Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  A CREW OF megalomaniacs would not survive very long in the cramped white tunnels of a space station, and so, while astronauts cannot be classified among mere mortals—their expertise in so many areas is too extraordinary—they are distinguished less by their talents as by a level of humility unusual among the rest of us who live and work our entire lives on Earth.

  So there are mortals, and there are astronauts, and then there are astronauts selected to go to space, and an even smaller pool of astronauts called back for a second mission; and even among this elite group, Thomas “Bear” Clark was known as the human avatar of humility. According to a biography of him slated for release in the next year, his ex-wife attributed Bear’s humility to the fact of his growing up as the middle child of two sisters, one taller than him (he’d inherited their mother’s good looks as well as her small frame) and one born with Down syndrome.

  “No, that’s not quite it,” his mother had reported to the biographer, not long before she died. “They are how they are from their very first day,” she’d said, insisting to the author that Bear had been a cooperative, mild-mannered soul from his infancy, long before he was aware of the compensations he would have to make as a brother or a son. His deep sense of humility was simply part and parcel with all his other gifts.

  If function followed form, Bear should have been a quarterback, with his square jaw and steep cheekbones. He was so good-looking as a child, old women in the grocery store used to give him money just because. Bear would save these quarters and dimes in a piggy bank, then buy presents for his younger sister, his mother had told the biographer.

  He’d grown up in San Diego, in a ranch house identical in size and shape to all the other ranch houses in their neighborhood, in a WASP family that could trace its roots back to the crew of the Mayflower. As a boy, Bear aspired to become one of the sandy-haired surfers who eked by on hobo jobs. There was a purity to that kind of life, lived in obeisance to the ocean, that Bear admired. He loved surfing and all it encompassed: studying the waves, asking permission to walk on their backs, waiting with sublime patience for their consent. He could have made those vows and been just as happy as a beach bum as he was now on the International Space Station. But when his father was killed by a drunk driver, the most sensible response to that stunning pain was for Bear to distract himself, his grieving mother, and his sisters with his achievements. He turned his attention away from the sea and toward his studies, where he excelled in math and science, and was encouraged rather glibly by a high school physics teacher to pursue a career in astronautics.

  “Sounds neat,” young Bear had said.

  He was the blue-eyed only son of a nice family in Southern California, a place where the climate and culture are suffused by an optimism that stands in utter defiance to geological reality, as though dangling on the edge of a chthonic fault line could be made A-OK if you believe in goodness, in your ability to manufacture safety and hope, and in that erratic human covenant that promises anything is possible if you only put your mind to it.

  Which is exactly what Bear did, and like a curse in reverse, everything he touched turned to gold. He joined the Air Force, studied at Stanford, was accepted into the NASA training program, and flew his first mission while still in his thirties, on the now-retired Space Shuttle. His crew then was rescuing a wayward satellite that had failed to reach its optimal orbital height, offering Bear the opportunity for an Extravehicular Activity, the golden ring of all astronauts. Floating outside the shuttle, he had seen asteroids streak the black sky beneath his feet. “If this is the only chance I get, if I never get called up for another mission, I will still die the happiest man on Earth,” he told his wife then.

  With the same combination of humility and hard work that had gotten him into space, he devoted himself to a grounded life mentoring other astronauts, working in Mission Control for other flights, being the best team player he could be. When this current mission came up—one year on the ISS, the opportunity of a lifetime—his dominant feeling was not pride but gratitude.

  From a distance his whole life glittered with the charm of the elect. Which is why his dark mood, and the accompanying dark thoughts of calamity, were so alarming to him.

  He made the mistake of confessing this in an email to his ex-wife. The only thing worse than being with your family on the holidays is not being with your family on the holidays, she replied. But that has always been your MO—to make yourself busy when there’s something you want to avoid, hiding behind “work.” I tried to explain to the girls that that is just your love-language—you’re a provider, so you feel the need to work hard to provide. But they could use less providing and more of your time.

