (women in particular) over the age of forty-five vanished. The country’s retirement system was mostly bankrupt, and I was told not to count on retirement checks to keep me afloat. The prime minister summarized the sentiment of the nation’s economy when he called upon the unemployed senior populace to fill the shortage of cashiers in small-town grocery stores. I answered the prime minister’s call, and through the years I taught myself to accept that within a world so competitive, so hostile, I oughtn’t feel ashamed for honest work and for sharing a home with my family. I had lived a minimalist, stoic life to rid myself of the pressure of expectation and material pleasures. But it seemed that no matter how small I made myself, there was still so much more our world could take away.

From the stash underneath my bed, I recovered a box of wine. I sat on my toilet and reached into the tub to touch the carp’s scales. I opened the box and drank directly out of the container. Rage. I hadn’t felt it in a long time. To be a stoic was to control one’s perceptions, and rage was the abdication of such control. Babi snored in the next room, and I wished I could ask her if she’d ever felt this brand of humiliation, which seemed to me a distinct feature of our time. My mother, who was a hundred and nine years old, had lived through every major event of the previous century following the Great War. A life of torrents and broken ideals, a country invaded and occupied and resold, its people laughing through the pain. And yet, having seen the many forms of terror that people unleashed on one another, she slept through the night unbothered. I had not inherited her good humor.

But sleep wasn’t what I needed anyway, as there was much to do. As soon as I’d received my diagnosis from the good doctor, I knew that I could no longer hide from the looming absence in my life. A mission I had put off for decades, a haunting from the past. Now I had no excuses left, nor could I tell myself I still had plenty of time, maybe I’d get to it next year… the final months of my life offered one last chance to travel to America and find my lost daughter.

ALTHOUGH I HAD surrendered Tereza to her adoptive family when she was but seven hours old, I’d kept close track of her since her high-school years, when her adoptive mother sent me links to her social media not long before she died. A concealed folder on my laptop became the chronicle of Tereza’s life. Hiding behind anonymous accounts, I had read through her early LiveJournal posts to learn about her teenage years. I downloaded the photos from her lectures at industry conferences, embraced the novelty of Facebook to cull pictures from her birthday parties. I learned to master the emerging technologies, to use search engines and social media, only so I could watch my lost daughter from afar.

Her Czech forename was the only thing I was able to give her; her parents graciously agreed to honor my wish that she keep it. Each time I typed the name into the search engine, I felt closer to her, as if that single act of naming had bound us forever. Tereza had gone on to work as a bioengineer for the VITA corporation, in pursuit of the company’s promise to prolong human life, cure entropic diseases, and, someday, make our species immortal. This sounded like a fairy tale—what kind of a maniac would want to live forever?—but as long as my daughter was happy and well paid in the booming permanence sector, I was content.

Knowing that Tereza was living a successful life and needed nothing from me soothed my yearning to know her. But whenever the night was particularly quiet and I had drunk too much wine, I fantasized about taking one last trip to the United States to reveal myself after a lifetime of absence. The idea of being absolved of my guilt was intoxicating, but the fantasy was never enough to overcome my fear of Tereza’s reaction. Perhaps she hated her anonymous birth mother, perhaps she thought I had given her up lightheartedly, out of selfishness. Staying away from Tereza meant I didn’t have to find out. But my visit with Dr. Škvoreček suggested I had to act immediately, against my fears, or abandon the idea of knowing Tereza for good. Her adoptive parents had passed away before she started college, and with me gone, she would soon become a true orphan.

Of course, following the Great Reclamation of the United States, the mission of finding my daughter would be even more difficult. During the American election in 2024, all but a few holdouts in the Republican Party had abandoned the tainted GOP to form a new political behemoth: the party of Reclamation. On the night of the successful coup, the new Reclamationist leader of the Senate—with the support of the first Reclamation president, a man responsible for the pandemic deaths of tens of thousands of his own citizens as the former governor of Florida—dedicated this revolution of conservatism to the brave patriots who had stormed the Capitol in January of 2021. Using the voting laws they themselves had passed in recent years, state officials of the old Republican Party certified the election results, thus granting instant legitimacy to an authoritarian takeover that had conjured its own legal standing in the country’s system.

Thousands of lawsuits were filed as every democratic watchdog in the world mobilized, as Europe and the United Nations threatened the United States with sanctions, as the police brutalized protesters in every major U.S. city from coast to coast. But this upheaval produced no change in the Reclamation Party’s hold on power. Nobody knew how to protect the archaic Constitution against sophisticated twenty-first-century deception. The country’s Supreme Court had long ago shown a disinclination to protect its country’s democracy, and its refusal to accept cases challenging the Reclamation was perfectly in line with its dismantling of abortion rights. Many people in the world had held a kind of reverence for the American brand of democracy, but now we saw that even the most celebrated systems on the planet were make-believe, a reflection of a consensus that no longer held. Russia’s medieval atrocities in Ukraine had destroyed the last hopes for stability anywhere, along with our collective belief in fairness, compromise, and the meaning of old alliances. During its first two years in power, the Reclamation Party was normalized by nativist Americans drunk on vengeance, and it went on to cement its power with narrow wins in the 2026 midterm elections and with the reelection of the Reclamationist incumbent president in 2028.

The first piece of the new government’s legislation had been the Reclamation Act, which closed the country’s borders to immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and visitors, with the exception of tourists from a small number of allied countries. America can’t abide the influence of foreign agents on our native soil, proclaimed the Reclamation government on its YouTube channel. The time of the unscrupulous alien seeking our charity has come to an end. Though the measure was initially billed as temporary, it proved so popular with supporters that it became the permanent law of the land.

