Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  Almost sixteen now, Sarah realized for the first time that Last Day was completely racist. Its seeming ubiquity was actually, like so much else, a consequence of Western hegemony. “And! It ignores, like, the whole continent of Africa, which is made of, like, so many different ethnic groups that don’t know or care about it. And Native Americans—they have totally different creation and apocalypse myths. It’s a stupid, largely Western, white invention.”

  “Oh, you’re such a Scrooge,” her mother said, which made Sarah wither. For one, as a literary allusion it didn’t even make sense. Sarah had read Dickens, and that novel was about a character suffering from a general spiritual bankruptcy that transcended culture and calendar, thank you very much, and besides that, Sarah really liked Christmas. Christmas was about a little baby and farm animals and hope. Her dad’s Judaism was pretty much phoned in. He’d taught her to light candles on Chanukah but he didn’t know any prayers, so the blessing he recited was a gibberish they pretended was Hebrew. On Yom Kippur they flushed a crust of rye toast down the toilet, a tradition she’d always looked forward to. She liked the renewal of New Year’s, and at least it made sense on the calendar. Halloween was always fun. The Mexican Día de los Muertos was even better. Easter was the coolest, a mash-up of seasonal changes and diluted paganism and Christianity and zombies. Easter was about surrealism and chocolate. What was not to love there?

  Maybe she just needed to ignore the holiday and focus on schoolwork. She had a paper to write that weekend on Lear. She was toying with a thesis about impotence, but broader, like the ultimate human impotence in the face of Nature. Or Time. Or something like that. She regretted not having written a draft by now. Deadlines scraped away at her already fragile nervous system, and she hated herself a little for letting this one creep up on her.

  It was hard to make plans for a day that you secretly considered to be your last. How could anyone enjoy herself under that kind of pressure? It made every idea feel holy and totally wrong at the same time. She knew some kids from school were dropping acid on Crane Beach, and while it was fun to watch her friends’ pupils dilate and to listen to their mad prose-poems of insight, eventually Sarah, as always the only sober person there, would get bored and want a coherent dialogue, which she realized made her a total loser.

  Her parents were having their annual pizza party but they said she could skip it this year if she wanted. Last year she’d met the love of her life at her parents’ party. It was, she realized now, the one-year anniversary of their whatever.

  He was her mother’s colleague’s plus-one, the unwitting boyfriend dragged to a lame work party where he knew no one else. Sarah’s mother taught women’s history at a small, private Christian college. She invited only the select few faculty members who shared her liberal politics, and last year she’d used the holiday to win over some more support for her personal campaign to repaint a dated, early-seventies-era Eve-shaming mural of the Book of Genesis in the student union. (In the mural, Adam looked like a hapless dork, shrugging his shoulders in a sitcom pose of “Take my wife…please!” Eve was narrow-eyed and ugly, with a darker complexion than Adam, a blatantly racist choice. The mural had to go, Dr. Moss insisted.) One of the invitees to the Mosses’ Last Day pizza party was Emily, a young creative-writing adjunct, a newly minted MFA with two minor publications to her name. She’d been particularly vocal in support of repainting the mural at a faculty meeting. Dr. Moss was eager to get to know her better.

  The man Emily brought as her date to the Mosses’ Last Day pizza party was hungover and gray. He was tattooed everywhere you could see, his arms sleeved in ghouls and skeletons, a storm amassing above his collar shooting lightning up his throat.

  “Kurt is a visual artist,” Emily announced several times after her boyfriend mumbled his hellos and nice-to-meet-yous to the other guests.

  “I’m a tattooer,” Kurt said to Sarah, who discovered the nauseous-looking man skulking in her most favorite place to skulk, down the hill from her house. They’d both found themselves sitting on the stones that encircled the Last Day fire pit, watching silently as the flames fizzled down to black and white embers. “This artist shit is about her, not me. She keeps telling people I’m working on a graphic novel. I mentioned to her once that I had half an idea for a comic book, but she knows as well as I do that I work and drink too much to ever get it started, let alone finished.”

