THE ALIEN CREATURE RAKES through the confines of my mind, gently but resolutely. It is seeing me. It is studying me to the very core of my genetic code. The tips of its legs strum on threads of memory, a rhythmic twitching within my brain matter. It shuffles through the history of my heredity, the origins of my nation, what brought both me and the name Jan Hus to the cosmos. The feeling is not entirely unpleasant. Together, we see Hus, a man of God whose name is engraved upon my ship. He preaches the words of John Wycliffe from a small cathedra in the public square of Univerzita Karlova. God’s people, he says, are made up of his common children, all pre-elected to be saved—they are not the visibly identified members of the Catholic Church. God’s favor can be neither bought into nor spoken from the lips of a golden-plated old man. The organization of religion is self-defeating, a trap for sin. Hus does not speak with hatred, but with the soothing composure of a prophet—a man who knows. And the people listen. Students gather with quills in hand and their hearts are moved. Bohemia must be freed from the tyranny of religious institutions.
The image changes. The creature has gotten hold of something else. It sees me falling.
I often try to forget the date, but the creature’s cerebral strumming has brought it to the center of my consciousness—March 26, the spring following the Velvet Revolution. I am ten years old. That morning, my parents take the cable car from their Austrian hotel in the Alps to Mount Hoher Dachstein. This vacation is to provide them with much-needed alone time before my father’s trial for the role he took on as a ranking member of the Party, namely the torture of suspects during interrogations. My parents risk adding to the charges by violating the court order to stay in the country, but my father says that marriage should not be subject to the whims of judicial systems. As my parents enjoy the view of the Alps and, I assume, pretend that the virginal mountaintops can distract them from the dread of punishment ahead, I spend time in St?eda with my grandparents. Grandpa takes me to the garden and we pick a basketful of sour apples, and some strawberries. I eat four apples, wash them down with a sip of cola, and finish with creamed strawberries for dessert. I collect spiders from the space underneath the rabbit coop and throw them to the vicious chickens, watch as they peck the arachnids apart leg by leg. Nobody wants to speak with me about the future. No one wants to tell me what will be done to my father, why my mother does not sleep and why her forehead sweat reeks of wine, when we can stop watching every news segment on every station as if the anchor’s hand could reach out at any moment and grab one of us by the throat. There is no space for my questions.
On the Monday my parents are to return, Grandpa takes the early train to Prague with me and walks me to school. All day I fantasize about the Austrian chocolates and fancy salamis my parents will bring back.
I wait in the school lobby, next to the doorman’s booth, for my parents to pick me up. At four o’clock, Mrs. ?kopková approaches me, hands folded behind her back, lips pale. In a quiet voice, she tells me that there has been an accident. My parents cannot, presently, pick me up. When will they come? I ask. Mrs. ?kopková apologizes to me, and I ask why, and she asks whether I need something. My grandfather will send a taxi to recover me. I’d like some chocolate, I say.
She puts on her coat. Ten minutes later, she is back with a Milka bar in her hand. The label shows the picture of the purple Milka cow grazing in a pasture in front of the Alpine mountains. Mrs. ?kopková apologizes again. The cable car collapsed, she says before she leaves. Your parents… The doorman glances at me over his crossword puzzle.
The driver picking me up is an old man who smells of pancakes. His hands shake as he drives. He makes the two-hour trip to St?eda, turning the radio volume up when I ask what he knows about a cable car falling down a mountain in the Alps. My grandfather awaits us in front of the gate. He gives the old man money and takes my suitcase. In my hand, I hold an empty chocolate wrapper. Grandpa’s gray whiskers reach to his lips. The skin sinks deeply into his cheeks, and his eyes are barely open. Inside the house, Grandma drinks slivovitz and smokes cigarettes at the table. I have never seen her smoke before. ?íma sleeps underneath her legs, wags his tail lightly when he sees me, but then again closes his eyes and exhales shallow breaths, like he knows this is no time for pleasure. Grandma kisses me on the lips. I go to the couch and lie down and their voices reach me through the rhythm of that damned clock, always nagging, asserting itself harshly over the tranquility of smoke.
My grandparents take turns explaining. Earlier that morning, my parents boarded the cable car to get to the top of Mount Hoher Dachstein. I stare at the ceiling and remember my father’s enthusiastic lectures on the workings of cable cars. Aerial tramway ropes are made of dozens of individual steel strings with hemp running through the middle. I imagine my father’s lips moving behind the tram glass, re-explaining this to my mother as she admires the albino behemoths ahead, nearly lost in the morning mist. Somewhere down the line, a string pops. And another. And another. The tram is suspended in midair as Earth’s physics race to catch up. In my imagining of the event, influenced by watching Laurel and Hardy every night before the evening news, the car falls very slowly, and the bodies slide back and forth as they grab on to each other, until they are forced into a dying waltz, ladies and gentlemen locked arm in arm, exclaiming vintage expressions like “Oh dear” and “I never.” But this serenity of initial suspension—this antigravity waltz—is interrupted as the falling car gains speed. A gentleman accidentally touches a woman’s midriff, and she slaps him across the cheek with a leather glove. The car wobbles and its occupants hold on to each other’s ties and skirts, pulling off pants and wigs, the slapstick shenanigans of the silent film era. I’m not sure how these cast members die, whether their bones burst through their flesh, whether they die on impact, spines and skulls thrown over the sharp edges of black rock.