Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  “Check.” Svec slapped the timer, and Yui let out a belch before replying with his own move and subsequent slap.

  “Check, friendo.”

  Bear rigged up his laptop in the Cupola and set up the connection with the high school in Pasadena. There was an annoying delay, more than the usual one- to two-second pauses that punctuated conversations with Earth. Bear tried to explain this to the teacher, a young woman in a bright green cardigan with whom he’d been corresponding for over a month now. She had convinced him to do the meditation challenge alongside her class and then discuss the results, her goal being to bridge the gap between science and spirituality.

  “Happy Last Day from the International Space Station, kids!” Bear said brightly. “I have to say I am impressed that a bunch of teenagers would come into school on a Saturday, a holiday no less, to talk to me.”

  “Oh, we don’t recognize that holiday at Pasadena Christian Academy,” said the teacher. Bear was embarrassed. He could have sworn that the teacher, who had reached out to him over social media, and whom he’d found attractive, had been very flirtatious in her emails with him, and never once did she mention her school’s religious affiliation.

  “Well, any day that I can connect with people on Earth is a good one for me, and I am happy to talk about what I have learned from this meditation, but I’m more interested in hearing from you guys.”

  In varying degrees of elegance, bravado, and embarrassment, the teenagers spoke about finding clearer focus after meditation, about the way time seemed to expand, the short sessions of sitting and breath somehow generating even more space inside the day. What had begun as an assignment, all of them reported, became something they greatly looked forward to.

  “Since I started meditating, I can hear, like, literally hear the fear in my dad’s voice when he criticizes us. He’s, like, just a man, a person. And he’s afraid.”

  “I wasn’t feeling anything. But I kept doing it, at least when I had to in class. Then one day I was sitting at home and closed my eyes—not to meditate but to rest—when I felt a big whoosh and I saw a white light. It turned out to be a lightning bug, but how did only one lightning bug get into my bedroom in the middle of the day when all the doors and windows are shut in my house?”

  “This is so dumb,” one girl said, her voice lisping through the heavy-duty mouth guard holding back her wayward teeth. “I had this thought, listening to all of us breathing, and shifting in our seats, and, like, sniffling and stuff, that we are actually just different parts of one body, and that one body is trying to get comfortable, which is hard with all us different parts thinking we’re in charge of it.”

  The kids laughed nervously at that last one, and their laughter, after a second’s delay, made Bear laugh. He was slightly jealous—he had not experienced any of what they described; most of his meditations were consumed by a chastising inner monologue about not being better at meditation—but he was also moved to see these kids, with their plump faces and muddy pores, engaging with the world on a level so beyond him.

  His eyes moistened a little as he listened to one boy say, “It’s like I found another room hidden inside my own house, where I’ve been living my whole life, a room I never knew was here.”

  “I see so much destruction up here,” Bear replied. “From my vantage point, I can see the visual evidence of pollution, global warming, deforestation, like a doctor sees disease in a microscope, and it gets very depressing,” he confessed. “Sorry, not depressing. Discouraging. But listening to you, I have so much faith in your generation, in the good you are capable of—”

  “Who is the master of all men now?” Yui cried, thrusting the scorebook in Bear’s face.

  “Ha-ha, sorry, folks, that is just another of our crew members here on the station, Yui Yamamoto, of the famous Yamamoto brand, doing some research for—”

  “Sir?” The teacher looked into the camera. Her face was disconcertingly close, her hands shielding the rest of the space in the frame. With a sting of shame, Bear realized that the screen image he was projecting back to the classroom on Earth had frozen on Yui’s graphic depiction of Japanese, Russian, and American flag penises in their record of contests.

  Bear heard his last faltering attempt at diplomacy finally reaching the class, a disconcerting echo repeating every syllable of his apology. He saw his own blinking eyes freeze, then release in the small square at the bottom of his screen. Then, after what felt like the longest delay yet, he watched with a feeling of suffocation as the video feed to the kids on Earth disconnected.

