Friday, slight insanity and composition of songs: A scratch you can’t itch. A scratch you can’t itch. Love is that scratch you can’t itch. Scratch you can’t itch, oh oh.
During the first few weeks of my deployment, Lenka and I would overstep the conversation limit of one hour and thirty minutes allotted by the space program. Lenka would close the dark blue privacy curtain and take her dress off. The first time, she wore brand-new lingerie she had just picked up that morning, black lace underwear and a black bra with pink edges. The second time, she wore nothing at all, her body clothed only in the gentle blue hue reflecting along her skin. Petr, the mission operator, allowed us to take as much time as we needed. There wasn’t much logic to the limitations, anyway—I could chat with Lenka all day long and the automatic trajectory of the shuttle would go on uninterrupted. But the world needed this narrative, Mr. and Mrs. Spaceman’s tragic separation. What kind of hero gets to chat on the phone?
During the past few calls, however, I had become thankful for the time limits. Lenka would grow desperately quiet before our first hour had expired. She would speak softly and call me by my first name, instead of the variety of pet names we had devised over the years. There was no discussion of nudity or physical longing. We did not whisper our wet dreams. Lenka scratched the edge of her right ear as if she was having an allergic reaction, and didn’t laugh at any of my jokes. Always tell jokes to an audience, never to yourself, Dr. Ku?ák had advised. Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness. Good advice, though difficult to practice in a vacuum. Lenka was the only audience I cared about. The emptiness of Space could not match the despair I felt when her laughter gave way to static silences.
Searching for the source of this decay, I’d been obsessing over my last night and morning on Earth with Lenka as I performed the menial tasks aboard JanHus1. I tested filtering systems, looking to squash any bacteria that might mutate unpredictably within the cosmic conditions and infect me with a vengeance unknown on Earth. I studied data to ensure the smooth recycling of oxygen (provided by a tank of water I often wished to dip myself into, like a careless vacationer plunging his body into the sea of a sunnier country), and I recorded the depletion of supplies. Around me, the shuttle hummed and cooed in its droning baritone, unaware, carrying me to our joint destination without asking for advice. I checked needlessly for deviations from the trajectory—the computer was a better explorer than I could ever be. If Christopher Columbus, that celebrated phony, had possessed a GPS as sophisticated as mine, he could have reached any continent he desired with wine in hand and feet elevated. Clearly, the thirteen weeks of the mission had offered much spare time to obsess over my marriage.
Three days before my deployment, Lenka and I had gone to Kuratsu, a favorite Japanese restaurant of ours in the Vinohrady district. She had worn a summer dress with yellow dandelions and a new kind of perfume, the scent of cinnamon and oranges soaked in red wine. I wanted to crawl under the table and nuzzle my face in her lap. She said that my sacrifice was noble and poetic, fitting these abstractions between powerful chews of her tuna tartare. Our lives were to become a symbol. I squeezed lime over my noodles and nodded at her words. Her voice spoiled the ecstasy of my cosmic exploration—I wasn’t sure whether the entirety of the universe was worth leaving her behind, with her morning rituals and her perfumes and her violent outbursts of panic in the middle of the night. Who would wake her to say that she was okay, that the world was still whole? A camera flash blinded us. The spices burned along the edges of my tongue and for the first time, I did not know what to tell my wife. I dropped the fork. I apologized to her.
“Sorry,” was how I put it. Just like that, a single word thrown in her general direction. It echoed through my mind afterward. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She stopped eating too. Her neck was slender and her lips so ambitiously red. This wasn’t my sacrifice—it was ours. She was allowing me to go. She who had napped on my shoulder while I pored over astrophysics textbooks and tests from my students. She who had ecstatically dropped her cell phone into a fountain when I told her I had been selected for the mission. Mortality was not discussed, only the opportunity, the honor. She did not comment on the negative pregnancy tests filling our wastebasket while I spent my days getting used to the lack of gravity in the SPCR training pool, coming home with muscles cramped and speech reduced to “Hungry, sleep.”
I never found out whether she accepted my apology. We picked up our forks again and finished our meal to the silent company of onlookers’ cameras collecting our likenesses. We kissed and drank sake and spoke of traveling to Miami after my return. Finally, we took our own picture of this last dinner on Earth, and posted it on Facebook. Forty-seven thousand likes in the first hour.