Chapter 1: The Legend Returns, Unfortunately Home

If I am to tell this story, I would like to state right at the beginning that in my lifetime, heroes returned rather differently.

I am not saying better. One must not idealize the past, only people who have forgotten formica, meat queues, and that peculiar shade of stockings in which every woman looked as though someone had dipped her legs in tea do that. But when someone returned, you could at least make sense of it. A son from military service. A husband from the pub. A neighbor from the hospital. A package from the post office, provided the post office decided to exist this time.

My son returned as La-Tex-Homme.

Yes. Exactly like that.

La-Tex-Homme.

After death, one gets used to all sorts of things. To not having a body. To no longer having to open doors because a door is suddenly more of a social agreement than an obstacle. To the fact that when someone leaves a teacup on the counter for three days, you cannot take it and put it in the sink, even though it offends you on a level theology evidently doesn't discuss.

But you do not get used to the word La-Tex-Homme.

Not right away.

And maybe never.

Especially when you have to apply it to your own child. To a human being you once bathed in a little tub, whose fingernails you clipped, whose forehead temperature you checked, and whom you told to put on a hat because it was windy. You think motherhood has some natural progression. Child. School. Puberty. Work. Hopefully even some success, once you've invested so many soups, snacks, and reprimands in their grade book.

You don't expect that one day they'll be standing in an old Prague apartment in front of a box with LA-TEX-HOMME written on it in magic marker, looking as if fate has just been returned to them.

Fate.

In a cardboard box.

Under a throw blanket.

That, please, is very modern.

After all, everything is modern these days. The Prague of 2026 was full of things that talked, blinked, updated themselves, and pretended to be helpful. Little robots rolled along the sidewalks carrying food for people who could afford not to cook. Offices reportedly employed programs that wrote letters for those who no longer had time to write even their own apologies. In the homes of wealthier people, machines washed the dishes, round little critters vacuumed, and refrigerators could apparently report when the yogurt ran out.

My son had a Google Mini.

He talked to it.

He called it an assistant.

Back in my day, an assistant was a human. They had hands, feet, a salary, and sometimes a bad mood, but at least you could tell whether they were listening to you or just waiting for you to finish speaking. This thing was a small cylinder that sat somewhere in the apartment and responded with a voice so obliging it was suspicious. You asked it about the weather, and it answered. You asked it for the time, and it answered. You could probably even have asked it about the meaning of life, but I wouldn't recommend it. Bodiless things tend to speak with too much certainty.

And yet, my son of course couldn't afford a robotic dishwasher, a robotic vacuum, a robotic fridge, or robotic anything else. The future walked past him like a well-dressed visitor who stops in the doorway for a moment, glances around the apartment, and decides they'd rather not sit down.

He had an old apartment. Old mugs. Old bills. An old box.

And a new problem that was actually so old it could have had its own ID card.

He wanted to be seen.

That's a sentence that's easy to say if a person doesn't know what it means. He wanted to be seen not as a good son, not as a sensible adult, not as someone who has their electricity bills paid and knows how to dress so nobody talks about them in the hallway. He wanted to be seen as La-Tex-Homme.

In latex.

With red boots.

With a whip.

And I, his mother, was supposed to be there for it.

Dead, naturally.

That is an important detail in our family arrangement. I couldn't come anymore, ring the doorbell, tell him to show it to me—well, alright then, show it if you must—and then spend half an hour being silent in such a way that he would understand absolutely everything. I couldn't help him with the zipper. I couldn't bring him soup. I couldn't tell him he was crazy, but my crazy, which is a phrase mothers use when they want to sound tender while retaining the right to pass judgment.

I could only tell the story.

And storytelling is a dangerous thing.

Especially in a family.

Because whoever tells the story is cleaning up. Moving things to their proper places. Giving one a coat, another dirt, a third shame, and a fourth a stamp of approval. And when the storyteller is a mother, so much the worse. A mother knows her child before the child learns how to lie. That is a terrible advantage. And an even more terrible mistake.

For a long time, I thought I knew who my son was.

Mothers tend to think that.

And sometimes they're right.

Except the truth a mother holds onto for too long starts to grow mold over time, just like the throw cover on a box in the back room.

My son was standing in front of a house in Prague 3 one evening, holding his keys.

That is all.

No explosion. No flash of lightning. No sky opening up to announce that the return was beginning. Just a man with keys in front of a house where too many things had been known for too long.

The legend was returning.

Unfortunately, however, home.