“I haven’t seen her in years,” Kurt explained to Sarah as they parked in front of a convenience store. Kurt and Sarah searched the empty shelves of the store for a decent bottle of wine. They could only find beer, which he knew would disappoint her. As if on cue, the Last Day standard “I Just Called to Say I’m Sorry” by Winston Wonderful began playing on the radio from crackly speakers in the store. Kurt took Sarah’s hand and squeezed it. He wasn’t going to waste his whole day on a scavenger hunt, so he grabbed a six-pack of the most expensive beer in the store and got in line to pay.
The old woman in front of them was trying to pay for her cigarettes with loose change. Her hands shook violently as she separated the pennies, nickels, and dimes on the counter. Her hair was short, thick, and white, half of it a poof of curls, the other half flattened from sleeping.
“Let me buy those for you,” Kurt said, slapping a twenty-dollar bill down on the counter. “A Last Day good deed.”
“I want a lottery ticket, too,” the old woman demanded. Her face was blotchy and bruised and her breath smelled like mold.
“And a lotto ticket for my friend here,” Kurt said to the clerk.
“A quick pick,” the lady added. “I don’t have no luck with my own numbers.”
“She didn’t even say thank you,” Sarah said after the woman left.
“It was sadder to watch her count coins.” He paid the clerk, who was watching TV behind a plexiglass barrier.
They walked back outside to his motorcycle. Kurt stuffed the beer into the backpack he was returning. “I’m glad you’re coming with me,” he said, and slung the backpack over his stomach. “Once we get rid of all this stuff, we’ll pick something up for dinner. And eat it on the beach.”
The girl beamed back at him a dizzy smile. The bright-eyed elixir of teenage adoration made him feel smarter and more confident. Maybe a better man could do without all that, but not Kurt, not today. He had learned through much trial and error that it didn’t matter what happened in the end, so he might as well surrender to his own idiocy. He took Sarah’s chin in his hand and kissed her.
It wasn’t Sarah’s first kiss, but she decided right there to rewrite history so that from now on it would be. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of this convenience store, it was Last Day….His lips were warm and very dry and did not linger long. A carbonated tingling erupted behind Sarah’s kneecaps. Her wrists fell numb, useless.
* * *
—
MARY’S SISTER HAD just returned from another one of her pilgrimages. She was gaunt inside her pale gray T-shirt, and her jeans looked like a sack her body had rolled into. Kurt held her for a long time when he saw her. Neither one of them spoke, until Kurt pulled away, a sad look on his face, and said, “Jesus, Sarah. When was the last time you ate something?”
“I have some plums. They’re mealy and taste like paper. It’s not their season yet. I shouldn’t have bought them.”
Kurt shook his head. “This is Sarah. It’s a day full of Sarahs, I guess….”
“Sarah with an H?” Sarah Moss blurted out.
“It’s the least interesting fact about me,” her namesake answered. She took the younger girl’s hand and squeezed it as hard as her bony fingers were able.
The only feature she shared with her sister, Mary, Sarah thought, comparing the figure in front of her to the photograph she had seen earlier, was their nose, though on the elder sister it looked ugly. This other Sarah had unnerving blue eyes set far apart on her face, giving her the vigilant look of an animal.
“Could I have a glass of water?” Sarah Moss asked.
“Of course,” the woman answered and walked as though in great pain toward the kitchen. Her black hair reached down to her waist and was streaked with white strands.
The apartment she had sublet was unfurnished except for a long wooden picnic table on which she had arranged a series of photographs.
“So you were in Asia this time?” Kurt lifted a photograph from the table and winced at what he saw. Sarah inched closer to him and looked over his shoulder. All the photos were portraits of people peering directly into the camera. The one Kurt held was full of little children squatting in a darkened doorway. Their mouths were ringed with erupting pustules, and tears streamed clean tracks down the filth of their faces.
“That one’s called The Impetigos. Isn’t the light perfect?” the other Sarah called from the kitchen sink.
Kurt returned it to the table and picked up another: a man with a mangled half of an arm held a chicken by the throat with his other, intact hand.
The other Sarah handed Sarah Moss a mason jar of lukewarm water teeming with particles. Sarah Moss sipped it warily as she watched the older woman stack the photos to make room for her guests at the table. “That man lost his arm as a teenager. He chased a soccer ball into a thicket where an unexploded ordnance was waiting for him. There are thousands of them left over from the Vietnam War.”
“You work for an NGO?” Sarah Moss asked.
“No, I don’t believe in activism. The idea that people’s lives are supposed to get infinitely better is the very barrier holding our species back from true fulfillment.”
“Sarah’s got a trust fund,” Kurt quipped. “So she can afford to be radical.”
“Not anymore.” She lowered herself to the floor and folded her long, willowy legs into a tight lotus. “I spent the last of it this year. I bought this girl out of sexual slavery.” She reached up for the cigarette Kurt had just lit for himself, and without looking or even thinking about it he gave it to her.
