Petr insisted that my body was devastated by zero gravity and in need of healing. He noted my swollen cheek, the result of my crudely extracted tooth. He noted my blocked sinuses and my slight limp. He explained that approximately 12 percent of my bone mass had vanished due to spaceflight osteopenia and that without therapy, I was looking at a lifetime of excruciating knee pain. Stomachaches, gas, gums swollen with gingivitis. I imagined those emaciated bones carrying my pounds of organs, flesh, and skin like an overloaded mule climbing a mountain.
And so they convinced me. I would spend three weeks in Carlsbad, Bohemia’s famous town of healing, dip myself into the hot springs, and drink mineral water. I would lift weights to rebuild bone density, wearing Petr’s borrowed gray sweat clothes, whose elastic band had worn thin from an indeterminable amount of time holding in his girth. I would also submit to the dentist’s tools to rid me of infection, and I would let Petr drive over once a week and provide me with physical examinations. Petr assured me that no one was going to recognize me. It was because people don’t think of dead men as physical bodies, he said, but glorified concepts. Aside from that, I knew that no man, woman, or child could confuse my transformed cheekbones and sagging eyes with the fresh-faced hero of posters and television screens. After these three weeks, Petr promised, he would take me to Lenka himself, if that was what I wanted.
When he dropped me off, Petr handed me a bag with eighty thousand crowns in it. Part of his severance package from the SPCR. I did not think about rejecting it for a single second. I was owed.
DURING HIS RULE in the fourteenth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV blew off steam after a day’s work by hunting on horseback around the Ore Mountains. One day, his pack discovered a hot spring flowing from the earth, a miracle sent by God to heal the emperor’s injured leg. Charles IV experienced instant relief after dipping his majestic limb into the spring, and declared that it possessed divine healing powers. He granted city privileges to the settlements surrounding the springs and this new town was named Carlsbad, after its beloved founder. As the town grew, renowned physicians from around the world published papers about the effects of the spring, and by the nineteenth century, Carlsbad had seen the likes of Mozart, Gogol, and Freud. To build a proper social playground for these celebrities, architectural behemoths in the style of art nouveau were constructed around Carlsbad’s trees and fountains, turning the town into a man-made Eden if ever there was one. Colonnades, hot springs, parks named after rulers and composers, buildings with curves and edges so delicate only the devil himself could have carved them. And silence. The silence of serenity, the silence of human beings too content to speak.
My room in Carlsbad wasn’t much bigger than the lounge area of JanHus1. By all standards, it was sufficient for a dead man. Its rough gray carpet itched my feet and there was a chair that smelled of chlorine and a table that creaked constantly for no apparent reason. The bed was magnificent just as fresh food was magnificent, just as humans walking around without a care were magnificent, their sheer existence a wonder for my starved senses. I ate all of my meals in this bed and shook the crumbs from the sheet out of the window before smoking a cigarette. Yes, since the pox-scarred driver had given me one of his menthols, I had taken up smoking. I hated the smell of cigarettes, the taste, even the smoke I found aesthetically overrated, but I chain-smoked regardless in an effort to form a habit, to build a structure for my lonely days. I woke at nine in the morning sharp with a prebreakfast nicotine craving and I smoked my last stick around midnight, right after ingesting sleeping pills. Tobacco was a timekeeper, the tuner of my biological clock. A friend.
Every morning at ten, I had my physical therapy. A kind-eyed woman named Valerie helped me submerge in a blue tub filled with hot mineral water. During our first session, she asked me where I came from, whether I was married. Prague, I said. I didn’t answer the second question. She got the implication of my brief answers and began talking about herself instead. Her father used to work in a factory that manufactured weapons for the Nazis. Near the end of the war, he and a few other workers decided to sabotage the guns—to damage magazine springs so the ammo wouldn’t feed, or to pack the ammo with too much powder in order to cause explosions and the loss of fingers. The inspector, a German, was a drunk, always loaded on slivovitz during his shifts, and it was easy to distract him enough for the weapons to pass through undetected. By the time these weapons were put into circulation, the Germans were retreating, and Valerie’s father never found out whether his rebellion had much of an effect. But he would walk around town for the rest of his life, chest puffed out, receiving free beer in exchange for his story of great sabotage, cutting those magazine springs with pliers, slicing his hands, bleeding with pride over those fascist tools of murder.
“My father never did anything else after that,” Valerie said. “Mostly, he became a drunk. But a man only needs one thing to be proud of. It will carry him through the rest of his life.”
Once, she ran her hand over the burn scar on my calf. She asked how it had happened.
“My father is responsible,” I said.
“Hmm,” she answered.
DURING THE SECOND WEEK of my stay in Carlsbad, Petr took me to a dentist’s office. A woman wearing a white mask set a tube over my mouth. The gas was dense and sweet, like kettle corn in Wenceslas Square during a hot summer. I didn’t feel the tools scraping the rot away. I woke up expecting pain, but all I could feel was a gap, another piece of my body gone. “It’s done,” the woman reassured me. I consumed a pill the size of a locust.
Back in my room, I woke to a strange scratching coming from the air-conditioning vent. It began with hesitance, a creature feeling its way around a new environment. After a few minutes, the scratching gained a rhythm—shka shka shkashka shka shkashka—the rhythm of work that some small rodent figured would bring it to freedom. Consistency. Work without interruption, work with intensity. Surely, working at a steady peace, without breaks, the creature could reach its goal. I listened to my companion, refusing to take away its dignity by opening the vent. It took twenty minutes for the rhythm to reach its climax—shkakakakashkakakakashkakakaka, now with true desperation, as the rodent beat at the world to convince it of its worth, not a plea but a demand: Hear me! Let me out! I am here! I decided it was time for relief for the both of us, and when I stood up I saw a small brown nose peeking through the bars, two black eyes fixed on mine. I unscrewed the cover with a coin. When I opened it, a small tail was peeking from a dark corner deep in the shaft. It was hiding from me. It would not be rescued. I tried to reach the tail without any luck. I sat on my bed with the vent uncovered for an hour, waiting for my new friend to come out. It didn’t. I put the cover back on, and while I was fastening the last screw, the nose appeared again, followed by the laborious scratching. Work will save me. Diligent, patient, never-ending. It must.