The Goromped experiments began to keep me shut inside the room for most of my days, which made the recovery seem slower, more painful. Suddenly I was aware of the soreness in my cheeks, my inability to walk without a slight limp. Outside, the sunshine touched upon the shoulders of women and men who seemed so without worries, a city of strollers without a destination. I too craved motion, but not that of a casual stroller—I wanted the thrilling speed of the Goromped.
I shrouded the jar with a black handkerchief and went outside. For the first time I made my way to the residential parts of town, the ones that belonged to neither patients nor tourists, and there I noticed a blue Ducati motorcycle leaning against a shabby house. A reasonable price tag hung around its neck. I hurried home to withdraw some money from the bag Petr had given me and I purchased the Ducati in cash, along with a helmet, from a man exposing his rotten teeth as he counted the cash. I rode out of Carlsbad and into the hills, past the forest filled with men reinforcing their winter wood supply, past teenagers sitting around a van without wheels, sniffing either paint or glue. The road was rough, filled with potholes, and I liked the vibrations it gave off. It felt as though I was working against something, making an effort. I rode through villages, caught the disapproving glares of old women sitting in front of their houses, the lustful envy of village boys working in the fields after school to afford a Ducati of their own. I escaped bewildered dogs snapping at my ankles, zoomed along miles and miles of bare potato fields, wheat fields, cornfields, the postseason desolation of the countryside. The landscape elicited a raw sense of survival: wood prepared, food hoarded, and now it was time to stay inside and drink liquor to warm the belly until the winter passed. After a full day’s ride I returned to Carlsbad, feeling hungry and already missing the smell of burning petrol.
The next day, I rode an hour outside Carlsbad, to Chomutov County. I stopped in front of the church in the village of my grandmother’s birth, Bukovec. In the cemetery out back, my grandmother’s gravestone rested underneath a willow tree. She’d always told me stories about this tree—she had been afraid of it when she was a little girl but grew to love it as she matured and its sagging shape transformed from monstrous to soothing, like the blur of moving water. When her appetite for cabbage soup—another comfort of her girlish years—at the hospital had lessened, and it came time for us to say our last words, she told me how much she hated leaving me. I asked what I could do, how I could repay the lifelong adoration she had given me, how I could show my love, and she said if there was a space anywhere near that damn tree, I should put her there.
I kneeled at the grave and brushed the dried catkins from the sleek stone. I was sorrowful that I hadn’t been able to release her ashes in Space along with my grandfather’s. But this had been her wish. At the end of his life, my grandfather wanted to become dust, to have all trace of the body destroyed so the soul could be free. My grandmother had an agreement with nature. She wanted her body to be buried whole, to become one with the soil, with the tree, with air and rain. With a heavy heart, I had separated them, but I knew that if any remnant of cosmic justice existed, they were already together again in another life, another reality. I stayed at the grave into the night, told my grandmother of Hanu?, as I knew she would’ve asked him many questions. I returned to Carlsbad as the sun began to rise.
PETR SAID THAT my recovery was coming along as well as it could. I had regained some muscle, my limp was not as severe, I even slept for a full evening here and there. My healing weeks were coming to their conclusion and I started asking the question forbidden to me until now: Where is she? “In time, Jakub,” Petr would say, “in time.”
During my last therapy session, Valerie ran her fingers along my leg scar. She was an older woman with deep wrinkles alongside her eyes, and a voice so deep she must have spent her life smoking tobacco and drinking vodka to numb (or enhance?) her desires. Her stories were almost erotic in their precision and in her desperation to narrate the truth without a word one could deem unnecessary. She was the only woman who had touched me since my return. She was Earth’s presence upon my body, made me feel as though she could be simultaneously a lover and a mother. Her fingernails teased my scar.
“I’ve come to love your silence,” she said. “You’re a blank canvas. I can imagine upon you any kind of life. Like a man from old folk stories.”
I kissed Valerie on the cheek. She allowed it. I put on my underwear, pants, and shirt and walked out of the spa whistling. I realized too late it was the tune of an Elvis song.
On that last Sunday in Carlsbad, I purchased a gallon of liquid detergent with added bleach and quickly tipped the Goromped’s holding jar into the plastic container. A frenzied sibilance brought me to my knees, but I held the cap on the bottle firmly to withstand the Goromped’s attempts at freedom. The bottle cracked along the edges, the liquid inside it warming. I clamped my fingers along the sides, desperate to hold it together and smother the cosmic vermin cunt in the one substance it couldn’t withstand, until finally the bottle exploded all over the room, spewing plastic shrapnel that carved a shallow cut into my cheek. Mountain-scented goo covered everything—the bed and carpet and ceiling and my clothes. I touched the walls, searching without success for a sign of a corpse, until at last I thought to pick over my shirt and face, and there in my beard I found the smallest remnants of dead legs and a particle of shell. The Goromped had split in half in the eruption. I spit on the remains, threw them in the toilet, and flushed. Yes, I took pleasure in its killing, science be damned. For a brief moment, my scientific convictions were loose enough to let me believe that Hanu? was watching from some kind of afterlife, grinning with satisfaction at this last act of revenge.
I left a seven-thousand-crown tip for the cleaning service. Removal of the havoc caused by the Goromped’s detergent grenade would take considerable work. At the downstairs shop, I purchased a box of chocolates and wrote, For Valerie. Her kindness had been unconditional. Her life consisted of welcoming men, women, and children in pain, some temporary, some chronic; she attended to people waiting for death, to humans praying that their despair and bodily imprisonment could be eased somehow, lifted, and Valerie effectuated this with her hands, her voice, stories, with a determination to find good in every word and every movement of a weakened limb. Valerie was an unknowing force. Leaving her chocolates seemed banal and almost insulting, but she didn’t need to be the victim of my glorification of her, idolatry in itself a certain kind of death.
WE LEFT BEFORE DAWN, the world still dark. Petr offered to carry the bag of clothes he had lent me downstairs, but I refused. When he opened the passenger door to his Citro?n, I pointed at my Ducati and strapped on my helmet.