Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  “To be fair, he’s probably not used to cleaning up after himself,” Bear said to Svec, after reporting the mouse incident to him. Much had been written about Yui and Tadeshi, the CEO counterpart of their video-gaming dynasty. In his attempt to be more empathetic to his annoying crewmate, Bear had taken the time to read a ridiculous, panegyric eight-thousand-word New Yorker profile of him that only succeeded in deepening the mystery. Both Yui and his twin were married to women, both fathers now, yet the two brothers maintained a shared apartment separate from their wives, and this flat, small even by Tokyo standards, had only one bedroom. The article painted them as post-modern Castor and Pollux. Strange ducks indeed, Bear thought.

  He had to be politic, to convince Svec of the severity of the situation without seeming to be culturally insensitive. The problem, he argued with Svec, was not that Yui was careless or willfully destructive, but that he simply didn’t see the messes he left behind, let alone the ramifications for the station, because living with servants had meant that such messes, for all intents and purposes, had erased themselves from his vision.

  “I’m trying to think of it as a kind of handicap, really,” Bear said.

  He and Svec had both ended up in the American lab at the same time, a rare occurrence on this ship where daily work was carried out in the seclusion of each national’s module. Yui, they assumed, was still in the Kibo laboratory, drawing in staggering detail portraits of the monotony that surrounded them—the white tunnels they’d come to think of as rooms, the arrows and instructions in various languages printed everywhere like cheerless, obsessive graffiti.

  Bear pricked his finger with a lancet and watched the blood bubble onto his skin. He flicked it gently, allowing the orb to float like a tiny red gem in the air before catching it on the plastic slide he inserted into the cholesterol meter. “Developmental delays as a symptom of ultra-wealth.”

  “Bullshit,” Svec answered. He scratched his thick beard, his fingers disappearing inside a wiry bib of black hair. This was his third six-month term on the ISS. He could not have gotten to this stage in his career if he had not known how to play well with others, but he brooked no tolerance for Bear’s particularly American tendency to wrap piss-poor excuses in a ribbon of unflagging cheer.

  “Serfs played tricks like this. They pretended to be stupid, to be lazy. But really this was their way to say ‘fuck you’ to masters.”

  “You might want to speak to him about it, Captain. Before it gets out of hand.” Bear sealed his blood smear in a plastic container, reset the meter, and handed it to Svec.

  “You can be his master if you want. I don’t want.”

  “Perhaps a report to JAXA could do the work for us. Coming from his home space agency, a reproval might inspire more respect in him. Keep him in line. “

  Svec lanced his own finger and squeezed blood to the surface. His face creased in what might have been a smile. Bear could never decipher Svec’s moods from his facial expressions. The smirk he saw now could just as easily be derision or affection. “He is only here for six more weeks.”

  “You will cry when I am gone,” Yui said, floating noiselessly into the module. He waited while the two men squirmed in their mutual embarrassment. After a long silence, Yui bowed to them.

  “This is the day that could be our last,” he said when he lifted his head. “I give you my deepest forgiveness.”

  “You mean apologies.”

  “No, friendo. Mou ii yo. Kin is shinade. All is forgiven.”

  KAREN KNELT ON the floor and pulled the trigger on a bottle of glass cleaner. The liquid looked like fireworks smashing against the window. She had thrown up from Mr. Cox’s painkillers, as she usually did, just a little. Rosette had, too. But now they were better. She watched the blasts of liquid start to run, their wild rays dripping into tentacles.

  “There’s no point in cleaning,” Karen mumbled. She let the blue cleaner stream down the window in pale streaks and walked hunchbacked to the front desk.

  “Hmmm,” Rosette replied, simultaneously texting and peeling the black reptilian skin of an avocado.

