Eventually, an alarm on the central computer announced it was five o’clock in Prague. I stripped into a black T-shirt, turned on my electric shaver, and ran it over my cheeks, chin, and neck as the machine collected and trapped the scruff. A stray hair follicle in zero gravity could be as dangerous as a bullet on Earth. The stress of the impending call with Lenka had pushed on my intestines all day, but I’d held out to make sure I wouldn’t have to go twice. I entered the toilet through Corridor 3 and activated the air purifiers. The fans soaked up the stale air and replaced it with a vanilla-scented conditioned breeze. I strapped myself to the toilet and pushed as its vacuum pulled at my ass hairs and transported the waste out of sight. I read more about Crusoe—after all, the toilet was where my love for the book had originated. As a child, I’d suffered from yearly bouts of the intestinal flu, putting me out of commission for two or three weeks at a time. While I shat water, weakened from a diet of bananas and rice soaked in pickle juice, over and over again I read about Crusoe’s solitude. 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. This was the very same copy I’d read as a child, yellowed and torn, abused by the coffee stains of my great-grandfather, who had stolen the book from the house of a Nazi captain whose floors he was forced to scrub. Even through the vanilla scent, I caught the stink of an intestinal system grown discontent with irregular eating, stress, a diet of processed foods and frozen vegetables, and water that tasted of chlorine. I studied the unkempt bush of pubic hair that sprawled to the sides of my skinny legs. There used to be muscle there, definition carved by years of running and cycling, now lost to pale flab that my halfhearted cardio session on the treadmill couldn’t keep away. I wiped with wet disposable towels, pulled up my pants, and cleaned the sides of the toilet.
Afterward I dressed in a white button-up and a black tie, the same one I’d worn to my last romantic dinner on Earth. I removed the boxer briefs I’d been wearing for five days and exchanged them for a new pair. As an Earthman, I had always refused to go on a date without changing my underwear immediately before. I opened the compost chute and threw the underwear inside—another recent development in space travel, whereby a combination of bacteria and minor organic garbage was unleashed on the underwear, breaking them down until little remained. This ensured I did not have to sacrifice storage space or shoot my filthy knickers into the cosmos.
I looked myself over in the mirror. The formerly well-fitting button-up hung from my thin shoulders like a poncho. The tie saved it, kind of, but nothing could make my scarecrow arms and collapsed chest look particularly healthy. The thinness of my frame responded to the ache in my bones. The circles under my eyes spoke of the nightmares interrupting my sleep and fleeting visions of long, arachnid legs creeping within the darkened corridors, a secret I kept from my reports and therefore from Dr. Ku?ák’s thirst for madness. According to Central, I was doing fine. Good heartbeat, great results on psychological tests, despite the verbal dialogues I was having with myself before bed. Central knew best.
I floated into Corridor 4, an improvised lounge, and strapped myself to a seat facing the source of my connection and entertainment—the Flat, its large sleek screen responding flawlessly to touch, its Internet connection provided through satellite SuperCall (major provider of wireless services and mission sponsor). It boasted a database of ten thousand films, from The Maltese Falcon to Ass Blasters 3. I had limited access to social networking—all communication with the outside world had to go through Central, of course, then public relations, then the office of the president, then back to public relations—but I had the rest of the Web at my disposal, with its magnificent power to entertain any brain on any subject anywhere it could reach its omniscient fingers. I had to wonder: if we could only give a simple laptop to all the starving and the overworked, blanket the globe in the warmth of unlimited Wi-Fi, wouldn’t the starving and the overworking be so much more pleasant, unlimited streaming for all? In my darkest hours on JanHus1, when my eyes hurt too much to read and I was certain something was stalking me whenever I turned my back, I watched dozens of videos of Norman the Sloth, a lazy, always-smiling creature whose owner had the ingenious idea to dress him up in boot-cut jeans and a cowboy hat. I grinned at Norman’s sloth shenanigans and spoke to him under my breath. Norman.
Above the Lounge rested one of the last functioning surveillance cameras on the station, its blue dot of consciousness radiating proudly and watching me live.
Thirty minutes until connection time. I played solitaire, ran my hand over my cheeks to confirm I hadn’t missed a spot. I imagined Lenka getting dressed for me, pulling the smooth tights over her coffee & cream–colored legs, stopping just below the half-moon dimple on her lower back. I practiced my greeting:
Ahoj lásko.
Or, ?au beru?ko?
Perhaps casual, Ahoj Leni?
I spoke the words in different intonations—higher, lower, gruff, sensitive, semiwhisper, imitation of my own morning voice, Darth Vaderesque, childlike. None of it sounded right. What could I say next?
I love bacon now. I want to feed it to you with my fingers while we sit on a beach in Turkey or Greece. Nothing tastes quite right in Space. I crave the taste of you.
I would remind her of our best days. Of the day we drove out to the lake, smoked pot underneath oak trees, spoke about the places we would travel. We made out in the car and returned home just in time to eat chocolate croissants and fall asleep on a bed filled with crumbs, our chins stained with wine and saliva. Bodies sun-drained and calves coated in rough sand.
Or the day we snuck into the astronomical clock tower and fucked so hard we defaced a national treasure.
Or the evening we married, in the middle of a Moravian vineyard, buzzed and barefoot. We didn’t have to work for happiness then. It simply existed.
This was the one. A break to the streak of our distant, alien conversations. I just knew it. Maybe she’d even close the call booth privacy curtain again. Let me see the reflection of jazz club blue.
A shadow of hairy, arachnid legs peeked from beneath the Lounge counter.
“Not now,” I said, my voice shaking.
The legs disappeared.
Two minutes until the call. I closed all other windows and glared. Would she call early? Even a few seconds would amount to an endless stretch of hope. One minute. She would have to call first. I couldn’t seem desperate. Ten seconds late. I couldn’t give in. Car trouble? One minute late. I breathed deeply, the heart rate statistics on my wristwatch hastened. Two minutes. Fuck. I pressed the dial button.
Someone answered. The expected face of my wife morphed into a gray, stained privacy curtain pulled all the way behind an empty chair.
“Well?” I said to no one.
A large hand, knuckles sprouting patches of red hair, gripped the curtain. It hesitated. No body yet, but I knew this was Petr.
“Hi, yes, I’m waiting,” I said.
The hand pulled the curtain aside and finally I could see the entirety of Petr, mission leader, in his usual black T-shirt, the faded Iron Maiden tattoo on his forearm, a shaved head shiny with perspiration, a biker’s beard extending well to his chest. He sat down and closed the privacy curtain behind him. My pointer finger twitched.
“Jakub, looking sharp. How’s things?” he said.
“Fine. Lenka ready yet?”
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s in the report. Where is she? Today is Wednesday, right?”
“Yes, it’s Wednesday. How’s the nausea? Are the meds working?”
“It feels like you should be hearing me,” I said, arms folded. Petr tapped on the desk with his knuckles. For a while, we were silent.
“Okay,” Petr said, “all right. I’m an engineer. I’m not really trained for this. It’s chaos around here. We’re still trying to figure out what happened.”
“Happened?”
“So, Lenka came in a few hours early today. She fidgeted a lot, wore sunglasses inside. We put her in the break room with some coffee. A few of us tried to talk to her and she just kind of nodded at everything. Ku?ák spoke with her for a bit too. And then, twenty-five minutes before your call, she just got up and walked out, walked to the lobby, and our guy down there chased after her, asking what was going on, did she forget something, and she put a cigarette in her mouth and said she needed out.”