Meta-metaphysics: October 2022

The Inertia of Entropy

Chapter 1: the x and the y

You may know me as the distant cousin of Boris, or, if you didn’t bother with his adventures, as the story unreported of a promising math academic who disappeared from Olomouc University. You might ask, if it’s unreported, then how would we…. know. Looking for lacunae? Playing on intuition? A we’ve-seen-this-movie-before? Questions I tend to enjoy, despite the circumstances. I never wanted Olomouc to define me in the first place.

I’m writing in Czech right now—my English is so-so—but Boris has agreed to translate; he promised not to extenuate or impose his style (like those annoying parentheticals), and I assured him that I’d write without filtering for his fancies, whatever they may be. I perused his loopy tale, for the record, in fairness to his willingness to work with mine. And by ‘work’, I mean the unpaid variety. He’s still grasping at straws to stay in the country and I’m still hand-to-mouth advocating for butterflies. Not what either of us had in mind for getting through our twenties, but the world as it is, I guess we’re alright.

He thought it would be cool to have similar titles—My Cocoon for the butterfly bit, like My Leash for his unruly dogs. Or even this step further: Free from my Cocoon to follow the imagined End of my Leash. Fact is, I’m not a caterpillar aspiring to be a butterfly. Can’t speak for whatever incarnations Boris dreams of. He’s kind of crazy about canaries lately, but probably that’s not for me to say.

No, as much as I’m fine with analogies, symbols of resurrection, metamorphoses like Greta Samsa stretching her body to exit the tram at the end of Kafka’s nightmare, they don’t touch my soul that much. Math and physics are at my core, no matter what degree I could have earned for the academic circle-jerk that, yeah, includes women but… not me anymore. You could say I’ve changed my inertia from Newton’s “uniform motion in a right line”—however wrong it felt—to my present “state of rest”. And yes, that does sound rather like a cocooned existence. But that’s where ‘entropy’ comes in, between the uncertainty of outcomes and an equilibrium that requires a closed system—more than what a cocoon can contain.

The mathematics behind these laws and axioms are worth doing, as much as we take such processes for granted. Carnot’s theorem, two hundred years ago, has everything to do with the efficiency of your car’s engine today, not that ‘car’ comes out of his name per se. My direction at Olomouc was more toward the reversed Carnot cycle—refrigeration, practically speaking, though I was groomed for the theory alone. Maybe they didn’t want to see me in overalls with a ratchet in hand.

There’s reverse entropy, too, beyond what Carnot conceived, and that is what all of us cling to, consciously or not.

“So why, Amálka,” my father asked again the other day, “couldn’t you just cling onto another semester or two?”

“Because it wasn’t reverse entropy,” I told him, more or less. “It was chaos in the form of calm.”

“Covid-related? Like we’re hearing about—the toll on mental health?”

“No—being in quarantine was actually pretty great. I mean, not that any of us wanted the thing in the first place, but…. If you weren’t going to die, the time to focus on personal interests was, for me, a gift from heaven.”

Dad knew I didn’t lean on other people much, so he nodded at my ‘time to focus’. What he didn’t buy into, though, was “personal interests. Plural. Like, more than the math itself?”

“You’re doing this again, Dad,” I narrowed my eyes in pretend disdain. “I’m not going to tell you about my love life.”

“That’s… not what I was fishing for,” he replied, then went inside to trade an empty beer for another always stocked on the second shelf of the fridge.

A word about Jiří, my father. He’s a good man who’s dying for things to do. Since retiring from Kladno steelworks, he can’t seem to reconfigure the routines of getting up early, packing a four-item lunch, factoring pub time that won’t get him stopped by the highway police. He even tried to convince Mom to sell the villa she had always known, here in Ořech, for an apartment in Kladno, arguing that the extra cash from the sale would finance a weekend house somewhere they otherwise couldn’t afford. Mom worked at the elementary school in Ořech and stuck to her guns that no weekend house would outdo our spacious backyard and the good neighbors she’d always known. As a compromise, though, she suggested they take in a lodger or two for our unused basement and, with that rent money, they were able to buy a small cottage in Libušín, just west of Kladno and buffered from its industry by a formidable forest and, as icing on the cake, a fishing pond that Dad would frequent more than the pub.

A few of those lodgers were like older siblings to me, which, as an only child, made my upbringing a little less lonely. A few were the opposite. One, when cornering me in the treehouse and laughing at my scream at him to get away, was practically killed by my father, coming from nowhere, it seemed, to throw this creep y = -0.75x + 3 meters into the backyard.

Mom was basically right about her instincts. I didn’t reveal to her anything more about Olomouc than I told Dad, but I think she guessed my tacit reasoning. “Helenko,” I heard my father hiss the first night of my return—he thought I was asleep—“we can’t just… not persuade her to reconsider.”

“That’s a double negative, Dear. And what we can do is trust she’s thought this through, like always.”

“But she’s coming on twenty-seven, and her tuition benefits will all go up in smoke.”

“Be that as it may,” Mom weighed her words in an apparent effort to be done with them, “our daughter is more valuable than any system, especially when it comes to governmental conditions. She’ll be fine,” she cut off Jiří’s grumble, “and maybe better for what we have not imagined yet.”

That notion presumed I had done some imagining myself, the exercise of which was better for my insomnia than counting sheep.

While there haven’t been any lodgers in our home since my return (and Boris, by the way, would have been welcome to stay with us for free if he had been more forthcoming), one that had been like a brother to me remains in regular contact. To, as a matter of fact, enabled my butterfly job; he’s worked on other restoration projects and, because I told him everything about Olomouc, he didn’t want me “in a state of limbo”—his words.

“Limbo, like, where unbaptized babies go?” I sorta teased.

“More like second-guessing your own status, as if you have to answer for anything.”

“‘State’ and ‘status’ make me cringe,” I said, clunking my coffee cup too hard against the unassuming table at the only Ořech café. “I mean, it’s nothing I ever wanted to be a part of—systems of subjectivity.”

“You’d rather fit systems of objectivity, then,” he wondered, “which, no offense, sounds maybe even more cringeworthy. Amál, your world is brilliant in the brainpower you bring to it. Creative energy, too—you never allowed tech tools to lead you by the nose. Remember that puzzle you gave me about any three-digit number multiplied by 13, then 11, then 7? And you’d get… what was it, again?”

“You’d get a six-digit number repeating the original three. Anything multiplied by 1001—the sum of those primes—will have reflective properties. And I got that from a meme, so… not my own wherewithal.”

“But I loved doing it, and swimming in your explanation. Prime numbers, was it?”

Not being in the mood for this, I lapsed into sarcasm that never suited me. “Let’s just say it didn’t crack the code on the Reimann hypothesis.”

“Which is?”

Ugh. “Matt Haig’s book, The Humans, spells it out. Or—I know that sounds dismissive—he plays with it better than I can. I’m…” looking at the ceiling, “not as talented as my mom in such ways of framing things. I’d never do well in the classroom.”

Tomaš wasn’t buying that, especially as this job with the butterflies would entail a measure of interfacing with school children on a near-daily basis. “And I’ve read Haig’s novel, actually. You are more human than his witty attempt. More down to earth.”

More a caterpillar than a butterfly, I might have said. We touched upon other topics through the hour, flitting a bit to avoid the sense of an intervention. I wouldn’t mind if that’s what he was providing, but I could see he didn’t want it to come off that way. Not at least until the dust settles, implied his blinking eyes.

The dust that’s down to earth, I would have liked to tell Tomaš, is the detritus of volcanos and windswept soil and skin cells dying to get away. I’m more inclined to cosmic dust and what seems to float more freely until fractals spiral to an infinite contingency of polygons. I was gifted a calico kitten for my 11^th birthday and named her Mandelbrot to love her random patterns more. Mom approved, having given me a children’s biography on Benoit Mandelbrot the year before; Dad demurred, suggesting that she’d be teased by the neighborhood cats for trying to be so heady. “Such a much,” he even tried, in his heavily accented English.

Mandelbrot died the winter before I left for Olomouc. One of those naïve curls onto a parked car’s engine, then clinging on for half the town’s length as the driver rushed for cigarettes or something else as urgent. I would have brought Mandelbrot to university, I think, but that’s a hypothetical that can never be tested. What she would have felt about the move is also anyone’s guess. For the first couple years I had roommates there, one of whom happened to be allergic to cats. I lived alone thereafter and thought about procuring a rescue pet—it to rescue me from too much number-crunching. Not loneliness, per se, though that must also be the case when one imagines the manic counter of stars in The Little Prince. To be sure, friendships budded there and some have stayed in touch, like Lara, who called me at dawn the other day to blast in my ear “Maggie May”, reminding me that “it’s late September and I really should be back at school.”

Actually late October by now—a beautiful ‘Babí léto’ that I gather won’t translate well into ‘Indian Summer’—and I’ve received various modes of communication from a dozen others questioning my absence, underscoring my obligations, all but begging me back. None yet from him, but I have to think that’s tactical. Playing hard to get and harder to pin down: the urbane professor with the elbow patches uninvolved with student titillations, if bound to be their star. Polaris, he’d assume—the handle tip of the Little Dipper that is Olomouc, pouring precious stardust into the Big Dipper of Prague and its Charles University.

I left in May and returned once in summer to collect a chemodan of stuff, pay a petty dorm fee, meet with Lara to shadowdance the truth, which wasn’t even clear to me. He hadn’t laid a hand on me, they’d say, or prove it if he did. The problem wasn’t mine, I’d say, or one I didn’t court. The ball is in your court, Amálka—put him on defense. But I’m not into sports, beating someone for a sense of victory.

Kristýna, my best friend growing up, does not agree. “You got me into hockey in the first place,” she said, “or your dad did, at least.” It’s true. Dad liked going to games of the 1^st division Kladno Knights, always hoping for some company. When buddies from the factory weren’t available, he’d charm me into giving up a Friday evening or Sunday afternoon to join him, spending more than he should have on stadium snacks and fanware. He’d encourage anyone else—Mom wanted nothing to do with the whooshes and clacks on ice—and increasingly, that meant Kristýna from a couple blocks over. We sometimes skated figure 8s and such at the Ořech outside rink, but during our teenage years the municipality didn’t flood it, winters being too warm. A tiny pond between the village and the butterfly sanctuary would occasionally entice, yet by this time in our lives, I was head-in-many-books and she was a 3^rd-line left wing for the Kladno women’s team. By now she’s 1^st-line and a national team player, just missing out at the Beijing Winter Olympics because of “stupid Covid! I mean, what are the chances?”

Pretty high, around then. Beyond my math, anyhow.

“And now I’m pregnant,” she told me yesterday, when we met for a beer after one of her games.

“What? I mean—how? with whom?” As close as we were, I hadn’t known of any boyfriends or even if she were attracted to men. She joked here and there about the banalities of locker-room talk, but it was hard to read where she personally stood in terms of romantic relationships. And the notion of motherhood certainly never came up. Then again, I was in Olomouc from age 19 on, when ‘adult’ interfacing might have carved out a difference. 19, for the record, is a centered hexagonal number (or ‘hex number’ for short): the way two rings of dots form concentric hexagons around a single, central dot. I’d draw it out here, but rather expect you’d want to do so yourself. Start with the skeleton of a snowflake, then add dots to connect arm-to-arm-to-arm-to-arm-to-arm-to-arm.

“With whom?” she inflected, as if she hadn’t considered the question herself. She said a name and then a vague context, but all the while I was thinking about the cross-checks she had made in the game, equal to those made against her. The blastula must have bounced around in her womb, fearful of growing into a fetus. When I asked in more sensitive terms, she shrugged, took another chug of her beer, and said: “nobody else knows about this. I’m hoping it just disappears.”

“But…” I was nonplussed. On the other hand, the hour further that we talked was about her dilemma, not mine. None of which ‘just’ disappears.

My doctoral advisor had sought me out when I first came to the Olomouc campus—apparently he did the same to every top-scorer for the admissions exam—and then, for the drudgery of the undergrad coursework, by and large he disappeared. He lent clues to his interest in more-than-mathematics, though, when he tried to joke that 19-year-olds were in their ‘sexy prime’—a differential of six from the previous prime. While I could guess his pun, he thought it clever to explain: “having completed 13 years of preparatory education, the real deal begins for you now.” A cousin prime, he continued, is a differential of four, and so: “I’ll see you when you are more in your prime, at 23.” And to a surprising extent, he was telling the truth. I’m sure he knew my progress at age 20, 21, 22…, but there were no consultations or even messages of encouragement to continue on past the core.

On the other hand, I attended some open lectures and may have caught his eye—hard to know, exactly, as his mannerisms were to rub his forehead with his left hand and wheel an erasable marker with his right, variously contacting the whiteboard and jousting some rhetorical challenge to the sloped lecture hall, attended by no less than 300 nerds and normals alike. He was not trying to come off like a rock star, but de facto did with the rapt crowd. I was there to take notes, but it was impossible not to see that many showed up without paper or pens or a TI-84. I even asked in selective whispers why they had come, if not to take notes.

“Just to be open to genius.”

“To wade in these waves and then float.”

“Like osmosis.”

Sounds like a cult, I wanted to say, but refrained. I’ve been told at every stage of my life to loosen up, take myself less seriously. My nickname at scout camp was Šroub, which sadly translates to ‘a screw’ (noun and not verb, though attaching the suffix –ovat would accomplish that trick). The way a young scout gets knighted, as such, is through something the older scouts see by association, bandy about in nods and winks, and then announce at a campfire made for the purpose. “Amálko, you are now Šroub”—and even though we’re not supposed to beg ‘why?’, the reason would follow: “you’re committed to cause and hold down the fort… but sometimes you’re wound pretty tight.”

I’ve lost touch with most of those scouts, but wonder how Bunny and Bathplug and Cauliflower and Smear feel about their names in retrospect. What resonates or not in childhood Czech may ripple over our bowl-like borders: you’d also regard them differently as Králíček and Špunt and Květák and Namazat… and Šroub, as their loose screw campmate. We were grouped one summer as teepee #5, also nicknamed ‘Pisa’ for its lean, like Mickey Mouse’s sorcerer cone. It was the butt of many jokes—no one actually tried to replace the warped poles that supported the muslin tarp—but my occasional references to Galileo fell on deaf ears. It’s hard to make freefall humorous, especially in a vacuum, which doesn’t care if you’re a feather or a cannonball.

‘Feather’, for the record, is what I would have wanted for my scout name, or ‘Little Feather’ even better. ‘Peříčko’ sounds so pretty in Czech. A nested fledgling lullabied and tucked in for the night.

A word about my mom. She wanted more of me—i.e., other fledglings in the nest that weren’t forthcoming—but she never made me feel like I was not enough. It was a balancing act, for sure. She longed to be involved with everything I did, from studies to scouts to the hope that I’d be popular; on the other hand, she inculcated a sense of independence. The August before my graduation to 3^rd grade, she gave me twelve hundred crowns and bus fare to get to the Zličín shopping mall for school supplies: lined notebooks, an army of pencils and pastels, new gym shoes, protractors, compasses and that sort of stuff. Whatever I didn’t spend could combine with a fresh thousand crowns she’d give me for Christmas, when I’d solo to the mall again for the chance to place gifts under our tree. “If you’re going to do this, Heleno,” I overheard my father say the following year, listening from the shadows upstairs, “at least let’s give her a mobile phone.”

“No,” she hushed back, “not yet. Kids need to read signs and ask questions, not fabricate an insular control.”

Jiří mumbled disagreement, if usually deferring to his wife’s judgment. “I don’t mind us raising such a mature kid,” expecting, I guess, Mom to fill in the consequent clause. When she didn’t, he continued with zero idea I was eavesdropping: “but maybe she’s gonna get too much adulthood, too soon.”

“Like?” Mom wanted to know, “learning to budget and manage money?”

“Like feeling she’s gotta face things alone, even when good folks are there.”

Mom clunked a pan out of the drawer near the stove (as far as I could imagine). She liked making tomorrow’s soup before her bedtime. “It’s not mutually exclusive,” she quietly asserted. “Notice I included that she should ask questions. To real people. Then read their responses to take things from there.”

I’m sure I asked more questions, then, the second year of venturing out, even though logic would suggest that I already knew what to do. I had to find out what ‘inquiry’ meant, if not just to procure information. 150% older—and the same age as Helena when she carried me in her womb—I still have trouble with inquiry’s intent, as if it were a tapeworm hibernating in my gut.

Or maybe they’re butterflies. Tomaš telephoned to ask how they were doing. I told him, of course, that this late in the season it would be like looking for stars in the daytime. He knew fully well the pasture program did not have a hangar of sorts to harbor butterfly hibernation and, even if it did, I’d have little to do otherwise. About a hundred head of sheep, goats and cows grazed the protected meadow, and my role of rotating their enclosed spaces and supplementing their diets with grocery store cast-offs didn’t require more than a few hours a day. Local farmers would take them in during winter months, and then I’d be effectively unemployed. I guess Tomaš had it in mind, when he secured this job for me, that I’d be back in Olomouc by now.

“Want to drive me to Příbram?” I asked him, virtually the opposite direction.

“Why? What’s in Příbram?”

“Hockey. Kristýna’s team, visiting theirs.”

He knew who Kristýna was, but played a little dumb. “You mean the one who never said hello when she saw me at your house?”

“She didn’t say hello to any of the lodgers. I think she viewed you all with some suspicion. Especially after the treehouse incident.”

Tomaš had been thoroughly vetted by my folks after a half-year hiatus of any new lodgers (a half-year sacrifice of rental income), and his genuinely good nature soon restored our faith. “Yeah,” he seemed to nod over the phone, “that was… a proper reason to be doubtful.”

“Wait, you’re supposed to be the doubting Thomas. Not the creator of doubt in others.”

“Especially if they’re named ‘Kristýna’, I suppose. But even Christ had to have some doubts, don’t you think?”

I probably grunted, not to completely ignore the question. “So,… Příbram?”

Since the game was the following day, Tomaš came over for lunch and visited a bit with Helena and Jiří, who surreptitiously worked like hell not to betray their hopes he’d become my boyfriend. Then again, we were the brother and sister they had more enduringly hoped for. People can’t hope for too much, especially with the same variables.

On the drive down, we talked about Olomouc. I told Tomaš that Kristýna doesn’t really know what happened, so if we’ll chat after the game… “Let’s not bring it up, okay?” Another thing not to bring up, I continued, was her pregnancy—though that was the reason I felt pulled to this event, like collecting data points.

“Okay,” Tomaš agreed. “So, I should just… talk about the weather?”

I stayed silent for a few minutes, looking out the passenger window at the Brdy Mountains. For the record, the weather was pretty good, maybe nondescript. But it hurt to think about: the outliers of topics heavy and light dominating everything.

He apologized and, after some thought, asked about the rules of hockey. “Offsides, for instance—I don’t get it.”

I heard my dad’s voice in my own: “it’s like football, but more interesting. The blue line is fixed, so an offensive player needs to hover there before the puck crosses. And if the puck goes backwards past that line, all five players need to regroup behind it if they have another chance at an offensive set.”

“A lot to coordinate, then. With everyone on the same page, as such.”

“And like they’re all speedreading, too.” I described Kristýna’s position at left wing and how she’d have to skate across that line countless times a game. “She’s especially good behind the net, by the way, so she covers more territory than anyone else out there.”

Tomaš took this in and ventured to ask about the ‘forbidden release’ rule: “isn’t that when the puck goes behind the goal?”

“The rest of the world calls it ‘icing’: when the defence flings the puck down the entire rink—past the opposite goal—to try to catch their breath.”

“Sounds smart. So why is it ‘forbidden’?”

“Because it’s a cop-out. They have to work their own offensive strategies in an organized fashion. And if they release the puck in such a haphazard manner, the consequence is that those players have to stay on the ice while the other team can change their rotation and catch their breath.”

“Which is ironic.”

“Yes. It isn’t easy in hockey to rest without putting in the deliberate work.”

Tomaš reflected for a half-minute, then risked going heavy: “are you kind of icing it concerning Olomouc?”

The game, when we found our seats (the arena all but empty of fans), was textbook in terms of balanced attacks, penalties preventable and not, good shots on goal and a 90% save rate from each keeper. To say Kristýna played well didn’t encourage much clapping, but I did so anyway. Tomaš was more refrained, lost in what was going on, or maybe lost another way. Halfway through the third period, the score tied 4-4, a Kladno defender inadvertently sent the puck over the plexiglass in the section where we sat. I went for it less as a souvenir—Dad had grabbed plenty a puck for me over the years—and more to toss it back for recycled play. The ref didn’t accept the offer, though, so I fidgeted with it through the remaining minutes.

That puck’s futile release from the rink constituted a 2-minute ‘delay of game’ penalty for Kladno, now bereft of their best defender. Kristýna was sent in by the coach to be a nuisance for Příbram’s power play: a lot of hot potato pursuit for no chance to score herself. And while ‘taking one for the team’ would be characteristic for her grit, she was clearly struggling to shift from one striker to another. When she finally intercepted a pass, she flung it down the length to the other goal line and lurched to the bench for a line change. Tomaš elbowed me: “isn’t that icing?”

“No,” my mouth said mechanically, as my mind was on how exhausted Kristýna must have been. “Not when the weak team on a power play does it.”

“Fair enough.” He wanted to ask something else, I sensed, but didn’t. “Last call for a beer,” he said instead, having paced one per period to this point. “Want one?”

“Coke, please. Looks like I’m driving.”

“Nah, Amálko, I’ll be alright,” he lifted himself out of the plastic seat and disappeared into the tunnel.

My scream brought him back a minute later. The power play had just ended and, with too little rest, Kristýna’s line returned for an offensive push, inspired by their penalty ‘kill’, as Dad always liked to say in English. The set up was routine: center to right wing to Kristýna swinging around the back of the net for a pass to find the cutting center again. Just as she directed the puck toward that target, two Příbram defenders smashed into her like the jaws of a crocodile, leaving her to crumble. She didn’t see what would become the winning goal, her third total point for the game.

“What, we’re up now?” Tomaš shouted toward my own rush to the plexiglass. As I was starting to wobble, he dropped the drinks to prop me up. Having fainted once before in my life, I knew that this was what was happening, despite some dram of willpower to fend it off. Clutching the puck might have bought me another second of consciousness…. Hard to know.

The face I saw, coming to, was not friendly. I gathered, eventually, that he was the doctor for Příbram’s team, annoyed that I’d slur a request to have Kladno’s team doctor instead. Then it occurred to me that Kristýna would need attention more—I hoped so, at least. Or… that her body and baby were resilient in the hit. No, not that, either. I didn’t know what to hope.

Tomaš spoke with raised eyebrows and hushed assurances to the doctor that he’d be sure to drive me to the local hospital, as it was evident they wouldn’t call an ambulance for me. And I didn’t want one, really, feeling that its trip for me would deprive a true trauma its due expediency. Like Kristýna’s, maybe. “Is she okay?” I pressed, reluctant to leave the stadium without a meaningful chance to talk with her. Before the game we had exchanged predictable pleasantries, including a shy nod to Tomaš as a first-time fan.

“She went to the bench on her own power,” he said, “and then walked to the locker room like she’d rather be back on the ice.”

“Did she look over here, at the scene I must’ve made?”

“You didn’t make a scene, don’t worry.”

But that wasn’t the point, and I wanted to scream his don’t worry back into his buzzed brain. We weaved our way via Googlemap to the Příbram hospital and its low-key emergency room. A couple of orderlies traded pokes at my arm and torso and eyeballs to shrug their shoulders as if I were a nothingburger, which, admittedly, I was trying to relay to them. Tomaš, to his credit, insisted that a bona fide doctor have the final call to release me in good faith, whatever that would mean in medical-speak.

“You’re good to go,” that senior doctor said, but clutched Tomaš’ arm to remind him that he wasn’t good to drive back to Prague.

“Well,…” Tomaš barely argued, figuring that a cop would have to be the one to give such a flag—green, yellow, or checkered. Funny, that: an officer happened to be at the sliding doors with a breathalyzer in hand and an ultimatum: Uber back to Prague (buses long since done by now) or check in at the Hotel Jurkos, implying it was the only place to stay in town. Defiant, Tomaš drove to the Hotel Belvedere—the officer escorting him from behind—to discover that, in fact, they were booked to the gills. With a I told you so, the cop trailed us to the green neon of the Jurkos and their double rooms with single beds smashed together, as if to factor in the ambiguity of guests like us.

“You want the window side, or…” Tomaš mumbled, not at all chuffed by this situation. He had been up for the chance that my dad might have driven down to bail me out of this unlikely jail. I had messaged him vaguely, but he responded in a selfie of him and his ‘mates’ at a Bubeneč pub (the same, I think, that Boris in his story found him at). A different message to my Mom had come back with a wink, as if she understood me to have wanted the evening to end this way.

“I don’t care,” I responded to Tomaš, who took the window side as if it would serve a natural alarm clock. The box-frame border between the beds would serve as a barrier between our accidental sex, I joked, and he blushed something incomprehensible. I was glad he wasn’t going to risk the two-hour drive, wishing the law weren’t the thing to mandate as much.

We watched the flat-screen TV to justify our downtime. Though I was sported-out for the day, the alternatives of 24-hour news or idiotic nostalgia shows would not do; we landed on a preview of the Qatar World Cup for what a Czech audience would have to sour-grape, not having qualified for this desert mirage. Besides a bunch of talking heads making their predictions around a glossy studio table, the footage from the host country showed a lot of camels, harnessed and free—presumably to make some comment on the migrant laborers who scraped these ‘cutting edge’ stadiums into eye candy. The architectural trick was to make each of the eight venues unique while casting enough a thought on how to keep the grass unseemly green, the hidden bathrooms clean, the air-con blowing at an undistracting speed. They could have used me, I’m sure, for some of the maths.

When the show turned to replays of hard fouls, botched headers, yellow and red-card entropy, I turned it off. Getting late, anyway—the pub downstairs was closed, thank God—and so we prepped for bed. “Want some apple slices,” Tomaš offered from his grab at the mini-market near the hospital, “or another rohlik?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”

He made a cup of tea from the tawdry provision in the room that probably upgraded this hotel’s status from two stars to three. “Keep hydrated, at least. Can I put it over here?”

“Sure. But what about yours?”

He smiled. “I don’t want to wet the bed. Besides, I feel like one of those camels.”

I wasn’t sure to indulge this, but…. “You feel bound to circumstances you can’t control?”

He turned out the light, so I couldn’t exactly see if he was scratching his head. But his response appeared to do the opposite. “Just that I’m watered up enough for the journey with the Sandman.”

“Sandman?”

“Yeah—sweet dreams and all that stuff.”

Suitable to slumber with such a tucking in, I should have simply agreed. For more than a minute I contemplated camels and how they were facing the night a time zone or two earlier. The word in Czech is interesting: ‘velbloud’ takes a prefix of ‘big’—the ‘vel’ like the whale that is velryba, a big fish (notwithstanding its mammalian properties). But the ‘bloud’ is not so obvious. As a noun, it may work backwards from the verb ‘bloudit’, which means to wander aimlessly. A camel, then, for early utterers of Czech, was a big, lost hobo. Maybe thankful to be employed in organized journeys, like the one to Bethlehem. Or this peninsula in the Persian Gulf.

I elbowed Tomaš on the sudden thought that we forgot the hockey puck somewhere. “No,” he answered groggily, “it’s… in my pants pocket… Don’t worry.”

“Not worried. Just wanted to keep it.” And waiting until I heard his soft snores, I lifted myself out of bed and to the chair where he had draped his jeans. I fished out the puck and sat down, studying its obsidian glint in the tiny wedge of light coming from the street. Did Kristýna live for this thing? Objective enough, and to each her own. She may stick with hockey or take a furlough, but at least she’s not an aimless wanderer. Unlike some people I know.

I turned on the desk lamp and slid over the pen and pad that also tried to justify this 3-star dive. After doodling and scratching out phrases—Czech and English—I flipped to a clean page to give the day its closure, sort of like vespers intend, perhaps:

The morning’s fog has reached

the camels’ field within the London zoo—

no mistaking for a sand squall, long dismissed

as less than distant memory.

But in that haze of heritage recall,

an older dromedary started wandering—along

the confines of the zoo’s design, and then

through portals of her unpenned mind.

“I’m bemused by all the fuss amassed on

what is called ‘tv’. Humans aren’t forthcoming—

I gather from their handheld screens—yet

somehow I’m a piece of why

a ball is kicked to death to find a brief reprieve

within a net. I’m the taxi to this thing,

the stoic poster child to bridge

the civilized and wild. I’m the being that

spits to your delight, as long as you’re

a mile away, smoking Camel Joes and playing out

the evening in an unassuming way.

But now that I’m a world away, put me in

your Magi scene, a Charles Dickens’ challenge

through the ghosts we sometimes meet,

the memories of where we’ve been

and where we’re bound to be.” Slowly,

lifting like the eyelashes of baby camels

fighting sleep, the fog in London bid the day new

reckoning, as if the zoo would do

enough to energize the air.

It didn’t beg a title, but still my hand flipped to the drafting page to try out ~~‘fog’~~, then ~~‘bloud’~~ and even ~~‘velk~~ý ~~bloud’~~, ~~‘suspended’~~ as in maybe ~~‘lost in space’~~…. A voice inside my ear suggested ‘discrepancy’ and I didn’t cross it out. Indeed, it turned to plural as I returned to the clean page and topped it with this term.

I could have freed the poem from the tablet and put it in a pocket (mine, at first instinct, or Tomy’s, where the puck had resided like a kangaroo joey). Instead, I kept everything on the table—the puck as a paperweight as if the tablet would blow away in the windless room. I turned off the light and cuddled into my side of the bed.

Chapter 2: the zeta

Dreams are like blood cells, channeled about: red, white or otherwise, you’d like to think the particles of plasma have occasional stake in staying put for a breather, but… three times a minute, the heart relentlessly pushes through each flakelike waif. No time for reflection, recalibration, reverie in that bend of an elbow or kiss with the spleen. Dreams are deceptive in the language we’ve made them to be.

Forget the ad hoc of Příbram, where any sleep logged was subsumed by the thoughts of Kristýna. The break of dawn did nothing to undo the puck and the weight of the fetus who’d bear such a brunt. I could have dreamed that, but R.E.M. sent me in vectors of other intent, timeless and breathless at once.

I was at Olomouc, charting the ‘reals’ with their ‘discontinuities’ (perhaps influenced by the ‘discrepancies’ that headed my poem), bearing in mind that oscillation of variables cannot discern ‘infinity’ from ‘minus infinity’, making the ‘real’ undefined. And even in dreaming, the inverted commas were digging at me: I jolted in bed—risking the rousing of Tomaš—at the urgent need to qualify ‘minus’ in the mix of ‘infinity’. Like a wet dream, I loved how it went yet regretted the mess that the morning would likely reveal.

Again, I was at Olomouc. I was starting to feel what… butterflies know about anything infinite minus itself: as rangy as zero to one to a million-and-three: the threat of extinction keeps egging it on—the DNA jumps past the primes to land on the divisible (or factors replicable, to cater to the semantics of RNA)—and so we are seeded, despite the forces that aim to destroy, by malicious design or mindless fuck-all. Pardon the cynical tryst; this was an unaneled dream, not my typical reserve in expression.

For certain, at Olomouc, my thesis was due—and by so defining, I flew to the corners of mansplaining halls: my thesis would need to come out of its skin, a molting of sorts, whether lizard or bird. My thesis had little to do with my words (and nothing to do with my blood cells imploring reprieve).

My dream ventured on, arguably free. I slid on the desk an analysis of the Riemann zeta function in application to Fibonacci patterns and ways in which the organic world—plants and seashells and skeletal structures—manifested the meromorphic properties of an open set, insofar as

“Hold it right there!” his mouth rounded larger than it should, in skewed proportion to eyes squeezed shut and nostrils flared. “Don’t you think,” his breath now hitting my forehead, “Fibonacci’s swirls to Riemann’s zeta is like handing out kazoos to virtuosos?” He wanted to pause for ponderous effect, but couldn’t help underscoring his derision: “meromorphic properties—like what? An open set? That’s it? Assumptions of a zero-free zone?” and on and on as if I weren’t really there. Which I wasn’t, if my dream betrayed a mirror, image alone, to reality. Maybe I was in his dream, but even then, I also wasn’t there. No use, then, to slice his vocal chords with paper cuts; even less the possibility to slice my wrists. Satisfied, then, with nipping problems in the bud, I took my efforts back and declared the dreaming done.

“Not so fast,” as often is the case when rolling from one phase of restlessness into another. “Did you do it yet?” No clarifying of the dangling pronoun—the ‘it’ that no one knew about, upon the strictness of his orders. I could lie, make him squirm, say I’ve reconsidered things. Instead, not facing him again, I dropped the hockey puck that somehow snuck into my hand and heard it clunk on the floor as the dream declared me done.

“Shit!” I woke myself for real, and Tomaš, too. “Where’s the goddamn puck?”

He shook his head and reached for my shoulder, “Shh, Amálko, I told you already. I’ll show you.” And getting up, he groped through his jeans and suddenly panicked. “Wait—I swear it was…”

I gathered my memory now and blushed out a “sorry, I forgot…” and pointed to the table. The gray morning light did nothing to make the surface shine.

He pinched a grin and stretched to pick it up. Then he bent to see the poem. “What’s this?” I turned away, realizing we both were in our underwear and not yet set to be our daytime selves.

“You can keep the poem,” I finally said, clicking seconds in my mind to pace his perusal (or his silence otherwise).

“Are you the camel here?”

“No.” I scanned the bathroom door for anything more to say on that.

Tomaš was dressing, by the soft sounds of it, and mumbled something about rummaging up some breakfast. “Tomato juice you like, yeah? and blueberry muffins.”

“Okay.” One muffin would suffice, but another for the road… “Is it nonsense,” I wanted to know, “the camel?”

He gave me back the puck, then patted the left breast pocket of his lumberjack shirt. “The camel is outstanding. And she’ll be safe in here.”

While I contemplated reenacting the dream with an actual trip to Olomouc (having broken that ice, perhaps, subconsciously), my mother had arranged for me to substitute at a gymnazium in Stodůlky, about a dozen bus stops from Ořech. A math teacher there was on paternity leave—go figure—and although I had no experience managing a class, the director of the school assured me some support. She wore her elfin glasses at the tip of her nose, but pushed them up to read me better. “Your job is to demonstrate the types of problems they’ll face on the exams, and make them do likewise. The other stuff is up to us.”

“Other stuff?”

“Discipline. Preparing shenanigans for their graduation dance, whatever skit’s in fashion now. Typical teenagers-tolerating-school stuff.”

“Understood. And should I test them, give them grades?”

“We actually call it ‘feedback’ now, and, seeing as this might last a couple months—yes! Have at it. Helena mentioned you have done your doctoral work in maths, so now’s the time to turn that hard work into profit.”

“I’ve done some doctoral work,” I wanted to clarify, but she waved off what she figured was academic modesty, if not the norm. “But I do know some good activities around Fibonacci sequencing, if that’s not too…”

“Complex?”

“I was going to say ‘simple’…. Like playing a kazoo.”

She looked at me funny. “Listen, I may have the role of saying what goes on in this place, but I’d rather make the assumption that teachers will instinctively do that for me. ‘Read the room’, so to speak. If you want to bring in kazoos for some reason, then—”

“I was only using an analogy. They’ll do the actual maths—I promise.”

“No doubt they will. But a bit of musicology as a fringe benefit, well,… why not?”

Depending on the stakes, I guess, jobs get started this way. The irony is that playwrights (Havel) and playboys (Trump) alike have little vetting for becoming leaders of the ‘free world’, whatever that may mean to aliens in outer space regarding aliens on earth’s own territory.

Let alone the aliens of Olomouc.

I dove right into lesson plans, stopping at the Zličín mall for kazoos and nautilus shells you wouldn’t think would be available there. Collecting a bagful of each, the question loomed what we’d really do with them. Toot our own horn? Listen for the ruse of an origin story, remote as an ocean in landlocked Bohemia? Olomouc, they’d know (but I wouldn’t tell them as such) is decidedly not Bohemia. Morava held the checkered eagle, red-and-white, strangely like the Croat flag in all the hype of this fucking World Cup. Again, I shouldn’t curse.

But goddamn, I’m nervous now, trying to weave a hint of schoolish meaning in this mess. It’s just a paternity leave, I have to remind them (and myself), and you don’t need to think of Olomouc for a change, I have to remind only myself. The checkered eagle will occupy itself with mice to kill and distant fiefdoms to oversee. The checkered eagle doesn’t have to determine ‘me’.

Begging an inevitable quandary: what else, then, does such determining?

‘Stodůlky’ refers to ‘barns’, by the way—little ones in the implication of the suffix ‘k’ that plays the plural out. My mom was always so proud about living outside such structures—those concrete rabbit houses posing as a neighborhood—the ‘sídliště’ in Czech that roughly translates to the housing ‘projects’ which America has never spelled out sufficiently: whose ‘project’, and projecting what ideal? At least in Czechoslovakia, the project was clear, stacking lives to see each other as coequal, codependent, coefficients in the algebraic slottings of the state.

Anyway, Stodůlky as a village predated communism, and a couple ponds remained in some defiance of the inevitable sprawl of cities in the twentieth century. The highway ring between Stodůlky and Ořech did something to reign in the urban designs, but my home village did away with their barns anyway.

Space, volume, density were on my mind as I dove into my preps, ranging from logic problems, quadratic functions, trigonometry, stereometry. The paternity teacher had left a messy drawerful of resources and a couple emails to guide me, but made it clear that he wanted no contact: “the baby is my job now,” he wrote, “just so you know.” I wrote back a “good luck” and thought about adding a ‘Baby Boss’ meme or something else questionably funny.

Instead, to break the ice on Day 1, I showed the opening of that movie twice—once for the laughs, another time to have students itemize the mathematical questions involved. The speed and sequence of outfitting all these newborns on a conveyor belt, for instance, with Baby Boss as the outlier. Did the factory require such ceilingless space? Or more space between each infant? Did the slope of each ramp make sense for the movement? Where would a safety inspector call ‘foul’, and why?

“And Miss Professor,” one student asked by the third class exposed to the same intro, “do you have kids?”

I swallowed at each evasion of my response: “not really a professor”; “Bohemia has one of the lowest birthrates in the world”; “first-time mothers are almost 29 years old, on average”; “I hope I look my age”…. Needless to say, I did not repeat this launch to classes thereafter, going rather for the drawerful of uninspired stuff.

1.67 is the number that came to my screen on the bus ride home, seeing if a number of ‘kids’ can be plural if less than 2. Czechs have had trouble sustaining a supply of multiple kids per family since the peak of Husák’s influence on ‘Normalization’. By correlation or not, the 2.4 birthrate around the time of Charter 77 diminished steadily to 1.8 by the Velvet Revolution, and even to 1.2 in the early years of political freedom. When I was around twelve years old, I interrupted my parents’ TV time to ask why I didn’t have a sibling, and while Mom exited to ‘check on dinner’, Dad put it this way: “we wanted you to have siblings. We were patriotic to the campaign around the time you were born to nedávej si bacha—don’t be overly careful—but to be like Bach! He (or his two wives, more to point) had twenty children. So billboards around the country showed exactly that: a big Bach with his distinctive mullet and twenty toddler Bachs below him.”

“Twenty?” I echoed, “that’s crazy! You and Mom wanted that many?”

Jiří chuckled and instinctively muted the TV, as commercials always hiked up the volume with goofy voice actors. “Not that many. Just another. A person for you to play with.”

“A sibling is more than a toy,” I wiseacred.

“Oh, for sure. For sure. A person to play off of is more what I meant. But as much as we prayed, we didn’t reach God’s ear. You gotta be Bach to get such attention, I guess.”

I wondered how sincere he was being, and how Mom’s body language would be—or how she probably was listening in from the kitchen. I decided to suggest really softly: “you could still adopt.”

Jiří sized up my concern. “We’re getting too old to be parents like that, Amálko, but we hope we’ve given you enough love and people to trust. Even the lodgers we’ve taken in.”

He actually mentioned their names. But this was before the treehouse terrorist or, in an effort to restore trust, Tomaš. The commercials over, Dad unmuted the TV—a program called ‘Kotel’ with a sharp woman moderating the fiery, mostly mannish debate—and I went into the kitchen to see if Mom wanted any help. She shoulder-wiped her cheek and said she was fine: the soup would be ready in just a few minutes. Rice was simmering and I could smell goulash from another pot. Without asking more, I took out some carrots and peeled them as Mom’s preferred dessert. I was careful not to slice my finger like last time—dávej si bacha, she reminded me now, and indeed I would continue to live life (or try) with the utmost of care.

Back to Stodůlky and Gymnázium Jaroslava Heyrovského, named after the Nobel Prize recipient in chemistry for his development of polarography. Unfortunately, that involved working with mercury and its lava-like threat. Worse, really, as lava at least projects its danger with red-flag heat. Heyrovský must have been great at handling a serene-looking killer.

Some of my students, getting to know them, were Maša and Daša (the latter from Ukraine), Patrik and Matěj (acting just like Pat & Mat), Lukáš and Filip and Nikola and Mai (short for Thanh Mai). Each class filled the thirty seats, but these were the ones I thought about on the bus ride back to Ořech. For the record, it was Niki who asked whether I had kids; I could tell by her pulsing smile that she wished she could have saved the question for a better time.

When I say they were on my mind, it was strictly to simulate how the next day’s lessons might go. They were used to drawing myriad graphs, triangular constructions with compasses, further polygons with protractors, and so on. Naturally, these tools turned into petty weapons for the more distractible—the ‘other stuff’ the director alluded to—but if I set up particular challenges, students were more likely to stay on track.

“So, you’re pretty good at two dimensions,” I told a class, “but we have to do more with the z-axis.” Here’s when I pulled the bags of kazoos and shells from behind the desk. “Decide which of these you’ll draw and calculate the volume for. You have until the end of the hour.”

Of course they monkeyed around and didn’t get the task done, but time was not at all wasted. Listening to the sea, humming a cacophonous symphony, laughing as a little welcome to my stint as fill-in teacher. I needed to recycle these for other classes—some wanted to keep theirs as if it were a rescue puppy—so I set homework for them to find similar complex curves to bring in the next day. We weren’t going to tackle anything Riemann in so doing, but try to make the notebooks come alive.

Many students didn’t comply, so after the first hour I rummaged around the staffroom for a few different items: a squat teapot, a stack of styrofoam cups—must have been from last century—a white-out tape dispenser that had run out of things to correct, an unlikely whoopie cushion. Acquainting myself with the teachers there, I was careful to ask them the right amount of questions, not presume too much. One of them, Teri, was interested in the premise and pursued some of the assignment details: small enough to draw to scale on graph paper, curved surfaces to factor in π, hollow to eventually fill with water as an inside job of the Archimedes principle. “Sounds like something Miss Frizzle would cook up,” Teri suggested, then elbowed my forearm, “if she predates you Gen Zedders.”

Being technically among the last Millennials—a Christmas baby, 1995—I affirmed that The Magic School Bus had been a formative part of my childhood. “I even had a lizard for a year, until it died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that. I thought reptiles lived, like, forever.”

“Maybe in the wild. This one died of boredom, staring at its own reflection all day. I should have taken it to school once in a while, like Miss Frizzle.”

“You even look like her,” Teri elbowed me again. “That’s a compliment.”

My hair sort of did, if not so often back-bunned. I didn’t have the fashion sense of print dresses and dangly earrings. But I guess I had as pleasant a visage. “Thanks. I won’t do any crazy field trips, though.”

“Winter’s hard for that, anyway. And paternity leave is just a couple weeks, so…”

I weighed my response, unsure how desirable more time might be. “I think he got approved for longer. We’ll see.”

The day grooved on, and engagement in the classroom was fair—the measuring and sketching less active than the horse-trading of items. Maša brought in a piggy bank, an ellipsoid which was perfect for the assignment, but she exchanged it for a lightbulb from Daša toward what I suggested would be the tougher challenge. Lukáš pushed some buttons with his bong—“just for shisha, Miss”—and I threw him off when I told him it would be one of the hardest volumes to calculate but easiest to prove.

“And I will check your calculations,” I told the class, “to determine your grade for this.”

“How?” Pat asked.

“Yeah, how?” Mat followed. “You’re going to take measurements of all this stuff yourself?”

“Oh, I won’t have to do more measurements than one per item.”

“Huh?”

I looked at Filip’s hockey puck, which I had been avoiding to this point, and clarified: “except an item like this, which isn’t hollow—i.e., not the inner volume of the other items.”

“So does it count? Will I get credit?”

“For a solid cylindrical volume? You only have to make two measurements, Filip. How much credit would you give yourself for that?”

I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic. He wasn’t a bad student, but rather tied to his training schedule—Kladno juniors—and admitted to needing just a minimal pass for this course. He grabbed an hourglass from Nikola’s desk (she was already fully involved with a nautilus shell) and mumbled, “then I’ll do this. Unless you count the sand as solid.”

“That’s an interesting point.” I held back an ‘of course sand is solid’ and encouraged him with “extra credit if you can do the calculations on the inner space minus the sand.”

Mai had been pensive since I claimed only one measurement necessary. She skulked over to practically whisper her guess: “you’re gonna fill these with water, yes? Then pour into a beaker?”

“Shh. We’re all going to do that next lesson, if you can keep that a secret.” I added, “you’d make Archimedes proud.”

She winked appreciation. “But what about the objects without holes? Like the lightbulb or hourglass?”

“Yep,” I shrugged, “that’s where I’ll have to make Archimedes proud.”

