I ran downstairs and tossed the room key and cash for the spilled beer stain at the clerk. I rode back into the center of Prague, to the streets near my former university, a village of pubs and Internet cafés filled with intellectuals blowing off steam. How I used to fit in here—but now, as I entered one of their Wi-Fi lairs, the young minds of the future looked upon me with distrust, perhaps even with wrinkled noses. Did I smell? No time. Something was afoot, pieces of my life suddenly did not form a whole, or perhaps they fit together too tightly. I paid for two hours of computer time and sat down with a cup of coffee that cooled as I ignored it and stretched my fingers over the keys. A few taps, the humming of a processor, an instant name, social networking profiles, emails. Radislav Zajíc, his life laid out before me. A light breeze traveled through the café, scented with car exhaust and blooming trees.
Finally, I drank down half of the cold coffee. I wasn’t sure what to do with the name now. Perhaps I wanted to spend the rest of my life as an avenger, haunting Him, displacing Him. What else was there to do? Perhaps he was the only person who knew me anymore, who knew my life before the headlines, before my ascent and before death. Maybe I wanted to do nothing at all.
Business tycoon Radislav Zajíc and Prime Minister Jaromír T?ma: childhood friends, victims of communist persecution, post-revolution opportunists. Their focus had gone in different directions but they had remained close, Zajíc being T?ma’s number-one adviser and largest fund-raiser. Within one search, again I had a purpose on this Earth, a purpose contained inside a small white rectangle and its blinking cursor. The two men had built a lifelong coalition, with Zajíc working in his preferred shadow, raising capital through his investments in energy, real estate, and the importation of Western brands, while T?ma became the political apostle of the boundless market, his haircuts, silk ties, and influence paid for by Zajíc and his brethren. Now the shadows had been lifted by the ministry of interior, and the Internet was once again proving a court of the people, the Arena of Rome in which the crowds declared Thumbs down. The entire affair had already been summarized on Wikipedia, the apparatus of justice rushing ahead to imprison the men as people of the republic protested these high-level crooks in the streets of Old Town. I glanced outside. No protests at the moment, not currently revolutionary.
I finished the terrible coffee. Shoe Man and Prime Minister T?ma, boyhood friends. Where did I fit between the two? I slammed down the cup and logged into my old student email account, knowing the university allowed these accounts to exist indefinitely without oversight. I pasted Radislav Zajíc’s email—his private information leaked by a vigilante hacker group—into the recipient field. Sure, it wasn’t likely he’d be checking it much, with the venom citizens were bound to send his way. But I had to find him. Before the day I died, I would look Shoe Man in the face and ask my questions. What had he done? This was the first step.
I considered soliciting one of the students around me for a cigarette or a swig from their flask to calm me. Given the ban on caffeine during training and the mission itself, the single cup of coffee was already affecting me with a vengeance—making my hands shake and causing a variety of typos that prolonged the writing of only a few simple sentences:
You offered me gum and I said no.
You took our house. Stalin’s pigs, oink oink.
My grandfather died in a twin bed from IKEA. My grandmother died in a hospital bed after eating cheap cabbage soup.
What else have you done?
I’m here.
I sent the email.
Beside me, a young woman with a thick book in her lap looked around conspicuously and poured from a silver flask into her coffee cup, and I leaned over to ask if I could impose in exchange for my silence on the contraband. She answered that I could have a little, and that blackmail is impolite, and I thanked her and drank down my own spiked cup as I stared at my email inbox. Refreshed, stared some more, massaged my stiff knees. Students began to depart, and as the young woman next to me left, the barista began to wipe the counters and I noted the café was to close in a few minutes. Refreshed, refreshed—once a known astronaut, now reduced to a customer overstaying his welcome to check email. The barista tapped me on the shoulder. My two hours had passed—I was welcome to return tomorrow morning.
I hovered my cursor over the browser window’s red X. It seemed more red than usual. The color of a stop sign. I hesitated. Behind me, the barista’s deep exhale.
A new subject line appeared. The preposition “Re,” bold, thick with life. I opened the email. The barista tapped on my shoulder again.
Little spaceman. If it is really you, call me.
I took a two-hundred-crown bill from my wallet and offered it to the barista for some paper, a pen, and whatever coins he had on him. He hesitantly accepted the bill and brought me a pencil and a napkin. I scribbled down the number Shoe Man had sent. The coffee and alcohol in my bloodstream made my heart knock against my rib cage. I shut off the computer and thanked the barista thrice as he locked the doors. He shrugged, and I ran to the end of the street.
I slammed twenty crowns into a pay phone around the corner. Where do the coins go? I wondered. The concept seemed like pure science fiction. Tossing a piece of metal into another contraption of metal, and voilà, hearing a voice.
I dialed the number as the sun outside descended, creating an array of shadows within the booth. Around me the city wound down, humans with their business concluded going about the pre-leisure rituals of getting dinner ingredients or hiding out in a bar. My headache and bloated stomach reminded me that I had been living on junk food and beer. But what was a body, after all? Why keep it pretty for the dirt?
On the other end of the line, a click, followed by hesitation. Then a voice I knew, as if I were still hearing it through the keyhole in the closed door to my grandparents’ kitchen.
“Let me hear your voice,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“It is you.”
“What have you done?” I said.
“You’re not dead. This is your voice. Unless—”
“Answer me.”
“I want to see you.”
“What if I kill you?” I said.
“Something your grandfather would say. The number you’re calling from, it’s Prague.”
“I’ll be by the statue they built. Tomorrow. Noon.”
“You used to study in that park. That’s why I asked them to build it there. But maybe I’m just talking to myself here,” Zajíc said. “Going mad. Is it you?”
“It might be better for you if it weren’t,” I said, and hung up.
I found shelter in a shuttered bakery shop offered for sale and ate a slice of cold pizza for dinner. Soon an entrepreneur would take the place over and give it a new mission. The floors were prewar, when stonemasonry was still an art. They were cool to the touch and I spread a tablecloth underneath myself, looking upon the withered and sagging signs advertising the former menu. Millennia ago, the earliest people found that they could pulverize grains of wheat to form a putty which, upon baking, would redefine the species. Even now, with culinary pleasures having gone global and the world offering complex delicacies, what comforted me as I rested in the bakery was the image of a simple roll, golden on the outside with pure white dough on the inside. The crack you make with your thumb as you rip into it.