Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  In Laos and some parts of Vietnam, people don’t speak after the stroke of midnight on May 27. Except for those necessary to sustain life, all noise-making machines are shut down. No televisions, no radios. The night is a pool of inky silence. The following day no one speaks except to assist children, and even these directions are whispered. Doors are shut with such softness, footfalls are slow and gentle. As a prank, children will try to startle their relatives into shouting by jumping out of a dark corner or placing a sharp pin on their chair. If you are caught in such a trap, you have to pay the cunning child a small amount of money. It is very bad luck to be born on Last Day unless your mother can claim she birthed you without screaming and that you took your first breaths without a cry.

  Western Europe, like North America, has its bonfires. Italians burn their old bed linens. During the Great Wars, when nothing could be wasted, they used Last Day to cut up their old linens into bandages. Nowadays most Italians burn a sacrificial dishrag. The holiday is marked by special sales in the home-goods sections of department stores. Italians believe that sleeping in a bed whose sheets have not been changed over Last Day will result in a year of impotence.

  Hungarians burn broomsticks. The Dutch burn all the candles in their houses down to the nubs on May 27 and walk through their neighborhoods on May 28 gifting brand-new candles to their neighbors. Women in Iceland throw one piece of jewelry into the sea, lake, or river. The English wash their windows, eyeglasses, and computer screens on May 28. The Irish drink.

  Certain Nordic tribes considered trees to be earthbound angels who silently, dutifully interceded between Earth and heaven, and so sometime later, even after Christianity was introduced, people left their homes on the night of May 27 to sleep in the forest. In coastal communities, villagers would gather on beaches and wade together into the sea at midnight, where they shivered before a dawn that might never come.

  Before Communism, the Chinese lit fireworks. To better illuminate the sky, fires were snuffed out and electric lights unplugged or else black drapes were hung over windows to hide the light. If not, neighbors would nail pictures of clocks on the negligent occupants’ front door, reminding them that their days were numbered.

  Orthodox Jews do not acknowledge the holiday. Conservative Jews recognize it as a kind of Rosh Hashanah–cum–Yom Kippur for gentiles. Secular Jews do what secular Christians, Muslims, and nondenominational folks do throughout the U.S., and that is order pizza.

  Last Day was a late arrival to Japan, forced in with so much other Western culture, in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the Japanese celebrate with wild, extravagant spending sprees. Small family-run boutiques and huge big-box stores alike offer seemingly endless kegs of beer for their shoppers. Fueled by alcohol and nihilism, many Japanese households have plunged into financial ruin on this one night, causing many prudent wives to order holds on their husbands’ credit and bank accounts for that day alone.

  Consumption had little appeal for Yui, so he had to find creative ways to observe the holiday, which he was incredulous to discover was not deemed significant enough to be celebrated on the International Space Station. All day he ignored directives from Mission Control in protest. He tied his ankle to a toe bar in the Japanese laboratory, where he napped on and off. He watched the mutant baby mouse and marveled as the two heads took turns breastfeeding from their mother while floating in their plexiglass cage. After lunch and another nap, he flew, arms extended Superman-style, down to the American lab in the Destiny module and began drawing pictures on the walls in black Magic Marker.

  “What the heck, Yui?” Bear gasped. In one image, lightning ignited a great fire teeming with the arms and legs of humans. A lizard’s tail, bicycle wheels, ice cream cones, a startlingly precise handgun, all of it danced chaotically between the licking tongues of the blaze. Bear grabbed the marker out of Yui’s hands. Without reacting, without even pausing, Yui unclipped another marker from his belt and continued limning his ghastly mural.

  “Mokushi hi,” he replied. “The day of silent revelation. It is my Last Day present. I am drawing it for you, friendo.”

  “Thanks…but you can’t…”

  “I can.”

  “You’re not supposed to.” Bear hated how whiny he sounded when reproving Yui, like a high school hall monitor, a pedant and a fool.

