Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  Rosette was no angel, she was the first to admit. But all had been forgiven when she’d turned her life over to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The main reason Rosette had joined was because she liked the idea that the unfaithful would be destroyed in a violent cosmic comeuppance, as this surely included her ex-husband, the most unfaithful human being to walk this rotting earth.

  For a time she’d wondered if she had brought this misery on herself, if her ex-husband had been sent by God to punish her for the wantonness of her youth. But this theory didn’t hold up to scrutiny. All Rosette’s childhood friends had been rapacious sluts—it was something about the plaid jumpers of their Catholic school, so ugly and itchy. It wasn’t enough to take them off after a long day; you wanted to rip such a skirt off your body in a violent passion and throw it in the face of a man panting with lust. And all of these Catholic school friends were in blessedly boring marriages now.

  When she was only thirteen, Rosette had seduced a seventeen-year-old neighbor, a boy who later flung himself off a fishing boat in a storm when he learned that Rosette had also taken his cousin as her lover. There were plenty of other boys to follow. São Miguel had become too small for her by the age of twenty. She decided to hunt for bigger game in the States. Once she had saved enough money for airfare and tuition, she’d enrolled in a nurse’s aide program in Boston, where there were enough other Azoreans to ensure that she could still find her native food and music and laughter. She told her friends and family she would come back as a millionaire’s wife.

  She knew her life was unfolding according to plan when she met Joey Mazzone in the Italian restaurant he claimed to own. He bought her gold necklaces, silver bracelets, and emerald earrings. He gave her the keys to his car and his golden American Express and said, “Don’t come home, sweetheart, until you’ve spent at least a grand.”

  After they’d exchanged vows at City Hall, she learned that Joey was in staggering debt to multiple credit card accounts. And he was the manager, not the owner, of Enoteca. He didn’t own anything, in fact, not even his car, a Lincoln Continental that belonged to his mother, who let him drive it whenever he wanted as she had become legally blind.

  They’d been married two years when, one miserable Saturday night, Joey was “out” again, and Rosette, quaking with rage at her kitchen table, couldn’t stop imagining a violent collision. And while Joey was out riding the Vespa he had bought with Rosette’s paycheck, impressing some harlot—which harlot Rosette no longer cared, there were too many to count—he hit a pothole and their two bodies went flying. Joey smashed into the overarching beam of a streetlamp, snapping his neck instantly. The harlot skidded across the pavement, crushed and skinned like a rabbit.

  Rosette believed she had made this happen with her mind. Guilt and pride swirled in a sour mixture in her mouth. If Rosette had given it a little more thought, she would have tempered the violence. Have Joey choke to death in his sleep, or develop spontaneous nut allergies and die of anaphylaxis. Yes, a good old-fashioned poisoning by natural causes, that would have been a peaceful end to him and his passions. But in her grief and rage that night, she’d had no control over her imagination.

  As a widow, Rosette was angrier than ever. She’d remained sitting at her kitchen table for days after the funeral, her thick black hair growing into a dark shroud around her face, her eyes swollen with powerlessness and mania. All day she nursed a coffee mug full of rum, occasionally, in the middle of her sobs, stopping to blow on the rim of her cup, as if there were really hot coffee in there that needed cooling. She didn’t want God to see her carrying on. She’d feared Him all her life, even when she’d blocked Him out.

  So it seemed like a message from the Divine when two teenage boys in short-sleeve shirts and skinny black ties knocked on her door, bearing the good news.

  “He float, he float, he float. This woman, that woman. But he always float back to me. I ask the Lord let me never ask him where he goes. And one day I did. Joey say it was because he was Italian. It was his nature, his God-given duty, to please as many women as he could. But it was my fault he ran off with harlots,” Rosette wept. She catalogued her flaws for the two boys—big feet, sagging breasts, excessive pride, and a very promiscuous past. “My mother tell me when I was a little girl, ‘Men love a wild woman for fun, but they only marry a boring one.’ I wanted to get married. So I pretended to be boring. Now look at me!”

