For weeks, I spent my days running among the three bathrooms, scrubbing each seat, each bowl. I bleached them and scrubbed them with such dedication I sometimes wished to lick them to prove my diligence, my commitment to the cause. I replaced soap and I provided oversized rolls of rough toilet paper. Some nights, the sailors got too drunk during their card games and their liquids and solids missed the bowls by miles. These were my emergency calls, apologetic voices waking me from uneasy sleep. I welcomed them. I had a purpose here. A simple one.
When we arrived in Poland, the gangly Pole offered to pay for my train ticket if I would keep him company until we reached Kraków. He spoke of his mother, who would welcome him with homemade smoked pork and garlic potatoes. He in turn would greet her with a surprise belated birthday gift he had saved up for with his wages—a new mattress and a certificate for weekly massages for her bad back. That’s all he’d ever wanted to do, he said. Make enough money to ease his mother’s life.
When he asked about my family, I asked if we could play some cards. He understood.
That night in Kraków, I flagged down a man with a pox-scarred face. He smelled of smoke and cheese puffs, but he was fond of reading philosophy and had published some poetry.
“It inspires you, the road,” he said. “In life, you should travel as far as you possibly can, get away from everything you were ever taught. What do you think?” And he coughed, the same smoker’s roar as my grandfather.
“What if everything you love is right where you are?” I asked.
“Then you find new things to love. A happy person must be a nomad.”
“You haven’t loved, then,” I countered. “If what you love gets away from you, in the end you are only walking in a labyrinth with no exits.”
Within six hours, we had arrived in Prague. The man offered no parting words, but he gave me the gift of intoxication. I drank his Staropramen. The sun rose. I tipped the bottle three times, splashing brew upon the ground. An offer for the dead.
I walked into a phone booth and searched for Petr’s name in the book chained to a broken telephone. That Petr resided in Zli?ín was the one personal detail I knew about him. Thankfully he was the only Petr Koukal in the city. I walked.
A tall brunette with a Ukrainian accent and gauged ears opened the door of a small but beautiful house. She told me that her husband was at the pub, of course. So Petr had a wife. I smiled at the long-awaited pleasure of resolving one of his mysteries. He knew what Lenka meant to me, after all.
I found him playing Mariá? with a group of old-timers, all of them collecting empty shot glasses and pints around the mess of cards. His beard was overgrown and resembled a rusted wire brush. He’d gotten a few more tattoos, and there was a hole in his T-shirt around the armpit.
When he saw me, he dropped his cards and tilted his head sideways. I quietly counted and at around the twelfth second he pointed at me and said to his Mariá? foes, “That man. Is he there?”
The men looked at me, then at Petr. He extinguished his cigarette and stumbled backwards as he stood. The men reached out to support him, but he waved them away. They groaned and grabbed at him, asking him to keep playing, but Petr no longer saw them. He put his arm around my shoulders carefully, as if expecting his hand to pass through me.
“This guy?” a toothless man said as he nudged me with his elbow.
In the silence, the man sized me up, as if now in doubt himself. He wiped the beer foam from his whiskers.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “I’ll say he’s there.”
No Penelope
THE STORY I GAVE Petr took the length of four pints of pilsner.
“You know when you wake up,” he said, “and the second before opening your eyes you think you’re somewhere else? In an old childhood bedroom, or inside a camp tent. And then you look around, and for a moment you don’t remember which life you’re living.”
“That’s very poetic for an engineer.”
“Jakub. That’s your voice.”
“You recognized me. No one else seems to. I don’t recognize myself.”
“I’ve been seeing you everywhere. You can’t be here. I must be hallucinating. Dreaming, maybe. But it’s nice. It’s nice to be with you again.”
I did not mention Hanu?, my encounter with the core, how I had landed and found my way home. I told him that I had stepped into the vacuum to die honorably on the frontier and that a crew of Russian phantoms had saved me as I choked. He intuited that I was omitting things but understood he had no right to ask. By the time we returned to his house, his wife had gone to work. Petr told me he had retired early and was now making a record with his heavy metal band while his severance from the SPCR and his wife’s work paid the bills. In the bathroom I shaved my neck and trimmed my beard, careful not to touch the spot where the infected wound of my former tooth rested on the side of my cheek. When I emerged and walked into the living room, I saw no reason to wait any longer. I asked about Lenka.
“Another beer?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Where is she now?”
Petr sat down and pulled a joint from underneath the couch cushion. He lit it with a burning candle. “I’m not sure if you’re ready.”
I slapped the cannabis out of his hand. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“I have something you need to hear. Don’t ask about Lenka until you do.”
I nodded, and Petr walked away. The joint was burning a hole in the carpet. I considered letting it turn into a full flame. I extinguished it with my shoe.
When Petr came back, he was holding a silver USB drive and a stack of disconnected pages. He handed them over.
“Listen to this. Then read the manuscript. I found these when I was clearing out the offices. Ku?ák held sessions with Lenka. She needed someone to talk to, and didn’t want you to know. Maybe these will have what you need.”
I held the drive between my fingertips. It was light, too light for what it held. The manuscript pages were supposedly an early draft of Dr. Ku?ák’s biography of Jakub Procházka. So the man would make his fame as planned. Petr gestured me into a den, where a laptop rested next to a guitar and a piano.
“Have you listened to this?” I asked.
“Yes,” Petr said. “I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. Take your time.”
Four hours’ worth of sound files. As I listened through earphones, Petr brought me a glass of water and a bowl of ramen soup. He touched my shoulder as if I might disappear, then lingered in the doorway. I heard him strum an acoustic in the next room. Outside, the sun was setting.
After these four hours, I ejected the USB drive. I walked into the bathroom and washed my face, ran my fingers through the wiry, curled hairs of my beard, the dry skin underneath. My eye sockets seemed hollow, detached from their mooring, as if my eyes were eager to retract and hide inside my skull. My lips were the color of vegetable oil, chapping in the middle. I had come too close to death ever to look young again. But there was something about the way my cheekbones protruded, creating lines I hadn’t seen before. There was something about their color, how the faded sunburn from my spacewalk had left behind a healthy hint of brown, which seemed somehow fitting on my otherwise pale skin. Whatever form I now occupied, I could grow to like it. I threw the flash drive in the toilet and I flushed.