The next class was less focused, and some of the boys wanted to test my grit. ‘Kde domov můj,’ they rasped through the kazoos, the national anthem that ponders ‘Where my home is’ in a semi-rhetorical question. The serendipitous answer is that the beautiful land itself—země česká, which assumes the identity of Moravians, Silesians, Roma, non-Czechs within the republic—is enough to define ‘home’. Maybe every nation-state should go through the same exercise, compare results. The boys weren’t being so intellectual, however. Staying remotely in tune with the hymn, they gambled some not-so-muted vulgarities, like ‘in the butt’ of so-and-so. And so-and-so. And—

“Enough. Unscrew the tops and take the timbral paper out. And get busy with the math.”

Some did; others continued their prurience in pantomime, using the voiceless kazoo as a torpedo to a nautilus shell, angling how far it could go. My mother had once told me a passive method she used when boys in her elementary school took clownishness to such an extent: ‘extinction’. Like letting the animus die without intervention. Love me, hate me, just don’t ignore me… “Sometimes,” Mom suggested, “ignoring is exactly the thing to do.”

“Ignorance is bliss?” I challenged my mother’s assertion then, never imagining myself as a classroom manager.

“Ignorance is the opposite of ‘ignoring’—the latter means you are aware and choose not to act on it; the former means you’re not aware in the first place.”

Thus, I ignored the rape of several shells and gravitated to the earnest attempts to measure, sketch, calculate, inquire. The offending boys lost the target of their audience, it seemed, and, with their T-Rex arms, made feckless approximations in their notebooks. They’d battle the low grades they’d have coming, but I stuck to the objectivity of the lesson’s design, sneaking a subjective wink to my mother, as if she were already watching from heaven.

She was very much alive in Ořech, if weary-eyed for my return. At the kitchen barstools, we talked about the T-Rexxers to get them out of the way; Dad, slinking in from the living room, was despondent about their disrespect for the national hymn, having sung it a thousand times after hockey games, especially. “Damn ingrates,” he mumbled as an impetus for fishing a beer out of the fridge.

“Like it or not, Dear, they’re the teenagers we might have been in the same circumstances.”

“Circumstances!” he scoffed. “What—ours on them or theirs on us? Could they survive a day without their smartphones? We survived the limits of freedom—being a teen today would be a cakewalk.”

My mother glanced at me in a code we had developed over the years. “Point taken, Jiří. What say we do brats on the grill tonight. And portobellos? I think we have some in the freezer—”

“It’s November, Helenko. Why heat up the—”

“Because our daughter has had a day to celebrate.”

He regarded my slouch over the countertop and thought it right to rub my back. “Yeah,” he uttered, “we should… do that.” He opened the downstairs door where the basement freezer would reveal his options, then descended.

Mom knew the proper gestation of the moment. She poured us two cups of nettle tea, added honey, and asked me more about the actual mathematics from yesterday to today to tomorrow. I talked about the bong as a fairly genius thing to bring in, the hourglass as something that could impel an all-nighter (not that Filip would know the difference between an eyeball estimation and a full-on proof). Mom laughed knowingly, having put grades on countless papers that no one—maybe not even the prospect of a God—would ever check. She recalled the dilemma of having to grade my schoolwork the one year our teacher/student roles overlapped (Ořech having just one section of 1^st-graders when I was seven years old, before a spillover section was approved the following year for the rise in population; the ethics, then, would have me in that spillover); I would merit a top-score ‘jednička’ in anything we did, but at a certain point… “It’s about Lev Vygotsky’s ‘Zone of Proximal Development’,” she explained, way too early for me to grasp. “Every learner has a specific zone, an acumen and wherewithal; every learner, then, must do their calisthenics in that zone in order to perform at higher levels. It’s like Kristýna”—cueing on the fact my twelve-year-old friend had found her calling by now—“finessing pucks now in a way she couldn’t a year ago, and imagining a sky’s-the-limit future in that sport.”

I’m sure I asked her what ‘sky’s-the-limit’ means in her own mind, having already fathomed the illusion of the concept of ‘sky’—perception over objective domain. That was more than half my life ago, so I should have had at least twice as much wherewithal (to use her term) to ask right now. Instead, I chanced: “How would you grade personal decisions, like… behavior outside the classroom?”

She characteristically turned her back to dice whatever raw vegetable was at hand—soup always in the mix to make. “Are you asking,” she framed deliberately, “if those boys were acting inappropriately in the classroom versus out of it—at recess, for instance?”

I would have added that they were trying to be clever with the ‘coil’/‘coitus’ wordplay that could be credited in a language course. I wouldn’t have to add, of course, that gympl students were too old for recess, conventionally. So, in such ad hoc calculation, I decided to specify: “the boys could fuck off, for all I care. I wonder about Kristýna—” and I instantly knew by the cold blood on my brow that I was casting her (and myself) among the startled of the Titanic— “if she should ever be hockey-judged beyond the ice.”

Mom faced me with the sympathy of needing more but not expressly saying so. The dicing knife was limp in her hand. She spoke to me in her burnt sienna irises: I don’t know the context to your question but love that you have asked it anyway. Nobody I know has ever done the same. Maybe Tomaš once, but not in recent memory. She could have left the hypothetical hang, but navigated this way: “Kristýna is a person before she is a hockey player, so…” gauging where I was at with this so far, “she’d be judged on hockey performance and whatever else surrounds the evident upon the ice.”

“The evident-upon-the-ice,” I had to repeat. “You have an aesthetic way of putting things.”

“And you are being oblique,” she quickly pointed out, placing down the dicing knife altogether. “Is Kristýna more on your mind than Stodůlky?”

“Both… Equally. I felt more or less alive,” I swallowed nothing to do with tea, “in class today. And,” sipping Mom’s conscientious refill, “more or less indebted to Loraxes before me.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, knowing more what I meant than she was leading on. “What Loraxes?”

“You read this to me a hundred times, Mom, always with a lachrymose subtlety. Don’t you think Dr Suess would constitute a major part of my vocabulary?”

“No. I just don’t know how to juggle now: Kristýna, your day of teaching, the Lorax, Lev Vygotsky—”

“I never brought up Lev Vygostky—”

“You didn’t. But I did. And we’ve spoken of his angel/devil zone before, if you’ll indulge my pensioner’s recall.”

“Mom! You’re not a pensioner.”

“I am, technically. By state’s degree.”

“But don’t do this to me. I need you to be my non-dementia mom. Especially as I don’t know what I’m doing…”

She understood. I thought of Goldbach’s conjecture here: the sum of two primes accounts for any even integer. She probably wasn’t thinking that, but she had the acumen. I loved my mom because she could cogitate around my temporal realm. “Okay, let’s back up. The most important part of today… is…”

The Lorax. Always. End of story. No need to—

“And I mean,” Mom continued, “a today-sense of today. Not just what would pass as platitudes for—”

And that is where I had to cut her off. “Platitudes? You assign the Lorax as ‘platitudes’?”

“Of course I mean things as much more,” she said, the same as I would always regard her for.

The weekend came and I had a superflux of social invites: from Teri and unnamed other teachers, who had a standing Saturday reservation at Manta Bowling in Řepy; from Tomaš, who craved a drinking buddy; from Kristýna, who said she needed a long walk. I suggested we could do that at Libušín, even stay overnight at our family hut. She looked away from the FaceTime camera to think about that. “Wouldn’t you rather meet your new colleagues?”

“Not really. They’ll be there on Monday.”

“But… bowling!”

Hard to tell if she was joking, as in: one just couldn’t do that activity in the gymnazium corridors. I gave a muted whoop, “but… I wouldn’t want to show up alone. If you joined me, on the other hand—”

Kristýna laughed, then sucked in air for the irony. “You want me to stop training for hockey. And hoisting bowling balls is supposed to be better for the fetus?”

These considerations would flood our time together—maybe in droplets, like a Chinese water torture. “At least it’s not a contact sport,” I tried to reason.

“Oh, so you’d rather I cease human contact altogether. Where was that advice a month ago?”

I didn’t respond to that, nor reveal my option with Tomaš. He could drive me to Libušín, which would save the hassle of waiting out the weekend lethargy of buses or trains to cover the mere 35 kilometers. We could have a pre-Kristýna drink—one, so he’d be road-tolerable on the way back (though the nontolerance rule was checked by highway patrol all the more on weekends). He could chop some wood at the hut, as heating there would require that—a reason my folks rarely went there in wintery months. They’d balk at the whole notion of bothering with the hut if I told them, yet… just like the night in Příbram, they didn’t want to come off as nosy. “So,” I finally uttered, knowing my fifteen seconds of silence was incurring some risk, “shall we walk from your place, or…?”

Now Kristýna mulled for fifteen seconds of her own, pretending to check something on another screen. “No,” she determined, “I know how to get there and… I don’t know when exactly I’ll be free.”

“Stuff with the team?”

She shrugged. “I have a life otherwise, believe it or not.”

“Of course. You remember where our secret key is” I asked, “in case you arrive before me? I mean, I can be there whenever.”

“We’ll call this the ‘whenever’ weekend, then. And Ami?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s not bring the whole universe into it. If you know what I mean.”

I didn’t, but nodded anyway.

Tomaš was an infinitesimal part of the universe, but maybe he loomed larger for Kristýna, like an asteroid threatening her orbit. He still drove me to the little Libušín grocery store on the questionable convenience that he wanted to head west anyway—check on an indoor butterfly nursery near Karlovy Vary, as part of his auditing duties. He offered to pick me up tomorrow, but I didn’t want to be pinned down (like a butterfly, I joked, which didn’t amuse).

We had a plentiful supply of compote at the hut, honey and jams and oats and lentils—all in mouse proof jars. Bottles of wine and slivovice, too, which compelled me to buy a variety of nonalcoholic choices to elbow those out.

“Too late for that,” Kristýna admitted, after I found her cozied up in an armchair, goblet in hand. “But thanks for the thought. I brought some chocolates and chips. Oh, and those”—pointing to a string of fat, short sausages we used to laugh at during campouts—“dictators” for the Napoleon complex they suggested.

I opened a bottle of shelf-warm Kofola cola and poured two glasses. Kissing Kristýna on the cheek was enough a move to have her set down the goblet; replacing it with the kiddy drink would not trick her, of course, but she pretended not to notice. Instead, she showed me what she’d been reading for the half-hour she’d been here: a lilac-colored paperback with an ivory figure of what seemed to be a primitive, pregnant man—I remarked as much and she gave me a death stare to say, not everything is going to be about that! “Sorry—it’s just that… oh,” I now took in the lower-case title, “‘aviaries’—like the guy has a cage under his… skirt?”

“I don’t know what the cover’s trying to represent,” Kristýna admitted, “but Brabcová takes on a lot of stuff about the country we’ve become. This was published just after she died in 2015, like a scrapbook of memories.” She paged through several vignettes and abbreviated their effect, “like how

‘Prague reflects off the river. And so it is here twofold—reality

and its reflection—while I can barely endure the one.’

See? How efficient that is…”

“Pretty morose,” I opined. “It’s a beautiful city, no?”

Ignoring that, Kristýna paged further to an entry dated February 6, 2015, in which the narrator reads about a 19-year-old sniper named Tatiana, fighting with Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. “Seven years before the full invasion,” Týna stressed, “and her claim is that by 2026,

‘Russia will be everywhere. All of Europe will be ruled by Russia.

God is whatever you believe in.’

God! Like, how does God enter the fray?”

“Are you asking my perspective on the present war? Because it’s going badly for Russia—”

“—it’s going badly for everyone.”

I released the book from her hands to flip through it myself. Zuzana Brabcová. Among the modern authors I’d heard about but failed to discover, academics demanding my time like a literal white elephant would. “It is interesting that she starts with Havel’s death. I remember waiting at Hradčany to view his casket, just before I turned fifteen. Didn’t you come with us then?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t have missed training then. No Christmas break for pucksters.”

I topped off our colas. “Read out a few more. Before we cook up the dictators.”

While we had one space heater—installing electricity was Mom’s one condition for buying the hut in the first place—we’d need to stoke the fireplace for the evening. Kristýna prepared our late lunch while I chopped wood to add to our modest stack (someone in the neighborhood, otherwise friendly, had been ‘borrowing’ our labors over the years). The kitchenette established 30% of the ground floor; another 30% was for the dining nook; two armchairs, a couch and barrel stove rounded out the remaining 40%. No room for stairs to the loft, so a ladder discouraged frequent ups and downs—just three beds crunched under the sloped ceiling. The cellar was almost as large as the main room, and our plan had been to make it more hospitable, spilling out to the lower part of our garden plot. But heating that cave would be expensive. We had an emergency bathroom down there attached to a septic tank, but tended to use the outhouse instead. A shower next to it depended on rainwater, so kitchenette sponge baths were our go-to during cold months. When we were younger, Mom would shoo Dad out to the grocery store or someplace else so that Kristýna and I could wash together; now, I’m sure, one of us would take five minutes in the loft for the privacy of the other.

That would be after our hike to the fishpond—a little more than a kilometer away—and the steep climb to the vast forested plateau that separated our village from Kladno. Since we were west, we never inhaled the effluence of the steel plant there, not that it produced a Beijing effect. Breathing was easy, even as I could tell Kristýna was getting exhausted. We sat on a bench and mused for a while; soon enough, dusk was warning us to wrap this up, get on back to civilization.

Almost there, Tomaš called to assure me the butterflies were fine—I didn’t ask for such assurance, but thanked him anyway for the update. He’d stay overnight there and reiterated his offer to pick me up tomorrow; “no, I’m alright. Just text me, anyhow.” He hesitated before asking if anything was wrong, and I probably made that suspicion worse when I gushed about the deer we’d seen, as well as the russet sunset he’d also be witnessing now, a fraction less dark.

I should have hung up before Kristýna unlocked the hut and went straight for the bottle she had uncorked earlier. She knew I’d object and hardened her face to argue in advance. Since I didn’t say anything, she took a full swig and stewed. “You didn’t have to sacrifice this weekend for me,” she finally ventured. “He’s obviously more on your mind.”

“Who, Tomaš?”

“No—the pope. Unless you have some other boyfriend you won’t tell me about.”

The water I was boiling for tea was ready, so I poured that before responding. “He’s not my boyfriend. And I’m not Catholic, so… Francis doesn’t do anything for me, either.”

“You can have any boyfriend you want. I would think you’d tell me, though.”

I dropped my jaw a bit. “Well—start with you: you didn’t really spell out your relationship with the father of this child you’re carrying…”

“Don’t describe it that way,” she said, “cuz he’s certainly not going to be a father.”

“And the way you’re drinking, bouncing that kid around, you’re not going to be a mother, either. Or a mother of a—”

Mercifully, perhaps, she slapped my careless mouth. Twice—likely as habit in checking an opponent. I would have curled into a hedgehog at that, but, seeing as she was reaching for more wine, I pulled her hair with unknown strength, all the way to the couch. Slaps turned to some form of wrestle (Greco-Roman?) and my insane effort to protect her belly more than either of our faces, arms, legs—whatever could be bruised for no greater injury. We may have been at it for three minutes, four; longer than a man would want to grapple with, at least for us this year. I could taste blood in my mouth and then Kristýna’s tears as she lapsed into a hockey referee, breaking up a scuffle on ice, as if there were three of us on that couch.

Which there were, technically. The fetus counted and was probably clutching more vigorously than us for flight-or-fight instincts. I had forced my own little life to an unwilling flight in Olomouc. And while we’d have the evening hours to cry out regrets and touchstones to our friendship, I still didn’t reveal my own story, selfishly—not selflessly—hoping to make the weekend Kristýna’s chance to come to terms with hers.

Chapter 3: the alpha

Eagle eyes will discern a lapse in the narration—i.e., no intervening letter ž to round out the Czech alphabet. Boris, who’s translating this thing, could’ve/should’ve figured that out; maybe he’s overwhelmed with his own coming-to-terms with life on the lam (an idiom, mind you, I gathered from whatever tendril of English had brushed my own imagination). He’s living with Simona—the one you might have perused as the ‘shih tzu mistress’ but I demanded that he name her here, for the love of God. Yes, she is a great vlogger on beauty tips—iceberg tips, she regularly says with savvy—and yes, they are making do with their canaries occasionally uncaged, their faithful mutt who never needs a leash, let alone a creepy macrame collar. Simona knows my story, more or less, and has added to some good advice from Boris. But I tested her at this point: why should emotional support come from those who haven’t rubbed or wrestled shoulders, as Kristýna has always done with me? Why should my best friend be naïve to what a distant cousin might affect, especially with secrets he himself should own up to?

“You’re gonna make me translate this,” he winced when we met at an underground pub, “like, for real?”

“No. You’re volunteering, remember? And—” I leaned in a little, “you sorta twisted my arm to write it out in the first place. I mean, why should anybody have to look into another person’s life? When he doesn’t even know them, like… how do you say it in English—a peering Thomas—”

“Peeping Tom? Unless you mean ‘Doubting Thomas’—in which case,” he curled the corners of his mouth, “a reader may cast doubt on the whole narrative. Like Holden Caulfield calling everyone a phoney but himself, as if he’d be a reliable ‘catcher in the rye’ for anybody running off the edge. As if he himself had mastered that edge, or could catch himself, or—”

“Boris,” I cut him off, “I don’t know literature enough to go there. I don’t even want to think of publication complications, and how to explain my muddled take on Kristýna, for example, to Kristýna herself. I mean, she’d kill me if she knew I was doing this behind her back…”

He swigged his beer and deliberated his response. “I suppose you’d have to ask her in the end… how she feels about her agon in getting at your own.”

“What do you mean by ‘agon’? Is it shorthand for ‘agony’?”

“One way of looking at it. Greek derivation. A struggle. An intellectual grappling match. The reason a protagonist cannot be consumed by antagonism, deprived of sufficient water for the soul.”

“Žíznivý?” I asked in Czech.

“I guess,” he said, “if all of us are thirsty for something, one way or another.”

So there’s the ž, I thought, heading back to Ořech. But that’s as much as I would care to consider ‘thirst’. The alpha here is for Fermat’s Little Theorem: if a number is prime, any integer a to that prime—then subtracting a—results in an integer multiple of that prime. Which proves the prime in the first place (math is sometimes tautological that way). It was the final lecture I attended from Professor Alpha, which I admit is the same tactic Boris used in his book, but for far more agreeable characters. Alpha was troubleshooting why the number 561 is considered a ‘pseudoprime’ because it passes Fermat’s test (a⁵⁶¹– a) yet results in the composite factors 3, 11, and 17—all of which happen to be prime, obedient to Fermat. 561, therefore, is not prime yet poses that way; any a cannot prove it otherwise.

Primality tests have come a lot further than 17^th-century Fermat, especially in practical cryptography, but Prof Alpha wasn’t overtly concerned with applied mathematics. He’d mention various proofs via Carmichael numbers (561 being the smallest), Agrawal’s conjecture using coprimes, efforts to be free of randomized methods and looping frustrations, like my own work with the Riemann hypothesis. Prof Alpha tended to jut his rhinoceros nose when he talked, like prying those spirits awake just to stare or stampede them away. I had cautioned him early in my second year after a similar lecture, sending him an email that underscored my love for Riemann, as far as I imagined; I quoted a couple lines from Yeats, recalling his poetry from my Maturita prep:

‘I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

His reply was blunt: “I don’t reply to such emails other than to say: my office hours are…” so-and-so and only when the door’s not closed.

Simona, when I told her that last week, responded with a sour frown. “That would be an orange flag in my book. Was his door closed a lot?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hang around his corridor. I attended all the lectures, seminars I needed to and split my daytime hours between a couple libraries and my brigáda work at the local science museum.”

“And evenings? Did you go out sometimes?”

Boris, listening in from the kitchen, laughed. “Fine question, Simko, coming from a common urge to mix among the hoi polloi?”

She shot him a don’t push your luck, buddy, then smiled back at me. “I’m content to be a bunny in a hutch. To that shite,” thumbing back at my cousin, “the nightlife here usually felt like going in to someplace seedy, not really going outlike a breath of fresh air. I mean, depends on who you’re with.”

“I had a few friends there. Have. Well, maybe one who still keeps in touch.” Her softly glittered eyelids raised to know her name, so I said, “Lara.”

“Lara also studies maths?”

“Rocks. Minerology. Same building as mine, so we’d always cross paths.”

“Was she aware of what this Alpha was projecting?”

I hadn’t come over to be interviewed as such, and my shift in the plush armchair likely relayed that, because Simona whistled over the shih tzu for a daily grooming, hairbow and all. We continued to talk about Olomouc more generally—that curling stream that served a modest moat around the fortressed town, a memory Simona had as a little girl visiting, and Boris more recently with Lenka, his then-girlfriend, when they visited me, naïve to Alpha and my calculation to stick it out or leave.

“Yeah, that Mlýnský stream was kind of a lifeline. Had its share of drunks and catcallers, but mostly joggers, strollers, people going to work.”

“Dogs,” Boris added, to remind us of his eavesdropping. “Don’t forget the dog-walkers.”

Watching Simona thread her fingers through the silky fur, as if the brushstrokes needed a more human touch, I suddenly longed to have Mandelbrot on my lap, connecting tangrams, orange and black, with strokes from supple ears to pluming tail, heaven in my hands. I wondered how she would have been as a guard-cat, thinking outside the box. Bringing her to Alpha’s office even as an extra set of eyes. Calling her a ‘comfort animal’ if challenged for the protocol. Asking her what she would do if she were me, and listening to the shoom within her torso—sometimes rolling as a mountain spring, sometimes rumbling as a distant thunderstorm. I guess I started getting misty-eyed, as Boris brought a pocket-pack of kleenexes with the platter of sandwich wedges he’d prepared. Simona finished the shih tzu with a practiced, perfect ponytail and then rose up to slide a bottle of wine out of a mahogany cylinder. It wasn’t quite a eucharist, of course, but, for those of us in exile, a Passover of sorts.

I should contextualize a bit: while those religious terms are not in my typical patterns of practice, my mother grew up with a Hussite tug to chapels west of us, in the town of Rudná and the village of Všeradice. These are cold-looking buildings with big chalices jutting out of their façades, a modest in-your-face to Catholics never trusting laity with the blood of Christ, “shed for you” but not for real. Dad had no such roots in either church and only went with her and me sometimes, and never to the altar area to delve into these Dark Age enquiries. Mom would tell me otherwise, that Hussites have always seen the light—that women were part of the clergy before 1948, and even through the vacuous cull of communism, the spirit of these parishes were irrepressible. The spurious association of Jan Hus as a warrior may have infused a fighting instinct, steeled to the consequence of maybe burning at the stake.

But enough on that for now. My job was calling—not to ward off Hussite wars, but to clarify why they shouldn’t have kindled in the first place. Maša and Filip were case-in-point in my untested attempt to keep our stereometry lessons going from good to… better? to boredom? to balance needs between the corridors and classroom chairs and bathroom breaks? They’d done their sketches, calculations of the inner volume of a badly drawn kazoo (by Maša, who’d given up on objects otherwise) and an adequate teapot (by Filip, who’d jettisoned the complicated hourglass). They’d time their requests to go to the restroom in what seemed to be a practiced pattern, whether or not their regular teachers would have picked up on this. The school had just this year designated a gender-neutral restroom and warned against the scrutiny of who was going in or out, for what duration or purpose. Maša asked first one day and Filip asked first the other day, and the third they asked in unison. I looked around to seek some tacit cues from Niki, Pat & Mat, Than Mai, all of whom had noses to their calculators. Lukáš didn’t, and I guessed he felt envious or jealous or wistful… “No,” I decided to whisper, not to make a power play. Filip shifted in his shoes; Maša went back to her desk; I moved around the room a bit to check on work, then felt a sudden urge to pee. I exited discreetly.

Though it was for faculty women, Maša entered a minute later, while I was washing my hands. She apologized through her eyes and arrowed into a stall with sympathetic urgency. I found myself conflicted about what to do: dash back to the classroom, speak something through the stall door, loiter in the hallway?... The last seemed wisest for at least the pragmatics of pointing out: “staff do not enter student washrooms, Maša, and vice versa.”

“Sorry, I really had to go,” she blushed, knowing we were forty meters and a staircase farther away than where her peers would have as this resource. “And,” looking around to ascertain the public privacy, “I didn’t want you to disrespect me… or even Filip, but,” her eyes pinkened slightly, “he should speak for himself.”

I could guess where this might be going, yet still—“what do you mean?”

“If we’ve been playing cat-and-mouse with you, um…”

As she said this idiom with uncertainty, I probed if she meant the two of them were a common cat, or a common mouse, leaving me to be the… what? Did she rather mean, I said in earnest interest, ‘when the cat’s away the mice will play’? “Because I’ll only be here, maybe, for another week or two, before the return of Mr—”

Then she burst into tears. “It’s not… it’s not… a common…” (hard to tell how anguish may have met with outrage, or its opposite). “We’re not—Filip an’ me—a team, not even in love…. He’s cheating on a friend of mine.”

“A friend of yours?” I offered her a handkerchief I always had within my pocket, almost never used. She grabbed it like a famished squirrel.

“I’m not being her friend right now, I know…. And Filip’s not either.” She blew her nose unloudly, then muscled her eyebrows at the idea: “I mean, how can you not be a friend to your girlfriend?”

We talked more, but in self-conscious clauses, cognizant that anyone coming down the corridor might try to decipher this little summit. Maša had crunched the cloth hanky into a ball and frowned at the thought of giving it back; “keep it, of course. I have a half drawerful more, right next to my socks.”

Not true. My handkerchiefs live in my underwear drawer, but not worth the disclosure. I used to dabble in magic tricks—for no other audience than Kristýna, usually in the tree fort—that would come down to tying multi-colored handkerchiefs in loose knots, pulling them through a papertowel tube, wrapping them around a plastic egg to then undercover a fuzzy artificial chick—clumsily, I’m sure, though Kristýna lavished hearty laughs for the illusions. My interest in magic stopped when mathematics availed more mystery, more chances to be on both sides of the ‘trick’—gullible and guiding simultaneously. Still, those handkerchiefs didn’t want to leave me altogether.

I reentered the classroom a minute or two before Maša, by agreement. I didn’t glance at Filip, who didn’t glance at me—but then again, I (and probably he) noticed as much. He had a hockey game that evening, I knew, and maybe had the X’s and O’s on his mind, or the fear of failure, the rush of possible success. Maybe his girlfriend would be in the stands. Maybe sitting next to Maša, though I’d rather doubt it now.

Niki came to my desk to show her work, bail me out of teenage funkdom. It was relieving to concentrate on her pure calculus, the care in the curves she drew partly for marking the parabolas within her chosen object (a lidded stein that looked the part of a pot-bellied Bavarian), partly for adumbrating the object she’d rather sketch for art class. “It’s good,” I honestly affirmed, cringing at my imprecision of the ‘it’.

“Thanks,” she said, needing nothing for advice. “I drew this because… I shouldn’t say.”

“No—you can say,” I touched her sweatered arm, then withdrew, “unless…”

She bobbed her head and I could see a tiny tide rising in her lower eyelids. The curve of optimism forced the corners of her mouth to stay afloat. “My grandpa… drank from this…” The moorings trembled in the sudden wake. “And… yesterday,” her voice less than a whisper now, “he fell and….”

Gone. The passing bell had rung, and Niki’s friends had glanced her way but shuffled out. I would leave her also—for privacy and propriety, for too much in a span of minutes for a sub. This day was not spelled out, and goddesses of math were seemingly a galaxy away, making sense of not-so-petty things as tended to be amplified on human-centered Earth. “I’m sorry, Niki, that he…”

“No, he didn’t die. Not yet, if like a cat he has a dozen lives.”

“Nine?” I foolishly corrected.

“Oh, he’s way past nine,” she tried to curve her lips again. “Like way. Heading for the infinite.”

I smoothed her drawing with an awkward hand. “It’s good,” I dumbly echoed, then, “the lid is what is most compelling here.”

The weekend was a binge of kinesthetics: bowling with colleagues and big-boy hockey with Dad, desiring a companion for the return of Jágr in his 51^st year on Kladno ice—well, that half-century on planet Earth, anyway, even if he strapped on his skates for other armpits of the lower-case earth, like Pittsburgh and Omsk, Calgary and Newark, drudgery that begged no real relief. Kristýna was still mad at me, of course, but crashed us in the third period, when the game was 6-1 in the hands of Třinec, another ironworks that justified a living town. Dad hugged Týna like a niece—too hard, perhaps, for a fetus kicking back, but who’s to know? As for me, I got a fist-bump and a glare to just shut up and let this goddamn be.

Jágr scored on a power play: 6-2. The end worth waiting for, as Dad explained such hopeless hope an umpteenth time: “an empty net with eight minutes left scares the bejeezus outta everyone. Then the mayhem can ensue—a third goal turning fourth, and fights break out and penalties accrue which only stokes the chaos gods some more. You get a lucky break with nervousness from now a team protecting a fragile lead, a reffing crew who shouldn’t want the drama (if fans always do), calling a late hit, high stick, hooking penalty against the guests; the hosts pile on with another empty net, so the five-on-four turns six-on-four. Then suddenly—a minute left—you’re down by only one, which means…”

“Another empty net?” Hard to tell Kristýna’s tone in that, but seeing her smile at Dad was, well, a cross between nostalgia and a jab to his naïveté, not yet (maybe never) clued in to her dilemma. Namely:

“Say, Kristýna,” he asked as if in passing, “when are you gonna hook up with one of these Knights to produce the next Jaromír, because you know the melding of nature and nurture is a sure-fire way to—”

The full brunt of my hand stopped whatever might complete the infinitive. The sound of the slap was like the cusp of a stick upon a bulleted puck, redirecting the physics from the passer to the target goal, which was to “shut your drunken face, Jiří Borový!” I pretended not to gauge Týna’s reaction, which was muted and unmoving. My vision was tangential to her wide eyes—just for the second it took to see my father nod his vague compunction. The stadium was packed and our section stirred a bit, but I left from the same gate as if it were only to use the bathroom, taking my coat as a difference.

The other measure of kinesthetics was with Tomaš, who met my SMS appeal an hour later at a Kladno bar. Technically, he came in at 59 minutes from contact, safe enough within the frame of primes I set before I’d leave—in eight more minutes, or twelve maximum. I was barstool height, and he naturally kissed my cheek in the motion of the half-hug he often did with me. My hands were too full to reciprocate—a bloody mary in one, my frizzled hair in the other. I didn’t say ‘thank you for coming’ because… I wanted to be a jerk and have somebody witness my ingratitude.

“For what?” Tomy asked, without my literal articulation. It made me angrier that he could read my mind, so I responded by gulping the bottom of my drink and gesturing the bartender for another. Tomaš ordered a Birell, the rising genius out of Plzen’s breweries to keep Bohemians from bursting at their livers. “I drove here,” he explained the obvious, “and I can drive you home whenever you need.”

“Fuck that,” I levelled. “Home is for mullet-lickers.”

His eyebrows lifted to his own, erstwhile bangs. “What’s up, Amál? It can’t be about Jágr’s graying hairstyle.”

I told him about kids at the gymnazium, how they were negotiating the space between compliance and natural entropy—bathroom stalls as off-the-grid as they could get. Sure, their phones would still GPS their whereabouts to the margin of error +/- a matter of decimeters. To decimate the last resort of privacy. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“Here—a couple clicks away from your dad? And…”

“And yeah, dumbass Kristýna. I’m sure they’ve stayed through overtime, penalty shots, Jágr as ‘Man of the Match’, VIP party—”

He cupped my triceps to slow me down. “I’m sure they lost 6-2 and had nothing to celebrate.”

“Oh, were you there? And decided to sloth it here so I could get just drunk enough to—”

“No! I wasn’t there—a little thing called the internet could tell me the goddamn score. I came here ’cuz I’m your friend. Male version of Kristýna, if you will. Maybe as concerned about her as you are—friend of a friend sorta thing.”

“An enemy?” I knew I was losing control of language. “Like a double-negative.”

“You’re not making sense, Amálko. Why don’t we go to a better place and get some dinner, or coffee at least.”

We did that, and also fit nineteen-minute walks away from and back to his car. I’m guessing that, as I had turned off my phone to stop the inquiries and notifications and whatever else would be ‘smart’ in the palm of my hand. Tomašhad placed his there, anyway, and I wanted to slink inside his coat and drop the pretense. He’d passed the friend test fine, was never that much of an older sibling—wasn’t off-limits at all, I resolved as I gripped and guided him to grip me more, meandering at sober speed to his apartment in Smíchov which, yes, means ‘laughter’, sort of like the name ‘Isaac’ when his 90-year-old mama couldn’t contain her amusement that she’d finally gotten pregnant. When I brought that up to Tomy, he supplied a grimmer derivation for this part of Prague: some guy in the ninth century was ordered to kill himself in these woods, and when he got here, rope in hand, the local ghosts laughed uncontrollably about the situation. “Did he go through with it?” I asked, listening to his heartbeats.

“Dunno. He’s among the ghosts, one way or another.” Tomy hadn’t known about Sarah—he hadn’t ever gone to church—and pursued that story a bit. We had admitted between foreplay and further that neither of us were prepared for contraception, and though my month was probably in the safe zone, I honestly didn’t care what would happen. Tomy pulled out the first time and almost the second, an hour or so later. He literally wept an apology, but I laughed that away as we kissed each other to sleep.

He had the presence of mind to set his phone alarm early enough to drive me to Ořech in time for me to get ready for school, idling down the block to avoid an encounter with one or both of my parents. Only Jiří was up, looking worse for wear. He could gather that a) I was okay—even refreshed with a night’s sleep—and b) I was in a fair hurry to get to work. “I’m sorry, Amálie,” he apparently rehearsed, “and Kristýna told me about… her situation.”

“What—you two went off to chat at a bar?”

He was defeated and seemed relieved I was even giving him this much a hearing. “No. No, never…. She lives near the stadium—but of course you know that—and she walked home herself. Told me not to make a big deal of it, but… that she’s, well, thankful that you care about her. And that she’s probably going to make a decision within a week, one way or—”

“What?! She reveals this to you? While pouring out with a thousand fans?”

“Five thousand,” he clarified, “it was a sell-out.”

I felt like slapping him again. Or hugging his stupid sense of being a dad. Instead, I dashed upstairs to dress and gather the student papers I’d graded. He had made me a sandwich in the meantime and offered to drive me to Stodůlky. “No need,” I said, nodding thanks for the sandwich and an apple he added to the plastic bag. “Gotta ride already.”

“With…whom? I mean, it’s your business an’ all.”

I’m not a sarcastic person, nor very good at leaving questions unresolved. Didn’t want to say ‘Tomaš’ without his permission, but would have shared in Dad’s gratitude about him. “Abraham,” I decided to try. And in English, “Honest Abe.”

He smiled as if he understood. Maybe, in his knucklehead way, he did.

Teri met me in the staffroom with a look of chagrin. “Hey, girl, you bowled great—better make that a habit.” When I shrugged a muted thanks, having just put my lips to a coffee mug, she breathed in the strength to say, “’cuz we’re gonna miss you, Molly.”

Shit! I burned my chin on the steaming slosh. It wasn’t hard to discern what she meant, but, bargaining for a less obvious answer, I imagined she—and whoever would logically be part of her ‘we’—might be moving on, facing a sudden diagnosis of cancer, burning out from this grind, retiring in mid-thirties like athletes have to…. “I’m, um, gonna…. I mean, what?”

“Oh!” Teri drew her hands to her mouth, “I thought you were already informed. Like, out of respect, you know. Your, um, position—he won’t extend parental leave, coming back after this week. I just thought that…” She reached for a paper towel to dab her eyes and, mindlessly, gave the same scrunched square to me. I wasn’t tearing up (not yet) but sponged my chin and squeezed it into a stress ball.

Minutes later, after Teri had left for other ways to launch the day, the director came in to corroborate the news. “Yes, I’m really sorry that we even broached the hope—you’ve been great here, Amálie. Kids like you. They’re learning uniquely. I mean, he’s a veteran teacher and everything, but… I’ll tell you what—”

“What?” I responded too bluntly, unsure what tone I was projecting.

The director pushed up her elfin glasses and gauged something in my pupils, dilating perhaps in the sudden hormonal processing. “I think there’ll be a vacancy in maths somewhere in our circle of schools, and you’d apply with my fullest recommendation.”

“But I’m not certified. It’s a non-starter—illegal, even.”

“No. Don’t go down that road.” She twisted her mouth in a wily way. “You’re implying I did something criminal in hiring you! The law is not so instinctive—doesn’t know the ‘teachable moment’ or how to balance needs and resources. I do, after all these years. And you are a talented teacher who shouldn’t have to wait on bureaucracy. For that matter, why not use the second semester toward that effort? That’s another recommendation I’d facilitate—getting into a teaching faculty, and—”

I turned my back on her, feeling the back of my throat itch in an unpredictable way. The stress ball was still in my fist and I fumbled to morph it into a little fireman’s jump blanket in case I had to hurl. She put her hand on my shoulder and said more things I couldn’t concentrate on. I hated being so vulnerable; this job, this chance occasion to dive into those ‘teachable moments’ were rather incalculable in such telescoped time—the kids teaching me more than vice versa, even in the crossroads of bathroom breaks. The Lorax burst into my brain—just like that, from a chopped-down Truffula tree. This was always going to be a one-off, I realized, a Once-ler devastation of an unprotected future.

Entering the classroom felt like the one day I had served a detention,…

back ten years ago in my own gymnasium on the other side of Stodůlky. I had been there only two months and got into a tussle in physical education; it was just a lousy basketball game but the girl who was guarding me, 125% my size, kept lancing her hands toward my midriff, maybe in a clumsy effort to steal the ball when I had it or prevent me from moving toward a pass. Whatever diplomacy I extended was only making the situation worse, and though I should have gone through the motions of a spiritless game or beg the teacher to let me sit out, I grabbed her meaty arm and rammed my knee up to splinter it like firewood. My lack of karate skills only aggravated this bruin: she ripped clean to push me fully off my feet and into a four-meter slide on my tailbone. I managed to get up just as her fist barreled into my upper lip, dislodging the left incisor. Adrenaline or otherwise, I slugged her multiple times before the teacher could separate us, crying and bleeding and flailing to finish what was both irrational and unreal. We had barely known each other, and even in the corridors, she had shyly projected a wish to be friends. We never became that, of course, and after a day at the dentist, I sat in detention alone—she having done likewise in my absence. The rotating teachers to watch me that day looked on with surprised pity; “at least you learned something,” one suggested.

“What?” I wanted to know.

A shrug. Figure it out. Peruse the walls to see what they say. Don’t beat yourself up trying to discover why the rage was due to come out, but at least give it some berth. Or birth, if I wanted to play with my English, as I sometimes did…

Niki noticed I wasn’t really myself as I mechanically put quadratic equations on the board and, for the reminder of the formula, neglected to put both a plus/minus in front of the square root:

as if students were supposed to multiply the negative b variable to the radical instead of to add or subtract. She told me twice, uncertainly, and I struggled to see what she meant. Mai bolted to the board and seized a marker in the tray, fixing what now became obvious:

I put on a brave face: “so you caught my not-so-little gaffe. Why,” turning to the whole class, “is it important to note what Niki and Than Mai remembered?”

They both knew, I could see, and no one else had a clue. I asked them all to think about this question when they’d graph the equations, if they could do so without a graphing calculator. I reminded them that at least occasionally graphing by hand is instrumental in understanding the x and y axes and where functions crossed those lines.

For the next ten minutes, I burrowed myself into a low sofa at the back of the room and watched them work out the problems in their notebooks. Filip, of all boys, finally got the point: “the plus/minus is important because the U-thing… what’s that called again?”

“Parabola.”

“The parabola needs to cross twice—once for minus the square root and again for plus the square root.”

Niki agreed and Maša frowned. I thought of how he might apply this realization to a hockey rink, as if the two blue lines might be operative here, but my imagination was spent. “Very good, Filip,” I simply said, and sank further into the sofa and counted the minutes remaining in the week, the opposite of a prison sentence.

Tomaš picked me up in the afternoon, having read my single tear emoji with no context, only messaging further with the time my last class would be letting out. We drove clear to the other side of the city, stopping at a communal garden site in the neighborhood of Vinoř, a place I knew as part of the butterfly network. Tomaš had to meet with the coordinator there for about a half-hour, which gave me a perfect amount of time to check out the caged animals—some rescued from neglect, some fattening for slaughter. Hard to know which would be the case for some new brahmas, huge chickens with feathered feet. Easy to know with most of the rabbits, especially those with ruby eyes.

Bara, the coordinator, was gesticulating a lot while conversing with Tomaš, who had his thumb and index finger to his chin most of the time. I made my way around to the cows—Nebeská and Krabička, whose names Bara wanted every visitor to know for the ‘heavenly’ gift of the garden ‘boxes’ that, naturally, the cows would only look upon from their fence rail. She hadn’t divulged the horses’ names, so I had nothing to call them as I stroked their dry, greasy necks, one by one by one. Bara startled me by asking—now just meters behind me—if I had much experience with large animals. “I mean, I know you worked with sheep and goats at the Ořech pasture, but horses?”

“No,” I replied, “just cows there, and someone else handled their needs.”

She nodded and glanced back at Tomaš, whose face had the shadow of apology. “Well, we may have some part-time work in spring, when school groups come for ‘service learning’—but I suppose you’ll be back with the butterflies by then.”

I shot Tomy a ‘Is this why we’re here?’ He pursed his lips and said something generalized, more to himself than to Bara or me. “Anyway, thanks… Looks great, everything about this place.”

“Oh,” Bara twirled a dreadlock, “we, you know, get by.”

I asked about the brahmas, but stopped short of ascertaining if they’d keep their heads or not. They weren’t great egg-layers, Bara made it known, so…

We left on that note. It was dusk already as we walked down the hill toward the Vinoř pond, where Tomaš had parked. Concentrating on our footing, neither of us spoke for a minute until I wondered aloud what that was all about.

“What?”

“Begging on my behalf for a job…”

He didn’t answer right away. “No,” and then, “Honey, I didn’t…”

“You didn’t mention that I’m a week from being unemployed?”

“I didn’t… well, think you’d mind, being in this network and all. I mean, if you’re not going back to Olomouc, not going to face down that professor—”

I turned abruptly to gag him with my glare. “Fuck Olomouc.” At risk of letting too much sink in, I spun and practically ran down the rest of the path. Tomaš followed, but not as quickly. The pond opened an invite to jump in—for no reason at all—and I nearly did, imagining the pluses and minuses of doing so.

“You’re right,” Tomy even-keeled.

“About what?” I rasped.

“About your life. Way more than the sum of its parts.”

I puffed out a silly smile. “Like, in a mathematical sense?” He put out his arms in admission he had no real idea. They stayed open just long enough for me to view them as the better option than the lake. The jumping in was warmer, at least.

The week went the way of hot asphalt compressed by a steamroller, my own body somewhere in the mix. I shouldn’t use the metaphor lightly; I knew the sister of a kid who died this way, hitching onto the back of a layer truck for God knows why (no, scratch that—God does not need to feature here) and falling off, according to his traumatized friend. The driver of the steamroller that followed should have seen it all—the kids horsing around the construction site, at least. The police report had parents identify their son primarily through his shoes, as everything else had been crushed beyond recognition. His sister, after missing a week from school, met a million words of consolation. “I know,” she repeated in a fading, graveled voice, “I know. I know….”

I know my own troubles are nothing in comparison. Students at the gympl could see I was sad to leave—telling them by Thursday out of some courtesy to their unresponsive teacher (I had emailed him on Monday afternoon an update of what we’d done; perhaps it landed in his spam). Niki cried overtly, which deflected attention toward her instead of me. Pat and Mat told me, awkwardly, they had learned “a lot.” Maša bit her lip as Filip went over to Niki, already being ministered to by Thanh Mai. Daša seemed to size things up philosophically—nothing to the point of juxtaposing casualties here with those in her motherland, of course, as she kept Ukraine close to the vest. I asked her about things there, but…. She sealed her lips as firmly as I have done regarding Olomouc.

To which, Tomaš asserted, I’d eventually need to unseal. “You can’t let the bastard grind you down,” he paraphrased from The Handmaid’s Tale, a milieu that had a plurality of bastards, left and right. “This… Professor Alpha, as you say,” to my upraised eyebrows as if he needed spelling out, “this fucking bastard cannot reduce you to some unresolved hashtag, especially if you aren’t going to use your voice to—”

“Don’t say more, Tomy. Really.” We were cooking together at his place, halušky noodles with bacon and parsley in bryndza sauce. I had opened a bottle of red wine, but Tomaš was on his second beer from a fridge that my stupid dad could have stocked, back in the day. I put on the wireless amplifier that would seek my bluetoothed phone and then I scrolled for something that might speak for me better. The Heartless Bastards, ‘Only for You’—“not to be ironic, if you’re listening in.”

“I am, Amál.” He came over to sit with me on the couch. “Don’t worry about the halušky; I put them on simmer.”

I wasn’t worried about them. To some degree, they were like little grubs that hadn’t ever seen sunshine but may still have dreams of being an iridescent scarab someday, contributing to the hieroglyphics of Mankind. Maybe what my erstwhile students would become, beyond the passing weeks of measuring the innards of a kazoo, a nautilus shell, an hourglass, a bong. A hockey puck. “Shit!”

“What?”

“I think I left that Příbram puck at school. Or did I bring it here?”

He studied my face for a second. “Um,.. I don’t know—you’ve been here just a week, and your suitcase is barely un—”

I jumped up to see if it was in fact there, but doubted such a stroke of foresight. For days after it had leapt from the rink, various pockets of my jeans and coat had harbored its homelessness. I wore dresses most of the days I taught, and on those I didn’t, I didn’t want the disc to show and stimulate some kind of whispered joke—teacher’s got a weird ass hard-on! Pretty passionate about maths…. I should have put the keepsake in my purse, naturally; I still wanted it closer to my body—in the pocket of a cardigan, for instance. But I didn’t have a wardrobe of those to set a routine. There wasn’t enough critical mass in the suitcase to fling my underwear and tee-shirts to the ceiling in some cartoonish deep dive for the lousy talisman. I scoured the bedstands and dresser with blurring sight. The song had changed to ‘Simple Feeling’:

“Going through the window of the tower that cast shadows on

the ancient sea that’s over me into the desert that I roam—”

Tomy came to the threshold and asked if I was okay. “With what?” I jabbed, not quite at him.

