Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  Terrence kicked some dirt over the pearlescent dribble of his semen and buttoned his pants. He took a deep, relaxing breath. He looked toward the path where the others had set out on their morning hike. If he ran, he could catch up to them.

  * * *

  —

  ARI AND ALISON Moss were fast asleep, their bodies pressed close as spoons, their minds awash in delta waves, pitching them toward the next round of dreams.

  * * *

  —

  IN A QUEEN-SIZED bed on the fourth floor of Morning Pines, Myra and Marlene were, too.

  * * *

  —

  JOSH LIKED TO leave the cage open, kindling the hope that his rabbit might hop into bed with him at night and snuggle. Just because it had never happened didn’t mean it never would, Josh had told his mother, who smiled and let it be.

  But when Josh woke up that morning, Arturo the Fifth was not in his bed or his cage. He looked in all of Arturo’s favorite spots, under his bed, at the bottom of his closet, until at last he found the rabbit in the laundry basket in the bathroom, surrounded by seven newborn bunnies. Josh brought his mother in to confirm.

  “Yep, seven of them. Arturo’s a girl!” She waved the smoke twirling out of her cigarette away from the little nest in her dirty laundry basket, away from her son, and thought about what to do. The house was a mess and now the laundry stank like a barn on a day when the Laundromat would be closed. Her car needed gas and she was waiting for a check to clear before using her debit card, which was so maxed out she feared sparks might fly from the ATM if she inserted it. Josh looked at her with wonder and fear, with perfect trust. It was the same face he had shown her in his first minutes of life, as if he had known her from long ago, before either one of them had been born, when a perfect version of everyone still existed.

  His mother ran the bathroom tap to extinguish her cigarette. “Go outside and pick some grass and weeds and stuff.” She filled a hot water bottle and wrapped it in the now-ruined T-shirt from the top of the laundry basket. She put the water bottle in a shoebox and let Josh arrange the greenery on top of it, including several dandelions he had picked along with the grass, which his mother assured him was a nice touch.

  “What are you doing?” Josh asked, as his mother probed each baby rabbit with her fingers.

  “Making sure their hearts are strong and their bellies are full.”

  “Are they?”

  “Uh-huh. Their mommy must have just fed them before we woke up.”

  “They’re kinda ugly.”

  “Most things are in the beginning.”

  * * *

  —

  RINGO HAD JUST woken up from his nap on the floor of his workspace and immediately took the next customer in line, a stately old drag queen named Taboo.

  “Do you mind if I just do an apple?” Ringo asked her. “My brain is fried. I can’t think of another flower.”

  “Honey, you do whatever you want,” Taboo said.

  Jake had passed out leaning over the toilet, a safe enough position as he could not aspirate on his vomit, Janine decided, after checking on him one last time. She’d woken up from her own disco nap with a strong feeling of fuck it. For over two decades she’d been watching the boys make their art. All her boyfriends, even before Jake, had been tattoo artists. She’d lived her entire adult life like a stupid fucking groupie, and not even for a rich rock band. Not even for a broke punk band. But for tattoo artists. What was the point? “Fuck it,” she said, and called the next customer into Jake’s chair.

  This was a big no-no. She was not licensed. She hadn’t even been to school—Jake had discouraged her, for selfish and sexist reasons he didn’t bother to deny. And Janine, if she was being honest, had allowed his barking to stop her, secretly glad of it, so that she didn’t have to face the fear of actually trying. What if she wasn’t as good as Jake? What if she was much better? How would it change their perfectly dysfunctional codependency?

  With that she began inking the letters REDEMPTION on a man’s biceps.

  Tom was inscribing a double helix on the thigh of a woman a little older than he was. Maybe she was the one he would go home with. He’d been waiting all night and all morning for the signal, that it was time to stop. He wiped away her blood and looked into her eyes.

  “You’re pretty hot for your age,” he said.

  “Stop talking,” the woman replied, shifting a little closer to him in the chair, “and this day might work out beautifully for both of us.”

  Tom mimed the zipping of his lips, pretended to lock them, then tossed the key behind his shoulder. The woman laughed without making a sound.

  In the early light of May 28, the buzzing of needles continued, but all conversation stopped. A calm energy had taken over, quiet and diffused with light. Ringo’s breathing began to synchronize with his customer’s, as did Tom’s and Janine’s, until all of them, even Jake asleep on the floor, were inhaling, exhaling, together, without knowing.

  * * *

  —

  IF WE ARE going to die, Bear and Svec decided, we die at home. They were in perfect harmony on this. Even if there is no one left there to mourn us. Home was where they belonged. And so with no assistance from Mission Control, Bear and Svec began the first steps of protocol for an emergency exit. They had calculated a landing in Kazakhstan during daylight hours, hoping a crew would be there to help them out. Now the only thing left was wonder, and it was terrible.

  The rage of the past century had finally been released. The stuff of dystopian novels and movies, one nuclear bomb launching after another until everything was fried. Gone. “War. Big. Bigger than before. Biggest in all time,” Svec said.