The looming disasters of America turned into a full-blown manic depression, unpredictable and volatile. Though my country had a limited visa agreement with the U.S. (our presidents were old business partners), based on the horror stories, I worried about how I’d be received in the Reclaimed America. I worried about the reaction to my accent, I worried about the militias, deputized by the government’s Homeland Deportation Force to patrol the streets for stray foreigners. I worried about disappearing, about ending up in a small room with no windows. I worried about finding myself in one of America’s growing work camps, spending my final days sewing cop uniforms. Finding my daughter would’ve been far easier if she’d lived in a stabler corner of the world.

Yet the impending finality of my existence seemed to diminish these dangers. On this cold night of a broken radiator, a happily splashing carp, and a jarring removal from the job market, the idea of finding my daughter ceased to be a capricious daydream and became an immediate obsession. I felt detached from all our antiquated ideas of personal responsibility. Or, to speak in clearer terms, I no longer gave a fuck. I felt free to do anything I liked, no longer beholden to the monthly process of paying bills, shopping the grocery sales, doing it all over again the following week, the routine of paycheck-to-paycheck that kept the kingdom of humans running in an orderly manner and discouraged us from delusions of grandeur.

Yes, I could do it. All of this courage, to resolve the unresolved, excavated itself after decades of fear. As I opened my second box of wine, my head began to ache, my vision became blurry, I no longer felt cold. I retrieved my laptop from the bedside table, returned to the toilet, and began to browse flights to New York. I felt heat in my chest, acid reflux announcing I was officially drunk.

“Do yourself a favor: Live fast, die young,” I slurred to the carp, and laughed so hard I slid off the toilet.

As I collected myself, the fish in the bathtub began to glow. Its scales turned the color of melting gold. The fish pursed its lips and started speaking in a deep, human voice. “Find your daughter, go, go now,” the carp said. “Idiot. Your destiny awaits in the New World.”

“A prophecy!” I screamed back at the carp, attempting to take it in my hands. But the slippery fish swam jovially to the opposite side of the tub. “Tell me what to do,” I said. “Tell me!”

But the carp refused to speak again; its scales ceased to glow. I poked at it, begged for more wisdom, but the carp simply watched me with its beady eyes, the frowning curve of its mouth opening and closing to breathe. Was the creature mocking me? Suddenly, I felt awfully alone, craved to get into bed with Babi like I did so many decades ago when I was a girl and the Russians had invaded our country and I dreamed only of tanks and strange men who spoke to me with smoke coming from their mouths. I left the carp and crawled to bed on my own, disappointed, exhausted from the day of terrible news. I ignored my chattering teeth and fell asleep, the second box of wine resting half empty in my hand.

In the morning I awoke to heavy footsteps announcing my son’s return from work. The slamming of the refrigerator door, the long pour of milk.

I dragged myself up from bed and splashed my face with water. The carp rested quietly in the tub, expressing no judgment about the previous night. I thanked the fish for understanding and went to greet my son. I tried my hardest to tell him the news of my diagnosis, to force out the words I’m dying, I’m sorry—but I couldn’t. Instead, I told Roman about the broken radiator.

He cursed quietly, asked if I was okay, why I had slept in the cold instead of taking the living-room couch.

I’d needed the comfort of my own bed, I said, because I’d been unceremoniously sacked. Roman put his hand on my shoulder, and I took advantage of this rare moment of tenderness. Without delay I told him I wanted to use my early retirement to go to America to find Tereza and convince her to come back and meet her family. It was to be my final journey across the ocean.

Roman drank his milk with great deliberation, taking the news in. My son was short and stout, his face marked by age though he was yet in his thirties, the kind of entropy accelerated by anger and disappointment. He moved slowly, he spoke slowly too, with ominous pauses between his words like craters on a battlefield, another salvo coming soon. He always knew better than I did. I expected harsh words about the dangers of Reclaimed America, his usual lecture about the safety of home. A plea to let old ghosts rest, our lives were difficult enough, the same arguments he raised whenever I spoke about Tereza. He’d considered his sister a distant threat, a destabilizing force that would destroy our family’s peace.

Instead, he put an arm around my shoulders. He sat down with me and booked the embassy appointment on his laptop within minutes. I was shocked at my son’s sudden flexibility to let me go overseas without protest. But as we read through the booklet of rules for embassy visitors, I realized why he seemed unbothered. He didn’t believe the Americans would allow me into the Reclaimed country at all. He viewed my trip as a harmless fantasy borne from an age-struck mind.

UNDETERRED, I WAITED for the appointment, and over the weeks I began to feel the changes in my body, the aches and fatigue, strange bruises, more severe nosebleeds. Babi and I spent our last Christmas together without Roman, eating the prophetic carp and potato salad. Some might judge me for eating the fish that had given me courage to find my daughter, but in fact, I was obligated to consume the carp for good luck. Roman had taken a Christmas delivery route for extra pay, though I suspected he also preferred the quiet cabin of his truck to being shut in with us.

Several weeks later, I took the train to my interview session at the American embassy in Prague. The officers collected my biometrics, ran a full background check, and had their own doctor examine me. The exam seemed designed to be as invasive as possible while identifying no actual health problems, as the issue of my deadly illness didn’t come up. I was asked to release my phone records, e-mail communications, social media passwords, and bank statements to the American government.

I sleepwalked through this long session of information gathering, weakened with influenza because I’d been staying in my cold room despite Roman’s pleas for me to take his bed. He’d given me a small heater, which I secretly turned off so as not to raise our electric bill. I felt obligated to save every halíř I could. To cover the visa fee and airplane ticket, I’d had to sacrifice all of my severance pay. I struggled to keep faith, to resist the possibility that I’d wasted the last of my money on a trip that would never happen.