“With my even asking if you’re okay.”

“Is that some kind of meta-test? Your application of the goddam commutative property?”

“I don’t know. Just concern.”

I went past him to check on the grubs. “They’re okay.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, following me, “they’re simmering, as should be.”

We ate, drank less than the early evening might have forecasted, went on a walk along the river, returned home to sink into bed. I filled in some gaps: Professor Alpha didn’t rape me in the sense of the three times we’d had intercourse. To regard those as consensual was not to say we had used the proper semantics; he initiated a kiss in his office which I didn’t refuse, if I also didn’t reciprocate during that after-hours consultation. I came back the next afternoon with an earnest sense that we were still pursuing questions on Riemann’s zeta. To some degree we were, until we evidently weren’t. A married man, he couldn’t bring me to his house and, despite the hermetic privacy of his office, a hotel room would have to serve as ‘safe space’ for the circumstances. I somewhat agreed, as he wasn’t delivering any illusions of a relationship that would pour into public arenas or create scandals. He didn’t try to sexy-up his voice, but prattled enough to get both of us in the mood. Sort of like the brain doctor in Kundera’s novel—

“Tomaš?” my Tomy flinched, “is that his fucking name?”

“No. Sorry I even drew the connection.”

I kept up the account. The professor showered and waited for me to do likewise, which I did without his suggestion that I should or shouldn’t. We made out a little bit—he wasn’t good at this, he said, but also wasn’t terrible. He put on his condom at a reasonable time—I wouldn’t go through every detail for Tomy’s understanding, but his listening eyes also didn’t want to influence my pace or description. My account.

One of three condoms didn’t do its job. I suspect the middle rendezvous, as we went one week after the other after the other, like an AA meeting or something of the sort. It didn’t occur to me to take a pregnancy test until a given morning when I didn’t feel like myself. The red parallel lines made the smallest jail cell I could imagine. While I wanted to inform him right away, several things prevented: his disinclination for phone calls and, as I wavered over a typed message, his probable reaction to be unhelpful.

“Lara was there, right? You told her—”

“I didn’t.” I don’t know why I didn’t, even now. I hadn’t carried anything like this in my life before and, selfishly I guess, wanted to face the consequences without interference. I’d wait for the baby bump to reveal my imminent reality—my present reality—and not whip up some apologia in advance. My due date would come after the defense of my thesis, which I imagined would be not a problem to complete—even with another professor presiding. But that’s where the shoe dropped: Alpha, when I did come to his office to tell him, was deaf to any option but a termination. He didn’t touch me, but, yes—you could call this a rape. He would refuse to let my candidacy go forth on the high prospect, he said, that he’d be implicated somehow: by association, by child support, by the hormonal unpredictability of emotions. By logic, he whisper-screamed, throwing my most recent draft to the floor, as if his whole office was a garbage can.

The abortion itself was indescribable. I could feel what was happening and what was not happening, the dull pain of the procedure, the numbness otherwise. Not true. I signed whatever papers and assented to a recommended check-up that I gathered didn’t happen in countries with more hospital strain than ours, or that in Olomouc, anyway.

And even as I showed the professor my receipt—7000 Kč paid, without even my suggestion that he should chip in—he lowered his eyes and said he’d have nothing to do with me. Too dangerous to consult, like poking a wasp nest to see if it were really empty. He said a few more things that I couldn’t take in, then shut the door.

“I’ll help you kill him,” Tomaš flatly suggested, “really.”

It was 10pm and too late to talk anymore. By midnight, knowing we both were counting sheep, I surprised my own ears by asking “how?”

Chapter 4: the beta

My suitcase stayed at Smíchov, but my bed was between there and Ořech, where my parents were happy with either sleeping scenario. I could spend days in Libušín too, and necessarily the nights that might entice Kristýna over for more friendship fixing. To practice for that prospect, I dressed in layers and nestled for hours at a time in the treehouse that Jiří (to his considerable credit) had kept sturdy and varnished and free from vermin. Who knows?—maybe he’d even needed the backyard retreat for his own conundrums. Or I guess they are ‘conundra’ in patriarchal Latin.

I usually gravitate to Greek, the language of Sappho and countless muses of mathematics. Despite such bigwigs like Pythagoras and Zeno, I’ve always had a soft spot for Anaxagoras and the ‘ingredients’ he saw in all the recipes the universe might whip up. I liked that he tried to explain rainbows after predicting eclipses, as if the eye’s capture of light’s release could be so easily tracked. Go and catch your rainbow, Anaxagoras, and I’ll hold down the fort. Like, literally—the treehouse, as close to a fort as definitions get. This fort is where I started writing my account, after having been convinced by Boris that pen and paper may not exactly serve as sword and shield, but something more than both.

Monday had me pining for Stodůlky and the easy excuse that I’d be there just looking for a personal item I may have left (otherwise, the puck has up-and-left, turned-on-its-heel, beggared-belief-that-it-ever-flew-my-way, a tak dále). I could swing by the gymnazium before students would arrive, if that made my presence less awkward; I could do so later in the afternoon. At any rate, I had nothing else to define the middle of this workless workday. I envied the fact my hapless cousin had dogs to walk and baby showers to dream about. Fuck it, then, a small, still voice emerged within my cochlea, I’ll make a novel of my life. “A harlequin,” I added out loud.

Mom, eating oatmeal and scrolling on her iPad, looked up to my own stir of breakfast. “What’s that, dear?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled. “Just… planning out my lack of plans.”

I should have simply repeated the throw-away airport genre that the treehouse waited for me to start. Mom thought the time was ripe to sell me on all my attributes—all the ways the world would be better with my work ethic, wit, wherewithal,… other wonderful intangibles. She promised, against my mild protestations, that she’d search for similar situations like that of Stodůlky. “And remember, Ami, you can apply at the teacher’s college and get back into study mode…” Yada, yada, a tak dale.

One thing I knew I could feasibly do from home would be to produce some videos on math concepts—my erstwhile gympl kids had told me point-blank that there weren’t enough of these in Czech language, even as the English ones were easy enough to follow. “But they’re all so boring. You could make a name for yourself towards anybody prepping their Maturita.”

Oh, sure—Ms Frizzle, the Gen Z influencer. I’d do math in a bikini, recruit a rescue dog to be my sidekick, play a kazoo at transitional points, outdo Boris at the box office…

The treehouse welcomed me back, after all these years, without some artificial need to plug anything in, let alone scroll for other points of view, virtual or otherwise. Inside there was, as ever: a rough bench and table, a box of crayons and scissors and glue—it’s not like I hadn’t created stuff in this pinewood box before. Dad had cleaned out some of the items that would be prone to mold, like dolls in their dresses and an ant farm (of all things) that I only recalled in its absence. My God, they must’ve starved to death in that flat trap, as if I knew how they’d survive under my watch in the first place.

So, without childish distractions, I put a brand-spanking-new notebook onto the table and contemplated my inroads to narrative expression. Being so out of my element, I resorted to the Greek alphabet and the beta function that had been my favorite to graph out for its symmetric polynomials and binomial coefficients, Pascal’s triangle and the 1+3+6+10+15=35 that creates a ‘hockey-stick identity’—

—not that I needed more of that in my life. I just wanted to scribble, doodle, draw… delay. Math functions are a good way to pass the time and let aesthetics wander.

I’d have to scribble definitions, starting with the one that stared me down: the legal, moral, personal, understood-or-otherwise determinations (or otherwise) of ‘rape’. Fucking Kurt Cobain blew the concept to shreds, maybe as a satirist desires. “Rape me, my friend,” he casually croons, “do it again” and “waste me”, to “kiss your open sores” and… blow his head off Hemingway-style. Both men fathered what they could—Kurt and Courtney to create a Francis Bean, and ‘Papa Hemingway’ to spawn an eventual ingénue in Woody Allen’s Manhattan—Mariel Hemingway, arguably a precursor of what her director would curate for the rest of his sunshady days.

I sketched out her late grandfather’s story, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, to do no justice to anyone: all are losers here, in the universe of, let us say, 1920s Spain. An ‘American’ tells ‘Jig’, who no habla español, that the vague operation they’re talking about will be so easy, “just to let the air in” (you mother-fucking nameless man, from America or anywhere you rest your case). Jig tries to talk about other things, like the distant hills that look like elephants, but to little avail. He railroads the conversation back to his coaxing, and she has one request, which he receives with unconscious, unconscionable magnanimity:

“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Of course he tries five clauses more, ending with a gauge of how she’s feeling. “I feel fine,” she repeats. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

A prime number of ‘pleases’. A duality of ‘fine’. A nullification of ‘wrong’. And none of this, arguably, is rape.

Move on. It’s not the point. What is the point? Scribbling in a treehouse is the point, says some abstraction, just to fill the silence.

I was shaken awake by Mom, who maybe looked at my notebook first, fallen onto the threadbare rug. She had climbed the ladder with a mug of tea, probably spilling a bit on her ungloved hand and, tortoise-tough, handling the heat. She gave me the mug and the notebook, in that order, then ran her fingers through my curls to establish a little eye contact. She used to bug me about my ‘Slash’ phase when I wore floppy hats to ensure my locks would curtain most of my face, hide a few pimples—that kind of thing. I didn’t smoke a constant cigarette like the guitarist, but sometimes drew a drag with friends. Nobody got the Guns N Roses thing, and with Axl being such an asshole, I was not trying to billboard them, per se. It fascinated me that Slash was simultaneously trying to hide in front of hundreds of millions. Maybe just pretending to hide,… but I shouldn’t presume.

Mom wasn’t asking me about Slash or any other phase I might be going through. She had called a couple schools, I guessed by her reluctance to say so—again, I shouldn’t presume. Instead, she wanted to talk about Tomy and if things were going okay. “But you don’t have to, you know, tell me,” she stumbled, “like you might with Kristýna.”

“Girl talk, you mean? With Týna?”

“Well… not that I’d put it that way. Just want you to feel you can, you know…”

“Are things okay with you and Dad?”

She blushed and borrowed a sip of tea. “Good enough, but that’s not the same as your situation. Unless you and Tomaš are that far along! I mean, your father would love it.”

“And you?”

“I love you and hope you’d get what you want, when you want. Including your profession.”

“Sounds like you’re nudging me into prostitution,” I tried to joke, but she pigged up her nose.

“Amálko, I’d never…”

“Kidding, Mom. And my ‘profession’ will take shape one way or another. The environmental programs Tomy works for are pretty soulful. They don’t pay much, but I could imagine a lot of different pay-offs. I liked my brigáda work at the science museum, too, and there’s got to be plenty of that in Prague, what with all the tourists coming back. If there’s one thing Covid taught us, it’s that resilience is not really a choice, but a raw necessity.”

I left that thought linger in the air, not because it was so profound; I didn’t know what else to say about ‘resilience’, though, when the concept wasn’t attached to elasticity, tensile strength, Young’s modulus and Euler’s review of Newton’s laws. The junk I left in Olomouc.

Speaking of, Mom’s eyes asked in an apparent dress rehearsal. “You could return to your doctoral work, Honey. Even down the road if you’d like.”

“Down the road?” I snarked, “like the Moravian horizon?”

“No, no. I meant it more in terms of a time frame. Like a gap year, you know? I understand how year after year of academics can cause burn-out.”

“It’s not that,” I mumbled.

Mom waited a minute for me to swig some tea and contemplate what ‘it’ was, then. I could tell she didn’t want to initiate anything more, but also that she couldn’t leave this boxy dollhouse without at least a try: “what happened, Ami, in Olomouc?”

What happened in Karviná, further east, concerned me more in the days to follow. Kristýna, who didn’t text me often, sent me a picture of herself in a hospital bed, her head wrapped like she was suffering from the mumps. ‘If only that,’ she replied to my query. ‘Skate blade along my jawline. Freak accident. Fitting, right?’

I pushed Facetime to make this a real conversation: “Týna, what in Christ’s name…?”

She strained to downplay: “don’t be so damned dramatic…, or else I’ll… hang up.”

“I’m sorry, but… Are you okay? Where are you?”

“Karviná still. Happened at the stadium… of course… and…,” she began to cry.

“Týna, are you okay? You’re there another night? With the team still, or?”

She nodded. “Whole team, no, but… a trainer is staying…. He’s not happy… with me,” looking around, “and I wouldn’t be, either.”

That’s it, I resisted saying, instead going for, “I’m coming—on the next train possible.”

She slurred some dissent and then followed through on her hang-up threat. I gave it a half-hour before texting my prospective arrival time, gathered by the train schedules online. Three hours to Ostrava, then forty minutes to Karvináwould slide me in before nightfall, nothing to negotiate.

Out of courtesy, I informed Tomaš, who offered to drive; I didn’t want his company on this, however, nor the temptation to veer off the main highway to Olomouc. I didn’t want to drive myself—could easily borrow Dad’s bucket ’o bolts, as earnest as he’s always been to keep it oiled and road-ready; the train would allow me to simultaneously zone out and study the passing countryside. Hum in my mind the query of our national anthem, maybe stroke my jawline to send healing vibes.

I ended up sleeping most of the way, curling into my own body warmth like a dog (or Mandelbrot, as I muscled my recollection). The shuttle from Ostrava to Karviná, then, had me wide awake and worrying about what to do with the evening. I had made an Airbnb reservation close to the Fryštát centrum—everything in this city was in walking distance from the train station—and brought a new Ishiguro to read, but feared, after all, that I wouldn’t get access to Kristýna, attached to the agenda of her trainer and medical treatment that wouldn’t depend on this provincial hospital. While I was pretty sure visiting hours would be over, I wanted at least to announce myself to the nurses station, get the lay of their land. I had been texting Týna occasionally as well, but her limited replies were message enough for me not to burden her situation. “I didn’t ask you to come here,” she even told me the one time I direct-called.

“Already on my way. Railroading, you know, means I at least have to stay overnight.”

“Let’s hope,” she strained through her teeth, “the train doesn’t crash.”

“Don’t you want a roommate?” I tried to joke back, and regretted the fact the call ended with nothing more said.

A restaurant in the Boženy Němcové park was not too pleased to take my order at half-past-eight, too dark and cold to remain open; I imagined if I were with some lover, splurging on drinks and desserts that would otherwise soon meet a dumpster, I’d be welcomed in. Ordering a grilled trout with almonds and red peppers meant the cook couldn’t leave early.

I ate while reading Klara and the Sun, barely begun from the train trip. From the speakers in corners of the ceiling came the tinny sound of Bert & Friends, the latest rave of shoegaze pop, looping loud enough to compete with Klara’s muted narrative. To some degree, the music fit the artificial intelligence Ishiguro was bringing to life: Klara would actually weigh in, without preconceptions or prejudice from her engineers. Not that Klara would say so, out of modesty, but ‘imagination’ needed to be the evolution of A.I. if the species were to survive.

The waiter sped me up at five minutes to nine, just as the song ‘Akamaféra’ begun its six-minute probe of the inner universe. I was just beginning to like this band when, like clockwork, the proverbial carriage turned into a pumpkin, pushing me to pay and exit.

The darkness of the park was not absolute: lamplights were liberally dispersed, conscious that the rowboat pond and enclosure for fallow deer were bound to have surveillance cameras. That said, a young group of drunks had climbed into the enclosure to chase the animals and, for the two they caught, share bottles of beer. Forty meters and closing in, I shouted at them to stop, which gave them more of a rise. Thirty meters I wondered what Klara would do, then Jesus, then Kristýna—with or without her injured jaw or 1^st-trimester fetus. Twenty meters moved my legs to an involuntary run, blurring into the final ten with ears no longer tuned into what was cackled my way. An empty bottle flew into my shoulder—not sticking like a poisoned dart driven into a Toro Bravo—and my calculation was simple: one less weapon they had. A couple girls were now discernibly part of this gang, and maybe they’d factor favorably into my approach; maybe, instead, they’d play a lioness’ role and rip me apart for the others to feast upon.

And maybe, as a result, I’d be dragged or gurneyed to the hospital, ask through broken teeth to room with my friend. “You made it,” she’d observe, always imprecise with whatever ‘it’ she often threw my way.

Boris, I should say, recently asked me about this part, whether it happened or not. Again with the ‘it’—go back a few pages, Cousin, and review: “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig.”

“And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be”…

A fucking 57 uses of the pronoun in less than three pages of life-story. 4% of their shared language, and no one uninvolved knows exactly what it is they’re talking about.

Anyway, I left the park with nothing more sore than my larynx, screaming the hooligans to their clumsy retreat over the opposite side of the fence I was in the process of climbing. The deer must have thought I was entering to sustain the antagonism, as they wobbled and weaved away from my attempt to check them out for damage. One was lapping at a puddle of beer before I stomped the poison swill into the ground. Another looked completely traumatized with every step I attempted her way, so I stopped. Time did, too, like sand running out of its upper chamber.

After I arrived at the two-room rental and showered, I realized I didn’t have Ishiguro in hand. To think it rested within the deer enclosure—with my full name in the cover as a bad habit (books to pass on, not to possess)—I knew I should go back and retrieve. It. Instead… I slithered naked into the puffy bedding and rocked myself to sleep.

The morning light—or lack thereof, in late fall—would show the novel not-so-worse-off for a night out with the deer. A couple dog walkers chastised me in their po našymu language: Czech, for the most part, mixed with the Polish, Silesian, Slovak hues of this borderland. I answered back by pointing to my prize, as if I had enlisted myself to read to the animals, librarian-style.

Kristýna, when I told her, laughed in spite of the evident pain. She couldn’t speak much—maybe didn’t want to, either, but welcomed my chatter. To describe her wound, she explained with strained gestures: a scramble for the puck in front of the goalie, out of her reach; a push from behind, sending Kristýna down to the blade of her teammate’s skate, angled absurdly to find the gap beneath the helmet cage and collarbone pads. “This close to the jugular,” she indicated with a nearly touching index finger and thumb. “and almost to this lip.” She breathed to pace her punchline: “now nobody will want to steal a kiss.”

I smiled pitifully and leaned to smooch her forehead, which she allowed more than I would have guessed. And when she asked about the bruise the beer bottle must have left, I unbuttoned the top of my shirt to show. Not so far as what a nursing mother would have to do, but that is the way her trainer saw me as he entered the room.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked, and, instead of uttering anything, I clutched the novel against my wounded shoulder, as if it were a shield.

A doctor and a nurse came in a minute later, shooing me and the trainer out to the hallway. The trainer protested a bit, wanting to hover within to inspect the wound, gauge whether Kristýna were ‘transportable’—his word—and even playable in the near future. No one answered that, and I was tempted, out in the hall, to spill the beans on her pregnancy. But…

The trainer now studied my face. “You were the one who fainted… at, where was that? Příbram. Yeah, quite a delay, I recall…”

“Are you trying to be ugly? I mean—”

“What? And you’re who again?”

I broke eye contact and reached into my pocket. Of course the puck wasn’t there—I’d given up on finding that—nor was a switchblade to make his face match that of his ward. Instead, twenty crowns to put in the coffee machine down the hall. “You want something?” I asked in equanimity.

“Hell,” he mumbled, then: “okay. Cappuccino,… please.”

I dug out twenty more crowns and ambled the small stretch of hospital. As I waited for the machine to wake up, I imagined a factor tree that might define the conversation lines. The guy looked fiftyish, weathered, obviously jaded. He likely felt this job a purgatory for what should have been sexier, more gratifying, less boring. He must have lived on the ice from post-toddlerhood, back in communist austerity. He probably had a daughter or some logical path to land with the girls. Charmless, by design, as if this was perhaps his way with everyone. Or maybe: reverse psychology—you’re never liked if you desperately want to be liked. Then: forward psychology—you’re tough if you desperately want to be tough, and what better training ground than hockey for that? But none of this was true, or ‘universal’ at least.

He sat in the middle seat of three connected chairs along the wall. I gave him his cappuccino, which merited his grunted thanks. “Move over one, will you?” I asked.

Pretending he didn’t hear, I repeated with a point in the direction I didn’t want for my own chair—namely, farther from Kristýna’s still-closed door. “I don’t believe in luck, good or bad,” he ventured, after complying to my request, “but you gotta admit, she seems jinxed: missing the Olympics for Covid, getting almost decapitated here. What’s next?”

I sipped my bouillon soup (the only thing I liked out of these machines). He mumbled a few things more, but I didn’t care to decipher them. At a lull, I decided to ask, “how did you become a trainer?”

“Me?” He was surprised at my interest, I guess. Or my guts to probe his credentials, if I were remotely being sarcastic. He sought my eye to estimate that I wasn’t, so gave me a meandering rundown of his résumé. Typical stuff: a career in the B-league, which actually paid a living wage (when the women’s A-league still doesn’t); a blown-out knee to kill off chances of advancement; a son he coached to the latter’s hatred of everything; a daughter he tried to do better by, if “she was lousy, but… you know. Showed up.” He paused as if I’d ask more about her, as I knew by the names on the Kladno roster she wasn’t playing on this team. Or, if ‘lousy’, not on any team. I let the unsaid float—his business, not mine. What was mine, though, was Kristýna’s best route to recovery. I thumbed toward her door. “Anything you’d advise about…?”

He set his plastic cup on the floor and leaned into the middle chair. “If there’s one thing you could do, it’s help her regain confidence. It’s been slipping, like she isn’t focused or something. This accident, for instance, could have been prevented—she didn’t need to leave her feet. It’s almost as if her instincts are off-kilter. Maybe it’s mental—not being able to show what she could do on a real stage. I’m a big reason she made the national team, you know, and now she’s looking… unappreciative.”

“Unappreciative? That’s not the word you want.”

“Huh? How would you presume what I want?”

Only the doctor came out some minutes later, shutting the door behind him. The trainer stood up for a briefing that, evidently, the doctor wasn’t inclined to provide. “Information on a patient goes through protocols, which—”

“I’m her trainer! I’m here precisely to support her best interest. Notice there isn’t any ‘next of kin’ to help process—”

The doctor put his hand up to that and looked at me. “And who are you?”

“I’m her friend. For twenty years. She called me to come here.” I felt my eyelids tugging down at that half-truth.

“Good. Well, she’ll be at least another night under our monitoring, for your planning.”
The trainer guffawed: “another night! C’mon, you know those stitches can come out at a hospital closer to home. Why would staying here be any advantage?”

“Her blood pressure is too high for overland transport.”

“Overland? Like she can be flown?”

“Of course not. Those cases are specifically outlined, and hers certainly doesn’t qualify. She’ll be fine here.” The doctor shifted his clipboard to check something—perhaps his next rotation.

“Wait—” the trainer grabbed his arm, “our team doctor, back in Kladno, can send you her info on blood pressure, not that it’s ever been an issue. But maybe you can use that to prescribe blood-thinner pills, or—”

“I’m sorry, but that wouldn’t address the fetal needs, as we haven’t detected yet a match for blood type.”

“Fetal needs? What do you mean?”

The doctor, hiding his exasperation, tucked the clipboard under his arm to put his fingertips together. “As her trainer, I’d expect you knew she’s pregnant. There are rules on your side that I’m only vaguely aware of, but she shouldn’t be engaged in this type of physical duress. Our treatment here has to be on behalf of both of them. And with that, I’ll ask that you do not exacerbate the situation.” He turned also to me, unsure of my own need for the same advice.

The nurse came out and conferred with the doctor in whispers, interrupting herself to say “not yet” to the trainer, aiming for Kristýna’s again closed door. More whispers and a comparison of whatever their clipboards held.

“Visiting is over now,” the doctor announced, “and I’ll leave word with the receptionist about the patient’s availability this afternoon.”

“But,” the trainer asserted, “visiting hours are until eleven—”

“Case by case. And this isn’t such a case.”

Frustrated by this term, the trainer grumbled “lost case” (which, I later debated with Boris, isn’t the same as ‘basket case’, though the trainer might have disagreed).

Time to kill, then, I walked the town and settled into a café on the campus of Slezská university and texted Kristýna—just to indicate where I was, not the fact that the doctor had spilled the beans. She must have found that out through the trainer, though, because her reply to me was simply a hair-tugging emoji, followed by ‘game over’, followed by ‘=life’. I called to say, “No, Týna—not true”, to which she hung up, promulgating this new routine of hers.

Life is the inverse of entropy, I would have liked to say, seeing the atoms there and in-the-making float away. Life is human, full enough with foibles, not defined as such by them, needing not a ‘Klara and the Sun’ to figure our shit out. Life is not a game, certainly not in terms of minutes, penalties, assists and goals.

When I returned to the hospital, just before 1pm, the trainer was pacing the reception area the same way he and his colleagues would fret behind the bench where hockey players sat, sometimes ready to scissor-jump the wall for player changes. Despite my effort to glide quietly to the other side of the room, he made a straight line toward me, digging in his pocket for what might have been the twenty crowns he owed me. Instead, as he stopped just shy of my meter of personal space, he handed me what could have been a debit card but, instead, was a cardkey for Penzion Aldo, overlooking the town’s main square—I’d considered booking it, but they had no rooms left for less than 1800Kč, three times what I paid last night. “Listen,” he said, “I’m here only to tell Kristýna that I’ll head back to Kladno and the team doctor will come tomorrow. I have this room, nonrefundable, that I won’t use, if…”

Since I hadn’t yet reserved the Airbnb for tonight, I took the card without calculating what this trip was costing (not much, but not nothing). “Oh. Well, thanks. Will I have to, I don’t know, clear that with the concierge?”

“No, no—the team has already paid it through and, well, it’s frankly our deal, not theirs.”

“Just seems sneaky.”

He grimaced at that and checked his watch. “It’s time,” he called over to the receptionist, who nodded a dull affirmation. Then he asked me if he could visit Týna first, fill her in on the trade of duties (as if it were babysitting). I was in no hurry and indeed happy that he’d be out of the picture soon.

I entered again Ishiguro-land, trying to decide if I had some of the same properties of the narrator, an ‘Artificial Friend’ to a gifted—or ‘lifted’, genetically—teenaged girl named Josie. Klara, to fuel her AF energies, requires enough exposure to the sun and yet, for all the programming to make her a savvy companion, Klara has no idea where the sun goes at night. And Josie, for all her cultivated intelligence, does not clue her AF into the ways of the world, human or otherwise. Could be out of a mean streak that comes with her deteriorating health—the lifting process had killed her older sister, after all, and doesn’t bother factoring EQ into the tired pursuit of a higher IQ. It felt strange to read this in the advent of ChatGPT and the pursuit of Potemkin knowledge—PQ, if you will. My mind kept trying to multitask: read for Klara’s naïve insights and wonder about my own, especially if I were being an AF to Kristýna, to any extent.

The trainer broke those trains of thought to bid me good luck with his “ornery player, maybe in no mood to see people for a while.”

“Why, what did you talk about?”

“Her suspension from the team, for starters,” he matter-of-facted. “She hadn’t disclosed her pregnancy and simply had to know her status, the rules, the—”

“Is she denying this?”

He stared at me for a full ten seconds. “Are you preparing some sort of deposition?”

I tightened my eyebrows. “No. Nothing here is about me. And shouldn’t be about you, either. I mean, for fuck’s sake, she nearly died…”

Surprisingly, his face softened as he turned his icy eyes to the linoleum. At some length, he nodded his head. “Yeah, you’re right. Doesn’t change the fact she violated team rules, but… bigger things in life, right?”

I didn’t want to echo him, so answered only with a subtle shrug. “The team doctor, you said, is coming tomorrow? And will stay as long as necessary?”

“Tomorrow, yes, but… more than that I cannot say.” He picked up his duffel, then, brusquely, jutted out his hand for me to shake, which I did despite the years of Covid that had taught us more caution in this regard. “See you later,” he strangely said, not the farewell that seemed to fit our strained hours. Again, my tensed-up shoulders subbed for any echo.

Upstairs, Kristýna was sitting, practically leaning against the edge of her bed. The mumps bandage was still in place, not hiding a xanthic spread of bruising. Instead of a hug or ahoj, she questioned this whole bout: “Round 2?”

“Well, if you think of it that way, we can throw in the towel. Not fight that jerk or the system he lords over.”

“The system that I’ve worked hard to make my career—”

“—yeah, rewarding you by forcing you to take a raft of jobs to keep afloat.” I looked away in fear of her response, which wasn’t forthcoming. “Not that I should talk, freeloader I’ve become. On the eve of twenty-seven, still dependent on my parents. Pretty pathetic. At least you—”

“Don’t talk about me. Not like that, anyway.”

Agreed. She rarely mentioned her parents, divorced for as long as I can remember. Like me, she had no siblings. Unlike me, she had no Tomaš. And, having tried a couple times to know her night-time life, I knew she had no interest in revealing the circumstances of her pregnancy. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, positioning myself beside her at the bed.

We sat silently for probably two minutes—a typical duration in the penalty box, maybe both of us were thinking. “This is boring,” she finally broke, jolting to her feet. “How far do you suppose they’ll let me walk? Maybe to those debauched deer you tried to save?”

I stifled my smile. “Not that far. Not outside, I’d guess. By the way, did the team leave you with enough, y’know, stuff? clothes? a warm coat, I hope?”

“Same as what I wore on the bus. Didn’t expect to stay overnight. Didn’t plan any of this—I’d be the singled-out one getting struck by lightning on a cloudless day.”

“You’re not unlucky, Týna.”

“I am. And your job is to tell the truth.”

So, I’m employed after all. To convey truth. To be truthful. “Let’s walk to the nurses’ station and see what they say.”

“About what?”

“About going farther. About what’s good for the baby.” I braced for her to lash out at that notion, but she curled her arm in mine as if I were a prom date, or she a senior citizen. We walked like that down the corridor, but opposite the direction of the nurses’ station. A better hospital would have a balcony to aim for, but maybe such an aperture would lend to occasional leapers; when we came to the end, the window was unopenable and the view was bland. Still, we stared out and stopped trying to address anything.

Until, inevitably, Tomaš buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t know it was him, of course, so in my checking, Kristýna pushed herself away from the sill to return to the room. I hovered over which button, red or green to push, and begged her back, but she guessed, “privacy. What everybody needs.”

I should have pressed red in that respect, but did the opposite.

He had found the puck, he said, lodged behind the washing machine. Of course! Memory clicked in that I had balanced it like a tangent on top, forgetting to factor in the jostle of the tumbler below. Pucks are meant to move, after all, and slide with forces playing on their fate. “Thanks,” I told him, though I wasn’t as ecstatic as I may have been, trading this totem for the concern for Týna and her more-than-blastula inside. “She hasn’t said what she’ll do now,” I told Tomy when he asked about her. “I’m hesitant to, you know…”

“I don’t know.”

I sighed before the obvious. “Me neither.”

The phone call over, I went back to Kristýna’s room to find her ‘asleep’. My whispers to ascertain as much were every bit the façade as her undulating eyelids, the sheer tissues that do their best to close the world for a while. The chair by the window might have invited the chance to ride out her ‘nap’, but now I also needed some privacy.

The lounge downstairs could somewhat provide for that, and my body gravitated to a casket-size divan halfway tucked beneath a potted palm. The fronds evidently needed some attention—whisks of water, carbon dioxide from a visitor like me, a touch more light. Instead of being a good Samaritan on those fronts, I studied the organism and its mindless manifestation of practical aesthetics. Tomaš had a plant like this in his apartment—an easy grab at IKEA, most likely, to woo a sense that not everything in a warehouse is soulless. The one at his bedstand (ours, I guess) impressed me more and likely had come from a garden center. Tighter in its natural design, something between a cactus and aloe vera, its reach for photosynthesis followed the mathematician Fibonacci—or the other way around.

And though it wasn’t evening, I imagined being lonely at Penzion Aldo tonight, cuddling into sterile bedding that wouldn’t feel like Tomy’s body, as much as I’d attempt that illusion. For the time being, I took Ishiguro’s novel and paged to its blank space at the end, just before the dust cover. A pen from my purse seemed to know which words to string together, sort of like the fronds uncurling from their mother stem:

Fibonacci, Lost and Found

Tonight I’m dreaming of the houseplant sleeping—

dreaming in its Fibonacci way—swirling out and curling in,

prepping for tomorrow’s light and how to leverage its catch, leaf by

leaf at ratios 1.618 and Zeno’s distance from each other.

The math goes on to say: your hutchless rabbits grab

each other’s fancy equally: swirling through the countryside

at two and three and five and eight and—if they’re not consumed—

thirteen pairs as months unfold, lucky in such faith.

And if we feel the cycles less forthcoming—an earring lost between

the last place worn and the first time known it isn’t there—

why not hope for it to jostle toward some light, grab

another’s fancy and find an opportunity to shine again.

Klara, I realized after finishing, depended on the sun to keep her own shine viable. A couple times in my reading thus far, she runs to a barn on the horizon in the ingénue thought she’ll get more solar sex, so to speak, before the night usurps this source. Her instincts, if a machine can have any, are not unlike a sunflower or a reptile basking on a stone. I decided that I’d finish the remaining hundred pages tonight in order to put the book in Týna’s hands, poem included, maybe with a kiss in lipstick I would need to buy, if that wouldn’t be unwise.

Visiting hours had forty-five minutes left, time enough for ‘Round 3’ if she regarded it that way, or the third period of the game she had given so much of her life-energy. Go figure: she was asleep for real—the nurse explaining that the combination of chemical alterations (not just drugs) were stimulating fatigue, an oxymoron I rather liked. We talked for a few minutes about the total situation, fetal feelings as well, and then I tore out an un-inked page of the novel to jot my friend a note. If it were worth narrating here, I’d do so. In fact it’s terribly worth it.

But also rather private.

I ate again at the same restaurant in the Boženy Němcové park—call it lack of imagination, or inertia to venture beyond the new familiar, or interest in a different sound loop than Bert & Friends, which sadly vanished for songs I had no desire to Shazam. A waitress was on duty and didn’t mind that I sat for hours and ordered little else than fried cheese and paprika slices and tap water, which democracy had worked hard to reinstate as a human right to freely order over the pricy moguls of Mattoni, Evian, Aquafina, Dejà Blue and whatever else siphoned off artesian wells. I easily had enough time to finish off Ishiguro, but didn’t quite manage the final chapters. Gazing out the window while the dusk still allowed, I couldn’t help but squint every so often toward the fallow deer a couple hundred meters away. In other words, out of sight. But not out of mind—and hopefully in a saner set of circumstances.

My other reason to linger there ’til closing time (and then another hour shuffling around the deer and dormant ducks) was to avoid the guilty feeling of striding past the Penzion Aldo concierge as if my usage of the place was on the up and up. Rehearsing several scenarios, ways to make eye contact or not, I decided that the naked truth would be my only resort if questioned: I owed nothing to the trainer and didn’t have to concern myself with what retribution might ensue from his off-the-record gift. Kristýna wouldn’t suffer any consequence—I didn’t tell her about the arrangement, cringing at the idea that… she’d cringe at the idea.

Turned out that no one at Penzion Aldo was on duty to check who key-carded into their front door. Inside, a checkerboard corridor led to an Escher-looking staircase to a couple rooms per landing, and because the trainer neglected to tell me which number was his (now mine), I had to lightly brush each door sensor until, by #4, a green light burped to let me in.

A lamp’s light was already on, as well as the television. Instinct should have pulled the door shut to shield me in the greater glow of the corridor, where I could then knock to see what mistake had been made. Instead, I pushed in and found the trainer groggily stretched out on the bed, watching some talking heads expostulating their views on General Petr Pavel, the lead presidential candidate against Andrej Babiš, the ousted prime minister fighting like other billionaires to be one-with-the-people. Because they were in mid-conversation concerning a fragile turn in the support of the Ukraine defense apparatus, I delayed my what the fuck and leaned against the wall to learn a little more about the throes of the wider world. The trainer acknowledged my presence with a grunt and forced himself into a sitting position, yet also seemed intent to follow the pundits’ argumentation. When a Tomio Okamura supporter started to flare his fascism, I paced to the remote control on the desk and hit the red button. At the same time, I reached into my purse for my phone, readying myself for the need to green button Tomaš… or 158… or the Airbnb or…

“Sorry,” the trainer said, not appearing contrite. “I would’ve told you if… I had a way, but… missed my train, and—”

“Not true. There’s always another train.”

He grunted again and this time shifted his weight. “Well, not tonight.” He kept his focus on the ebony slate that now served as a mirror to the room instead of a window to the world of realpolitik. He hadn’t reacted when I cut off Tomio, as if the screen could have shown a Little Mole cartoon well past its bedtime or a porno beyond its premature ejaculation. “Sorry,” he mumbled again.

“Sorry that… you are… what?” I kept my relative distance to gauge his level of inebriation. Never talk to a drunk, the adage goes, often ignored. The Laffer curve jumped into my brain for some reason, substituting tax rates with blood alcohol to a point of no return.

He finally made a semblance of eye contact, fatigued more than jaundiced. “Sorry for putting you in this position,” he uttered clearly enough. “I get that it doesn’t… pass the smell test.”

“Huh? What ‘it’ are you talking about? Like your reclamation of the room?” Because he didn’t respond to that, “or your agenda otherwise?”

“I don’t have an agenda. Just to leave this shitshow in the morning.”

“Brilliant! And so what am I supposed to do?”

He rotated his crumple-clothed body to stand up and stumble toward the TV. The minibar below it, actually, as he opened the fridge in an insipid overture for me to take my pick of what was left, “on the house, of course.”

“How did you even get in here? They wouldn’t have issued you a second key.”

“After missing my train,” he pulled a mini-bottle of Chablis, “I told the gal downstairs that…” Now he was gauging me, offering the unscrewed bottle as a peace pipe, perhaps. I shook a definitive no! and spiraled my hands to make him finish his stupid syntax. “I told the gal that I left my key at the hospital. Which, you gotta admit, was no lie.”

“You didn’t say you left it in my hand!”

“No, cuz then they’d shutter you out. You’d be homeless.”

“And why can’t you be the one to be homeless? Or find another place to stay?” I scrolled my phone to the Airbnb contact and rather demonstrably tapped that number, keeping an eagle eye on his stolid, mashed potato face. It was past their answering hours, evidently, as the ring jump-frogged to oblivion, lending no option to ‘leave a message, please.’ With my ear pressing the phone to silence the lack of any response, I quickly contrived in my mind a salvaging script:

Hello? Hi, it’s… me, from last night. Yes, thanks, all was fine and, in fact, I need the room again. Tonight—yes, I know it’s late. I’ll pay extra for the hassle. Yeah, thanks. You can be there? But only in the next ten minutes? Okay—I’m on my way, then.

As convenient as that would have been to utter aloud, then force this galoot to go in my stead before chain-locking the door to his furious return, I gave up the whole ruse. “Nobody,” I answered to his query about whom I was trying to call.

“Look,” he said, “this bed doesn’t separate like they sometimes do,” pointing to the queen-size he had rumpled, “but that chair over there pulls out, y’know, and…”

I won’t narrate what the next five minutes had in machinations and mixed thoughts. I considered moving that chair out to the hallway or even scoping out the lobby for a more comfortable couch. I relayed those same options to him. I wondered what the differences would be if Kristýna were aware of the situation—or even bodily present as a third person to stake sovereign territory. What if the trainer were female? or twenty years older, or younger?

After arranging the chair where I wanted it—closer to the door than the window view that had been its raison d’être—I took all my stuff into the bathroom and locked myself to at least a half hour for myself. And Tomy, as I called him after showering. I lied when he asked to put me on FaceTime to see me, kiss me goodnight. “Left my charger at the hospital, so… battery is pretty low…. Yeah, I know. Love you, too.”

Opening the door to cope with the rest of the night was a gamble I wish I had recalculated. The trainer’s snoring was slightly reassuring, but the opposite of an equal sleep-inducer. I wrapped myself into the puffy duvet—at least hotels separated those items for each double bed—and held my fully charged phone like a stuffed animal to my chest. I reconfigured a couple times, rising even to procure that mini-bottle as a truncheon, if need be. The idea of handling his empty, sticky Chablis made my face pinch; the mini-bar had another that would pack a greater punch with its extra weight. Still, I unscrewed it to have a few gulps at least. It was on the house, after all.

It.

Chapter 5: the gamma

Tomaš was none too happy with that last chapter, as much as he commended my Good Sam sense of what a situation needed. Kristýna’s situation, anyway. “But to tolerate that man’s scheme?”

“I didn’t have to tolerate anything. He left first thing in the morning. Quiet as a mouse, to let me sleep.”

“Let you. Nice.”

“And if you were in my position, you’d have done things so much differently?”

Tomy looked into his hands—we were bookends on the couch—and then into my eyes. “I doubt it,” he confessed.

The dubito, neglected older brother of Descartes. In Olomouc I audited some seminars in philosophy that hoped to bridge the faculties: Descartes as mathematician (of course), but also scientist and theologian. He likely had an influence on Hume’s advocacy of freedom in passions and thought—the empirical method as prerequisite to realms theoretical. You experience things, then experiment perhaps; you extend your findings to whatever extrapolation is rational; you exit the rational once in a while, knowing π did exactly that before humans could properly dispense with their rulers. Irrationals had rhyme and reason for Descartes, but so did imaginary numbers. Take the equation, he proffered: i² = -1. Experiment with that, as much as pencil and paper allow. Multiply anything by itself—even negative selves—and you’re bound to see a positive increase. Except starting with zero, of course: the tabula rasa that rarely satisfies.

But embraced by René, along with the doubts that come with staring into the void. He didn’t abandon what was common sense, that 2 + 2 doesn’t need Orwellian spin to = 4. He did, however, abandon ‘sense’—including those beloved passions—to think beyond the empirical and theoretical (all-too-armchaired, even in his day). His search was summed in Latin terms: dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum. Doubt and cogitation essentially congruent. Where the nuances of ‘cognition’ fit would become the subsequent tomes for us to write.

Long way of saying: I love Descartes as much for his navel-gazing as the pragmatics that result from the gamma function: those graphic curves that inform probabilities by regarding any set of isolated points. The box-whisker plot could not have proper footing without the gamma function, for instance, not that humans are more benign to one another with such statistical determinations.

In my post-Stodůlky, post-Karviná days of kicking about, I headed to Karlovo náměstí to bother Boris and Simona, their shih tzu and canaries. They could see right through my Descartes deflections and carefree time to kill. “It’s not employment you need,” Simona surmised, “but purpose. Raison d’être. If—” she raised her perfect eyebrows while lowering her chin— “that’s not too patronizing to say.”

Boris held back for a minute whatever advice he’d want to spew. I think he was feeling guilty about pushing me to write about my life, a preposterous precis no matter how effluent or edited. Like, am I supposed to ink the grumbles in my gut when, fuck, I have no idea what they’re trying to say? He was at the end of some leash that didn’t really control him, or cost him ‘raison d’être’, to throw that cream pie back into the room. Tacitly, anyway.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m sure there are a lot of expat kids in need of math tutorials. Czechs, too, who could afford the thousand crowns an hour you’d deserve. Really!” he inflected as if I would have scrunched a face of disbelief. “Even more, I bet. Walking dogs is small change when it comes to what people value, here and now; they’d pay far more for a roll-out carpet to their future...”

He prattled on for a while on this point, but my attention was on Simona, who had opened the canary cage and was now cooing the birds to fly free. “They don’t want to at first,” she noted, “but a) they need the exercise and b) after a half-hour or so, they seem to appreciate their little house within their greater home. They’re happy with their perch, having tested out what humans have as an equivalent.”

“Don’t they worry about the dog?” I asked.

“Nah. She’s no Tom and they’re no Jerrys—kind of a perfect world of co-existence. Not that they regard each other as friends; probably that’s the irony of Tom and Jerry in the end. They play their trifling games of war and would be devastated to see the other actually die.” She prodded one and then the other out, and they flew straight to the top of the wine cabinet. The shih tzu took notice, but, to Simona’s point, didn’t add anxiety. “Boris,” she beckoned, as he had gone into the kitchen, “I’m going out for a walk with anyone else”—she eyeballed me sweetly—“who’ll join me. Watch the canaries, will you?”

“Well, with the—”

“Pooch? We’ll take her with us. Just along the river. You won’t miss us.”

We actually walked the other way, circling the quiet swell of hospital structures that topped the north plateau of the Botič valley, infamously spanned by Nuselský bridge (née Gotwaldova), where cameras were always on suicide watch. We weren’t going to amble that far, instead looking for late November greenery. One of the hospitals here had converted Saint Kateřina’s convent to long-term psychological care. Despite the occasional howls through windows winter-sealed, the public garden was serene, and that is where Simona, the shih tzu and I settled for an hour.

Though the brick wall was twice taller than anything Romeo could have scaled, we pretended to view the neighborhood: the birthing hospital to the south, the botanical gardens to the west, the Dvořak house to the east… The patients here were not allowed to venture out to them, let alone this very bench that lent to our imagination. “Shame, really,” Simona sighed. “It’s been my struggle, too.” When my eyes asked her to elaborate, she started with “isolation, self-imposed” as distinct from involuntary fortunes. She didn’t spell out everything in this regard, but went on to ponder how the internet had accomplished the paradox of knitting the world together and cutting the threads of physical contact. “It would be case-by-case, I suppose, but I wonder how many folks in there,” gesturing toward the upper floors, “need solitary confinement from their erstwhile solitary conflict.”

“What do you mean? Like a double negative?”

“Anders Breivik, in Norway, must be isolated for safety reasons. I’ve heard he has relatively liberal access to the internet, which… I don’t know. It would be stupid, I guess, to make correlations.”

