Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  crazy busy indulging artless drunks their shamrocks and roses and yin yangs. possibly ruining lives. wicked cool. you??

  Later that fall when Sarah had planted a strategic line about Emily in her email, Kurt reported that they had broken up.

  disappointed her to death, he wrote. only way to get her to leave. otherwise you stay stuck forever. she doesn’t even realize it wasnt me who disappointed her—her imagination of me did.

  Bummer, Sarah wrote back, a word she would never use in real life. Cool, slightly archaic, self-consciously retro, totally blasé. She took this opportunity to copy and paste the final draft of her essay for Dr. Vasquez-McQueen’s sexuality practicum (peppered with strategic spelling and grammar mistakes, to make it appear like her own spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness rant). It was a test—to see if he would get weird and/or dismiss her. Also, he’d once told her, apropos of nothing, that the TVs he’d grown up with, when disconnected from their antennae, had produced a flurry of black and white dots (a snowstorm effect Sarah had only ever seen replicated on the digital screens of her lifetime) and that this static contained one percent of the big bang. He had not clarified what that meant—contained 1% of the Big Bang—but he had honored the birth of the universe with a rare use of capitalization, which made Sarah’s heart thump so loudly she could hear it.

  Kurt did not respond for three months, almost four. In that time Sarah sustained a mood of bridled alarm; his response times usually ranged between two days to two months. Not that she was measuring. She didn’t need to. She had looked at his emails so often and for so long that they were burned into her memory. All she had to do was close her eyes and the beaming white screens appeared on the backs of her lids, where she could see with perfect clarity the always blank subject lines and the dates of his pithy, precious missives.

  So she panicked, waited another day, and then another, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and wrote to him in late March, just two months ago now, deploying a calculated terseness, a deliberate absence of capitalization, so he would know just how cool and fine she was, what a not-big deal it was, this silence, his silence.

  how’s tricks, stranger?

  She considered, even wrote a draft, without punctuation, but couldn’t bear to send it.

  The next day he responded. sara my dear you are too good for this world.

  Who said things like that? No one, Sarah was sure. Kurt was the most fascinating creature she’d ever met. He’d spelled her name wrong but she didn’t care. Reading this one sentence over and over, she’d never been so sure that she was doomed, that everyone, the whole world, was inescapably, officially doomed, and coming from Kurt, this eulogy was glorious.

  AFTER THE DAILY inspection, Bear microwaved some coffee for Svec and himself and prepared Yui’s pouch of matcha so that all three beverages would be hot and ready to drink by the time they gathered in the galley for their debriefing with Mission Control. His strange mood of the last few weeks was now infecting his dreams, a fact he would have ordinarily ignored if he had not been assigned the task of recording his dreams for a NASA psychologist who was doing heavens-knew-what with the information. Just before waking, he’d had a nightmare that was following him through his morning now. In the dream, he was at summer camp, on a bunk bed thousands of miles above the earth. Trapped in a cycle of paralytic analysis, he wondered, Am I an adult or a child? Should I climb down or stay here and radio for help? He ran through a series of disaster inventories and decision trees—his dreams could not relieve him of this responsibility to rational thought; he was an astronaut even while unconscious. He determined, at last, in the credulity of dreams, that he was suspended in a middle-gravity zone where the rules shifted often and without warning and that everything he knew, everything he’d studied, was no longer relevant.

  Bear thought the dream was psychologically significant, illuminating his fears about what might happen with the subtle power dynamic that had emerged, leaving Svec, Yui, and him alone. But Svec had put a moratorium on the discussion of dreams.

  “Nekogda. We will die of boredom.”

  “I had a dream,” Yui announced as he floated over to them later that morning. “I rented the special observatory deck in the Tokyo Tower,” he went on, ignoring Svec’s thick brows pinching toward the center of his forehead. “The floor is covered by people. All naked. Lying like tatami mats. Covering the entire floor. I do not have to yell at them because they know they are under my command. I go down on my hands and knees and do a somersault. Then another and another until I cross the whole floor like this. When I get up, I bow, wave my hands, and say, ‘Thank you very much. I am finished now.’ The people say nothing. They will not move until I leave. I know this because it is my dream.”