  “Women will say absolutely anything to justify their sexual selections,” Sarah replied in a matter-of-fact tone. She felt equipped to judge because her paper on Madame Bovary had gotten an A. “It would be so cool if people could just say, ‘His pheromones smell like safety’ or ‘She successfully distracts me from thoughts of death.’ And then we could all nod and be like, ‘Yeah, mazel tov,’ and move on to more important stuff.”

  “Huh.” Kurt inhaled his cigarette and held the smoke for a long time in his mouth, like an actor in a movie. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Self-deception is the greatest crime,” Sarah said, then wondered if she believed this was true or was just saying it to sound cool. Surely there were worse crimes. Like rape, and anything involving children. Her companion looked at her with his squinted, bloodshot eyes and nodded in agreement, which made her feel, in the dumbest possible way, so good.

  Up the hill, Emily teetered across the yard, continually sinking then extracting the heels of her muddy sandals out of the soft, moist lawn. A hard rain had fallen the night before and relented suddenly, as though bidden to do so, just before dawn. Sarah had listened to every drop fall with an impatient, hopeful heart. She was panicked as usual, waiting for the end, or not the end, and had refused to take even one tiny milligram of the Valium her mother saved for long airplane flights and Sarah’s Last Day panic attacks. Though she changed her mind about everything every single day, exasperating her parents with her constantly relapsing vegetarianism, she knew one thing for sure—if the end was coming, she wanted to be fully awake to see it.

  “I’m still here,” she had wept silently in her bed once the rain had stopped and the sun rose. “We must be okay.”

  This long, anxious night had made for a groggy, exhausting day, but sitting next to this man now, she felt she was falling into a deep, transformative sleep and waking up from it at the same time.

  “She shouldn’t have worn heels,” Sarah observed of Emily.

  “Are you a student at the college?” Kurt asked.

  “Yes,” Sarah said. The pistons of her heart quickened, fueling the audacity she needed to lie. “My name’s…Sarah.”

  “I’m Kurt,” the man said.

  “One question.” Sarah touched his shoulder, an action that surprised her. She was not a hugger. This was often remarked upon at her very emotive private school. “If you did write a graphic novel, what would it be? I don’t care if you ever do it or not. I’m just curious.”

  “It’s from a dream I had once a long time ago. About a little boy who swallows a butterfly, then one day coughs up an egg that hatches into a lizard who becomes his best friend. Their adventures and stuff. I don’t really like writing. So it would be mostly pictures.”

  “Like a fable.”

  “Yeah, but not a fairy tale. Not for kids. They would get into real danger. Ghosts and hurricanes and serial killers would come after them. Did you ever see M by Fritz Lang?”

  She had not. She had seen the movie poster for Metropolis. Her friend Terrence’s parents had a large vintage print framed in their upstairs hallway.

  “Totally,” she answered. “That would look awesome. Like, as your aesthetic.”

  “Here’s the prototype.” Kurt pulled up his T-shirt. His torso was largely untouched by ink, which made the few images tattooed there even more vivid. He twisted to show her a tattoo on the left side of his rib cage. A blue-and-yellow lizard munched on a turquoise butterfly. The attention to detail was remarkable. The butterfly’s tiny
face was etched with infinitesimal agony. Crumbs of its iridescent wings fell from the lizard’s smiling mouth. There was a quality of light to the tattoo that Sarah thought miraculous. Even flat against Kurt’s pale, dry skin, the lizard and its prey seemed to glitter.

  Again she reached over and touched him, this time letting her fingers run over his skin for what felt like a long time, as though deciphering a code written in the rise and fall of his ribs. She looked at the tattoo on the other side of his ribs, the happy lizard’s evil twin—a scorpion that was inked too dark and was now fading, looking more like a badly healed scar than a picture of anything. She looked at Kurt’s thick waist, his softly protruding beer belly, the way the hair sprouted erratically over his abdomen, then gathered darkly, with purpose, at a central point below his navel. She imagined where his spleen was hidden. She thought about his kidneys, the ruffled scarf of his intestines, how fragile and alive he was, all the secrets he was keeping beneath his skin.

