Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  “Oh.” Bear held the plastic sheet in his hand and smiled. “He’s autistic.”

  “He is good boy!” Svec slapped his hand hard on the table.

  “Tadeshi choked to death.”

  “Terrible. Terrible.”

  “He was alone. Eating at his desk. I suppose, eating too fast. Why was he rushing? I wonder.”

  “Best not to think about it.”

  “He had a mole. On his left buttocks. I do not have this mole.”

  “Okay, Yui. It’s going to be okay—”

  “If the crack in the buttocks is the equator, Tadeshi’s mole would be somewhere near Madagascar.”

  “Which orientation are you using?” Svec asked.

  “All right, fellas, let’s be careful with this stuff.” Bear took the vodka pouch from Yui and saw that it too was already empty. Yui and Svec laughed and opened another pouch that they passed back and forth to each other. Ripples of laughter flowed into rushes and within minutes they were out of control.

  “Svec, you have girls, too. Daughters, am I right?” Bear needed to take control and steer this ship in a different direction.

  “Whores,” Svec said, his eyes squeezed shut, trying either to hold their image in his mind or prevent it from entering. “Like their mothers.”

  “I love whores,” Yui sighed. The very thought calmed him immensely.

  “Oldest daughter is dancer. Not real dancer. How do we say? Strip dancer. Whore dancer. Her mother is, too. I tried. I send her to good school. I give her good advice. Always give her mother money. They don’t care. They like to take their clothes off. Her grandmother was whore, too. Mother’s mother. It’s in their blood. Nothing can be done about it. Second daughter, from second wife, she is lesbian. She has hair like you.” He pointed to Bear. “And ring in nose like bull. She hates me.”

  “Tadeshi has a gay son. Masami. His mother wanted a girl and gave him a girl’s name and now he is fully gay. This is how it happened.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Bear said.

  “My sons are little assholes,” Yui said, then doubled over laughing until he was spinning in place.

  “Kids can be tough,” Bear offered. “I know I certainly had a hard time with my girls. And once they hit the teen years? Phew, it was tense. Everybody about to burst into tears or rage at any second. My wife, my ex-wife, she was a mess about it. Crying and screaming right alongside the girls. I was so glad to go to work every day back then, I’m telling you. Pack it on, I told my project manager. Anything to get me away from their mood swings. But now they’re both in college, my girls. One’s in graduate school, for special education therapy. The other is studying economics at UCLA. They’re great girls. I really feel like they are my buddies now. Like, if I met them in some other context, if they were my interns, I’d be really impressed by them, and interested in what they had to say. But man oh man, the road here was a rough one.”

  “My sons were born little assholes. It is their destiny.”

  “But you love them, right?”

  Yui sucked the vodka out of the pouch until the package crinkled and folded in on itself. “Yes, of course. I love them. But I love Tadeshi more. No one can compare.”

  “I understand,” Svec said, opening another pouch. “I feel same about Greg Koehler. He is my truest friend. Like brother. I would die for him.”

  “I would die for my brother,” Yui said. “I feel one emotion right now. Just one. I am furious Tadeshi did not let me die first.”

  Bear wasn’t sure how long he could babysit his colleagues as they drank. The porthole window offered a glimpse of Australia, a fat, stunned rhinoceros marooned in the middle of the sea. A meteoroid sailed into the atmosphere and burned up like a cigarette tossed out the window of a moving car.

  “I should send a few emails out before I hit the hay,” he told the men, but they were not listening to him.

  After settling into his CQ, Bear opened his laptop and began typing in his journal. He used to think he would die for his wife, that she was his partner in every sense, that his success depended on her nurturance, and that without her, there was no point in succeeding. Then she left him for a pharmaceutical exec from Boston. And his daughters? Would he die for them? They were self-sufficient, resourceful, tough. He’d raised them that way, and so never, not even in their childhood, had he loved them with the vertiginous pity so many parents feel toward their helpless young. His daughters could survive anything; they didn’t need their dad’s even hypothetical, metaphorical pledge to give up his life for them. And besides, they had chosen their mother in the divorce, had followed her across the country to Boston, treating Bear like a beloved uncle they patronized with visits not more than twice a year. He loved his sisters, but he would never give his life up for them.

