Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  Last Day is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Domenica Ruta

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Ruta, Domenica, author.

  Title: Last day: a novel / by Domenica Ruta.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018051202 | ISBN 9780525510819 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525510826 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984855879 (international)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.U776 L37 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018051202

  Ebook ISBN 9780525510826

  spiegelandgrau.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover photograph: Zafer Çimen/EyeEm/Getty Images

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do

  “THERE SHE IS,” he whispered to himself, as if a little surprised to still see her twinkling in the darkness.

  It was universally agreed, Earth was always she. The astronauts needed to latch onto this umbilical pronoun, a reminder, while they were as far from home as one could be, that they were still human.

  The form she took was different for everyone. Some astronauts saw an eye, others thought of her as a jewel. Just today Bear saw something new: the blue head of a baby, slathered in a caul made of clouds, crowning from out of a black womb. Bear remembered his own daughters being born, and the happy terror of that first, sickening glimpse.

  It was the twenty-sixth of May. He had completed six months of his mission on the ISS and was already preparing for his exit, still six more months away. He was a three-hour ride from home, and though it was technically possible to make an early departure, no one in the short history of the International Space Station had ever deorbited before they were scheduled. What would it take, Bear wondered now, to justify an early exit? A medical emergency, or a family tragedy? What kind of calamity could he in good conscience withstand?

  Bear stopped himself. This kind of future-tripping was dangerous. He knew that. He’d advised other astronauts at Johnson Space Center against the countdown mentality when preparing them for their missions. You can’t stop the demons of isolation from knocking on your door, he’d say, but you can stop inviting them in for coffee.

  He decided to take his own advice and redirect this morbid longing into something more productive: drafting notes for the things he would say about this mission after landing. There would be a barrage of interviews, both in-house and for publicity, and Bear put a lot of pressure on himself to say something no one had ever said before about the experience of space flight. This womb-birth analogy was quotable, with potential to go viral in the media, just the kind of thing he needed to preserve. He reached for the pad and pencil attached by cords to his sleeve, catching the pad but missing the pencil. He reached again and missed it, again and then again. Entwined with the floating pad, it eluded his grasp like a tiny pet playing tag.

  “Got you,” he said at last. He scribbled down his notes about the earth looking like a birth in progress, then immediately crossed them out. It was a stupid metaphor. He watched the sun rise over the earth for the eleventh time that day. The clouds unthreaded for a moment and he saw the staggering blue that could only be the shallow waters of the Caribbean.

  No, he decided, taking one last look at the earth before heading back to work. What he saw through the windows of the Cupola was so much more than any single human birth, more than any man could pin down with words.

  He pressed his hand against the thick glass. “There you are.”

  She was the biggest thing in the galaxy from this perspective, though really just a pebble. Less than a pebble. But a pretty one, Bear thought, prettier than any other; he wasn’t afraid to admit this most basic chauvinism—to think of his home planet as better than all other bodies in space. She was his, after all. Or he was hers. He’d felt that on his first mission over a decade ago, and now on his second mission he felt it even more, a sense of humility so precious it dangled wildly on the edge of tragedy.

  His watch vibrated with a reminder that his break in the Cupola was up. He’d spent as many minutes as he could possibly spare in this Earth-sick reverie. It was time to go.

  SARAH MOSS HATED her name. It was a mistake, a fundamental one, with possibly catastrophic results for the rest of her life. Her last name, Moss, was okay, she guessed. Monosyllabic, rhizomatic, and green, Moss was actually pretty cool. Sarah was not and never would be.

  But did she really hate her name? Hate had lust at its core, a dark quicksand of desire, which was a little dramatic, even for Sarah. And besides, how could she bring herself to hate something that was essentially a gift from her parents? The second gift they’d ever given her, life itself being the first. Even though her parents were the most annoying people she knew, they were eternally well intentioned, so it felt wrong to hate in any official way the name they had chosen for her. She was their first and only child. They must have been fumbling in a postnatal stupor when they’d picked out the name Sarah—she had to believe this. Something as boring as Sarah could not have been premeditated. They were probably tired. What could she expect of people in that state? They didn’t even know her yet.

  When Sarah was three and a half, she requested that her parents start calling her Buckle. Those two smiling syllables, like a drink of sweetened milk, never mind what they denoted. But her parents laughed at her—an eternally well-intentioned laugh—because it was funny, this tiny girl with big owl eyes and toy-sized glasses, asking to be called Buckle, and Sarah had burst into tears.