  Yui clung to the wall with his feet. His toenails were as long as talons. He must not have cut them in weeks, Bear realized. He wondered if it was part of an experiment. It was hard to tell with Yui which choices were recalcitrant defects of character also present on Earth, which had crystallized in the pressure cooker of space, and which were in the name of science.

  Yui stopped drawing, placed the marker in his mouth, and gave himself a long scratch deep in his pants. A solemn look had sunk into his face. This mural was no act of rebellion. Or it was, but only in part. He had been struck all of a sudden with a bout of anxiety. He missed the comforts of home, his hydroponic persimmon tree, his skateboard ramp, his chauffeur, Asami, an elderly fetishist who regaled Yui with stories about the extramarital affairs he had with drag queens. He missed his brother, Tadeshi, so painfully he could not speak about it.

  “I am sad, friendo,” he pouted. He was now drawing a volcano spewing thick rivers of oozing, erotic lava. Bear squinted at the fine print on the marker, to see if it was washable or not. Yui embellished the streams of lava so that figures engaged in lurid sex acts appeared in the swooping arcs of its flow. Bear couldn’t be sure, but it looked like there was some bestiality going on.

  “In Japan, today is the day we celebrate the man who was born before man. He was born dead. What is the word in English?”

  “Stillborn?”

  “Yes. Stillborn. The gods had to start over. They went through many drafts. They failed. Sometimes man failed. Mostly man failed, but the gods were joking sometimes. They built man’s asshole over his heart. They made a man with two penises—one in front and one in back. They made a man who was too dark to see at night. These men kept getting lost every new moon, falling off mountains, breaking their necks. Then they made a man who was so light he caught fire at sunrise and burned away. All these men wanted to live, like we want to live, but they had to die. That’s why we celebrate today.”

  “That’s cool, Yui. I never knew that about Japanese Last Day.”

  “It is not exactly true. Your American friendo Val Corwin wrote it. It might be true. Perhaps.” He held the book in his arms like a teddy bear.

  “Kitsch holiday,” Svec said, appearing suddenly. Despite his thick fire hydrant of a body, he navigated the ship like a water snake.

  “We believe what has meaning for us. Or what has meaning we believe. I change my mind. But, because I am confused, I know it is true.” Yui smiled wanly.

  “JAXA has been trying to reach you,” Svec said with a tenderness that caught the other two men off guard.

  “I know,” Yui said, his gaze fastened to his mural. He was about to destroy its perfection with too many lines. He was aware of this yet he continued to draw fast, tumultuous waves undulating in the rock, in the lava, in the scorched earth bereft of man.

  “Don’t make me tell you,” Svec said.

  Yui capped the marker and let it float in the air. He pushed off the toe bar and glided toward the Kibo lab as if backstroking on the surface of water.

  “What’s wrong?” Bear asked once Yui was out of sight.

  “His brother died,” Svec said.

  “What? How?”

  “Don’t know. Didn’t ask.”

  “Whoa,” Bear said, tracing his fingers over the mural. “Poor guy.”

  “Very sad,” Svec agreed. They floated in silence for a moment. The only sound was the whir of the air ventilation system and the erratic ping of meteoroids striking the ship.

  “Everything changes,” Svec declared at last, “nothing disappears.”

/>   He squirted cleaner into a paper towel and with fast circling swipes erased Yui’s dream song of the end of the world.

  THE LIBRARY WAS a modern, one-story building made of caramel-colored bricks. It wasn’t the best-stocked branch of Boston’s library system, though the staff there tried to make up for this by programming elaborate community events. Karen had grown fond of the librarians, who either didn’t know about her past troubles at the main branch or had decided to allow her a fresh start. Either way, she was grateful and on her best behavior.