“Like,” trying to figure out this train of thought, “contact with the outside world is not helping his rehabilitation?”

“Fuck him,” Simona smirked, “I don’t know why I brought him up. Just that… I bet some people would be better off without the illusion that a savvy life is somewhere tucked in cyberspace.”

I hesitated to address the obvious, but did so anyway: “you make a pretty good living from cyberspace, online groupies—and boosting their self-esteem to do themselves up, show their best face—”

“Their best face isn’t due to make-up. That’s like saying the best days of the year must comprise a gentle breeze and twenty-five degrees, clouds that look like ice-cream cones, butterflies and bluebirds that won’t eat them.” She gauged whether she should supply more clichés, to which I shrugged. “Those don’t hurt,” she continued, “but also don’t mean shit when self-esteem has to be more than skin-deep.”

The shih tzu was patient with the further weave of conversation, occasionally fetching a seasonally doomed pine cone Simona tossed this way and that. The topic of Olomouc and the professor was carefully broached, less on what to do than what had been done—kiss and tell and yell and never bring this up. The wonder if this were a #MeToo story and what that might mean to litigate, reclaim my place, ‘destroy’ an accomplished life for the chance never to resurrect the fetal life destroyed. The opposite of which is to ‘reconstruct’, and nothing the professor could do to prevent that. I was not an Offred in the grips of Gilead, and he was certainly not a Commander. Atwood might say, “well, not quite…”, but my guess is that she’d listen and take notes. Read much more than write.

A scream from deep within the hospital pulled all its twenty-second energy from the diaphragm, like a long-gone opera singer. “Holy cow,” I said in English, not for any reason I could fathom.

“Yeah,” Simona answered in Czech, “neither fit to milk nor send off to the slaughterhouse, whoever makes that call.”

“That’s horrible,” I also said in Czech, then bit my lip. The slaughterhouse was just as likely anywhere a person could not freely live. Olomouc or otherwise.

Back at the apartment, we found Boris with a canary on his shoulder, like an underachieving captain of a pirate ship. “Where’s the other one?” Simona asked, maybe with a name in mind—Uhlí, for ‘coal’, Důl for ‘mine’, her little joke to see if Boris would survive any longer than his house gift of these birds.

“In the cage,” he responded, “just now, as she-slash-he heard you coming up the stairs.”

Simona went to the cage to check. “Uhlí is a boy, I think. Pretty shy on any eye contact with me.” She stuck her finger in to pet his feathers, which also worked to get him out again, back to the top of the wine cabinet. Důl flew there as well, and the two preened in equal measure, self and one another.

Boris had been reading my manuscript to this point—opening chapters, anyway. I took a mug of coffee from the kitchen before hearing what he wanted to say. “Nothing, really,” he shrugged good-naturedly. “It’s… yours, and doing, you know, what you want it to do.”

Hmm. “Like the story is on a leash? Did yours do what you wanted it to do?”

“Yeah, but it took its own directions, too. I didn’t know about certain things at the end until circumstances enabled them to happen. And I wasn’t sure when to sprinkle little departures here and there—well, you got them, too.” He scrolled up the pages on his laptop to find what he had in mind. “This poem about the camel, for instance.”

“Is it dumb?”

“No! The opposite. Rounds out that Příbram episode nicely, and… yeah, keep it.”

The dubito. “You have some reservations, though.”

He shook his head to indicate otherwise, rattling off a handful of details he seemed to like—characters like my dad he was getting to know more deeply or, in the case of Kristýna, for the first time, trusting my account of her. He endorsed whatever liberties I might have taken with the ‘facts’ (not that I’d done that overmuch), appreciating what personal journals embark upon as distinct from correspondent journalism. The journeys of each can be more or less open to public opinion, but the former is not so fact-checkable. “I’m not writing to misrepresent, though,” I wanted him to know.

“Of course not. I mean, you could do that for one reason or another, but…”

The dubito. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

All this while, Simona had been in her room with the door open, ostensibly checking vlog comments and such. Boris scanned in that direction, wondering if her take might help his own search for words—in English, Czech, body language, whatever. “Someone told me while I was writing mine, sorta in the same drafting phase, this joke about two jokes.”

“Ok, do tell. At least one of them ought to be funny.”

“Not necessarily. The first goes like this: there are a couple guys walking down a street that has a little construction site with a pile of bricks. No one else is around, so one of ’em picks up a brick and says to the other, ‘I bet I can throw this over top of the building.’ ‘Prove it,’ says his buddy. He does exactly that. End of joke.”

“End of joke? What did I miss?”

“Joke number two: a person walks out of a pub on a similar-looking street and gets clocked by a brick. End of joke.”

Simona had, in fact, been listening. She crept up behind Boris and bonked him playfully enough. “It’s supposed to be a comedic timing thing, right? Or else a ‘you had to be there’—”

I was more blunt: “I don’t get it.”

“Well, maybe nothing to get, really. The first could be a set up to a fuller anecdote; the second is a logical extension, yet naïve to the first. We, imagining as we’re hearing both, see the folly and the fate, but the players don’t. It’s less a combination of jokes than an occasion for dramatic irony. The audience is supposed to put the two together and weave them into a cohesive story.”

“Like cause and effect. Consequence.”

“Yeah, and perhaps reflection, rerouting, revision of how discrete episodes fit together.”

I sought Simona’s sympathy in what I didn’t want to utter: “you’re basically telling me the manuscript needs an overhaul. A better rudder, or—”

“Not a better rudder! You should be your own best judge of that,” he tried to reassure, shutting his laptop, “and I happen to like drifting, going with the flow once in a while. It’s just that… the reader knows there’s an elephant in the room.”

“You better not be body-shaming!” Simona bonked him again, a bit harder this time.

“Figuratively,” he went on, a bit cautiously, “like, I don’t know… the hints as to what actually happened in Olomouc. They’re evident—sorta like a foreshadowing of the past. But also like that unconnected brick.”

I sipped my coffee to contemplate my next question. “Did the brick kill the guy?”

“I don’t know…. End of joke.”

The next day I went with Tomy to his rotations in western Bohemia—‘Bring-Your-Girlfriend-to-Work Day’, I imagined his colleagues would tease. But he didn’t see it that way; I needed employment, vaguely worked with butterflies, and stop #1 would be at that breeding center outside of Karlovy Vary. “Nothing to lose,” he repeated every ten kilometers or so.

When he asked more details about my time with Boris and Simona, I told him the joke about two jokes. He took the whole thing differently, that the ‘joke’—i.e., something unexpected—was that neither one nor the sum were at all joke-worthy. He recalled the time when a former Soviet dissident came to his 2^nd-grade classroom (even though it was a decade after the fall of communism) to explain how everything resulting from Russian governance was a lie. He had this archaic transparency, Tomy continued, that required an overhead projector that his school happened to keep in the depths of the storeroom; on this acetate sheet were two cartoon panels that had come out of the Kremlin-published Pravda, circa 1975. “Of course, this seemed incongruous to us 2nd-graders, a quarter-century later…” He went on to describe the two panels: a TV weatherman forecasting a sunny day, then the comrade who had trusted as much getting drenched on his way to work. ‘See?’ the dissident asserted, ‘how unfunny it is? The Soviets had no sense of humor.’

“Maybe it was a dissident cartoonist,” I suggested, “trying to satirize the whole message-making apparatus.”

“Satire? for 2^nd-graders? Might as well tell us that the Good Soldier Švejk would endorse a referendum to join NATO.”

“Well, turns out joining NATO was a good idea,” I countered, “seeing as Putin’s war hasn’t morphed into World War III.”

“Yet.”

He wanted me to keep talking—at least echo his ‘yet’—yet… I wanted to look out the window, think more about bricks. Chuck one at the professor’s window? Prop them like the shape of π and break them by karate chops? Wall myself in with a palate-supply and fresh cement? We don’t need no education, the radio in my mind began to play, we don’t need no thought control…

We arrived at the butterfly nursery before I had finished the silent hum of Pink Floyd, segueing in spurts to “Us and Them” and “Cymbaline”; I didn’t know all the words, but imagined hanging around their studio spaces, being on hand to advise any math-based challenges, like the 7/4-Intime signature on “Money” or the helium pressure of the pig float that didn’t cooperate for the Animals cover.

“You alright?” Tomy asked, lifting the parking brake and turning off the car.

I opened the door as an implied answer. “Let’s go,” and after a half-hearted fist bump, “I’m eager to make a butterfly effect.”

It’s been a couple days now, and I won’t tell you how that fata morgana went. Actually, I’m being coy: the prospect of employment is still a mirage, as a ‘fata morgana’ implies, but also tangible in the fact that Prague’s main botanical gardens has a capacious facility called ‘Fata Morgana’ that channels visitors through and thrills them with inevitable landings of the generations of butterflies within: tens of thousands of them—even more by volume than the private facility near Karlovy Vary. Why, per se, would a 10-centimeter butterfly on one’s shoulder be a mirage? More a phenomenon, I’d say. And here I feel like handing off to Husserl.

[Boris, in my mind, is semi-screaming no! Don’t stray away and drop that brick. But sorry, Cousin—sticking with a true-grit plan, well,… I don’t feel like it.]

Husserl, from what I’ve learned along the way, was interested in what makes for ‘phenomenal experience’—what Kant and others argued was a need to ‘bracket’ the natural world (whatever that meant or might mean, in his era or our own) in deference to the ‘experienced world’. Add a dab of ‘experiment’ with that world, whether with consciousness or chemicals, and you have ‘empiricism’. Anybody with a heartbeat and a head can have experiences, and some of them can produce actionable plans going forward—a combination of recall and revision. More often than not, Husserl maintained, our experiences are reflective of a particular idea—a first kiss, for example, whether anticipated or unforeseen, fleeting or remembered forever.

All well and good in some lecture hall at Humboldt University, Berlin, or the equivalent in Vienna or Prague or even puny Olomouc, but what about the not-so-studied bracketing that goes on everywhere else?

My dad was always a bit suspicious of academia for this reason. He supported my doctoral candidacy and bragged to buddies in the pub that I could solve world problems by cracking the codes of evil-doers, like the Poles did against the Nazi’s Enigma machine. He liked that example because it was hands-on practical, like David’s approach to Goliath—equal measures of skill, faith, savvy. Street-smart.

My mom didn’t disagree with any of that, but also didn’t need to push the pragmatics the way she felt the communists did it in her own academic journey. Never was she asked, what do you want to do for a living?—the shuffle from one board of examiners to another pretty much prescribed that she’d be, not unhappily, an elementary teacher. I think she envied my greater options, though she never said so verbatim.

I started writing poems when math tests were too easy and I had to sit for the duration of the hour. Lost a lot of them, if the teacher wouldn’t let us keep our marked result in order for the chance to use those same problems for another class. But this one slipped through that system and I like pulling it out once in a while. It’s called, for the time being, ‘Helicopter Dad’:

Ballet class:

Dad would drop me off

en route to anywhere he’d rather be,

if pleased as punch

the dancing would add grace to me,

bookworm that I’d always be.

Dance recital:

Mom was there of course, promising

to save a seat for Dad,

whose shift was done at six,

coinciding with my age, the year

I’d chance a public stage.

Safety rules:

Dad had said my deer jumps flew too

closely to the edge, and

I would need to calibrate my run;

Mom was less concerned, promising

to let my instincts be.

Denouement:

Mom had shushed him (I could see

while flying toward the edge a couple

times); Dad at last leapt up,

slipped in blindness meant to save,

split his forehead for his pride.

There’s your Husserl, the bracketing of what is and may be, the driving force to affect outcomes. Was he tipsy that evening? Grabbing a drink or two after work or—God forbid (yet rarely does)—pounding beers while driving from Kladno. I couldn’t discern as much at the time, being just a six-year-old; I can’t now recreate that part of his passion. I love him regardless, and maybe appreciate that he took the fall for me.

Daytime hours, kicking around the house in Ořech—I didn’t like housewiving in the relative blankness of Tomy’s apartment in Smíchov—even the old ant farm was telling me to get out of my funk. I considered winterizing the treehouse for at least a thing to do, but…

Kristýna called and wanted to hang out. “But not in your fuckin’ treehouse,” she perhaps tried to joke. “I’ll be at Klub Moo at 4.”

This place was conveniently near the central bus station, yet “Why there? Why not at the food court near the—"

“I don’t want to be near the stadium or even talk about hockey, period.”

Fair enough. Klub Moo—Můčko, if patrons didn’t want to cater to the Anglicization of many modern businesses—was only a half-kilometer farther from the stadium than the mall, but the principle seemed to matter. And the beer, as Kristýna had arrived early, seeing me enter and quaffing what remained of a large mug. We hugged, checked each other’s necks (hers still bandaged under a vanity scarf), and tented our fingers on the semi-sticky table. The waiter came for “ještě jeden”—which in Czech only occasionally meant ‘one more’—and asked what I desired.

I looked into my friend’s clear eyes. “Um, the same. I guess.”

When he left she poked my forearm. “What, are you pregnant now?”

“Huh?”

“This is Birell, in case you had more debaucherous plans. But are you?”

“Pregnant? No. I mean, Tomy and I are, I mean, aren’t really there in terms of… well, it’s a long conversation.”

“That’s why we’re here, right?”

I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t confided in her about the worst days in Olomouc, and the longer ago that was, the more awkward it seemed to break that ice. Instead, I asked about her self/selves, if she could feel the life inside. She somewhat smiled. “You mean the little lamb that sacrificed my career?”

“I think you’re mixing metaphors, but…” I bleated like that lamb to greet her or him, then clinked the frothy mugs the waiter had plopped onto the coasters. Birell, cold and fresh, really had enough of the conditions of real beer to assist such moments.

“Okay, well something had to die. Between this Frankenstein”—pointing at her neck—“and mandatory suspension for not telling the team brass my intimacies, I would not be able to suit up for the national team before the roster deadline. So, I suppose the little lamb got lucky in that regard.”

I bit my bottom lip. “Honestly, Týna, I’m happy to see you take it this way. And around this time next year, I’ll babysit the whole way through the championships. Could use the 70Kč an hour I wouldn’t let you pay!”

“Who knows if I wouldn’t give the kid up for adoption?”

Hmm. “You could.” I considered through her swig whether to suggest Tomy and me as possible candidates, but drowned that in my own, long gulps.

“Anyway, thanks for the offer. Probably call on you for Lamaze and all the other shit they’ll make me do. Unless you return to Olomouc, which—you never really clued me in—must still be an open door, right? Or does Tomaš factor too much for that prospect?”

“His job is pretty mobile. Moravia has butterflies, too. But I doubt I’d want anything more to do with Olomouc.” Feeling my eyes thicken, I excused myself abruptly to pee, spending most of the time in front of the bathroom mirror to restore appearances. Kristýna, though, wasn’t in the mood for duplicity. She entered the one-sink space and leaned against the separator of the stalls.

“You wanna say it here, or out there?”

New tears answered, doesn’t matter, even if it did. We paid for the pretense of Moo and ended up walking aimlessly through Kladno, eventually to her tiny flat. I called Tomy to say I’d stay out here tonight—“Ořech?” he might have asked, but didn’t, so I didn’t declare otherwise. Learning how not to lie was perhaps the deepest thing Descartes left us, despite (and due to) his dubito.

A funny thing about Kristýna, who’d strangle me if I said too much. She makes kitten-like snores and talks in her sleep, sometimes also like a feline. Topics, if they could have such categorization, would be things like the colors inside a porcelain pot (I whispered her way, thinking she might literally need one: “a chamber pot?” Still unawake, she strung clauses about her grandmother’s Christmas carp soup, ostensibly served in that porcelain pot). Minutes later, she’d mumble something about “the taping’s too tight,” (I brushed the edge of the blanket away from her neck, but she was flinching her left wrist—her shooting hand); otherwise, nothing referring to hockey made its way out of her mouth. I asked her, like a clinical test, “how is Little Lamb?” Silence for a while, then “Putin, dude, just gotta die.” I found it remarkable that her dreams spanned a balance of past, present, potential future—an equilibrium harder to strike in consciousness.

Breakfast was leisurely. Two unemployed women with nothing but daylight to fill. Not entirely true, though: Týna’s erstwhile hours on the team did not pay enough, so she worked a spotty schedule at the Kladno library. For my part, I did take on a student for private tutoring, if the arrangement was questionable; Nikola, who insisted on paying whatever coins were in her pocket, was crazy-bored with the return of Mr Short-lived Paternity-leave. Unwritten ethics suggested I shouldn’t solicit such one-on-ones from students of this gymnazium. But what if Niki wanted to talk through her family difficulties? What if our sessions were less about math and more about logic? Why, for instance, did Germans put a lid on their steins while better beer-makers in Bohemia did not? I imparted these questions to Kristýna, who referenced the obvious: for factual questions, at least, Google and YouTube supplied ready answers. “But then again, I’d be talking myself out of the serendipity a library affords.”

“Perhaps, statistically, libraries garner more interest because of internet searches. Like a need for some publisher to organize our rabbit holes: German steins, Czech hops, mineral-free water, yeasty froths—”

“That’s carbon dioxide at the head, even of Birells. The yeast is feasting on the sugars below. It’s why beer makes us fat.”

“Speak for yourself,” I thoughtlessly said. Týna has always had an athletic body, big-boned and muscled-toned to make her sink in swimming pools. Never ‘fat’, and pregnancy wouldn’t fit that adjective either, at least in my silent justification for the joke she just let pass. As for my own body—and the fact I’d been as pregnant as Týna is now—I’d be lying to downplay how ambivalent I felt in front of a mirror, naked (me, but also the mirror). I counted once the number of mostly men on a twenty-stop tram ride who ogled me—five seconds or more by my tapping of the digits on one hand, and of course only those I could myself see. Double the results, then, for the absence of eyes in the back of my head. The number of mostly men? I’ll give you a while to guess.

We took a walk toward the bus stop, making our playful moues at the klub we had abandoned last night. Kristýna bumped my shoulder in a buddy way of appreciating candor—and a clumsy caveat not to let so much time pass before voicing the next emergency. “Like, I’ve only been here all your life.”

“Yeah, that’s true. Me for you, too. But you haven’t always divulged—”

“I’ve had one emergency in my whole life, and I called you right away. Twice farther from here than Olomouc, no less.”

I nodded. “Karviná, indeed, was that. So the circumstances of your own pregnancy never were on a ‘call me’ level?”

“To answer stupidly, as you already know, I’m not one to kiss and tell. And though you’ve been kissed more often, I’m sure, you aren’t so inclined to, either.”

“Maybe we’re allergic to girly talk. Envying those who mansplain.”

“Penis envy a hundred-some years after Freud? No thank you.”

“Well, I wasn’t implying…” I didn’t know what I was or wasn’t implying. “Anyway, I’ve always liked our never-needing-to-explain.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Parents. Lodgers. Likes and dislikes. Roses and thorns and—”

“Birds and bees? Ask your awkward questions to the puppet on some certified hand? Listen to the throatless mouth in no sync with the syllables? Pay for pills that maybe make things better, worse—at least more tangible.”

“You’ve always had a good somatic sense, tangibility included.”

“Yeah, if that means body-checking someone into the boards; but hugging somebody,… Shit, the frickin’ baby’s going to have to teach me that.”

We were at the bus stop by now anyway, so my plunge to hug her did not seem so contrived. “Will you miss the fact that people will not see you play for a year or so?”

“I told you yesterday I didn’t want to bring up hockey.”

“You just did so with the body-checking analogy.”

“Wasn’t an analogy. It’s my job. Or was.”

“Is. Just on sabbatical.”

She shrugged. “To your question, though—with all your math skills, have you counted the number of fans our games attract? On one hand, maybe?”

“Many have seen you on TV. Even in street clothes while the team was earning bronze—the interviews they did of you were, well, every part the story.”

“What are you getting at?”

Now I shrugged. “I think true fans will want to know your journey and the fact that Little Lamb is not a compromise.”

She turned pretty abruptly. “That’s not a narrative I’m looking forward to. I care enough that they tune into a game, but not my life per se. I doubt anyone would look for me out-of-uniform.”

“Sports commentators would, and then—”

“Let’s just admit I’m not someone people would pick for their OnlyFans pleasure.”

“I wasn’t at all implying…”

“What, is that your phrase of the day?” She folded her arms in such a way that each hand clutched the opposite biceps, allowing her to flap the fingers to wish me away. “Anyway, catch your bus and call me, if you want, tomorrow.”

I grinned with the inner-sense that probability was against it. “Okay,” I replied, “you, too.”

The bus was quite full and I nearly didn’t get a seat. In fact, I offered up mine to some older passengers who assured me they were only going a couple stops. Not the twenty or so that I would travel to Stodůlky before deciding on another bus to Ořech, or else a metro and tram to Smíchov. I thought of counting again the possible oglers, for the sake of statistical analysis, but the variable of vehicles would necessarily make a difference. And to some degree, I didn’t want to alter the cubic dimensions already in my mind—and maybe yours as well.

Twenty-seven. Aesthetic, if one survives its fabled curse. I was now on the eve of that anniversary, which technically would hand me to a twenty-eighth year. I wonder if Amy Winehouse viewed things that way, on her death cot during the middle of my sixteenth year (both of us, maybe, humming ‘Stronger Than Me’). Some people record their lives in milestones past, and others for the goals to come. Others, like Kristýna and me, were somewhere in media res. Maybe that’s the sweet spot of the blend between reality and faith, whether cogitated or experienced, well beyond the lecture halls.

Chapter 6: the delta

Not everything comes down to mathematics, yet practically anything can be lifted up through its study. I’m thinking of the death of David Bowie, just after my fifteenth birthday (and a half year after Amy’s—what to say?... deathday). I didn’t know much about this Ziggy Stardust dude, morphing into conventions of the more conventional, at least as far as cultures wanted to keep up or compartmentalize. But years later, I found this meme online that made me wonder who was on the statistical detail:

Certainly, a world ‘going to shit’ required some analytics, whether through the unachieved goals of the Paris Agreement at COP21 (the enumeration of these gossamer COPs never clear to anyone), the populist squalls from Brazil to Hungary to ’Merika, the naïveté of Bitcoin vagaries and wet market verities that had to be the stuff of esoterica, right? Cause and correlation, coincidence and conjecture—we had everything and nothing at our fingertips to craft an argument to anyone in our echo chamber who’d care to click ‘share’ and count a daily duty done.

As much as I had a physical presence at Olomouc for most of my doctoral candidacy, the months that spanned from February to June, 2020-2021, were Zoomed into my bedroom or, weather permitting, the tree house in Ořech. One of my other professors played a live version of Bowie’s “Changes”, pausing to apparently have a public discussion/private cry over how “these children that you spit on” are “immune to your consultations”—whatever they might entail—and are “quite aware of what they’re going through.”

Were we, though? At university age, were we ‘children’ in the first place? Niki, in her first year at gymnasium, would have been (still is, to some degree). And even with ubiquitous Covid updates at our fingertips and social media feeds, what we were going through seemed more like vertigo than awareness.

During lockdown, Professor Alpha stretched his consultations beyond his typical office hours. At the end of lectures, he underscored his disdain for emails or dropbox assignments and arranged for regular mini-orals every week. I was always last on the list, as his advisory role for my thesis would require extra time. Not that I had formed the seminal idea for a thesis. He took that lacuna as a chance to get to know my interests beyond the “boring” basics.

“I find nothing boring about Fibonacci,” I asserted, knowing he was fishing for fantasy supply. “And, picking up on the David Bowie tangent from today”—and here I contextualized the other professor’s use of seminar time, to Alpha’s chagrin—“I’d like to understand the eukaryotic evolution to this design.”

“Eukaryotic? Explain.”

My head jerked back a bit. Was he testing me on this term, or I him? “Any cell with a nucleus, DNA and such. The building blocks to cellular reproduction and an organism’s sustainability on a day-to-day basis. Then generational, necessarily. Because, as far as we know, all eukaryotic life is bound to die.”

“And you’d do what, exactly, to trace Fibonacci back in time? Research fossils?”

“Well, not as a field researcher—”

“Not that Covid would let you. Or me, for that matter.” He smiled, ostensibly, at his sense of power.

“I’d use the Kronecker delta to set up a—”

“Kronecker? Why would you start there? Wouldn’t the Dirac delta work better to factor in a time sequence? And is this supposed to head toward Riemann’s hypothesis, or rather distract from it?”

I didn’t answer, and he took my contemplation as his void to fill, using no organic analogies whatsoever for the remaining time of my ‘consultation’. I nodded my head sometimes, but my mind was on any delta that might stream away from his source. Not that his mansplaining was useless—I signed up for this stuff on purpose and knew, intuitively, that his influence wouldn’t diminish my imagination. And vice versa.

Since I’m burrowing back in time—not to the first eukaryotic cells, but my early days as a university student—a fairly formative trip to the Danube delta also compelled thoughts about evolutionary patterns and patchwork. As far as European Union territory goes, the delta is sparsely populated and barely prepared for tourism. Nonetheless, my friend Lara recruited me to fill out a group of six that could fit into a van with two canoes strapped to its roof. An inflatable raft was also packed but unused—two of Lara’s friends dropped out when they browsed online and learned about the density of vipers, mosquitos, vermin in general. And like ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ expresses the irony of

“Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink”,

we’d be paddling through a liquid desert—the heaviest and hottest air of Romania. So just four of us ended up going: Lara and her boyfriend Radek, who owned the van, me and Petr, a medical student I met for the first time on the morning we departed. He admitted to having scant experience with canoes, and though he was gangly and awkwardly sarcastic, I felt reassured that he’d be our first-aid kit, if needed.

Petr wasn’t happy that we were reduced to four, however. “Bad luck, by Chinese tradition.”

“Chinese?” challenged Lara. “We’re not going that far east.”

“And the letter ‘delta’ is fourth in the alphabet,” he continued, “like fate is luring us—a baited hook.”

“Hmm,” Radek grunted. “Bad luck, then, for the fish we’ll catch. Or, otherwise, I’ve packed plenty of jerky.”

“Jerky is our backup plan?”

“If it’s any consolation,” I tried, “ancient Greeks regarded this letter to represent balance—an equilateral triangle. And Egypt took that a step further with their quadrilateral pyramids, combining the strength of three and four.”

“Killing millions along the way.”

“Well…” I searched my brain for a Cleopatra joke, letting the Nile glide troubles away, but maybe he’d take that as a flirtation. He and I would be in one canoe, Lara and Radek in another, along with her chihuahua. “Charley makes us five, anyway! And no culture deems that a bad luck number.”

“Great,” he mulled, “a pentagram. The devil’s delight.”

Radek, in his winning way, must have had a private talk with Petr during a rest stop, as the pessimism generally surceased thereafter. By the time we put canoes in the water, Petr was actually pretty gung-ho. His interest in Chinese medicine meant that he had brought a cupping kit he was eager to share, “to massage back muscles at the end of the day,” and ziplock bags of scallions, ginger and oolong tea.

“What about garlic?” Lara teased, “to fend off Dracula.”

“We aren’t going to that part of Romania,” he deadpanned. “Too flat for bats.”

“And anyway,” Radek quipped, “garlic would necessitate a fourth bag.”

Petr dug out another from his backpack: “already have that. Cannabis.”

“Medicinal?”

“Sure.”

I wasn’t sure where Romania was headed on recreational drug legislation, but decided not to bring that up. “Whatever floats the boat,” I said instead, “but light up after the day’s paddling, okay?”

Our route started in the village of Murighoil, where camping was legal, then east and south—not quite to the Black Sea—where we’d need to camp on the sly. LTE reception was sketchy the first day, nonexistent the second; Radek, who had done a similar trip the previous year, had a fold-out map and an old-fashioned compass in case we felt lost, which happened on the third day. Our main waterway was the Sfântul Gheorghe, distinguished enough from the marshes and seemingly stagnant canals all around. But without a bird’s-eye view—a pointer on a smartphone—our senses blurred. And Petr’s pot did little to reduce the angst. Charley remonstrated his whining with well-timed barks; Lara orchestrated a switch so that she and I could be in one canoe—it was tacitly apparent that Petr had a crush on Radek; Lara sent her boyfriend a wink-wink, play along kind of look before scooping up Charley and settling in with me.

As much as that helped the paddling (in circles probably, but still), Petr lost his mind just after we found a suitable bank to camp for the evening. Precisely, we deduced half-way through, he was having an epileptic seizure that probably lasted three or four minutes—any longer than that, he informed us later, could kill a victim of this disease. “So maybe four is your lucky number today,” Lara chanced, and Petr grinned a grim relief.

There weren’t really ‘woods’ here, but we weren’t ‘out of them’ for another day of meandering. Food (more than jerky, but not the anticipated fish we’d catch) was dwindling and Petr, who changed into a more amenable sojourner, explained that his fit may have hinged on low blood sugar. With that knowledge, we pushed all of our bon bons and gummy bears and Nutella at him, preferring our grumbling stomachs to the chance he’d have another attack. The ungarnished knäckebrot tasted better as a result. And, learning patience, we managed to catch our first and only fish—a golden green tench big enough to provide us all a savory, maybe life-saving dinner.

Eventually, on day 5, we found the Sfântul Gheorghe and dug into its current, less daunting nearer the banks. Humanity reemerged with a few other boats and charity in the form of candy bars, soda, advice on how far Murighoil was. Prayers, perhaps—certainly the sign of the cross, here and there.

And to various degrees, each of us reciprocated such faith. The Hussite in me made it not too difficult, but I could see untested atheism becoming tested agnosticism in Lara, at least, and a softer demeanor in Petr, which carried over to Charley. Radek maintained his ‘voice of reason’ throughout, yet now it trembled with gratitude. The delta changed us, and, notwithstanding the sunburn and side effects, did a better job than what we might have dreamed. Fibonacci swirls of learning curves, acting well beyond our consciousness.

When I read that account out loud to Tomy, he asked a fair share of questions—if a ‘tench’ tastes more like a carp or pike, for instance (“somewhere in between”); he also stayed silent for a couple minutes when I was finished. Maybe I intended as much by getting up from the couch and sorting laundry to start a new batch of darks. He hadn’t moved or drained the last gulps of wine, either, looking up at the ceiling fan that he had probably never seen rotate.

“Why,” he paced his reflection, “when you nearly died with these friends, did you not confide in them about…”

I waited for him to come up with whatever noun he had in mind, but maybe there was none. “About getting pregnant,” I supplied, “and caving in?”

“About the professor in the first place. I mean, if Lara, especially….” Again, he was lost for terms.

“Lara was having her own difficulties with Radek by then, stuff she didn’t want to talk about. So…”

So. Stories have their contingencies, their tried-and-true audiences, their gates and gatekeepers. Tomy didn’t make these determinations, but maybe had something to do with planting them in my present, narrative garden. On the run-up to the winter solstice, no less.

My birthday (thus, Christmas) was a week away, and Tomy underscored his willingness to go with me to Olomouc and reinstate my candidacy. He knew my shrug of indifference was anything but that; I craved the journey of math on that academic level and agreed that it would be nearly impossible to recreate such a vibe on my own. “Or alternatively, you can transfer to Charles,” he said, as if that notion hadn’t occurred to me a hundred times. “Anything to create a sense of justice.”

“Justice? I thought you were going to say ‘closure’.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“But it would reopen the wound.” I turned away from his caring glare, adding softly, “and certainly not recover the baby.”

“You can recover your career, though.”

He spoke in encouraging phrases a couple minutes more, though I was barely listening. I imagined how it would transpire: a campus emptying itself for the holidays; paperwork to file the fitting complaint; more paperwork to re-apply to the program, essentially; passing familiar faces who’d express delight or perplexity in seeing me here; passing blank faces who’d never know or care that I had left in the first place. I thought of where to sleep in the absence of my former haunts. Lara would label me silly for taking a hotel room, notwithstanding the fact I’d have Tomy in tow. Would we need more than a day, anyway? Returning to seminars (assuming the administration would allow me to) wouldn’t happen until late January. Procuring a new advisor wouldn’t begin until even later—these things take time. The start-to-finish of a thesis was an elephant’s gestation, including the pachyderm’s instinct to remember everything during the oral defense and subsequent grilling of details. Honestly, I was out of practice by now. Two weeks at Gymnázium Jaroslava Heyrovského and a few tutorials with Niki had almost nothing to do with the daunting demands of Reimann & Co. There’d be no way I’d finish by summer, and the admin would not necessarily approve of a second year beyond my original timeframe. I’d be in my 29^th year by then—effectively, a student spinster, like Miss Havisham watching youth with greater expectations play cards. On the other hand, what else could I do?

“Okay,” I finally uttered.

“Okay?” Tomy echoed to ascertain.

“For a day. Not to go through a lawsuit or anything like that.”

He subtly shook his head in a manner, maybe, of agreeing to that dodge. Or disagreeing but not wanting to reconsider that avenue at this moment.

“Tomorrow, then? Offices will be closed by—”

“If your schedule allows.”

“Of course. Of course,” regardless if it really would.

“Because you goin’ AWOL would smack of my bad influence on you.” I tried to smile to punctuate the intended joke, but couldn’t. Instead, I bawled like a baby for countless minutes, thoroughly drenching Tomy’s shirt collar.

“We are free, we are free,” he kept repeating, regardless if we really were.

We figured on leaving before 7am to get through Prague traffic and arrive in Olomouc by mid-morning. Lara’s availability or not, we decided on the option of spontaneity on how we’d spend a night. Or two. Or else barreling back home before the proverbial dust would settle.

I called my mom after the pasta dinner Tomy whipped up, and we talked for five minutes before she suggested we meet at the Nový Smíchov mall near the Anděl metro stop, convenient for both of us. “But it’s already pretty late,” I reminded her.

“Just something I want to give you.”

“Not the dead ant farm, I hope.”

“No, not that. Something for your trip tomorrow.”

While most stores had their portcullises down, the top floor remained open for its cinema crowd. A couple restaurants also, and we chose the one that had a long aquarium with iridescent gourami and maroon suckerfish and piebald angels—“like the Anděl neighborhood they live in,” I reflected, touching the glass to attract one, “not that they’d know.”

Mom acknowledged with a nod and went to the counter to order a couple of mango smoothies, leaving me to explore the microcosm. Give them names, school for school: Niki being the angel that floated to my fingerprint; Pat and Mat as gouramis in synch; Than Mai as an oranda goldfish I hadn’t seen at first, like a shy shadow following in Niki’s finstrokes; Filip as a sucker; Lukáš, an unassuming stone; Maša, a red molly, skimming the surface as if contemplating an escape; Daša, another oranda emerging from the thick aquatic plants, longing for a return to Ukraine, or at least a return to normalcy. Where was I in this tank? I searched for a snail and the Fibonacci shell she would have, but couldn’t find one. I supposed the suckerfish had monopolized that detail, depriving snails of their livelihood.

The smoothies came with a caveat—“They said we’d have to leave in ten minutes. They’ve already wiped down the tables, so…”

“So, don’t make a mess. Wasn’t planning to, but… power of suggestion, you know?” I slurped a bit of mine after a plasticky clink of Mom’s.

“No. You’ve never in your life been a problem child, and maybe it’s healthy to spill a smoothie once in a while.”

“Or poison a professor?”

She drooped her head. “Is that what you and Tomaš are planning to do?”

I leaned in to gauge the tone of her eyes, which were shut. “No. Bad joke. I might toss a beverage in his face, though. If we even see him, which…”

She raised her eyelids. “Which you’d have to, at some point. I mean, if you intend to re-enroll. You wouldn’t manage to avoid encounters—”

“Depends also if he’d be trying to avoid me, as is probable. Sheer entropy in a contained space is bound to have molecular fly-bys. But add the aspect of ions: then more of a push and pull will happen.”

“Add the aspect of his wife and family.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Like I should feel sorry for them?”

“No!” Mom drooped her head again. Perhaps she had been sobbing earlier in the evening as well. “No,” she echoed in more of a whisper, “not pity, but perhaps some commiseration. Unless they went in attack mode against you.”

I was confused by this and simultaneously wanted Mom to spell out her thoughts more or abandon them altogether. When she said on the phone she had something to give me, I figured she had a tangible object in hand, not some mile in another person’s moccasins advice. I mean, I had told her back in the treehouse that the professor and I weren’t having an affair—weren’t dating, at any rate. If there were a homewrecker in the mix, it would have been him on his own household: he extended our consultations to the point of celebratory drinks and pokes toward his preferred hotel. I was always able to refuse, and I did, early on. To my knowledge, he never brought things up outside those consultation hours, and if I could say ‘to his credit’, he honored the math and my own interests (albeit sometimes dismissive of direct applications to biological studies). No one else in Olomouc was paying me similar attention, and while I was aware of the impropriety, I adopted a what the hell ambivalence, especially when he dug a packaged condom from the same cabinet that harbored his liquor. Not victim at that point, and certainly not victimizer, as I underscored to my mom right now.

She listened without a need to jump in, and when I invited her response, it was a worker at the restaurant who approached to say, “time’s up, ladies. The food court must be vacated.” Then, before we stood up, he wiped the table clean of our nonexistent spittle.

“We can sit outside the cinema lobby,” Mom suggested, “for a little while—you’ll need a good night’s sleep.”

A security guard followed us when we walked the span of this upper floor toward the cinema. “Gotta leave,” he said, “the mall is closed.”

“But movies are still going on,” my mother pointed out.

“Are you intending to see one?”

She shook her head. “We’re waiting for my husband to come out.”

The guard gave a side glance. “Which one?”

“Which husband?”

“Which movie?”

I had never witnessed her fabricating anything before. Worried she’d falter, I sputtered, “The Whale. He’s a fan of… character studies.”

“And you’re not?”

Mom stiffened. “That’s none of your business.”

He pressed his lips in consideration of whether or not he had stepped beyond his ‘business’, but gestured toward a bench and bid us a pleasant wait. When he was out of earshot, I grabbed my mom’s arm. “Where is Dad, really?”

“At the pub. Bubeneč, probably.”

“Did you tell him about… me? I mean, Olomouc and everything?”

“No. I could if you wanted me to—that’s for you to decide.”

I contemplated the why not and whyfore, imagining how he’d react. Jealous, probably, and meek in his occasional compunction for not reading the world very well. ‘More heart than head,’ he’d sometimes say whenever he goofed up, ‘but I’m working on it.’ Nobody disputed any of that. “Go ahead. Maybe in the morning, when there’s no turning back.”

“Okay.”

“If you want to,” I thought to add.

Our smoothies were done, but I still fiddled with my straw to capture any dregs. Mom set her empty aside to rummage in her purse. A moment of consternation that whatever it was had disappeared, but then a melancholy smile of relief. “Years since I’ve handled this—wouldn’t it be ironic if I suddenly lost it?”

“What, a wooden puzzle? Oh, I see now—the chain makes it a necklace.”

“Yeah, your grandma didn’t wear it as often as just hold it and roll her thumb against the pearl, see?”

It was a cross, maybe eight centimeters tall, carved out of a single piece of black walnut. Apparently varnished, but not shiny. The prongs were just thick enough to surround two insets: a pearl at the center of the crossbar and a garnet about twelve millimeters below. The difference was how they were floating or fixed: somehow, the pearl had the liberty to glide like a ball-point pen, while the garnet appeared to be wedged in with no wiggle room. “Did Grandma… make this?”

“After my dad died, she did a lot of woodworking. Influenced Jiří in our courtship, as he wanted to impress her as a handyman.”

“I remember Grandma inspecting the treehouse to make sure it was safe.”

Mom rubbed the pearl as if for a final time, then handed me the whole thing. “It’s yours now.”

My hands trembled, unsure how to hold the process of a blind chick pecking through its eggshell. “I… can’t… don’t know… what to—”

“I’m not forcing this on you, but I’m sure she wanted to pass something on to future generations—”

“Don’t tell me you’re dying, Mom!”

“I’m not dying, no. Not more than the average person.”

The light through the garnet suggested I might use that heart as an eyepiece, even if no object would be clarified through the attempt. The pearl amazed me: “how on earth did she pry this in? There aren’t any seams. It’s a real pearl, right?”

Mom slowly shook her head and shrugged one shoulder. “The things I should have asked her—that wouldn’t even feature in my top 100.”

“What would?”

“How I might stay in touch with her, for instance.”

“And?”

Her phone rang in her purse and she fished it out. Dad’s voice chimed that he was on his way home, not wanting to be out late. Would catch a bus at Stodůlky, all good.

Mom thanked him for calling and repacked her phone. “And she’d say, I’m sure,” remembering my lingering question, “love needn’t worry, if life often does.”

In the tawny spread of sunrise, just before 8, I was telling Tomy about my mom and grandma—he had asked what I was thumbing, even though I didn’t recall taking the cross from my pocket. He chuckled about the ruse of waiting for Jiří to emerge from The Whale, “like Jonah being spit on the beach!” It was a good thing about Tomy, empathizing with a respect for a religion that neither of us ‘practiced’, at least insofar as going to church and such. Grandma, apparently, went all the time, and Mom less so, and Tomy said it was the same for his family. “In Poland,” he had read, “they’ve built more churches in the last thirty years than we have in total over a thousand years. Active parishes, at least. Poland’s a bigger population, sure, but per capita, they’re making an investment in how young families have that option. Ours tend to invest in tourism—like St Michael’s in Old Town making permanent a Banksy exhibition. The altar of post-postmodernism.”

“Banksy is important. Children feature a lot—holding the strings to balloons like humble meteorologists of their alleyways. Begging us to see what’s behind a given wall, especially when—”

“Whoa!” Tomaš swerved toward the shoulder to let a string of police cars pass at high speed. An ambulance followed, curiously without sirens blaring. “Shit, an accident.”

Or one that was unfolding. And hard to put in the ‘accident’ category. As we rolled another kilometer or so, we came to a stop before the big bridge spanning an arm of the Švihov reservoir. The cops had barricaded both directions of the highway with their cars, though our side was evidently more crucial. Against moral nudges not to gawk, we got out of the car and tiptoed toward the bridge to squint at what was going on: a young man was over the guardrail, holding it with his right hand and an infant at his chest with his left arm. How long he had been there like that was anyone’s guess, but there must have been a flood of 112 calls from horrified passers-by. The fact that he was male added anger to the agony: “where’s the fucking mother?” I stammered just loud enough for Tomy to hear.

“Does that matter at this moment?” he breathlessly replied.

Yes. Even if she were the one threatening this homicide. Especially if she were one of those gathered with hands to their faces—covering mouths for anything that would push the horror further, covering eyes for the event you’d never be able to unsee. Maybe the mother was unaware, working somewhere and assuming the stay-at-home dad was doing that worthy job. And wouldn’t the infant clutch more to a mother than a father, whose grasp was strictly on his terms?

That said, Tomy curled his arms around me, unsure (he, me) what else we could do. The police were scrambling on eggshells for positions they must have trained for: one to establish communication with the threat, another as sort of ‘her back’—maybe to establish if the threat would respond in an adversarial way to his partner; a pair was coming toward us with gestures to get back into our cars; another pair huddled with the paramedics. I imagined the possibility that one officer would follow the potential jump into the darkness to try to swim the baby to safety; the 50 meters or so would likely kill both (or all three, if the professional didn’t hit the water like a rocket-in-reverse) upon impact. The Macocha Gorge north of Brno is almost three times as deep—that is where suicides went for no such ambiguity.

Viewers walked backwards with reluctant compliance. Some yelled toward the man—“give up the baby, will ya?” The negotiating officer may have said exactly that in a quieter tone; a conversation was not yet happening, not even eye contact. The child was clearly awake and maybe aware that something wasn’t right in this barely dawning world. He or she squirmed a little, and everyone held a trembling breath as the father let go of the rail to switch arms. His face was obscured in the turn, but now the baby’s—likely a girl—was visible for the first time, scrunching in a strange effort not to outright bawl.

“Back in your cars!” The officer walking our shoulder of the road was shoving to some extent, shushing anyone’s attempt at advice. “Making this a spectacle does not help. Give the team a chance to work. We understand this is—”

“How do you presume what we understand?” I almost envied the lady who asked this, a couple cars in front of ours.

“I don’t presume anything, ma’am, but this is a private ordeal, not a public debate. Get back in your car, now!”

There was only so much the police could do: windows whimpered their way down for probably the first time in months, and cameras stuck out, sometimes producing a flash in the confusion of what object needed what illumination. The tops of the service vehicles had suspended their own whirling lights—an attempt, perhaps, to reduce any anxieties within their control.

Twenty minutes must have passed. The man had switched hands five times, so now, in the growing daylight, we could see the furls of his face but not that of the kid. Several times he released his grip on the guardrail to lance the negotiating team to come no closer, measuring the distance they might lunge like rugby tacklers against the moment he’d need to react, whatever such motion that might be. Was this a cry for help? A ploy to draw out the torture as long as possible, like that shooter in Las Vegas? Was this a private ordeal or a public debate?

Tomy and I whispered some of these questions, leaving them float as if to buoy hopes that reason—if not answers—might prevail. I twirled the hell out of the pearl and Tomy massaged my nape and right shoulder. His view otherwise would have been impaired by the car in front, and probably most drivers had resorted their vision to something else to pass the time.

“Oh my God, oh my God—” I constricted in the sudden motion of the man unfolding the baby from his chest—exposing us to both faces of fear. His arm was stiff as a scarecrow’s, which made the baby look like a cabbage patch doll, not resisting the straight drop that was about to occur. “NO!” I hollered with a chorus of others from their passenger windows, most sticking out like whack-a-moles. “For the love of—”

Nothing could have prepared the instant, the macabre ballet that recalled the deer jump of twenty years ago. The scarecrow’s arm swiveled and hurled the bundle to the officer who caught the baby and, in her ability to do more, commanded the man to “hold on!” He looked at her and then the starless sky before pushing off. The back-up officer ran to the rail in what could only be a witness to the inevitable—perhaps the only one from on high to see the endless four seconds. There may have been a police boat down there at the ready, as none of the professionals attempted a life-saving leap. The baby, crying healthily, was passed to a paramedic who stepped into the ambulance. It then rolled away from the village of its origin, not to fight the clog of cars like some salmon having to go upstream. One patrol car raced off in that same direction, while another acted the salmon, perhaps to test which of them would first get to the reservoir surface through the serpentines of forest roads.

