I wanted to see the dead bodies of all phantom astronauts. To bring them back to Earth and keep them embalmed in glass cases inside Lenin’s mausoleum.
I wanted Valkyries to soar through dimensions and caress the dead souls of African orphans. I wanted all the mythical beasts the human mind has created to pile on top of one another and fuck and give birth to a hybrid so perverse it would unite us all. I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters? I wanted cosmic dust to gather around clay nests with the aggression of hornets, to breed and evolve and merge and form its own planet occupied by its own humanlike figures driving their own carlike cars. Perhaps if such a world of gray shadows existed—a reflection, a mimicry of the entire human experiment—we could finally watch and learn. A proof.
I wanted someone to tell me they know what they’re doing. I wanted someone to claim authority. I wanted to leap into the Vltava and taste its toxicity, to recognize that somewhere along the slush of runoff there was real water. I wanted to live on both sides. I wanted to touch every cube brick on France’s roads. I wanted to drink English tea without milk. I wanted to enter the filthiest American diner in the dustiest city and order a burger and a milk shake. The way the word rolls off the tongue—buRrRgeRrR. I wanted to lose myself among the suits of New York City and feel cocaine residue on toilet seats. I wanted to hang off the edge of a whale skeleton. I wanted proof of the chaos. I wanted it so badly I didn’t want it at all. I wanted what every human wants. For someone to tell me what to choose.
Yes, Lenka was right. I would return as a changed man, she would return as a changed woman. Some parts switched out, our casings the same. Who said these two brand-new humans couldn’t love each other?
TWO WEEKS BEFORE the landing, I decided. It was time to discover Vasily. I had avoided him to forget my grief for Hanu?, but I needed to hear about his visions while we were still trapped in the same quarters together. Vasily had abandoned his sleeping chamber, they told me, and had set himself up in one of the ship’s three laboratories. Klara no longer visited him; Yuraj made a visit every two days, officially to deliver snacks and mission updates, and unofficially (he’d say in a smiling whisper) to ensure that the “cookie fawk” was still alive. For the past few days, I had been monitoring Klara’s and Yuraj’s movements, looking for the small but certain overlap in their sleeping habits.
Finally, I had found it. During their nap time I slipped out of my cabin and made my way past their chambers and into the lab corridor, where the Russians (I guessed) studied the cosmic effects on bacteria, and how these mutations could be used in biological warfare. (Whether this was exaggerated Cold War paranoia, understandable distrust of the occupier, or a simple acceptance of the real world, I couldn’t be sure. After all, what would my country have done with the Chopra samples? Look for any way to get ahead in the race of nations, or at least sell them to the highest bidder, the most convenient ally, before the spies of the world descended upon Prague’s streets to find out for themselves?) I arrived at the last laboratory door, delighted at the comforts of floating freely in Yuraj’s sweatpants, which slid off my hips regularly but which I was grateful for nonetheless. Finding the observation window covered and the access panel to the lab smashed, I knocked.
“Ostavit' yego tam,” the man inside hollered.
“What?” I said.
“You are not Yuraj,” he said in English.
“No. But you are Vasily?”
“Are you him? The dead man?”
I did not respond.
Several anxious minutes passed. I looked toward the entry corridor. Silent, but soon I could be discovered.
At last the door slid open. Behind it was a greased blob of a man, stuffed inside a white tank top and a pair of briefs. His hair had been reduced to a sweat-soaked pierogi at the center of his skull. In his left hand, he held a rigged remote for the door. Bare wires extended from the small box of the control panel to his side. His right hand was wrapped from the tips of his fingers all the way to his shoulder with gauze. His teeth were gray.
He nodded, as if knowing that I could not speak to him until gandering at the sty he had made out of a state-of-the-art research facility. Filthy underwear, microscope lenses, empty ration packets, pencil caps, crumpled pieces of paper, and individual potato chips floated around the room in an odd hoarder ballet, like an art show one might see at the National Museum as yet another condemnation of materialism. An unidentifiable yellow substance stained the lab chair, and the lab computer had been split in two with a hard steel pipe. At first, I thought that the walls were covered in twisted wires, but a closer inspection revealed countless pieces of paper with drawings. Every single one of them offered the same subject. A mess of dark shadows connected in a semicircular shape. From these black clouds erupted words written in an insidiously red Cyrillic.
The man, Vasily, uncrossed his arms. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly.
“I do. You’ve heard him.”
His eyes widened. He grabbed me by the neckline of my shirt, his breath sour upon my chin. “You are the prophet, then,” he said, “you. It could have been me, but do you know what I did when the god visited me? I thought it was a demon. I closed my eyes and I prayed him away. I haven’t been to the church since my grandmother died, yet there I was, my eyes closed for hours, and I begged for the god to be gone. Finally, he listened.”
Vasily’s English was nearly impeccable, only a slight hint of an accent. His bottom lip trembled. He picked at the gauze on his arm, tearing off small pieces and rolling them into balls before putting them on his tongue.
“You saw,” I said.
“I did not see. Only heard. Heard a voice from the corners.”
“And the voice told you of me.”
“He told me to wait for you. The prophet.” Vasily caught a potato chip and offered it. I shook my head. With visible disappointment, he returned it to its orbit, then strapped himself into the stained chair. I noticed that the microscope lenses were shattered, and braced myself for the possible glass particles swirling around, waiting to be inhaled.
“One must be lower than the prophet when the prophet is addressed,” Vasily said. “The god returned to me again, yes, a few hours before we found you. He said I would not hear him again, no, but he would send a son in his name, and that is you! And he said we must rescue the son. I told Klara we must wait a few more minutes before leaving. We plucked you up, hmm, right before you perished…”
In front of me, then, sat a man who may have truly also known Hanu?, however briefly, the final proof I sought since I met him so long ago. I became immediately impatient with Vasily’s tics, his muddled speech.