  Bear wrote in his journal that if he died tomorrow, there would be no lingering resentments. No unfinished business. He had been a good husband, and then a compassionate ex-husband, a great son and brother, a loving father, a dependable friend. But there was no one he would die for, like Yui’s Tadeshi or Svec’s Greg. Is this a fundamental failing of mine? he wrote, his neck perspiring. There is no one, not even my children, whose life I value above my own.

  “Hotel of Bad Dreams. That is where we are. That is the name I will give my new game. Because that is the name of this place,” Bear heard Yui saying to Svec outside his CQ. A long silence followed, floating like matter, carrying weight and dimension. What were they doing? Bear wondered. Then at last he heard each of the men crawl into their crew quarters.

  “Name of this world,” Svec answered.

  THE BUS STOP nearest Dennis’s address was at the bottom of a hill in a neighborhood Karen had only ever heard of on the news, and never for a good reason. Trash cans were lined up on and around the sidewalk, standing expectantly, like children waiting for the school bus. In the distance, at the top of another, even taller hill, sat a power plant surrounded by a few straggly trees. The sun sank behind it, streaking the sky like a chemical explosion slowly burning off its rainbow of gases.

  She continued down the long street. It looked like all the other streets in the neighborhood. Rows and rows of triple-decker apartments, each building a different shade of Easter egg pastel, with wooden front porches that sagged in the middle, on the verge of collapse. Karen came upon a lean woman in a conical straw hat picking bottles and cans out of the trash. The woman wore a surgical mask and purple rubber gloves that spanned almost the entire length of her slim arms. She reached intrepidly into the barrel, practically disappearing inside, then resurfaced with a bottle that she shook empty and stowed in one of the many plastic bags tied to her grocery carriage. It was an elaborate system, Karen could see, separating items by material and size.

  “Get out of my trash!” a man yelled from his porch. His hair had been shaved off and was growing back in patches over his white skull. No one, certainly no immigrant, which this trash picker probably was, had a right to touch his private property, even if it was private property he didn’t want. He yelled at the woman more and she yelled back in her language, some kind of Chinese-sounding tongue whose very tone infuriated him.

  “It’s a friggin’ holiday. Even God took a day off.” He nodded at Karen, as though they were in agreement.

  Could this be Dennis? Karen wondered. She double-checked the address she had written down at the library. No, Dennis lived ten houses down, she was relieved to see. The man took a last drag of his cigarette, wincing as though it hurt him to smoke it, then flicked the still-burning ember into a bucket of murky, brown water standing on the small front lawn. He looked at Karen with a knowing leer, and she froze in that old, old way, grinning back at him like a scared animal. Sometimes men could just tell. They knew all about her just by looking at her, and before she knew it, they were unbuttoning their pants. She had to be careful. She and Nora were working on bo
undaries. “You have choices,” Nora was always saying.

  “I have choices,” Karen repeated to the man, her voice quavering like a pool of water disturbed by a tiny leaf. She prayed the house would reabsorb this man, suck him back into its hideous belly. She held her breath. “Go away,” she whispered. The man rose and returned inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  Of course that was not Dennis. Karen rebuked herself for even thinking it might be. Dennis was her brother. Well, this wasn’t really true, but it seemed spiritually true. They’d shared a kind of womb together. A terrible one.

  In the distance Karen heard the train approaching. The tension of its arrival rattled the ground. Pulses of silver, splashed with graffiti, swam fast behind the houses like a school of fish. She was glad Dennis lived near a train. It would make traveling to and from this place easier for her. She imagined a whole future in which she lived here with him, in this neighborhood, in the house she had yet to reach, a house she was fast furnishing with the frills of her own imagination. The thoughts were unspooling too quickly. Rip by rip she ate a brown paper napkin her fingers found at the bottom of her purse.