  He hated that she talked to him like this now. She took the familiarity between them too far, exploiting their post-divorce friendship as license to casually criticize him. But in that same castigating email, she had also included very helpful links to the things their daughters wanted for their Last Day presents, a considerate gesture that would make shopping from space easier.

  Thanks was all he wrote back to her.

  Bear worked with his customary efficiency that day, despite a persistent headache, and was able to recoup eleven minutes of R&R before dinner. He used the time to do a three-minute meditation exercise in the privacy of his crew quarters, part of a thirty-day challenge he was partaking in alongside a group of high school kids on Earth, and then tackle his holiday shopping. His younger daughter, Kayley, both needed and wanted a new phone. For Elyse he got a little silver dove for her charm bracelet. For his ex-wife’s birthday, which fell on Last Day, he found a specially designed foam roller—she had been complaining about leg cramps during her marathon training. He placed all the items into his virtual cart at the mega online retailer Jungle.com and clicked “Purchase.”

  A minutes-long delay was followed by an automatic return to the Jungle home page. His shopping attempt had failed. He would have to search and select the items all over again. These precious minutes had been wasted. Bear punched the quilted walls of his CQ.

  Immediately he blamed Donna: it was her gift that had crashed the order. It was irrational, he knew, but he resented that he felt guilty if he didn’t buy her a birthday gift. Being the amicable ex-husband was Who He Was. It was part of the reason he had been selected for this second mission in space. Lots of astronauts were permanently grounded after a divorce. It was an unspoken practice of NASA, with roots in the military component of the program—if you couldn’t keep the peace in your own household, how could they trust you on board the $2.9 billion operation in space? But not Bear. He was agreeable. He was good. He followed the rules even when he broke his marriage vows.

  His daughters hated Jungle.com anyway. It was a corporate overlord, or some such fulmination they’d picked up in college. They always made smart comments about it. And Last Day was not really a gift-giving holiday. This shopping was a gesture reaching out of Bear’s guilt for being away from them for so long.

  Was it even possible, Bear thought, for a good man to do the right thing anymore?

  Perhaps it was the excess CO2 in the station that was making him so sloppy and morose. The second CDRA was broken—again—leaving just one operating air scrubber for the six people on board. But that was changing tonight. Three of the six members were leaving first thing in the morning. Even if Mission Control would not grant Bear permission to try and fix the CDRA, halving the population of the station would lighten the load of the one that still worked, and the air would be a little cleaner.

  Bear floated into the Russian module, where the mission captain, Mikhail Mikhailovich Svec, was cementing a crown in his own molar.

  “I could have done that for you, comrade,” Bear offered.

  Svec snorted. “Hyouston never allow extra time for you Americans in schedule. I can do myself. No problem.”

  Svec was something of a legend in the international space commu
nity. Among many more obvious triumphs of physicality (mountaineering, dead-lifting) he had inured his mucus membranes to withstand pepper spray. It was a trick that got a lot of applause at bars across the globe. He never soiled his space diaper, not even during launch. “Well-trained dog can hold bowels for twelve hours. So can I,” Svec declared. His record for holding his breath underwater was six minutes and three seconds, and he was a skilled practitioner of tantric sex.

  He also claimed to have willed the color of his eyes to change from brown to blue. As there were no color photographs of a young Svec extant, this claim could only have been substantiated by his now long-deceased mother, an infamous alcoholic in a city where binge drinking was hardly noteworthy.

  The mythology Svec perpetuated was that on his thirteenth birthday his mother had confessed to him the identity of his father. Before that day, the only thing Svec knew about this man was his shoe size—forty-three—the worn number on the sole of the boots his father had left behind one night when Svec was still a baby. These boots remained by the back door of their apartment for years, an eerie, truncated effigy to the man who’d left and never come back. His mother would sob whenever Svec asked her about them—the disembodied them, never him, never the man the boots represented. Svec knew his patronymic was a sham, that it was derived from his maternal grandfather, and that these things—his name, those boots—were a source of deep pain he must not aggravate if he wanted his mother to sleep at night.