  Cleaning was the stupidest thing about life. First, with the pollen outside, she could clean and clean all day and the windows would still look dirty. The world was golden and hopeless out there. Second, Karen was not a good cleaner. She got demerits all the time at Heart House because her room was such a disaster. The staff said it was a fire hazard with all her library books and journals and newspapers stacked up everywhere, but the house was run by Lutherans, or used to be once upon a time, so there might have been a strain of puritanism in all the insistence on cleanliness.

  “And third, it’s Last Day. These are possibly the last moments on Earth. I mean, I don’t really believe this year is the year. Plus there are so many other astral conflicts with today’s position in the zodiac. It’s a day for planting, not reaping, technically. But who even cares?”

  Rosette shot her a stern look. She dragged a spoon across the soft green flesh of the avocado and fed it to Mr. Cox. “This attitude is poor. You need to be grateful. We gonna make a list. This will help.”

  Rosette gave the spoon to Mr. Cox to hold. He was very tall with broad stooped shoulders. His hair was thin and gray, pasted by sweat against his brown-spotted scalp. It was getting a little too long in the back. Rosette charged his daughters extra to bring him to a barber, then cut it herself and pocketed the cash. Mr. Cox stood up, clenched the spoon in his fist, and examined it. “Princeton,” he said.

  “That’s right, Mr. Cox. Now sit down like a good boy.”

  “Princeton!” he said again, the veins on his forehead swelling blue.

  Rosette waved her hand in his face as though shooing a mosquito, and Mr. Cox sat down. She rummaged through her purse and slapped a pad of paper down on the front desk. “The lady on TV say this is the key to happiness. They studied the brain. People who do this every day don’t get depressed. Write down a list of everything you grateful for. I’ll make one, too. You’ll see. No matter what happens, you can’t do nothing to change it. But you can face it all with a grateful heart.”

  “How many things should I list?” Karen asked.

  “As many—” Rosette began, then thought better of it. “Five.”

  The two women bent over their papers and wrote their lists.

  “So fun! Now let’s exchange,” Karen suggested. She took Rosette’s paper and read:

  Lord, I am so grateful to You for all that You have blessed me with, but today most of all for—

  Your kingdom, in Heaven and on Earth

  Pastor Alfred

  Freedom from lust

  Not being born Italian

  My mother’s cozido

  “Your handwriting is so straight and tall. Like you,” Karen exclaimed. “Mine is so loopy.”

  “Ha-ha! Like you!” She read from Karen’s list:

  Things Karen (me) is grateful for:

  Candy

  Tigers

  Kittens

  Swimming

  Rosette

  “That’s sweet of you, baby. I am grateful for you, too. Sometimes.”

  “Rose, do you think, when the end comes, that we will melt or explode or crumble or what? What does your new church think will happen to those of us who aren’t saved?”

  “I think every bad thing will happen all at once. Fires and floods, earthquakes and volcanoes, freezing nights and boiling days. But I am ready, so I don’t worry about it no more.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Karen said. Her stomach twisted hard around the remaining objects she had swallowed but not thrown up that day. She knew in this case, as many times before, that more was not better. She called upon the voice of Nora in her head and Nora agreed. She looked at Rosette roughly wiping the avocado off Mr. Cox’s face and knew that if she asked her counsel, Rosette would say the same thing
: No more. But there was another voice, hungry and hoarse and whining like a baby. One more. One more and you’ll be done. Just one more. Karen broke the eraser off Rosette’s pencil and swallowed it. Again it burned and then she felt nothing at all.

  THE CHARTER BUS grumbled in the parking lot of the Edgewater train station. Terrence stood outside it tapping on his phone. In her pocket Sarah felt her phone vibrating with his message.

  U coming? We’re waiting 4 u

  Sarah hid behind the pillars that supported the depot platform. The ground beneath her feet began to rattle. In the distance she heard the train’s approaching horn.

  I can’t. Sorry, she texted back. She watched as he received the message, slid his phone into his front jeans pocket, and knocked on the door of the bus. With a great gaseous sigh, the door opened and Terrence disappeared inside.

