“There’s nothing to fear anymore.”
I saw myself there, a boy in an itchy tuxedo, my rat tail cut off for the occasion, sitting on a red seat inside the State Opera, consuming the mint suckers my grandmother had snuck in. Three years after the death of my parents, not long after we move to Prague, we go to see the opera on my mother’s birthday, purchasing an additional empty seat next to us. I am hopelessly in love with this Rusalka, a wild-haired beauty dressed in the muted colors of the forest. She is a water nymph in love with a prince, and she gladly drinks the witch’s potion to become human and capture his attention. The prince takes Rusalka to his castle, but of course, as I guessed, the square-jawed scumbag betrays her, casts my Rusalka aside for a foreign princess. I wish the opera would never end, I am captivated, I wipe the snot off my upper lip. During the third act all seems to be lost. The echoing voices of the forest spirits sing sad songs for Rusalka, who, abandoned by the prince, is now forever destined to lure young men to the lake, let them use her body, then drown them and keep their souls in porcelain cups. I want to jump onstage and save her, carry her away, this lovesick ghost trapped within the confines of a lake made of papier-maché and a kiddie pool. In my future, there would be only one other woman I’d love as much as Rusalka.
“Yes. I feel it with you, skinny human.”
Through the echoes and through the darkness, the prince rides looking once again for Rusalka, realizing now that he cannot live without her. He calls, and she appears, and he asks for a kiss, knowing that touching Rusalka will cost him his soul. The lovers kiss, and the prince collapses on the stage. Now Rusalka’s father, the feared water goblin, emerges from his pool, and his voice soars: All sacrifices are futile.
Hanu? sang it. He sang the line and for the first time in my life, I understood it, just as it came out of the alien’s mouth.
“It is not yet the end,” Hanu? said.
“No.”
Rusalka weeps with gratitude, for she now knows human love. She gathers the prince’s soul, and instead of adding it to her father’s cup collection, she releases it to God, allows it to ascend to the heavens. Both lovers are now apart but free. As a child, I found this to be a bad ending. The prince, in heaven or not, was still dead, and Rusalka was alone, left with her beastly father and a chorus of whiny forest ghosts. Love didn’t seem worth all this trouble, especially if in the end the lovers were torn apart. But now, hearing Rusalka in Space for one last time, I saw that the water goblin’s declaration was wrong. There was no futility in me, in Hanu?, in Lenka, in the SPCR, in the stubborn human eye always looking beyond, under, next to, below. In the atoms composing air and planets and buildings and bodies, puttering around and holding up an entire dynasty of life and anti-life. Futility nowhere to be found.
I looked ahead to the core. There was something to it after all. Perhaps my death would mean more than my life. I couldn’t come up with anything else I had to offer the universe. I was a selfish husband. I had not produced a genius child, given the world peace, or fed the poor. Perhaps I was among the men who needed to die to make anything of life.
“This is not a bad place to end things,” I said.
Unaccountably, I found myself wondering where Shoe Man was, and whether he was well. Whether he would remember me if he saw a story in the newspaper—Astronaut dies for country, body lost in Space. He would put down his newspaper and announce to no one in particular: “Little spaceman.” He would finally stuff the repugnant old shoe inside the garbage can, where it had always belonged, and allow it to rot on the heaps of landfill trash with all the other useless artifacts of human memory. Cruel images invaded my brain. I saw Shoe Man in my bedroom, sliding his tongue along Lenka’s light stomach fuzz, his fingers pushing gently on the inside of her thighs. While the iron shoe rests on our living room table, freshly shined, he turns Lenka around and she looks straight at me as she comes, silently, suffocating her screams in a pillow that still smells of my hair and saliva. Age has not affected the hairline or skin of Shoe Man over the years, but he has grown a thick black beard, and from the beard, black ink, or blood, or simply some liquid evil drips onto our cream-colored sheets, seeps into them like petroleum. As Lenka falls asleep, overwhelmed by the intensity of the superior orgasm this stranger has given her, the man looks at me, a silent observer, and pours himself a glass of steaming milk. As he drinks, the milk turns the color of licorice, and I wait for the ink to make its way through his blood, to poison his heart, rip it to shreds. He sets the empty glass down and goes back to bed. Lenka wraps her thighs around him.
Perhaps Shoe Man did not exist at all anymore. Or perhaps, with my father’s line now extinguished, he would drop dead and dissolve as soon as I died.
I opened my wrist panel and checked the oxygen level gauge. The clock’s hand quivered in the same way my grandfather’s clock used to when he smoked cigarettes in front of it. In its generous approximation, I had forty-two minutes to live.
Hanu? offered one of his legs. I held it. Together we entered the core of cloud Chopra.
Prague in Spring