  But on his thirteenth birthday Mama Svec sat him down at their kitchen table, sliced some sour pickles and pumpernickel bread, poured a shot of vodka for each of them, and told him the whole story. It was a short story in the end, a disappointingly common one at odds with young Svec’s already burgeoning notion of himself as a heroic figure with mythic origins. His dad was a high-ranking Roscosmos administrator who had another family, a legitimate one, that prevented him from acknowledging the alcoholic waitress he had impregnated, other than the occasional envelopes of cash he left her, usually enough to buy a week’s worth of groceries but never more than that.

  From that day on, Svec despised his father. He was obviously a coward. So close to the ships that could reach the skies yet he chose to become an administrator? He cursed this man and the short limbs and brown eyes he had passed down to Svec. He and his mother took turns refilling the glasses of vodka until the bottle was empty, and moments before throwing up, Svec vowed to grow taller than six feet, to change the color of his eyes from his father’s cow-dung brown to his mother’s forget-me-not blue, and to become one of the few men to touch the void of outer space. He failed at only one of these, and could not entirely forgive himself.

  It was Svec’s honor and duty as captain to give the goodbye speech and toast to the departing astronauts, an American whom Bear knew from the Air Force, a Swiss particle physicist, and a Canadian industrial engineer. It could not be a real toast, Svec felt, without alcohol, but the Westerners were strict about the ban on alcohol in space and so he did his best to incant the drinking spirit into their sad little pouches of reconstituted apple juice.

  “…and so I say to you, our comrades Linda, Deitiker, and Sanjay, fly straight home. No wandering. Do not go like arrogant bird of our Russian fairy tale and fly directly into sun….”

  The other astronauts, including Bear and a billionaire Japanese space tourist, Yui, listened patiently while microwaving their individual dinners as quietly as they could. Svec did not let their eating stop him.

  “…Budem zdorovy—to our health. Na pososhok—safe travels…”

  The crew hovered awkwardly around the table bolted into the wall. Bear wolfed down his barbecue beef and used his leftover tortilla to hold a polite sample of the caviar Svec offered each crew member to commemorate the occasion. The smell of it, mixed with Yui’s crabmeat and the odor of Deitiker’s irradiated sausage, was making Bear’s stomach turn.

  He gulped his nausea stoically and told the group, “I also want to say a little farewell, but I’m not as good at toasts as our Commander Svec. So if you don’t mind, I’ve been practicing this for weeks….”

  Svec watched with a bemused smile as the American pulled a harmonica out of his zippered pocket. It was the captain’s job to oversee special functions, and Bear was second seat.

  “I hope I’m not overstepping,” Bear said.

  “Nekogda,” Svec said, nodding.

  Bear played a jazzy rendition of “Mercy Mercy Mercy” that he had been practicing for this night’s farewell. He chose it because it was a bit more upbeat than the standard blues and gospel tunes in his songbook. As he played, one by one the other astronauts drifted away to their CQs to watch TV on their personal laptops.

  Only Svec remained, and Bear was touched by this show of solidarity. The Russian commander was almost stereotypically macho, and came off to Bear as downright cold at times, but like many other Russians Bear had known, Svec was a sentimental man with a tenderness for ritual, tradition, and symbolic gesture. Bear took Svec’s quiet attention as a cue to keep playing, so he tried a more modern pop song he was just beginning to learn. He fumbled a bit through the chord transitions, but Svec was a respectful and sympathetic audience, listening in perfect silence. Bear had begun the second verse when he heard the rattle, then the rasp, followed by a snore.

  Those legendary eyes that could withstand pepper spray and allegedly change pigmentation could also remain open during sleep, it appeared now, as Svec snored. Drool gathered on Svec’s slack lower lip and remained there, weightless, shining like a pearl. Bear dabbed Svec’s face with a tissue—stray particles of water, even tiny ones, were dangerous for the ship—and woke him. Svec snorted again, and floated off without so much as a goodbye.

