Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

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.”

THE STORY I GAVE Petr took the length of four pints of pilsner.

“You know when you wake up,” he said, “and the second before opening your eyes you think you’re somewhere else? In an old childhood bedroom, or inside a camp tent. And then you look around, and for a moment you don’t remember which life you’re living.”

“That’s very poetic for an engineer.”

“Jakub. That’s your voice.”

“You recognized me. No one else seems to. I don’t recognize myself.”

“I’ve been seeing you everywhere. You can’t be here. I must be hallucinating. Dreaming, maybe. But it’s nice. It’s nice to be with you again.”

I did not mention Hanuš, my encounter with the core, how I had landed and found my way home. I told him that I had stepped into the vacuum to die honorably on the frontier and that a crew of Russian phantoms had saved me as I choked. He intuited that I was omitting things but understood he had no right to ask. By the time we returned to his house, his wife had gone to work. Petr told me he had retired early and was now making a record with his heavy metal band while his severance from the SPCR and his wife’s work paid the bills. In the bathroom I shaved my neck and trimmed my beard, careful not to touch the spot where the infected wound of my former tooth rested on the side of my cheek. When I emerged and walked into the living room, I saw no reason to wait any longer. I asked about Lenka.

“Another beer?” he asked.

“No, thanks. Where is she now?”

Petr sat down and pulled a joint from underneath the couch cushion. He lit it with a burning candle. “I’m not sure if you’re ready.”

I slapped the cannabis out of his hand. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I have something you need to hear. Don’t ask about Lenka until you do.”

I nodded, and Petr walked away. The joint was burning a hole in the carpet. I considered letting it turn into a full flame. I extinguished it with my shoe.

When Petr came back, he was holding a silver USB drive and a stack of disconnected pages. He handed them over.

“Listen to this. Then read the manuscript. I found these when I was clearing out the offices. Kuřák held sessions with Lenka. She needed someone to talk to, and didn’t want you to know. Maybe these will have what you need.”

I held the drive between my fingertips. It was light, too light for what it held. The manuscript pages were supposedly an early draft of Dr. Kuřák’s biography of Jakub Procházka. So the man would make his fame as planned. Petr gestured me into a den, where a laptop rested next to a guitar and a piano.

“Have you listened to this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Petr said. “I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. Take your time.”

Four hours’ worth of sound files. As I listened through earphones, Petr brought me a glass of water and a bowl of ramen soup. He touched my shoulder as if I might disappear, then lingered in the doorway. I heard him strum an acoustic in the next room. Outside, the sun was setting.

After these four hours, I ejected the USB drive. I walked into the bathroom and washed my face, ran my fingers through the wiry, curled hairs of my beard, the dry skin underneath. My eye sockets seemed hollow, detached from their mooring, as if my eyes were eager to retract and hide inside my skull. My lips were the color of vegetable oil, chapping in the middle. I had come too close to death ever to look young again. But there was something about the way my cheekbones protruded, creating lines I hadn’t seen before. There was something about their color, how the faded sunburn from my spacewalk had left behind a healthy hint of brown, which seemed somehow fitting on my otherwise pale skin. Whatever form I now occupied, I could grow to like it. I threw the flash drive in the toilet and I flushed.

“I’m so sorry,” Petr said. “I deserve the punishment, we failed you, we failed the mission, but I still have to ask that maybe you don’t bring the whole story to the media.”

“Petr,” I said, “don’t you understand? I don’t care. I just want my old life back.”

Kuřák:So these concerns, they came to you only after the mission started? Or did you feel this contempt before Jakub left?

Lenka P:I tried not to think about it too much. He was getting sick all the time, you know? I could tell how happy and how horrified he was. I could tell how badly he wanted to leave a piece of himself with me. There was no room for me to feel contempt. But once he was gone… people become abstractions. And the things weighing on you become clear. That’s why people are so afraid to be away from each other, I think. The truth begins to creep in. And the truth is, I have been unhappy for a while now. Because of his expectation that we have a family, because of the guilt he carries around, because his life was always in focus more than mine. My struggles, my insecurities, they had always been mostly on the back burner. The project of our marriage has predominantly been to figure out Jakub. But I digress.

Kuřák:Tell me more.

Lenka P:Aren’t your questions supposed to guide me better than that?

Kuřák:Is this session irritating you?

Lenka P:I’m irritated about feeling these things. And I hate that I’ve agreed to these meetings. He would consider it a betrayal.

Kuřák:His contract bars both of you from seeking unapproved psychological help. He would understand that this is your only option…

Lenka P:Can I tell you something? Maybe it will make sense to your analytical mind, somehow. Jakub and I, we used to have this hiding place. A small attic in a building where I lived as a kid. It looks so different now than it did the last time Jakub and I came there. It used to be an old, dusty, mice-infested dump, you know? It was our dump, covered in fake stars and condom wrappers. Now, it’s a room where the residents hang their laundry. The walls are painted mint green, there’s a plastic window. To see if there was anything left behind, something I could collect and hold on to, I tore through the wet towels and sheets of the room, tore my way to our corner, and then I saw them. The first girl, in a bomber cap and shorts and a leopard-print shirt, holding a Polaroid camera. Haven’t seen one of those in forever. A few feet away from her, leaning against the wall, was another girl, completely nude, her back against the wall, hips sticking out. At their feet were hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures, all of them of this nude girl in different positions. I had so many questions, but I asked none. What I knew right away was that the girls were lovers, and this was their contract. They had a hiding place, a place of their own, where they explored their rituals. Tell me, can’t you recognize these contracts as soon as you see them? A man pours more wine for his wife than for himself. A contract. Lovers watch Friday night movies in the nude with containers of Chinese food on their laps, General Tso’s sauce dripping on their pubic hair, they cool each other’s bodies with bottles of beer. A ritual, a contract. Jakub and I spoke of these contracts often, the importance of their preservation.