He shook his head and began to remove the diaper with a disgusted grimace. I slapped the top of his helmet. He grabbed my arm, thrust it to the side, and strapped it to the wall, then did the same with my left. The notepad and pen floated away. When I looked down at the straps on my chest and stomach, I realized that all of them were secured by a miniature padlock. I wasn’t too surprised—of course they had to quarantine me by force, in case I decided to take a tour of the ship during my feverish hallucinations. Whatever bacteria I might contaminate the corridors with would mutate unpredictably in the zero gravity environment, causing possible disaster for both the crew and the structural integrity of the vessel. Yet this confinement brought on unprecedented terror in me. I tried to scream, wriggled in my chains, turned my hips to the side, but nothing could end the violation. With flared nostrils, the man wrapped plastic around the diaper to prevent its contents from flowing around. He tied the bag three times and unwrapped four towels, which he used to wipe my groin, my thighs, and my rectum. I closed my eyes, counted, wished I could produce an auditory expression of my rage and shame, but I could do nothing. The man left without looking at me, as if he were somehow the punished dog.
I had no way to tell how long the Russians left me in solitary. I tried to count, but by the fifth minute, all numbers seemed alike, thirty the same as a thousand, and I could not guess how long a second lasted. Throughout these hours in the darkened room serving as my holding cell, I had only one thing to hold on to: the reality of my return to Earth, the possibility of living. Because if all that had happened had really happened—from the moment I stared into the fire as the Velvet Revolution sent my father and, eventually, the rest of us on the course of our punishment, through the time I first spotted the iron shoe in its monstrous efficiency, through the time I met Lenka by a sausage cart and a senator proposed that I fly to Space—if all was true (and I couldn’t be sure about anything in this room, not life or death, not dream or reality), then I was really on my way home, on my way to all the other futures I could create. The vision slowly returned to my right eye, and the burning around my forehead and chest subsided.
Home. I focused on the concept intensely so my thoughts would not wander to questions I may not want answered. For instance, why a Russian ship had come to cloud Chopra without anyone knowing. Or whether Gorompeds bred somewhere inside me, bound to consume me from within as they had with Hanu?.
Hanu?. His body slipping away. The ache around my temples I would never feel again.
The female astronaut came to me in the midst of these thoughts, bearing another tube of spaghetti. She allowed me to feed myself. I grunted without shame, lapped at the tomato sauce like a feral dog, ignoring the excruciating pain of my rotted tooth. I studied her through the visor. Her sunken eyes, brown with golden nebulas shooting from the middle, indicated a lack of sleep, and a thick scar snaked along her round cheek.
When I was done with the meal, she took the empty tube and handed me an e-tablet.
“Your obituary,” she said, and smiled.
I looked at the date and time of the article, which had been written by T?ma and published a few hours after Central lost contact with JanHus1:
In the search for brilliance, sovereignty, and a better future for its children, every country must occasionally face a dark hour. One of these moments descends upon our hearts today, as we mourn the loss of a man who accepted the most significant mission our country has ever embarked on. Though books could—and will—be written on this man’s service and role in advancing both our humanity and our technology, we are all already familiar with Jakub Procházka the Hero. What I’d like to write about now is Jakub Procházka the Human.
Jakub’s father chose to align himself with a specific current of history, one he considered righteous but which turned out to be monstrous. Jakub’s willingness and determination to overcome this…
My hand trembled. I became aware of my lachrymal ducts—dried out, burning, empty.
… his last moments, before we lost contact, Jakub told me a story of a time he almost drowned, and the symbolism of a burning sun…
… so as a great personal friend of Jakub’s, I feel deep sorrow in my every cell, and consider it a small but significant consolation that he expired without pain, fulfilling a lifelong dream…
Without pain. A barefaced lie.
The service will be held at the Prague Castle, and the nation is invited to join the procession that will travel to a service organized in the St. Vitus Cathedral, and conclude outside the castle walls, where vendors will provide free food and beverages to celebrate Jakub’s life. Arrive early, as the event is expected to become one of the biggest mass gatherings…
… and to go against what I set out to do earlier, I would like, once again, to return to Jakub Procházka the Hero, and remind us all of the famous words of a poet who captured the meaning of the Chopra mission: “With JanHus1 lie our hopes of new sovereignty and prosperity, for we now belong among the explorers of the universe, the guardians of the frontier. We look away from our past…”
I handed the tablet over.
“You want to see pictures of funeral?” she asked.
No. Maybe later. How long has it been?
“A week. They are building statue. There are many candles still in this square, and pictures of you. Paintings.”
What is your name?
“Klara. Your fever is coming down. We fear superbacteria. That is why there is quarantine. But you seem better.”
Yes. Better. Why are you here?
She studied something on my forehead. The silence felt long, even excruciating.
“We are part of phantom program. Have you heard of this?”
Myth, I thought?
“A myth, yes. No one knows exactly how many have died being shot into Space quietly. At least technology makes odds bigger now. We are a phantom mission. There was one before us, shortly after cloud appeared, even before Germans sent the monkey. It was one-man mission, like yours, and the man—Sergei, I knew him well, good person—he never returned. And so we come, bigger ship, more crew, we launched couple of weeks before you but came off course when Vasily… well, there was the incident. And so we arrive late, after you, and you were a floating man. I am telling you this because you have to know, Jakub, that my government will never admit to phantom programs, especially now that we have Chopra dust, we have this advantage, what world wants. And if we do not exist, then your rescue does not exist. You do not exist. Do you understand?”
You gathered it? Chopra?
“Yes, we have dust. But do not think of it anymore. You will never see it.”
I looked away. She apologized under her breath and I waved her off. She too was a soldier. Home felt much less certain now. What could the future of a rescued phantom dead man be? Life under surveillance in a Belarusian village? A Russian prison? Would they hold me until the fact of my rescue could somehow be used to political advantage, or until a whistle-blower agile enough to penetrate a century of state-sanctioned lies revealed that the phantom program of the USSR was alive and well, a wild conspiracy theory sure to kill at any cocktail party?
You said incident? With your third?
“Yes, Vasily. He hasn’t been himself.”
What happened?
She studied the strap on her glove, quiet, frowning.