  What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she just fall in love with Terrence and climb into a sleeping bag with him under the stars? That was romantic, normal, and probably fun. Sarah Burke would have killed for Terrence’s attention. Sarah Burke had even tried to seduce him over spring break, but Terrence had refused. He was saving himself for love, for Sarah. And what was she doing? Obsessing over a strange man she’d met only once, a grandiose imaginary friend.

  “Train to Boston. Train to Boston. Last Day, no fare. All aboard. Train to Boston,” the conductor sang.

  Maybe she didn’t have to know the answer. Maybe she just had to show up and see what happened. That was the Last Day spirit, wasn’t it? Sarah hopped onto the train just as it began to depart from the platform. It was already so full that she had to take a seat among a group of teenage boys, all of them wearing dirty white baseball caps. They were passing around a pint bottle of liquor wrapped in a brown paper bag. They laughed and jostled each other in a way Sarah found cute, sociologically speaking.

  One of the boys noticed her watching them and offered her a sip from his bottle.

  “No thank you,” Sarah said.

  “You’re beautiful. You know that?” the boy slurred. He was a bit older than she was. His cheeks were rosy in a way that suggested skin disease. “Sweetheart,” the boy said, leaning so close to Sarah she could smell the cheapness of the booze on his breath. “You gotta boyfriend?”

  “I do.” Sarah smiled. Sort of.

  “Lucky man,” the boy replied. “You tell him I said so.”

  He turned back to face his friends, who were covering their faces, laughing into their shirts, so ashamed for and of him.

  “Don’t laugh,” the rosacea-faced guy told his buddies. “At least I take risks. That’s what today is all about.” He lit the wrong end of his cigarette, then flipped it around and burned his lips with the ember.

  “Relax, dude. She’s a seven.”

  “Not even. She’s a six, max.”

  “A blond six is a seven, bro.”

  “Guys, it’s Last Day,” Sarah’s former suitor insisted. “We should strive for eights. Eights or higher.”

  “Good call.”

  “Even O’Keefe can score a drunk-enough eight tonight.”

  “I don’t care. We’re on the road. A two is a ten on the road.”

  As the boys evaluated her worth and laughed, Sarah looked for an escape route. So many more people had gotten on at the succeeding stops that there was not even room to stand in the aisle anymore. She was stuck with these boys, who were so much easier to confront in the abstract, in her journal or in her opinion essays at school. In real life, boys like this made her feel nervous and depressed. She looked out the window of the train as it glided over a marsh—thick green grass studded by pools of water that reflected the broken blue of the sky. She didn’t want any of this to end. It was too beautiful. Even if it meant sharing the world with snot-nosed sexists in Patriots hats.

  Maybe, Sarah thought, she could create a cosmic reversal. Maybe, if she made the day memorable, it would beget a future from which she could stand and look back and remember. There would be another new day, and then another and another. For a few seconds this possibility felt real.

  But.

  What if today, with its too-nice weather and too-pretty sky, was too ordinary to be anything but profoundly, ironically doomed?

  Maybe her parents were right. Maybe she should try going on medication.

  When she got off the train, she marched into a convenience store and asked the cashier for cigarettes. “Pack of Reds,” she blurted, not entirely sure that was a thing people actually said. She could feel her entire body shaking under her clothes. “And this.” She slapped an issue of that week’s The Economist on the counter. The cover was an illustration of a dead dove, belly-up, a stock market ticker tape streaming from its beak. Outside, Sarah inhaled three drags of her first ever cigarette and promptly threw up.

  “What am I going to do?” she said.

