Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  He drank one beer very quickly and another slowly. The idea for his next tattoo swam to him as if in a dream—an image of classical octopus hentai. When Kurt’s next customer said he was a stripper, it seemed an example of what Kurt’s old Irish grandma used to call providence. An encouraging step away from the ghosts of dread and guilt taking jabs at his peace of mind. Kurt rerouted his nervousness about the afternoon into the stripper’s tattoo, the curves of the tentacles, the detailed suckers each with a tiny hook inside it. The squid’s human lover arched her back; her long hair spilled down the calf of the man in Kurt’s tattoo chair. Kurt was pleased with the finished product, and the customer loved it. For a moment Kurt relaxed.

  He was washing his hands when a girl with long legs and dull blond hair hopped onto his empty chair. Dressed in magenta athletic shorts and a baggy blue T-shirt, she was obviously very young, though he couldn’t tell how young. Her forehead bore deep age lines of wonder or distress, but her mouth, her cheeks, the delicate skin around her eyes were baby smooth. A neon-pink Band-Aid protected a nick on her shin, and a tiny spot of blood seeped through the plastic. Her sneakers were filthy. The most disgusting sneakers he’d ever seen. They smelled awful.

  “Hello, I’m Kurt.” He offered her a handshake.

  Sarah Moss stared into his eyes. “It’s me,” she said. “Sarah.” She sank her straight, slightly gapped top teeth into her lip.

  He remembered the name but the face not at all. That girl from the barbecue? When was that? Fourth of July? Did he sleep with her? He was ninety-nine percent sure he hadn’t. Yes, it was coming back to him, slowly: it had all been completely chaste, so chaste, in fact, he’d only jerked off to her twice, and one of those times by accident—in the pantheon of angels his subconscious had presented to him one night, these same long legs so pale and pure had randomly appeared in the fray. Kurt was relieved. As long as he hadn’t slept with her, he didn’t owe her anything.

  “Kidding. How could I forget you?” Kurt said, and shuffled through the memories of so many mornings waking up with his laptop next to him on the bed, the screen wide open against the pillow like a lover with her mouth agape. Most likely he’d emailed this girl Sarah in a blackout, as was his wont. But he could have sworn she was in college. Young, but not this young. Though that was a piece of fiction he had told himself about many other girls many times before, with his faculties relatively awake and alert.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Sarah. What can I do for you?”

  “Oh, good,” she said, recovering. “Okay. I’ve been thinking about this for a while actually. Since I met you.” She searched his face for the light of love and thought she saw it, a tiny glimmer, in the gold flecks of his brown eyes. “I know I can’t choose my tattoo, and I’m totally okay with whatever you give me. I trust you completely. Like, totally. But I want you to know what I would choose, so it can be, like, our common vocabulary for the moment. Right?”

  “Go on.”

  “So, I’ve been obsessively watching birds my whole life. For as long as I can remember. My first memory is not of my mom or my dad but this time at the park when a swan bit my hand as I was trying to feed it my French fries. When I was little, as soon as I could walk, I was chasing birds across our lawn. I wanted more than anything to see them up close. As up close as possible. And obviously they never let me. Birds fly away. It’s what they do. I love that about birds. Admire, love, and envy—like, there should be a word for those three things mixed into one.”

  “You want those words.”

  “Oh, no. No no no. I don’t want any words on my body. I read too much as it is. I don’t want to read my own skin.”

  “Good,” Kurt said.

  “Right? You get it. I knew you would.”

  Sarah was thunderstruck with self-consciousness. It was weird how you could totally forget you had a body, then suddenly remember and think of nothing else. She pawed anxiously at her bangs. It was an awkward fringe of hair she was trying to train into a swoop across her forehead. So far unsuccessfully. The rest of her hair was limp. It just hung there, as though it grew only as much as it wanted to and then gave up. She pulled it into a messy ponytail and prayed her armpits were not visibly damp.