  Her head collapsed onto the table and she sobbed into a pool of rum spilled from her overturned mug. One boy got up and found a rag to wipe it up with; the other began sorting through her mail, stacking neatly all her unread newspapers and magazines, throwing out the coupon circulars that were now out-of-date. They did her dishes and made her some toast. After she had nibbled a little of the crust, she said, “So, what do I do now?”

  The two young men were immigrants like Rosette. Their parents had brought them from Haiti to give them a better life in the States, even as they sought to protect them from so much of that new life. As Jehovahs they were not allowed to go to college, making this door-to-door ministry an important outlet for their youthful energy and ingenuity. They made sweet attempts to connect their ultimate message to Rosette’s story of betrayal and grief. It was Satan’s rule on Earth, they explained. It really wasn’t anybody’s fault. Lots of innocent people and nearly all politicians were under Satan’s spell and couldn’t help it. They told her about the End of Days, which she welcomed. The Catholics of her childhood had preached that all would be one in heaven. Hell no, Rosette thought now. Heaven on Earth, as the Jehovahs promised, was much more selective. It was a place that definitely excluded her dead husband, meaning she would never have to see that man’s bloated, stubbly face again. All that was required was her belief.

  Karen had shown some interest in Rosette’s church, but to her it was more like a cabinet of wonders. She was fascinated by their arcana, their chosen symbols and songs. She’d read that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were not allowed to participate in any war, that they hated flags and were terrified of blood. Even if Rosette was dying, she was not allowed to accept a transfusion.

  “What if you were unconscious and the doctor went ahead and gave you a transfusion anyway, then what?” Karen asked.

  “Your mind jump on all the wrong things,” Rosette responded.

  Karen’s head was resting on Rosette’s thigh. Rosette pulled one of her blond curls straight, then released it. Karen had traded Rosette a couple of her tranquilizers for one of Mr. Cox’s painkillers. The three of them lay beneath the lifeguard’s chair in a listless calm, watching diamonds of sunlight rupture the surface of the pool.

  TERRENCE HAD CALLED the night before to say that someone had dropped out of the Habitat for Humanity Club’s camping trip and there was an open spot. Did Sarah want to come? Sarah had no gear, but Terrence assured her he had plenty for the two of them. Sarah allowed an awkward pause to speak for her.

  “B-besides,” Terrence stuttered, “these guys know how to build houses. They can make a shelter out of wet leaves and a shoelace. If there’s anyone you want to be with at the end of the world, it’s the Habitat for Humanity Club.”

  She said she’d let him know after her morning run.

  “Meet us at the train depot. We have a charter bus. Leaves at 11 A.M.”

  Sarah double-knotted her sneakers and hit the road. Even Terrence was so goddamn glib about the world ending. She was furious at him. He of all people should know better: this whole stupid holiday was nothing more than a political distraction from the real destruction and cruelty happening worldwide; everyone was celebrating an imaginary apocalypse while schools filled with children were bombed by dictators and pipelines leaked millions of tons of crude oil into the sea. It was so obvious it was stupid, and Sarah hated herself for being sucked into the myth, for being so afraid.

  She ran until her legs seemed to disappear. She stopped finally at the Edgewater ca
useway to catch her breath, a good eight miles from home, not remembering the preceding hour of her life. Two egrets stood on either side of the channel, their legs so lissome and still as to appear invisible at that distance, making their round white rumps seem to levitate above the marsh. The water was mute and silver, flowing eastward into the sea. Sarah listened to the wind, her soft panting breath, and the sound of the water. One of the egrets took three steps on its spindly legs, then stopped, plunged its nose into the tall grass, nibbled on something brackish and small, then stood erect and still once more. The other egret did not move at all.