After the interview, I spent a month waiting in a resigned haze, taking walks around Hluboká to memorize every part of my birth village, as if I could carry these images into the afterlife, footage on a loop. Every day I felt older, more burdened, every day I lost hope that I could reach Tereza in time. I avoided phone calls from Dr. Škvoreček offering a consultation on my pain-management options. My bones ached, and I dreamed of worms burrowing their way through my marrow, eating what remained of it. February brought even more winter storms, freezing the roads and cutting villages off from train and car travel, making the season even lonelier. In Louny, a man walked into Kaufland and shot five customers and two of my former colleagues before giving himself up to the police.

On the day of this tragedy, unprecedented in the history of our country, I received a decision from the embassy. As always, America surprised me. It granted a “monitored ten-day” visa. The letter explained that upon my arrival at JFK Airport, an immigration officer would attach a tracker to my wrist to transmit my whereabouts and biometrics to the Homeland Deportation Force. Any attempts to remove the device would trigger an immediate manhunt, with the full force of federal and local authorities descending upon my alien presence. This solution accommodated the limitations imposed by the Reclamation while allowing America to hold on to some tourist revenue. White European visitors welcome; surveilled.

Babi and I watched the Kaufland gunman on television, a seventeen-year-old incel in sweatpants and a Donald Duck T-shirt, handcuffed and surrounded by police; according to his manifesto, he’d been admiring the actions of his American counterparts since he was twelve. Babi asked whether I was sure I wanted to leave the comforts of our village. No one could blame me for staying on familiar ground in a world gone mad. I had to go, I insisted, even the carp in the bathtub had told me so. Besides, there was no such thing as a safe refuge, not even the hypermarket in a small Bohemian town.

Seeing my resolve, Babi pulled an envelope filled with dollar bills from her apron pocket. She was able to produce money whenever needed, one of her many superpowers. I’d always guessed that the dressers and wardrobes in the house were padded with cash Babi had squirreled away over the years. I understood this hoarding when my father died twelve years ago, and we became aware of the debts he had accrued at various drinking establishments. Babi was able to pay off all of it from her savings. In a lifetime spent with a man unable to hold on to a penny, she had learned to compensate.

As she gave me the envelope, Babi told me she always knew I would someday look for Tereza. I kissed her right cheek and promised she would know her granddaughter, even if I had to die trying.

Roman arrived home later that afternoon, immediately shell-shocked by the embassy’s unlikely decision to admit an old foreign woman into the Reclaimed territories. “Congrats” was all he had to say as he withdrew into his room.

A week later, when a cab arrived to take me to the airport, Roman had already snuck out of the house without a word of goodbye, gone to deliver a truckload of canned pâté to Poland.

BY THE DAY of my departure, I’d become even more ill with a cough and chest pains and an occasional fever, symptoms I blamed on the broken radiator. I tested negative for all COVID mutations, and I wasn’t about to let a little cold keep me from taking my chance. I boarded the plane owned by an ultra-budget airline. The plane fit twelve passengers per row, offered no in-flight entertainment or cushioning on the seats. Each passenger was limited to one cup of water. To get into the toilet, I had to pay a cash fee to the flight attendant. But I was too sick to rage at the indignities of travel. I covered my face with a jacket and slept through the nonstop flight.

On arrival, exhausted from the journey, I used some of Babi’s cash to splurge on a cab to my dusty Manhattan hotel in the Flatiron District. I’d visited New York only once before, in my twenties, when I lived in Florida for some years, during what felt like an entirely different life. Back then New York was a city fighting madly to stay alive, the evidence of which was in its decay. The neon signs had been rigged haphazardly atop crooked buildings that seemed to have no business standing tall. I’d seen whole city blocks turned into dance parties, an improvised boy band serenading a subway car, a crowd of vigilantes descending on a thief who had stolen from a beloved local grocer. As a young person, I idolized the spontaneity, the chaos. Now, Manhattan seemed anxious and sterile. Pale. The ground under my feet suspiciously clean. The New Yorker stride of bulldozer swagger had turned into a timid saunter of people looking at their feet, as if the whole city had suffered a shared tragedy that bent the invincible spirit I’d once witnessed.

I had expected to be overwhelmed with emotion to find myself in America once again, to relive the memories of youthful wonder, the excitement of a nomadic life. Perhaps I was too ill or too preoccupied as I watched my cabdriver dodge one traffic accident after another, but I felt nothing but irritation, a desire for the comforts of home. Anyway, why should New York owe me anything? It had lived through its own share of tragedies. While I was painting a nostalgic portrait of the city in my mind, it had seen more death than I could ever imagine.

Before my arrival at the hotel, I called Babi and Roman. My son said he was too tired to speak to me. My mother begged me to watch out for guns. “Look for bulges behind the belt,” she advised.

The hotel receptionist, an unkempt, sweating man in his thirties, demanded to see my visa as soon as I gave my name. He asked questions about why I had traveled into the country, inquired about my religion, and pushed for my opinion on the omnivaccines.

On his hand I spotted the tattoo of a DNA strand wrapped around a mattock. The identifying mark of a devoted Reclamationist. Blood and soil. The man’s eyes betrayed a hunger in the way they darted across my body, and he grew coiled and focused like a predator beginning his stalk. I was sure he’d call the HDF to verify my immigration status as soon as I left, hoping he might be a hero who’d caught a foreign socialist instigator or welfare thief. Seeing I had only silence to offer, the man surrendered the room key, and I rushed toward the elevator.

I hooked the chain on my room’s door, trying to shake off these unsettling moments. I unpacked my small suitcase and washed the distress of the flight from my skin. Aches pulsed through my muscles and bones. Blaming the discomfort on jet lag, I decided to get in bed right away, leaving the terrifying business of finding Tereza for the following day.