The remaining cops marked and photographed angles of the bridge for another ten minutes before giving the green light to go. One officer stood on our side of the guardrail where the drama had happened. He kept waving the nervous drivers through, saying “ano, ano,” to whatever expressions were coming from open windows. Mine was about the mother, whether she…. And here the officer merely shook his head and told Tomaš to drive on. A different officer at the end of the bridge did the same, warning people not to stop on the highway.

“Do you want to?” Tomy asked me a couple kilometers farther. “Town of Loket, even just to, I dunno…”

I had been silently weeping, shaking my head and clutching my triceps. “Do you?”

He had a look that said, ‘hey, it’s your trip after all.’ Instead, he factored that “we wouldn’t be the only ones to exit here. Might be a frenzy.”

“Then let’s not.” I wondered if the guy—now dead—lived here in Loket. There was no evidence of a car he took to get to his perch. This was either hugely premeditated or as spontaneous as the very trip we were on. In every life there are days that wake the naïve into unfathomable experience, like countless September 11^ths. Or the chance to catch a baby thrown your way. “Let’s stop when you need to, okay?”

Tomy had been silently weeping, too—I just hadn’t noticed. “Deal,” he nodded and held my hand after shifting into sixth gear.

Nothing of this on the radio—“delays on the D1” highway were commonplace, and perhaps the memo had gone out that reporting further would be a breach of ethics, factoring the mother’s knowledge or lack thereof, the extended family, the no-way-to-abbreviate for a barely listening audience.

We pulled into Olomouc around 10:30 and drove the length of the Old Town—much bigger than Prague’s, with two main squares to boast and an astronomical clock that seemed stuck in the 1950’s, trading saints for socialist workers to chime in the hour. Since we hadn’t had a significant breakfast, we decided to eat an early lunch at the Šnyt Mikulda, a place I liked to go when my modest budget allowed. They had just opened, but a pre-Christmas crowd was already filling the booths and ordering their specialty beer—the ‘šnyt’ that Germans called a ‘cut’ of a larger mug, topped with a froth that constituted 70% of the beverage. The main appetizer, a cheese smelling worse than used socks, also was a draw to this region. But I’d come here for the kulajda dill soup and potato pancakes with coleslaw. Tomy stayed with his preference of pasta and, since driving was basically done, a couple of šnyts to see out the morning—“offices will be breaking for lunch, so…”

Time then to kill. The art museum would be enticing, especially for the sculptures, ranging from modern Moravian altarpieces to David Černý’s life-sized Adam and Eve:

But we didn’t go there. Nor the science museum I had worked at, guiding children (mainly) through a hundred interactive stations and strapping the willing into a giant gyroscope. Instead, we sat in the main cathedral listening, by chance, to an organist rehearsing for a Bach concert later in the day. Fugues and adagios were intuitive—“Sheep May Safely Graze” one of my favorites—but I had never heard his Air for Suite #3 in D major without a string ensemble before. The pipes of this ancient varhany could rattle a ribcage or soothe an insomniac to well-needed sleep. Tomy realized the latter was happening to me and drew me in to the pillow of his inner shoulder. I would have said, drifting off, this is what I want played at my funeral, but then thought of the man on the bridge, and my nostalgia felt instantly out of line.

“Okay,” Tomy kissed my left temple to wake me up, “tourism over. We gotta get on with the day.”

Groan. I called Lara to procrastinate more, and she was a mixture of confused, chuffed, perturbed that I had been so out-of-touch, cautiously relieved I was back. She’d known my basic entanglement with the prof but not the twin turmoil of pregnancy and abortion. Maybe she conjectured as much and wanted to honor my privacy. Maybe she evaluated our friendship as limited, which too often in life was my unintended effect. And blushing now, I explained my purpose here today: fishing for a hand to hold as I’d have to taste the bitters of bureaucracy. “My boyfriend came with for moral support, but… can you meet me at Foucault?”

I.e., a working pendulum in the largest building of the university, hosting the mathematics and geology departments, among others. Lara had been on track to finish her doctoral thesis on mineralogy when I’d finish mine, but she encountered different snags—too much field study, her advisor scolded, and not enough research with published sourcework. Her fate for this year, then, was to burrow herself in the library here, surfacing for coffee breaks in the slow, stoic turns of the pendulum.

Tomy introduced himself and, politely, made himself scarce (‘a phone call away’). He wasn’t explicit on how he figured his presence might complicate things—running into the professor, for instance—yet wanted to be sure I had my space and pace toward how the afternoon would unfold. Including what Lara and I might talk about.

We did some of that between waiting rooms. The registrar’s office gave me an old-fashioned clipboard with a questionnaire, an item of which asked my reason for early departure. Lara and I back-and-forthed how to answer, debating if two words—‘sexual harassment’—would be better than a labyrinthine paragraph on the emotional struggles of unexpected consequences of…. Sexual harassment, period. Turning in the clipboard, I asked the person on duty (a student, evidently) if I could see the chief registrar; the processing of the form would determine the chance of such a meeting, this student said, and that usually took a week. I tapped at my two-word justification for more urgency, but that was simply met with an I only work here pursing of lips.

Lara suggested we go to an unassuming professor—preferably a woman—to make a more direct appeal. Finding one with open office hours was met with futility, though, and passing any recognizable soul in the corridors went down these lines: oh, you’re back? So good to see you! Oh, not sure if you’re back? Well, it was good to see you… Professor Alpha was not in today (insisted one of the department secretaries) and wouldn’t be available tomorrow—do you realize how close to Christmas we are?

Five days, to be exact. “There’s still tomorrow,” Lara encouraged, “and if you’re willing, you might make some headway with a student advocacy group. They usually work on formal complaints, which I guess you haven’t filed yet.”

“No,” I quavered. “Wasn’t sure what that would entail.”

“Listen, I still have to finish up some stuff before the library closes, but,” Lara touched my forearm, “you can stay at my place as long as you need.”

“There’s Tomy, you know.”

“Sure, the futon’s for two. I was planning to leave tomorrow afternoon, but you take whatever time and just toss the key in my mailbox when you’re done.”

“That’s really gracious, Lara. I don’t deserve your generosity.”

She looked at me with sadness. “You do. Maybe your silence over the past half year speaks for much that’s unspoken, even unspeakable. Believe me, you’re not alone.”

“Did… something happen to you?”

She backstepped toward the library, saying, “we’ll talk later, but that’s why I brought up the student advocacy group.”

Tomy was glad to stay an extra day and hear about Lara’s help. For his part, he had scored a plausible justification for his absence from work today and tomorrow, emailing his boss a connection he’d made at the botanical gardens next to the science museum where I had worked. In a word, they were quite interested in the development of a butterfly nursery of their own and would possibly liaise with the university on research and seed money. A visit to the chamber of commerce tomorrow also was possible. “And… [he tried not to gloat] send.”

“Sounds like you have a better future here than I do,” I tried to gibe.

“C’mon,” he drew me to his unzippered coat, “keep optimistic. The main thing is that you re-applied, and if that takes a month for them to process, so be it. You’re back in the system.”

“Welcome to the machine,” I didn’t feel like singing.

We walked the span of Old Town for a place to have dinner and I texted Lara to see if she’d want to join. ‘Actually,’ she wrote, ‘I’ll be at the Hen House for a hockey game—can get tickets for you, too.’ I showed this to Tomy with no idea what ‘the Hen House’ might refer to, and he grinned at the implication that Lara was into this scene: “I hear that the men’s team are called the roosters—kohouti—and I guess they must find the will to win if their arena is, you know…”

“Full of hens? And Lara is one of them?”

“I’d be one, too, if we accept her offer.”

I wasn’t sure. I had seen the Kahouti in Kladno once with Dad and Kristýna, but never had an ounce of interest in hockey while living here. Come to think of it, I had heard some drunks uttering ‘Hen House’ as their very own Valhalla, and perhaps those two words were among the few they knew in English. I guess as an academic, I had felt too aloof to be part of this crowd, or any crowd for that matter. I wanted a PhD to happen in the manner of the myriad symposia I conducted alone in the tree house. Getting out was a process I hadn’t trained for, and maybe Lara recognized that way back when in the invitation to the Danube delta. “Okay,” I shrugged, messaging her the same. ‘We’ll buy you dinner, though.’

‘Great!’ she texted back. ‘But I’ll have dinner afterward with a certain goaltender.’ She didn’t follow with any emojis—winks or hugging heart or key under mat—so I continued merely with the logistics of where to meet and when.

Their opponent, it so happened, was Sparta Praha—“Tomy’s team”, we joked, as he didn’t know the game too well—and the mood was now upbeat enough to skulk away from the tumult of the morning drive and afternoon anxieties. Lara was excited to introduce us to her goaltender (not Branislav Konrád, the starter) before the game, but only for the ten seconds such interruptions to the warm-ups allowed. The Hen House itself was gritty, totally non-tech: we could have been watching this game fifty years ago, I imagined, with zero difference in the sounds and blipboards. No instant replay, for instance, on a jumbotron. No ‘kiss cam’ during ice-cleaning breaks. No cheerleading hens in the aisles, as Sparta would have at their own state-of-the-art arena. But plenty of drums and horns and banter to energize this claptrap of a stadium. The game itself was defined by defense—only one goal by Sparta’s David Tomášek seven minutes in—so we didn’t see the wild twirl of scarfs or a change of goalies to account for fresh reactions. It gave us more opportunity for easy conversation, Tomy and Lara’s further acquaintance, my chance to probe how a hockey romance happened so soon after Radek. Well, the latter wasn’t going to be easy, but…

Lara gave us her key after the game and went on her way. We had eaten enough at the game and were rather fatigued, so a straight line to her flat was all that the evening desired. Lara had laid out sheets on the futon and a bottle of wine with a bow, which we decided not to open.

The next morning didn’t have us see Lara or the student advocacy group—the latter bidding me to ‘leave us a message after the tone’. They must be aware that Christmas sees a spike in suicide ideations and other opportunities for intervention; then again, an advocacy group is not necessarily the same as a first-responder. And, as down as I was on this whole Olomouc gambit, I was not going to do anything drastic. Tomy and I walked around the campus for a couple hours, dipped our heads into rooms that were more or less abuzz about the topics that drew students here, then spit them back into their teenage homes to hibernate through their holidays.

We stopped again at Professor Alpha’s office to hear, again, that he was not in. I asked the secretary to at least provide me an envelope to slip under his door, “or however else he might receive a note from a former candidate.”

“Former? How long ago, if I might ask?”

I looked at her unfamiliar face and gauged the intent of her question. “Less than a year ago, actually. I was here enough for office hours—Petra, I think, was the secretary’s name—”

“Yes, she filled in for me for a couple years. During my maternity leave,” she added.

“Oh.” I almost followed with ‘congratulations’, but held that back. “I’ve also been on… a leave of sorts. That’s why, if you have an envelope…”

She fished one out of a drawer and offered a better piece of paper than the back of the hockey ticket I had pulled out of my purse. But because hers was letterhead with the professor’s name at the top, I stuck with my instinct—the ticket served as a convenient time-stamp, at any rate. My note, uncoached but read by Tomy, simply went as so (in Czech, of course):

Amalie here, enrolling again. I’ll need a new advisor for my thesis

and will appreciate no undue obstacles. This is just to let you know.

That’s all. I stared at it for a couple minutes, imagining a hundred reactions. When I put it in and sealed the envelope, the secretary asked me to put my name on the front.

“It’s in there, he’ll remember me.”

“But can you give me your name, at least?”

I looked at Tomy, whose eyes said ‘your call’. Options came to mind: my scout name Šroub, perhaps with a suffix -ová to make it more believable; Kristýna, for no good reason; Amalie, to reflect the only one I knew of in last year’s roster. “I can’t,” I decided, “until he reads it. Please understand.”

Her jaw did not show she was game for that, but her nod allowed this interchange to end. She took the envelope and swiveled immediately to slide it under the door, even if she’d likely have the key to retrieve it and feed the possible hex to the shredding machine. Tomy verbalized a “thanks” I couldn’t concoct, but I did nod in the same fashion she had unconvincingly done. We left to face nothing more to do than trudge home.

Avoiding the D1, we both agreed. I texted Lara to thank her and wish her an early “PF”—the ‘pour féliciter’ Czechs like to use to usher in a new year. I didn’t extend more, not to jinx my own new year prospects. A hockey stick emoji seemed the best way to conclude, regardless if it were the shield a goalie would use or the weapon of a winger. Tomy drove exactly the speed limit, not because of fear of being caught on radar—he knew the parameters to go 10-15 kph over—but seemingly for the way of easing me out of this inconclusive venture. He glided the car to an offramp for Litomyšl, where Bedřich Smetana was born. His symphony Má vlast has typically been translated into ‘My Fatherland’, but ‘vlast’ is a) actually feminine and b) comes from the verb ‘to own’. The most famous portion of this opus is the musical journey of the river Vltava, which in Smetana’s time was more likely Germanized to the Moldau. Language makes its glacial changes sometimes on the sly, and Tomy asked me at our quiet dinner spot if mathematics was the better marker of reality.

“Because our sense of numbers do not change?” I wanted him to clarify. “Seven and thirteen are only defined as the 4^th and 6^th primes?”

“Well, people can add any connotation to anything. The numbers themselves, though… do not change, right?”

Would numbers exist in and of themselves if humans hadn’t given them names? I was usually up for this kind of discussion, but became instantly tired. I shrugged and stuffed my mouth with mashed potatoes; so did he. We were in no rush to solve such conundra, assured they’d always be there. And we would remain together.

Chapter 7: the epsilon

Coming home, I felt infinitesimally small. I crunched my legs between the glove compartment and my arms snaking across my chest. Tomy talked a little about Christmas memories as a kid, skiing at Šumava, chopping wood… I nodded that we could do that if he wanted. We could spend some days at the cottage in Libušín, less to ski than to chop wood. Kristýna might appreciate an invitation there, and three of us would approximate a family feel. Three-and-a-half.

We crossed the Vltava on a bridge called jižní spojka, almost always under some kind of construction. I looked to the north to see the other bridges spanning the steely water, imagining as far as Karlův and the pedestrians invariably having a good time there. The stones for this bridge were set in 1357, the 9^th day of the 7^th month, at 5:31 in the morning. Charles wanted such numerology for the crossed fingers that this effort would sustain and prove his beloved city to reflect its name: Praha, for ‘threshold’. East to west, as we were traveling, or even west to east, if Germans would come this way in peace. Charles’ reign ranged from Tuscany to Luxembourg, scattered states in Prussia and Bavaria; his outlook was to network and be that good King Wenceslas to feature in your Christmas carols. Calculated or not, he managed to die naturally instead of through a rival’s sword, and that is about as good as any medieval figure could expect.

Beyond the succession of kings, the city needed other forms of protection in the toss and turl of being a little guy at the crossroads of increasingly ‘enlightened’ power barons. The Habsburgs strolled in from the south; the Saxons kept their visions north; the Ottomans threatened from the east yet wouldn’t get further than Vienna. For threats internal, like the mafia tactics of Prince Křesomysl at Vyšehrad, something from the villages around Praha would step in to intervene, or at least mix things up for the greater good. Horymír, the brave knight in this instance, would face the executioner’s axe if not for the idea whispered in his ear by Šemík, his faithful horse; the two appealed to Křesomysl for a final trot around the ramparts—granted by the powerful dullard—and proceeded to leap into the Vltava and escape as if through an unattended gate. Centuries later, when the Nazis flew in the face of the Munich Pact’s peace for our time, other Horymírs and Šemíks and Rabbi Loews and Golems would place banana peels where they could, including the attic of the Old New Synagogue, where a Nazi officer investigated rumors of a stow-away there and succumbed to a heart attack brought on by a hulking shadow.

“What’re you thinking about?” Tomy asked, driving past the Staropramen brewery a couple blocks from his (or our) apartment.

I wondered myself. “The Golem,” I abbreviated.

“Hmm. Should I be jealous?”

As if he were Othello and I were Desdemona. “Should you be?”

“Dude’s pretty imposing. Are you thinking about—"

“Well, your shoulders are sturdy like his,” rubbing his right as he was gearing down from fourth to third, “and sometimes your mouth goes slack when you’re sleeping, which is kinda cute.” He didn’t seem amused. Probably just tired from the drive. Kilometers are one thing; concentration, another. Concern could make a two-three hour trip into an exponential series of waiting rooms for a chance to finally get some stamp of approval or diagnosis, otherwise. “But no, I’m not thinking about another dude that way.”

“Okay. Me neither, then.”

We parked and pulled ourselves upstairs, wishing probably that some cocker spaniel or something would greet us with nothing but elation. Maybe that’ll be under the Christmas tree, Tomy mumbled, actually using the Czech idiom, “from Ježíček.” Maybe.

I called my mom to tell we were home and that the embedded pearl from Grandma was helpful. No other details, as she wouldn’t ask too much over the phone anyway. Dad, when she invited his ‘hello’, even less so. But it was good to hear them for a few minutes. They’d be at Libušín tomorrow to decorate some of the trees around the cottage, warm the place up for anyone who wanted to use it. I almost asked ‘who else did you have in mind?’ But that would sound, well, jealous.

Tomy made dinner while I curled into the couch to write a poem. This was a surprising instinct (if it were), to convert my integer associations to letters that weren’t strictly variables in an equation. I scribbled lines in Czech and then in English, sometimes reaching into my phone for a Googled boost of plausibility, including what nuances might clash or confirm in terms like ‘swan song’, let alone the collective spirit of that suffering individual. Dinner now prepared, I put the papers of the reciprocal translations onto the table and pinned them with the hockey puck. Tomy saw this, of course, but waited my time to weave its process into our need to eat, drink, be merry. But the poem was also merry, in a way, and after our first glass of wine I took the English in hand and gave him the Czech and we both read both, exchanging wordlessly to ‘hear’ this in a couple languages.

The threshold we have come to know

as Prague, we hope

will never disappear, having gone through

occupations, fenestrations (de- and re-)

tourists’ fancies come-and-go,

swan songs premature and proven to be old,

timeless as the Golem in some crises of

a wanderer untold—maybe prayed about,

yet often still untold….

The threshold holds its own,

including you, and anyone who needs

a humble, honest hug for any unnamed thing

they’re going through….

The threshold also has its needs, and so

esteems the Golem

as an empathetic guardian:

born-of-clay from someone born of clay and

rib and Eden’s promises and threats,

a work-in-progress (like us all)

rekindled on a starless night by Rabbi Loew,

handed to humanity hereafter—maybe

to be prayed about, who knows?...

He didn’t say which was better—he didn’t resort to the Googling which would probably be necessary for such a judgment. He did ask what the title should be, and, since the final lines were still fresh in mind, I wondered if “humanity hereafter” wouldn’t be too grandiose.

“Humanity,” he turned the puck upright and wheeled it between his hands, “starts with any human caring for another. The opposite of ‘grandiose’.”

Rabbi Loew was the human; Golem was the monster many would make of his efforts, but unlike that which Victor Frankenstein contrived, the locals wouldn’t drive this clay giant out of town with torches and pitchforks. Maybe we do need to embrace our monsters more, or be embraced by them.

“Should I send this to Lara? or…”

“She’d like that, I think.”

I phoneshot the Czech version, then, and without further context messaged it to her. After about five minutes, she messaged back a photo of herself in what must have been a recent trip to Prague she hadn’t told me about. It turned into a blurry glow on my screen—my eyes, not the LCD itself—and Tomy took my hand to describe the picture in his own poetic terms:

Christmastime retained its sparkle despite the ennui in my soul. Tomy gave whatever space I didn’t say I needed, in body language or otherwise. The treehouse was no longer a comfortable resort, even if I rolled out an extension cord to feed an electric heater the size of a crockpot. I read a couple books up there, including The Physics of Sorrow by a Bulgarian author my father met somehow on a road trip to the golden sands along the Black Sea. He and Mom had never seemed at a point of marital divide, but asserted at times their desires to be on one side or another of inertia—static to remain so, dynamic to keep life moving along—and in the latter mindset, he up and headed south. He pulled out his high school Russian to speak with Mr Gospodinov, who gifted him a copy of his memoir, translated into English. Dad paged it in cursory fashion, then tossed it my way.

It’s far less about physics than mythology—the feeling of growing up as a minotaur, encaged by the labyrinth which that monster is supposed to guard, somewhat like a queen ant fated to supply a colony’s hope at her expense. My ant farm hadn’t the space for such a view, so my ten-year-old self had to imagine her manner of coping with the circumstances. Gospinov presents a Bulgaria that paced in similar stumbles as Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, with less loosening up in the 80s. That said, he was able to sell books in a blind-eyed black market, and titles he alluded to—like Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not about Love and Kafka’s I Was Born to Live in Solitude—compelled me to seek them out. I managed, ironically enough, only to find the Russian’s epistolary novel at Shakespeare & Sons, where I occasionally met Boris in his similar hunt for tomes.

After reading Shklovsky, I decided to wrap it up for Kristýna and present it to her at Libušín, where she and I had a miniature version of a family holiday. She liked my gesture, blushed that she hadn’t thought of something in return but promised to chop wood to ‘pay the rent’, so to speak. Of course I didn’t want her to do that, yet I also didn’t want her to feel so tied down to the point of zero physical exertion. She had quit hockey and its related training in the weight room, but (a bit like my dad) she’d still desire a reasonable freedom of movement.

She grilled me on the details of Olomouc and wondered why I didn’t do more to get what I wanted there, which I wasn’t even sure of myself. “Your doctoral candidacy, dumbshit,” she wryly reminded.

“Oh, that.”

“What else? Your baby back?”

“No. That bridge is burned. That’s why I didn’t want you to...”

“Burn my own bridges? Like Covid did a couple years ago and that blade to my neck did a couple weeks ago?” She puffed her cheeks. “Count your blessings, Amálko.”

“Those were out of your control. Hard to make them analogous with my situation.”

We left that conversation hanging, trading a potential flare-up for an innocuous chance to watch from my laptop the Christmasy film Pelíšky, roughly translated as ‘dog beds’ (if having no such canines as characters within). To call it ‘Christmasy’ is maybe a stretch; a couple scenes pertain to this season, but it’s really about wondering “where is my home?” as the 1968 tanks roll in to dash any hope for a bona fide ‘socialism with a human face’. Kristýna hadn’t seen it, surprisingly, and loved how the overture was the Blue Effect song she (and everyone here) had heard a hundred times: “Slunečný hrob”—a ‘sunny grave’ in ways that didn’t determine a mood of optimism or pessimism: “I’ll say goodbye” to childhood dreams yet “I’ll stay faithful” to whatever ideas and ideals the singer and his friend had tried to realize. Týna pretended not to wipe her eyes, loath to seem too sentimental. We drank up the last of the rooibos tea and put a final log in the stove before going to our own pelíšky, joking about how the Nutcracker might come, and whether we’d wake the other up in such a fortune.

The following morning showed no evidence of ferries or aristocratic mice or Mother Ginger’s children. A light cover of snow had fallen, though not enough to shovel or form into a snow sculpture. I decided to make vánočka, a semi-sweet bread with optional raisins embedded, as I tend to like. Kristýna pored into her new/used book, asking after a while if I had a particular reason for directing it her way.

“Is it like you wanna know who’d send love letters to me?”

“Well,” I lightly bit my lip, “not exactly.”

“But vaguely? I already told you that he was never a love interest. He doesn’t even know about... this,” lifting her shirt to rub her belly, still rather ripped.

“Are you in touch with him? Or... was he a, um—”

“A rapist? No. A friend? Not really, but, you know... one night he happened to be. And that’s that.”

I didn’t believe either ‘that’ but now bit my tongue. “How many weeks are you again?”

“Eight. Should be showing, right? Doc said it was the size of a raspberry. Organs forming but not yet on the job, except for the heart, beating like a mouse. I basically have a month to decide what to do, cause after that—”

“Decide what to do?” I guffawed. “I mean..., if it’s a matter of caring for the child, me an’ Tomy could be... y’know, if you wanted, of course,... us to be...”

“Foster parents? Is that where you’re going with this?”

“I want you to be happy, Týna, that’s all.”

As if she had read my mind a half-minute ago, she echoed, “I don’t believe that.”

I wiped my doughy hands and went over to the middle of the couch, not to pin her in one way or another to the adjacent armchair. “I do, really—and you can factor our help in whatever specifics you need.”

Kristýna turned her head to the frosty window. “Let me get this straight,” she spoke in deliberate syllables: “so you want me to keep it because your professor forced you to dump yours.”

“Oh, c’mon! Don’t say ‘dump’…”

“Abort.”

“Don’t say ‘it’, either.”

She swiveled her head to stare me down. “About mine? or yours?”

“Neither, please!”

“Well what’s the better word? It’s not a baby, not a little girl or boy, not trans. Cis. It.”

“Fuck you!”

“No, fuck you, using me to get over it.”

My brain felt instantly on fire, like the movie Backdraft. All of it at once. It. It. It. It.

It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It It it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it iti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti ti tititititititititittititititititititittititititititittitititititititittititititititititittititititititititittititititititititittititititi

Kristýna also didn’t say anything else for at least an hour. Enough time for her to read and me to bake. I remember thinking about what motivated her to play hockey in the first place: you really gotta want that puck to meet the net, she said, something like that. Was it to punish the puck, like detention? Or to merge pieces of the game, like enzymes? Point to an accomplishment? Be done with the entropy of unfulfilled shots?

Hate this—I don’t want to narrate this anymore, pages and pages of an unhinged psyche. I’ll keep it jammed within the plastic windows of the ant farm in that godforsaken treehouse, where no one goes to play….

“Well, you can do that,” Boris allowed, having listened to my giving up—I had intended to spill this out to Simona when he would be walking dogs or whatever else he did, but (go figure) she wasn’t home and he was. “You can bury your story like a time capsule that never needs to be recovered.”

His pause suggested a ‘but’ to follow, which never did. Not for the three or four minutes I sulked, sliding my fingers along the rails of the canary cage. I whistled softly to them to fill the silence, and Boris kind of did the same while arranging a plate of weeks-old cukroví and figs and other yuletide sweets. I joined him in the kitchen to fill the coffee-maker and decided to prod him on: “but—”

“But.., what?”

“You know. You don’t just encourage a person to write a memoir or whatever the hell I’m doing—”

“A novel, by my reading. Artful.”

“Clumsy.”

“Not at all.”

“And then advise them to deep-six the thing.”

“I didn’t initiate that thought—you did.”

“And so now you’re supposed to pep-talk me into keeping it alive.”

Boris lapsed into his typical droopy grin, a way of buying time. He lifted the plate for my choice of delectables, none of which I’d take before a swig of coffee, which wasn’t ready yet. “There’s no pep-talk in me, Cuz.”

“Cuz?”

“Cousin. Sestřenice. Amálka, mi amiga.”

“I thought you meant, like, because—no pep-talk in you... because...”

He shrugged, but then sought my irises to imply his genuine je na sais quoi. “Because I don’t presume to need something for someone’s deeper need.” I screwed my eyebrows at that, so he fumbled on. “I’m a reader here, not a guide. I care deeply about your journey—before you started writing—and how anyone else who’d read might—”

“You want a #MeToo out of this—a genre to supply some market out there—”

“No! I mean, nothing against that, if it reaches someone...”

“Like whom? A consensual, pro-choice adult? A geek who’s not so wise?”

The pitter of the shih tzu’s nails emerged from the landing, so Boris bounced to the door to let her and Simona in. The dog still had that macrame collar with the faux spikes, if probably none of them (who knows?) harbored a micro-camera anymore. Simona curled the corners of her lips as if she was reading my mind. She kissed Boris and then came over to me to do the same. She would have done so to each canary, too, it seemed, but—

“Amálka’s just made coffee,” Boris thought to offer the transitioned apartment.

“Great! And news from Olomouc, I gather...”

I slumped into the shadowed end of the couch and tried not to cry. Closing eyelids at forty percent pressure helps that cause, I’ve found, especially when fingers weave at the same torque. I pictured Kristýna’s fetus and guessed that at least froglike fingers were taking shape. Eyes could never open then—too soon an exposure of the darkness that life might become. Evolution is picky that way. Point a way to survive the murky circumstances, not the reasons to roll over and die.Knees and elbows preparing to unhinge, knock invaders out of personal space. Alternatively, keep them bent for future prayers, as God knows they’ll be necessary, too.

The shih tzu licked my nose, which had fallen forward in my unanticipated funk. Boris and Simona tiptoed out to let the living room be mine, and not to say it would last hours, I levered myself into the stretch of couch that blessed my need to sleep a little while—twenty winks, enough for no one’s need to justify how time is spent in public/private space. I’d like to think I dreamt of something nice.

Instead, a battle plan: I would counter-invade. Such has been the political parlance concerning Ukraine’s need to push back Russia, now that the former has survived almost a year of existential threat (over ten months, in fact—thatbaby’s been born). I didn’t use this analogy in a walk-through with Boris and Simona, but knew that I, like Ukraine, would need external resourcing. I was too small to take on Professor Alpha alone. That said, like Ukraine, I’d have to face the frontline by myself.

I’d practice at Stodůlky, throwing caution to the wind—nedávej si bacha—and entering that classroom which was mine when it wasn’t his. I’d wink at Niki, probably having messaged her in advance, then greet the class as a whole. The teacher might be in mid-sentence, so I’d of course wait for him to pause. “Just wanted to say,” when the question of my presence in this room would be overtly levelled (or not, playing it all by ear), “that 2023 can be a good year for you, and I’d like to support that journey with any tutorials you may need.” I’d leave a precise number of A5 handouts with a Fibonacci picture-problem and my contact info. Then I’d wave good-bye.

Simona did not blink her perfect eyes while I was delivering this plan, but lowered them in lack of anything to reply. Boris asked who Niki was and why I’d let her in on this surprise visit, to which I contextualized our handful of tutorials before the holiday break. Satisfied with that, Boris wondered if the point was to “put yourself out there or catch the teacher off-guard?”

“Both, I guess. I mean,... he didn’t do anything wrong to be caught out on anything. But he also never cared about what I could offer. What I did offer. And would want to offer again.”

Simona asked about my YouTube channel aspirations, and whether that might add to the pitch. I mumbled that those would take months for me to make, and wouldn’t pay off as easily as tutorials. “But still, Amálko, I could help you with the optics...”

“Maybe,” I considered, but not with any conviction. “I was more interested in the guts to go in unannounced. Like, was that enough?”

“Enough for... whom?”

“Enough for the class to be on my side.”

“And rise up to depose their regular teacher?” Now Simona’s eyebrows looked less sexy, more artificial.

I breathed in a sigh and decided to tell them about the closed doors in Olomouc, even if the student advocacy group might follow up with my grievance. The bureaucracy scared me, I admitted, and the dependency of systems to work on my behalf. “I just want to be in and out, like a thief—but one who’s reclaiming what had been rightfully hers in the first place.”

Boris grunted an irony: “like O.J. Simpson.”

“Huh?”

“After getting away with murder, he had to sell most of his memorabilia—Heisman trophy, bling, whatnot—to pay for all his legal bills. Some baron in Las Vegas collected that kind of stuff, so Simpson burgled it one night and... that’s actually how he landed in jail.”

Simona glared at the analogy. “You’re comparing your innocent cousin to O.J. Simpson? Like America has any words of wisdom for circumstances here? Dummy.”

Blushing, Boris apologized for his clumsiness.

But I picked up on it. “I am innocent. But a powerful system has taken essential parts of my life, and while I can’t get the baby back, I can restore my academic status—much more than stupid trophies of past glory.”

Simona shook her head. “Reactions are still feeding into dependency. Be proactive—prove you are better than the system—”

“That’s what I’d do. In Olomouc, I’d plan to give more than an A5 handout. In fact, I’d enter the hall a couple minutes before the scheduled lecture and put some stuff on the board—more than a Fibonacci picture-problem, but not unlike that kind of creative mind-teaser. My full name would follow with my established credentials: two years as a T.A., several published articles—”

“—peacock plumage,” Simona nodded, “I like that.”

“Well,” Boris demurred, “what male peacocks display. Female peacocks—”
“Shut up!” Simona slapped his knee, then patted mine affectionately: “go on—what next?”

I looked at the canaries (Uhlí and Důl) to see if they were paying attention, which would be impossible to gauge, at least mathematically. “My goal wouldn’t be to make myself large. But credible, even in small ways. I’d introduce myself modestly to those who’d come early—assuming Alpha would be late, as was his routine—then, to the hall at large. I’d know from experience where they’d be in the course, what they might have prepared for this lecture. Honoring that, I’d pass a couple empty kleenix boxes this direction and that to ask them to supply whatever queries or thoughts they had on the direct topic—”

“Would they be studying Fibonacci?” Boris wanted to know.

“This time of year and the course I have in mind, probably Hilbert. Epsilon calculus and first-order logic. Usually stirs discussions, which I’d love to, you know...”

“Logically.”

I glanced at Simona, who covered her smirk. “But the precise content would be less the point than how their esteemed professor would enter and address the situation. It would be my turf that he’d have to retake—in an O.J. Simpson way, perhaps.”

“Don’t say that! It was a crude analogy in the first place...”

Simona nodded. “And you’d have a room full of students to witness how you’d do better than him, anyway. Stay true to your own way of conducting the lesson—”

“Yeah,” I felt my heart thumping in the thought, “exhibiting my style of teaching would need such support. It’s the gamble of doing this without surveying those students in advance.”

Boris was evidently hesitant to add, “let alone the gamble of how the university admin would regard this...”

“...stunt?”

“That’s not the word I was looking for. This... initiative. This leap.”

Simona stretched her hands to the Gordian knot I had made of mine. “It’s not a leap either. It’s a definitive step in the direction you need to go, and we’ll be there—I’ll be there to ensure you won’t be pushed down.”

“I’ll be there, too,” Boris promised. “I was just trying out... first-order logic. And what might follow.”

“What would follow is that I’d get thrown out on my ass,” I surmised.

“Which is basically where you are now,” Simona laughed, “so what’s the difference?”

I would have proffered the Dirichlet boundary condition and extinction theory, but the shih tzu was begging for someone to brush her hair. Parenting practice for one of us, though Boris and Simona busied themselves with other things to do. My fingers needed the silky exercise, anyway, and the dog wouldn’t judge poorly my efforts.

New Year’s Eve fell on Saturday, and while I didn’t think the teachers’ reservation at Manta Bowling would stand, I showed up anyway, unannounced. Teri was there and three others—I’d be a fifth wheel, but warmly received in my month or so away from them. Next time, I promised, I’d text in advance (which begged the question if I were among their phone contacts, and vice versa). Teri had me in hers, and that was enough; the others would be, well, friendly at a distance.

We had little to talk about—school a topic to avoid in all the stress of grading and such. They asked about my month, and I described to some extent the drama in Karviná, protecting Kristýna’s identity as much as possible. I didn’t bring up Olomouc, and—bowling taking in the rhythm of clipped conversations—resigned myself to general holiday chit-chat. No one divulged plans after our two-hour reservation was done, and I figured that, like me, they didn’t really have any. The next two days were in fact the ‘holiday’—tonight mattered less.

My best frame was 144—“a gross!” I joked—a dozen or two lower than these more seasoned players. Nonetheless, Teri encouraged me to not be a stranger, to which (in the privacy of the powder room), I outlined my plan to make a surprise visit to the gymnasium.

“Oh,” she raised her rather bushy eyebrows, “that would be... nice. Should I, um, help you with anything?”
“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“True. I wonder how he”—the teacher I subbed for—“would regard... y’know.”

I didn’t want to say that’s the point and instead named the students as the real purpose. “Niki has made good strides in tutorials, and I know Mai would be interested.”

Teri looked into her sink, and so I did likewise to mine. “You know, Molly, he’s got a real jealous streak. He used to come bowling with us, incidentally, and couldn’t stand being second, third—not first. He seemed to hate it when I beat him, or any woman.” She looked up to grin into the mirror. “Oh, his subtlety was lame—like ‘okay, winners buy next round’ when he lost, or cutting his evening short after his best performance. I mean, I’m his colleague and all—don’t mean to throw him under the bus, but...”

I nodded. “Me neither. I just don’t want to be closed out. Nothing against him....” I hesitated to say more, but decided to add, “nothing against me, neither.”

Teri seemed to like that. She promised on her own guess to keep this confidential—to act surprised when I’d make the visit. I reminded her that it would be in-and-out, under the radar, missable. “Maybe,” Teri allowed, “but memorable one way or another.”

“Hope so,” I whispered, not having factored in the consequences of ‘memory’.

My final frame struggled to get any spares, let alone a single strike. Teri and the others smiled that off and insisted I’d need more regular practice, starting the following Saturday. And, who knows? Maybe that trajectory would pay off.

In the days that followed—the sleepiest in the whole country, due to the nothing-of-note as to who Saint Silvestr is and why we’d close everything down, except the ski slopes struggling to make enough snow—I read a bunch of books, including Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve. The plot was rather too close to mine, as a young woman from Istanbul could not complete her studies in Cambridge, but there was comfort in the 3^rd-person narration, as if the camera could only do so much—for better or for worse. One passage had it that a huge aquarium resided, absurdly, in a sprawling washroom of a rich man’s mansion, and the woman had the sudden urge to smash the glass to set the exotic fish free. What she was doing there was hard to tell; how the aquarium doubled as a mirror—the size of the one at Manta Bowling, I imagined—or even a voyeur portal for anyone on the other side, obscured by coral and seaweed. “If only she could find a hammer,” the narrator thought on her behalf, adding ellipsis to have us pace in kind, “. . . Sometimes her own mind scared her.”

Perhaps a cautionary tale, I decided not to tell anyone else my not-so-smashing plan at the gymnasium—not my mom, not Tomy, not Kristýna. I wasn’t afraid to, but also wasn’t convinced there was anything to gain from their advice (probably to use my energies differently, like Simona’s tips on making tutorial videos). I told my dad in a spontaneous self-dare. Just the Stodůlky part, not the Olomouc. He thought it was a good idea, “keeping yourself in the game,” he thumped my shoulder, “with what you’re the best at.” I underscored that the teacher would probably get his dander up, to which Jiří mumbled a who gives a shit and offered to drive me in when this would all go down, as if he’d be my getaway car in some kind of robbery.

“Nah,” I said. This one would be solo, somewhat to think through how much Olomouc would require a difference. Maybe bringing a hammer there, for one thing.

The best-laid schemes of mice and... female mice... go oft awry. In my treehouse I rehearsed the way I’d walk in and wink at a Stodůlky guard who wouldn’t ask for my I.D., let alone frown upon it. Unless he was new on the job? Then I’d resort to Plan B (lying). ‘Oh,’ I could say, “just forgot some nautilus shells I left here when I was booted out’, or ‘hey,’ with a campy smile, ‘I just wanted to catch up with colleagues I had barely come to know’. In other words, Plan C (longing for camaraderie).

January, 2023, and why would anybody care about a substitute returning to her barren hunting grounds? Rules have slackened: Covid is a weirdly distant memory, and no one has the energy to contemplate, say, a madman taking internet cues of targeting a school in no one’s view, as if anonymity-times-two would ever abnegate the point.

A theorem I’d been working on in Olomouc barraged me on the bus:

What may be relatively huge, like the integer 33013, is always rooted to its baseline square that may be also sizable, like 181.694 (et cetera). But then the prime above or below is never going to make an integer difference—the sum subtractive will be less than one. 32999 squares itself on 181.656 (et cetera); 33023 on 181.722 (et cetera). The gaps between these primes—14 and 10—respectively, hardly make a dent into this proof. Primes enjoy their shoulder room yet cannot stray too far. And while this hypothesis wouldn’t yet merit a license from the gods of Silicon to use toward algorithmic codes, I wanted to explore how infinitesimal prime determiners could be:

By definition non-divisible by any number other than themselves and one, primes (so far) must be an integer that cannot be negative or fractional—the notion of -.013, for instance, never to be broken down.... This could have been the emphasis of my PhD, though I was more inclined toward patterns in the organic world that formed themselves on primes. Like the tidbit Boris taught me about his hometown Chicago and how cicadas there had amazing reunions. The summer after next, he forecasted, the primes will be exquisite:

the 17-year cicada resurrects at the same time as the 13-year variety,

begging bets on what they’ll do together, vying for

the best oak trees to climb and molt and buzz and mate,

just to die again for real this time—their eggs enjoying nothing more

to do for 17 or 13 years to come. Teens to rise like infants,

instantly to climb and molt and buzz and mate

in homage to a cycle they must own. Now they’ll meet each other’s prime,

never since Napoleon had sold the swath of Mississippi west....

He shared his poem with implicit encouragement: an abstract past may pave a clearer way to look ahead. Especially with the support of friends. You know, power in numbers (et cetera).

At the root of things, presently, I was feeling less than one. I got off the bus and tried to imagine how minions would do this—Belle Bottom on a mission to kill Gru. I came to the corridor where life had spilled a month or so ago, the washroom almost as memorable as the classroom where I had subbed. The names of students appeared upon the whiteboard of my mind: Maša and her crush on Filip, independent Niki and the symbiotic Pat & Mat, Lukáš, Mai and gosh, am I forgetting them already? And what to do when they ask me how I am, instead of how to calculate the volume of an object with a complication of curves.

At a protracted speed of light, I was at the door of their room—not their teacher’s, per se, whose name I had trash-compacted in an effort to replace him with myself. At hand were my half-sheets of a Fibonacci problem and ways that they could contact me, for tutoring or anything else that fate would bring. I had an eye on Olomouc, of course—this was only a scrimmage toward that laurel wreath. I thought of knocking, bursting in, running away, anything but standing there... cemented to the spot.

“How was your day?” Tomy would ask a couple hours later, not yet seeing the faint forehead bruise perpendicular to my right eyebrow.

“Um,” I hadn’t rehearsed this part, “you know, trying...”

He was undressing for a shower, his own day tossing him to several barnlike places. I knew he was listening, but he didn’t want to repeat, ‘trying... to...?’ Instead, he asked, “should we go out for dinner tonight?”

“Or find a cocker spaniel to adopt?” I didn’t want that to sound petulant, like the kid who didn’t in fact get that wish under the Christmas tree, so I tagged on a “just kidding.”

He let out a fraction of a laugh. “We could do that, too.”

Then I joined him in the shower, where he kissed my forehead before asking anything more about my day, or ‘trying’, or best-laid plans of orphaned animals.

Chapter 8: the theta

When I said the bruise line was ‘perpendicular’ to my eyebrow, I was only approximating. My eyebrow is of course a curve, and technically the convex of my forehead up into my hairline means that we’re not dealing with a plane angle, anyway. The classroom door caught five centimeters of my leaning in, oblivious to who was coming out until the damage done. I gauged enough that the blow was not mortal, if I was mortified anyway with—

“Cut the crap!” Kristýna demanded, “just tell the story straight.”

Again. I thought I did, between the telephone call to meet her at Kladno’s Můčko Bar and the deja vu of downing beerless Birells on tap. “I’m not giving you any crap. I stood at the goddamned door and it opened unexpectedly and,... I got clocked.”

“Like a cross-check in hockey,” she laughed. “Welcome to my world.”

“It wasn’t like that. A cross-check would have been dirty, deliberate, from behind. This was innocent—someone opening the door to, I don’t know: go to the bathroom? see who was loitering on the other side?”

“But the door didn’t have a window, did it?”

“No. Probably legally required to in this day and age, but... Stodůlky is still kinda ‘old school’ that way.”

“Then how would anybody know you were loitering? Unless you were being noisy about it—”

“I wasn’t,” I said, but then took a second to reflect on how veritable my recall was. “I mean, I don’t think I was breathing audibly or shuffling my feet—”

“You said your feet felt like they were stuck in cement.”

“Yeah. They did. Still do, at least in the long view of this problem.”

Týna smirked a little—not maliciously, but in a facial tic I gathered she detested, being called out on it sometimes from as early as second grade. “Cold feet, more likely. You have plenty of power to move on this. You’re procrastinating, is all.”

I nodded. “Probably right. I thought ... Stodůlky was going to act as a pep rally—that the students would buoy my chances to do what I was born to do...”

“You were born to do math?”

“As much as you were to play hockey.”

“Fair enough. And so, what did those students do when the door smacked you in the face?”

Maša was the one who opened the door so abruptly, and I should have known: she was taking her regular mid-class trip to the restroom like she did when I was subbing—the teacher less the issue than the stifling curricular content for her. And/or her need to get away from Filip once an hour. I could have explained the context of their soap opera to Týna, but (cut the crap) stuck to the relevant ignominies. “It was only one student—Maša—and she closed the door right after she exited the room and saw me wobbling backwards. My little half-sheet flyers fell to the floor, so she first started picking them up, whimpering some sort of startled apology. Then she realized who I was and staggered toward me like the bride of Frankenstein—”

“—or his monster,” Týna corrected in her part-time librarian voice.

“The monster that was me, holding my palm to what might have been an open gash, but...” I glanced below Kristýna’s mouth to where her scar curled from her chin to halfway down her neck, the crude reminder of the ice skate that tried to murder her in Karviná. I felt a sudden urge to change the subject altogether, ask about her convalescence on this front, but I knew she wouldn’t like that. Not now, at least. “Um... I didn’t feel any blood, so—”

“So you breathed relief,” Kristýna guessed. “And this girl Maša also realized she didn’t do any real harm, right?”