  Svec gazed out of a porthole, watching the sun being snuffed out behind the earth like the ember of a cigar. “Dreams are garbage of human mind,” he pronounced.

  “I am not telling you another part of the dream. I cannot.”

  “Good,” said Svec, wiping his mouth and hands.

  “It is too dangerous for me to tell you. You would not be able to sleep or eat or think or work if I told you.”

  “Today’s agenda is ridiculously packed,” Bear said. “We’d better get to it.”

  “Our countries could go to war.” Yui chewed thoughtfully on strips of dehydrated salmon. “If I told you.”

  “He reminds me of my son,” Svec said, not without a tinge of affection. “Relentless.”

  “No, I will not tell you. I must not. I care about peace,” Yui declared, and somersaulted the whole way to the exercise station.

  Bear saw on his schedule that he had finally gotten the okay from Mission Control to fix what they referred to as the “extra” CDRA. Both CDRAs were necessary at all times; excess CO2 in the air affected mood as well as mental acuity, Bear had argued, but NASA contended that the effects were “negligible” and that the levels were acceptable.

  Technically, this was a victory for Bear, who’d been lobbying for permission to service the machine for over two months, but the feeling of triumph was short-lived and he quickly slipped into a state of quiet resentment. He worked alone for hours, dismantling the large machine one piece at a time, taking care to seal each tiny part in a series of ziplock bags tethered nearby or affix them to a large magnetic board. The station had a habit of swallowing small objects, and once lost, there was no sensible way to search for them in the floating chaos of microgravity. The sounds of the ISS, grating and constant, were somewhere between a factory and a hospital in terms of ambience. The idea struck Bear that some music would be soothing while he worked, then a moment later he forgot about the music and kept working in silence, only for the thought to resurface after another hour.

  Again he counted the weeks he had left in this mission, breaking them into days, hours, and then individual tasks he had left to complete. How many more urine samples would he collect from now until departure? How many more hours would he log on the treadmill? It was a depressing arithmetic.

  Another hour passed like this, in a silence scraped by groaning filters and fans. When he reached a benchmark in the repair process nine minutes earlier than planned, Bear felt a surge of dopey joy. He did some quadriceps stretches and tried again to do the three-minute breathing exercise he had learned in his meditation challenge that was supposedly so therapeutic. But the good feeling evaporated as quickly as it arrived, and Bear felt worse than ever.

  Bear liked to describe himself as easygoing, rarely angry. He believed he was among a minority of humans organically hardwired toward contentment, and that the unhappiness of others was a maladaptive trait inherited from primitive ancestors—to hold on to bad memories at the expense of the good ones. And yet he had woken up this morning—at that artificially contrived moment they called morning—with such rage at his surroundings it felt like a fever, an angry longing for Earth consuming him with a
quality of light, aching, and burning, both particle and wave.

  At last Bear discovered the faulty valve in the CDRA and was pleased it was something simple enough that he could make a new one in the 3D printer right away. He sent his design for the part to the printer, then again found himself imagining a catastrophe that would require him to deorbit immediately. A medicine-resistant bacteria, one that significantly impacted his ability to function—that would do the trick. What symptoms would he be willing to endure for this to happen? Hyperemesis? He hated puking so much. Maybe an upper respiratory infection would be enough, if accompanied by severe chest pain. Ideally it would be quick, acute, and a manageable amount of pain soldiered by him alone. He didn’t want anything to happen to the station—no fires or breakdowns of essential systems. The success of the ISS was too important to mankind, this was one of his core beliefs. The only other option besides personal illness was the death of an immediate family member on Earth….

  “Your face,” Svec remarked, sounding a little unnerved at the sour expression on the ever-smiling American. “Your health? No good today?”

  “Perhaps our Bear-o might be constipated,” Yui suggested. He was upside down from the position Svec and now Bear had chosen to orient themselves, a thick hardcover comic book in his hands. “Perhaps our friendo might need to reach inside anus to—”

  “Nope. Regular as always, Yui.”

