You don’t have to say
“I will tell you because it is nice to talk. These two with me, they will not talk. Do you know what it is like when you speak and no one listens? You do, Jakub. They sent you all on your own, your people. It was three months into our mission. Vasily looked into my bunk, pale, breathing heavy. Yuraj and I, we asked him for two hours, what is wrong? And he said nothing, only drank the milk and looked into distance. And then, finally, he put his hands like this”—she crossed her arms on her chest—“and said, I hear monster. It speaks in darkness, like a dog’s growl, and it scratches on walls. And this monster, he said, it spoke inside his head, asked about Earth, asked about Russia. And he just sat, his hands like that, saying like, C’mon, druz’ya, you tell me I’m wrong, I won’t agree, I know what I heard. We never told him anything, never said, Vasily, you are probably little crazy from Space. Still he always put his hands like that, like we wanted to take the truth away from him. We reported what he said to tsentr, but they never told us what they did, if anyone talked to him. And so, after that day, he does research on his own, and he eats his meals on his own, and we are worried, but what can we do? We are tired too. We too can’t be taking care of someone’s head.”
I tapped the pen on my forearm.
A monster
“Yes. A dog’s or wolf’s growl.”
Could I talk to Vasily?
“Maybe if you get better and he agrees to come here. We cannot let you out of room.”
How much longer?
“We are expected to be on Earth in three months.”
Are you scared?
“Of?”
Going home
She took the pad from my hands and slid it back inside the front pocket of my sleeping bag, then zipped me up to the neck, and rested the forefinger of her glove on my cheek. “You should sleep,” she said. “Fever is coming down—maybe we can unstrap you soon, if you promise to not come out to the ship.”
She floated away, stopped in the entry, but did not turn around.
“Silence drives us crazy,” she said. “But we are afraid we will miss the silence. Bozhe, it is hostile up here, but it is easy. Routines and computers and food in plastic. Yes, I wonder, can I ever share life with people again. I think about refilling my car with oil and I want to be sick to my stomach.”
She left.
I pulled the cocoon of the sleeping bag over my head so I would not hear the subtle creaks of the ship. Even the most sophisticated structures cannot avoid the sighs of life. Materials copulate, clash, grasp for air. I felt strong, the blood flowing through my extremities, and thus I slept. Once, I caught myself stretching my fingers toward the rabbit’s eyes so I could drop them to the quarreling chickens. Rain escaped through holes in the gutter and woke cats snoozing on the bench. The modest sandals of the doppelg?nger Jan Hus struck the cobblestone path as he was led to his trial, and he grunted quietly as he was hoisted onto the wooden platform where he was to burn.
I have never been clear on my first memory. It could be one of my father holding me nude on his bare chest, my clumsy hands grabbing at his curled chest hair. But it could also be that this is no real memory at all, that I wish so desperately to remember this moment because of the ragged black-and-white photo my mother kept on her nightstand. My father’s jaw was still fleshy with youthful fat, not yet sharpened by age and unfulfilled desires. I knew nothing except this man’s warm hands nearly as big as my body, his odor that would one day become mine, the warmth, the light. Is the question of whether I remember this moment more important than the empirical evidence proving it actually happened? I hope the memory is real. I hope the sensation, the phantom of my father holding me that closely, isn’t manufactured, but is based in the animalistic instinct of grasping at those moments in which we are protected. The instinct in the animal named Jakub.
I DIDN’T KNOW how long I had slept after the last feeding break when Klara and Yuraj came to unstrap me. Klara told me that three weeks had passed and the quarantine was over. I floated around the room, stretching out my muscles, my joints, smiling at the pleasure of motion. My voice had come back to me, at first a hoarse whisper, then a guttural tone I didn’t recognize. My throat still ached whenever I spoke more than one short sentence. I studied Klara, who was no longer cautious around me, only kind. Even Yuraj shot me a quick smile, though he maintained an air of masculine indifference. They had laid out the rules: I’d promise not to leave the room under any circumstances without being accompanied, and in exchange they would uncover the small window. I agreed. When I asked about my future, about their instructions from Russia, they became tight-lipped and irritated, and so I ceased to inquire about the matter altogether. I was too happy to have human companions, to hear language travel through its usual channels, to smell someone else’s sweat. We were headed to Earth. I missed Hanu?, more than I could attempt to describe, yet I could not speak of him at all.
Klara seemed to like talking to me, especially now that I was healthy and thus offered no bacterial threat. She would come into my room without her space suit, sometimes with her hair braided, revealing a slender neck I could not avert my eyes from, other times with her hair untamed and frizzed, a lion’s mane surrounding her cranium. Eventually, I couldn’t prevent thoughts of kissing her slender neck, of zipping the two of us inside my spacebag and feeling the touch of human skin along mine. Perhaps strangely, these thoughts never arrived outside our conversations. Her insights and her memories rekindled the seemingly dead impulses within me, the impulses I had pledged to forever limit to Lenka. I made no indication of my lust to Klara. I wanted her to keep coming back. The simple comfort of her companionship as the dreaded day of our return to Earth approached was worth more than any physical gratification.
“I have been reading about you,” she said once over our lunch, “about your father. Not too many things left around the ship to do, so I think, I will know more about our guest.”
“Okay.”
“Did you love him?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s the curse of family.”
“I hoped you’d say this. Have you heard of Dasha Sergijovna?”
“I haven’t.”
“She was my mother. She too was phantom. Is this surprising?”
She wore a sports bra and loose sweatpants, the postworkout sweat staining the smooth edges of her clavicle, belly button, lip line. She seemed as comfortable as a human being could be, and I envied her.