  Science was a later pseudonym, the brainchild o
f her seven-year-old self. Science was her favorite subject at school, so adopting it as her name seemed like the next logical step. She confessed this wish only to her babysitter. Her parents had laughed at her once; she would not allow them to do it again.

  “Human beings can’t have names like Science,” her babysitter snorted. She was an elderly next-door neighbor with black wiry hairs sprouting from her chin that she paid young Sarah a dime per hair to pluck out with rusty tweezers. “Especially not little girls,” Mrs. Whiskers had said as a final judgment. Older now, Sarah knew this was a sexist and small-minded thing to say. It was pathological how much resentment she still harbored toward that lady and her chin hairs.

  She asked her friends at school to call her Claudia when she was eleven. It sounded elegant and strong, as a girl approaching adolescence should be. But everyone kept forgetting, so Sarah let it go. Just last year, she’d made a case for elective name-changing at school, trying to piggyback onto the burgeoning transgender rights movement. “It’s transnominalism,” she’d said to Dr. Vasquez-McQueen, her guidance counselor. It didn’t go over well. Sarah was a freshman in high school by then. It wasn’t cute to think like this anymore. She understood that completely. She’d actually understood it the same day she tried (and failed) to pull off the Claudia conversion. It had been embarrassing and lame four years earlier, and now even more so.

  There were over 1.6 million Sarahs in the world (she’d looked it up), and eight of them were at her high school—eight!—out of a student body of only fifty-two students. Plus at least a dozen more Sarahs in the lower school, and probably close to a hundred in her town’s overcrowded public school system.

  Famous Sarahs throughout history failed to inspire her. Even supposedly cool historical Sarahs couldn’t be trusted, because who knew what was real and what was fiction when it came to famous people.

  Of the not-famous Sarahs that Sarah Moss knew personally, all of them were seriously lacking. Sarah Wilmington, for example, was a senior at the Phoenix School who collected pewter figurines of dragons and unicorns, wore a variety of hand-stitched velvet capes, and wrote sad, sensual poetry, especially discomfiting, Sarah Moss felt, because everyone knew that Sarah Wilmington was a virgin. Sarah W. often hijacked the weekly all-school meetings to read her poetry out loud in that lispy voice of hers. “Juicy mangoes” and “sweat-studded skin.” It was enough to make you puke. No one at school could really look each other in the eye after a few couplets from Sarah Wilmington.

  Sarah Burke was a sophomore like Sarah Moss. She’d come to the school in the middle of freshman year, a transplant from some suburb in Connecticut that sounded identical to Edgewater, Massachusetts, their home now, though Sarah Burke loved to insist it was so different there. This Sarah had a nose so large it cast a shadow across her face, a feature Sarah Moss would have completely overlooked if Sarah Burke had been at all nice, but, and perhaps because of her nose, Sarah Burke had a cruel hatred of the world. The opposite of Sarah Wilmington, Sarah Burke had lots of sex. Sarah B. bragged that she blew random guys she met on the commuter rail to Boston. It was obvious to everybody but Sarah Burke that sex was a weapon she wielded with zero mastery, only hurting herself. She was often found crying in the girls’ bathroom as she texted novella-length screeds to her uncaring lovers. Poor Sarah Burke. Except—no, she’d once made fun of Sarah Moss’s dirty sneakers, so screw her.

  Sarah Curtis and Sarah Mitzenberg had been best friends since fifth grade. They had a secret sign language and were totally insufferable. Sarah Hunt was way too proud of all the antidepressants she was taking. Sarah Jones picked her nose in public, then examined whatever she’d excavated on her fingertips for a long time. Up close. She had Asperger’s, or something like that, it was reported, which made her easier to forgive, but the sight of her, even when not engaged in her oblivious grotesqueries, made Sarah Moss cringe.

  And then there was Sara-without-an-H Toomey. A junior, this streamlined Sara wasn’t so bad. But she wasn’t so good, either. She represented a perfect mediocrity, equally as far from being cool as being awful. Five minutes alone in conversation with this Sara left one longing for anything that evoked deep feeling—even failure, cruelty, pain!