I spent the night in and out of consciousness and awoke with a fever. New York came to life outside the miniature window of the bathroom as I puked. Already the glamour of the place was pushing me to resubmit myself to the American ideal: Stand here, ye who are worthy, and look over one of civilization’s greatest cities. Go shopping, eat oysters, catch a show. My lungs burned; my delirium turned me sluggish, at odds with the pull of the cosmopolitan. I poured a triple dose of Advil drops under my tongue, put on a dress I hadn’t worn since my son’s university graduation, and left the room. As if in reward, I was greeted by a pleasant young woman at the front desk.

I had chosen the hotel because it was the only affordable option within walking distance of Tereza’s workplace. Fifteen blocks. I set my foot on the icy sidewalks and made my way across the city. Veteran New Yorkers exhaled their frustrated sighs when they got stuck behind me. This fact of the city appeared unchanged—it reviled anyone who dared slow it down. No patience for aged bones, and yet aged bones I had, and no other option than to share the sidewalk. Whatever else changed, the city still favored the young.

At last I stood in front of an eighty-story skyscraper belonging to the VITA corporation. It wasn’t built for the likes of me. No, it was designed for the sexy people of the future, people who would never age thanks to vegetable juicing, people who craved disruption and fought a sense of impending doom with manic productivity. There were no signs or logos on the building, no distinguishing features to offer a clue to its identity. Everyone already knew whom it belonged to. I walked through the glass door and found myself in a minimalist lobby made of sleek obsidian stone.

The man behind the reception desk beckoned me forward. “Positive tidings,” he said. “What is your purpose today?”

For a moment I got lost staring at the small round device installed just below the man’s ear, where his jawline met his neck. A hWisper. The device unsettled me whenever I saw it. It had been invented a couple of years earlier by the very people working in this building, the first successful attempt at linking the human brain directly to a computer. The machine functioned via two chips, one implanted in the person’s brain and one in the hand, through which the hWisperers (as adopters were called) could browse an interface of apps as if the software lived inside their own heads, all controlled by the mere motion of their fingers. This experimental technology was far beyond my desire to accept or understand, a sentiment I shared with most of the world’s population. But despite the widespread pushback, the device was gaining apostles among the younger generations. I had seen it only once in the Czech Republic, but here in New York, I’d already encountered several pedestrians who had converted to the hWisper lifestyle.

“I’m here for Tereza Holm,” I said to the receptionist, exhilarated that my English, which I hadn’t practiced in some years, was still passable.

He maintained eye contact with me as he browsed the hWisper calendar in his mind. “She doesn’t have scheduled visitors. Who may I say brings chill vibes?”

“I’m her mother. In a way.”

The person Tereza knew as her mother had been dead for some time, a fact that the young man was perhaps aware of. He raised an eyebrow, his positive vibrations ceasing to flow; clearly, I’d worn out my welcome already.

“It’s complicated, but she’ll want to see me,” I said. I hope.

The man asked me to wait outside.

Standing in front of the entrance once again, I rubbed my cold hands together and squinted through the tinted glass of the sliding doors. Twenty minutes later, the wall behind the receptionist opened, revealing a secret portal. A woman’s silhouette stepped into the lobby. It occurred to me that Tereza might think I wanted something from her, money or love. I imagined her slapping me across the face, unleashing her rage on the mother she’d never known, the one who’d abandoned her at birth. There was still time to run. Fifteen blocks and I could be back at the hotel, door locked. Tereza would never know I had really been here. Some idiot playing a prank on her, that’s all.

The glass doors opened.

Out walked my daughter. I managed to stay upright just long enough to recognize her. Numb and light-headed, I took a step forward, opened my mouth without knowing how to greet her. It felt like I stood there for centuries, one foot forward, mouth agape and soundless. My knees weakened and my vision turned black as my body found a way to unfreeze itself…

Only when I felt the pressure of concrete on my back did I realize that I was no longer looking at Tereza’s face but at the sky. Clear and easy, going about its business above the skyscrapers.

She leaned over me. Green eyes, unmistakably hers, identical to mine. Red hair cut midlength, similar to the haircut Babi had when she taught children in our village. I reached up and touched her face. I’d seen it in the pictures, but here it was truly unbelievable just how much we looked alike. A spherical bump on the tip of her nose, long neck, ears just slightly too small for her head. She was the revenant of my youth.

Tereza spoke her first words. “It’s you.” She knew right away. Most parents don’t have to wait decades to witness their child speak for the first time, but my joy was undiminished. She saw herself in me. She knew why I’d come.

TEREZA PULLED ME to my feet as passersby paused to gawk at the reunion. I didn’t know what to say after my botched greeting. I whispered the word mother, suddenly uncertain whether Tereza had really made the connection. My daughter put her arms around me. She trembled in the cold as I did my best to maintain the stoic gaze that had so often accompanied the most significant moments of my life. When your heart is pulverized into powder, pretend you saw it coming. Control your perceptions. Direct your actions accordingly. I wished for life to stop so that this moment wouldn’t be diluted by any other experience to come, so that I would have no chance of saying something to make her recoil, losing her once again.

After exchanging a few awkward words about the hostile weather, we made our way to a bar overlooking the East River. Tereza insisted she could take the day off without issue, she was her own boss. I hoped that facing each other in a small space would force us to break through the daunting pauses, the stiff, polite rhythm of strangers. Make us honest. The first twenty minutes were strained. I felt like setting my forehead on the table and weeping, terrified that my feeling ill would spoil the moment.

Tereza’s voice shook when she asked her first, formal questions, as if she were speaking to an intimidating teacher. She asked how I’d found her. I told her that her adoptive mother had contacted me before she passed away and sent links to Tereza’s social media so that I could someday reveal myself, should I find the courage. But shame had prevented me from taking this opportunity until now. I told Tereza I was sorry, that I didn’t know how to behave, felt unworthy of her company.