  RECORDS OF LAST Day good deeds and acts of chivalry dated back to medieval Europe. In the seventeenth century a tradition of the settling of all debts arose, evolving at last to the present custom, borrowed from the self-help movement of the twentieth century: that of making amends to all those you have harmed before the sun sets on May 28.

  There were as many different practices as there were people practicing this secular sacrament. Some were very public apologies on television, radio, and social networking sites. For $200,000 you could buy a whole page in The New York Times to print such cryptic poems of contrition as:

  Evan, I’m so sorry I stole from you. I’ve made a donation in your name to Save the Pandas. Sincerely, Nick

  There was a retainer wall in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where someone once spray-painted a florid apology, and decades later the trend exploded until it became the Wailing Wall of the Buckeye State. The city eventually started whitewashing it every April in preparation for the yearly onslaught of apologetic graffiti.

  Some folks chose one person every year to seek out and apologize to; others made long, exhaustive lists of people and tried to contact each one in twenty-four hours, going “on tour,” sometimes traveling great distances over the holiday just to make face-to-face apologies. It was considered good form to make appointments ahead of time, many etiquette columnists wrote, so that the former victims of whatever moral crime you had committed could be prepared for the inevitably awkward conversation.

  Karen’s plan was backward. She started with a list of things she had stolen: underwear; a cheese grater; an expensive pair of scissors; Pop-Tarts; a very pretty spoon—tiny, as for a baby, with a soft white rubber coating the lip and a snail embossed on the handle; countless hairbrushes; a box of oranges—the whole box.

  “This is what is holding me back—my past,” Karen said to herself. She wondered, At what age did one’s past transgressions start requiring Last Day amends? At eighteen? Twenty-one? Everyone’s conscience emerged at a different moment. How were such things measured by the people of this world?

  Rosette was gone now, so Karen would have to look up the answer herself. Except she was forbidden to use the internet at work. She’d gotten into trouble twice already and nearly fired both times, close calls, as consistent employment was one of the conditions of her stay at Heart House. The first infraction was when Karen tried to play matchmaker. Looking up members’ confidential information, finding out who was not married, assembling romantic profiles according to astrological sign and address, she would try to bait unsuspecting parties with the details she’d unearthed from her research. People were understandably creeped out, and Karen got a month of custodial work as her punishment. The second infraction concerned a more sinister element. She’d become obsessed with registered sex offenders. There were over thirty in the same zip code as the Huntington branch of the YMCA, a fact she was happy to publicize while people did their circuit training, accosting members in the middle of their lat-pulls to report the names and addresses and descriptions of these local pedophiles.

  “In case they were lurking in the parking lot,” Karen later defended herself. Karen’s abstention from the office internet was on the honor system—her boss, Roberto, never monitored her usage; he didn’t even know how to. Since her second strike, Karen had only caved in one time, after listening to some members des
cribe a video of a kitten that had gone viral. She simply could not wait until the end of the day to watch the video at the library. With heart pounding, Karen logged on to the front desk computer to find it. Two kittens crawled around the inside of a grand piano. Their legs kept slipping between the strings and they cried a lot. It was supposed to be cute, but Karen was disgusted. Their paws were too delicate for this! Then someone offscreen started playing chords, and the kittens tumbled over headfirst, their faces the very portrait of terror.

  After watching the video eight times, Karen burned with the desire to discuss each and every layer of her outrage. For her there was only now; waiting until tomorrow, when she could pretend to have seen the video at the library on her own time, was simply impossible. It was just the punishment she needed—to have something so important to talk about, and for it to be verboten because of her own treachery. This was her definition of torture. She vowed never to go on the internet at work again.

  But now it was Last Day. Surely these were extenuating circumstances. Rosette’s gratitude list had inspired her, and after she and Mr. Cox had left, Karen made an exhaustive inventory of everyone she had ever harmed. It was, like so many millions of other Last Day inventories, a dishonest and manipulative tactic, a way to reach the collection of people she just wanted to touch again, to feel the static spark of drama, even if only over the phone.