  “It was frustrating,” she went on. “There’s only so much you can learn from books. Field research is key. My dad bought me these amazing binoculars. Made by NASA. But I hate using them. I get seasick easily, and tracking a bird from tree to tree at such a close magnification makes me really dizzy.”

  Sarah could hear herself prattling on. I sound like such a girl, she thought, but felt powerless to stop herself. She talked even faster now.

  “Then one day, I figured out that if I scattered birdseed on my windowsill, the birds would come and perch there, and hang out for a while, and let me watch them through the glass. Instead of chasing them, I could invite them closer to me. Which is, like, a metaphor. Right? I started scattering seeds on my lawn and other places in town. And as long as I sat still, and was patient, they would always come. Not quite close enough, but closer than before. And I know, it’s obvious. But it was kind of a big breakthrough for me.”

  She lifted the fabric of her T-shirt off her belly in a weird flutter that horrified her as she was doing it. Stop it, she told herself. Be normal. Just BE. NORMAL.

  “So for a tattoo,” she said slowly, deliberately, until her voice did not sound real, “if I could choose, and I know I can’t—you have your tradition and everything, which I think is amazing—but just for an exercise, this is what I’d want: a hand reaching out, palm open, all the lines and stuff, a real hand. And seeds falling in a light spray, and some collecting on the ground, though I don’t want an actual line to demarcate ground. And some birds eating away at those seeds. But cool, realistic birds. Nothing cartoonish.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe a lark. Or is that cheesy?”

  “The heart wants what it wants.”

  “You’re right.” Sarah smiled. “Thank you for saying that. I really like larks.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “So?”

  “Yeah.” Kurt scratched his neck. “I would love to do that tattoo.”

  “You would?”

  “When you turn eighteen.”

  “I am.”

  “What year were you born?”

  Quick arithmetic was not one of Sarah’s gifts.

  “Exactly,” Kurt said.

  “Come on!”

  “I don’t have many rules here. Especially today, as you can see. It’s drunken pandemonium. But that is one rule I must abide by.”

  “Your ads promise free tattoos for everyone. Everyone is everyone. Including me.”

  “Drunks. Pregnant women. The criminally insane. Anything goes today, as long as you are the age of consent.”

  “I promise I will never sue you.”

  “Your parents might.”

  “You’ve met my parents. They would never do that. Not in a million years.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “But I’m telling you the truth.”

  “And I’ve heard that before, too.”

  “You won’t even consider it?”

  Kurt ran his hands over his face like he was washing it. “I did consider it. I would be honored to do that tattoo. And I promise I will, free of charge, but next year. You’ll be eighteen next year, right?”

  Fat tears sprang from Sarah’s eyes.

  “Take a deep breath. You’re way too emotional about this. You on your period?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s okay. I have sisters.”

  Sarah couldn’t believe that the man she had decided to love could say such a thing. It was sexist and reductive and uncreative and untrue! If anything, she was closest to the ovulation phase of her cycle, a time of peak an
xiety, she theorized, because of her asexuality. It was as if a part of her primitive biology despaired all those lost little eggs going to waste. The time of her period, on the other hand, was usually relaxing and productive.

  She jumped off the chair and heaved her backpack over her shoulder. “Don’t you get it? In the calendar of the cosmos, we’re living—right now—at December 31, 11:59 P.M. It’s the end. Every decision matters. I thought you—you of all people in the whole doomed world—would understand….”

  It was fascinating, disorienting, and unspeakably sad, Kurt thought, how still her face remained as she sobbed. It was like watching an animal cry. And yet, the sight of an attractive female in tears had always given him an erection—a phenomenon too shameful for him to explore. It was Kurt’s sexual kryptonite and it had caused him nothing but pain.

  As if to cement this point, another crying woman flung open the door of Redemption and scanned the studio with bleary, blackened eyes.

