Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

I didn’t choose Lenka. I failed our contract. Now she had made a life for herself. Of course, I could merge into this life. Rid myself of any ambition left, drop any designs for my future and simply live alongside Lenka in any way she wanted me to, do as she would tell me, cause no further disruptions. But such life didn’t seem worth consideration, not only because I would never be able to truly embrace it, but because Lenka would reject it as an insult to what life is supposed to stand for.

She rested the brush upon the ground and sat by the edge of the river. She rolled up her pant legs and dipped her feet into the water. Frogs dispersed with protesting croaks. The air grew chalky with smoke from a nearby bonfire. Lenka hummed and leaned back into the grass. Peaceful, alone. Looking out over the calm surface.

There was no space for me here. I took a step back. And another.

Lenka returned to her easel and began to disassemble it. The cup used to rinse the brush tipped over, the water marked by all colors of the palette spilling on the grass. Lenka leaned over and began to draw something into the stain with her finger. I had never been as curious about anything as I was at this moment about what Lenka was creating out of view. She was an unmatched engineer of these small moments. Embracing accidents and curiosities. She judged the work below and laughed to herself.

I couldn’t exist here. In the world that had come into being due to my absence.

Within me now lay the mystery of Hanuš, the violent rejection of Chopra, the bodies of the three humans whose deaths I was responsible for. Klara’s eyes wild with betrayal, her effort to murder me with a single arm, her teeth sinking into the meat of my thumb like fangs.

I had nothing to give anyone else. Not here.

I turned and ran back up the pathway. I jumped onto the Ducati and started it, throwing my helmet to the ground.

She had loved me so well. I could never have asked for a better life as an Earthman.

Now I was a specter. Fragments of pasts, futures, gates through time and space. I was the series of particles released by Chopra’s core. My only destiny: motion. I rode at the highest speed. Away from Plzeň. Lenka had freed herself of the things haunting me. She was to remain free.

Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.

Lenka P:He didn’t suffer? You’re telling me the truth?

Kuřák:Yes. It’s reported that he took the cyanide pill. His passing was without pain.

Lenka P:And you gave my message to him?

Kuřák:I was assured he was told.

Lenka P:I let him die thinking he’d lost me. I should’ve pretended it was all right until he returned.

Kuřák:Again, a certain role imposed upon you.

Lenka P:That’s what loving someone is.

Kuřák:I’m not sure I agree.

Lenka P:Jakub did what he needed to. He was fulfilling his destiny.

Kuřák:His, not yours.

Lenka P:Why are you so adamant about making me feel better?

Kuřák:Nature of the job.

Lenka P:I’m terrified by my reaction. I can’t feel anything. It’s like it didn’t happen. It’s like I’m going to come home and the Jakub I first met, so cleanly shaven, will be there waiting. What if time really works that way—we can manipulate it like that, we just haven’t wanted it hard enough.

Kuřák:This is how you grieve. Don’t be afraid of it.

Lenka P:I married a sweet boy who walked around the city like he was lost. And then, he goes to Space. What a life. Amazing. Wonderful. Terrible. All at the same time.

Kuřák:Do you feel free?

Lenka P:I feel like I’ve lost too much.

Kuřák:Freedom can feel that way.

Lenka P:You promise me?

Kuřák:What?

Lenka P:You swear he was told? That I loved him. That our life together was not a forgery—that everything we did in those years came from the best parts of ourselves? That we’d have that, at least.

Kuřák:He was told. I swear it.

Lenka P:I keep having this image of Jakub, like a thick star highlighted in the darkness, with a line of movement behind it. I see it every night, as if he’s leaving all over again. How can things get so far away from us? What use are the physics of Earth, these layers of atmosphere? They keep things from reaching us. But I wish they could’ve also trapped him here.

WITHOUT THE PURPOSE of finding Lenka, my time became an endless orbit on Earth’s concrete. Days ceased to have beginnings or endings as I rode my Ducati in circles on the highways surrounding Prague, teasing out ever higher speeds, much like the Goromped that had lived in my Carlsbad room. The singular purpose of motion. No schemes to it. No plans.

At a gas station, I purchased a clearance hooded sweatshirt sporting the colors of the national football team. I pulled it over my head, still nervous whenever a person stared at me for too long, afraid that in the correct light I might be recognized, despite the forever-altered facial structure, despite the sunken eyes, despite being severely underweight. I did not look strangers in the eyes, I turned my head so no one could ever see me fully in daylight. Now the hood made me feel slightly more invincible.

When I grew too tired to hold myself up on the motorcycle, I stopped at a trucker motel and ate vending machine chips on a rough bedspread. The TV set in my room would not turn on. I had almost convinced myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t need it, but I knew it’d be hours before I could sleep, and complete silence worsened my headaches. I asked the attendant downstairs for help, and with an abundance of loud sighs, he gave me a television set from another room. Victorious, I opened a beer and switched to a news station.

Milk prices rising. (I snickered, recalling my conversation with Tůma.) France, another country to leave the crumbling European Union. Then, suddenly, the faces of men I knew. Their hands cuffed.

Prime Minister Tůma himself, clothed in sweatpants, his hair unkempt, was being led out of his Barrandov villa by policemen. These images were from two days ago—history happening as I had been riding in circles.

Then, different footage from a different place appeared. This was downtown Prague, an office building modeled after a New York skyscraper. From within its depths the police led a man whose face I would have recognized in a lineup of millions. It was Him.

I felt my foot dampen and glanced down at the beer bottle I had dropped without knowing it.

According to the newscaster, the two men had been arrested, along with two other politicians and another businessman, for siphoning cash from phony government contracts. The media called them ringleaders of the scheme who, in the span of three years, had managed to steal seven hundred million crowns of taxpayer cash. Prime Minister Tůma, the self-professed savior of his nation, and the other man, supposedly a close childhood friend of Tůma’s and his phantom adviser throughout the years. The man, Shoe Man, whose Christian name was introduced to me for the first time through this cracked, dirty television screen—Radislav Zajíc.