She stood and walked to the bar. My nausea struck again. Already my daughter was done with our meeting and was settling our tab to end the misery.

When she returned, I whispered that I understood, that it was wonderful just to spend these twenty minutes with her.

“No,” she said, “you don’t understand.” The bartender came over and placed a couple of drinks on the table. “Martinis, double vodka, dirty through and through,” Tereza said. “A tonic for the nerves.”

As we emptied our glasses, I told my daughter about the supernatural occurrence that had confirmed I should seek her out despite my fears: the carp in the bathtub speaking to me like a creature from old folktales. I didn’t plan on revealing the true reason for the timing of my visit, not anytime soon. “I don’t want you to think I came here because I want something from you,” I said.

“Why not?” Tereza replied. “I want something from you. Family. To make my world bigger. Isn’t that what people do for each other?”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“Nonsense. You’ve done nothing wrong. You found the perfect family for me. I couldn’t have asked for better.”

“When your new parents came to get you at the hospital, I nearly attacked them. I changed my mind a million times. They must have been remarkable, to raise a daughter like you. Working in the Division of Permanence… I’ve never known anyone so accomplished.”

Tereza grew quiet as she tore her napkin into ever smaller strips. “I haven’t accomplished much. Not yet.”

“I’ve read the articles. They said you might cure cancer. Alzheimer’s.”

“Let’s just say that my employers’ main interest is in… more disruptive models of longevity science. Brain mapping. Cryonics.”

“Brain mapping?” I said. “What in the world?”

“Yes! They will put your mind in a bottle, like a genie. Scan your brain to capture your personality, your memory, your very essence, whatever that is.”

“And then?”

“Mind upload. Maybe they will transfer your personhood into some indestructible body. Or the cloud.”

“I suppose it would be nice to be invisible sometimes. Just a soul. Can they put me in a dog’s body? I would quite enjoy that,” I said, delighted by Tereza’s laughter. It didn’t last long.

“I want to eradicate the disease of aging,” she said, solemn again. “The pains of a failing body, to make the twilight years pain-free. But my bosses, my colleagues—they want to turn leaders of industry into cyborgs. To upload people’s souls as software. It’s not quite what I had in mind,” Tereza said and drank down the rest of her cocktail in a single gulp. “But I shouldn’t complain. They pay me a small fortune. I run my own lab.” She nodded at the bartender and spun her finger in the air.

I didn’t know what to say. When I watched her from afar in YouTube videos and read newspaper profiles about her, my daughter seemed to have everything a person could want. What advice could I possibly give? I had nothing to show for a lifetime of labor. Nothing beyond a meager pension looted by decades of government mismanagement. A life lived paycheck to paycheck, never a chance to save or build.

“You’re young,” I said, and immediately regretted using this tired platitude. “What I mean is, you have the run of the world, don’t you? You can always go work somewhere else, do what you want.”

“Every permanence company is like this now,” Tereza said as the bartender delivered our next round of cocktails. “The new futurists have taken over. They think the body is a hindrance, an obsolete bit of nostalgia for romantics. Like books.”

Clearly, I couldn’t help this brilliant child, as I didn’t know anything about her problems. She probably thought me stupid, naive, a relic with no place in her world. I folded my hands in my lap and scrambled for a new subject, anything to show my daughter that I was an interesting person and could have value to her.

“I like your necklace,” Tereza said after a while.

I touched the golden beetle on the chain around my neck. An antique by now, and a reminder of a world that would never be again. “I wore it when I met your father,” I said.

“Really? Is he alive?” Tereza said, hope flooding her voice.

“I’m so sorry,” I told her, “he died some time ago. We hadn’t spoken for decades, but he tracked me down and sent me a letter from his deathbed. I’m afraid we were hopeless together. A couple of dreamers.” It was Michael, I said, who had sold me on America, on the life you could live if you had money. “Soon we became reminders of each other’s failures. I don’t mean to sound negative. I loved him. But I had to leave America, and the only way to do that was to forget him. Sometimes you have to do that to survive. Forget people entirely.”

I hated that Tereza had to find out about her biological father’s death in this way. The parents who’d raised her—a Danish couple, academics who’d moved to America soon after they adopted Tereza—had passed away before she went to college. She seemed to have no luck at all when it came to family.

“Is that why you… gave me away?” Tereza said. “To survive?”

It was the question I was most prepared for, yet it still caught me off guard. “I’ve been having nightmares about you asking,” I said. “But you say it without any malice. I don’t deserve it.”

“Having a child—I can’t even imagine it. There’s no reason for malice.”

“I was on the run,” I said. “Between countries. I had nothing to give. Along came a perfect couple who looked at you like you were the answer to all of their questions. It’s complicated, but I will tell you every bit of it.”

“I want to hear it,” Tereza said, “but later. Today we’re going to behave like an ordinary family. I want to welcome you, a mother visiting her daughter in the big city. Because this should be a celebration. We’ve been talking about painful things since we sat down. Let’s take it easy for a while.”

“A celebration,” I agreed.

Tereza paid the bartender with a corporate credit card seemingly made of gold as I rose and headed to the bathroom again. My eyes were red, I couldn’t stop sweating although the bar was cold. I looked far better than I felt, and I intended to keep it that way, preserve this perfect day. I put six Advil drops under my tongue, washed the sweat off my forehead, and took a deep breath. There was no room for fatigue, for mistakes. This day had to be perfect.

WHEN I CAME out, Tereza suggested we stumble to the Museum of Modern Art, one of the city’s most beloved tourist clichés. We locked arms and walked west, doing our best to avoid a march of protesters extending all the way from the UN building to Rockefeller Center as drones buzzed overhead, scanning the crowds. The band around my wrist vibrated, a verification of my legal status in the country.