  It was Megan Brown, aspiring model-actress and onetime fling Kurt had quickly regretted when she’d claimed a week later that he had gotten her pregnant. “I don’t think that’s possible,” Kurt had said to her then, and her tears at that point turned to rage. “Don’t worry—I had it taken care of!” she screamed loud enough for the whole tattoo studio to hear. A year later Megan returned on Last Day to drop another grenade: “I just wanted you to know that I am a lesbian and I am moving to New York. You’ll never hear from me again!” Kurt could not hide his relief, which enraged her all the more, so she swept her hand across his tray of inks and sent them clattering to the floor. A year after that she came to Redemption again on Last Day, this time to make amends. “I’m sorry. I made that whole story up. I was never pregnant. I never had an abortion. I was just—I don’t know—I guess I wanted your attention.” She offered Kurt a wad of twenty-dollar bills for the spilled ink but he refused to accept it. “It’s all good,” he assured her then, believing this was the last he would ever see of Megan Brown.

  “Oh Christ. Not again…,” Janine growled. “Kurt!”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah. Please forgive me. I’m just—really hungry. I don’t know about you, but I start talking some nonsense when I’m hungry. You hungry? Let’s get burritos. On me.” Kurt wrapped his arm around Sarah’s shoulders and ushered her toward the back door.

  “I’m starving,” Sarah admitted, her pulse bolting at his touch.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE KURT WAITED at the counter for their food, he reviewed their correspondence on his phone. He’d gotten pretty intimate with this girl, telling her things he hadn’t admitted to anyone else, not even to himself in the sober light of day. In her emails she went on and on, as most women did, but she seemed to really pay attention to him, and pick up on things intuitively. She might be young, but she knew what she was talking about.

  “You’re smart,” Kurt said, taking a seat across from her. He placed the tray between them and started in on the nachos.

  “That’s so misogynistic,” Sarah shot back.

  “What? Why?”

  “You say it like it’s a surprise.”

  “I—I…”

  “I’m choosing to take it as a compliment, because men are only surprised by intelligence in women they also find pretty. So, thank you. But also, you’re welcome.”

  “Ok. Whoa. That’s not at all where I was going.”

  “Then where were you going?”

  “I was going to say, for someone as smart as you, did it ever occur to you that the calendar of the cosmos is just getting ready to turn another page? Everything looks like the end when you’re moving forward.”

  “I wish it were that simple.” She folded her paper napkin into a tight square that she squeezed in the palm of her hand.

  “I know how you feel. And it’s okay. It’s normal. The end of the world is the scariest thing when you’re young. Then you grow old and realize that dealing with a world of shit that never ends is even scarier.”

  “I saw a bumper sticker on the way here. It said, Cat-titude. That’s it. Fucking cat-titude, with a picture of a cat apparently copping an attitude. And I was like, yup, we’re done. Our reign here is over.”

  Kurt laughed a big expulsive laugh, with bits of rice flying out of his mouth, culminating in a choking cough; Sarah swore she could feel the serotonin surge in her own brain.

  “And I know you’re probably right. But I still can’t get rid of the feeling that this year is different. This year is really the end. But then again, I feel like this every year. I don’t know. My generation or whatever, which includes you, too, by the way—I mean epochal generation, not what-TV-shows-did-you-grow-up-with generation. We’re all so—derivative.”

  She paused to scan his face for evidence that she was using the word correctly. He was handsome at the edges but not at the core, she noted with some disappointment, a diffused beauty that scattered and fled. His jaw was sharp and the shadow of his thick, short beard cast the lines of his cheeks and nose in a shifty light. His eyes were too small, too far apart, too determined. His nose looked like it had been broken and roughly slapped back together several times. His forehead was waxy with huge pores.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Like, when was the last time someone thought of something new? I mean really new. Not an improvement on something that already exists. And don’t get me started on pollution….This planet wants to scratch us off like fleas.”

  Kurt took two wolfish bites of his burrito. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. “I mean really. The thing that scares you is never the thing that gets you. It’s the thing hiding behind the thing. So the end of the world means, what? Your parents are getting divorced?”