“She was sixteen and had a severely lazy eye. I mean, the thing looked like it was going to roll out of her face at any moment. That one lazy eyeball had seen more in its sixteen years than most of us see with both eyes in a lifetime. It had had enough, was ready to abandon ship. ‘Let the other guy do the witnessing,’ is what that eye was saying. I liked her lazy eye. I liked her, too. I took some amazing photographs of her, then erased the data from my camera. I wanted to stipulate that this prostitute never wear sunglasses again, but my Thai is fluent only to a four-year-old, and you can’t make stipulations when bargaining over human lives. I paid a gigantic sum to her pimp. Emptied my trust fund.”
“That’s a kind of activism,” Sarah said.
“I just wanted to see what would happen. I wasn’t trying to save her.”
“No one would accuse you of that,” Kurt said, lighting another cigarette he kept partially cupped in his hand, as though hiding it from her.
“What happened?” Sarah Moss asked.
“She went back to her pimp. Not even a week later. But it was my goal to get my bank balance down to zero, so I succeeded.”
“Sweetheart,” Kurt began, but the conclusion of that thought was too sad for him to finish. He excused himself to the bathroom.
What was the attraction? Sarah wondered. This elder Sarah was frightening and came off as even more asexual than she was. Then, as if she’d read the question gleaming in Sarah Moss’s eyes, the woman offered this:
“It might not appear so, but I do love that man. In my own way. And he loves me, though he can’t admit it. Not anymore. It’s like the darkness within him recognizes the darkness within me. A negative namaste.”
Sarah wanted to run out the door that very moment, to leave this witch forever, but she would not let this woman win Kurt’s love. Not today. She picked up a photograph and asked about it, trying to change the subject. “What’s going on in this one?” It was a picture of a dead tiger hog-tied to a stick being carried by two slight, stern-faced men.
“That was in Indonesia. That tiger killed a little girl in the village. The villagers took it really personally, which I found fascinating. We see natural disasters as blameless, senseless tragedies. Typhoons and earthquakes are emotionally fraught but simple at the same time. Not like the bulk of life�
��s traumas, caused by some human being’s fear. But these villagers regard the realm of nature on the same level as any other human endeavor. So when nature strikes, they first propitiate the gods they offended and then seek vengeance. They stalked that tiger for a month before they caught and killed him. I was there the day they took his corpse on a parade for everyone to see.”
“How did they know which tiger did it?”
“I wondered the same thing. Animal faces are as distinguishable as human faces to them. They’re all neighbors. They were confident it was him.”
“I feel bad for him. If it was a him,” Sarah Moss said. “The tiger.”
“The only thing left of the girl was her arm. The tiger left it at the edge of the village as a kind of offering. Like a house cat leaves a dead mouse on the doorstep. It was a hell of a parade.”
“I bet.” Sarah Moss wanted to cry. It was taking all her strength to maintain this posture of cool immunity.
Kurt returned from the bathroom and it was obvious right away to both women that he had been crying. “What do you say, Sarah? Should we order a pizza? My treat.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, gazing up at him. “No.”
“You got to eat something. You’re disappearing.”
“I know.” She unfolded her legs and gathered them into herself. She rose slowly from the floor and walked her imperious, exhausted body over to the window, where she sat again and stared. For a long time no one said anything. Sarah Moss began flipping over the photographs so that she and Kurt wouldn’t have to see them anymore. When she was done, she looked at Kurt and tapped an imaginary watch on her wrist, telling him that she was done with this adventure. He smiled at her. That’s what he had brought her there to do, to let him know when it was time to leave. Without her, he would have stayed all night, trapped in this abyss.
“So,” Kurt said. “I wanted to return these to you.” He unlatched the fringed top of the backpack and took out the can of Mary’s ashes.
“Don’t,” Sarah said from the window.
“They don’t belong to me.” Kurt pulled out the items one by one. “It wasn’t right for me to keep them.”
“Guilt is a waste of time,” she started to argue. “It’s a—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know your intellectual arguments very well and I don’t need to hear them again. I feel bad and have felt bad for years now because she made this painting for you, and I didn’t think you deserved it. I didn’t want you to have it. I didn’t even want you to have her fucking ashes. So I took it all from you. Even though I couldn’t look at it, either. It was under my bed, for Christ’s sake.”
“It doesn’t matter—” she groaned.
“Yes it does. She loved you. She made this for you. I was spiteful and selfish and I’m sorry. That’s why I’m returning it to you.”
He placed the painting on the floor and slid it across the room to where she stood by the window. Sarah Moss was scared that the woman would do something horrible, like throw the painting out the window or drop her pants and pee on it. But she didn’t do anything; she didn’t even look at it. She continued to stare at the sky.
Sarah Moss looked out the same window. The uppermost branches of a tree were wiggling a little in the wind. Beyond them, nothing.
“Happy Last Day. Until night falls.” Kurt took Sarah Moss by the hand. “Come on. We’re leaving.”
“Wait.” The other Sarah pulled herself out of her reverie and walked up to Kurt. She put her hand on his cheek, and kissed him. It was a long, slow kiss that Sarah Moss could see involved tongue.