  “I know the world is shit, but I still don’t want to lose it,” she said, gazing now at the birds. She felt tears welling up. A hollowness in her chest rose to her throat and pushed hard on the walls of her soul. The membrane between her mind and the atmosphere was burning away. She felt like she was being lifted out of her sneakers, off the pavement, about to be hurtled into the endless sky.

  This is it, she thought, this is what the end is.

  Then the feeling passed, her feet were on the ground, it was still morning. She began to run again, hitting a 7:30 mile on the way home, a personal best.

  Her parents were in the kitchen still, twirling globs of dough into pizza crusts for their party. Sarah breezed past them, took the quickest shower of her life, then stuffed a backpack with clothes, her journal, and a sleeping bag.

  “Where are you going?” her mother asked her. She was wearing a frilly pink-and-red apron that Sarah’s father had bought as a joke for Valentine’s Day. They’d been married nineteen years and were the two happiest people she had ever met in her life.

  “I’m going camping,” Sarah answered.

  “Where? With whom?” Her father taught in the physics department at the college, on the floor above her mom.

  “Don’t say ‘whom,’ Ari. You sound like a pedant.”

  “Which friends, Saralita?”

  “The Habitat for Humanity Club.”

  “Oh, good. You’ll be in good hands.”

  “Do you need any money?”

  “No,” Sarah answered. “I mean, yes.”

  Her parents exchanged looks. Her dad wiped his hands on his wife’s apron and looked around the kitchen for his wallet. Sarah inspected the toppings. Eggplant and mango.

  “Purple and gold,” her mother explained. Sarah’s pulse fluttered in a bitter, stringy rhythm. “You’ve got to try this marinated chicken. We used pineapple juice! Your dad and I are geniuses. We’re going to quit academia and sell this stuff full-time at farmers’ markets. You won’t mind going to a state college, right, honey?”

  “Very funny, Mom. I’m in a hurry. I’ve got a bus to catch.”

  “Here you go, kiddo.” Her dad handed her two damp twenty-dollar bills. “We’ll save you a couple slices for when you get back, okay?”

  “I’m not eating meat, remember?”

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “Oh, that’s too bad. These are going to be so good.”

  “We can just make one without chicken,” her dad suggested.

  “Of course! That’s what we’ll do. Sorry, I’m frazzled. You know how I get on the holiday.”

  “You guys, I really have to go.”

  Did she kiss them goodbye? she would wonder later. Did they say they loved her? It was an utterance so common in their happy house that the sounds of those words had lost all resonance over the years. It had become a reflex of the mouth, a hum as constant and forgettable as the refrigerator’s motor, audible but seldom heard.

  ANOTHER OF BEAR’S directives was to maintain a social media presence for the ISS, curating images and short videos that people on Earth would find interesting, in the hope that it would stoke an electorate with a dispiriting apathy toward science to vote for more government-funded space projects. This doubled as an excuse for Bear to hang out in the Cupola, as it provided the best optics, where he liked to take what he’d come to think of as a nice cool drink of Earth.

  Just looking at her made Bear’s mouth water, as though at a cellular level his body was aware of the artificial environment he was in, where the only water existed in plastic sacks. He attached his camera to the end of a selfie stick and positioned himself so that a glimpse of Earth was behind him in the shot. He was recording a laymen’s guide to the weather research NASA was conducting at the moment, but his spiel, which he’d written out beforehand on index cards, kept losing focus when he tried to go off script. He could see in the camera’s screen that they were flying over Africa now. The Nile River appeared as a crack in a thin shard of clay.

  “Look,” Bear heard someone say, and he turned his head away from the camera and past his feet where he saw Yui floating toward him, his hands cupped against his chest.

  “They are so cute. Too cute. I cannot believe how cute,” Yui said. As he got closer he showed Bear what he was holding so delicately in his hands. It was the infamous newborn mouse pup, about the size of a cashew nut, scrawny and gray with one white belly, four tiny paws, and two heads curled into each other as though taking refuge.