  “My parents are the most happily married people in the world. They’re soulmates.”

  “That’s cool. That’s rare. My parents had an Irish divorce,” Kurt said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sometime, when I was nine or ten years old, my dad started sleeping on the couch. Every morning he’d fold up his sheets and blankets and pillows and stuff them in the space between the couch and the front window. Like it didn’t happen. Except we all knew it did. He did this every night until my little sister finally moved out. Then he repainted her room and moved in there. He died a couple years ago. They were still married, he and my mother, forty-two years. Still in the same house, they just never spoke to each other.”

  Women were always pressing Kurt for personal information, their blatant attempt to force some kind of emotional dependency. The longer he kept silent, the easier it was to stall. But with Sarah he kept blurting out these dark little tales. There was something about her that elicited his trust. It was more than the Ambien, more than the safety of near-anonymous email. It had to be, because he was doing it again here, sitting across from her.

  “You going to any bonfires today?”

  “I hate today,” she said. “Everyone acts like it’s a big joke. Or a big party. No one thinks about what it really means. What if we really lost the whole world? The whole world!” Her eyes started to well up again and she wiped them with the backs of her hands, smearing a bit of guacamole on her forehead. “And don’t get me started on our lame-ass rituals. Beer and bonfires? What about a blood rite?” she said, composed again.

  Kurt reached across the table and wiped the green off her brow. “My whole business is a blood rite.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “That’s why I wanted to get a tattoo.”

  “You’re still pissed about that, huh?”

  “I’m ninety percent over it.” Sarah sighed. “Fatigue makes everyone more forgiving.”

  “That’s a good one. Who said that?”

  It was the one gem of wisdom bestowed by her former therapist. “Free-floating anxiety is so bourgeois,” Sarah had said to the old woman her parents’ insurance
policy had assigned to treat her. This practitioner, who was neither a PhD nor a shaman—which irked Sarah; she’d been hoping for a little of both, but Jungians, her parents explained, seldom accepted COBRA—had only the blandest anodynes, the saltines of psychiatric advice. “You judge yourself too harshly,” this silver-haired woman would say. “The future is a mystery, so focus on the present.” The moment their work together ventured into Sarah’s fear of Last Day, she quit going and refused to return.

  “I said it,” Sarah lied, for what felt like the millionth time that day. It was getting too easy.

  Kurt thought he was long past the age when teenagers would find him attractive. On occasion, a very drunk twenty-something would present herself as an option, if he hung around the bar late enough. Boston’s blue laws were the biggest impediment, or lifesaver, depending on the night, the girl. Those drunk twenty-somethings had been offering diminishing returns lately. They fell into two categories: the ones who woke up, looked at Kurt and his pale naked body sliding off his tired bones like loose meat, and cringed with regret, tiptoeing out of his house while he pretended to sleep, the only remnant of the previous night a makeup-smeared pillow on his bed like a hideous Shroud of Turin; or the crazy-as-shithouse-rats girls with serious daddy issues who refused to leave the next morning. The former were ego-crushing, the latter ball-busting, which is why, in his forties, Kurt was wont to go home early and abstain from both. Sometimes things worked out all right. Another satisfied customer. Other times—Jesus. He didn’t like to think about it too much.

  “So you really have nothing planned for today?”

  “Nothing,” she blurted. “I mean, I have a bunch of parties I could go to, but I’m not committed to any of them.”

  “Right,” he laughed. “We always have our parties. But how about we do something different?”

  IN MOROCCO GRANDMOTHERS make a spicy root vegetable stew on Last Day, and the greater the number of mouths they can feed that one night, the longer it will take for the end of the world to come. There are conflicting algorithms in this calculus: some believe each mouth fed is equivalent to one hundred years, others one thousand years. Throughout Morocco and parts of Algeria it is considered impolite to refuse the food of any married woman on the night of May 27, a tradition expanded over time so that it has become standard to say yes to any offer made by a married Morrocan woman on Last Day.