Jaroslav Kalfař: Spaceman of Bohemia

The day ahead was to be a pleasant one. After finishing a few usual menial tasks—testing Ferda, the cosmic dust collector and the tech star of my mission; engaging in a halfhearted cardio session; and running diagnostics on my oxygen water tank—I was to have a few hours of peace and reading before dressing myself for a video call with my wife. Afterward, I was to enjoy a glass of whiskey to celebrate being only four weeks away from my destination, cloud Chopra, the gassy giant that had altered Earth’s night skies and escaped our attempts to study it. After penetrating the cloud, I was to gather samples with the help of Ferda, the most sophisticated piece of Space engineering to ever come from Central Europe, and study them inside my custom-designed lab on my way back to Earth. This was the reason the Space Program of the Czech Republic had recruited me, a tenured professor of astrophysics and accomplished researcher of space dust at Univerzita Karlova. They had trained me for spaceflight, basic aerospace engineering, and suppression of nausea in zero gravity. They asked if I would take the mission even if there was a chance of no return. I accepted.

Thoughts of death visited me only as I fell asleep. They came as a slight chill underneath the fingernails, and left when I lost consciousness. I did not dream.

I wasn’t sure whether I was more anxious about reaching the mysteries of Chopra or about the upcoming conversation with Lenka. Conducting an Earth/Space marriage through these weekly video feeds felt like watching an infection claim healthy flesh inch by inch while making plans for next summer. After these thirteen weeks, I noticed that there was a steady rhythm to human longing.

Monday, raw stage: God, babe, I miss you. I dream of your morning breath on my wrists.

Tuesday, reflective nostalgia: Remember when the Croatians stopped us at the border and tried to confiscate our schnitzel sandwiches? You unwrapped one and started eating it, shouted at me to eat too, shouted that we would eat them all before crossing and show those fascists what’s what. I knew I’d marry you then.

Wednesday, denial: If only I wish it just right, I’ll be back in our bedroom.

Thursday, sexual frustration and passive aggression: Why aren’t you here? What is it you do with your days as I spit into a blue towel—courtesy of Hodovna, mission sponsor—and count the hours separating me from gravity?

Friday, slight insanity and composition of songs: A scratch you can’t itch. A scratch you can’t itch. Love is that scratch you can’t itch. Scratch you can’t itch, oh oh.

During the first few weeks of my deployment, Lenka and I would overstep the conversation limit of one hour and thirty minutes allotted by the space program. Lenka would close the dark blue privacy curtain and take her dress off. The first time, she wore brand-new lingerie she had just picked up that morning, black lace underwear and a black bra with pink edges. The second time, she wore nothing at all, her body clothed only in the gentle blue hue reflecting along her skin. Petr, the mission operator, allowed us to take as much time as we needed. There wasn’t much logic to the limitations, anyway—I could chat with Lenka all day long and the automatic trajectory of the shuttle would go on uninterrupted. But the world needed this narrative, Mr. and Mrs. Spaceman’s tragic separation. What kind of hero gets to chat on the phone?

During the past few calls, however, I had become thankful for the time limits. Lenka would grow desperately quiet before our first hour had expired. She would speak softly and call me by my first name, instead of the variety of pet names we had devised over the years. There was no discussion of nudity or physical longing. We did not whisper our wet dreams. Lenka scratched the edge of her right ear as if she was having an allergic reaction, and didn’t laugh at any of my jokes. Always tell jokes to an audience, never to yourself, Dr. Kuřák had advised. Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness. Good advice, though difficult to practice in a vacuum. Lenka was the only audience I cared about. The emptiness of Space could not match the despair I felt when her laughter gave way to static silences.

Searching for the source of this decay, I’d been obsessing over my last night and morning on Earth with Lenka as I performed the menial tasks aboard JanHus1 . I tested filtering systems, looking to squash any bacteria that might mutate unpredictably within the cosmic conditions and infect me with a vengeance unknown on Earth. I studied data to ensure the smooth recycling of oxygen (provided by a tank of water I often wished to dip myself into, like a careless vacationer plunging his body into the sea of a sunnier country), and I recorded the depletion of supplies. Around me, the shuttle hummed and cooed in its droning baritone, unaware, carrying me to our joint destination without asking for advice. I checked needlessly for deviations from the trajectory—the computer was a better explorer than I could ever be. If Christopher Columbus, that celebrated phony, had possessed a GPS as sophisticated as mine, he could have reached any continent he desired with wine in hand and feet elevated. Clearly, the thirteen weeks of the mission had offered much spare time to obsess over my marriage.

Three days before my deployment, Lenka and I had gone to Kuratsu, a favorite Japanese restaurant of ours in the Vinohrady district. She had worn a summer dress with yellow dandelions and a new kind of perfume, the scent of cinnamon and oranges soaked in red wine. I wanted to crawl under the table and nuzzle my face in her lap. She said that my sacrifice was noble and poetic, fitting these abstractions between powerful chews of her tuna tartare. Our lives were to become a symbol. I squeezed lime over my noodles and nodded at her words. Her voice spoiled the ecstasy of my cosmic exploration—I wasn’t sure whether the entirety of the universe was worth leaving her behind, with her morning rituals and her perfumes and her violent outbursts of panic in the middle of the night. Who would wake her to say that she was okay, that the world was still whole? A camera flash blinded us. The spices burned along the edges of my tongue and for the first time, I did not know what to tell my wife. I dropped the fork. I apologized to her.

“Sorry,” was how I put it. Just like that, a single word thrown in her general direction. It echoed through my mind afterward. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She stopped eating too. Her neck was slender and her lips so ambitiously red. This wasn’t my sacrifice—it was ours. She was allowing me to go. She who had napped on my shoulder while I pored over astrophysics textbooks and tests from my students. She who had ecstatically dropped her cell phone into a fountain when I told her I had been selected for the mission. Mortality was not discussed, only the opportunity, the honor. She did not comment on the negative pregnancy tests filling our wastebasket while I spent my days getting used to the lack of gravity in the SPCR training pool, coming home with muscles cramped and speech reduced to “Hungry, sleep.”

I never found out whether she accepted my apology. We picked up our forks again and finished our meal to the silent company of onlookers’ cameras collecting our likenesses. We kissed and drank sake and spoke of traveling to Miami after my return. Finally, we took our own picture of this last dinner on Earth, and posted it on Facebook. Forty-seven thousand likes in the first hour.

As soon as we arrived home that night, I loosened my tie and retched. The antinausea medications had worn off with the alcohol at dinner, and my body had returned to its natural state of revolt against the strains of training for spaceflight, fighting lack of gravity with ceaseless vomiting. While I dry-heaved over the toilet, my gut hollowed out, Lenka ran her fingers through my hair. I told her we needed to give it another try, right then, if she could only wait for me to brush my rancid teeth. She said it was okay. I knew it wasn’t. She waited in bed while I washed myself off, and with shaking arms I crawled on top of the bed and slid my tongue along her collarbone. She arched her back, grabbed at my hair, pushed herself toward me while I rubbed my palm along my flaccid cock. We caressed and twisted and sighed and in the end she gently pushed on my chest and said I needed sleep. I was sure the timing was perfect, maybe destined—husband and wife conceive; husband leaves for Space and discovers great things; husband returns to Earth with a month to spare to become a father. Lenka put lotion on her arms and said we’d get it right after I came back, without a doubt. See the doctor again. Solve the problem. I believed her.