Men in Space by Tom McCarthy

confused. Hájek tilts his own head back; he takes in the constellations on the ceiling, then brings his face down horizontal again and announces:
    “A Soviet cosmonaut is stranded in his spaceship.”
    There’s a pause; Jan, Ivan and Karel look up at the ceiling.
    “No, not here!” scoffs Hájek. “I mean really. This guy went up as a Soviet, on a routine space mission, and then while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now, no one wants to bring him down.”
    “Why not?” asks Jan.
    “The Russians say he’s not their problem,” Hájek explains. “He set off from the Ukraine, so they say he should go back there.”
    “Fair enough,” says Jan.
    “The Ukrainians don’t think so,” Hájek tells him. “They’re saying,
Fuck off! This was a Soviet space project, and Soviet means Russian
.”
    “This is true,” Jan concurs. “What nationality is the cosmonaut?”
    “That’s the thing,” says Hájek. “He’s from Latvia or somewhere. So the Ukrainians and Russians are both turning to the Latvians saying,
You can foot the bill for all this
. Millions of dollars, you see.”
    “What are they going to pay with?” Jan asks as the waiter sets a drink in front of Hájek. “Potatoes?”
    “Right!” Hájek half-bounces in his seat. “They don’t even have a space programme! And while this shit is going on, all these negotiations, this poor fucker’s stuck up there.”
    “That story’s old!” Sláva sneers across the room from his table. “I heard it months ago.”
    “Of course you did!” says Hájek. “He’s still up there. He’s been there for months now!”
    “What’s he living on?” asks Jan.
    “Supplies,” says Hájek. “They have stuff, you know, all compressed, dehydrated …”
    “You got stuff?” Ivan asks him. A burnt-out flare lands on his shoulder; he brushes it to the floor. Hájek throws two small wraps onto the table.
    “Three hundred apiece.”
    Before the revolution he wouldn’t have charged anything: drugs were something you shared, like books and films, among people you could trust – friends, colleagues in the underground, the happy few … Those evenings at Havel’s place, at Matoušek’s, at Brázda’s – safe houses – watching some blacklisted philosophy professor talk about Merleau-Ponty through a haze of weed smoke: Hájek was their Easter bunny all year round, bouncing across rooms grinning as he handed out tabs, pills and powdered this and that, byproducts of an abandoned chemistry degree … But now it’s business. Ivan and Jan pull money from their wallets and hand it to him. Hájek stuffs the notes into his jacket, then remembers something, fumbles around inside an inner pocket and pulls out a pistol.
    “Jesus!” says Jan, looking over towards the waiter, who’sfacing the other way. Tyrone has gone so pale he’s almost white.
    “You like it?” asks Hájek, still grinning morosely. “It’s a replica. A fake. But pretty realistic.”
    “That’s a goddam piece!” Tyrone has pressed himself right back against his seat. Jan explains to him in English what Hájek’s just told them. Tyrone sighs, bows his head, laughs in a theatrical, exaggerated way, then holds his hand out towards Hájek. “Let me see it.”
    Hájek hands the pistol to him. Ivan picks up his wrap and slips off to the toilet. There’s only one cubicle. He locks the door, kneels on the floor and unfolds Hájek’s paper. The dry white flakes inside it have a crystalline sheen. With his identity card he scoops some of them out onto the toilet bowl’s lid, chops them up into fine grains and shunts the grains into a line. He takes a hundred-crown note from his pocket, rolls it up and, pinching it between his thumb and second finger, hoovers the line up into his nose. It burns across his septum, sharp and pure. He tips his head back, sniffs until his lungs are full, then empties them through puckered lips in one long whistle. He dabs at the toilet bowl’s lid,