As soon as we arrived home that night, I loosened my tie and retched. The antinausea medications had worn off with the alcohol at dinner, and my body had returned to its natural state of revolt against the strains of training for spaceflight, fighting lack of gravity with ceaseless vomiting. While I dry-heaved over the toilet, my gut hollowed out, Lenka ran her fingers through my hair. I told her we needed to give it another try, right then, if she could only wait for me to brush my rancid teeth. She said it was okay. I knew it wasn’t. She waited in bed while I washed myself off, and with shaking arms I crawled on top of the bed and slid my tongue along her collarbone. She arched her back, grabbed at my hair, pushed herself toward me while I rubbed my palm along my flaccid cock. We caressed and twisted and sighed and in the end she gently pushed on my chest and said I needed sleep. I was sure the timing was perfect, maybe destined—husband and wife conceive; husband leaves for Space and discovers great things; husband returns to Earth with a month to spare to become a father. Lenka put lotion on her arms and said we’d get it right after I came back, without a doubt. See the doctor again. Solve the problem. I believed her.
The night’s disappointment wasn’t my main concern. It was the violation of a ritual I committed during my last morning with Lenka. When I was still an Earthman, I didn’t have much use for morning rituals. Why should one spend time staring out the window, sipping lip-burning liquids and cooking feasts on hot surfaces when the world outside was so fresh and ripe for the taking? But my wife loved these mornings. She wore a robe (why not get dressed?), made eggs, bacon, rolls, and tea (why not buy a doughnut and a cup o’ black before getting on the metro?), and talked about our hopes for the day (as long as we are not dead or bankrupt, three cheers) while I played along. But why shouldn’t I have allowed myself to be tied to this slice of domestic sentiment, to relax my thigh muscles and help scramble the eggs, to take occasional glances at her slim ankles as she danced through our home in her daily festival? Lenka fried up thick slices of bacon, not prepackaged but obtained from the corner butcher, the slabs still stinking of living beast. She presented them to me as an offering, a coercion into her leisurely morning attitude, knowing my ache to move, my eagerness to wrestle the world. She knew this was her power, slowing the pace of our living to a soothing dance, regulating my heartbeat through her touch, her voice, her curves. Through pork grease spilling across porcelain. This was one of the many clauses in our contract, this bacon and grace exchanged for my compliance, and never once did I violate it. Until the last Earth breakfast with my wife.
I woke up that morning with the familiar nausea from the antigravity dive training, popped a few acetaminophens, and walked into the kitchen to find breakfast already waiting on the table. Lenka sipped from an oversized mug and cradled a laptop on her thighs, building a budget presentation. She closed it when I entered.
“It’s getting cold,” she said.
“Not today,” I said.
“What?” She crossed her arms.
“I don’t want it today. Not hungry.”
She opened up her laptop again, wordlessly, going against another contract of ours, a ban on screens whenever we sat over food together.
I sat and I drank some tea, pushing the plate away. I pulled up email on my phone, feeling no need to defend myself. I did not want to ritualize the morning that day. The way our lives were about to change, the pretense did not fit in. Perhaps I was too ill, or scared nearly to death, maybe unstable, but I broke a clause of our contract unpredictably and absolutely, a violation that never fully disappears from the record of life. After a few minutes, Lenka dumped my breakfast into the trash.
“Last time, then,” she said.
PERHAPS I ASSIGNED too much importance to this single moment. Perhaps not. But today, during our video chat, I was going to ask Lenka whether she felt the same way about our long silences and lack of humor. I would tell her how much I’d been thinking about the morning I rejected her ritual. I would ask whether she read the newspapers predicting the likelihood of my return. I would tell her that lately my nights (or periods of sleep, to be more precise, but Dr. Ku?ák had recommended I hold on to the concept of day and night) had been filled with plates of bacon spitting grease, my tongue slithering in anticipation of carnivorous fulfillment. I wanted bacon on my Nutella sandwiches, my celery, my ice cream. I wanted crumbles of it sprinkled into my nose, my ears, between my thighs. I wanted to absorb it into my skin, revel in the busty pimples it would cause. During this call to Lenka, I needed to address my violation of the contract, beg for forgiveness. Never again would I refuse something she offered with her own two hands.
The call would reunite us. Kick-start a new wave of long-distance passion that would make the triumph of the mission that much more satisfying.
I entered habitat and nutrition data into the logs, leaving out my splurging on chocolate spreads and cider. I recalibrated Ferda the dust collector, ran internal diagnostics to ensure the filters were clean and ready for Chopra’s offering. Having completed my preparations, I killed some time reading Robinson Crusoe, a favorite of mine from childhood that Dr. Ku?ák had recommended I bring to create “an association of comfort.” More obviously, Dr. Ku?ák offered, I should take Crusoe as the perfect example of a man who embraces solitude and turns its crippling tendencies into opportunities for self-improvement.