Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

Mladen turns away from the stage and its screen. Behind him there’s a photo shoot going on. The model, a friend of Nick’s he’s vaguely met once or twice, wears a blue-white-and-red slip, the colours of the new Czech flag; around her neck she wears a handkerchief-like strip of the same colours, same material. She’s holding a mocked-up new Czech passport in one hand, an A4-size piece of white card in the other. Various people swarm around her, touching up her make-up, taking light readings, repositioning a leg or adjusting the way the slip is hanging, while a guy in a red baseball jacket who was also at the French guy’s party tries to shout instructions at them.

Behind these people, perched at tables, groups of American collegiate types. They’re talking politics, shouting above the music and each other. They’re discussing the splitting of Czechoslovakia that’s to take place in — what, less than one hour from now, the reconfiguration of Central Europe it’ll bring about. The phrase transitional geographies keeps coming up: one guy keeps saying it and another jumps up each time and shouts Fuck your transitional geographies! East Coast, probably: Yale or Princeton. Mladen’s seen the films: woollen sweaters and striped scarves, clean young boys running after girls in pleated skirts who look like Heidi, only slightly prettier, and clutch books to their chests. Frat parties. Weird rites.

A little further down the bar is some Czech kid whose face is vaguely familiar: classical, high-cheekboned, blond locks swept across the forehead. Mladen knows that face, from a gig maybe, only then it belonged to a girl. Or to a girl and a — yes, that’s right, it’s David, one of those twins Roger, at that party, just before he got his eyebrow cut, said came straight off the one-hundred-crown note: the peasants. David’s standing at the bar alone, looking down into a beer, morose. Mladen walks over and nudges him. The boy looks blank, then clicks:

“Mladen, right? Friend of Kuba.”

“Yeah. You’re David. Where’s your sister?”

“We had an argument. Our parents …” He moves his two hands apart as though swimming the breaststroke …

“Separated? Got divorced?”

“That’s right. The tribunal decided we should remain with our father, which is what I’d prefer. But Jana’s refusing. She says he doesn’t respect her. She wants to live with our mother. Which means we get separated too.”

“ Yuuu! So difficult. I’m sorry. Are you identical twins?”

“No,” says David, chuckling. “That way we couldn’t be one boy, one girl. Identical’s very unusual: perhaps one in a thousand times. We’re dizygotic: two eggs in the mother.”

Mladen buys David a beer and David perks up. He says he’s finishing school next year and is already apprenticing as a telecoms mechanic. He tells Mladen that a telephone box at Jiřího z Poděbrad is broken in such a way that you can make international phone calls for as long as you want for a single crown coin, and suggests Mladen call his family in Yugoslavia. He tells Mladen that he likes the Dead Kennedys, the Pixies, Ministry. He must be sixteen tops. Mladen can see his sister’s face in his, identical or not. Dizygotic . There were eggshells littering the floor at Ivan Maňásek’s. That humans start the same way, then get smashed up the same way … There was a set of twins in Cres, back in Materska Skola , who’d never leave one another’s side, got distraught if apart even for a few minutes. You read of twins separated at birth and reunited decades later, who turn out to have married in the same year, had near-fatal accidents or illnesses within weeks of one another, things like that. David laughs when Mladen tells him what Roger said about him and Jana looking like the one-hundred-crown peasants. Turns out Roger wasn’t the first: David’s school friends, apparently, still call him Stovečko , Little Hundred …

They’re still talking when Nick shows up. He’s with a girl he introduces to them both as Karolina, from AVU. The guy in the red baseball jacket, the photo-shoot man, comes over to Nick and asks him where Ivan Maňásek is. Photo Shoot Man’s eyes are glazed and luminous. Nick tells him he doesn’t know where Ivan is. An older, taller guy, the American adman Michael who’s lent Roger all this state-of-the-art equipment he’s using to cast his images up onto the stage, joins them and whispers something into Photo Shoot Man’s ear; Photo Shoot Man pulls an envelope from the pocket of his jacket, opens it, shakes out something that looks like an aspirin and hands this to Michael. Michael pats Photo Shoot Man on the back, slides to the bar and orders, in English, some sparkling water. Back on the stage a strobe’s been switched on; the rocket and the city are ascending through the smoke and flashing light. It looks as though the stage is ascending too, and Tyrone and his harem, all being launched together with the new republic. How long to go now? Nick’s friend Karolina’s wearing a watch; Mladen asks her what the time is. Karolina tells him:

“Half-past eleven. Let’s go down to the square.”

“Sure,” Nick says. “Why not?”

Mladen and David go with them. They make their way out of the club, walk down the steps and across Švermův Most towards Staroměstské Náměstí. The square’s full of smoke just like the club was. It feels as though they’d wandered into Roger’s film, and found themselves on a huge launch pad during take-off. People are stumbling around coughing, clutching bottles of champagne or sparkling wine, shouting out to each other in Czech, in French and in Italian. Young men are lighting fireworks, hurling rockets up into the air. Some explode above the statue of Jan Hus or beside the interlocking spheres on the face of the old astronomical clock, illuminating zodiacal and terrestrial rings, sun and moon discs, figures showing death and the Apostles; others, badly launched, snake along the floor biting and spitting sparks at feet and ankles, or hurtle along at head height, leaving tracer-bullet trails. They must hit people, some of them, burn their faces; they could even take an eye out. Sirens, two or three of them, are wailing somewhere off the far side of the square: there’s a peaking-troughing one, then another that rises and falls in a single continuous movement, their sounds weaving together in the air heavy with sulphur, weft and warp. There’s a loud bang! nearby, and people spill back outwards as though a mine were throwing them through the air. Someone falls against him, grabs his coat.

“Mladen!”

It’s Angelika. Nick, noticing her, slips off into the crowd, pulling Karolina with him. Angelika’s got some kind of name tag hanging from her jumper. Mladen takes it in his fingers and reads it.

“Spiegelova, huh? Your last name?”

“Mirror, yeah. Is Nick with you?”

“He was just here now. He should be … Look out! ” He pulls her down as one more rocket wobbles past their heads. It makes a vicious sound: thousands of fricative phht s pretending to be music, like when you rub a glass’s rim.

“I’ve just come from the hospital,” says Angelika, peeping up above his shoulder’s parapet again, then straightening. “The accidents were coming in: all burnt. But I had something to show Nick.” She digs her hand into the pocket of her leopard-skin coat and pulls out a small plastic bag. “It’s an ear,” she tells him, stroking back the plastic.

She’s not joking: it’s an ear. Its flesh has turned slightly yellow. Whirls of cartilage spiral down towards a pit that must once have led into a brain.

“Put it away!” he tells her.

“Wimp.” She wraps the ear up again and slips it back into her pocket.