This is what I wanted Hanu? to hear now.
Together we traveled to that May morning. Hanu? of the cosmos, an alien but overpoweringly human friend. Jakub Procházka of Earth, the first Spaceman of Bohemia. I choked. The oxygen had run out, all soaked up by the greedy sponges inside my chest. Despite the hold the Claw had on me, the ship seemed far away. Death was near.
May
LENKA AND I WALK along the edges of the Karl?v Bridge, across the untamed width of the Vltava, the river vein of Bohemia that divides our city. We have just visited my grandmother at the hospital, finding her in great spirits as she happily slurped on the hospital cabbage soup even though we had brought her sandwiches, and asked whether we were planning to give her a grandchild. With my grandmother’s warmth and seamless recovery from the stroke putting us at ease, we wander. Around us, the languages of the world mix into the usual hum of spring. A notorious bridge artist draws crude caricatures of clueless tourists. He picks at the fleas in his beard and drinks wine out of a leather jug as he grins at the platinum faces of the Swedish couple shifting on his stool, then adds a goat udder below the man’s chin and gives the woman a Victorian mustache. I’ve seen his shenanigans a thousand times—often the tourists simply get up and walk away, and he yells at them in his own invented language. But once in a while, their visitors’ guilt overpowers them, and they pay for his nonsense. He is a comforting sight against the backdrop of the statues of patron saints guarding the bridge, with a rather grim portrayal of crucified Jesus leading the entourage. Without the painters, pickpockets, and strolling couples, the bridge would be a cold, terrifying reminder of Gothic overindulgence. But here we are, the winos and leather-clad Eurotourists and Prague lovebirds eager for a Sunday beer buzz and a stroll along the water, providing the bridge with the humor and gentleness it needs. In exchange, the bridge makes us feel like our history goes back beyond the day we signed up for a bank account.
We leave the bridge and walk through one of the many Vietnamese markets, where children chase each other with laser guns, adults gloomily smoke Petras, and their knockoff Adidas and Nike merchandise flutters in the wind like a nation’s flag. Frowning men scoop a mixture of eggplant and chicken into foam containers. Muscular white men in baseball hats—likely policemen staking out illegal sales—lurk about clumsily. Child scouts let their parents know with elaborate whistles whenever a fashionable customer is coming, so they can quickly display their fake designer dresses before hiding them again from the poorly dressed policemen. The inner workings of the market.
A little boy knocks a little girl on the nose with his laser gun and disappears between the windswept tents. The little girl sobs until Lenka, my sweet Lenka, takes her by the hand.
“Boys play rough,” Lenka says. “You have to play rough too. Next time you see him, knock him over his own melon.”
The girl stares at us, tight-lipped, her own laser gun still in hand. She pulls Lenka forward and leads us three tents down, where a woman snoozes in a lawn chair. The girl extends a yellow T-shirt toward Lenka and nods with a devious smile.
“You want me to have this?” Lenka asks.
“Sixty. Discount,” the girl says.
“Sixty crowns?”
The girl nods, a savvy saleswoman. It is obvious that she means to keep the money to herself, and not to share with her mother—if she is even related to the sleeping woman at all.
There is no turning back. Lenka’s compassion flagged us as weak, and she hands the money over and pats the girl on the head.
“You told her to play rough,” I say, “so she’s playing rough.”
“Good. Let her be an entrepreneur.”
Lenka unrolls the shirt. Over the yellow background of the cotton, a cartoon sun holds a pint of beer in one hand and a bottle of sunblock in the other. It squints its right eye in a drunken stupor, while its left eye studies the obscene curves of nude men and women tanning on the beach below (nudity beyond nudity, with a double line for every crevice, thick pubic hair, massive breasts and erections). The sun grins creepily as it squeezes liters of creamy sunblock onto these unsuspecting bodies.
The girl smirks as we explore the cartoon. “Nice for summer,” she says.
“You are naughty,” Lenka tells her.
“Sixty crowns!” she squeals as she disappears between the tents just as quickly as the boy who hurt her, clutching the hard-earned bills. The snoozing woman wakes up and looks at the T-shirt.
“Eighty crowns,” she says, hand outstretched.
Lenka and I cannot contain our laughter as we give her more of our cash.
“You realize you have to wear this now, right?” I ask Lenka.
“Are you mental?”
“Law of the universe. You rolled over and exposed your neck as the enemy bared her teeth. You were presented with a simple Darwinian challenge, and you failed.”
“You sound like a hopeless academic.”
I point at the shirt and frown with insistence. She sighs, but the half smile she betrays does not escape me. This is what we need. Teasing. Humor. Something unexpected. After months and months of me sweating on top of her without pleasure, praying to reinforce my sperm as she sends positive vibes toward her aureus ovarii; after piles of pregnancy test boxes crowding the bathroom trash can; after failure upon failure, and my retreat between the halls of the university, where I stay late to “grade papers” and “attend committee meetings” while really just snacking in my office and playing Snake on my phone, this day could be our chance at finding a new way forward, at once again fusing our emotional and neurological chemistry instead of seeing each other merely as the owner of a potentially defunct baby-making orifice or appendage.
Lenka pulls the T-shirt on over her shoulders, and I nod with approval. She kisses me and presses the large round S sticker from the shirt against my beard.
“Now we both look like idiots,” she says.
Witness my most joyous moments, skinny human. I will show you where I come from. Hanu? interrupts the memory of Prague, takes me elsewhere. I see his world, once upon a time.
Millions of eggs circumvent a small green planet. Above the ovum ring hover members of Hanu?’s tribe, a collective hum of their speech announcing that the time is right. The eggs begin to crack, tips of thin arachnid tarsi pushing through membrane and shell. Among the thousands of newborns I see Hanu?, I recognize his hum as slightly different from the others. He studies his own legs as they poke at the smooth, furless skin of his body. The shell fragments float around, create an entire dust cloud of their own, and the young and old members of the tribe circle one another. At last the Elders, a council of twenty, their legs short and contorted like the roots of trees, order the tribe to cease motion. The tribe’s laws are passed on to the children:
The body must not be violated.
Truths must not be feared.