  LAST DAY WAS an oddity on the calendar. Slightly more than one day, but not quite two, it began at some point on May 27 and ended on May 28. Whether encircled by sunrise, sunset, midnight, or quitting time, the parameters of the day were entirely personal. This lack of clear boundary was just one of the many reasons Sarah Moss hated the holiday. As a child she would cry and cry for the duration of Last Day, refusing to fall asleep all night, making May 28 cranky and miserable for both her and her parents. Everyone assured her she would grow out of it. When that didn’t happen, she affected a teenage air of disavowal. The perfect mask for her shuddering fear.

  The fear was totally irrational, she knew. Despite what felt like a never-ending fountain of oil spills, carbon emissions, and toxic waste, the planet had yet to smolder into one big ashtray. Life marched on. It always did. It probably always would, at least in her lifetime and for many thousands of lifetimes after hers. No big deal. It was a dramatic holiday of self-inflicted upheaval drawn out into a public performance. Collective catharsis and all that. Right?

  Sarah had researched the many apocryphal histories of Last Day for various school projects. The earliest antecedent supposedly took place during the Babylonian era, on the last full moon of the vernal equinox of 2807 BCE, when a meteor struck the Indian Ocean during a total lunar eclipse. Terrified, the Babylonians scurried to propitiate whichever god they had offended, slaughtering prized animals, building pyres, bathing in sacred waters, giving gifts to loved ones and strangers alike, and this crisis narrowly averted gave rise to a tradition of yearly reckoning.

  Later, astrologers of the Ayyubid empire predicted the end of the world for May 28, 1186. The sultan Saladin, in flagrant mockery of his superstitious advisers and his primitive father-in-law they still loyally served, held an open-air candlelit party for all the nonbelievers the night before. They danced and ate and drank themselves into an orgy that would make a Dionysian blush. The lines between man and woman, ruler and servant, pain and pleasure shattered.

  In illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth century, later proven to be forgeries made by Romany peddlers of the seventeenth century, was the story of a Florentine village that had lost more than half of its citizens to the
plague. The story went that a Franciscan monk took a vow of silence after the last of his brothers had died. Alone in his monastery, he meditated day and night, hoping to understand the wisdom in his God’s seemingly sadistic plan. He spent weeks in this trance, sipping only water steeped weakly with nettles, fasting in solitude. Then, in a very Italian mix of Christian and pagan devotion, he emerged from his monastery naked as a baby, trundling a small cart full of linens. He built a fire in the town’s piazza and urged passersby to add their garments, their bedclothes, the shirts on their backs, right then and there, into the fire. At last the whole village stood naked in the chill spring air, their bodies warmed by the enormous fire, and on that day ever after, not another soul was touched by the Black Death.

  All of these stories could not be more obvious bullshit, Sarah thought, and yet the broader her knowledge of Last Day mythology grew, the deeper her fear took root. Sometimes people will things into being, so what possible good could a couple thousand years of end-time fetishizing bring?

  For her school’s chapter of Mock Trial, from which she had defected earlier that year (high levels of theater-kid solipsism and disenfranchised-nerd neediness—an insufferable combo), she could wax philosophical on the mythopoetic function of Last Day, its vitality and necessity in today’s techno-dependent, isolating world. But every word she’d uttered in those debates had been insincere, a homily delivered for a teacher’s approval. And she was ultimately annoyed that she’d brought her team to victory in the debate. The opposing team should have won. Their argument was much better—that Last Day was a perpetuation of an intensely self-centered lie: the world could not go on without us.

  “A product,” her best friend Terrence pronounced, “of our pattern-making brains, that so crave completion they cannot hear tick tick without the inevitable tock.”

  Now, that was a good point. But when being judged by a committee, especially of high school teachers, sentimentality was going to take the prize over bleak truth.