I asked Tereza about the protest. Americans were angry at the UN for failing to address the Reclamation Act during the recent General Assembly meeting, she explained. Refusing to impose sanctions on the United States for its antidemocratic agenda and crimes against humanity. Why wouldn’t the world come to their aid? An old feeling for me, the citizen of a small, often forgotten nation.

Having passed through this scar across America’s iconic city—the march of people terrified of an unstoppable plunge toward the collapse of their homeland—we arrived at the museum. As we toured its floors, I forgot the circumstances of our lives, the strangeness of me walking around with a daughter who hadn’t known me just hours earlier. It was as if the two of us had been visiting this museum for years, as if it was our tradition to come for special occasions. I hesitated to speak. Our newfound confidence seemed fragile, breakable with a single word. I followed Tereza, listened to her talk about Frida Kahlo and Nadia Ayari, the field trip she had taken here when she was in high school, the classmate she’d kissed in front of Water Lilies when the group left them behind. I tried my best not to stare at her too much, utterly taken by every story she offered.

At last, we made our way to the museum’s most popular floor, which hosted a famous attraction painted by a Dutch recluse. We stood at the back of a massive crowd as a family of three posed for a photo with the painting, surveilled carefully by a gaggle of guards. The painting wasn’t protected; it simply hung exposed like all of the other pieces, easy prey for vandals looking to make their online fame. I was shocked that MoMA hadn’t made better arrangements after the series of assaults on works of art around the world committed by a faction of TikTokers who assumed, correctly, that the destruction of famous works would bring viral fame and fortune.

I scanned the crowd for any possible assailants. A little boy who had just taken the photo with his parents suddenly broke left and ran up to the painting. With his sticky fingers, which just reached the village of Saint-Rémy, the boy began to tap the canvas, as if to see whether the painting had a touchscreen. Luckily, the painting had a protective cover after all. The horrified father pulled his son away before the guards could reach him, but the Public Shaming Alarm had already been activated.

A life-size hologram of Vincent van Gogh appeared next to the family. The maestro was dressed in a blue coat and a white shirt buttoned all the way to the neck. He had the same severe cheekbones and focused blue eyes from his self-portraits, although the features seemed a bit cartoonish, not particularly realistic, probably because the museum wanted to avoid customers thinking that the Dutchman’s resurrection was real. The cartoon van Gogh opened his mouth and berated the family in Dutch, exclaiming to the skies and waving his fist at the little boy, whose snot and tears dripped onto the floor as his parents dragged him out of the room, mouthing apologies.

Van Gogh turned to the rest of us with a mad look in his eye and spoke in perfect English: “Under the Emergency Art Terrorism Act of 2025, damage to protected works in New York is punishable by three years in state prison.” Whereupon he bowed and vanished.

I wasn’t impressed by the spectacle—something about the holographic van Gogh invading a space where people came to admire classics reminded me of the robotic Register 12 at Kaufland. What indignity it brought to the deceased artist, this digital caricature, a Disneyfied attraction. I imagined living this kind of afterlife, a holographic version of myself dancing atop the casket at my funeral, performing karaoke hits, making crude jokes about my guests, haunting our house Wi-Fi in Hluboká. In that moment, I couldn’t yet imagine how likely it was that digital ghosts would soon roam the earth. I shook my head and asked Tereza if we could move on to my favorite analog activity—more drinking.

We ordered blue cheese martinis at the MoMA bar and tried our best impressions of the hologram’s absurd Dutch accent. Despite Tereza’s good mood, I felt anxious, as I wasn’t sure what to do next. When the museum announced its closing hour and the winter sun began to set outside, I feared that the day might be over, that Tereza would return to her life, leaving me shut up in my hotel room, passing time until I could see her again. Who was I to demand more from my daughter after she’d been so generous? And yet I couldn’t accept the thought of letting her go.

“Would you like to see my apartment?” Tereza asked.

Was she humoring me, sensing my dread? “I’ve already taken up so much of your day,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“This is our day. I should say that my apartment is more of a storage room. I’ve barely been there since I re-signed the lease—I live at the office—so I can’t vouch for the smell, but I keep all my childhood things there. Things I want to show you.”

“Yearbooks? I have always thought about how much I’d love to see your yearbooks.”

“Yes. I have everything. I’m a bit of a hoarder—greeting cards and baby teeth and Polaroids and movie tickets—and now I know why I’ve kept it all. For you.”

At my behest, we took the subway instead of a cab, to accommodate my nostalgia for old New York. Neither of us was aware just how dangerous the underground had become. My daughter and I ventured into the unknowable depths of Manhattan, headed for South Slope. By then, I was sure that this time with Tereza was easily the most important day of my life.

WE BOARDED THE R train and claimed two free seats next to a rolling pool of unidentifiable brown liquid. Tereza seemed nervous, clutching at the strap of her bag. It had been years, she admitted, since she’d had any use for the subway, as her VITA private chauffeur took care of all her transportation needs. She’d forgotten that the subway tunnels were a different dimension, one in which humans were unwelcome visitors with no guarantee of comfort or safety.

“Let’s make this quick,” she whispered as we rode, a New Yorker’s prayer.

As if her wish had violated some law of the underground, the train came to a halt between stations, so suddenly that a woman sitting a few rows away dropped her container of hot and sour soup. The black liquid and chunks of chilies spilled over the feet of her indifferent neighbors.

“Good news, passengers,” announced an obscenely cheerful voice from the intercom. “Today our trains are running with a brief delay of forty minutes. We’ll move as soon as traffic clears. Please sit back, relax, and enjoy the Soothe Protocol, brought to you by Procter and Gamble: Keeping you sanitized no matter your destination.”