  “No way,” Bear said. He quickly hit “Pause” on the recording and swatted at Yui like an errant child. “Get that thing back to the lab before it—”

  “Too late.”

  A string of gold liquid issued from the mouse pair and re-formed into a ball. Yui let go of the mouse, whose legs paddled against the air as its ball of urine floated aimlessly away from its body.

  “Awww, even their urine is so cute,” Yui said. He cupped his hands around the wriggly animal again and gave a gentle kiss to each of its heads. Bear wrapped his hand in his T-shirt to catch the floating globule of piss before it hit the sides of the ship.

  “You absolutely cannot do this, Yui.”

  “I may not, but I can. A surprise for you. To cheer you up. You looked so lonely this morning. You are very welcome, friendo,” Yui said.

  Yui was a man who had never been asked to grow up. He and his twin brother, Tadeshi, were born into oceans of family money, wealth so vast and deep and regenerative it strained the imagination to picture a future when it would be depleted. Their father had inherited a fortune from his own father, a Tokyo real estate mogul, and increased this fortune exponentially by starting what became the largest, most successful video game company in the world. Their mother was a child model-actress who had married their father at nineteen and committed suicide eight years later. Yui and his brother did not mourn her for very long; they were raised by a staff of doting, indulgent nannies who insulated the twins from every blunt strike the world might fling in their direction. Their father was distant and impossible to impress, and their mother, while alive, had been a very pretty ghost, striking a vision in the hallways as she glided in and out of rooms in her bright silk dresses that, lacking the creativity to do anything else, she changed several times a day. A creature of alien and alienating beauty, she was less like a parent than a tropical bird whose clipped wings prevented her from going anywhere beyond their lavish compound in Roppongi.

  Yui began sketching ideas for his company’s newest virtual reality game, a strangulating dreamscape of outer space in which the first-person player-protagonist is confronted by the myriad buttons, dials, and instruments of a space station without any knowledge of what function each instrument performs. He was populating the game with monsters, real and unreal: vanishing air pressure, missiles from warring nations, mendacious aliens, synthesizing the horror of banality—I can’t breathe! I’m trapped!—with the elaborate terrors of the mind. It was to be his magnum opus.

  And as he drew and dreamed on this thesis now, his mother stole out of his unconscious for the first time in years, appearing on his tablet as a sketch of a bird of paradise flitting improbably across the black velvet void of space.

  Yui had awakened to the alarm at 6 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time along with his other two cr
ewmates, then retreated back to his sleeping pod to masturbate, reread his favorite graphic novel, and nap. Napping was an essential step in his creative process. He believed it re-created the bleary color splash between sleep and consciousness that fueled his imagination. As he hammered away at his game now, another vision emerged—that one day he and his brother would open the first brothel in space. He smiled to himself, already proud. Yui was the idea man; Tadeshi made things happen. Because of this, there was perfect harmony in the world.

  Yui closed his eyes and swallowed three times, a fraternal ritual encoded in childhood for sending thoughts back and forth between the twins without speaking. It worked at least half the time. Yui would call his brother later to ask him if he’d received the transmission. He hurried to scribble down the last few notes about the game before he forgot them: the protagonist of the game would have to decide whether or not to follow this bird of paradise, to determine as one of his many possible obstacles if she was real or not, trustworthy or not, as the player swam in his unwieldy spacesuit between the unblinking stars in search of help.

  Along with his work on the VR game, Yui was supposed to be aiding the other astronauts with their ongoing scientific experiments and representing the nation of Japan in the spirit of cooperation and brotherly love. So far he had used his time perfecting the art of peeing upside down.

  “Not so perfect,” Bear pointed out as he flew out of the bathroom with a wad of paper towels and slammed them into the trash receptacle. Yui did manage to take many of his duties on this mission seriously, but cleaning up after himself as diligently as was required in these cramped quarters was not one of them.