She had loved me so well. I could never have asked for a better life as an Earthman.
Now I was a specter. Fragments of pasts, futures, gates through time and space. I was the series of particles released by Chopra’s core. My only destiny: motion. I rode at the highest speed. Away from Plzeň. Lenka had freed herself of the things haunting me. She was to remain free.
Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.
EXCERPT FROM FINAL PHONE CALL with Lenka P., approximately one day after Jakub P.’s projected death:
Lenka P: He didn’t suffer? You’re telling me the truth?
Ku?ák: Yes. It’s reported that he took the cyanide pill. His passing was without pain.
Lenka P: And you gave my message to him?
Ku?ák: I was assured he was told.
Lenka P: I let him die thinking he’d lost me. I should’ve pretended it was all right until he returned.
Ku?ák: Again, a certain role imposed upon you.
Lenka P: That’s what loving someone is.
Ku?ák: I’m not sure I agree.
Lenka P: Jakub did what he needed to. He was fulfilling his destiny.
Ku?ák: His, not yours.
Lenka P: Why are you so adamant about making me feel better?
Ku?ák: Nature of the job.
Lenka P: I’m terrified by my reaction. I can’t feel anything. It’s like it didn’t happen. It’s like I’m going to come home and the Jakub I first met, so cleanly shaven, will be there waiting. What if time really works that way—we can manipulate it like that, we just haven’t wanted it hard enough.
Ku?ák: This is how you grieve. Don’t be afraid of it.
Lenka P: I married a sweet boy who walked around the city like he was lost. And then, he goes to Space. What a life. Amazing. Wonderful. Terrible. All at the same time.
Ku?ák: Do you feel free?
Lenka P: I feel like I’ve lost too much.
Ku?ák: Freedom can feel that way.
Lenka P: You promise me?
Ku?ák: What?
Lenka P: You swear he was told? That I loved him. That our life together was not a forgery—that everything we did in those years came from the best parts of ourselves? That we’d have that, at least.
Ku?ák: He was told. I swear it.
Lenka P: I keep having this image of Jakub, like a thick star highlighted in the darkness, with a line of movement behind it. I see it every night, as if he’s leaving all over again. How can things get so far away from us? What use are the physics of Earth, these layers of atmosphere? They keep things from reaching us. But I wish they could’ve also trapped him here.
A Child of the Revolution
WITHOUT THE PURPOSE of finding Lenka, my time became an endless orbit on Earth’s concrete. Days ceased to have beginnings or endings as I rode my Ducati in circles on the highways surrounding Prague, teasing out ever higher speeds, much like the Goromped that had lived in my Carlsbad room. The singular purpose of motion. No schemes to it. No plans.
At a gas station, I purchased a clearance hooded sweatshirt sporting the colors of the national football team. I pulled it over my head, still nervous whenever a person stared at me for too long, afraid that in the correct light I might be recognized, despite the forever-altered facial structure, despite the sunken eyes, despite being severely underweight. I did not look strangers in the eyes, I turned my head so no one could ever see me fully in daylight. Now the hood made me feel slightly more invincible.
When I grew too tired to hold myself up on the motorcycle, I stopped at a trucker motel and ate vending machine chips on a rough bedspread. The TV set in my room would not turn on. I had almost convinced myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t need it, but I knew it’d be hours before I could sleep, and complete silence worsened my headaches. I asked the attendant downstairs for help, and with an abundance of loud sighs, he gave me a television set from another room. Victorious, I opened a beer and switched to a news station.
Milk prices rising. (I snickered, recalling my conversation with T?ma.) France, another country to leave the crumbling European Union. Then, suddenly, the faces of men I knew. Their hands cuffed.
Prime Minister T?ma himself, clothed in sweatpants, his hair unkempt, was being led out of his Barrandov villa by policemen. These images were from two days ago—history happening as I had been riding in circles.
Then, different footage from a different place appeared. This was downtown Prague, an office building modeled after a New York skyscraper. From within its depths the police led a man whose face I would have recognized in a lineup of millions. It was Him.
I felt my foot dampen and glanced down at the beer bottle I had dropped without knowing it.
According to the newscaster, the two men had been arrested, along with two other politicians and another businessman, for siphoning cash from phony government contracts. The media called them ringleaders of the scheme who, in the span of three years, had managed to steal seven hundred million crowns of taxpayer cash. Prime Minister T?ma, the self-professed savior of his nation, and the other man, supposedly a close childhood friend of T?ma’s and his phantom adviser throughout the years. The man, Shoe Man, whose Christian name was introduced to me for the first time through this cracked, dirty television screen—Radislav Zajíc.
I set the television on my knees as if I could reason with it to give me more detail. After their arrest two days earlier, the men had immediately posted bail and retreated to an undisclosed location. The image of their arrest flashed by again, and although there were signs of gray in the sleeked hair I had last seen as a child, it was him, inescapably. With all the cruelty of the modern news cycle, the story melted away and into a report on a new red panda born in Prague Zoo.