  Karen broke up her inventory into three columns: foster families she’d stayed with for under six months (they could wait, as she hadn’t been with them long enough to cause any real harm); then families who’d fostered her for a year or more; and a third category labeled Before. It had only one name listed under it: Dennis. She was saving him for last.

  She opened up a search site and started plugging in names. This meant, of course, that now she would need to add her boss, Roberto, to this very list, for this very infraction. But that could wait until next year.

  Memories flew at her in clusters, the younger memories dark and globed while the older ones were translucent and pointy. So many families, so many houses, each one she remembered by its bathroom. Though the first few she totally forgot. That was in the very beginning, when the apartment was raided by the FBI, and their real parents went to jail. Dennis was still with her then. After that was the lady with the black hair. That lady straightened it out with the same iron she used on their clothes, which Karen, nearly eight years old, thought was novel. She had filthy wall-to-wall carpeting throughout the apartment, even in the bathroom. It was gray with a low loop pile. Karen remembered getting out of the shower and making wet footprints on the already soggy fibers.

  Her list grew, first names, fewer last names, towns, and the occasional zip code—all of it ejected from her memory bank with a vile, emetic force. Like the Colsons. Where were they? Karen remembered at least six of them in the real family, all with the same carrot-colored hair. They were so proud of this fact that they found a way to work it into every conversation. “Do you know,” Mrs. Colson liked to say, “that only one percent of the human population has true red hair?” Long, curly strands of their hair were always sticking to the porcelain of the bathtub, writing secret notes in a loose, lazy cursive only redheads could decipher. Karen was so angry when they said they were not adopting her that she broke a coffee cup on Mrs. Colson’s gingery head. She wasn’t sorry at first, and then she was never not sorry, because they had an in-ground swimming pool in their backyard. She’d slept with Mrs. Colson’s hairbrush in her arms like a baby doll for months after she’d left them.

  Karen wrote down The Colsons on the YMCA stationery pad. Then there was that woman who called herself Auntie. Auntie what? What was her real name? Her boyfriend was named Roger and he had inappropriate boundaries, Nora helped her to learn later. There was no column for such people, Karen decided. Let the stars in their pitiless wisdom handle Auntie and her pervert paramour.

  The Giraud family was fun for a while. They fostered lots of kids, it was a career for them, their house a kind of outsourced orphanage. Mrs. Giraud made pancakes every single morning on a big griddle that covered half of her stovetop. Other kids got sick of pancakes and complained after a while, but not Karen. For her, there was no upper threshold when it came to breakfast sweets. She simply wasn’t born that way. It was sad when she had to leave the Giraud house. Mr. Giraud was adventurous and he was usually hanging around the house, unlike most foster fathers. He worked from home, he used to say, but didn’t say what work he did.

  One day a huge cardboard box appeared at their house full of scratch tickets, and Mr. Giraud put all the foster kids to work scratching them. Karen wanted to be in charge of collecting the winners and tallying the earnings, but Mr. Giraud said only Barry could do that. It was because Barry was a boy, Karen thought then, and it wasn’t fair. She complained about this to her social worker, who launched an investigation and later busted up the whole house.

  After that Karen went to live with the old spinster in Dorchester who made her wear braids to school every single day. Karen was in high school by then. It was embarrassing. The old lady’s name was Miss Catherine May and she had a short, thick tuft of gray hair. Miss May hung framed pictures of herself in her youth all over her apartment. There were never any friends or family in the pictures—just Miss May on the deck of a boat, Miss May on a horse, Miss May drinking from a coconut. At breakfast she would push Karen down into a chair and brush her blond curls until they were straight and frizzy, then braid her hair so tightly that Karen felt her eyes squinting. If she squirmed, Miss May would whack her several times with the brush. If Karen was more than three minutes late for curfew at 7 P.M., Miss May would lock all the doors and make Karen sleep on the wicker couch on the screened-in porch. Karen spent a lot of nights on that porch. Like cleanliness, punctuality had never been her strong suit.