  Svec was making what felt like an endless series of tiny plastic coils on the 3D printer. “You almost done with that, comrade?” Bear asked him. Bear felt that because his work today on the CDRA would improve the CO2 levels for the whole ship, benefiting them all, his job should have priority on the printer. “I only have one small part to print. How many do you have left, Svec?”

  “Thirty, maybe thirty-five more.”

  “I am concerned about our American friendo,” Yui said. He closed his book and held it against his heart. “I look at you and I wonder, Why he is so sad?”

  “I think we’ll all feel a lot better once I get this second CDRA up and running, friendo. And I only need to print this one part to finish up….”

  Bear stifled a yawn while waiting for Yui to search his vast, largely libidinous vocabulary bank for the right words. Yui’s fluency in English, while advanced by any metric, still lagged behind the lightning field of his mind. He refused to make a mistake or be misunderstood when he spoke, so sentences issued from his mouth with impeccable care, the delivery painstakingly slow.

  “No, I don’t think that is it,” Yui replied. A series of lewd hypotheses cycled rapidly through Yui’s brain. When at last he spoke, he looked at Svec, not Bear: “Commander, perhaps you did not remember to brush your teeth before you kissed your little Bear good night?”

  “Nyet.” Svec shook his head. “Am thoughtful lover. Is known across globe.”

  Svec sipped kvas from a plastic pouch and waited patiently as the printer issued coil after coil. He looked to Bear like a coffee shop folk singer, with his thinning gray hair plaited in a French braid that floated off his neck.

  “Not now, boys,” Bear said, his voice wilting. He was in no mood for the locker room antics that Yui spewed so automatically it seemed a reflex, and that Svec, as commander, did nothing but indulge. Svec derived no pleasure from policing grown men, and so saw no benefit to censuring Yui, who was not an astronaut. This trip on the ISS was an expensive research vacation for the crude savant, one he had paid forty million dollars and trained for six months to attend.

  An almost perfectly circular break in the white clouds opened over the coast of New England. Bear spotted the battered, imbecile forehead of Maine and, a click below, the palsied arm of Massachusetts.

  “You guys ever been to Boston?” Bear asked.

  “Ah, yes, Boston,” Svec said, a memory returning suddenly. “I go once. Very pretty city. Spoke at conference at Garvard. Big lobsters, big as my arm. Ate three for dinner. Met beautiful woman. She own dry-cleaning business. She and I had fun for night. All pubs have televisions. This I did not like.”

  “Harvard is in Cambridge, not Boston.”

  “True,” Svec said.

  “Cambridge isn’t so bad. The way the necrotic tissue surrounding a tumor is not as bad as the tumor.”

  “Very interesting,” Svec said. “The sunshine American astronaut has dark spot after all?”

  He did. If there was a nucleus for all of Bear’s pain as an adult, it was in Boston. His older sister had moved there after college, gotten married, had two daughters, then drank herself into near psychosis after her younger daughter died. Once their mother died, this same elder sister moved their disabled younger sister from their childhood ranch house in San Diego to a group home nearby in Boston, ostensibly so she could visit more easily. Bear had disagreed with this move, and he doubted very much that his older sister ever made good on her intention to visit their younger sister, but he could not bring himself to confront her. They’d been through too much already. It was better to swallow his opinions and anxieties and quietly foot the bill for it all.

  “It’s too cold there,” Bear said.

  Svec sneered. “You cannot say to native Russian.”

  Yui said, “Boston is the home city of my favorite writer and illustrator. Val Corwin.”

  “Never heard of him,” Bear said.

  “Here.” Yui thrust his book into Bear’s hands. It was a galley copy, bound in a plain white cover free of ornamentation. Yui’s assistant had secured an advance copy just before the launch. The type was in Japanese, but Yui explained that it had been translated from the original English edition. “I cannot believe you do not know who he is. He is one of the most popular in Japan.”