“Thank you, Kurt,” she said at last. “I’m grateful that you took such good care of these things. I’ve moved around so much over the years. I’ve acquired and lost so many possessions, some of them, I’m loath to admit, quite meaningful to me. There’s no way I could have been a good steward of her ashes and effects. But you were. And I’m truly grateful.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kurt whispered, his eyes tearing up again. “You’re too good for this world, sweetheart.”
“We all are, Kurt.” She opened the door for them. “Goodbye.”
The door shut behind them with a bang followed by the clatter of multiple locks.
The air outside had cooled quite a lot. The sun was not ready to set but its light was thinner, almost watery, as it prepared to swim away.
“Thank you for coming with me,” Kurt said, wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. “She was always weird before, but not like that, not so—”
“Sadistic?”
“Maybe.” Kurt remembered the last time he’d slept with her. She’d said things he shuddered to recall now.
Sarah fished her sweatshirt out of her bag and wrapped it tightly around her body. She looked up at the wan blue of the sky. A thick tower of cloud was disintegrating fast like something on fire. If there was proof of anything mystical—answers, explanations—she couldn’t think of a dumber place to look for it than the sky.
“IT’S FUNNY,” BEAR said, “she doesn’t look all that far away.”
“I am surprised every time I come here and see that she is so close.”
The green tangled veils of the aurora borealis rippled over the North Pole. The ISS made another lap around the world.
“He was supposed to be here,” Yui said, following Bear to the galley.
“I read that.”
Yui and Tadeshi had both trained to become guests in space. Their ultimate goal was to go together. Tadeshi, who was six minutes older, had offered ridiculous sums to JAXA, NASA, and Roscosmos to allow for the first time not one but two non-astronauts concurrently on the mission. Even the desperately underfunded European Space Agency had refused their offer. The Yamamoto twins had never been separated like this before. They were a study in cooperation. They had been since they were born, and probably before then. Yui would not drink from his mother’s breast until his brother latched onto the other. When the boys started their schooling, their tutors learned early on to give them identical grades, an easy indulgence as their test scores often were identical, or near enough. The woman who became Tadeshi’s wife had first approached Yui for a date. She’d been a silent stalker of his at university, claiming that she alone could tell the twins apart from across the street, a boast that was probably true given the amount of time she spent staring at them. Yui had spent their only date combing through her friends’ online profiles to find a girl he could claim was prettier, confabulating a story that he liked her friend instead, so that she would like Tadeshi better. In a standoff of kindness, each of the two brothers, both engaged, stalled his wedding plans so that the other could have the honor of marrying first and offering his bride their mother’s wedding ring. In their company, they assumed separate roles—Yui was the artist and Tadeshi the businessman—but drew the same salary. They were competitive only in their ability to surrender and sacrifice for the other. When Tadeshi won the first seat on ISS Mission 47-48, his brother was overjoyed that he would not have the burden of taking it from him. Then, two weeks before they were to fly to Moscow, Tadeshi tore his Achilles tendon getting out of a Jacuzzi.
“I demanded to see the MRI. I thought Tadeshi was faking, to give me the trip. He was not faking. But the injury was intentional. Definitely. I know.”
Svec had smuggled several pints of vodka on board, which he now offered to Yui. He had been saving them for his last night on the ship—this would be his last mission in space, he was planning to announce his retirement once he landed—but the death of a twin certainly called for drinks, no matter what that punctilious American said. The vodka was hidden among all the other beverages in soft plastic pouches, suggesting some outside cooperation with the team that had packed the Soyuz that had brought them here.
“It might not—” Bear stammered when he smelled the alcohol on the other men’s breath. “I mean, I suppose it’s okay, o
n Last Day. But don’t you think drinking, and whatnot, will interfere with our mineral balance tests?”
Svec swigged without apology. “This one here”—he pointed at Bear—“was not supposed to be on mission, either. Greg Koehler was my left-seat man. He got sinus infection before launch.”
“That’s true,” Bear admitted. “Greg’s a good man. A great astronaut. I feel sorry for him, missing out on this.”
“Greg is like brother to me,” Svec said.
“Do you have a brother?” Yui asked Bear.
“Two sisters,” Bear said.
Yui sobbed, but without gravity his tears could not fall, forcing him to blink like a maniac in a grand mal seizure and blot his face constantly with a towel.
“My older sister lives in Boston. My younger sister just moved into a group home there recently. She’s special needs.”
“What does she need?” Yui asked.
“She has Down syndrome.”
“My son,” Svec began, then stopped. A meniscus of water pooled over his eyes. It took very little—the opening bars of “Ochi Chernye,” a single line of Pushkin—added to a few milliliters of vodka to make Svec cry. He threw the remainder of the empty carcass of his liquefied dinner in the trash and pulled a laminated index card out from under his shirt. It was held in place by two clamps attached to a chain of tiny metal beads around his neck, like a Christian scapular. “He made,” Svec said, smirking again in that expression Bear now realized was involuntary, not ironic. On the paper, printed in messy Cyrillic scrawl, was the name and birth date of every single man and woman who had ever orbited the earth in space, Svec explained. “Maxim cannot be in school. He is not normal. But loves astronauts. Knows everything. More than me! He can recite this list without looking. Like machine.”
Last Day Page 15