  Would she marry him? Yes, she would. She would ask Rosette to be the maid of honor at her wedding. Dennis would stroke her hair every night until her eyes closed. He would get cancer and she would have to nurse him to health, but it would never be the same. Such is life. They would survive until the end. Just the two of them, sitting on the cement foundation of a house that had been burned down along with everything else in the great undoing of a Last Day far in the future.

  She kept walking, the numbers on the houses ascending. By now, a deep blue darkness had gathered above the great pillowy clouds, a siphoning point where night was slowly being released. And then she was there at Dennis’s house, number 60. There was no front porch, only a cement step without a railing. Three names were listed next to the buzzers, but not one of them was Dennis’s. A strip of duct tape covered the doorbells but Karen pressed them anyway. The tape felt sticky and the buttons inert. When no one responded, she opened the front door, which, she discovered, was unlocked.

  Loud Spanish music rattled through the first-floor apartment. She heard voices on the other side of the door, talking and laughing. The door opened and a man emerged holding a tray of uncooked hamburgers. He said something to Karen in Spanish. It sounded busy and congratulatory. Karen peered behind him. A Last Day party was in full bloom: a bouquet of gold and purple balloons tied to a chair, a toddler bouncing on the hip of a woman in a purple dress. The woman leaned over a table of food to kiss a man who was uncorking a bottle of wine. It was a nice little scene, and Karen was distantly satisfied to see that no matter what happened to the earth tomorrow, these people were leaving it in joy. The man in the hallway finished whatever he had to say to Karen, then headed down the hall to the back deck. Karen climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  The door to this apartment was open only as far as the chain that locked it would allow. A woman appeared in its frame at the sound of Karen’s heavy feet on the landing. She was an erecter set of bones bound in pale yellowing skin, wearing a loose gray T-shirt. Two bare feet protruded from beneath the thickly folded cuffs of her jeans.

  “You’re not the delivery service, are you?” she asked Karen, in a grainy, colorless voice.

  “No. I’m sorry,” Karen said.

  “Don’t apologize. Colloquially, people attach the words I’m sorry to the word no, when a simple ‘no’ is enough. It cheapens the whole English language when you toss an apology into a conversation where it doesn’t belong.”

  “I’m sorry,” Karen repeated, feeling sweaty and uneasy in her green dress.

  “Fine,” the woman allowed. She leaned against the doorframe and rolled herself a cigarette. She picked bits of tobacco off her lips and tongue and tucked the cigarette behind her ear. Her hair was long and black, with silvery white strands. Karen remembered her fifth-grade teacher telling her that all human hair longer than one and a half inches was just a string of dead cells swinging uselessly off our heads, and that if aliens ever landed on Earth and met us, they would think our habits disgusting.

  Karen lingered on the stairs, transfixed by this opinionated ghost of a woman. “Today was a really pretty day. A good one to go out on,” Karen offered.

  “I haven’t left this apartment since—I can’t remember. Thursday?”

  “Oh. Do you have one of those ankle bracelets that go off at the police station when you leave?”

  “No.”

  Karen wanted to know whether the woman behind the door was pretty or not, but she could only see one narrow slice of her at a time. Almost every face in the whole world was gorgeous if you looked at only one small piece of it, especially if that piece was an eye. All put together was where most people’s beauty fell apart.

  “I’m testing myself. It’s an exercise,” the woman said. She waved the smoke away from her face, stirring the white tendrils into a messy cloud.

  “Like, for losing weight?”

  “How much can we live without? At what point does isolation force us into connection? At what point does something become everything?”

  “Yeah.” Karen had no idea what she meant. “Does Dennis live here?”

  “I think there is a guy who lives upstairs with that hog and her piglets. I’m just subletting. I don’t really keep track.”

  “I’m going to see him now,” Karen explained.

  “I am ready for it to end,” the woman said. Her voice came from a well, not a fountain, Karen decided.

  “Okay.” She was getting anxious now. And hungry. She hoped Dennis was friends with the Spanish-speaking family downstairs and would want to go join them for hamburgers.

  “Could you do me one last favor?” the woman asked.