I looked out the windows of the train at the gritty tunnel walls surrounding us. Was this a joke? The train dimmed and all around us the soft glow of blue light emanated from the ceiling and beneath the advertisement frames. I could no longer see the stains on the floor, the duct tape sealing cracks in the seats, the mice excrement, only the soft blue light that reminded me of hotel lobbies. The stereo speakers inside the train played a gentle tune, a bit of piano, a pinch of saxophone, the croon of a bar lounge on a slow weekday evening. As the grand finale, the emitters underneath our seats released aerosol sanitizer, scented with lavender to mask the stink of spilled soup and crotch sweat. I inhaled deeply. As we waited, an advertisement broadcast from the speakers let us know that the scent was available for purchase in the form of candle, spray, or toilet freshener on the MTA website. Tereza said she’d read about the Soothe Protocol when it was first introduced, a response to the countless subway brawls that broke out due to passenger frustration.

“Do you like to travel?” I asked Tereza in an attempt to normalize our circumstances.

“I don’t get to do much of it. The world, well, we can’t travel as freely as we used to. I did go to a conference in Croatia last year, during the red tide. I watched the tourists evacuate in droves while the army tried to clear millions of dead fish from the beaches. Hospitals filled with people who’d swum in the algae or breathed in the spores. It put me off travel for a while.”

“So you do travel to Europe. Close to us,” I observed clumsily.

“I’d love to visit you soon,” Tereza said. “Don’t be afraid to ask.”

“You have a brother and a grandmother, and they would love to meet you. Our village is small, I doubt it’ll impress you, but the house belongs to you as much as it does to us.”

“You don’t have to ask me twice. My mother… my other mother? Sorry. When I was little, she showed me pictures of where I came from. Maybe I’ll go with you now. America feels less and less like home.”

The train doors jerked open, and four men carrying automatic rifles, accompanied by a German shepherd, entered our car. Their faces were concealed with black masks printed with white skulls. The passengers removed wallets from their pockets and held up their citizen IDs as one of the men flicked his fingers to verify their identities en masse in his hWisper database. Tereza’s company, VITA, held a lucrative government contract that equipped all federal law enforcement with enhanced devices. The man set his eyes on me as the K9 sniffed at the bags and feet of the travelers. He approached me, and I stared at the letters sewn into his bulletproof vest in golden thread: HOMELAND DEPORTATION FORCE. I didn’t know what was expected. He looked at me and inhaled deeply.

“Your tracker,” Tereza whispered.

I held out my shaking hand and waited for the man to find my identity in the depths of his brain-computer synergy.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked without making eye contact.

“Visit?” I whispered.

“No English?” the man said as he gestured to his comrades.

The four of them surrounded us, and the people sitting nearby moved to the opposite side of the train. The dog had strained the limit of its leash and began to lick the spilled soup.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “I meant I’m here visiting my daughter.”

“Her papers are in order, Agent,” Tereza said. “Is there a problem? I could call my bosses, the founders of VITA, to clear this up.”

The man ignored her. “You’re this feminazi’s mother?” he asked me and nodded toward Tereza.

I knew this man. I had been surveilled, hunted, arrested, and detained by his kind during my country’s darkest days. The enforcement of the Reclamation had become one of America’s largest industries, and many collaborating citizens found employment as agents of the Homeland Deportation Force, overseeing immigrant work camps, pursuing fugitives, or laboring within the massive bureaucracy of surveillance and public relations to ensure the patriotic wheels turned smoothly. Much like the secret police of Czechoslovakia, the specter of my youth. This man had found his life’s calling, his greatest pleasure and joy, within the unlimited mandate of the HDF mission. Authoritarian revolutions offered lucrative opportunities for the natural-born cop. The most important requirement of the job was his passion to dominate.

I said nothing to the man. Silence was the only safe option. I was to show fear and submission, an easy task, seeing that the muzzle of his rifle rested about forty centimeters from my face. Give him the high he craved, reassure him he could do anything he wanted to us. He needed to know we were entirely at the mercy of his benevolence.

Tereza seemed to understand too. The moment passed. The man’s face eased up; he saw we would offer no resistance. He was at once fulfilled and disappointed.

“Make sure you don’t miss your boat home,” he told me. “There are no sanctuaries left.”

The men and their dog passed into the next train car. I breathed and counted to myself, determined not to let Tereza see me tremble. At last the fake scent of the Soothe Protocol weakened and gave way to the raw smells of the underground. The music ceased to play, and the train jerked forward, causing pieces of tofu from the hot and sour soup to slip and slide down the aisle. A couple of children stood up and began to kick them around like a football. The passengers resumed eating, reading, watching videos on their devices. It seemed we would all continue on as if nothing extraordinary had just occurred.

Tereza attempted to return to our conversation, but I struggled to speak, to focus. Had the men facing us made another choice—arbitrarily, instinctively, based on nothing but their need to harm, to dominate—they could’ve hauled me off to one of their facilities, they could’ve disappeared me until the machine of the Reclamation decided my fate. What would it be like not to have even this minimal protection of my visa, to live in a constant state of being hunted by the HDF? I had no doubt that if I weren’t a white European woman, I would’ve been treated with far greater suspicion, perhaps arrested regardless of any paperwork. I hadn’t felt this kind of terror since the days of my youth, when my country had lived through its own nightmares, and the matter of disappearing at the whim of state agents was an accepted fact of daily life.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we arrived at the Prospect Avenue station and walked up to Tereza’s apartment, a minimalist two-bedroom filled with boxes and unwrapped designer furniture. It was part of a condo high-rise, mostly unoccupied, and on our walk from the subway I had noticed many more luxury buildings sitting empty. Why would the city allow the construction of these towers for ghosts? Perhaps they, too, were made for the hypothetical sexy people of the future: they were aspirational apartments for the coming generations of young professionals. Surely the tens of thousands of unhoused people in the city understood the importance of aspiration while my daughter used the warm, luxurious apartment as a storage closet.

