Lenka. Her sweet hands.
She paid the vendor and turned her back, the green tunic over her shoulders flowing in the wind like a queen’s robe. For a moment, the tunic slid off her right shoulder, and the few inches of bare skin inspired a lust that made me dizzy. I stumbled, but kept following nonetheless. What was the best way to approach her? I couldn’t put my hand on her shoulder before she saw me. She needed to see me first, recognize me, recognize the man who had so selfishly gone away from her to chase his own ambitions, the man who had returned now that she had made this new life to ask that she drop her solitude and, once again, change everything for him.
Lenka. Her sweet hands, the skin of her shoulders. Was I worthy of her still? I quickened my pace, pushed through the herd to get ahead of Lenka, and turned back into the lane in which she strolled. She was now walking toward me, thirty meters, twenty-five. But there were too many bodies obstructing us. My eyes sought hers, ten meters. For the first time since I had left Earth, I saw Lenka’s face clearly. Peaceful. Adoring every sight and every breath. As if the world had been her creation and she a carefree supervisor walking the floor on the seventh day of rest.
She was changed, happier than I’d ever seen her. Happier even than in our best days, our orgasmic slumber in the Orloj tower, the peak of our love. Five meters.
I froze in my steps. Lenka looked directly at me. No. She looked past me, with no sign of recognition, no acknowledgment of my material form. She walked past me. As though I were just another stranger in too large a crowd.
Could I be anything else, in the new world she had built for herself? She had to see me. There was no other way to begin anew. I cursed the enveloping masses.
I shadowed her, searching for a better opportunity as she ate boiled peanuts, purchased a few canvases, and made her way home with the setting sun. I was drunk by then, mostly on samples of liquors flowing across the border from the rest of Europe, belching menthol, caraway, and coffee from the earthy shots I had picked up as I stalked. My mind a warren of confusion, uncertain whether I belonged to Earth anymore at all. But my body ran on autopilot—where Lenka went, I went.
She retreated into her apartment and I sat on the pavement outside, down the block. The ground was cool to the touch, and the distant voices of people coming home from the festival, drunk on simple pleasures, encouraged me. The street lamps came on with their low buzz of static. A beautiful night. I imagined walking up to Lenka’s door and ringing the bell. She would have to see me then. The possibilities of her reaction terrified me, each of them bringing their own special sense of horror. If she touched me, put her arms around me, would my bones hold together? Or perhaps she would run, thinking me a corpse come to haunt her. This endless loop of thought kept me confined to the sidewalk. Her words to Ku?ák replayed over and over. She wanted a life of her own, one that wasn’t overshadowed by my obsessions, my needs. And then I had seen her face in the crowd, serene and impassioned, and the lightness in her step.
Was she her happiest like this? I needed to leave Earth, pick at the particles of Space. What did Lenka need?
She walked back out of her building holding a large canvas bag, and I took cover behind a building at the end of the street. Lenka stepped toward the river. I followed her down the path, but still I kept my distance, still I could not bring myself to reenter her world. It was so easy, I had only to shout out her name, to run the short distance separating us and touch her. But with each passing moment I felt more and more like an intruder.
She set up an easel and began work on the unfinished painting of the night sky.
Her voice from Ku?ák’s recording, counting up all the things I had done. Yes, the winter of 1989 was the Big Bang of my life. The guilt of my father’s servitude had followed me everywhere, leading us here.
She took a sip of something from a thermos. Coffee? Wine? All I had to do was ask.
The paint upon the easel, grains of powder and oil staining the cotton fibers, the solvent evaporating to leave a pigmented, dry oil to oxidize. This resinous film was now the new dimension of reality, confined within a rectangular cloth. A new world. A perspective. Lenka had painted the edges purple to allow for Chopra’s influence. She raised her hand to her head, and though I couldn’t see I was sure the purple on her fingers colored a streak of her hair. What if this reminder of a phenomenon so distant, yet one that uprooted our lives, remained there forever? Within the painting existed the sum of our lives. My decision to leave. My decision to put something else above Lenka. I chose the dust, I chose Space, I chose the trip to nowhere, I chose to live above humanity, I chose higher missions, I chose symbols, I chose to claw at redemption.
I didn’t choose Lenka. I failed our contract. Now she had made a life for herself. Of course, I could merge into this life. Rid myself of any ambition left, drop any designs for my future and simply live alongside Lenka in any way she wanted me to, do as she would tell me, cause no further disruptions. But such life didn’t seem worth consideration, not only because I would never be able to truly embrace it, but because Lenka would reject it as an insult to what life is supposed to stand for.
She rested the brush upon the ground and sat by the edge of the river. She rolled up her pant legs and dipped her feet into the water. Frogs dispersed with protesting croaks. The air grew chalky with smoke from a nearby bonfire. Lenka hummed and leaned back into the grass. Peaceful, alone. Looking out over the calm surface.
There was no space for me here. I took a step back. And another.
Lenka returned to her easel and began to disassemble it. The cup used to rinse the brush tipped over, the water marked by all colors of the palette spilling on the grass. Lenka leaned over and began to draw something into the stain with her finger. I had never been as curious about anything as I was at this moment about what Lenka was creating out of view. She was an unmatched engineer of these small moments. Embracing accidents and curiosities. She judged the work below and laughed to herself.
I couldn’t exist here. In the world that had come into being due to my absence.
Within me now lay the mystery of Hanu?, the violent rejection of Chopra, the bodies of the three humans whose deaths I was responsible for. Klara’s eyes wild with betrayal, her effort to murder me with a single arm, her teeth sinking into the meat of my thumb like fangs.
I had nothing to give anyone else. Not here.
I turned and ran back up the pathway. I jumped onto the Ducati and started it, throwing my helmet to the ground.