  “Maybe.” But maybe a few survivors? Bear wondered. He wanted to water the plants, to quickly design and rig a system to keep the mice appropriately fed for as long as possible, just in case.

  “Comrade, no one is coming back here.”

  “Eventually…”

  “Look.” Svec took Bear by the hand and sailed him into the Cupola. The once blue gem was a whorling, frothy brown. The distinction between land and sea was so blurred it was hard to discern by sight exactly where on Earth they were looking.

  “If we survive, if we find others who survive, coming back to station will not be priority for many, many years. In that time, station’s orbit will decay. She will fall back to Earth with Yui inside her. All this will be destroyed.”

  “We have to hold on to some hope, Svec. I can’t just nosedive into an empty pool so fast. We don’t know what is going on right now. That is the truth. We do not know.”

  “You’re right. But what can be done about it?”

  * * *

  —

  PULLING THEMSELVES INTO the Soyuz, the two men shared a common nightmare—the very real possibility that no ground team would be there to pull them out after landing. There might not be a living soul for hundreds of miles. After six months in microgravity, they would have the leg power of arthritic, bedridden eighty-year-olds. Both men agreed that they were equipped to survive this. What they would not admit to each other: they might be the last humans alive.

  “God bless Yui,” Svec said.

  “What?”

  Svec heaved himself close to Bear, until he was close enough to hold him in his arms. “Night before Yui died, he held me like this.” Svec thrust his hand behind Bear’s skull and held it. “He kissed me. After, he went to bed and died. Was kiss of death. Goodbye. Can you see?”

  Bear smelled vodka on Svec’s breath and it enraged him. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said. Svec was still holding Bear in an embrace. Bear tried to pry himself away but Svec held on. He pulled Bear’s head closer and kissed him on the mouth. Then he slapped Bear’s face three times, kissed him again on both cheeks, and let go.

  Strapped into their seats, they hurtled toward Ear
th at five hundred miles per hour. “Zhatka, zhatka, ya zhdu tebya,” Svec whispered. A prayer, Bear guessed, wishing that he too had a prescribed set of words he could recite. It seemed comforting, even if it was imaginary, to incant the hopes of another time, something older if not bigger than himself. Bear had learned a prayer or two in his life, but nothing that had stuck. A few sentences, a few words even, would suffice. He settled instead for a list:

  Rain, falling in sheets, falling in drops, collecting in gutters, streaming down drainpipes, slamming against the windshield of a car, swished away by wipers, returning a half second later like a report of gunfire, then swish, ratatatat, swish; bathtubs his girls used to splash in until their fingertips wrinkled and their teeth chattered; the obnoxious plop of a leaky faucet; a still pond troubled by a frog plunking below the surface; the spray of a car driving through a large puddle; the rhythmic gurgle and swoosh of a washing machine alternating the direction of its toss; the sound of his childhood dog lapping water from her bowl; the sound of gulping several long sips in a row on a hot day, ice tinkling against the glass.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE DYING. They could feel it as surely as the sweat on their skin, as the ship rumbling all around them. Dreaming the same dream, dying the same death. If nothing else, Svec thought, I am grateful to you, comrade, to hold the other half of this fear. If nothing else, Bear thought, we are home, we are—

  * * *

  —

  AS THEY BREACHED the atmosphere over Central Africa, the ship’s parachutes opened. A silvery-brown matter sloshes out of the seats that once held them.

  * * *

  —

  A POD OF eleven dolphins swim in the Bay of Bengal. Six juveniles, not all of them related, a mother and her newborn calf, two adult females, and a badly injured male who’d escaped a shameful battle with a male from another pod. The wounded dolphin keeps sinking too deep to catch his breath. The adult females take turns pushing him up to the surface for air. The nursing mother communicates to the group to swim slower, and they do. Darting through the warmer, shallow waters near the coast, they feast on a school of mackerel. One of the youngsters, a female with a uniquely low whistle, decides it is time to jump. Her body shatters the tensile skin of the water as she leaps into the air. A spray like a thousand diamonds rolls off her back. An act of joy and an invitation to play, there is no other reason for it. Her schoolmates follow her in scattered succession, jumping in and out of the water. The sun burns low in the sky, golden and overripe as a peach. Three of them are midair, the other eight underwater, when all of them melt from the inside out, leaving slimy, limp tendrils of their old form in the wake.

  * * *

  —

  THERE ARE DEEP rich pools of sludge where the Amazon rain forest once breathed. The greenery now wafts a scent never smelled before, the reek of all life and all manner of death combined, like burnt hair, low tide, afterbirth, and sick. That river, now nameless, pushes its snakelike pattern into the earth, slowed down by the sedimentary weight of all its dead.

  * * *

  —

  A TINY DUTCH garden enclosed by a stone wall steams like a hot bowl of brown stew. Stone-carved angels kneel in the dry granite fountain at the garden’s center, the shadows of them stretching over the viscous roux, against the wall in dark, elongated repose.

  * * *

  —

  THE SITES OF three different genocide campaigns on three different continents congeal into an even bigger pool of the dead.

