Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

I softly pulled the eyelid from my eyeball, felt a parting pop— a trick my grandmother taught me to determine whether I was conscious. I was awake, and this was real. It was her, the outcast of Moscow, the first living heroine of spaceflight, a street bandit transformed into a nation’s pride.

It was Laika the dog. Her body preserved by the kindness of the vacuum, denying the erosive effects of oxygen. I thought about attempting a spacewalk to recover the body, but I was tired, and too close to Chopra to receive approval from Central. Why bring her home anyway, to rot in the ground or lie next to Lenin’s embalmed corpse in Moscow’s catacombs when here she was the eternal queen of her domain? The comrade engineers cried for her as she died in agony, and the nation built her a statue to repent for its sins. Earth could provide her with no further honors, while the cosmos gave her immortality. The dryness had evaporated most of the water in her body, leaving her skin pale, her ears perked up. The individual hairs of her fur waved back and forth, like sea reeds. With the biological decomposition suspended, Laika’s body could float for millions of years, her physical form surpassing the species that had sentenced her to death. I thought of snapping a photo, sending it to Central, but we were not worthy of the honor of this witnessing. Laika’s eternal flight was her own.

The body vanished. When I turned, Hanuš was with me. I asked him whether he had seen her too.

“Would you truly care to know?” he said.

ANOTHER EMAIL ARRIVED from the ministry of interior. I hesitated before reading.

…subject is not, I repeat, not currently engaged in a sexual relationship, at least not at her place. Analysis of bedsheets, sofa cover, bathroom towels…

…no traces of bodily fluids…

…in the afternoon, the subject engaged in a phone call with a journalist who had managed to track down her new phone number. The subject claimed that she was on simple holiday, and colorfully asked the journalist to cease his harassment. After hanging up, the subject recovered the photograph of J. P. from underneath the bed and briefly covered her face with her hand. After this episode, the subject ordered pad thai from a local…

…based on Zdeněk K.’s deeply intimate relations with another man outside the bar Kleo, it is clear the subject was not engaged with Zdeněk K. on any level other than friendly and platonic, and thus J. P. can rest easy knowing that he was not abandoned for another man, at least not this one…

…eight o’clock in the morning, the subject walked to a local ob-gyn office. Agent was not able to penetrate the building in a manner that would allow eavesdropping on the conversation between the subject and the healthcare provider, but another sweep of the subject’s apartment revealed a positive pregnancy test wrapped in two Kleenex tissues. Might indicate subject is in the early stages of…

…agent sent urine sample for analysis to ensure it belongs to…

For a moment, I lost my vision. The black letters and white background spilled from the screen and coated my surroundings. I bent over and with a great force of will suppressed the bile building in my throat. I coughed and felt chunks of acidized tortilla at the tip of my tongue. Hanuš floated behind me.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I told Hanuš.

“The human cub could be yours, skinny human,” Hanuš offered.

“She wouldn’t be gone, then.”

“As I have learned from all self-reflecting resources of humanry, your motives are not drawn as line segments.”

“I don’t understand anything,” I said.

“The cloud of Chopra is days away, skinny human. All other things can be understood later.”

I responded to the report: Is the child mine? And can I get a picture of her?

A response came almost immediately: Will find out. What kind of picture?

A nice one, I wrote.

I pressed my middle finger onto the screen and closed the browser. In the kitchen, I counted my remaining whiskey bottles. Three.

Damn Central and their regulations. Dr. Kuřák’s asinine obsession with every human being as an alcoholic in training. The bottles were not enough, but I decided to drink properly instead of saving the goods to spread throughout the rest of the mission. Yes, wasn’t this the way to live in modern times, to consume and forget the rest? Civilization could fall apart any day now.

As I opened the bottle, Hanuš appeared behind me.

“Want some of this?” I asked.

“Ah, Earth’s spiritus frumenti. I have read much about its destructive effects.”

“You must’ve skipped the chapters on healing.”

I offered the bottle. Hanuš closed his eyes.

“I am afraid I have already sacrificed my impulses to hazelnut spread, skinny human. I do not desire further disruptions to my functioning.”

“More for me,” I said, and slurped.

“You grieve over your human love,” he said.

“Can I ask you something? Or do you already know?”

“I may or may not, but do ask. Your speech comforts me.”

“When I caught you in my room. Looking for the box.”

“Yes. The ash of your ancestor.”

“Why?”

Hanuš made his way out of the kitchen, and I followed him into the Lounge. There, he tapped on the computer screen, activating it.

“Please, do open the window,” Hanuš said.

I pressed the command button for the window cover. Ahead of us, the universe opened.

“I am interested in human loss,” Hanuš said. “It pertains to me and my tribe in a particular way.”

“What are the particulars?”

Hanuš turned toward me, and for the first time, his eyes split in two different directions—the left half looking directly at me, the other staring absently into Space.

“I have deceived you, skinny human, but I cannot any longer. I do not approve of the physiological sensations associated with such actions. I will not be bringing the news of Earth to my Elders. I cannot.”

Hanuš’s form sagged toward the floor. He gazed out the window with longing, reminding me of those weeks I had searched for my parents, as if eyesight alone could penetrate space and time and the edges of mortality. His was the look of not knowing, a look that seemed to be shared and recognized by all species.

“I have traveled through galaxies,” he said. “I have raced with meteor showers and I have painted the shapes of nebulas. I entered black holes, felt my physical form disintegrate with the chants of my tribe all around me, then appeared again, in the same world but an altered dimension. I traced the outlines of the universe and witnessed its expansion, a turn from something to nothing. I swam in dark matter. But never in my travels, or in the collective memory of my tribe, have I experienced a phenomenon as strange as your Earth. Your humanry. No, skinny human, you were not known to our tribe. I was not sent here by them. We considered ourselves the only spirits in the universe, privy to all of its secrets—but you were kept from us. As a human would say, I encountered you by pure coincidence. Not by mission.”

I slurped at the whiskey. Zero gravity or not, the burn was the same: gut full of cotton, blood vessel dilation, bliss. “Go on,” I said.

“Naturally, my curiosity led me to begin my research of humanry immediately. I have lived in your orbit for a decade of human years. I have visited a few astronauts, but all three either ignored me or prayed. The senseless chanting, I confess, repulsed me. I was content as a quiet observer until I learned of what you call comet Chopra.”

I strapped myself into the Lounge chair to make my drinking easier. My calves were numb. Hanuš was truly speaking about himself for the first time. I felt justified to drink the entire bottle. What better response to such progress?