  Sarah’s psyche was in its chrysalis, a place where all the inventions of her childhood, her desires and opinions and perceived truths, were being dismantled, then liquefied into a putrid ooze out of which her adult character would eventually take shape. But before she could emerge from that glorious unfiltered roux of teenage narcissism, she would have to spend hours that added up to days of very sincere, very insane, unattractive but psychologically necessary navel-gazing. All sorts of thoughts sprang delightfully from this moody introspection. Some of them—for example, that algebra was pointless for all but computer programmers and should be cut from the school curriculum—she had believed passionately, then dismissed later. Others cycled more quickly through the inchoate intellectual mill in less than a day, such as I will never be the kind of girl who gets pedicures. (Until she did, and loved it.) There were ideas she cherished and would have nurtured for the rest of her life, like the realization that she was wanted into existence by two people in love, wanted even before she was born. And then there were overzealous opinions that would later embarrass her: that Kerouac was the Blake of the twentieth century. The unifying thread in all her meditations was the seriousness she applied to them.

  So when a reckless mix of fables, myths, movies, and self-importance presented her with one particular idea at around noon of Last Day, Sarah felt deeply and instantaneously that this was right and true: if I have sex with Kurt tonight, the world will not end.

  It made a comforting kind of sense—how about supplanting a fear of the apocalypse with a new set of more tangible anxieties? Like, would he even want to have sex with her? How would she broach the subject? What was she expected to do? Were there prescriptive movements and sounds she should perform? Would it hurt? Would she hemorrhage like courtly maidens on their wedding nights? Was she pretty enough to pull this off? What if Kurt wasn’t there? What if he had made other plans? What if she got pregnant, or herpes, or both? Wasn’t it tradition not to use a condom on Last Day? What if at this very moment he was in Buenos Aires? What would she do then?

  She closed her eyes and saw a vision of Kurt beside her on the beach, a pink sun emerging from the ocean. Watching the sunrise was cheesy, she knew. There were so many nauseating movies and TV shows and commercials about Last Day set against the backdrop of a shy but indefatigable rising sun. It was the universal symbol of the holiday, representing the hope that life would go on. (Duh.) It wasn’t the sun’s fault that sunrises had become a cliché. Natural phenomena were always getting co-opted as symbols for causes that had nothing to do with them. It happened to rainbows and lightning and shooting stars. So why not, Sarah reasoned, do the thing that everyone else said was so special and watch the sun rise on May 28? Maybe doing this was so trite that it actually doubled back to being cool. And Sarah had never watched the sun rise over Last Day, and never having done something before seemed as good a reason as any to do it.

  YUI GRABBED THE cholesterol meter from Svec and took his own reading. “Who will be master of all men now?” he said, his eyebrows arched. />
  Yui had inaugurated an ersatz Olympics with a game of space darts the moment the previous crew had departed. With a woman on board, the atmosphere had been less competitive. Bear had known and respected Linda for many years, but he had to admit that she wafted a relentlessly feminine air of consensus-building and kinship throughout the ship. As soon as she and the other two astronauts were gone, Yui burst out of what little shell was restraining him and the games began.

  It was hard to prove one’s prowess with nothing weighted to lift. There could be none of the push-up contests both Bear and Svec had grown to love in the military. So the three men relied on vision tests, space darts, chess matches, and even cholesterol readings in their not-quite-kidding quest to assert personal and national dominance over each other.

  Yui frowned at his daily cholesterol reading. “Typically, Japanese people have very low cholesterol,” Yui said. He rubbed his soft, protruding belly. “I am not typical Japanese.”

  “You are not typical nothing,” Svec replied.

  Bear wrote down their results in the notebook where all their competitions were recorded. Instead of their names, Yui had drawn penises in the colors of each man’s flags (the white and red penis of Japan was pornographically large and erect while those of the U.S. and Russia were flaccid and small). Svec was in the lead almost across the board, though Yui was a formidable threat in chess; cholesterol was the one category where Bear had the other two squarely beat. He stuck the notebook back to the Velcro strip on the wall.

  “Sixty-nine HDL, Yui. Not too bad,” he said, trying not to gloat.

  Svec and Yui were already absorbed in a game of speed chess they played with Velcro chess pieces on the galley table.

  “Got to go do that video conference,” Bear said to them as he exited.