  * * *

  —

  A FLOATING RADIOACTIVE island made of fishing nets and plastic bags, almost a mile in diameter, rides the waves as ever off the coast of Fukushima.

  * * *

  —

  THE GOLD DOME of a mosque in Brunei glitters in the setting sun, its white stone still pristine at the top, as though purified by the approaching sky, its foundation laced with the brown accretion of matter lapping like a tide on its shore.

  * * *

  —

  A U.S. NAVY aircraft carrier, named for a president credited with once forestalling the end of the world, floats across the roiling brown sea. Steam rolls off the surface of the ocean, all the life released now in a surge of heat. Enough heat to melt the thick plastic of the computers inside the ship, which slowly, then quickly begins to sink.

  * * *

  —

  TREES BUCKLE AND collapse like grieving women, reduced now to a hot brown sap. Sunlight stabs the atrium of a cave, piercing the waves that splash against its glittering minerals, the remnants of stars.

  Rays of light gleam against the brown water, where blooming clouds of dead fish, dead flora, dead plankton, and things even smaller rise and fall in eddies of brown foam.

  The sea grows hot with death, the energy released boils even the most frigid water, until the oceans are seething with brown foam, and the steam rolls off the surface in clouds so thick they block out the sky.

  Hills are blistered and brown. Grasses melt into slime, along with the millions of insects tunneling beneath them: the trillions of microbes, cell by cell, reduce and recombine into brown sludge. The sludge oozes everywhere. Dripping down fjords in Norway, smearing the faces of Mount Rushmore, bleeding beneath the fast-melting snows of Kilimanjaro. What were herds of antelope, oryx, buffalo, are now dark smears on the plains. The brown ooze of human communities dries up in the hot sun, leaving stains on the cement of the cities they built.

  For a while the lights stay on. In Tokyo, London, Times Square, screens still flash images of beautiful women twirling their skirts, lying on the beach, rubbing lotion into their skin. Generators continue to burn unmanned for several hours until the systems governing the power plants across the globe start beeping and shut down. Pumps that keep running water in its place shut down, too, flooding the streets of the dead.

  * * *

  —

  AIRPLANES, WHOSE PILOTS have liquefied to puddles in their cockpits, whose passengers are now seeping into the upholstery of their seats, fall by the thousands out of the sky. Trains skid off their tracks, knifing long wounds into the earth that soon will be sealed with the liniment of sludge. Across the globe, highways are littered with smashed cars, embolisms of gleaming metal on corridors east and west, north and south. Oil fields burn black smoke. Gas plants explode. Nuclear reactors, scrupulously programmed, remain intact for a while longer, until they, too, combust.

  * * *

  —

  TIME PASSES. ATOMS of carbon dance in perfect terror. Ocean waves beat the shore.

  * * *

  —

  AND HIGH ABOVE it all, a message in a bottle. Before launch, Bear and Svec had sent a small craft through the airlock, hurtling via timed thrusters they had programmed manually to travel as far from the earth as its fuel would take it, then sailing forever after on its own trajectory into deep space. Among the data installed, all their findings from decades of research, all the records of their time on the ISS and their observations of their home below, and three objects they hoped one day, if never fully understood, would be loved as relics from another world: Svec’s son’s handwritten list of astronauts, Bear’s harmonica, Yui’s favorite Val Corwin book.

  * * *

  —

  ALL WAS WATER and waste, heat and odor. Cell membranes puckered and shrank, nuclei collapsed, all the constituent parts of life recombined into one plasmic ooze.

  What was lost? Mitochondria, proteins, reproductive organs, bones, gymnosperms, voices, music, faces, hunger, dreams, flowers, fields, ferns, snakes, crabs, snails, algae, bacteria, stories, traffic, apologies, wolves, holidays, rage, anthills, rhizomes, gratitude, pain…

  What remained? Clouds. Great big clouds. Shadows. And wind. And beauty remained. It had existed before, and always would, whether or not it could be borne.

  * * *

  —r />
  IT WAS OVER almost as soon as it began. The sun continued to rise and set, moving across the galaxy, a distinct but ordinary flame in the deep. Planets continued orbiting in their ellipses. And it would be like this for a very, very long time, before the first thing happened, then another, a cause, and then its effect, and then the new story that would begin.

  For Will Stanton

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was not easily born. Cindy Spiegel was a wise, patient, and trustworthy editor. I won’t embarrass you with the superlative (“the wisest…”) though I know this is true. I am so fortunate to work with you twice. Thank you, Cindy. This story is immeasurably better because of you.

  Big thanks to Jim Rutman, whose extemporaneous emails are more lucid and thoughtful than my best rewritten prose. You were a wonderful support, truly going above and beyond, long before there was anything substantial to support. It’s an honor to work with you.

  A whole team of talented people at Penguin Random House have again worked to make the difficult progression from draft to book appear easy: Mengfei Chen, Kelly Chian, and copy editor Deborah Dwyer did with grace and skill.

  I would not have put up with this book beyond its very ugly first draft if not for the intelligent and kind appraisal of Ariel Colletti, who gave the first read. Thank you forever.