I hadn’t thought of causes to such effect, Maša’s role an instant blur. I wondered if she had ever been on the brink of pregnancy, as at least two patrons of the Můčko Bar could empathize. Týna still shielded the father of her half-completed child; I never had as much to realize, let alone shield. The fateful father to mine would have added DNA to the math prodigy I would have raised without him. Maša had hooked up with hockey on the rise—Filip already scouted by the NHL—and only privacy would know if her schoolday runs to the Stodůlky washroom were a way of checking hGC or seeking to be clean, otherwise. I mean, fuck—I was her teacher for three weeks, and couldn’t do the simple calculus to figure out what really mattered in her life? or life extended, as the case may be?

“Hel-lo,” Kristýna tapped the table, waking me from the makeshift reverie I might chalk up to Dickinson:

‘To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.

One clover, and a bee.

And reverie.

The reverie alone will do.

If bees are few.’

The academic archives enumerate this as poem #1779 of “the almost 1800” that we know. A dozen or so short of whatever unctions left, the poet was perhaps concerned about a legacy that comes down to organic interactions and metaphysics, in that order. Causes to effects. “Are you okay, Amálko?

I shook my head to focus on her forward-pressing eyes. “Yeah, I... just started rabbit-holing.”

“You sure this isn’t a concussion? You didn’t get checked out?”

“No, I feel fine. Preoccupied.”

“Scared of Olomouc, now that your test-run failed?”

I took in that prospect and blew a big sigh like a pufferfish. Olomouc would be easier in the sense that I would already be in the room before Professor Alpha, so no door to smack me in the face. I also wouldn’t have little Mašas and Nikis and Than Mais on my mind—I wouldn’t know the graduate students at this early stage of their lecture cycle. I’d have justice on my side, as distinct from a Stodůlky environment that never did me wrong. I’d have him to regard me—not the other way around. So why would I be scared? “Yes, Týna, I am.”

Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. The angles René Descartes had to hinge to acknowledge doubt, extend reason, verify existence. I could practice this Cartesian process alone, but after leaving Můčko and Kristýna a few streets further, I scanned my phone to see a message from Maša, as if her ear were burning.

‘I’m so sorry, paní učitelko [the Czech address to any female teacher], that I wrecked your surprise visit. I only understood after you ran off why you came back to us, and—don’t know if you wanted it this way—I handed out what you had dropped after class was done. Pan učitel sux [the Czenglish here a norm] and cannot teach the way you do. I don’t think I’ll pass this course, so maybe you’re the angel dropping in at just the perfect time. Delete me if I’m out of line—you deserve a better welcome back.

I hovered over the instant instinct to reply, but kept it cooking for the bus ride home. I had no doubt that Maša would be good for me, as I’d be good for her, but needed some time to decompress.

Tomy greeted me with a letter addressed from the student advocacy group at Olomouc University. He hadn’t opened it, of course, but was eager for me to do so right away. Whatever it would say—whatever bureaucracy it would compel—at least I was addressed by name. Like an introduction from a pen-pal, as my 3^rd-grade teacher orchestrated with a school in Slovakia, for us to learn about a ‘foreign’ place in syntax just as loopy as our own. And much like then, I wanted to tuck the licked-sealed thing into my backpack and save it for a treehouse read. But that would not be possible today, as it was getting dark and Tomy paced the parquet in anticipation of its help toward Olomouc, again.

I ripped it open and asked him to read it first, silently or audibly—his choice. He decided on the former, for reasons I could understand before I’d do the same myself.

My mother, two days later, also read it silently. I had waited for my bruise to fade, but the damn thing only went from purplish to pumpkin-hued, as if I were battling a cocaine line of jaundice. Mom had lots of tactics to press and ice and powder-puff the vertical eyesore away, but I was never one to sit through body probes, be it dentists with their angle-easing mirrors or August doctor check-ups to tick the boxes that I’d be in the clear, again, to go back to school. No lice. No scoliosis, like a couple friends had struggled through. No return of an early childhood heart murmur, though rest assured, this doesn’t necessarily mean....

She wasn’t happy that I’d kept her out of the loop. When I told Dad my plan to storm the Stodůlky gymnasium, he didn’t indicate whether he’d tell Mom—we’ve never worried about confidentiality that way. For her part, she didn’t say, ‘your father told me about your hare-brained plan’—maybe she heard from one of the teachers there who wondered what the hell I was up to. She also didn’t say, ‘play with fire, you might get burned’... or bruised... or badmouthed. But I could tell she was hurt about being the second-place parent in this case. So I showed her the letter to compensate.

In a word, it said nothing. Procedural things I had already done at the registrar’s office, contextualizing my side of the story with trusted individuals, going to the police if necessary.... Keeping in touch with this ‘student advocacy group’ with the passive-aggressive proviso that they aren’t professional lawyers and will not be held accountable for advice in a court of law or elsewhere.

We hear you. We’re here for you.

Now shut up and scram.

“So when do you want to do this siege in Olomouc?” Mom asked, zero irony in her tone.

I honestly didn’t know. The idea of it elbowed away the raw logistics, and now that I had experienced a door slamming into my face, I feared a flowcharting the ‘if this, then that’ or ‘other this, then other that’ eventualities. Thoughts to mock the sense that I’d be in control. It wasn’t rocket science:

arrive early, unannounced to the lecture hall; distribute something similar to what I’d printed out for those Stodůlky kids—a math problem and my contact info; start the lecture with no reference to Professor Alpha at all; continue on as he would enter, always late; read the room and be the ethos of it.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Mom was always good at wait-time, having developed that instinct as an elementary teacher. Sure, the class clowns and extroverts would have snappy answers, but pupils like me would need and even appreciate the awkward measures of thinking everything through before an uttered response. Her patience essentially repeated her question.

I volleyed it back. “When do you think I should?”

“Strike while the iron’s hot,” she proffered—in Czech, of course, though the English is the same (I’ve debated Boris’ translation skills on this, because he thinks ‘shit or get off the toilet’ speaks better to what my mother had in mind. Then again, he wasn’t there to pick up her inflection, which wasn’t so banal).

“Do you wanna come with?”

“Do you want me to?”

I wasn’t sure—hadn’t imagined groupies, so to speak. Tomy would be there, and Lara too, probably. Whether or not they’d be inside the lecture hall, at least I knew I wouldn’t be alone. When my cat died before I could call myself an adult, I buried her beneath the treehouse and tucked a note inside: “Mandelbrot, I hope you don’t get lonesome. Love, Amálka” with some catnip we would have only thrown away, otherwise. I vowed then and there to walk that talk and never feel alone, at least in terms of loneliness. Mom might have been reading my thoughts as she seeped into the kitchen to let me stretch out on the couch and close my eyes and try to channel Mandelbrot a little more, more or less alone.

Safe within the angles of my truer home—i.e., Smíchov and the early Tenebrae of unreligious thoughts that Tomašwould accompany through his own fatigued return—I drank a couple untapped beers, ate cold pizza and predictably passed out to the nakedness of dreams. Tomaš, it seemed, was also as indisposed for reasons I would not abbreviate here. It’s sometimes hard to be a partner to an agent of the butterfly effect—an epithet I once offered him (and he did not reject).

My dream, in this regard, may have mixed with anything of his. The morning might avail a chance for sharing out, but statistics show most dreams are gone by 5am, long before a waking mind makes sense of them.

For the record, it didn’t start with Mandelbrot, waiting with whatever bated breath until the awful end. I don’t remember me or Tomy playing Beck’s ‘Volcano’ recently—not on the highway to Olomouc, for all that I recall, nor within the modest vaults of his apartment. Doesn’t matter. But my dream conjured the dulcet tones of that weary voice mumbling its way to a strange crescendo: “And I heard of that Japanese girl who jumped in... to the volcano...” and oh, for the love of god wake up—because the next clause might be the litmus test that says you’ll die in dreams if, for fuck’s sake, you don’t raise eyelids before the fall. But I could not stop Beck from conjecturing, “was she trying... to make it back... back into the womb of the world,” ending with a question mark or something less exact.

Mandelbrot wouldn’t care about such shoegaze music, right? She was busy bustling out of the lack-of-casket we had put her in, something sturdier than a cardboard box yet nothing Jiří, my lack-of-vision dad, could quite satisfy. Don’t get me wrong (in the middle of my dream): Jiří’s not a problem here, neither is Tomaš, nor Helena as a sweetly stoic mom, nor anyone else we could assign as dragon to my cause. Indeed, I’ll do a quick survey of the suspects:

Kristýna, are you the devil here? and if she’d answer, she’d respond with swabs beneath the swears. Tomaš? would roll over to lend privacy to my restless sleep. Lara, are you better than an advocacy group that’s scared of what I may need? And fading in and out of consciousness, Lara never really reifies. Colleagues I have bowled with at Manta, reigning in the gambled hopes of lives laid waste (or salvageable) in Stodůlky....

These filed through my dream, as Mandelbrot appeared to dig out of her existential enclave beneath the treehouse that was supposed to keep me safe above the fray. Instead, I jumped down to greet the calico and celebrate her sharp return. I thought we’d naturally resort to how she liked curling into my lap, meowing vague requests for some reward as if this feline ‘r’ was what I had been going for.

The resurrected spirit, in my dream, leapt onto my chest and then slid to my stomach, scratching painlessly with some ulterior design to both reverse the operation and set the fetus free. My arms remained slack, as if I could facilitate, or even validate, what was happening to me.

Mandelbrot was neither here nor there at the pre-dawn breaking point: I had not gone into volcano mode, nor jumped anywhere beyond the bed that Tomy and I shared. One of us, of course, could go for an onanistic under-the-radar release. One could claim a morning worth of lined-up work. Regardless, the day was now defined—overdue, it seemed—by the exponential effect of Mandelbrot, more than the kaleidoscope she had been since kittenhood and now fully extirpated from my naïve tree.

January is a rather vacant month, especially for universities. I wouldn’t have the sweet spot of a 2^nd-semester return for a couple of weeks, so I filled the time helping Tomaš with clerical details (his field visits also in some limbo until spring). We could work from home—just like the cozy feel of quarantine—or a little office carved out for him at the Institute for Environmental Studies. It was odd, though, to be on the Karlov campus when no one there knew anything about my Olomouc, or how I’d destroy the latter for a chance to transfer here.

I also gained more kids to tutor—not Maša, who did due diligence by passing out my pathetic flyers, but Than Mai and Daša and Pat-a-Mat. Niki had been with me since November, and she didn’t want to share time with her peers, so she and I continued to meet at the open study space no tourists are aware of adjacent to the clock tower on Old Town Square. There’s another at Kampa Island sponsored by Junák, the scouting community predating World War I, and because that’s a short stroll from our Smíchov apartment, I was hoping they’d take that as another possible venue. Instead, they chose Pivnice Stodůlky, a couple metro stops from their school. It wasn’t for the beer, exactly, though Pat-a-Mat maybe wouldn’t have been on board otherwise. It was for the 3pm opening and liberty to sit an hour or two without depriving the neighborhood sots of their table space. We got a fair amount done—this being their ‘Maturita’ year to pass their pressing exams.

“Remember why Euclid gave us stereometry,” I’d often try to pep them up: “it means ‘solid measure’ of any volume, but also the surface that wraps it. We’re all too young to know our parents’ stereo systems, but they were named so for the ‘solid’ sound that comes out of at least two speakers—preferably more—to deepen the sense of dimensionality and make the music feel more rounded.”

“Like Dolby surround sound at the cinema...”

“Precisely.”

“So are we supposed to get the two-dimensional wrap out of the three-dimensional volume,” Patrik wondered, “or is it the other way around?”

“Start with your vectors and the scalars that make the ‘inner product space’. You remember how we did this with the kazoos and nautilus shells?”

“Yeah, that was fuckin’ hard,” Matej decided to add, not having said much this session.

“Watch your mouth, Magor!” Daša threw him a probably flirtatious look, but also a nod on how tough that assignment was.

“Why can’t it just be as easy as water displacement,” Than Mai lamented, “like we did to prove our paper calculations? I mean, these exams should let us do that, no? Make these stupid theta variables come to life. Not just stay on the page to remain... unproven.”

I smiled at the thought of bringing in manipulatives to a scantron test. Even their oral exams had to exclude the ‘showing’ from the ‘telling’ that determined if they’d pass or not. It was like talking oneself into or out of a relationship—blind dates, cease-and-desist letters, wishing everything between would have been so easy to say, or that the saying would suffice for the deeper needs to feel. “The 2-D surface matters as the way we understand the 3-D underneath. We can imagine the volume of a cone without seeing that orange thing at a construction site, but... the orange thing is what we grasp or go around. And that will invite you to imagine black holes and time warps and—”

“—oh, fuck,” Matej doubled down, “the reward for passing this is just to go harder at university.”

I shrugged, not wanting to bring up ‘university’ per se. But Daša kicked him under the table. “Don’t shy away from hard things.”

“That’s what he said,” Pat snorted into his beer.

“What, are you shmucks sharing the same dick or something?”

“Guys, let’s just get busy. Miss Amálka doesn’t have time for this,” Mai tried to redirect. “I want to know more about scalars and—what did you say about ‘Hilbert space’?”

“Did I say anything about that?”

“Yeah, last week.”

“Oh. Well, that’s a couple steps further than what you’ll need for Maturita. Don’t know if our time allows for—”

“You said that Hilbert opened doors for you at Olomouc.”

My eyes must have dilated as I looked into the set of four staring at my struggle to recall. “Did I?”

And then there was Kristýna who needed a different kind of open door. She was going a bit batty in the absence of training and games. Her bump was now the size of a salad bowl—something between servings for one and another. I met her at a few different outdoor rinks (because none satisfied): at Vítězné náměstí, then Václavské, then the base of the TV tower made famous for the David Černý babies crawling up, defying gravity and looking for a better deal than what pretends to be our terra firma. By default, we skated as slowly as Adrian and Rocky, as everybody and their clumsy brother crowded up the pint-sized ice.

“This blows,” she leaned into my ear, and though it didn’t altogether, I m-hmmed and laughed us around another couple laps. “Could you—or your dad, really—do me a favor?” she asked when we benched ourselves.

“What?”

“He knows more people in Kladno than I do. And the ones who know me don’t want me near the stadium right now.”

I could guess where this was going. “Okay... Jiří is not much in that loop anymore—”

“But he knows the stadium folks—independent of the clubs that call it home. I’d like an hour or two on an empty evening—”

“Are there actually any of those available this time of year? I mean: your team, Jágr’s, the juniors’, seniors’—it’s gotta be jammed.”

She gave me her murderous squint. “Don’t you think I know that? Or that the last Zamboni sweep comes no later than 9pm, by that dude’s contract—he gives a shit for any overtimes, at least when Jágr isn’t there.”

“The Big Boss. Why don’t you ask him directly? You must know him.”

“Yeah I do. Oh, and did I fail to mention he’s the clandestine cause for this kid,” pointing at her belly, “on one of our chummier meet-ups?”

“Jaro is the father?!”

The squint dropped into a how-dumb-are-you probe. “He’s given me a high-five once and mistook my name for someone prettier. Or pretty to begin with.”

“C’mon, you’re—”

“—and who knows? Maybe he had just jacked off and had my hand in mind.”

“Týno,” I moaned, “you’re so much more than...”

She wanted me to finish, and because I couldn’t, she mumbled, “a smudge on a scoresheet?”

“Yes. You’re more than that. And you’re gonna have what Jágr, for all his family values, lacks: you’re going to have a baby who will love you unconditionally and vice versa—”

“Cut the crap. Just get Jiří to unlock the place for me. And you, too—I don’t want to skate like there’s no one to play off of.”

We had changed into our boots by now. I went to return my rental skates; Kristýna of course had brought her own. The day was overcast and would give up its light within an hour, well before our forked returns to Smíchov and Kladno. I wondered what she meant to have someone ‘to play off of’, as if she also needed to rehearse for some dramatic turn. But instead of asking, I reminded her that, “I’d skate no better at the Kladno stadium than I do here, at a turtle’s pace.”

“Don’t worry—I’m not looking for full-contact drills. I just want to take some slapshots and need someone to assist.”

“So I’ll be that—the assist guy.”

“Yeah. Unless you want to be goalie.”

“No thanks. But Týno, could I ask a quid-pro-quo?”

“Quid-pro-what?”

We had started walking to the metro stop and I bit my lip on what that what might entail, with or without my dad as an operative galoot. Kristýna let me think and maybe had a measure of ESP. “If we break into Kladno, will you come with me to Olomouc?”

“And break into that motherfucker’s lecture hall?”

My lower eyelids prepped to hold what would freeze with release. My mitten tried to help that prospect and may have made things worse. Or better. “Y-yes,” I stammered, “the hall that doesn’t belong to him.”

Kristýna stopped our amble and pivoted me to be sure. “Amálko,” then kissing my unmittened cheekbone, “I wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

And as we embraced, I could swear I felt her baby kick, just a tiny bit.

I should say—if just to satisfy myself—that Kristýna’s joke about Jaromír Jágr being the father was not the last word on the subject. We’ve known each other so long, we don’t have to gauge anymore how little or much we have to share, like dreams we’d wake to that more or less need some audience (a pillow or phone call away) to help interpret. An essayist on Kafka’s parables, Judith Shulevitz, opined this on the process of interpretations:

“From 1912 to 1924, when other modernist writers were embracing

Freud, and James Joyce was experimenting with stream of consciousness, Kafka was choosing surface over depth psychology. Or, you might say,

he was keeping the same tactful distance from his characters as

the biblical narrator did from his.”

I do not want to narrate my friend’s fate in some sort of liminal zone. She did tell me more about the way she was impregnated and... that’s that. The measures by which her

stories—in plural—and mine overlap are significant to me and may beg curiosity from you. Perhaps I’ll encourage her to write it out, as Boris did for me. But for my part, I’ll keep that ‘tactful distance’ for the time being.

Another thing I’ll quote is from a book that Boris gave me, interested in how I’d square the circle (so to speak) between my mathematical weltanschauung and literary license to subjectify the angles of the camera that is this manuscript, blurred or focused as it is. David Berlinski, in A Tour of the Calculus, has a chapter on the limits—infinite they may seem—of time and space; “Forever Familiar, Forever Unknown” is the manner in which the Cartesian coordinate system operates, all so tidily abbreviated in the graph paper notebooks you filled and threw away during adolescence. A ball is thrown into the air, Berlinski describes, and the mathematician charts the trajectory and speed and constants—earth’s gravity, for instance, as distinct from the variables of wind and other friction—and truth has been objectively told. But “novelists know that the event and the way that it is described—its story—are inextricably linked” and thereby “amplify the details” to add wonder, fear, ecstasy, ambivalence, analogues.... The ball is less the point than the mind by which it’s thrown and thought about.

Or the puck in this case, as we planned for Kristýna’s invasion of ČEZ stadion Kladno. When I spoke to my dad about her situation (cabin fever? stir crazy?), he thought her best chance would actually follow a home game by the men’s team on a Friday evening, as the shuffle toward the exits could allow for someone of Kristýna’s credentials to skate without undue scrutiny, and even have some carryover of the atmospheric buzz. “But she doesn’t want any buzz,” I reminded him, “or questions about her judgment, now that she’s starting to show....”

“But what business is it to anyone if—”

“Daddy, it’s her business. She’s asking me to help her get some personal ice time. And that’s it.”

But secretly, she wanted to invade, do something on the sly and in the darkness. Of course she’d need a little light: the full moon was a week ago and so the waning orb would only dimly glow through windows on the mezzanine level. The ice would barely shine, yet just enough to demarcate the boards and prevent a blind crash. With or without Jiří’s connections, she’d get in, hide in some enclave until everyone had emptied out, emerge like a shy creature of the night—a hedgehog, maybe—and disappear again with only subtle curves the ice would not pronounce to naïve morning eyes.

We chose a simpler evening to crash. It was a reunion match between men in their sixties who played in Kladno’s heyday when the team was named ‘Poldi’ for the steelworks yet sponsored by the state security police. Not that stars like Milan Nový would play differently under one anvil or the other. Poldi and its employees had nothing to hide in the communist cause, so perhaps this marriage was an effort toward ‘gestapo with a human face’.

There weren’t enough players to recreate a specific championship series (Poldi dominating the league in the late 1970s), so they divided up in home uniforms and away whoever was able and invited to skate out this exhibition. The crowd was an appreciative thousand or so, filling one-fifth the seats. The P.A. played sound bites from the era during warm-up and the seconds before each face-off: Olympic and Abraxas and Collegium Musicum replaced the modern (if still retro) strains of AC/DC and Thin Lizzy and Axl Rose. The referees, also long on years, blew whistles more for timeouts than fouls—pacing to prevent a heart attack that no one came to see.

Jiří acted like himself when we were little girls, even though we’d only ever seen the Knights that followed Poldi and other clubs of the bygone Czechoslovak First League. He even bought us commemorative scarves to complement his own ragged relic of his youth, yelling his mind out for yet another goal. I think he lost track of why we had attended this game—Kristýna’s cause—as we might have come here anyway, for old time’s sake.

After the second period, he stood up with the intention of talking to the Zamboni driver about using the ice in an hour or so. “I don’t recognize this one, though,” he admitted. “Must be new. You’d think for a Poldi reunion game they’d bring back one of the vets, like Honza or Vlad—”

“Don’t bother,” Kristýna responded, close to his ear. “He’ll say ‘no, I just work here’ and not take the risk.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Cause I recognize him, and he’s that way. An asshole, really, to especially the younger gals on my team.”

I snuggled in to the conversation, conscious to make sure no one nearby was hearing, the closest fans a couple rows and seats from us. “So what do you want to do?”

She scanned the rafters as if they’d inspire, then came up with this: “after the accolades—best player of the match and such—I’ll head to a bathroom stall with my duffel bag and wait for the crowd to leave.”

“Cleaning staff’s gonna catch you there, no?”

She thought some more. “So then, I’d like you to be there at the sinks—or come in right when the cleaner does. Only one on duty, I’d think, for a game like this. Make small talk for a while—"

“Small talk? Like about the game?”

“I don’t know, flirt with her—figure out a way to let me slip out.”

“She’d still see you doing so—”

Kristýna rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but she wouldn’t know where I’d go.”

“And where would you go,” Jiří leaning in to be part of the plan, “to the locker room to lace up your skates?”

“Probably safer to go across to one of the men’s stalls,” I guessed, “assuming she would’ve cleaned those out first.”

“Good point,” Jiří admitted. “Get the sloppy job out of the way.”

“No,” Kristýna sighed, “can’t assume that. And if someone was in there, that would blow my cover all the more. No,” she repeated, “I know the best place to go if you two can distract any lingerers still looking at the rink.”

“I can chat up the guard at the door, for that matter,” Jiří assured.

“Good. And I’ll slide my way to the penalty box, visitor’s side, and tuck myself under that bench.”

“Why the visitor’s side?”

“I don’t know—just don’t feel like going ‘home’, so to speak.” It’s not that Kristýna accrued so many penalties in her career, but yeah—any hockey player knows that enclosure rather intimately. Maybe the home box had more spit on the wall and shards of smashed sticks to show the crowd how unjust the refs had been. Visitors could feel the same way, yet chalk it up as par for the course in a rival’s house.

“Then where would we go?” Jiří asked, a little too loudly.

“Shhh,” I reminded, and then, “I could hide in the men’s room and if I get caught, no big deal.”

Týna shook her head. “That doesn’t help in the least. Just exit at that point—I don’t need you here to babysit me—and I’ll get out on my own.”

“You’d set off the alarm system,” Jiří surmised.

“With or without you I would. So what? I can scoot toward the trees, the side streets heading to home before anyone—”

“Cameras? They’d catch your image.”

“Main door, maybe there as well,” pointing toward a mezzanine exit. “But what can you do? Hedgehog yourself against any threats?”

“We can wait in the car, Týnko,” I offered.

“Like it’s a bank robbery? No,” she smirked, “don’t wait out there and draw attention to yourselves. For that matter, I don’t wanna be on your clock.”

We protested that our own ‘clock’ meant nothing—dad retired, myself unemployed—but also understood her need for autonomy. Maybe she’d skate in increments, resting and losing herself in the rafters. Maybe she’d want to sleep there atop the penalty bench and wait for morning skaters to come in, the exits then no longer hooked to alarms.

As the next hour unfolded, the plan went swimmingly: the game’s final applause, brief ceremony, a Zamboni sweep to kiss the rink good night, a milling about while most players skipped on the showers—eager, instead, to raise mugs at the pub. Jiří had friends and strangers alike to greet, and I watched the cleaner go through the stands before starting with the sloppier part of the job. Týna and I went into the loo and stationed ourselves where we said we would, a minute or two before the cleaner came in. My acting skills were likely atrocious, but worked all the same. She didn’t mind my asking about landing this job on the honest excuse I was searching for fuller employment. “Here? It’s okay,” she said, wiping down the sink area and ignoring Kristýna’s tip-toed departure. “Nothing to write home about,” she implied, which led me to question where else home might be for a twenty-year-old. “Ukraine. I’ve been here for seven years—my dad used to play for this team—but now he is fighting near Kherson.”

“My God, is that on the eastern front?”

“Southern. But just as intense. I had it in mind to begin university in Odessa. Still do, but...”

“I’m sorry.” I touched her shoulder for less than a second, suddenly guilty for my part in this canard. “Could you, um, apply here at Charles? I mean..., what would you like to study?”

“I’m not good at much. Maths, probably.”

Meanwhile, my dad had done a similar job with the last of the security guards (and maybe he also was crying inside). I ended up walking out with them all—the cleaner having finished her work during my stumbling encouragement to hold on to her dreams of eventual peace and however she’d use her math skills. Presence of mind prevented me from giving her my phone contact, which would have added an element of traceability if Kristýna were caught by the cameras.

The guard and the cleaner went toward the bus stop while Daddy and I ambled to the car. We sat there for a half-hour against Kristýna’s wishes, idling the engine to keep us warm. I told him about the Ukrainian cleaner and the mention of her father, which jogged Jiří’s memory a bit. He was getting sleepy, though, and I suggested time was up—she’d be okay—and I could drive the two of us to Ořech and tally the night a fair success.

“I’d rather sleep here,” he slurred, leaning forward into his arms against the steering wheel.

So be it. I quietly jettisoned from the passenger side and trudged toward the northeast windows of the stadium, mezzanine level. Despite the efforts of the moon, darkness defined the cavern that had been so whitely-lit a little while ago. My hands became a periscope against the glass and gradually my eyes adjusted to discern my life-long friend. She was the size and movement of a bumblebee, though slimmer, and whatever blossoms she was visiting necessitated graceful turns, reverse and swirling back to forward strokes, granting deliberate attention to each sextant of the rink. I felt she was doing this unwittingly for me, nurturing the fetus that would have been mine with exercise and wonder: what this world will be for you, rough and tumble in the prospects of serenity. She did slip on two occasions, both in slanting curves that would have shouldered an invisible opponent, protecting a puck that wasn’t there with an extension of the other arm. Oh, to have a hockey stick right now and drill some shots at the open nets! Then again, the jackknife motion would be bad for baby. Tonight was fashioned more as lullaby.

Of course I fell asleep, just like my dad. The alarm from the emergency door not far from me blared the blur of Kristýna’s indignation: “why the fuck are you here!?” With her duffel bag, she was poised to stride her own way home, but I came to and convinced her to take a ride with Jiří. He was much deeper in slumber, though, and had inexplicably locked the car doors (or else they acted on that protective instinct automatically—who could tell?); for a minute I feared he had asphyxiated himself with the trickling exhaust, but he finally roused at our banging on the windshield and driver’s door.

Unlocking the doors, he slapped himself to further consciousness and revved up the engine for a get-away. Instead of turning north out of the parking lot, however, he angled south and west toward an exit from the city. “Whoa—where are you headed? My apartment is—”

“I know where it is,” he cut her off, “but the cops will be coming from there—”

“Okay, but if you drive less like a maniac, they’d pass you by as uninvolved.”

“I agree, Daddy—slow down and we’ll be good.”

In an oblivion I’d never witnessed in my father before, he pressed on at breakneck speed—as much as a Škoda Fabia might do in that regard. We yelled for him to reconsider, but our logic could not muffle the sirens in pursuit. He insisted he had a plan if we were willing to jump out—“I’ll stop the car, of course”—and let him drive on alone.

“Deposit us somewhere? And you’d continue on?”

“There’s Libušín at the other end of these woods—you know that, Amál—”

I did. “And you’d get us there... for what?”

“To throw up,” Kristýna might have joked, though an unpregnant person like me could have an identical nausea.

“To get you to our cottage—use the secret key and I’ll...,” his brain wasn’t freezing, exactly, but “never mind me. Just be prepared to slide out when I stop at our side alley, and I’ll continue on the village road.”

“Until?” I balked, “you wrap this car around some tree? or you run outta gas?”

“Or give yourself up to the secret police,” Týna’s voice more discernibly sarcastic, “and congratulate them on their victory tonight.”

The village road curved up ahead, and while we had seen the twirling lights of the police car a half-kilometer behind on the straighter highway before Libušín, now was a chance for Dad to jam on the breaks, bark us to scram, and drag-race the rest on his own.

We scurried into our alley and hid behind shrubbery until the patrol naïvely sped by. “I forgot my duffel,” Kristýna lamented. “That might be incriminating.”

“Why, you have a wallet in there? ID?”

“No, just skates. And a scarf. Better things to worry about.”

We briefly embraced—as close as a prayer would befit the ongoing night—and walked the crisp earthen road to the cottage. I reached over the gate to turn the handle from the inner side, then found our secret key in the hollow of a tree, Boo Radley style. We entered wordlessly, exhausted. I could have checked my phone to see that it was 1:36 (Týna must have skated for more than three hours), but the clock in the kitchenette indicated as much. Too late to light some kindling in the always-ready fireplace, I switched on the space heater and traded our jackets for some cardigans in the closet. I had spare pajamas in the loft and offered them to Kristýna, but she had already laid out on the couch and pulled the comforter over her for an instant sleep. I stayed in the loft and tried to do likewise.

Succeeding, until the 3am call from Mom.

Chapter 9: the iota

She was beside herself, so I became that, too. I didn’t react loudly—wanted to keep Kristýna sleeping—but the exchange was alarming. She had tried to reach Jiří by phone, which had gone dead; her messages to me, in the meantime, all blended into my slumber—including a couple of ringtones before this one. She hadn’t known of our attendance at the hockey game in the first place, assuming Jiří was just out with his buddies. Calling one of them (after midnight, to her embarrassment) came up empty.

“Have you contacted the police?” I asked, trembling.

“Not yet. Do you know where he could be? You said you left Kladno together?”

I described what the evening had been, including the dump to our cottage in Libušín; calling the cops, I suggested, may add to his chase. “On the other hand, if they tracked him down already, wouldn’t he or they have contacted you?”

“How would I know?! I’ve never known anyone... on the run, let alone getting caught.” She was weeping by now. “I’m far more fearful... about the opposite.”

Not knowing what to say, I suggested we let the darkness take its course. “The police know his car and will be looking for it. And maybe he’d prefer we don’t put more of a posse on his tail. Momma, have faith that he’s okay,” I tried to convince myself more likely than her, “and the morning will make some reveal.”

Mathematics bases itself off of ‘natural’ numbers, then ‘real’ (including ‘rational’), then ‘irrational’, then ‘complex’. Where arguments heat up is in the realm of the ‘imaginary’—from Descartes onward. I always thought, from my tree house imagination, that impossibilities were worth the conceiving: the circle that spirals just beyond π, the problem of making a map from a globe, the particle aspect of light and whether it travels as fast as the wave, the absolute value of i.

Since I’m writing this memoir (Boris no longer bending my arm) and empathize somewhat with other such authors, Zamyatin right now comes to mind. His novel We would have served a cautionary tale to the earliest Soviet citizens, had the Leninist government not censored it. The narrator, an engineer of the post-apocalyptic spaceship called ‘INTEGRAL’ (still on its launchpad, if ready for code-red escape), is torn by the direction of OneState and risks much by recording his diary accounts of what he sees, feels, imagines. His ‘name’ is D-503, and since the delta letter in Russian is the same as in Greek, ∆, I figure Zamyatin intended this protagonist to struggle with change. The 503 is prime, and so is the suffix of his poet friend, R-13. The women of the novel all have vowels to launch their names followed by even numbers: O-90 is his state-sanctioned lover and I-330 is a rebellious femme fatale who challenges his sense of inertia—what needs to move on from this stuck-in-time place. He learns beyond the scope of his academic training that entropy cannot be corralled by science itself, and the notion of ‘reverse entropy’ is the mystification of organized life. O-90 wants that in a pregnancy forbidden for her—she is not up to OneState’s standards in that regard. D-503 doesn’t share her imagination in a life they could create without the rigid parameters of their here-and-now world (as unlivable it is). I-330 tries to lure him to the other side of the ‘green wall’ that collars the domed city state, and a frightened D-503 informs the authorities of her seductive, subversive effect.

He could seek solace in the pure world of mathematics, but even here he’s at odds. He hates the idea of a negative number having a square root—the dreaded enigma of i, the slippery slope of the imaginary to lock horns with the reified. That stupid iota, along with the bending of spacetime and fractals and incalculable algorithms... not that Zamyatin could peer into such conundra a century later. Yet his drafting of human relationships is indelible. I don’t imagine anyone reading my story a hundred years from now; I’m not sure I imagine next week, or even tomorrow.

Which ushers itself to today: Dad stumbled into our cottage at dawn like a sasquatch, covered by a rank blanket the weight of an X-ray vest. Kristýna, tumbling out of the sofa before I could climb down from the loft, pulled his shaking body to the space heater and rushed to boil water for tea. The shower in the cellar would warm him up faster, however, so I turned that on for him and laid out some fresh clothes he always had available in a wardrobe down there.

By the time he emerged, groggily still, Týna had stirred up some soup (in the absence of any typical food for breakfast) and opened a jar of apple compote, also putting its contents onto the stove. Anything to thaw what had evidently been a hypothermal night. I messaged Mom, who called in response right away—not having had a wink of sleep. “Yeah, he looked quite the mess coming in, but now he’s alright,” I guessed by the sound of the shower and subtle fluctuations of the water hitting the tiles, the sliding door, Dad’s suspirations. “I’ll have him call you.... No, I don’t know what’s happened to his phone—he hasn’t described his night to us yet.... Don’t worry... really, Mom—try to get some sleep....”

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep,” Kristýna whispered in librarian mode when I hung up. “What’s your best guess on your dad’s doings?”

My lower lip pushed up like a mushroom. “I don’t imagine he murdered anyone, and, evidently, he wasn’t murdered. Zero-sum, as the maths would have it. I don’t see his car outside, so that’s... conspicuous.”

Dad, a couple minutes later, started with that fact, and an apology: “I ditched the car—drowned it, actually—and regret I didn’t grab your duffel bag, Kristýno.”

“Drowned it?”

He sipped some tea before diving into the blow-by-blow: “Červený rybník, this side of Mšec,” a village fifteen kilometers west of here, “when I knew I couldn’t shake the cop. Gotta admit, the ol’ Fabia held its own through Smečno,” the town directly north, “to Nová Ves, where I had to choose between the forest or village road. I think that same dilemma cost the patrol car a few seconds.”

“Th’ fuck, Daddy—what were you trying to achieve?”

Another, deeper slug of tea. Týna slid a plate of crackers his way, which he smiled at. “Achieve? I’m here, aint I?”

“Like a goddamn ghost. But go on—how did you sink the car?”

“Turned towards Lodenice—there’s a pond there, but all skirted by trees. It got me thinkin’, though: Červený rybník, if I could make it a few more clicks, has no such barrier. It’s as shallow as any of these ancient reservoirs, so I figured I’d have to keep a good speed slanting into it.”

“You actually aimed for the pond? Are you crazy?”

“Completely sane. I lowered the windows for the better chance to exit. ‘Crazy’ would be to jump out before plunging in. I worried that the airbag would trap me, but... thank God for stubborn triggers.” He took a cracker at that, maybe in a eucharistic reflection that he had had another guardian angel beyond what Škoda could provide. “It was scary,” he admitted, “to hit the water at that speed. Any slower, though, the car would have rolled and probably knocked me out—I had no seatbelt on, of course.”

“Of course. Why would anyone wear seatbelts these days?”

Kristýna shot down my sarcasm: “Jirko, don’t mind her. I’m grateful for what you did. I could go into ‘I told you so’ mode—you guys shouldn’t have waited for me—but.... It is what it is.”

“Was what it was,” he snorted, “tunneling out of that bucket of bolts. Your cousin Boris”, turning to me, “liked to call it a ‘Trabant’, which probably would have more sentimental value, at least.”

“Did it really sink completely? Before the police caught up?”

“Hard to know. I remained in the freezing water for a minute at least—that’s when I thought of your duffel in the back seat, or my cell phone, wherever the hell that would be. But to your question, my eye was on the road and the flashing lights coming from the final curve into the causeway. I was surprised it was only one car by this point, figuring they’d call a back-up, which—who knows?—might have been coming from the opposite direction to box me in somewhere.”

“You were thinking all this out, Daddy, like a flowchart?”

“More like the butterfly effect, if I’m using that phrase correctly.”

“We’ll see. Not out of the woods yet. But how did you manage to get here? That’s a long way to walk.”

“Tell me about it. I gave the water another minute after the cop sped by, then slogged out to what felt like the colder air—I figured I’d be moments away from freezing if I didn’t get dry somehow. Luckily, the farm complex near the pond was pretty easy to break into—”

“How?”

“Kicked in a window. I don’t know—adrenaline? Then foraged for this horse blanket. Stripped down to wring out my already crystalizing clothes, then found the furnace for this barn and managed to drape what would fit around it. Nervous as hell I’d be caught by this point, but the closest house is still down the road, so I decided to rub myself as warm as could be before dressing again. Nothing completely dry, but no longer cold. The boots were my main concern, but...”

Soup and compote ready, Kristýna served up all three of us—I hadn’t realized my own hunger until now, and while the cottage wasn’t prepared for an ad hoc banquet, these nonperishables were like manna in a barren desert. I immediately imagined Týna eating for two (or one-and-a-half) and felt the formulation of teardrops, which didn’t dither in their splash onto the tabletop.

Figuring they were for him, Dad reached for my shoulder and mumbled some nevadí assurances that things didn’t (if they did) matter. Všechno pořádku, he liked to abbreviate, even if the ‘order’ of ‘everything’ was still in the wanderlust of entropy. “I made it here, gals—we’re good!”

We let that optimism linger, probably to entertain a contrary point of view, which no one vocalized. The police would be able to trace Jiří here within hours of finding the car, identifying the license plate, retracing the route from Kladno, pinpointing our cottage and putting an end to this mid-life crisis. Crises, including those aged twenty-seven. Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse came to mind, though I couldn’t assign one to Kristýna and the other to me. I wondered if either had ever been pregnant.

“Yeah,” Týna finally broke the slurping silence. “I can’t imagine how you hiked the moonless way from there to here, but... you are a faithful father to my friend.”

It was strange candor—I looked through my eyelashes to gauge her face, rarely smiling and not doing so now. But also not unhappy, which made me... not unhappy.

Tomy had assumed my night had been in Ořech, safely home through Daddy’s conscientious driving. I called Tomy around noon—the three of us needing the morning to make up for lost sleep—and asked him to pick us up, just saying the Fabia was ‘indisposed’. It’s odd: I didn’t want to misrepresent the situation and certainly could have summed it up in a few sentences, but also didn’t want to have the story go through the airwaves, as if the Poldi sponsors would listen in. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not paranoiac. But naturally, you’d think, investigators would tap into ways to trace a person at large, as well as his fellow ne’er-do-wells.

My apprehension on this prospect prevented further sleep. A farmer would figure out that some Goldilocks had broken into the stables and stolen a blanket. Petty as that might seem, he’d call the police and they’d show up to file a report. They’d know nothing of the midnight car chase, right? Then again, the station in Mšec would have likely been alerted immediately of the target arrowing their way, and maybe even these morning officers were on duty at the time. What happens when a pursuing officer loses the pursuit? At what point does an all-points bulletin come onto the screens of every law enforcement officer of a region, the fuller nation, the entire E.U.? Not armed, necessarily, yet dangerous—the car itself a missile through the countryside, coming to your neighborhood at Škoda breakneck speed....

Alternatively, I imagined, the carcass of the car would be discernible in morning light. The towing would be relatively easy if the cables stretched the same trajectory as Daddy took to ‘land’ it in the first place. Those Mšec officers (thoughtful, dedicated goons as they took shape inside my brain) would go through handbook protocols by making sure the scuba squad had left no underwater stone unturned. They’d record the license plate and vehicle number—how to remove the latter? if we could eventually unscrew the former.... A knock on our Ořech door, Mama still in her pajamas, maybe. Then, whether or not she’d sing like a canary, a siege on our Libušín cottage would follow. Any time now.

“No,” Kristýna figured when I told her that, “we would’ve heard helicopters if they even found the car. How would they know how many passengers to look for, and where they’d go from there?” She palmed my triceps and repeated, “no. Nobody’s looking for us.”

You take these things on faith—gut instincts, not so much the same. When Tomy came to taxi us where we needed to be (Týna, first, to her apartment; Daddy, next, to the waiting arms at Ořech; me to Smíchov and the beginning of my denouement, the scripting of which I could only dread). Before Kristýna trudged to her apartment—naked a bit without her duffel—I pressed a poem into her hand, written out of insomnia and a meme I’d seen about the elusive snow leopard, as you may also try to seek out as a parlor game:

The icy environment, naturally, compelled me to the question of viability—only a handful of creatures can live in such frigid isolation. I had read Peter Matthiessen’s book on the topic—more on the tenable Buddhist forays than on the animal that strictly remained in his estimation, never having been witnessed by his team. While a handful of zoos could supply a captive version of snow leopards, Matthiessen would hope to see one in the wild. It’s like the Yeti—or the swamp thing my dad had become overnight—less a monster than the sympathetic beast, slouching toward some manger to be born into a better set of terms. At any rate, the poem I hope Kristýna read:

You were not seen, my leopard friend,

and thus our plan succeeds:

you’ve fixed your fix by breaking in

and breaking out of what has been a man-

ic world of consequence.

I must do the same on different

glides of ice: escape may come the way

we’ve fumbled in the dark, trusting

innocence instead of caving in to gauntlet

forms of guilt.

You are my leopard friend, disguised

against the rocks and snow of Himalayan

lack-of-anywhere-to-go, if world

enough to roam. Now I need the fangs

to complement the hide.

Tomy read it, too—I had scribbled out a draft before a Hallmark push to let Kristýna receive it less rehearsed. The rawer version doubled down on gauntlets, fangs, and consequences man-induced. While he had been rather irritated about the chaos of our night, he softened at the way Kristýna had her window of recovery and why the risks were instrumental, beyond a fuck-you to the fates that seemed to pin her in. His eyebrows turned to me, and what I’d need:

“You’re ready for the cops at Olomouc?”

I did not know. “Are you?”

He also seemed the same as me. “I’m ready for what hasn’t been imagined, if that’s of any practical use.”

“You’ll be the iota variable, then,” I said, “the mystery that links what is and what could be.”

He scoffed a bit. “I’m not skilled at formal functions—math or otherwise.” He read the poem again and kissed my stomach, bared to welcome warmth in the apartment. “But I’m a quick study and will not let you feel alone.”

“Even in the limbo of the consequences?”

“Especially there. That’s when larvae turn to butterflies, as you have helped make happen.”

I domed my stomach more to him, and though I’d fall asleep within the hour, we had ourselves a lovely night before the essence of the afternoon.

Simona called me the following day, naïve to our night and a refreshing tangent to pretend she didn’t have to know what had transpired. We talked canaries for a while—Uhlí and Důl and all their dumb Czech declensions. They were happy, flitting between their comfortable cage and the Xanadu of the apartment always at their disposal, the cage gate open for that ever-invitation. “So there is no need for them to check the breathability of the coal mine,” I determined (more than asked), “because the air inside is good?”

“All good, dear Cousin-in-law, and you will be the first to know if otherwise.”

I faked a smile. ‘Otherwise’ was not a word I ever liked in its equivalence in Czech: ‘jinak’ for the sense of what we’re talking here, or ‘alespoň’ for some ridiculous ‘at least’.... There is no math in such semantics—at least some way of shedding light unto the vector depths of endlessness. Like a probe unto the Marianna Trench to find (at least) a floor that will not tempt a probing more, the submarine beyond its reach to enter earth below the sea. I was growing tired of the eggshells of infinity, whether big or small.

“And you? All good?” Simona returned the question, hinting in her voice that maybe this sonic call should transfer into FaceTime.

“All okay,” I thought it safe to say. Other stuff was said, but not significant for any lawyerly review.

She knew how to loiter pretty well, perhaps through the training of video livefeeds where a guest on another screen could only respond after lag-time and any other uncertainties of what an audience would regard as worth their hearing. Vloggers can’t afford to fill every nanosecond of unspoken space: the effort would exhaust everyone and break the confidence that meaningful things needed a contemplative frame by which the thought could be cooked enough for proper consumption. I never quite had a friend like Simona—a virtual in-law, no less—and wondered if I were so inclined to swap her for Tomy (not imagining how Tomy and Boris would get along in such a swap), would my present malaise be bettered for the wait time that paradoxically would encourage me to ‘get on with it’, take things into my own hands, be my own boss....

“Um, if I could ask—don’t answer if you don’t want to—”

“Agreed. It sounds like the question means more than anything I could supply as added value.”

“Value Added Tax! That could be my job, I guess, calculating the sweet-spot by which purchases are more or less likely to be had.”

“Yeah, and depending on how trapped that client feels—needing a duty-free gift at the airport to bring home to the wife and kids, for instance, to cover for the deadbeat things he had probably done on his biznes trip...” She spoke rather knowingly.