  What?

  This was something new. Sarah was a sworn asexual. It was a well-explored part of her identity. Ninth grade at the Phoenix School meant completing Dr. Heather Vasquez-McQueen’s practicum in human sexuality. Dr. Heather made her class read selections from the Kinsey report and Freud and the newest edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which the boys in the practicum protested. What about their bodies, themselves, hmmm? Dr. Heather was a lesbian married to a transgender man and she had no time for parity, what with eons of subjugation to counterattack in one semester, one abbreviated semester, as the practicum was supposed to be finished before Thanksgiving break. In just ten weeks they had to cover STDs, rape culture, masturbation, gender identity, the whole sexuality-is-a-continuum-not-a-fixed-point thing, and still drive home all the practicalities of how to put on and properly dispose of condoms as well as other safe-sex options and watch at least one documentary on Roe v. Wade.

  Their final project was to “map your sexuality” in a four- to five-thousand-word essay. It was optional to read this essay out loud, though highly encouraged by Dr. Heather, who said it was a critical strike in the war against repression. The Sarahs Wilmington and Burke naturally jumped at the chance, but that year a surprising number of other kids did, too. Even Terrence. He wrote about the time his mother walked in on him jerking off and the shame that followed, which got a lot of sympathetic head nodding from Dr. Heather. Sean Fusco talked about knowing he was gay when he was a little boy watching soap operas with his grandmother, how he’d wished the men would kiss each other. Lindsey LaSalle wrote an essay on pansexuality that had Dr. Heather practically weeping with pride.

  Sarah Moss wrote her essay about the parallels between the energetic attraction of subatomic particles in the first microseconds following the Big Bang and the attraction of humans, and how attraction plus collision makes new matter, whether that matter is a universe or a baby. The connection was flimsy and kind of sentimental, she knew, but the story of baryons was rife with meaning, worthy of a B+ at least, though she’d hoped for more.

  “The energy of creation is attractive but it is not sexual. It’s narcissistic projection to label it as sexual when these forces of attraction and creation began before there was carbon-based life,” Sarah read.

  Dr. Vasquez-McQueen smiled a smile that made her face look like a rag being wrung out to dry. After class Lindsey told Sarah that she should get tested for autism.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo. They think everyone is autistic these days,” Sarah’s father consoled her later. “The noise of the world is deafening. People shut down.”

  “And besides, you’re not autistic, pumpkin,” her mother added. “You’re just a late bloomer.”

  Or maybe she was not made to bloom at all. Never in her life had Sarah been sexually attracted to another person, male or female. She’d never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and had never wanted one. It was rumored that Terrence had a crush on her, but he was shy and waiting for her to make the first move, which was perfect—it meant she could stall him forever, or at least until graduation, without losing his friendship.

  That fall Sarah had kissed a freshman named Marcus Stroman at the school Halloween dance. He’d pushed himself on her but she was able to shove him away. He was drunk and arrogant and smoked unfiltered Camels. Sarah could taste the cigarettes on his teeth, and the acrid residue of his spit lingered on her tongue for a while after they stopped kissing, like the gentle pain of a tiny animal’s bite. She’d kissed Lindsey LaSalle one day two summers earlier. Lindsey had talked a lot about consent beforehand, so much so that Sarah finally blurted, “Yeah, fine, let’s kiss or whatever,” just to shut her up. Lindsey’s mouth was soft and a little sandy because they were on the beach. Both times, Sarah had opened her mouth, and there the experience had lived and died. Besides a tiny splash of fear that had quickly turned to tedium, clock-watching, when-will-this-be-over, she felt nothing anywhere in her body. Not even a tingle. But she couldn’t write an essay about that. It was the most shameful thing anyone could possibly admit in Dr. Heather’s class, that she was fifteen and asexual. It was worse than getting aroused by mascot animal costumes or period-staining your skirt or getting caught jerking off in the living room. Sarah was the biggest freak of them all.