  A last one? Karen was scared that she had inadvertently agreed to do a first favor and had already forgotten it and failed.

  “If you pass by a bonfire tonight, could you toss this in?”

  She held up a backpack, and before Karen could assent the woman was cramming her bundle through the four-inch space her chain lock allowed. It took a lot of finagling. Whatever the bag contained, it must have been a collection of things small enough to rearrange themselves into an agreeable shape with one large thing that wanted to cause trouble. Karen immediately pictured a human skull, a man’s. The woman pushed with her weak, malnourished arms and Karen pulled. The bag popped through at last. It was made of tan canvas and the top flap had been threaded with what looked like long strands of human hair.

  “It’s heavy,” Karen observed. “But not too heavy.”

  “Good.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “It’s bad luck to ask.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I forgive you,” the woman said. Karen couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw the woman wink at her.

  * * *

  —

  SHE HEARD THE sound of a baby wailing as she reached the landing of the third floor. This was something she had not considered—that Dennis might already be married, that he would have gone and started a family without her.

  She knocked on the door. At first no one answered, so Karen knocked harder. A scurry of feet and sulky moans and the continued cries of a baby were the only response. A low-pitched “Get it” blasted through the noise and at last the door opened. The little boy who opened it immediately ran away from her, his job done. He wore underpants decorated with cowboy hats and guns, and a pair of thick glasses that magnified his eyes. He leapt onto the couch where a young girl, presumably his sister, also sporting thick, goggle-looking glasses, was reading a magazine. The boy grabbed the magazine from her and threw it behind the couch onto the floor. The little boy was around seven, Karen guessed, and his sister a bit older but not much. The baby she’d heard crying was nowhere to be seen.
/>   Karen entered the apartment, closing the door behind her. “Here you go,” Karen said, picking the magazine off the floor and returning it to the girl, who did not look up or thank her. It was a back issue of Famous, Etc., a weekly periodical reporting on famous people doing banal things and banal people doing extraordinary things. This issue, which Karen had read in Nora’s office months ago, featured a TV actress talking about her lactose intolerance and a teenage girl who had given birth to a baby in the middle of her school’s field trip to the Bronx Zoo. The teenager had washed the baby in a bathroom sink, cut the umbilical cord with a plastic cafeteria knife, and left her son swaddled in her jeans jacket at the entrance to the reptile exhibit. Later she changed her mind and wanted the baby back, and through a surprising amount of legal mercy, she was now reunited with her baby, who was doing fine, the article said. The TV actress talked about her battle with gas and bloating, a hereditary response to milk, but admitted that she indulged in goat cheese every once in a while. The magazine in the girl’s hands had the address square ripped out of the cover, a telltale sign of a doctor’s office magazine.

  “My therapist is named Nora. Who’s your therapist?” Karen asked the girl.

  “Hillaria,” the girl answered, still not lifting her enlarged, bespectacled eyes from the glossy photos of infant abandonment.

  “Do you like her?”

  “She sucks.”

  “Oh. I’m sor—” Karen began, “I mean, that’s too bad. Where’s your dad?”

  “I don’t know. Probably jail. You can ask Ma when she gets home from work. But be careful. Sometimes, just mentioning my dad puts her in a bad mood.”

  “Jail?” Karen’s heart rattled inside her chest. “Is your dad named Dennis?”

  “Dennis is in the bedroom,” she said, and pointed with her chin to a dark hallway behind the kitchen.

  The boy was busy building a fort out of towels and blankets that stretched from the kitchen table to the couch where his sister read. He yanked a cushion from behind her head and she swatted him like a puppy with the magazine. The front window of the apartment was blocked almost entirely by a large television, the big boxy kind Karen thought of as old-fashioned. At Heart House they had a flat-screen TV. One of the rich absentee relatives of a catatonic named Aimee had bought it to make herself feel better about never visiting. Karen felt a little bad for these kids, living with such an unwieldy, obsolete piece of machinery. On the TV a cartoon mouse was traversing the vast landscape of a dining room table laid out for a banquet. Karen remembered watching this same show when she was a child.