  Bear and Svec looked at the pictures. A pregnant woman watched in horror as the lower half of her body liquefied. Each panel moved closer to her agony as her body and that of her fetus became a dangling tendril of mucus. It was, Bear thought, unnecessarily grotesque.

  “Ha-ha,” Svec laughed. “This comic book? For children? Can’t be. Picture very—how do we say? Corrupt and bizarre?”

  “No, definitely not for children,” Yui said.

  “Well, I’m heading back to the CDRA. I’ll print this missing part later, I guess. Hopefully we will all be feeling a lot better soon.”

  “Have not been feeling bad, comrade.” Russians were loath to complain, as Roscosmos docked them pay for ingratitude. So maybe he was lying. It couldn’t be Bear alone who was feeling off. Bear looked to Yui for the truth.

  “How about you, friendo? You been experiencing any headaches lately?”

  “I feel…” Yui thought a long time. “Extraordinary. Ten years younger. We are weightless, friendos. Nothing can keep us down. Now I will go and play with the two-headed mouse.”

  “Don’t be crass. Please,” Bear said. Without some reining in, Yui could quickly become a hazard on the station. If Svec wouldn’t take this duty seriously as commander and nip his behavior in the bud, Bear was not afraid to step up and be the adult.

  “I promise that I am not joking, Bear-u.”

  “Yes. True,” Svec said. “Mutation. Born this morning. Your NASA very excited. You don’t know?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Bear said.

  “Perhaps you should work a little less, friendo,” Yui said, bowing to him. “You would see more.”

  Through the porthole Bear saw clouds swirling over North America, their long white skeins pointing like the thin spectral fingers of a ghost casting spells.

  HISTORICALLY, LAST DAY was celebrated with a community pyre. It is legend that in Egypt stray dogs were corralled for the sacrifice, and in parts of southeastern Europe, a stillborn baby was included in the pyre to prevent dark spirits from repopulating the newly evacuated earth. On top of these embers townsfolk would toss their most beloved article of clothing, a perfectly useful, well-conditioned saddle, a warm, cle
an quilt. The offering was not a bargain to forestall death but rather a tiptoeing into the greater sacrifice possibly awaiting, to prepare the living for the coming of the end.

  Now, for most Americans, throwing some hot dogs on the grill was considered an adequate homage to the pyres of antiquity, and piñatas stood in for live animal sacrifice. What was once a communal celebration, Last Day became more personal and private, confined to one’s own backyard. But some cities were making a return to large public observances, such as the Brooklyn Do or Dye. On May 27 volunteers built a series of stations throughout Prospect Park in which New Yorkers could screenprint a T-shirt with a confession to be worn all day on May 28:

  I pray that my good friends fail

  Hey, Bill: EAT SHIT AND DIE

  The condom broke

  He hits me

  I told my best friend I had an abortion to get her sympathy

  It doesn’t get better

  Will you please hug me please

  A macabre swap meet was held annually at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, where people brought a cherished object—“the one thing you would take to the grave,” the invitation commanded—and left it on a table for a perfect stranger to claim. Someone’s childhood teddy bear might be traded randomly and anonymously for another’s illicit love letter. The wait list to be included in this somber gala event was over two years long, and the price of admission was five hundred dollars and a quart of blood donated at a designated blood bank one week prior to the event.

  Minneapolis had an annual Zombie Parade, a ritual adhering to the discomfiting fiction that, somehow, some people would survive the end of the world (never a tenet in any culture’s interpretation of the day) and that those survivors, for inexplicable reasons, would be transmogrified into movie monsters. The parade ended with a twelve-hour dance-off-cum-fundraiser for the homeless, which had raised over three million dollars to date.

  In Boston, a city subject to wild vicissitudes of weather well into the month of May, a city where joy not earned by a measure of pain was not to be trusted, there existed a singular Last Day celebration. Each year for more or less twenty-four hours, from whatever time they felt like opening on May 27 to whatever time they closed on May 28, the staff at Redemption Tattoo inked free of charge anyone willing to wait in line. The catch was that you could not choose your tattoo. You were at another man’s mercy, and the men who worked at Redemption were notorious drunkards even on non-holidays.