“Have you…” (I curled the invisible coils of what would be a telephone cord before I was born), “ever, um…”

Wait time, and then, “you don’t need to be afraid, Amálko. I can meet you somewhere if you’d like…”

“Have you ever been pregnant?”

Wait time, another way. Then, “I have something to show you. At U Kroka,” she specified the place, and the time implied was now.

We had been at this restaurant before, nestled under the north (i.e., mossy) side of Vyšehrad, one of the loveliest places in Prague. The name means ‘at the step’ of this high castle, and I suppose Simona chose this for the step we’d take together, halfway between our homes.

She came alone, without the shih-tzu, so I had to reflect if ever we were just the two of us. The waiter, of course, was bodily presence, and a few other customers in the corners of this workday afternoon. Notably, I suppose, she had no make-up on, maybe to match my general ambivalence to apply stuff to my own face. Pretty, both of us, in our mid-to-late twenties.

“I’m actually thirty-eight,” she clarified, “and only smirk like a teenager when anyone unofficial asks my age. Not ashamed, mind you—”

“No, you should be proud—”

“Not that, either. I’m in the position, professionally at least, to reduce the judgments people level at each other. I don’t tolerate the mean girl tendencies of other vloggers. Nor the notion that cosmetics need to cover up what’s wrong, according to uncaring eyes.”

“Then why do you promote the industry? To change it from within?”

“Maybe that, but also capture back the fun of dressing up. The tea parties we did as little kids.”

“I was more a tomboy, I guess, or Marion the Librarian. Content in my treehouse.”

“I gotta see that someday,” she winked, and took a graceful slug of wine. “But for the time being, I’m glad you came here.”

“Cuz you had something to show me…”

“Yeah.” She dropped her eyes to her edge of the table and lowered one hand below that surface. “We’re not positioned right for any in-depth inspection,” she kind of quipped, “but if you turn a little,” guiding me with the tilt of her head. She lifted her blouse to reveal a surgical line above her skirt, a finger-span below her bellybutton. She let me calculate its length inside my mind, the increments of stitch marks barely seen. “It’s been with me a dozen years,” which would make the baby, well, as old as that.

“Where is she?”

“He,” she corrected my assumption. “In heaven, I guess. Victim of SIDS four months into a disastrous marriage. Not that the father had anything to do with it—barely ever home to burp him in the night.”

Puffing out the air I’d held while she was saying this, I could barely utter an “I’m sorry.”

She nodded slowly, “me, too.”

“His name? The baby’s, I mean?”

She reassembled herself to put both elbows on the table. “Don’t laugh: Svatopluk.”

I did let out a chuckle, which she allowed. “Holy Order? Like a little bishop?”

“Maybe he’d aspire to that. But the name really comes from the old Slavonic root of ‘svet’ that stood for military strength—”

“Svět? Like ‘world’?”

“I dunno. We fuck up our world enough with military might. I didn’t think that fully through when I needed to give him a name. Just wanted something kinda original, as Czech names go. Moravian, as I found out later…”

“Who?”

“The Svatopluk I should’ve learned about in school. Saint Ludmila eclipsed him, at any rate, and that would have been the baby’s name if he were a girl. Maybe like you, I felt in pregnancy that he was really a she…”

It hadn’t occurred to me to name the fetus I had carried, nor the gender, really. I hadn’t put a face to the inchoate being, perhaps unconsciously on purpose. A face, a name would fight back notions to abort (which I was fighting anyway, so a little fellow warrior made some sense). I had read Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a teen—in my treehouse, of course—and wondered why the “crawling already?” title character never had a living name. Her mother Sethe, a slave in 1855 Kentucky, sent the infant and her older brothers ahead to the freedom of Ohio, then joined them when her own escape could be had. The slavecatchers, though, sniffed out her trail and cornered her and the kids—including a new baby she delivered on the journey there—in a toolshed. Trigger warning, I guess we need to say these days: it gets holocaustic.Sethe knows they’d take the kids as assets, more vital than her own worth as ‘damaged goods’, and so she tries to kill them all with a shovel head and pruning saw—maiming all and “succeeding” with the unnamed crawling girl. Beloved, she’d ascribe on an eventual tombstone, because when the slavecatchers threw open the door, they relinquished any interest in her capture. Why bring back to Kentucky a psychopath and the bloody bodies at her feet? Professor Alpha wasn’t exactly a slavecatcher in this retrospect, but perhaps I was Sethe to some extent. Getting rid of what someone was trying to steal from me, but that ‘what’ couldn’t have a name or a reason for me to reconsider….

“Hello?” Simona tapped my hand, splayed upon the table as if the restaurant had tremored in an earthquake, as if I’d ever experienced one. “I didn’t mean to startle—”

“No, no—I’m okay.” I shook Sethe (and Alpha) from my head. “I don’t know enough about SIDS, if…”

“If I’m up for the description? Don’t worry,” she caressed my hand now, just a little, “I invited you here knowing that we’d ‘go there’. It’s as sudden as the acronym implies, and all advice to put the baby on his back—boys die of this more than girls, by the way—and make sure the crib is uncluttered, has a firm mattress, proper ventilation, everything or nothing you’d need to provide, doesn’t matter in the morning. I was completely sideswiped when I saw his blueing head and hands. I picked him up and tried to bounce a whatever energy I could safely muster, but had to lay him down again on the diaper table for fear of dropping from my enervated arms. I tried CPR, yelling between breaths, too confused to cry.”

I thought she might tear up in the retelling—no mascara to run, maybe as a measure of her preparation—but in a dozen years, the emotions must adjust. Still as sad, probably, but not as sudden. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated, turning my hand over to return her caress. “And you were alone through this?”

“My husband, you mean? Swooping in like Superman from his ‘business trip’ wherever the fuck that was? No…, I wouldn’t want him there at such a moment. A neighbor lady heard my screams and called 1-1-2, pounded on my door, held me like a matryoshka doll. The days that followed determined SIDS as cause of death and divorce as necessary for me to file. He ‘let’ me have the apartment in the settlement, figuring (I guess) it would be too haunted to profit from.”

“Do you feel that sometimes? The presence of Svatopluk?”

“Kinda. I needed Boris to know all this, of course, so he’s been helpful to give some life back to the place. The canaries are why I fell in love with him, by the way.”

I felt an invitation to smile. “I thought it was the charming macrame collar.”

She smiled, too. “Yeah, he had some ’splaining to do on that one.”

We finished our goblets of wine, and felt subtle nudges from the waitstaff to either order some food or vacate for the early dinner patrons coming into U Kroka, perhaps making their own steps to get to know each other more meaningfully. Simona suggested we take a walk through Vyšehrad’s ramparts and cemetery, maybe say ahoj to the national treasures of Božena Němcova, Karel Čapek, Antonin Dvořak and others. I was surprised by one figure I hadn’t seen there before: Jaroslav Heyrovský, who gives name to the gymnazium I worked at for too short a time, and that lent a chance to recall the students for Simona’s imagination (and my longing to see them again).

Topics like that, as well as the fable of Horymír’s horse Šemík leaping from the western wall to escape his captors, kept us talking into the dusk of this unplanned day. Inevitably, I couldn’t shake Simona’s reveal from the restaurant, restraining myself for more questions she’d likely not want to answer. Svatopluk would have been eleven or twelve by now—she hadn’t given his birthdate—and therefore would be a first-year candidate to a gymnazium, if that’s where his nature would lead. Had Simona gone to gympl? Or trade school to start her beautician practice? What business ventures exactly did Svatopluk’s father engage in, and why did they preclude more engagement with family? We talked around these direct questions, and I’m guessing Simona had an equal slate of curiosity for the shadows of my background.

I did ask her, though, how she tends to remember the baby beyond the fallout of SIDS. As cold as the benches were, we sat as she pulled out her phone and scrolled. I was bracing to see the monthling himself, if even she had such a photo from that long ago; instead, she landed on this watercolor:

“A friend sent me this a couple months ago,” Simona reflected, “and while it didn’t make me smile,” she pursed her lips pleasantly to gather more words, “I felt somewhat… ‘seen’, to use the new lingo.”

“It’s even called that,” I noticed, “‘SEE ME’ is the title at the bottom.”

She reverse sniffed. “So it is. I always think of this as Tahlequah and mládé kosatka—baby orca, whatever they’re called. The backstory is that the mother whale was aware that her newborn was in trouble (unlike me), and so she nosed her or him to the surface to breathe as often as viable, and then even beyond the mortal passing point. For months this went on, according to maritime witnesses, and from what I read further, Tahlequah isn’t the only mother orca to exhibit this behavior.”

I pressed her phone screen to revive the fading glow. Simona leaned into me, and we sat like that for a while—maybe a fifth of an hour, or a minute for each year she has nudged Svatopluk to the surface to ‘breathe’… or be seen.

That night, back at Smíchov, I told this to Tomy (who had met Simona once) and took to the internet to learn more about orcas. I didn’t want to go down the road of Free Willy kind of videos, but did learn about social patterns, animal psychologies, grace. Tomy encouraged me to write out a poem, perhaps to send to Simona. I wasn’t so sure about wearing out that welcome with her, but at least came up with:

Tahlequah’s tears

When willows have no cause

to weep, the world will need another

keep, a harbor for the teardrops

trickling in shrouds of night, even

in the salty sea, where even

killer whales can grieve: Tahlequah,

upon giving birth to a dying calf,

pushed her pride and sorrow up to

catch whatever breath, day by day

and week by week, growing

weak in such a cause. Some mariners

took notice; Lori Christopher made

a portrait out of watercolors,

maybe from her tears.

When willows have no cause

to walk from flowing streams, others

need to lift their feet, find a new

Tahlequah and paint a path unique.

While I was writing, Tomy baked an eggplant Parmesan that perfumed our apartment and invigorated a hunger I had left, unfulfilled, at Vyšehrad. I had already imbibed enough wine at U Kroka, and never was there pressure to have more, but I felt like letting loose a little. To celebrate my deepening with Simona; to sleep well, eventually; to self-medicate, truth be told. I wanted my dreams to swim in the same melancholia as that mother orca.

We spoon-fed each other the first tastes out of the oven to agree the marinade had been satisfied. Tomy had made a smashed cucumber salad with garlic-buttered croutons, then mixed a light lemonade in case I wanted to go cold turkey from here on out. He lit some candles and read my jagged stanzas silently, sometimes asking about this smudge or that in my phrasing. He didn’t know this Lori Christopher painting—I forgot to show him in advance—so he fell back on his imagination, figuring he could paint the scene adequately in his mind. “It’s lovely, Amál; you could really bring these poems together in a book, I bet.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled between chews, “to help pay the rent, right?”

It was a mean thing for me to say, inadvertently, and Tomy wasn’t going to pick up on my self-pity. “Rent don’t matter. It’s just good to see your creativity.”

“My creativity? Like this chicken scratch?” I wanted to bully myself, or…

“You were adored for your lessons at Stodůlky, for instance, bringing in those shells and kazoos to get those students to see beyond the math exam—”

“Didn’t make an iota of difference, though—”

“What d’ya mean? You still tutor a few of them.”

I harumphed. “Yeah, but now it’s pretty reactionary to their homework. Prepping for Maturita, which doesn’t give a shit about volume calculus of nautical shells. Even the kid who brought in a bong—he’d more likely use his math skills to set up a head shop for tourists pretending to be Amsterdammers.” I took Tomy’s cue to dig into my cut of casserole, but still spoke with my mouth full: “Whatever creativity I had for mathematics,… I left in Olomouc.”

Tomy masticated in the pause for a response. “I don’t doubt,” he framed his affirmation deliberately, “that the university extended space for you to think outside the box, but… to say you left it there? Like they’d own your intellectual property?”

“I hadn’t published anything of note. So, no—they didn’t own me as such.”

“Then what are you referring to?”

“The chance to explore the mysteries of fractals and theorems with the resources I don’t otherwise have at hand.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to delve into a practical example, but “algorithms, for instance, in our digital signatures and chain data—they depend on imaginary numbers…”

“The square root of -1 you’ve told me about—”

“Yeah, as a start. But coding will demand more, as you say, outside that box.” I mixed my half glass of wine with lemonade for no good reason and chugged it down. The eggplant was delicious, but I was becoming woozy with the layers of the day (now night). Tomy showed some chagrin that we wouldn’t get to the roasted almond ice cream for dessert, let alone anything else he’d have in mind.

“Take a bubble bath and go to bed, Amálko—I’ll clean up here.”

“What if I fall asleep in the tub?”

“I’ll check in on you, if you want.”

“If I want? I’d drown if you didn’t!”

Tomy didn’t want to indulge that paradox, so I kissed his cheek to remind him that, indeed, ‘I want’….

Early the next morning, we had a simultaneous idea to go swimming at Podolí, the enormous indoor pool that we had tried together before Christmas. The lanes weren’t so peopled at 6am (they’d be so an hour later), so we could splash around a bit. Tomy liked doing the butterfly, if we both had to smile at how clumsy it looked. “Then you try it, butterfly girl!”

“Nah,” I simpered, “I’ll stick with the breaststroke.”

“Suit yourself.”

The night had embarked on its own kind of swimming—the band R.E.M. has a song on that concept, a line of which is that

September’s coming soon

I’m pining for the moon

And what if there were two

Side by side in orbit

Around the fairest sun?

That bright, tight forever drum

Could not describe nightswimming.

I hummed this as I did my laps—often on my back, as breaststroking takes the breath away for the length of 50 meters. Tomy joined me after 250 and we floated for a while. The roof of this place was like a tsunami, as if a dinosaur-sized meteor had smacked into the Vltava, directly to the west. But inside this wave, all was serene. “Would you rather be a dolphin or an octopus?” he asked me, out of the blue.

“Huh? Why just those options?”

“Well, they’re still human-ish with their smarts and hands and—”

“What about a moray eel? Or pufferfish? Or sea cucumber?”

“Ok. Which would you be?”

I gave it a whirl. “An orca, I think.”

Tomy stretched his memory. “Tah… Tahquela?”

“Tequilla sunrise?” I playfully punched him. “You’re making her sound like a cocktail! Tahlequah.”

“Tahlequah,” he repeated to reinforce.

“But that’s Simona’s animal. I’d be the calf, I think.”

I knew Tomy wanted to say something like ‘not to suffer the same fate’, but he refrained. Instead, he ventured this way: “If we’re opening up the options, I’d like to be an otter.”

“An otter! Why?”

“Because…,” he maneuvered himself below my treading body to become a raft for me to slide on, “we could do this all day.”

Trouble is, if you’ve seen Tomy—he doesn’t have much body fat and, unless he pushes water continuously down to support his own buoyancy, he makes for a rather flimsy raft. “Is this gonna end like the Titanic scene? Am I Rose or Jack—”

“No, I got this! We only have to paddle in synch—”

And he was kind of right. We were otters for a minute or two, or water sloths at least. His slicked-back hair made him look more the part than my frizzy curls, which pillowed into his upper chest. There’s a good poem by Seamus Heaney about married otters. We’re not married, of course, but… perhaps the pool imagined us so. To no one in particular, as the 7am crowd was coming in to gently nudge us out.

Chapter 10: the mu

Halfway through January ‘already’—the only urgency being my vicarious dilemma with Kristýna, who had about a week left to legally abort. She never let that topic go four sentences deep, the first three being to a) mind my own business, b) apple/orange our situations, c) share nothing again forever and ever, Amen. We still talked about books and music—she floated me new volumes from the Kladno library, and I reciprocated with Spotify picks—nothing so overt like “I’m losing my baby, I’m losing my favorite game,” which snuck in sometimes for the other Cardigan songs I played. ‘Erase and Rewind,’ though, she rather liked.

I often went old school on my playlists, Nick Drake and Phil Ochs and other beautiful people who snuffed themselves out. Jeff Buckley’s irony of ‘Grace’; Karen Carpenter’s lack of such in ‘Only Yesterday’. Some who stayed alive, of course, like Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’ and the nagging reminder that “I really should be back at school.”

By now, that ship was sailing out of sight. I pretended to keep occupied with occasional visits to environmental centers—Tomy also pretending that his schedule was too busy for him to cover all the territory of his job himself, when winter shut most things down and bound him to his spreadsheets. Mom was having trouble getting me into subbing duties—my stunt in Stodůlky had evidently caused some ripples and wrinkles in my bona fides, as they say. So, like the kid I was two decades ago, I resorted to the treehouse built so sturdily by my dad, who liked that I would come over a couple times a week but tacitly lamented when I’d disappear into the backyard for hours at a time.

“How’re the ants doing?” he asked one time, bringing me a new thermos of hot chocolate.

Both of us knew that ancient plastic farm had long been vacated by ants, but I decided to say, “they keep me company. Not too noisy, not too nosy—perfect neighbors, really.”

“Ok, well,” he looked around from the trapdoor he still occupied, not ascending more rungs on the latter than he needed to, “anything else you need? A new cat, maybe?”

“No. Mandelbrot would be jealous,” I said, pointing to his grave below the floor and three meters further. Dad nodded at that, as if he approved of jealousy.

Further, I wondered when he left—the Czech is ‘další’—or farther—simply ‘dál’? Spatial difference for the latter, abstract depth for the former, and my lingering utterance between. My trusty notebook was nearby, and I set down the Petra Dvořáková book I’d been reading to scribble phrases. The idea had been brewing for a couple days now, and I’d scouted out the possibilities. Now all I needed was a good note.

This poem emerged, which I wrote out neatly on a fresh page, torn from the rest of the notebook I’d take with me while leaving this sheet on the treehouse floor:

Locust that I am

Knew I had to climb down from my treehouse soon,

having milked that solitude for days and nights

to nothing nourishing in weeks and months to come.

Then my tie to axes x and why dropped me further

than the ground—like a locust who had found

a branch to molt & mate and, with the newborns, fall.

I travelled south to find a cave adjusted to my name,

burrowed by the gold-diggers of ancient times

whose flames would highlight veins within the quartz.

Until my battery runs out, the cave allows for sight—

even phone calls if the network digs into the earth

and searches for the code attached to where I might be.

Unless somebody else responds, as if they’d join me

prospecting for gold or trading cold above the ground

for cold inside this cave. Locust that I am, I’ll rise again.

I figured no one would come into the treehouse for, well, maybe forever—at least three days or so, to parallel the Jonah and the Jesus span of being swallowed up and left for dead.

All the same (time being on my side), I returned to the house, went up to my room to rummage up a sleeping bag and thicker socks and stuff like that, then tip-toed down the stairs to let Dad’s nap in front of the TV set go undisturbed. While the thermos might have served my further intentions well, I left it on the kitchen counter with a new note underneath: “thanks, Daddy—the warmth helped.”

To reiterate, I had planned this out a bit, but not to a meticulous degree. A train from Praha-Smíchov south to little Čížová, then a bus to bigger Strakonice, then another to Kašperské Hory with light still left in the afternoon to hike farther south into the valley carved from the Zlatý potok—the stream that led gold panners to wonder what else could be prospected from the quartz under so much moss and quietude. For whatever reason, they named the valley ‘Amálino’, which I took to heart when Dad and Mom had brought me and BFF Kristýna here sixteen years ago. Tomy and I had come to the same location a half year ago, when parts of the stream were still skinny-dippable.

Presently, snow was scattered here and there, melting faster in the valley than the sunlit hills; the Šumava have ‘mountains’ in their designation, if their bunny curves belie a feel of such-a-much. And being this far south of Prague, my mind felt that the lower latitude also mollified the atmosphere. The groceries I had gathered at Kašperské Hory would last three days, maybe four if I could catch a trout with my retractable butterfly net. I took one box of matches and a half-dozen cubes of PEPO firestarter— when that would run out, I’d know what to do. I mean, that much time to calibrate would naturally define the consequences, right?

As dusk descended, I smiled before the iron-latticed gate that should have been locked sixteen years,.. and six months,.. and now... ago. The nearby sign warned of the danger inside, as if a miner’s sneeze would cause the thirty meters to collapse. More likely would be a bite from the copper spiders clinging to those veins of gold, or a disgruntled bat throwing all its fright into your head, careening to an unforgiving wall.

I took pictures on a fastly fading phone, knowing that the power pack would not supply so much reserve to light beyond my days of calibration.

Then, as blacker than the night would be the place I carved out for my sleeping bag, I took a glance at Tomy’s message – will be late, should I pick up some sushi? – and swiped the innocence away to give the phone (and me) a needful shutdown from the world.

My dreams weren’t anything repeatable to summon some reveal: baby-sitting Corgis for a non-existing queen in her Balmoral gardens I had never seen...; the job was credited, I thought to ascertain, and faceless service staff all nodded with the same assurance—yes, we’ve never been let down and no, the question wasn’t out of line. The dogs themselves ran in circles all the time, like Möbius strips through Escher steps as if the milieu were some litmus test to see if I’d predict where things would go. I set up little barriers at points where scuttling feet were bound to fall, then tried to catch these sons of bitches partying pell-mell. I woke to no alarm of any reprimand of a non-existing queen, nor the phone that would remain turned off until....

My hunger woke me up. I felt my way against the tiny light of dawn a quarter football pitch from where I slept to how I’d face the inchoate eternity. I hiked the stream without the net at hand, partly not to hunt so fast without a sense of baby steps—the groceries were my bid to not go Alexander Supertramp so fast, nor Mr Kurtz in consequence that never should extend beyond a soft response in literature class. I was trying hard not to be a creature in contempt of my humanity.

The day passed by in stoic strokes of how I’d guess the snow leopards would calculate the calories for when to spend them on a prowl and when to let them gather dust—gold, at that, in wonders lined within my cave. I slept there hours during what would be your daylight, then hours again during what would be our common night. By turns of moon and sun and auguries of afterlife, the cognizance of anything mattered more or less to me.

Knowing, naturally, that Helena and Jiří, Tomy, Týna, Boris and Simko, maybe even Lara in a caring multiverse would knot their worries into more or less the molecules of me—mass conserved, for all we know, and reconfigurations waiting, like Achebe’s vultures, in the wings. I wouldn’t hurt them for the world; I wouldn’t want the world to hurt me in return. I frankly wasn’t so enmeshed in ‘hurt’, feeling anything as a numb alternative. The groceries would expire regardless of their designations inked; I would return to buy some things in cash—my debit card as darkened as my phone by now, hoping no authorities would track me down to make me face their press.

The spiders, with their hold on gold they could not comprehend, were my inspiration in the end; they never measured time, as Moira-interested they’d be in spinning what would be a lifeline improbable to know beyond the cave. I won’t pretend they were umbilical in any way or form, but then again—a lifeline begins before our infant eyes may indicate we’re more or less alive.

I did not try to die, as evidenced in visits back to the mini-mart and one exhilarating success in capturing a trout. For the former, I should say, interactions with the Vietnamese couple who ran the store lent an opportunity to shoot-the-shit, as Boris would say. Get to know them a little bit. Why, for instance, after great-grandparents might have landed here in the strange embrace of communism-with-a-human-face, ‘normalized’ by then to put the ‘real’ in ‘politik’—why, by 2023, were they still immigrants? Not refugees—Ukraine defined that lot—but outsiders, at any rate. For decades we’d exchange our ‘dobrý den’s and ‘děkuju’s and little more. Of course their children would exist in public schools and therefore ‘mluvit’ more... of course we would assume the threshold of our history would blend such differences with ease. But we have rarely been a culture to imply an open door to anything beyond a grocery store, or pub.

“Hello,” my day 3 interaction started.

“Hello,” in muted sing-song, no eye contact.

“Do you have...,” I pretended to search for something, not really needing anything, “nail clippers? Like the little scissors kind?”

“Nail clippers?” as if she hadn’t had the inventory memorized. Leaving the cash register cubicle, still sort of rigged up for Covid, she jaunted toward an aisle that would have made more sense (I’d been standing in front of Ramen noodle packages, craving them right now). She pretended that they’d be hard to find, giving me the benefit of the doubt. “Nail clippers!” she lightened with her eyes, looking into mine.

“Thanks, but do you have the scissors kind? With a gentle crescent—” I was going to say, ‘as if the center point were miles away, like the moon’s horizon from the landed capsule’s point of view’, but chickened out. I didn’t like the lack of math in thinking about that curve.

“Scissors?” chirped up her inflection, then sank down to answer “no.” She did show sizes large and small to account for the range of gnarly toenails to children’s pinkies. She took the latter off the peg and put in it my hand, which didn’t show too badly the way I’d done the job these days with teeth. I nodded thanks but then replaced it for the more expensive levers, mainly for that extra 10Kč of business. I went back for two packages of Ramen and a couple other things, then lingered at her cubicle as if to recall a shopping list I’d left at home.

“Anything else?”

“Just, no... a little advice maybe.”

“Prosím?”—the word for ‘please’ but also ‘huh?’ in what she’d be able to say beyond her inventory.

“I’m here for a few days. Passing through. Wondering what folks like to do here.” My voice was unconvincing to my own ears, but not like I was lying. The woman, maybe six years older than me, sized up the question in her brain. What ‘passing through’ might mean. Who ‘folks’ would be. Where ‘here’ is in comparison to any given ‘there’. Why nail clippers became my way of asking more.

“Oh, this place is small, very small,” she shrugged, then smiled. The answer was sufficient for the circumstances, ostensibly.

But I pressed on. “Yes, and charming. I mean, that castle on the hill is—”

“Ah, yes—the castle is nice.”

“But closed, until April.”

“Yes, closed. But nice.” She looked at items in my hand and gestured that I could put them on the counter for her to scan, but I held them still.

“My research is in butterflies,” I somewhat lied. “How their patterns coincide with ours, if they do.” She nodded. Her husband, who had been stocking cans of beer and other beverages in the refrigerated showcases (each the size of an upright coffin) wandered over, but not to show he had been listening. “The prairies around here are optimal, I’d think, for... pollination.”

Nods by both, barely convinced this was what I meant to express. Since I did not elaborate—I don’t know if I could, really—I lowered my visage to the stuff in my hands. “The prairies,” she suggested after the wait time her 2^nd-grade daughter (who had been here the other day) might receive at school, “are protected.”

“Lots of cows, though,” her husband decided to say. “They have fairly free range around here.”

I looked at him. He had picked up that I was ‘passing through’ and I wondered what that meant in his mind, distinct from hers. “Cows and butterflies get along just fine,” I proffered. “It’s the industrial additives that create the problems, like herbicides that get into every creature’s diet, eventually.”

Nods again, but not so clearly an invitation to go on. “We have butterflies here,” the woman beamed in recollection of their supply. “Over here—” she sprung again from the cubicle to lead me to an aisle I had dismissed both times I’d been in this store. “Stickers, for kids’ notebooks. Do you have kids?”

Of course I did not. “Um, I have students, high school-aged, sort of...” My mental map reminded me of Niky, Mai, Daša, Maša, Filip, Pat & Mat... “I’m on leave from my gymnazium right now.”

“Maternity?” she had the balls to ask.

“No. Just... on leave.”

“It’s okay. Nice here in the mountains. We—” she flashed assurance at her husband—“have lived here seven years, just after our little girl was born. City wasn’t so good to us.”

“České Budějovice,” the husband clarified, “not so good for family.”

His wife sought my eyes, fearing I might have come from there. “Not that every city is...”

“I understand,” looking at the stickers over-rainbowing the natural beauty of the insects. My fingers tested the puffy rise of some of them, giving the impression they’d be magnets on a different assembly line. Or pillows for a worn-out pupil. I wondered if their little girl had these on her own notebook, and whether she were alert at school right now, vaguely after lunch. “Does your daughter...”

“Yes, yes!” she read my mind, her eyebrows reaching well into her bangs, her cheekbones blushing a little. “Every good grade she gets something new—”

The husband smirked at that: “we don’t spoil her so much,” abashed in his own way, returning to those refrigerators.

“No, we don’t,” she wanted to affirm. “She’s good without anybody saying so. She’s a ministrant at the church, you know.”

“Is that right? Like...,” I tried to envision, “ringing the bell, or—”

“Not the big one. But the chimes when the bread becomes body, the wine becomes blood. And she holds the candle when people come forward for that.”

“Wow”—literally, in Czech: factually, yeah? Not that the notion was so amazing, but... I just didn’t expect such disclosure. “It must be nice to see her in that glow.”

Probably we said too much at the point, as she motioned at the stickers for their inevitable purchase. “You can give them to your students. Never too old.”

“You’re right,” as I restacked my items to carry them to the check-out counter. We said no more than the conventional tally of price, keep the small coins, thank you, thank you, see you, see you soon—even as I exited in the sudden sorrow that I’d never know them better, let alone see them again.

My phone was long since dead, having served only as a flashlight in the removal of my SIM card. I thought about burying the silicon and plastic into the base of the castle five kilometers north of my cave—enough separation, I thought, if anyone dug it up and somehow put together the pieces that would lead back to me. Or... maybe I’d want to dig it up myself in reconciliation with the person I’d comfortably been for 26 years. Then came the 27^thto do me in.

As a little girl, I conceived of castles as engineering feats—less to harbor princesses in towers and more to be the labyrinth of escape hatches when enemies got through the moat and outer court, the barbican and baileys, fortified or otherwise. I loved the libraries for their wheeled ladders and trapdoor shelves. The stone walls would seem impenetrable, yet ventilation ducts and fireplaces and hanging outhouses all pointed at the human need to learn from termites how to build and bore through their monuments. Every winter I’d watch the DVD of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet with my mom: the mirrored hall where he’d speak his “to be or not to be”, the chessboard floor where myriad calculations would be had, Gertrude’s chamber with the infamous arras, the padded room of Ophelia’s last stand, the spare key in her mouth to let her free...

Which reminds me how I had to lock myself into the iron-gated cave. Guessing right from my first excursion here, years ago, the latch was long-since worn away; a sign to stay out may have deterred the most honorable hikers, but lured many others— especially with flashlights on their phones—to the darkened depths. Having been to Newgrange, north of Dublin, that Neolithic passage to its sacrificial alter is shorter, though the extra meters of mine only led to the sleeping bag and detritus of a misanthrope. In summer, the entrance would have dozens trying out the squeaky hinges every day:

But now in winter, most would stay away. The coils of my bike lock didn’t look convincing—a forest ranger would have bolted the gate shut with a hundred times the impenetrability. It might even have been a ranger who yelled, “who’s in there?” the other day. He beamed an industrial-strength light toward the lump I had become and repeated his bellowed query. Decidedly, it wasn’t Tomy’s voice; on reflection, however, it might have been one of his acquaintances in charge of protected ecological zones (like this Amálino údolí).

It’s why I didn’t stay inside while the sun would let me hike the entire area between Vimperk and Sušice, not to dwell in those small cities, as such. I went inside places to catch some warmth: the church in Kašperské Hory, for instance, with its distinctive skirt of millstones leaning like shields against the prospect of invaders. The Vietnamese family wasn’t there—it wasn’t Sunday, after all, and they’d be disinclined to leave their store for some sparsely attended mid-day mass. I couldn’t remember if the present day was Thursday or Friday and wondered how I’d find that information out—discreetly—if there was any compelling need to know. I had been writing poems and snippets in a diary of sorts, but hadn’t attached temporal indicators to those mental meanderings.

I trudged back just before dusk and saw that someone had messed with the bike lock, turning the male/female connector inward to the pitch black of the cave. Figuring it was only someone earlier in the day who had failed to enter, I pulled the coil back to normal and rotated the gears to all four digits. Click. Soft slides to disconnect and liberate the gate from the frame. Tiny squeaks of familiarity ushered me forward, step after increasingly blinded step. Thinking mechanically of walking, probably like toddlers have to. Using my hands to brush the moist walls and low ceiling. Imagining nothing more than

“Amálko?”

I should have frozen, yet did the opposite—spinning around and blasting myself out like a clown from a circus cannon. It did not occur to me that the voice must have known who I was, now flattened on the slushy ground right outside the entrance, gripping my skull in agony and fading consciousness—the upper jamb serving as a stoic speedbump for such tomfoolery: that of the person inside, or mine, or the gods like wanton boys who kill us for their sport....

“Amálko? C’mon—don’t black out! It’s me,” the voice added breath to blow onto my tightly closed eyes, raising the curtain to my bellowing mouth. “Pshhh, pshhh, pshhh—try to slide over here to drier ground. It’s not so bad...”

“Wh-what’s not?” I adjusted my lifted hands to find the source of the trickle of blood guttering the worry lines of my forehead.

“The cut’s not... too deep. But wait here for me to—”

“Týnko! Don’t leave me—”

“No, no—I’m not going away,” Kristýna assured, “just over to the stream to mock up an ice pack.” Then, at distance: “to keep the swelling down.”

I was fully crying now from the shock and pain and fear and relief of being found. What must have happened (and Kristýna would corroborate in due time) was a confirmation of her guess where I’d gone, her recognition of the coiled lock, her memory of the combination since our pre-teen ventures into Praha, hitching our bicycles outside the Zličín metro. That had been years ago, but the 9-6-6-9 was evidently unforgettable. “The year we learned to walk,” she beamed, “and, well... it’s a palindrome.”

Indeed. The ice pack turned out to be a plastic bag emptied of its bread rolls and filled with water from the Zlatý potok. Balancing the blob atop my head, Týna tied it with her scarf to make me look like I had the mumps, conjuring a bit of Karviná. She daubed the blood from my forehead and kissed under each eye my nearly drained tears. Her sigh of satisfaction was her way of indicating she would refrain from speaking anymore until I’d account for myself.

“I don’t... know what to...” say? do? believe? “think... I mean, thank you for... searching out this stray sheep.” She blanched at that, but didn’t interrupt. “I wasn’t trying to test out who might, I dunno, find me. Was it my note in the treehouse?” Týna turned around, barely disguising some welling of her own tears. “Or that we had trekked through this valley before, with my dad? Or that phones are trackable even when they’re off? Or that...” I could think of no further logic to canvass.

My friend’s body was a silhouette forming in the eventide. I wasn’t able to see at this angle (and still unsteady vision) the progress of her baby bump and how, to some degree, we were more than two people. Eventually, without facing me, she uttered, “or that you’re fucking lucky, how ’bout that?”

Of course I didn’t feel lucky, but understood she had a point. “Yeah, I am.”

“And that you’re doing this shit to avoid the real thing you need to do.” Her hands readjusted the scarf to ensure the icy mollifier wouldn’t slide out. “Think you can walk up to the town?” I nodded in slow millimeters. “Or I can call a taxi.” I morphed those millimeters to the x-axis. “Okay. Stay here while I gather your stuff.” She lit her way into the mineshaft and came out a minute later with an armful of what I had become in a short week. I offered to help her re-roll the bundle, but she insisted I sit in a naturally carved out place—a penalty box, of sorts, for perhaps the countless others who had preceded me. Then we left.

“I love you, Kristýno,” I barely vocalized, two meters behind her pace back to the town.

“Shut up,” she said, and so I did.

We trudged up to the town and little bus station—by chance our transit out of here was due in a matter of minutes. Kristýna adjusted my head wrap, trading the now lukewarm water for a couple handfuls of snow. I must’ve looked like a turnip-tending grandmother in the eastern flatlands, but didn’t care. We talked about the particulars of survival—the trout I caught, for instance, and the methods of keeping warm—and how the Amálino valley changed or stayed the same since both of us were kids. She hadn’t seen my treehouse poem that hinted at my presence here, but figured everything out after Tomy had read it from his phone. “Was he sad?” I toe-tested.

“Of course! Wouldn’t you be? Want me to dial him up to hear for yourself?”

I wasn’t sure. The notion of our voices bouncing off some satellite made me feel queasy. “No. Not yet.”

We boarded the bus and leaned into each other’s seats to try to sleep. Strakonice, our destination, came before it occurred to me that I should have said goodbye to the Vietnamese couple—or, to be precise, the Czech couple of Vietnamese heritage. “They run the mini-mart,” I thought it natural to clarify, if playing into the stereotype.

“Nevadí. We’ll pick up some food here for tomorrow’s train,” Kristýna calculated, having phoned a reservation for a rental room that wouldn’t include breakfast. But it wasn’t the groceries I was thinking about. I would have loved to meet their daughter—nothing I wanted to explain to my friend right now, fixated on pragmatics. We’d get the keys, fill a basket with bread rolls and jerky and bananas and grapes, then dump them to go out again for a hot dinner. It was there, over guláš soup, she dropped me the bombshell that my dad was in police custody.

“What!?”

“Jail,” she repeated too calmly. “They found his car in the pond and ran a check on the owner. Arrested him in Ořech.”

I was incredulous. “And you’re telling me this now? Like it’s today’s gossip?!”

“To be clear, Jiří isn’t spilling any info on us—”

“I don’t give a shit about us, dammit! Where exactly is he? What prison?”

“Liboc, I think. Where else?”

“You haven’t visited him, then? So how do you know what he has or hasn’t said?”

“Cuz I talked to him on the phone—”

I pounded my palms on the table, ready to holler, but reeled it in to avoid making more of a scene. My hiss may have drawn equal attention, however: “he has one fucking phone call and he makes it to you?”

She smiled tightly and blanketed my hands with her own. “I don’t know how many calls he gets, but he managed anyhow. Told me not to worry. Bid me luck in finding you...”

“This would be all traceable: the authorities would know we were in that car—in the goddamn stadium, illegally!”

“I was,” Týna retained her naughty look, “you weren’t.” She gulped more of her soup while I withdrew my hands and pressed their heels into the grottoes of my eyes. I couldn’t see her, then, when she gave her wry appraisal: “ironic, isn’t it, that your dad and I were the real fugitives, when you’ve been faking that status this week.”

Fuck. She was right: I had been faking it. Craving to stir some drama for no good reason and make others react. Like a kid causing trouble just to get noticed, but then not feeling any better for the attention. Even now, I could have used her phone to call up Tomy or Mama—even my stupid cousin Boris—to put them at ease, to simper the verses of ‘Amazing Grace’ as if I had come of age or come to terms with my lost-lamb self. My own phone was still dead, if not actually dismantled and buried at the base of the castle. I was reluctant to charge it from the socket beside our table, turn it on to the searing glow of concern. Kristýna intuited this, it seemed, easing me back to earth’s gravity as if I’d been stranded on the space station too long. “Is... Daddy gonna be okay?”

She shrugged and bobbed her head like I’d seen her do a thousand times before. Then an aftershock: “I’m more worried about that cleaning gal you talked to while I had slipped out of the washroom. Jiří found out somehow that she was under the gun for not checking the stadium adequately, being the last one to exit. Except for me, of course.”

“I thought the security guard locked the place up—”

“Yeah, but she’s supposed to vouch that it’s all cleared out.”

“Does she know that Jiří’s my father? Like... have they spoken to each other?”

Kristýna shrugged again and scooped up a full spoon of soup, pointing with her pinky for me to do likewise. “I don’t know. But it isn’t your problem, anyway. Let me assume the guilt on this for the time being.”

Fat chance. I needed to get out of this restaurant, walk around, scream. Reading my mind, Týna didn’t prevent me from doing so. I only took my jacket and scarf (no longer swaddling my bruised head) and decided, on second thought, not to scream. As dark as the evening had become, there were pedestrians walking under the streetlamps that lined the Otava River—some with young kids, babies in strollers—and making a monster of myself was not going to help anything. Nor would plunging in, the rippling black waterway the opposite of any relief. The day had accrued perhaps a couple dozen kilometers under my feet, so my beleaguered pace was only adding to the drear.

I reclined on a bench facing the town’s winter stadium, lit up for a 3^rd-tier game, I blindly guessed. A trickle of fans were exiting, and I couldn’t discern if their team had won, or were in the process of winning, losing, skating through a stalemate. A cleaning lady in there would have to wait the whole thing out: overtime, penalty shootout, shenanigans with self-indulgent stowaways. She’d have her sights set on a better life and then—smack!—she’d be fired for gross negligence. Or worse: deported for abetting a crime. Sent back to Kherson and the looming prospect of being raped by Russian soldiers. None of whom would coerce an abortion for their scorched earth ‘military operation’. What was her name again? Oh, right—I conscientiously forgot to ask.... As my vision blurred in the confluence of fatigue and sorrow, I placed as many names on her as would seem to fit, falling asleep probably on ‘Květa’ or some such hope for flowering.

“Make room for a baglady,” I heard after several pokes to my ribs, “at least until you run off again.” Kristýnabutted where my lap would be and bowed in to check the status of my scraped head. “Still hurts?”

I mumbled a soft affirmative, again to contain that latent scream. We sort of snuggled there on the cold slats of the bench and said little more than, eventually, the need to pace ourselves back. The restaurant would be closed by now, but Týna managed to take a styrofoam box of what I had ordered—a duck breast rollup with spinach and rice. No silverware, but back at the rental room I’d lap it up like a dog. She showered while I ate and then I did for maybe five times the duration. I intended to charge my phone in the meantime—vowed to do so after this deep cleanse—and with each scrub of my body, I was attempting to build up the courage to call my mom.

“Hey, c’mere,” Týna motioned as I was still wrapped in an oversized towel, reluctant to put my grubby clothes back on. She was sitting at the far side of the queen-sized bed, arms kind of akimbo. Her shirt was hiked up.

“What? Is something wrong?”

“I think...,” she swallowed what seemed to be a doubtful cough, “I felt a little kick.”

I rushed to her and knelt. “You’re barely showing. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m showing, dummy. This hill isn’t just a big dinner. But... I’m not really sure.” She gathered my hand like the end of a hockey stick and placed it over her kidney. We waited like that for maybe a minute, and then...

Sleep, perchance to dream. Czech designates this infinitive as snit, the same as ‘to daydream’, which I definitely was not doing in that barren rental room with cute-snoring Kristýna. I dreamt instead of dreamed—the latter entrenched in my head from the musical Les Misérables and Fantine’s conscious nightmare that “the tigers come at night ... to tear your hope apart”—and what I dreamt is nothing I’d want to share.

Because I have to step out of myself for a moment (the ‘me’ of January, 2023) to tell you my guilt by association for what will have besieged our capital later in this year, just this side of Christmas. A killer of a baby girl and her father, perambulating serenely in the woods of Klánovice, before turning his insatiable ire to students at the philosophical faculty at Charles University. Boris warned me about breaking up my narration this way: “you don’t use ‘guilt by association’ so casually, Cousin. It can’t help your—”

“Fuck you, Boris. I didn’t ask you to pull me into this vortex to begin with.”

“Amálko,” he tried to walk back, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Too late. Cat’s out of the bag, I guess Americans like him would say. For the record, I didn’t have anything to do with what led to the slaughter of those sixteen souls and everyone they reached—even the Christmas market tourists. But when it happened, I felt like stuffing this manuscript into my sweater and jumping off the Vyšehrad ramparts, caring less if I hit the river or the aproning road—the difference being a drowned account or bloodied.

But back to the naivete of Strakonice. I did feel Týna’s fetus kick a little before we drifted into oblivion. I’m sure my slumber wasn’t torturous at first, devoid of tigers or feral female horses. ‘Nightmare’ in Czech translates to ‘moth’, that softest form of butterfly, as if remorseful for its effect. But scary all the same.

I had entered the biggest building of Palacký University and greeted the glassed-in guard by first name, even though I had never met him. He nodded and returned his focus to some video clip glowing on his phone. I took that as a tacit invitation to make some mischief, so I stepped over the barely-barrier of the pendulum that lent proof to our orbiting planet, seemingly rotating like a 24-hour clock—when in fact the lateral motion never broke its plane. Catching hold of its cord was not as easy as (when I did) climbing like a lemur to the top and leaping to a platform I had never known before, despite having studied in this building for years. My weight had stopped the pendulum from swinging, but now that I had jettisoned, it resumed its job as a gargantuan metronome, minus my temporal intrusion. “Manipulator of Time!” I announced to a gaggle of students rushing to get into a lecture hall. One of them had stringy hair to the middle of his back, and I asked him if he had any ammo.

“Why would I have any am... ammunition, you mean? Like, for a gun?”

“No, dumbshit,” I snorted, “for a trebuchet.”

He searched his backpack and produced a mace. “Not as big as you’re looking for, probably,” chancing my disapprobation, “but this motherfucker is potent.”

“Tell you what,” I cuffed his skinny forearm with my left hand. “I’ll trade you that for my boots. They’re real leather.”

“What would I do with your boots?” he smirked, but then appeared to calculate their value. I slid out of them and my socks, too, desiring the best footing on the faux-marble floors. “I mean,” he draped a strand of hair over his ear, “if you’re serious—”

“Of course I am. Deal?”

He thrust the handle of the mace into my right hand and ran toward the open door of the lecture hall, leaving my side of the transaction on the floor. “Watch for my cue,” he hissed, as if we had planned this out for weeks. No one else going toward the doors seemed aware or concerned about what I was holding, its weight testing all sinews of my arm.

My only thoughts in entering the back of the hall were a) how this fifth floor of the building sloped into the fourth, an architectural feature I feel I should have known previously, and b) how my weapon might fly through this space like a shorter version of the hammerthrow in track & field. I wasn’t thinking of a script—the kind of thing Lex Luther would expostulate to a kryptonite-weakened Superman; I had nothing to query of Professor Alpha, neither publicly nor one-on-one. I just wanted to see the spikes of this ball embed into his body, aiming less for head or heart than… soul. The probability of a miss didn’t concern me, as I’d follow with a sprint to do the same through lunging fingers. Maybe others in the hall would slow me down; maybe they’d join in. It didn’t occur to me to care.

I waited for him to come while the hall buzzed softly with unrelated conversations. The stringy-haired student spotted himself near the fourth-floor door where Alpha would likely enter—I had seen his late arrivals a hundred times before, but never in this hill of a room. My palms were getting sweaty in the back-and-forth rhythm of adjusting to the hanging ball—another pendulum, I realized, killing time in waiting for its role to realize.

