“I used to come here as a kid and play with my best friend. We would take all this bubble gum up here and see who could chew the most. Petra, she made the moon. All her. It’s lucky people don’t pay attention to these attics, isn’t it? They throw their junk in here and forget about it. I haven’t been here for what, twelve years? Thirteen? So, I said to myself: Jakub, my astrophysicist, I’ll take him and see if my universe still exists. If it does, he can see it, and maybe it’ll make up for my silence over his grief, because grief is something I run from. And perhaps I won’t protest if he tries to kiss me, because I have not been in love for a while. Here we are. Things are unchanged, all these years later. I’m in my only hiding place. With you.”
Solar flares occur when magnetic energy is converted into kinetic energy—thus, the attraction of one element to another turns into a movement. What exactly causes this process, we are not sure. Be it the ejection of electrons, ions, and atoms into the universe, or a cocktail of pheromones infiltrating the olfactory receptors of a future lover, some of the most essential functions of reality remain a mystery. Lenka’s breath smells of cigarettes and Juicy Fruit. We lean gently against the wall and I thumb the outline of the cigar box, which I still carry in my bag. The bag slides off my shoulder. She takes my face in her hands and studies it, while I take a breath, take two important seconds to realize I am in love and living will never feel as it did before. The alteration to my future, a whole new fate stands here in the form of a slightly drunk beauty who has invited me to the greatest place I’ve seen. So much we can tell from a single surficial eruption. A flare to tear the sun apart. The flares are my fingertips feeling the inside of her thighs, her breath on my neck, her hands pulling up the hem of her dress, her eyes searching for my reaction to what I see underneath. The universe assigned the tasks of speaking and kissing to the lips because there is never a need to do both at the same time. We do not speak for hours. Soon most of the room is covered in our clothes. Our bodies pleasantly battered from the wooden floorboards.
Exhausted, we sit among the planets and talk about the foods we’d like to eat. She wants spaghetti; I crave an old-fashioned Spanish bird—thin beef rolled around bacon, egg, and a pickle. We concur that our best plan of action is to drink and walk well into the night.
Do my grandfather’s ashes belong here? Can I leave the box behind and feel happier once I walk out the door, or will I forever wonder whether the same cat that murdered the rodent will eat the contents of the box? Lenka asks what I’m thinking about. Everything. How to leave it behind. I carry my father’s curse and my grandfather’s dust. She does not understand what this means, not yet, and she doesn’t ask.
Instead, she tells me of her own father, who went to America before the revolution to work on a car assembly line in Detroit. A true worker’s paradise, he wrote back, declaring that Detroit would become the city of the future, a hub of industry and wealth. Each summer, he was supposed to arrive home, smuggle Lenka and her mother through the Berlin Wall, and take them to this new world. Each summer, instead he wrote that it wasn’t the right time, that he’d wait for another promotion, another bump in pay, so he could welcome his “queen and princess” with a mansion, an American car. By 1989, his letters came only biannually, coarse and bereft of affection or detail. When Lenka’s mother wrote to him that the country was free, that they could cross the newly opened borders in daylight, among the people, and come to him immediately, she received no response. With her father lost to her, Lenka often retreated to the attic, keeping clear of her mother’s devastation, the empty wine boxes collecting by the door. Only when the Internet began to connect disjointed lives around the globe did Lenka find a photo of her father. He stood on a Florida beach, beaming at the camera, one arm around his new son, the other around a new wife, a fully stocked cooler of some blue American beer at their feet. Lenka never spoke to her mother about this, and wasn’t sure whether her mother ever found out. They lived on.
I ask Lenka what she feels now. Rage?
No. Not here in the attic.
“When I was a child,” I say, “I used to sit in a car and pretend it was a spaceship. The cassette player was my deck computer. I wanted to turn the radio knob and blast off—fly away. But I didn’t know much about being alone back then.”
“Would you fly away now?” she says.
“Not anymore. Now that you’re here.”
“Now that we’re here. In our hiding place.”
In exactly two years, we will return. The attic won’t change—we will simply dip our feet into thicker dust. We will hide behind the curtain and I will ask her to marry me, voice shaking, knees so heavy I’ll wonder if the floor might collapse beneath us. At the wedding, my grandmother will dance like a woman half her age, telling me at the end of the night that she stayed alive to see me and Lenka on this day.
And my grandfather’s ashes will rest inside the cigar box in our closet, thought of with devotion, until I leave them at the mercy of the cosmos, a reminder that most everything dear to us is bound to become powder.
The Claw
I PASSED THROUGH the knot of time like sand slipping away inside an hourglass, grain by grain, atom by atom.
Time was not a line, but an awareness. I was no longer a body, but a series of pieces whistling as they bonded. I felt every cell within me. I could count them, name them, kill them, and resurrect them. Within the core, I was a tower made of fossil fragments. I could be disassembled and reassembled. If only someone knew the correct pressure point, I would turn into a pile of elements running off to find another bond, like seasonal farmhands journeying from East to West.
This is what elements do. They leap into darkness until something else catches hold of them. Energy has no consciousness. Force plots no schemes. Things crash into one another, form alliances until physics rips them apart and sends them in opposite directions.
The core offered no wisdom. It took away my senses. It made me live inside my own body, truly, made me a flash of matter without the power of reflection. I wasn’t a human. I was a stream of dust. What did you expect? the core asked me. No, I asked that of myself. Another projection. My desperation to ascribe personality and will to capricious outcomes of chaos. The true kings of the world, elements and particles, had no agenda except movement.