“She doesn’t smoke anymore,” I said. “Never mind. When is she coming back?”
“I don’t know. She jumped in her car. I went after her. She locked the doors and then the car wouldn’t start. So I just stood there, she fidgeted with the key, the car coughed, stalled. So she rolls down the window and asks me if I could give her a jump. I told her I couldn’t, I took the bicycle to work today, but I could grab one of the guys from upstairs. And then she just cried, and she told me she couldn’t handle any of this, that she didn’t know why she thought she could, that she couldn’t believe you left the life you had. She punched the steering wheel and turned the key again and the car started. Then she sped off, almost ran over my foot.”
I looked into the blue eye of my webcam, the last working lens capturing my likeness on the ship. Should I name it? It studied me so loyally. I tapped on it in acknowledgment.
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I don’t either, Jakub. Maybe she’s going through some things? I’ve got people calling her number on a loop. I’ve got a guy calling her mother. We’ll call some friends. But she just ran off. I guess that’s what I’m telling you. She just ran out of that lobby like Beelzebub was chasing her.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She knows how much I need to hear her.”
“Look, we’ll find her. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”
“She didn’t say anything else to you?”
“No.”
“You promise? I fucking swear if you’re lying, or if this is some kind of joke—”
“Jakub, your vitals are a mess. You need to try to focus on the mission right now, stuff you can control. We’ll find her. She’s just having a moment. It’s going to be all right.”
“Don’t tell me what I need right now.”
“Stay with the structure. What were you going to do after the call? Dinner?” Petr said.
“I was going to masturbate and read,” I said.
“Okay, well, I didn’t need to know all of that, but you should proceed with your day. Keep a clear mind.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Have a protein bar. Do some cardio. That always helps m—”
I ended the call and unfastened myself from the chair. I slid the tie off my neck and let it flicker down Corridor 3, then unbuttoned my shirt and ripped it off my back. Petr’s voice sounded through the intercom, the last resort of forced access into my world.
“You’re on a mission, Jakub. Focus. It’s not easy for Lenka. Let her do what she needs.”
I pressed the intercom button to reply.
“I survive on these calls. I sleep thanks to them. Now she can’t do it anymore? What does that mean?”
I craved Mozart, gummy bears, rum cake, the curve underneath Lenka’s breast where I could slide my fingers for warmth. The closest comfort on the ship was the remaining three bottles of whiskey the SPCR had reluctantly allowed me to bring on board. I tilted one of the bottles and dipped a finger inside, then spread the flavor along my tongue.
“Through these months and through these miles, Petr, I can’t shake the vulgar sense that somehow I got fucked on this.”
He was silent.
The nausea came with the usual urgency, as if an invisible hand squeezed my medulla and clawed at my stomach lining. She had left. She needed out, she said. Where was my wife, the woman I hallucinated about as I attempted to sleep vertically, the woman for whom I was to return to Earth? Where were the decades of dinners and illnesses and lovemaking and images of our coalescent lives? She had walked into the Space Program of the Czech Republic headquarters in her sunglasses and couldn’t stand to wait and talk to me. She had told a man she barely knew that she needed out. As if I no longer existed.
Lenka left me. The silences had led to this. I had read her exactly right.
She had left me once before, in those weeks around the anniversary of my parents’ deaths, when I hid out in my office for days at a time and left her alone after the miscarriage. But back then, my legs were bound by gravity and I was able to run after her to the metro station, to beg her in front of all the people waiting for their train, to tell her I’d never leave her alone again (yes, I saw the lie now, as I floated inside my vessel), and by the time the train arrived, she allowed me to kiss her hand and to take the suitcase, and we walked home, where we could begin the negotiation of repairing our battered union. There was no such possibility here. Every hour, I was thirty thousand kilometers farther away from her.
BY INSTINCT, I made my way to the lab chamber. Life made sense inside labs, it was measured and weighed and broken down to its most intimate essentials. I removed a plate of cosmic dust, an old sample, from its container, slid it underneath the microscope, and focused. It was the Space genome, the plankton of the cosmos, water turned to wine, and it whispered to me, revealed its content. Another sip of whiskey as I gazed at the milky crystal of silicates, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and that omnipresent vermin, H2O in solid form.
Yes, of course, this was why I had been put on Earth, to collect the pieces of universe and within them find something new, to throw myself into the unknown and bring humanity a piece of Chopra. What marriages I failed, what children I could not bring into being, what parents and grandparents I could not keep alive, it did not matter, for I was above all these earthly facts.
There was no consolation in it. I slid the dust plate back inside its container.
As I exited the lab, shirtless, again I spotted the shadow.
“Hey. You,” I said.
I wondered, not for the first time, why I was addressing an illusion.
The legs quivered, hesitated, then skittered around the corner. I pushed on. I heard the legs scratching along the ceiling, as if tree branches were scraping the vessel’s windshield. Behind Corridor 4, the shadow rested. There was nowhere else to escape. I was unafraid, which frightened me. I swam forward.
The smell was distinct—a combination of stale bread, old newspapers in a basement, a hint of sulfur. The eight hairy legs shot out of the thick barrel of its body like tent poles. Each had three joints the size of a medicine ball, at which the legs bent to the lack of gravity. Thin gray fur covered its torso and legs, sprouting chaotically, like alfalfa. It had many eyes, too many to count, red-veined, with irises as black as Space itself. Beneath the eyes rested a set of thick human lips, startlingly red, lipstick red, and as the lips parted, the creature revealed a set of yellowing teeth which resembled those of an average human smoker. As it fixed its eyes on me, I tried to count them.
“Good day,” it said.
Then:
“Show me where you come from.”
A Very Deep Fall