My breathing accelerated as blood rose to my forehead, chilly as the iron ball below my knees. At the risk of anybody noticing (it was as if I were a ghost), I lifted both arms to set the mace in motion, counterclockwise above my head. Slow at first, adjusting to the way my body otherwise would balance the inertia: the mace at rest remains at rest; the mace in motion remains in motion unless the friction of my fear or inabilities would nip the process in the bud.

The door downstairs cracked open. The stringy-haired student sprang up to manhandle the entrant. They tussled awkwardly in front of passing interest from part of the crowd—most were still involved in their discrete conversations. The orbit of my mace was now at a releasable speed, though I was somewhat apprehensive about the potential casualty of my abetting weapon-provider. Perhaps he had as much cause as me to do this bastard in—why would I bury them both? Shake it off, became a voice inside my head, if foreign to my larynx. Amálko, don’t do this to yourself! Not Tomy’s voice, but suddenly his face in the figure that the stringy-haired student was wrestling, just as my double-grip flung forth the cannonball, laser-accurate in its trajectory as long as my vision would allow—and as I clenched my dreaming eyes, I woke up gasping in Kristýna’s arms.

“The fuck, Amál!” she huffed into my ear. “It’s like you need an exorcist.”

She squeezed me even closer as I flooded her t-shirt with tears. “Did?” I rasped, “Did I... kill him?” Digging her fingers into my frizzled hair, she didn’t want to answer, so I screamed: “did I?!”

“Kill whom?” And now I realized the same timbre had awakened me to advise me not to do this to myself.

“I... I don’t really... know.”

“So let it go. Let it go.... Let it go.”

We took a proper hour to adjust to the dawn and feel again for baby kicks. As they didn’t come, we left the rental room as if it were a tiny mausoleum for chimeras dreamt or dreamed or otherwise conceived. Breakfast waited for the bus to Čížová, then we’d take the train back to Praha-Smíchov. It occurred to me that now would be the right time to call home—Mom first, then Tomy, grateful that I hadn’t maced him to death. In all the tumult of last night, I failed to charge my own cell, so asked to borrow Týna’s.

“Ok. But I should tell you straight up.”

“Tell me what?”

She turned away to hide what could have been a shutter of compunction or glee, then admitted: “I lied about your dad being locked up in jail. No one’s found his killed-off car which,” she elbowed me, “still contains my skating bag.”

I wanted to elbow her back for actual retaliation, but thought of the baby. Our baby, it could be argued, in the scheme of things.

Chapter 11: the nu

The Greek letter μ is, conveniently, what Möbius decided as a multiplicative function that helps us understand the distribution of prime numbers. And yes, by hook and crook, these contribute to his famous strip and other challenges to Euclidean space. I thought in my Amálino exile I’d ruminate on theories such as these—less to write out formulae and more to kill the time.

The Greek letter ν gets us back to brass tacks: no navel-gazing here in the land of differential equations and how to solve them. Thanks to the Laplace transform, we can derive integrals for the complex variables of time and frequency in countless problems that used to overheat our calculators (or dendrites, back in the day).

Spelled out beyond their applications in mathematics, the mu and nu were on my mind in the silent hours after Kristýna’s reveal of her duplicity. This best friend bitch wanted to guilt me into what real trouble might feel like, as opposed to my post-Olomouc pity party, where coulda, woulda, shoulda barely mattered anymore. “You weren’t raped, after all,” she had said at one point, which was technically true—the sex had been consensual, if the coercion to abort more contentious in terms of legality. When Týna made that conclusion, I instantly wondered if she had been raped in the lack of disclosure of who had impregnated her, but I didn’t dare bring up the topic again. The tacit bonding agent of our relationship has always been to give the other space, even if both would crave each other’s ears, eventually.

In this regard, just before our train would dump us back to separate trudges home, I told Kristýna about the details of my dream, having benefited from the early need to ‘let it go.’ She wondered, naturally, who the stringy-haired student could be—even twirling her own strands with anxious hands. The mace, she said, might be an extrapolation of ‘pepper spray’, though the Czech palcát (for the medieval weapon) isn’t the same as pepřák (for modern self-defense). “Your English could have informed your dream,” she reasoned, and maybe that was so.

“I would never be a warrior,” I said; “it was as if I needed confirmation about how horribly I’d feel to kill someone—with a mace or otherwise.”

“But he forced you to terminate the pregnancy,” she reminded, in too nice a tone. “He played Don Corleone to your... what’s his name.”

I swatted her shoulder. “Are you comparing me to Al Neri? his hitman?! What the fuck is wrong with you? I just said I’d never be a warrior, and certainly not a... Goddammit, Týno, I shouldn’t have opened my stupid mouth.”

She turned away, pretending to look at the Vltava in its ever-inching into Prague. This was her way not to turn our shit into a cry-fest, as would befit the circumstances. I gathered she was thinking about her own decision recently ‘to be or not to be’ a mother to the Little Lamb we felt kick just half-a-day before. I had not been with her when she settled on the former side of fate; maybe she would have called me, if inclining toward the latter. The fact is, I didn’t even think of her a year ago in Olomouc when I had faced the same dilemma. Tomy also wasn’t in the picture yet to be a lifeline, so to speak. Lara, closest to a confidant back then, didn’t enter my imagination. Mom and Dad, Boris and his shih tzu mistress—nobody in Prague had any clue what I was going through. Only Professor Alpha knew, and... fucking hell, he was Don Corleone.

I unswatted her shoulder and used it instead as an upward pillow, which didn’t tense up at the weight of my head. “I’m sorry, Miláčku,” I whispered the nickname reserved for lovers or grannies to grandkids—rarely exchanged between friends. I was never her lover, to be perfectly clear, if (fact of the matter) we were each other’s first kiss, a second or two on the lips just to make sure we’d know how to do so with boys. Twelve-year-olds do stuff like that, yes?

“Yes,” she replied, maybe reading my mind. “I’m sorry, too.” She waited for me to say something more, but in that lacuna she seemed to rehearse what would be her last word for a while through clenched teeth: “I will Al Neri that Alpha in front of his students, with or without you.”

She happened to say it in English, as sometimes occurs with many young Czechs. I doubt she was channeling the song by U2, but that’s how I let the idea sink in. And though the train slowed to the end of its job, I wanted to sleep on the shoulder of my chivalrous friend and someday reciprocate—the spirit and function of nu.

Tomy wasn’t home, naturally working wherever his job took him this time of day. I’d call him before his return, of course—my unannounced presence might jostle his heart the wrong way—and began rehearsing my lines (for a phone call? text message?), strangely morphing them into a poem. The hockey puck from Příbram served as my muse to some extent, as the words I paced around the apartment found their way to paper, then typed into my phone:

I made it back, miláčku,

from the quandary what to do with

too much life to live

and death to bid goodbye—

the child I might have birthed

who maybe strives to find another way

to land into the safety net of

mother earth. Týna

saved that soul, I think, though

I don’t know if I deserve

to spill my ink on metaphysics, after all.

I’m supposed to study butterflies

who never meet their caterpillar kids.

Sad to us or otherwise,

they operate with physics—

not inclined to dwell on one side or

the other of a universe

we may articulate as warped.

Within that fulcrum you deliver faith,

even when I ever run away.

Apologies are Greek sometimes but try

to wallow in the sway.

It took a full fifteen minutes to push ‘send’ after reading every word for how Tomy might receive—that whole ‘apologia’ paradox, for example, of standing one’s ground or supplicating to another’s mercy…. We’d talked about such concepts in the joy of our relationship, but after this week of my abandonment, I shouldn’t take that joy for granted. I decided to follow this poem with a simpler, "I love you. See you soon after I stop in at my folks” (which would constitute my next apology).

My phone was heated and getting moist in hand as I finally called my mom. She didn’t want to FaceTime, she said, on the wept-through logic that seeing me now would take away from seeing me in physical form, as if our modern tools diminish our natural senses. I started to explain everything that pulled me to the Amálino cave, but she halted me to reveal that Kristýna had filled her in with a phone call that preceded mine right now—behind my back, essentially. But it was good to have a surrogate narrator for this purpose. An advocate, no less.

When I arrived at Ořech bus stop, my dad was waiting on the bench with a transparent bag of yogurt-covered raisins, cranberries, almonds and cashews—my favorite combo from a shop nearby. He nearly fumbled them in his abrupt embrace, though he had double-knotted the top against such an eventuality. “Where’s the car?” I tried to joke in the blur of my smiling eyes.

He reflected my visage and let actual teardrops fall. “Still at the bottom of that pond, I hope!” Handing me the bag, he admitted that the past few weeks had been reckless, but not necessarily careless. “There’s a difference, right?”

“Between a train wreck and the recovery efforts?” I knew the analogy wouldn’t carry over so exactly in Czech—bezohledný for ‘reckless’ could also be ‘inconsiderate’, while neopatrný could be ‘careless’ but also ‘uncareful’. I wasn’t even sure myself what I wanted to relay (giving it up to Boris, first, then you—whoever and wherever you are).

Daddy gave his typical Jiří-shrug. “Nevadí, Amálko: you’re home now.”

“Like a prodigal daughter?”

We started walking the five blocks home, sharing the victuals. Something about chewing gives the mouth relief from an obligation to talk, though we were downright chatty the whole way. He wanted to know about Kašperské Hory and that Vietnamese family running the grocery store, and I wanted to know how Jágr handled his fifty-first birthday in a Kladno Knights uniform. It wasn’t like we were evading some elephant in the room, but that there were other animals of interest.

And Mom kept that mood going, greeting me at the door as if I’d only been to, say, Norway for a week, and not some unannounced exile. “Tomy called to see if he could join us for dinner,” she informed me, strangely—he hadn’t responded to my poem, and I figured that he was justifiably pissed off at me. When I asked Mom how he sounded on the phone, she winked assurance: “familiar, like a family member. Like every time he calls.”

Not jealous, not suspicious, not presuming anything but a warm evening, I still needed to adjust to the ‘light’ of being extricated from my dabbling with the underearth. I could go up to my bedroom for a while, but I thought a better catnap could be had in the tree house—partly to prove to anyone that it remained a safe space instead of a cause of consternation. The ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ message I had left was not there, but the rest of the notebook was: Jiří was always conscientious about not messing with my private stuff, but as a dad he also understood when I was reaching out.

When I was twelve, for instance, and asked for an ant farm for Christmas, he negotiated with Mom that I could indeed have one if I kept it out of the house. It was the size of a pizza box, with sand and starter tunnels on the bottom 60% of the plastic panes that made their 3-D world into a viewable slice of their activities. A green frame had some apertures for air and food supply—cricket jam and seeds—and the chance to add more tubing to accessories, the same way an oval track for toy trains could expand to all sorts of trestles and roundhouses.

I kept it simple and generally out in the tree house (Mom eventually abdicated basement space, insisting that I check the screws to prevent absconding ants). Kristýna came over to poke their situation sometimes—fair game, really, as our manipulation of these insects’ lives was already inexcusable, and we only hoped to engage with their processes. It wasn’t like we were the girls in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, where smashing ants was their pastime (“Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely,” suggested one, the answer to which was not so clement).

Týna berated me, though, when I took an experiment too far. I wanted to see how they’d react to choices beyond the sugar water I’d top off every day in a thin dish at the center of their surface territory. I didn’t have equivalent dishes to place left and right, but instead injected Pepsi on one side with a baster I borrowed from the kitchen, and on the other side a sleep-inducing syrup called Stopex, which American readers might identify as NyQuil. In health class we’d learn the basics about stimulants and narcotics; I wondered if I’d see any differences in how the ants scurried around or rested. The queen was deep under the sand, so I figured she wouldn’t be affected (but then again, I never thought about how she got hydrated on a regular basis). Naturally—or unnaturally, really—the creatures gravitated to the sweeter substance but also to the antidote to their busy-bodyness. In just a couple days of this awful offering, they derailed their routines and, before I knew such science, demonstrated the duality of inertia: paralyzed around the Stopex and unstoppable around the Pepsi. Kristýna had already heard about steroids in sports and quoted somebody, primly, that I was “on the wrong side of history.”

So, in contrition, I unscrewed the apertures and leaned the farm against the trunk below my tree house. I considered undoing the whole thing and forcing their relocation, but then… the queen would be the most vulnerable in such a seismic change. I didn’t know the term ‘agency’ yet as applied to dignity and personal choice (antly choice, in this case), but hoped they’d still have some. And wouldn’t die in droves.

Now, an hour before Tomy would come over and I’d have to act grown up, I stared at the same sand and larval holes behind the dulled plastic, serving a final purpose as a lousy mirror. I might imagine that a couple generations of those ants were still below my very being, benefitting from the ecosystem of this backyard, even in the present hibernation.

Dinner was good: Tomy came with a bottle of Bohemian sekt—what we couldn’t label as ‘champagne’ by EU mandates, but even by Czechoslovakian pride in their cheaper product—and we downed it all before the soup was ladled. Chicken, Mom decided, due to my head wound. “Shouldn’t we get that checked tonight at Motol?” she wondered, but didn’t press the point after my shrug that indicated it was no emergency. Motol hospital took in all sorts of concerns—hangnails to tummy aches to the general blues—without the possible self-consciousness that maybe ‘muscling it out’ could be better done at home.

And while the conversation was also easy-going (getting updated on Boris and his bullshit and Kladno hockey and… anything besides my tunneling), I was feeling woozy by the time the cukrovi came onto the table in two serving platters—motley cookies hanging around since the Christmas season, usually in shoeboxes set on the patio as a natural refrigerator. I ate a doughy coconut ball and a včelí úl—a dunce cap of brown sugar reminding some ancient baker of a ‘bee hive’—and whispered into Tomy’s ear that maybe a swing by Motol wasn’t a bad idea after all.

No details to spare you, as I fell asleep in the waiting area and barely remember how they checked my pupils and scalp and figured it wasn’t worth a CAT scan, at least not tonight. Tomaš asked the questions I didn’t, the answers rather uninteresting. Ibuprofen and rest, as if my cave and treehouse hadn’t served enough in that regard.

We got to our apartment after midnight and went right to bed. Tomy kissed my ear and (finally) acknowledged the poem I had sent, tender in his role for delivering faith—even as he snickered away the confusing entendres about apologies. Sleep was deep and any dreams were starfish on the Pacific Ocean floor, far from Prague and cradled by my pillow.

I woke after Tomy had left for work, another poem scratching to be born:

To make a maybe

into must is

the silkworm’s dreaming

of anything but

dust when put into

a Turkmen room to spin

for Marco Polo’s bliss…

They’ll pulverize,

she hears internally—

they must, if profits

lean on lust;

the moth she would become

might threaten what

is made from her cocoon…

Still, she weaves herself

to sheer oblivion,

sucking in

the fears that come

from tucking in the maybes

of her mind, hoping

to unfold in time…

That’s what I’ve been calling the fetus lately, to no one in particular but as a reference point: ‘Maybe was waiting to be born, minding her/his/its business to form limbs and match a beating heart with rhythms of a personality, never imagining a cessation of self.’

“But also,” intervened some voice of rationality, “never conceiving a sense of self in the first place.”

‘Maybe that’s true, too—we’d have to ask her/him/it… in the abstract, of course.’

And that is where some voice of rationality checks out of the conversation. And so I run my fingers through the curtain strands of willow trees along a stream I go to in my mind and bring this Maybe more to life:

I’ll consider her a ‘she’, just to stop the backslashing. A part of her would have escaped the Alpha’s scrotum and squeezed into my being, meeting the other part of her in the guess of which fallopian would be ‘the path less travelled’, so to speak. The parts conjoined would sink into my uterus, the lining primed like some primordial soup, and just hang out. Perhaps there’d be a twin—she wouldn’t have the eyes or wherewithal to know. But I shouldn’t sell her short; knowledge is immeasurable, especially when co-opted by the limits of language to satisfy a human measure of a thing. Since I have to work in such strictures (Czech, English, sighs and cries therein), it’s impossible to convey the thoughts of Maybe in 1st-person, but I’ll try:

I am anything but a passing gleam in my father’s eye. As I hold the inside of my mother, I feel her hopeful energies but also how they’ve drained away. They spoke in math, my mom and dad, and shadows of propriety. Calculated risk, from condoms doing their job 98% of the time to wonders from the wife where he’d go to, after office hours. The ratio of cologne and perfume to cover up the mesh of body odor, not that the latter would compromise the lust. And that’s precisely what constituted my incipience: the magnetic cat-and-mouse that couldn’t see beyond the chase, the urge to plunge one’s teeth into the other and tease away an actual kill. The exhilaration of survival on a tidal wave, the tumble of the ocean’s force into the float of aftermath, vying for a second wave or straggle toward the beach and a deep desire to sleep, laundered bedsheets be damned.

But I’m a fetus, for fuck’s sake—why am I thinking like a libidinous adult? I should be dreaming about hopscotch and kittens, tricycles and sandcastles. I should be discovering the magic of my hands, what to cling to and what to push away. I might prepare for the reactionary aspects of my name: maybe I’ll be pushed away at the playground; maybe I’ll be pushed into sundry submissions, chemical or otherwise; maybe I’ll be a Menendez copycat and premeditate the murders of these worse-than-jerks who coupled me with their lack of… meditation. Academic jerkoffs, what they are, essentially.

And I am Aristotle’s accident—the chaff to dispose of when the more valuable core is ripe and ready for the world, even towards its consumption. It was his forebearer Sophocles (as I’d be bound to study) who expressed this bile through the epiphany of Oedipus:

“Not to be born at all

Is best, far best that can befall,

Next best, when born, with least delay

To trace the backward way.”

Exactly. To go back to the fallopian of choice and sink back into oblivion. To live vicariously through Mama—Maybe & Mama forever merged, like a joint venture. To essentially remain… a dream.

Not a nightmare. Not a noční můra, as Czech pits more apprehension in moths than horses, regardless of the silk that may result. I am just a housenka—a caterpillar content to be just that, without a need to morph into a Gregor Samsa world. I shall remain inside of you, Amálko, no matter what you do….

No matter what you do… I kept hearing through the yellow metro line from Smíchovské nádraží to Stodůlky, where a previously reserved lesson with Niki and Mai was waiting on differential equations—beyond the linears that the Pats and Mats in their class were still stuck on. They were rather interested in the second-order nonlinear equations that applied to pendulum movement (for instance), as if they’d pass that problem every day at the Olomouc faculty. I hadn’t revealed my journey there and back—certainly not the reason my PhD imploded—and so we kept the problems only in their notebooks and graphing calculators.

After the modestly paid hour, we stayed a little longer to talk about the upcoming dance and ‘last bell’ parties that they’d need to prepare for, maybe mitigating some of the stress of Maturita exams to follow. Niki lamented that, based on last year’s window on these spring shenanigans, the season felt like dogs in heat, probably adding more stress as a result. No matter what you do, I felt like telling them, keep a condom ready. I’d say the same if Pat or Mat or Filip were at the table; strangely, though, I couldn’t utter it now, conscious that it would be an opportunity missed. I’m their math tutor, for fuck’s sake, not their…

Mother. No matter that I could have been one as of a couple months ago. I’d have one of those swaddling wraps that doubled as a breastfeeding tent. I’d be tapping one-two-threes upon her little fingertips (four and five, Maybe, but not so fast!), her tiny feet, brushing wisps of hair that needn’t any curls to match my own, but Maybe… you’re so beautiful exactly as you are.

I left Stodůlky for Kladno and a visit to Kristýna’s library, where she managed to boost her hours in the absence of other employment (and hockey training, which was never paid to begin with). She was reading Animal Dreams and said Kingsolver’s style would likely appeal to me, if I wanted it in a couple days. It was her way of getting me back, I thought, but just as equally my own need for patterns.

“What I could use in the meantime is a movie”—Tomy’s laptop still had a slot for DVDs, and Kladno’s library had overstocked that dinosaur genre in a decade’s effort of ‘keeping up with the times’. “Something messy,” I surprised myself in saying.

“That you need to clean up?” Týna raised her eyebrow.

“That I don’t need to clean up! Not that it would be on me, anyway. Can’t I watch something that has nothing to do with—”

She stopped listening and went to a back room, returning after a couple minutes with a half-dozen choices. Sophie’s Choice, Do the Right Thing, The Place Beyond the Pines, Zero Dark Thirty, The Piano, and “what the heck, Týnko, with this one,” holding up Sin City. “Don’t you remember we walked outta this at Kino Aero, what, ten years ago? It’s horrible!”

“Do you remember why we did?”

I flipped the flat plastic box to jog my memory. Jessica Alba’s voluptuous body at a fuckable age, not that the detective Bruce Willis plays can think in such terms, having saved her life eight years earlier as a preteen. “We didn’t want to become bemused. What would make the difference now?”

“Spoiler: it’s just a cold shower. And there are other storylines, of course.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t take it, then—I’m not offended.”

I took it. With the Spike Lee and Kathryn Bigelow, in case I needed to binge before I’d see her in a couple days, when she’d be done with Animal Dreams. “Jiří wants company at Tuesday’s hockey game, if you dare darken those doors with us.”

“Ha! Your dad’s either fearless or foolish! But maybe…”

Tomy had not seen Sin City and made a kind of stinky face at its cover, implying a general aversion to comic book noir. The other two films, however, were already under his belt and he’d rather see something new than… “but really, whichever you’d like.”

“Hard to say ‘like’ with all the gruesomeness.”

“Then why did you take it in the first place? Kristýna testing you or somethin’?”

“I didn’t talk it over, really, yet I think it may be a process film—a motivator for revenge, maybe.”

His face soured more at that suggestion. “Process… for revenge?”

“Nah. Let’s just watch it mindlessly,” knowing we’d probably do the opposite. The character arcs of Hartigan and Callahan were less compelling this time, traded in my imagination for the lonesome allure of Marv, played by Mickey Rourke. His hint of grace in this grisly world comes through a prostitute named Goldie, murdered by a cannibal named Kevin during their post-amorous sleep. Since I hadn’t watched this long into the movie the first time with Kristýna, this Kevin character had slipped my attention. That, and the fact that Elijah Wood in my mind was Frodo first and foremost—the total opposite of Kevin—and yet his sweet smile and lamblike eyes were the same in both adaptations.

As Marv decides his ultimate act to honor Goldie, he goes to the hardware store to buy barbed wire (of course), a hacksaw, handcuffs (hah!), rubber tubbing, and the stuff to make for a Molotov cocktail. He lopes into the forest surrounding Kevin’s monasterial estate and rigs what he can to pull him out for a midnight brawl. The barbed wire fails to trip him up, but the handcuffs work to catch the gymnastic cannibal and keep him hooked to Marv, who then can knock the consciousness out of him. Goldie’s sister appears at this moment with a magnum in hand: “Lemme finish him, Marv,” which he will not allow, knocking her out to spare her the gore he has premeditated on her sister’s killer.

The rubber tubes serve as torniquets, ironically, to keep Kevin alive as long as possible for his unblinking eyes to bear witness to the amputation of each limb—handcuffs no longer necessary—and the icing on the cake: Kevin’s own pet wolf invited by Marv to devour what’s left in this ouroboric scene.

“Satisfaction guaranteed?” Tomy asked, smoothing out the press of fingernails I put into his thigh.

“Sorry…”

“In the… Greek sense? or—”

I paused the DVD. “Holy shit, that was intense.” I leaned back into Tomy, smiling that the Gorgon images hadn’t killed us as collateral damage. “I hope we won’t have nightmares.”

“Nightmares? I’d welcome them! Just as long as you weren’t trying to…”

I dug my hand under his shirt and waited for the infinitive. “Trying to… what?”

“Trying to premeditate Olomouc.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

He mirrored me with his hand beneath my shirt. “For real, though.”

Whatever ‘real’ meant in this world…. I wasn’t interested in probing that notion, though, nor finishing the film. And Tomaš was in tune with me as we cuddled ourselves to sleep.

Tuesday came more quickly than my empty schedule would have imagined, partly because I watched each of these DVDs a couple times and walked across the river to Globe bookstore for a more recent Kingsolver novel—Flight Behavior, set in Appalachian Tennessee and the unlikely wintering of millions of monarch butterflies, either lost or pushed north from their overheated Mexican habitat. I thought the storyline was so-so (a little stilted) but valued the question of how hospitable the planet has been to any species. Butterflies can be a bellwether, flying sometimes ‘by the seat of their pants’, so to speak.

I traded with Kristýna for Animal Dreams, which promised to be a better plot, at least. Then we made our way to the ČEZ stadion, where Daddy met us with printed tickets—he hadn’t bothered to get a new phone for the QR-coded equivalent since the day it drowned with Týna’s skates. Tonight’s game was a sell-out, despite the fact that the Jagr-run Knights had been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Their opponent, the Mladá Boleslav Lions were mathematically in, but just barely—so this ‘battle of the basement’ was more a chance to get fans drunk than make intelligent commentary.

Dad had grown out a ragged beard since escaping the cops, so he didn’t feel self-conscious going back into this venue. Týna neither, but my stomach was in knots. It didn’t help things that, when I went to the bathroom, there was the Ukrainian cleaning lady looking up from her early-game mopping duty to see me, squint, and say hello.

I froze, of course, wanting to calculate the degrees of freedom (v) for this random vector—an instinct honed from Statistics 101. She dropped her bashful glance and didn’t seem to know what to do with my suddenly extended hand. Neither did I, as the appendage acted robotically and without discernable intelligence. “Ahoj,” I uttered too casually for such an encounter, and followed with, “I’m Amálka.”

She read my good faith, if it were, and gently shook my hand. “Ksenia…, pleasure.” When I asked if she spelled it with an X, as it sounded, she noted, “no—that would be Greek. I’ve been sorta sour on Cyrillic letters lately, as Ukrainian may resort to Latin letters…, you know, computer keyboards and…”

“—the fucking war Russia thrust your country in.” I presumed too much, perhaps, but her hand still in mine squeezed slightly for the recognition. “I’m sorry for what is happening there—” and here, I imagined in her sympathetic eyes. Their aqua irises conveyed an invitation to her trust—like a border collie assured I wasn’t a wolf in some disguise.

“Oh,” she crimped the corners of her lips, “it’s, um, gonna be okay. We’re a tough stock of people, and…” She evidently didn’t want to talk about this. But she also seemed interested in what was on my mind. Dealing with duress.

“You know,” I tapped my temple to channel memory, “I recall that you wanted to study at uni. Mathematics, right?”

“I don’t qualify for anything here. I doubt I could study and still work—as menial as this seems,” indicating the realm of this tiled room, “it pays the rent. A few odd jobs extra, then maybe I can send my savings east. Daddy doesn’t want me to, but….”

A few odd jobs can mean anything, I tried not to betray by my delayed reply. Our purposes in this semi-sanitized space became conspicuous, as she surveyed the sinks to see if they needed wiping down. And I was here to use a stall, right? I feared, though, losing a chance to say, “I teach some students math, privately. One of their friends, Daša, is from Ukraine—I haven’t made enough of a connection with her for lessons she surely needs before her Maturita exams, but I wonder…”

Ksenia arched her eyebrows high, pulling more a smirk than a smile. “You wonder if I could teach? Like math needs native language?”

“Well, it couldn’t hurt. I mean, it wouldn’t need to be Daša—she just came to mind. I’m also thinking of making video tutorials, and… those could benefit from, you know,… a team approach.” Beads of sweat were forming on my forehead in that ambush of embarrassment I was so determined to quash the last time this had happened—as recently or long ago as my pre-pregnancy with Professor Alpha. “We—you and, well, it wouldn’t need to be… I’m sorry to even suggest—”

Gracefully, she pulled a couple paper towels from the dispenser and, handing me one, reached for a sharpie in her pocket—ostensibly the same to sign the chart that she had swabbed this place within the required hour. She didn’t watch what I’d do with my paper towel, but focused on hers to write neatly her full name, WhatsApp contact, some hours of availability. To buy me time, she doodled a little joke: √-1 <3 #s ∞. “Here,” she left it on the counter, then laughed a little. “We both need to go.” She pulled her mop cart toward the door and averted further eye contact. “I’m glad to meet you, Amálko.”

My mouth formed the also but no sound emerged. I pulled more towels to wrap her message into precautionary insulation. Because, to be clinical about degrees of freedom, probability has everything to do with variance and constraint. And to add a pun to the mess I had become, I was rather v to the pragmatics of statistical analysis. “Jesus,” I lightly cursed inside my stall, “why can’t I just… chill the fuck out?”

“You okay?” Kristýna pressed my ribs with her elbow, “need a tissue or something?”

I thought I’d gotten myself together adequately. “No. How’s the game going?”

She pointed to the scoreboard, which could have meant something on an evening years ago. “Power play against us lasted just a couple seconds. Plekanec having trouble with face-offs. Your dad is happy, though.”

“I’m glad for him.”

She let me muse on whatever I wasn’t saying—a reason we’ve been friends this long. Like when we went to a game like this as kids, Jiří a clean-shaven version of his steelworks self. It was the stretch of days between Christmas and Silvestr, probably a Sunday afternoon for the easier inclusion of children. One boy a couple rows below us had a plastic machine gun that added twelve percent, I’d say, to his four-year-old mass. Or subtracted inestimable innocence, as he spent the whole first period shooting every player on both sides, every spectator—me at least twice—and even himself in a moment of navel-gazing. Týna shrugged it off when I tugged her opinion of the spectacle, and Daddy wasn’t too inclined to get involved. “He wants attention, so… don’t give it to him.”

Extinction, I’d learn later from my mom, who had to deliberately ignore unruly behavior in her classroom to deprive clowns from their audience. Almost always little boys conceiving bigness in their brains, or at least relief from feeling small in front of their peers. This Kladno kid had an enormous father who paid him no mind; the gun had been a gift under the Christmas tree, ostensibly—in other words, given by Ježíšek, the ‘baby Jesus’ of the largely agnostic culture here. Next to the man was either his teenage daughter or too-young lover. As a preteen then myself, I didn’t know what to make of her place in this scenario, equally neglecting the imp and sapping the favors of the man, who sat there like a Roman emperor.

“Dad,” I implored at the end of the first period, when most fans vacated their seats for beer or urination, “it’s insufferable. Can’t you just tell him to stop?” Whatever actual adjective I used—probably not ‘insufferable’—confused Jiří, as if this child’s upbringing was any of our business. “Of course it is,” I stuck to my guns, so to speak: “he’s ruining our experience. We came to watch hockey, not get bullied by a baby.”

“That’s the point,” he contended. “I can’t tell the kid to stop, and I can’t tell his dad to—”

“Why not?”

“Be-because, well,… he’s huge, for starters.”

My mind flashed back to the time Jiří threw a sizable tenant out of my treehouse when I was too cornered to scream; he’d never start a fight, but he’d also never run from a threat. Perhaps he wasn’t reading my complaint on that level. So I decided to take things into my own hands, whether or not he’d have my back. I could hear preteen Kristýna demur as I climbed over a row of seats towards the plastic killer. “Excuse me, mister,” I spoke to both-as-one, “you can’t keep playing like that. It’s wrecking my chance to have a good time.”

Stunned, both of them, the girl-woman stuck out her chin and demanded, “who the hell do you think you are? Your ‘good time’ is not our concern.”

“Your brother is making a bad time for everyone. You’re teaching him to bully—”

“Fuck you, brat! Making assumptions like that is—just an asshole move.” She reached at me but was blocked by her dad/lover, whose snigger implied he rather liked the feistiness. Even more so when Týna caught up to pull me back (the way I’d seen a referee do with her already in her mighty-mite games, the hypocrite); “pack of brats!” the girl-woman added to their mirth.

For his part, the little boy appeared oblivious to any sense of trouble—caused or about to come down. He was still triggering, albeit half-heartedly and not at me. In the flash of a couple seconds, though, the muzzle pivoted my way with just enough thrust for me to grab it without falling into the row between us. He shrieked and crumbled into his father’s tree-trunk leg as I scrambled to whirl the damn thing out onto the open ice. “There! Go get it, tough guy,” I yelled to the three-as-one.

Better late than never, Jiří found his way to step between the fury (mine, now, included). He said reasonable stuff, I recall, and didn’t flinch when the beast and his beauty spewed vitriol. Týna huddled into my side, as I felt she was doing right now, jostling me from my memory. “Was it really that way?” I asked, abbreviating the blow-by-blow. “Did Daddy let me face that goon alone?”

“Ask him, why doncha?”

But he was too full into this battle of the basement, now with Kladno on a power play of their own. “Do you remember it the same?” I grimaced, hoping Týna wouldn’t tell me I was full of shit, as she sometimes did.

“Put it this way,” she leaned to cup her hands through my curls and to my ear, as if someone in the crowd would steal this secret, “I was proud of you. And still am.” I bent my neck to cover my eyes, but didn’t pull away from the next thing she wanted to whisper: “we’ll have your back even better when you’re ready for Olomouc.”

“That’s not the problem, though,” I hesitated to sour her sweetness. “I had nothing to lose being a social justice warrior. What I lost in Olomouc cannot be recovered. It’s not like I can fetch the fetus like I’m sure the kid got back his gun.”

She didn’t have an answer for that, but still kept her hands in my hair, eventually to hold my head like a teddy bear. Inevitably, Dad would notice, but like those distant years ago, let me face my figuring alone. “Where do you think that kid is now?” she chanced, “planning a Palladium massacre?” And while that shopping mall would be spared such a fate, the timebomb at Charles University was now ticking, nine months away.

Chapter 12: the xi

One of the courses I miss, not that my doctorate depended on it, was ‘Harmonic Analysis’ toward periodic functions and frequency, instrumental toward the work of Laplace. I suppose the idea of ‘the music of the spheres’ comes from this prong of mathematics—the manner in which patterns are predictable to an extent of representation, the risk that may come from generalizing an observed expectation. Probabilities and statistics needed something to bank on, and the Greek letter ξ served some purpose (giving over to χ and ν for the pragmatics of spreadsheet calculations). I guess what has always appealed to me is the mystery of maths—the imagining more than the usable solutions.

Ksenia spelled her name in Latin letters, not the Ксенія of Ukrainian or Ξενία in Greek. Over the next couple days, the sharpie ink had bled into the paper towel to blur the rest of her information, if not to the point I couldn’t actually make the connection. Other factors hindered, but they can’t be attributed to the decoding process.

“You got a crush on her or something?” Tomy teased when he heard me talk about encountering her again. “Or are you worried she’d figure out you have something to do with your father’s fugitive status—”

“Shut up about that, buster!” I tried to banter back. “No, I’m just a little hesitant…,” feeling like a broken record, “to meddle with life.”

“Whose, hers? She’s free to say, thanks/no thanks to whatever you had in mind. Video production, was it? Math tutorials?”

I shrugged. “Guess so. Something employable. To pass the days with a better sense of purpose than….” I didn’t want to say.

“Cleaning toilets?”

“She says she does ‘odd jobs’, too. And I’m not aloof to the need for clean washrooms, by the way.”

Tomy put his arms out with assurance: “we are earthy people, you and I—and it seems like this Ksenia is, too.” He kissed my forehead, once again leaning too much like Rodin’s thinker. “C’mon, message her—at least to honor that she showed interest in you.”

“Oh, so you think she has a crush on me.”

“No, no. Crush this whole ‘crush’ idea, unless we’re talking about mine for you and yours for me, kapeesh?”

“Kapeesh? What are we, on the set of Goodfellas now?”

He booped my nose and got his jacket on to go to work, leaving me to another day without butterflies to keep me occupied. But plenty of time to mull about them.

Simona was my mull-mate, as she was easier to text today than Ksenia—and it would be convenient to run the latter by Simona’s advice anyway. We decided to meet at the Fata Morgana pavilion at the botanical gardens in Troya, where butterflies could stir our imagination on how they might mix with math videos—“those cycles you talked about, ‘fibrillations’ or something like—”

“Fibonacci cycles, probably. Though I kinda like ‘fibrillation’, now that you’ve said it. Like changes in a heartbeat that must be the pattern for caterpillars morphing to moths or butterflies. We think of their viewable differences, but there’s gotta be a ton of renovation going on inside.” We weren’t at the venue yet, sitting side by side on tram 17, but my faraway look brought the idea closer. “See? You can be also on the narration side of these vids, like you do so well with your own!”

“Listen, cousin—I’m garrulous about mascara and self-image, but have nothing to say concerning maths. You may as well have me sing ‘a hundred bottles of beer on the wall’—I’d likely mess up the verses on that, too!”

“I’ve heard you sing,” I smiled, “like a canary—beautifully!”

“Makes me feel guilty. Like tattling on something Boris did.” She scrunched her Kashmir scarf to hide her eyes, a movement elegant yet inscrutable. “Which…, I should confess,” she mumbled through the fuchsia cloth, “if… it’s not—”

“What?” I felt my heart fibrillate, thinking the worst. “If he has the evil eye for that Barrandov bitch or—”

Simi laughed at that, lowering the scarf. “Barrandov? Nah, nah, nah—those stupid days are done. He’s with me for the long haul. And, not that I orchestrated it this way….” She took off her mittens and placed them evenly on her thighs, then wove her fingers like a tent against her tummy.

It took me a few seconds and then my heart went even crazier, running free instead of for cover. “Are you serious? Certain?” She nodded rapid fire. “And does Boris… know?”

“Of course he does—well, as of yesterday. It’s all pretty surprising, actually. I mean, we weren’t not trying, but also—”

“You were trying? And talking about it?” I wasn’t sure correlated those questions, and Simona’s side eye didn’t, either. “I mean, were you talking… family?”

“Being a family, sure. Getting pregnant, not exactly. Are you searching for details in that regard?”

I wasn’t, and turned my gaze toward Císařský island, now that the tram was gliding on the new suspension bridge over the Vltava. Our stop would be next, then either a bus or a hike the two kilometers further to the butterfly greenhouse. This side of town always seemed serene, unbothered by anything; the island harbored horses for the aristocrats who inhabited the Troya chateau and all the surrounding villas—even when it was illegal to be so bourgeois. “Will you need to move to a bigger place?” I queried in the direction of those horses, “with a nursery?”

“Baby can sleep in our room for a while. And I don’t need all of the second room for my ‘office’. But that’s down the road quite a ways. Not even sure I’d want to keep up the same pace of vlogging—or just change up the format, you know?”

“I don’t really know. But as the world turns, I guess we’re in sort of the same boat.”

She grabbed my arm like I was falling into the river: “oh my God, are you also expecting? You and Tomy?”

“Oh my God,” I echoed her, “no! Not that…”

“Not that you’re not trying? Or… is that in bad taste for me to—”

“You’re not in bad taste. I just uttered exactly that about you guys, for Christ’s sake!”

“Well, what ‘same boat’ are you talking about then?”

I sighed my typical not so sure; “vlogging, I guess. Being a media math tutor, maybe with the help of this Ukrainian I mentioned. Ksenia—”

We stood up to exit the tram. The February wind hit us to force the decision to wait at the bus stop, from one glass enclosure to the next to the ultimate next. “It’s like we’re fishbowling through the city today! That might be the way you’ll feel as a vlogger, just so you know. Privacy becomes to some extent public. Are you sure this Ksenia is up for such exposure?”

“I have no idea. But I want to give her a boost if possible. Her dad is fighting on the front lines and she seems in a kind of limbo—”

“—in the two encounters you had with her? I mean, girl talk in the bathroom can be important and all.”

“But?”

“But nothing. I’m surprised, is all, that she made that much of an impression on you. I guess I’m a bit jealous,” she poked me not to read too much into things. “I’ll act as a consultant if it comes to it. The photogenic aspects, to tease them out.”

“If it comes to it,” I echoed her again, and blushed for doing so.

My second bout of blushing for the day came about twenty minutes later, when the good folks at the botanical garden ticket office reminded us that Fata Morgana’s butterfly exhibit doesn’t start for six weeks, in the natural turn of their world and ours. I suppose my assumption of its year-round sanctuary for these insects was informed by the fact that smaller, private enterprises like Papilonia were popping up in shopping malls, zoos, castles—wherever tourism needed another kind of freak show. Tomy was concerned about this trend, creating tiny ecosystems of non-indigenous flora and fauna for the sake of soft education and hard entertainment.

While Simona wasn’t disappointed by my false billing, I felt the coming-on of that same cold sweat I had with Ksenia, and hated this sudden fragility in the face of surprises. I guess the journey of becoming a mathematician caused an overt allegiance to patterns that didn’t smash into entropic chaos: The Orwellian 2 + 2 = 5 was a purposeful provocation that has emboldened mathematically illiterate demagogues to “prove me wrong”; the truer academic mysteries rather begged a ‘prove me right’, like Reinmann’s work with the location of nontrivial zeros in a meromorphic function. Although I wasn’t close to proving anything at Olomouc, I was falling in love with prime numbers and their essential role in such adventures. Their capacity to surprise was always pleasant, harmonic, happy to be there.

“I am,” affirmed Simona, when I asked if she was okay to stroll the pathways just for the botany. “And it’s not just for anything. We’re here to breathe, for goodness sake.”

And to use that oxygen for talking things through. I wondered how Boris was going to finally secure his legal presence in the country, for instance, now that fatherhood was on the way. Even a marriage that they hadn’t overtly considered wouldn’t guarantee him a ‘green card’, so to speak—he was still doing his free-lance crazy stuff and evading reporting responsibilities; Simona was somewhere between amused and bemused by this, admitting that his bohemian disposition was both refreshing and risky toward an expanding partnership.

I knew she was speaking about the two of them becoming three, but expanded the social net a bit further: “Does he still hang out with that guy who helped with his video skills?”

“Tolliver? He’s… yeah, still a drinking buddy, so to speak. Not that they binge in that regard. They gave up on the baby shower campaign, if that’s what meant—”

“Ironic, sorta—he had no notion that he could be playing guitar for his own flesh and blood.”

“Well, gestation needs to take its course. He’s playing every night lovely ditties—even some Czech songs by Svěrák and Uhlíř real close to my belly. And Pink Floyd he likes, of course—”

“‘Wish You Were Here’, like he busked at Kampa…”

“And,” she sang in stride, “ fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd’—he likes that one a lot!” She laughed, “as I do, too. Pretty idiotic world to populate further, but… what can you do?”

I thought about Kristýna having no fellow idiot to high five when her baby would bring joy, or towels to throw at when the opposite would occur. I wondered how Tomy would be as a dad, not that we were remotely at that point of shared speculation. “Did you and Boris… talk about this prospect?”

“Um, more or less,… over glasses of wine. I suppose we’ll have to do so with more sobriety. The key thing is—and I don’t take this for granted—we both agree to see this through. We aren’t debating, you know… the opposite.”

“To have or not to have…”

“Yes—not necessarily the question.”

We were at the six-meter waterfall into the largest pool of the pavilion, and the humidity compelled a loosening of our collars, so to speak. A bench invited our chance to sit and appreciate the beauty of the view and fragrance of the air. If butterflies were not in sight, swallowtails or otherwise, the fleeting presence of stowaway birds added to the jungle approximation. We gathered that the chirping sounds were piped in artificially, but, with evidence now of the actual creatures, we couldn’t be sure. “I could work here, I think,” I decided, “if they’d have me.”

“Of course they’d have you,” Simona assured. “And when the butterflies would be ready, you’d be the resident expert.”

“Not sure about that. I’m still a math geek. Clumsy with things that can’t be worked out on graph paper.”

“Ale, ale,” Simona gently chided like a Czech grandmother, the conjunction of ‘but, but’ maybe serving as a double negative to the things we say we cannot do. Or be.

I told you plenty about my ant farm already, how I should have been a better curator to their little lives. Strength in numbers, I reasoned, as they took my offer of release underneath my tree fort (figuring that climbing up the trunk could be their option if they felt unprepared for non-captivity).

Another thing I should have told you at the time deserves a trigger warning, so… feel free to skip this part. Some boys during recess, twenty years ago—we were just seven, for Christ’s sake—caught a shimmering, cobalt blue and brown butterfly with white splotches, one I’d come to know later as batolec duhový in Czech, which translates funnily to ‘rainbow toddler’ in English, though it’s hard to see the logic in that name:

The boys wouldn’t know the species, either, but decided to put the creature to an existential test, tearing one half of a wing to see if it could fly three-quarters capable. I was watching from the high perch of the playground’s jungle gym and screamed at them to stop. They were rather out of eye contact otherwise, crouched behind the shed that harbored stuff to throw and kick—even pull apart—without being hurt. Toys become too boring, I suppose, at a certain age.

But seven years old, c’mon! They scooted farther from my sight and, by the time I extricated myself from the ropes and sand, they’d ripped the other side of the creature to make it look like a crucifix on the cusp of futile attempts to flap itself to survival. If I were Kristýna, who wasn’t there for some reason, I would have bashed these boys with the fearless savvy of a hockey player; being just me, I tried to reason with them that enough is enough.

Honza, the taller of the two, had eyes that seemed to agree. But Pavel had other designs, claiming it could do no harm to return the adult to caterpillar stage—we were learning about metamorphosis around that time—and why the hell should you care, anyway, Miss Priss? He didn’t express himself so clearly, but the grunts implied as much.

The spirit of Kristýna moved me: I rushed at Pavel and grabbed his left arm, hoping to rip it off like he had done to the poor ‘toddler’. Honza was startled and backed away, disloyal to his friend (or maybe faithful to my need to act). Pavel nonetheless kept his clutch on the butterfly with his right hand, preventing his potential clobbering of me. It meant that Honza didn’t have to be a knight in shining armour to protect the ‘girl’—the damsel in distress—even though he should have done so with the insect, whatever gender it was.

End result: the desperate pistoning of wings worked fast enough to slip out of Pavel’s sweaty fingers. He, in turn, escaped my grasp and ran to try and catch his victim once again, tripping instead on something that hadn’t been stored away—a scooter from the shed (as a reminder of the more appropriate ways to play).

~to be continued~

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (October 25, 2022)

Meta-metaphysics

Friday, October 28, 2022

a final pay-per-view

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

The Inertia of Entropy [a sequel of sorts to 'My Leash']