  A phase, her parents said calmly, a rebellion in reverse. They’d raised her in such a loving, accepting, shame-free milieu that she was forced to reject basic biology to be different.

  “You’re just afraid of getting hurt,” Terrence suggested.

  But what if they were all wrong? What if she was born this way, part of a growing number of genetically unproductive people, evolved because the world had reached its limit and humanity was coming to its end?

  In her sunny backyard with Kurt that day almost precisely one year ago, Sarah had been able to forget all about the end of time. They had talked for two hours in a breathless, exhilarating way about music and movies and forgivably embarrassing things they had once done. Full disclosure was still out of reach; both had wanted to impress even as they’d pretended to disarm. For example, Sarah did not tell the story of the time she’d pissed her pants during a cross-country track race. Kurt did not reveal how much debt he was still in ten years after opening his tattoo studio. They’d told innocent tales of pratfalls and mistaken identity instead, pretending to be more mortified than they actually were.

  They’d discovered that they both loved a graphic novelist named Val Corwin, a reclusive artist and writer whose controversial work was published sporadically, always to mixed reviews, and about whom not much was known personally, not even the gender of the author. The biggest commercial and critical hit was Corwin’s fully illustrated version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. While many other graphic novelists had taken a stab at this story, Corwin’s edition centered on Gregor Samsa’s sister, casting the ordinarily tragic beetle as an ugly antagonist. The book was hailed as a feminist masterpiece, but the graphic novel that followed it, about a lecherous Hollywood screenwriter and his chronic impotence, was both lauded and reviled for its grotesque precision. An entire chapter was devoted to the protagonist’s botched penis-enlargement surgery, one that many readers, even devoted fans, found hard to take. Like most of Corwin’s work, it was an uncomfortable mixture of the sacred and the profane that left readers uneasy.

  Corwin’s work, in different ways, had carried both Sarah and Kurt in their darkest hours. The newest book, release date unknown, was rumored to be an illustrated anthropology of the Last Day holiday. Sarah had gushed that it was her greatest fantasy to meet Corwin in person. Kurt confessed that when he was a teenager he had staked out an address in Boston he had heard belonged to the artist. He’d stood outside in the rain like a creep until the owner of the house invited him inside for a cup of tea. She was an elderly woman adorned head to toe with silver and turquoise jewelry and a caftan, under which she wore no bra. The woman claimed she didn’t know who Val Corwin was, though she had the charcoal-stained
fingertips of an artist at work.

  “All Corwin’s work is black-and-white!” Sarah swooned.

  “I know. I can never prove it, but I swear it was her.”

  “I always hoped Corwin was a woman.”

  “Me, too.”

  Sarah and Kurt sat on the low stones around the fire pit, close enough to feel the discrete energy of each other’s bodies without touching. The heavy rain had prevented a proper fire, but Sarah’s father had stayed up all night like the good patriarch that he was, and once the storm had subsided, around four in the morning, he’d built a small, sputtering flame in the pit. Now the ashes had turned smoldering and white but were still radiating heat. The sun shone on the glittering grass.

  Up the hill, Kurt’s girlfriend, Emily, had finally extracted herself from an awkward conversation with a theology professor. She was beckoning Kurt with a wave. It was time for him to go.

  Kurt got up and gave Sarah a long hug.

  “Keep in touch,” Kurt said, and handed her his business card.

  Sarah opened a new email account, pretending to be the fictional college student Kurt thought she was, and wrote to him the very next day. We made it. The end is not for us, not this time, she said.

  Over the course of the past year, Sarah had revealed herself in a way she had never done before with another human being, all the while remaining perfectly hidden behind a screen and the false identity of a Christian college student. Sarah was good about spacing out her correspondences—she didn’t want to appear needy or deranged—and Kurt responded, when he responded, either with long, stream-of-consciousness tracts or incomplete sentences that made him sound drunk. For the most part his messages were funny, cryptic, and a little sad. He refused to use first-person pronouns, giving his voice a foreign, disembodied timber.