We picked through relics and photos Tereza had saved and I pressed her for the stories that accompanied the mementos and pictures, all while we drank too much wine to suppress the lingering tremors from our subway experience. I told her about the history of our small village, showed her photos of the Hluboká house. I mentioned her brother’s struggles, though briefly, as I didn’t want to scare her off. We took a couple of trips to buy more wine from a store around the corner (“Just buy the damn crate,” suggested the clerk amiably). Twice I was overcome with the fever plaguing me, sweating, unable to breathe, and in these moments I retreated to the bathroom to collect myself, determined to keep the truth of my condition from my daughter. I splashed water onto my face again, took more Advil drops, an overdose.

When Tereza asked whether I was all right, I blamed the alcohol. But my unyielding fever combined with the wine and the image of armed men interrogating me led me to a place that was dark and restless. I had entered my daughter’s life under false pretenses. Already our relationship was based on a lie. Suddenly I felt I needed to confess. I will never know whether the impulse was based on selfishness—a need for someone to feel sorry for me—or an attempt to honor our new relationship by being vulnerable, by sharing the secret that only Dr. Škvoreček, Marek of Kaufland, the golden carp, and I knew.

“I have something to tell you,” I said in slurred English.

“Wine confessions are dangerous,” Tereza said.

“It’s so late. I’m sorry. I feel I can’t lie to you, keep the pretense up. I just, I haven’t said it out loud.”

“You’re freaking me out,” Tereza said.

“I’m sorry, I said too much too quickly. Forget me. Show me more pictures.” I looked frantically around the room, searching in desperation for a new topic of conversation. There was nothing to hold on to. I noticed a miniature crack on the wall. “Better get that fixed soon,” I said as I nodded toward it. “It’ll grow on you—suddenly a crack turns into a gap, and it’ll get drafty in here, or you’ll get bugs.”

Tereza set the boxes of nostalgia aside and crossed her arms. For the first time, I saw her outside the polite, welcoming demeanor she had shown me since my arrival. This small moment of honesty confirmed that we were family. I knew I had to finish the act of drunken idiocy I’d started.

“Some weeks before I came to find you,” I said, “my doctor gave me news. A diagnosis. I didn’t plan on telling you, it’s not your problem.”

“What is it?”

“I have a year left on this earth. Maybe less. That’s about it.”

In horror, I watched my hand tremble as it held the empty wineglass. Generations of women in my family have practiced superhuman calm in times of tragedy, they’ve lived through the famines and the wars of kings, through the old fascists and the new without so much as a sniff. Were they right in their defiance or was I justified in my honest expression of fear? How could a person face death calmly when she had so much to lose?

My daughter reached for me. She played with my beetle necklace. This was it, I had lost her. In the long minutes of silence between us, I was too scared to speak.

“I wanted us to meet while I still had time,” I said after a while. “I understand if this is too much for you.”

“This is it,” Tereza whispered. “I’ve been waiting for it.”

“What is it?”

“Never mind.” She stood and helped me to my feet. She had to make a phone call right away, she said. It was important. Life or death. She would explain in the morning.

It took everything in me not to panic at this jarring change in my daughter’s voice. Our night was over, just like that. I was sure I had pushed her away. What had I been thinking? To come into her life and introduce more grief, to oppress her with my problems. Yes, I had to leave immediately. I collected my belongings and stumbled to the door as Tereza ordered a cab for me with her hWisper. I tried to make my goodbye brief, as I could tell she was distraught, distracted. And yet, as I put my foot out the door, she called me her mother and told me she loved me.

“I promise I’ll take care of everything,” she said. “Just wait until the morning. Don’t worry. Don’t look at me that way, everything is fine. More than fine, you’ll see.”

She simply wanted to get rid of me, was giving me this story of an important phone call to ease the parting. I made my peace with it. We held each other, swayed in our inebriated unrest, until the cabbie outside began to punch his horn. I slipped into the taxi, drunk and red-eyed, and asked the driver to turn up the music loud enough to make it hard to think.

Back in the unfamiliar bed of my hotel room, too weak to change from the clothes I’d worn all day, I rested as the fatal fever overtook me, bearing me first to deranged dreams and then to the place I speak from now. I kept my hands close to my face, inhaled the scent of my daughter’s hair. I shouldn’t have told her about my diagnosis, but the morning would offer a blank slate. After a night’s rest, I would beg Tereza to forgive my upsetting announcement. I did my best to forget the panic, the change I had caused in my daughter, her sudden urgency to get me out of her apartment. There was still time to make it right, to start over with her. I continued to soothe myself with these hopes until my body no longer belonged to me.

In the last moments of my life, between the haze of sleep and the afterlife, I hallucinated that my daughter appeared, sitting on the edge of my bed. She whispered comforting words and ran ice cubes along my cheeks and forehead. Was she really there, had she tracked me down at the hotel because she couldn’t stand to be apart? I wanted to tell her my stories, too, before it was too late. I began to tell her about my childhood in a small village of few prospects, my escape into the big city and a community of outlaws. The stories she needed to hear, the only thing of value I could pass on to her, tales of her family and how she had come to be in the world. As the cramps sent my body into convulsions, I tried to crawl from bed to reach the phone, but I was unable to move. Yes, best to accept the end with dignity. I stared at the peeling paint on the room’s ceiling, at a baby roach making its way in and out of the cracks, the last view I would enjoy during my mortal reign. I turned back to the apparition of my daughter and whispered, the words blending with the silence of the night… I whispered to her about my young life amid the ruins of a failing state.