  What would Karen say if she got ahold of these people? I’m sorry, I love you, Happy Last Day, goodbye? She didn’t know which of those things she actually meant, only that the need to say them was dire.

  The internet was not the magical portal of solutions she had hoped for. It was as fickle and confused as any other augury. After searching all the names she could remember, the only phone number Karen was able to track down was for Deborah Giraud, the Girauds’ one real daughter. Karen imagined this girl was still seventeen, beautiful, and glamorous, wearing high heels and ankle socks even when it was snowing.

  “Did you guys end up winning a lot of money off those scratch tickets?” Karen asked her on the phone now.

  “I don’t remember much after the stroke, honey,” Deborah replied. It sounded nothing like Deborah. Not that Karen remembered. But the woman on the other end of the phone did not sound pretty at all. Pretty was something you could hear, and this woman didn’t have it.

  “How’s your mom’s cat? Tabitha was her name. I remember her fondly.”

  “Tabs? Tabs was a trooper. Tabs will outlive us all.” Deborah pulled her face away from the phone and coughed a very liquid, tumultuous cough.

  “Did your parents ever talk about me?” Karen asked. “Did they miss me after I left?”

  “They missed the checks, that’s for sure. Mom had to get a job as a nurse’s aide. She hated it. But then some rich old fuck left her a bunch of money, so she and Pop moved to Florida. They sell hot dogs and Popsicles out of a truck at the beaches down there. Happy as pigs in shit, those two.”

  “Can I have their number?” Karen asked.

  “I don’t even have their number. Couldn’t come up with a lousy five grand for my wedding? Come on! I’m through with cheap people. Life’s too short.”

  “Okay,” Karen said, her eyes welling up. “Happy Last Day! I love you!”

  “Good night, honey,” Deborah said. She cleared her throat loudly before hanging up. It was quarter past noon.

  SPRING WAS SHY that year, emerging slowly, raw, soggy, and pale like a newly healed limb coming
out of a cast. There’d been a feeling of apprehension lingering in the air, a feeling of being run aground. Then the end of May brought a flamboyant display of sunshine. Overnight, flowering plants exploded, their pollen and petals scattering everywhere. By the twenty-seventh of May people were peeling off layers of clothing, letting the sun touch their skin for the first time. Sitting on the sidewalk of Commonwealth Avenue, waiting for their free tattoos, their skin began to burn. No one cared. The sky was nothing to them but a fresh swell of blue.

  They sat and stood, flitted and danced, eating each other’s snacks and drinking each other’s booze on the sidewalk in front of Redemption. Suddenly a dog darted into the street and a car came to a screeching stop from hitting it. The dog, a stocky pit bull the color of baked yams, bounced off the front fender. The driver leaned on the horn. The dog shook his head, then his back, then his rump until the near-death experience had wriggled out of him; he bounded across the street and into the line of people waiting on the sidewalk for their tattoos. He smelled chicken somewhere and nothing could stop him, not even his owner, who was pounding her fist on the hood of the stopped car.

  The dog at last plunged his nose into the purse of a woman sitting in line and chomped down on her half-eaten burrito.

  “Hey,” the woman said, laughing. “Let me peel the foil off for you first, boy.”

  Sarah had arrived just in time to see all this. The dog ate the burrito in three bites, then swallowed it foil and all. Laughter erupted among the few people who had looked up from their phone screens to see it. A couple tried to pat the dog, who sniffed their reaching hands and licked them profusely. When the dog trotted into the tattoo studio through the open door, Sarah saw an opportunity, and followed quickly behind.

  “What the fuck?” A redheaded lady with thin penciled eyebrows stood up on her chair. “Jake, help me!”