  These were her closest namesakes, this pseudo-sorority of Sarahs. It was dispiriting, and maybe even a portent of the coming end. The signs were everywhere. Genetic diversity was in decline—not too long ago there were thousands of species of apples grown in North America alone. Now? A few dozen. There were too many people in the world, and not enough resources to sustain them, not even enough names to go around. This was what was really troubling, Sarah thought—the growing lack of creativity. How many movies were exactly like other movies? How many times could people tell the same story? The world was running out of ideas. If there was any death knell for humanity, it was not peak oil or global warming or beehive collapse but the superfluity of Sarahs.

  And her parents’ response to all this?

  “Stressosaurus Rex! Lighten up!”

  The kitchen was warm and filled with the scent of butter and sugar. Light streamed in from the east and north, easing any sharp edges in its glow. The radio was set as ever to the local public classical station, to which the Mosses contributed annually, amassing an absurd number of tote bags. The first low notes of a Wagnerian prelude lapped over each other like currents in a great river.

  “You’re just a kid, Sarah. You should be worrying about boys.”

  “Or girls? We don’t care. We love you unconditionally, no matter what.”

  “Have a brownie, kiddo. They’re perfectly undercooked, just like you like them.”

  Their abundant love was an unwavering beam of light in Sarah’s adolescent universe of doubt and dread. And it hurt more than anything else in the world that this did nothing to comfort her.

  CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS EAGER for Armageddon were always relatively calm on Last Day. Their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ would never pick some heathen festival for His rapture. No way in hell.

  And yet these faithful lovers of Christ’s promised end times were mistakenly lumped in with another faction known as Doomsdayers. A loose confederacy of pagan fundamentalists, Doomsdayers subscribed wholesale to all apocalyptic prophecies, regardless of contradiction: the almanacs of Nostradamus, the Book of Revelations, the Mayan calendar, the underwhelming turn of the millennium, the coming of Bahá’u’lláh, the prophecy in the Book of Daniel, the Frashokereti, and many more humble, homely tales spun out of that comforting nightmare that everything comes to an end.

  Like alcoholics passing for normal amid the debauchery of St. Patrick’s Day, during Last Day these apocalyptic lovers found a yearly pass to come out of their gloomy, conspiratorial hovels and party. They would take to the streets, littering city parks with their encampments, scaring away tourists with their sloppy bivouacs and homemade signs. Their children were pulled out of school, all normalcy and basic hygiene jettisoned, so that they could band together in a public display and wait for the inevitable nothing.

  What they did after, when the world did not end, was almost sweet in its resilience. It never actually mattered to these people that the prophecy failed to fulfill. Their love for the end was everlasting. And so as the month of May ended, the Doomsdayers would slowly dismantle their camps, pour sand on the fire pits, fold up the tarps, pack up their vans (they were a van-driving folk), and return to whatever temporary place—in the worldly sense—they called home. They went back to normal, to their normal, in which fear and righteousness attended the mundane business of living. Standing over a sink of dirty dishes, a battered mother of three could look with tenderness toward the coming end. All those unmade beds, the children with ringworm, the bills in arrears, would eventually be obliterated. The abuse and betrayals, the longings and resentments, all the little and big failures, would be irrelevant. They simply had to wait for the next sign, the next opportunity, to give it all up aga
in.

  It was a miracle that none of these sects had yet to absorb the likes of Karen Donovan. She certainly met the criteria for a militant Doomsdayer: her passions were scattered all over the occult; she held fast to wild misinterpretations of life’s most basic systems; she was all too willing to believe any message whose messenger burned with intensity, stoking her own easily inflamed heart; and finally, as she’d been excluded from every social group in her life so far, including the most basic unit of family, she was so hungry just to belong.

  But you had to be willing to rough it to be a member of a doomsday cult, carry your share of canned goods, weaponry, and bedding, and Karen hated walking almost as much as she hated carrying. She would rather wait forty-five minutes for the bus than walk the five blocks from her house to the local library. And though her mental landscape was scorched with traumas, both real and grotesquely imagined, the end of the world didn’t register high on her litany of fears.

  Karen belonged to a different caste of crazy. Heavily medicated and monitored by a slew of social workers her whole, well-documented life, she had a talent for causing trouble for herself even within narrow parameters, restricted to her job at the YMCA, the Boston public library system, the counseling center where her long-suffering psychiatrist, Nora, saw her pro bono, and a group home where she was currently on very thin ice. At twenty, Karen was too old to qualify for many of the social services that had sustained her as a child, and the current administration’s refusal to fund what few programs were out there for people at strange intersections of lunacy and competency limited Karen’s options to only four group homes in the state, three of which she’d already been booted from.