Free Men in Space by Tom McCarthy Page A

artwork was considered of such importance as to have three departments of the Prague Central Criminal Police assigned to its recovery. There were, after all, he argued, valuable artworks passing through Prague every week of the year; his office, he continued, was full of files on these, or at least had been until recently, when the bulk of his files had been moved to another office which he had not yet been allowed to occupy. The officer from Interpol replied that it was beyond Novotný’s, Rosický’s or my remit to be informed of the reason, or reasons, for the value placed on the painting, just as it was beyond our remit to know the nature of the bodies for whom it held such value. Some information is to be shared with the likes of us, some not: we can only expect to be told so much. The meeting ended at 11:07 [eleven zero seven], after which …
    * * * * *
    The presence of the subterranean practice room on Ječná is announced by these words, scrawled in chalk on the building’s outside wall:
Roger! This is the practice room
. Below them, an arrow points down uneven stone steps. Lying at the bottom of the staircase, moulding and rotting, the strings, plate and soundboard of a disembowelled piano hint at the musical enterprise to which the basement has been consecrated. The practice room itself is shaped like a wine cellar: a stone ceiling that curves down into walls which are offset with alcoves that house instruments, leads, amplifiers, wah-wahs …
    Right now, these very objects should be stacked up in the middle of the room ready for carrying up the staircase, but somehow it’s just not happening. Roger Baltham has set up a small projector which is throwing images up onto the flat section of wall that’s furthest from the door, behind the drum kit. The drum kit is intercepting the bottom of the images before they reach the wall, but this isn’t a problem as the effect of these images distorting around curved metal and taut hide seems to please the assembled company, who purr and chuckle as they watch. A joint is being passed round. The Velvet Underground’s ‘Stephanie Says’ is playing on Radio Jedná. Roger’s standing behind the projector, the index finger of his left hand laced round the thin strip of celluloid so as better to facilitate its passage from the projector’s lower spools into the upper mechanism’s slit. From time to time, his right hand takes the joint, feeds it up to his lips and passes it on while he exhales the smoke into the cylinder of light in front of him, watching it uncoil and disappear …
    The images show the moon landing – the first one, 1969. Or rather, they show a television screen on which the landing is being shown. Roger found the film among old boxes full of cast-off clothes in the attic of his parents’ house in Palo Alto. He plays a cameo role in it himself, crawling nappy-clad towards the screen and touching it before being whisked away by adult arms. At this precise moment Armstrong, orperhaps Aldrin, is bouncing on the surface of the moon, and Roger’s older sister Laura is copying him on the surface of the coffee table, oblivious to the hands that appear from the edge of the shot to wave her aside. The company assembled in the practice room all laugh. Armstrong or Aldrin bounces again. The camera swings round to show a hair-bunned aunt performing Monroe pouts at it, then zooms in on her breasts. The assembled company laugh some more: they’re in a laughing mood.
    The company are, in order of appearance on the CD jacket: Tomáš Stein (bass, lyrics), Kristina Limová (vocals), Jiří Vacek (guitar) and Jakub (“Kuba”) Masák (drums). When the reel they’re now watching was shot, Roger’s friend Nick was two or three days old, but none of these people had been born. Not one of them had yet been conceived – not quite. After the joint has passed him for the third time, Roger starts wondering if their parents were still virgins when the landing module made