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I remember Prague best not as I last left it, blur of lights and music and saying our goodbyes and the airport in the snow, but as it looked when I was a child. But you do not know anything about what is going on when you are young, of course you do not; you only know that this is your life, and that it goes on like this, and that tomorrow it also goes on. But in my memory, everything has this same gray quality, a nothing quality.
Only in mornings, then the colors are fresh, they are new. In my mind, like a painting not yet dry, as if I could reach and run fingers through and come away with sky on my hands; though of course a work such as this would have been forbidden, then. Unrealistic, nonpartisan. My bed, it was in a room that looked toward the east with one small window. The morning sun would come inside, would wake me, and I remember making conscious decision – it became ritual, you see – every day, to open my eyes, to brush the night away, to face the light.
***
Sometimes there is a dream. There is screaming, and fire, and too much water. The ceiling has collapsed, crumbled, but the main force of the ocean has not yet reached them, only her seeking fingers, her tears, a measure of sorrow that soaks the hem of their pantlegs; not made of the blue, blue refracted light, but colorless, like all tragedies. It does not put out the fires, only makes them hiss, and smoke, too much smelling of burnt transistor, plastic toxin, metallic spice.
Radek pulls a man from the wreckage, through the water, American flag on the man’s shoulder and blood that is not red but a gray, thick wet seeping through his uniform.
There is no time here for reassurances, or goodbyes. Only the terrified, shared look of the trapped, the unlucky. A shriek, a shake, and the bones of Atlantis twist, and the water rushes in to meet them.
This is not how it ends for them. Once, already, this has happened, but not to him. Already, many years ago, a different universe, he has died, in a dream he does not remember. He and Sheppard shot down from the sky – not falling to earth but two scattered exile souls (if there are such things in them) trapped forever in an endless darkness.
Sometimes the American he tries to save is Major Lorne, an impossible choice and twisting of timelines; sometimes, most unlikely, he is Sheppard, blood as black as his uniform, styling his hair into awful parody of fringe and spikes. Sometimes, there is no American. Sometimes, the blood is his own.
***
Atlantis, his new city of spires, has secrets she will not share with him.
He has tried to listen, many times hoping he will catch a hint of song, a touch of color, the pattern of a knowledge he does not know how to look for; still a part of him thinking unreasonably that the ability to understand is within him after all.
But always he is grateful for what she has given. The terrifying beauty of her. The day she rose shaking from the sea – he will never forget the way the light burned through the windows of stained glass, fire crawling down from the sky while the ocean bled away; will never forget that, not until the day he dies.
He loves her, but he knows a ruler can be fierce and cruel with her favorites. He knows this, his own private and quiet belonging, and he is not jealous.
***
Someone murmurs, a sound halfway between hum and agreement.
Radek stops. Stands uncertainly in the middle of the hallway, peering into an unlit side corridor full only of black shadow. And sounds of movement – someone trying to be quiet. A prickle begins to make its way up his scalp, and he knows: he should not be standing here. Wet sounds, breathing – he is instantly sure of what is going on, and that he is standing in the light where he can be seen. He walks back, until he can no longer see the strip of floor disappearing into shifting dark.
Leans quietly against the wall, listening.
The voice doesn’t come again, but he knew its timbre, recognized it right away, although his eyes wish to have confirmation before he will believe.
There is the sound of breath, of rough movement, of a secretive sex that cannot acknowledge itself. His body responds eagerly. No matter who is there, hidden in the dark, he cannot help but feel a part, feel the insistent submerged violence of sex. It makes him feel dirty, impatient, and under cover of his tablet, with the open palm of his hand rubbing slow against his erection, he indulges in a furtive pleasure, conscience dictating he feel also a little bit awful.
The sounds stop abruptly, and Radek, with pounding heart, quickly pulls his hand away, walks slowly backward. And less slowly, and farther backward, so that he is many meters away when Colonel Sheppard, of course – Radek is both gratified and obscurely horrified by the confirmation – steps out of the dark corridor and turns to walk away toward the transporter at the end of the hall. His back to Radek, but he doesn’t miss the way Sheppard’s hands smooth and tug and his uniform, the brief touches to his face and mouth.
Radek turns to exit the way he had come. He does not want to have the Colonel hold the transporter door for him, to share a brief and awkward ride with a man radiating the guilt of the freshly fucked.
Neither does he wish to see who the Colonel was with. He does not need this kind of knowledge.
Still, there is no surprise in him at all when moments later there are footsteps, first walking then jogging the last few paces between them, and Major Lorne saying, “Hey, Doctor Z, wait up.” A little out of breath, a little nervous, and a little bit happy.
***
Radek has secrets, not only because he wishes not to tell them, but mostly because no one has bothered asking about them.
He has had a daughter, but no wife. He has killed a man, without touching him. He has had many lovers, but not love. Once, when he was young, a bird flew against his window while he was asleep. The sound stirred him, but he did not wake. In the morning, there was a dead pigeon on his sill and a delicate smear of gore which glowed like thin fire, as if an artist or angel had visited in the night and flapped his brush across his window, just once.
This began his two great and true love affairs – with pigeons, and with science. The burning to know, to know why. The desperate urge to hold off death.
For a time, an owl took up residence in a broken concrete hollow in the faceless housing development that matched his own — identical, reversed reflection as if a mirror could be walked through and he could come out the other side in another life, another Prague – and Radek slept with his birds many nights on the cramped balcony. Until the deceptive nonchalance of the predator’s call came no more, until Radek no longer found the furry castings on the ground around the building, mangled mice, tidy little satellites of twisted bone and hair.
It was, perhaps, an irrational fear he nurtured inside of him for some weeks, a month. But he carried it proudly, as evidence of some distant feral heritage, when stories were told in firelight and people were not so rational.
There is still a part of him afraid of any animal that chooses to live and hunt in the dark.
***
I watch him mix the soft dust of Pegasus-found mineral with oil, scraping with the flat of his knife. We are quiet together, he and I. I am a patient subject.
I sit, doing work with the laptop actually on lap, hand shading the screen from New Lantea’s light. I do not do much work, truthfully. I am watching Major Lorne, waiting for his paint to be ready. Many other Earth-bought tubes are around him – kinked, rolled, some fat and new. “But,” he had explained, hushed and nasal and northwestern, “The blue of the water, I want that to be real. A real Pegasus blue. I can’t get that from back home.”
I do not know how many of his people he has painted. I flatter myself that perhaps I am the only one, then reject myself, say it is unfounded. Scientific mind always at war with what I want. I imagine, just as foolishly: loose papers moving quietly in the wind from an open window, they are dark with charcoal, perhaps. The lean, predatory shape of a man in the nude. The long groove of his back surrounded by tight muscle, his soft penis and cushion of testicle, the soles of his feet.
There are many things wrong with this scenario. The nakedness, the bodies unhidden and tender together on the bed, the morning sun behind the window.
I think of it anyway, and I smile in secret.