Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

“My father never did anything else after that,” Valerie said. “Mostly, he became a drunk. But a man only needs one thing to be proud of. It will carry him through the rest of his life.”

Once, she ran her hand over the burn scar on my calf. She asked how it had happened.

“My father is responsible,” I said.

“Hmm,” she answered.

DURING THE SECOND WEEK of my stay in Carlsbad, Petr took me to a dentist’s office. A woman wearing a white mask set a tube over my mouth. The gas was dense and sweet, like kettle corn in Wenceslas Square during a hot summer. I didn’t feel the tools scraping the rot away. I woke up expecting pain, but all I could feel was a gap, another piece of my body gone. “It’s done,” the woman reassured me. I consumed a pill the size of a locust.

Back in my room, I woke to a strange scratching coming from the air-conditioning vent. It began with hesitance, a creature feeling its way around a new environment. After a few minutes, the scratching gained a rhythm— shka shka shkashka shka shkashka —the rhythm of work that some small rodent figured would bring it to freedom. Consistency. Work without interruption, work with intensity. Surely, working at a steady peace, without breaks, the creature could reach its goal. I listened to my companion, refusing to take away its dignity by opening the vent. It took twenty minutes for the rhythm to reach its climax— shkakakakashkakakakashkakakaka, now with true desperation, as the rodent beat at the world to convince it of its worth, not a plea but a demand: Hear me! Let me out! I am here! I decided it was time for relief for the both of us, and when I stood up I saw a small brown nose peeking through the bars, two black eyes fixed on mine. I unscrewed the cover with a coin. When I opened it, a small tail was peeking from a dark corner deep in the shaft. It was hiding from me. It would not be rescued. I tried to reach the tail without any luck. I sat on my bed with the vent uncovered for an hour, waiting for my new friend to come out. It didn’t. I put the cover back on, and while I was fastening the last screw, the nose appeared again, followed by the laborious scratching. Work will save me. Diligent, patient, never-ending. It must.

I put a coat on and walked outside.

A yellow hue spilling from the windows of a hotel facing the Smetana Park spread across the last bits of dried, frozen oak leaves paving the road. The fountain ahead glowed red, which made the statue of a nude woman pouring water from a vase seem mischievous, in cahoots with the devil. I removed my shoes and stepped into the grass, then leaned on the fountain and massaged my right knee, observing the lightless sky, which an upcoming storm appeared to have coated in tar, masking even the effect of Chopra. I was grateful for the darkness. Stars didn’t seem the same anymore—to me they did not invite fantasies, did not symbolize aspiration, did not arouse curiosity. They were dead images of things for which I had no use.

Inside the fountain, a black, sleek thing splashed around. It seemed too large to be a snake or a cat. The red lights dimmed. I looked closer, reached toward the swimmer, and then he rose, lifted himself on eight bamboo legs and extended a pair of human lips toward the naked woman’s vase, lapping up the cascading water without giving me a single glance with his many eyes.

“Hanuš,” I said.

He did not respond. He drank, coughed, spit, and drank some more with suckling greed. I stepped into the fountain, and the cold water soaked through my jeans. I reached for Hanuš, but before I could touch him, the statue came to life. Above us stood Lenka, her firm calves attached to the fountain. Her hair was tied into thick braids. My Lenka, she looked like a Bohemian queen. I touched the soft flesh of her calf, no longer interested in Hanuš, and a sharp pain stiffened my knees and knocked me backwards. I was submerged, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which way was up, the surface, the light, and which way was down, the depths, the darkness. The water stung my nose and eyes and at last I found my bearings and lifted myself up. I was alone in the fountain, alone with the statue. The stream of water from her vase landed on my chest and I lowered myself to have a drink. It tasted of copper, or maybe zinc. It tasted of things that weren’t alive. I wanted her so badly.

When I returned to my room, the mouse was on my bed. The air-conditioning vent was undamaged. The creature studied me, ready to leap. I went to the minifridge to get a Kolonada wafer for it, but when I returned, the mouse was gone. Had it stayed around to thank me for helping, or to emphasize it didn’t need help— see? I can take care of myself. There had been an escape route for the mouse the whole time. The vent was simply another obstacle to be overcome for the sake of overcoming. I ate the wafer, its hazelnut flavor melting on my tongue. We could make such great things. Smooth liquors, wafers melting on touch, statues so close to life.

The idea of Lenka’s calf, the feel of its skin, guided my hand below my waist. My body did not respond. I massaged, caressed, but the sensation was mechanical, devoid of pleasure. Desires used to come to me so easily.

Failing to achieve a climax, I stopped. My ear itched, something moved around my eardrum. I stuck my index finger inside and fished at the speck of dust bothering me. When I took my finger out, a small black creature hopped off onto the carpet. This was no dust. I leaped, upending the television set as the Goromped escaped my thumb, then I grabbed the carpet and hurled it into the air, my eyes locked on the small black dot bouncing up and falling back down. I caught it as it struck my cheek, held it between thumb and middle finger. My first instinct was to squeeze, to squash the beast and wash it off my hand with soap, but its outer shell was as hard and sleek as a stone. It gnawed at my friction ridges with its miniature teeth, and wriggled its legs to free itself. I seized an empty preserves jar and dropped the Goromped inside, then secured the lid as the creature jolted up and down, up and down at a frantic speed, its force almost tipping the jar over. I put a heavy book on top. Now there was nothing but tapping.

“I got you, you maleficent fuck. I got you.”

I gathered the pieces of the old television. Inside the jar, the Goromped spun like a helicopter rotor, emitting a mild whistle reminiscent of wind blowing through a small alley.

“Clever. Momentum theory won’t help,” I said. “You are mine.”

On and on through the room’s darkness and cold, the Goromped spun without pause.

Kuřák:You sounded very urgent on the phone. Would you like to tell me about the incident?

Lenka P:It’s not much of an incident. A freak-out, rather. It was when the Lifestyle magazine people came over. They took pictures of me sitting on the couch all by myself. They asked me how I was coping with the waiting. Whether I still slept only on one side of the bed. There was something about their questions that suggested I wasn’t whole, like they were interviewing a person who had half of their body removed. They want to sniff out my rituals of loneliness and parade them out for the world. I just don’t want to do it anymore. I want to… this is awful to say, but I just want to be separate, from the mission, from Jakub’s fame. I want to live how I choose. And I don’t want to entertain the world with my sadness.

Kuřák:Do you blame Jakub for this unwanted attention?

Lenka P:I guess so. Friends, family, they all ask me about him, treating me like a temporary widow. Like he’s my world and my world chose to depart. And you know, there is some truth to that. I am the spaceman’s wife. I can make my pancakes in the morning, go to work, come back home, go to the gym, run my five K, and do my squats, but at the end of the night, in bed, I’m the half of the marriage that’s been split apart by this mission to nowhere. I do ache for his touch—understand, I don’t need men, I never have, but I want Jakub, because I love Jakub, I love him and I have chosen him to share my Earthly life with. I ache for that serene sleep of his, the way he can wake me when I’m tossing too much and bring me a glass of pineapple juice, which somehow calms me. I ache for our magnificent fucking, and I ache for the days when I didn’t have to anticipate a call about his death, when his living was obvious, without interruption. But then, I don’t know if that Jakub can ever exist anymore. The Jakub existing now is the one who chose to leave.