  For Last Day the librarians had transformed the main hall into an exotic street bazaar. A banner in purple and gold announced their bleak and whimsical intentions: OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO—NOW OR NEVER! Large swaths of metallic cloth hung from the ceilings and draped over bookcases, creating darkened channels of mystery between the stacks. Stalls were set up throughout the lobby, each representing a different place, both real and imaginary, which library patrons were able to visit for the first and/or last time. As expected, the stalls were set up in alphabetical order. Algeria, Alice’s Wonderland, Bethlehem, and China were all disassembling their stations by the time Karen arrived at quarter to four. Two dads and their geriatric-looking toddler walked toward the Jurassic Age, where a live iguana sat on top of a card table, placidly waiting to be adored.

  Somewhere between Mexico and Mount Olympus, Karen found Joyce, her favorite librarian, wearing a sombrero. Joyce was passing out samples of mangoes with lime salt to children. She waited until their faces puckered, then snapped a picture of them with a Polaroid. Near her, a slim Chinese man in overalls sat barefooted on the floor playing the erhu. A little girl offered the musician her already-bitten slice of mango, but the man shook his head.

  “He’s fasting,” Joyce explained to the girl.

  “What’s fasting?” The girl was around six or seven years old. She had been deposited there by a nanny, who was now napping in one of the leather armchairs by the front entrance, an Avon catalogue spread over her snoring face.

  “It means he won’t eat or drink anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “To empty himself, starting with his belly, then his heart, and finally his mind, so that he can make room for the new world that might or might not come tomorrow.”

  A bolt of lightning made of sequins was stitched on the front of the girl’s T-shirt and she picked at it avidly, flicking the tiny discs of silver and scattering them across the floor like seeds.

  “I will eat macaroni and cheese for my last supper,” she said. “My mom will eat Pinot Grigio. Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore. He can eat shit, Mommy said.”

  “Even rage deserves a place at the table,” Joyce said, patting the little girl’s head.

  Joyce was not foster-mother material, Karen knew, but she was on Karen’s short list of people who would probably host her for a week or two in the near future while she found a more permanent home. But there was time for all that later. The celebration was winding down. Crumb-strewn platters were piled high with crumpled napkins and lipstick-stained cups, the paper corpses of a once bountiful feast. Mexico had one churro left and Karen shoved it into her mouth before anyone else could get it.

  A row of potted Ficus trees marked the entrance to Xanadu. It was rigged up like a tent, or an elaborate blanket fort, constructed out of white bedsheets and hat racks. The entire Coleridge poem was silk-screened onto one of the tent walls. Several cones of pungent incense were burning on an altar. In the very center of the tent a chocolate fondu fountain bubbled, surrounded by skewers of fresh fruit for dipping. This is what Rosette means when she says the Devil is always tempting her, Karen thought. She wanted to dip her lips into the chocolate fountain and drink forever, but she needed to get onto the internet and time was running out. The system automatically logged you off after thirty minutes and made you wait ninety minutes more before allowing you the chance to go on again. The library would be closed by then.

  “I have to look something up,” Karen said, her mouth full of bananas, to Pam, her second favorite librarian, after Joyce.

  “Be careful, sweetie,” Pam warned. She was wearing a scarlet kimono, her black and gray hair swept up in a topknot. “We’ve been so busy creating this spiritus mundi that no one’s had time to police the computer room. It could look like Caligula in there for all I know.”

  Karen did not know what Caligula was but she could guess.

  The library’s computer room, a way station for homeless men locked out of their shelters for the day, was not decorated at all. A brightly lit purgatory, it reeked of mouthwash, which the men guzzled in place of real booze, and the minty urine that soaked their pants afterward. Karen found all the usual patrons, bearded men slumped like statues of slowly melting wax, rapt in listless concentration as thick cocks thrust in and out of the raw, pink bodies on their various screens. Fluorescent lights buzzed reproachfully above them. The extreme wattage was meant to discourage these men, freeing the computers up for more civic-minded research. It didn’t work. The exploding sun could not keep them from their porn.

  Karen selected the sharpest mini-pencil from the box provided, both a writing instrument and a weapon in a place like this, and sat next to a man with a hole in his cheek. Each time he swallowed, his teeth flashed for a second behind the rotted hole. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care when Karen gaped at him; another moment of devilish temptation—Rosette would be proud that she had recognized it. Karen wanted so badly to ask this man a million questions, squandering the few minutes she had left. How did he eat? Was the hole self-inflicted? A piercing gone gangrenous? Oooh, maybe it was part of a scarification ritual. But, no, she had to focus.

  Dennis.

  She couldn’t remember his last name, and so she began a search with her own name, quickly finding newspaper articles from the time of their rescue. Front page of the Herald, fifth page of the Globe. Those were the days of the early internet and much had been made of the innovations it brought to a very old form of evil. She saw her mother’s name and felt a string being plucked inside her, ringing through the center of her body. Her hands shook, clumsy on the keyboard. Karen crumpled a wad of tissue and sucked on it until it was soft enough to swallow. She saw Dennis’s father’s name and her body clanged again. But this was no time for a seizure. She searched for Dennis Conhaile—his father’s last name—and boom, there he was.

  In a few moments more she had located his address and jotted it down on a piece of scrap paper. He lived just minutes away, according to the map. He had been so close to her all this time.

  The man sitting next to her began to rub the outside of his pants as though vigorously wiping out a stain. Karen plotted the bus route as quickly as she could, and staggered back into the festival.

  Most of the people were gone now. Tables were flattened and stacked next to a pile of drapery. Joyce was directing Pam with great, sweeping arm movements, and Pam ignored her, showing the remaining patrons a picture on her phone. Karen explored the last stalls in search of more food. Between the drinking fountain and the bathrooms was a station still standing, draped all in white. Lace and chiffon and satins were pleated together in thick, voluptuous folds. It looked to Karen like an enormous wedding dress. There was nothing else except for a white plastic chair.

  “This one is Nowhere. It was my idea,” Joyce said, appearing suddenly at Karen’s side. “I wanted to capture the negative space that makes reality real. The wa in konnichiwa. I thought about making it completely empty, but we have too many elderly patrons who might collapse if they don’t have a place to sit down.” She folded up the chair and held it under her arm.

  “It’s really pretty,” Karen said. Joyce frowned. Her face had a clayey texture that furrowed deeply, almost comically, with emotion. Joyce had been trained as a rare-books librarian but had a laundry list of gripes against her colleagues in that field, and a longer list still of
vengeful machinations she’d plotted against them, only some of which she had gotten away with. She’d been exiled to this quiet outpost of the city library system as a result. It was her Elba.

  “I didn’t want Nowhere to be pretty,” Joyce confessed. “That was all Pam. I wanted it to be stark, to inspire contemplation. To push people past the anxiety and fear, the grasping and desire, and into a place of sublime acceptance at the end of the world. But then someone donated all this lace. It is really pretty, though. You’re right.” She rubbed it between her fingers a little resentfully.

  Pam waddled into the tent and unloosed her obi, where her phone was hidden. “Hey, Karen, did I show you the new love of my life?” Pam pulled up a photo of a miniature potbellied pig. It had black and white spots like a Holstein cow. Pam had driven to Vermont to buy her from a breeder. “She fits into the palm of my hand!” Pam squealed.

  “Not for long,” Joyce said. “There’s a reason gluttony is represented by a pig.”

  “Joyce’s just afraid she might feel something so base as to resemble affection,” Pam said, and skipped through dozens of shots of her pig until she found one of Joyce cradling the animal like a baby, feeding her a bottle, a beatific smile on her face. “Ha! See?” she said, thrusting the phone in Karen’s face.

  Pam would be an ideal foster mother. And her home came with an alternative-mammal pet! If tonight didn’t go well, Pam was a contender for plan B.

  “We’re ordering pizza and watching movies tonight while we try to house-train Pam’s pig, if you want to join us,” Joyce said.