“Huh,” Sarah said when it was all over.
“Yeah,” Kurt sighed.
“Is it always like that?”
“Sometimes.” He pulled his jeans back on and rolled himself a cigarette. “You don’t shave at all?”
“Only in the summer.”
Kurt crouched by the fire and fed more logs into its snapping flames. Sarah’s underwear was knotted up around one ankle. She pulled them on and let the cool air chill her body. She still didn’t know what to feel. Was she repulsed, piqued, or suddenly insatiable? No. But she felt fine. With or without orgasm, the mere concentration of sex, its focused physicality, had a calming effect. At least for the moment. She gazed at the black sea shimmering beneath the opaque black of the sky and was so grateful to have had this experience at this exact location, at this time, with this person. It was nothing to write poetry about, but it was nice being so close to someone, trusting him to care for her body and knowing he trusted her to care for his. If he asked her for more, she would probably consent, but if they never did it again, that would be fine, too. As long as he wanted to lie next to her and hold her, protecting her again like he had when those strangers passed by.
“There are no stars, either,” she said. “Are you sure there isn’t a storm coming?”
Kurt looked at the dark folding over the sky.
“It’s okay. It will blow over.”
She wiped her stomach off and put on her shorts.
“We should burn something. Each of us. Here.” She handed Kurt her journal, her scattershot dissertation on names, birds, time, sex, and the cosmos, all the hopes and anxieties of her life so far. “There’s some pretty important stuff in there,” she added, as though he had contested the worth of her offering. “Stuff I won’t be able to remember or repeat.”
“Sounds good,” he said. He took a check out of his wallet. It was for $350, from a customer getting a full-back piece that he was paying for in installments. It was a toss-up whether or not the check would even clear. Kurt threw it into the fire.
“It’s cozy over here,” Sarah said. She shook the sand off the sleeping bag and smoothed it with her hand. “Come back.”
“In a minute. Got to keep this going.” He poked at the burning logs.
“In love,” Sarah’s mother had once said, “there is always the one who offers the kiss, and the one who offers the cheek.” She had never elaborated on this. Sarah wondered which thing her mother offered, which her father did. Sitting here now, she couldn’t even venture a guess. Sarah had had several major epiphanies so far in the protracted crossover from childhood to adulthood: that her parents were once kids with dreams of being something different from what they actually became; that she had lived with them for a decade and a half and that there were things she would never know about them, nor they about her; that all people were fundamentally unknowable; that her body had pretty much reached the size and shape it would always be for the rest of her life as long as she took care of it; that if she was lucky, she would be with her parents when they died, and if she was unlucky, they would outlive her. Intellectually, she’d figured it out a long time ago, or most of it—what it meant to be an adult, to grow up. But there was still so much she didn’t know. She had imagined that sex would be a portal to more answers, but it was only another question.
“Come over here,” she said again. Kurt continued rearranging the burning logs, reaching into the flames. “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry.”
She considered her parents again. They definitely loved each other. Perhaps they loved each other more than they loved her. Growing up, she’d never felt a lack or a longing. Being with them, sitting at the dinner table, all three of them content, paying attention, making jokes—it was good. But she was a discrete object outside of the force field created by their composite energies. Not left out, just outside. There was a standing invitation for her to join them, but it was her choice, and for reasons she was just beginning to understand, she chose not to. She didn’t want to live inside their love, because it was theirs, and she wanted her own love. Was this it? This feeling for the man tending the fire that kept her warm on the last night of the living world? Was this love?
Maybe it was not about a biological balance of immunities, but about one body of knowledge compensating for another. What he knew, what she understood, his observations, her readings, the way two of them together annealed each other’s mental weaknesses, leaving them with a greater wisdom.
“Do you remember the email I sent you? About the formation of the universe?”
“Yeah.” Kurt tossed his cigarette into the fire. “But remind me. I forgot some of it.”
“That’s okay. Because I want to tell you about the part I cut out. It was too long already, and it seemed irrelevant, but it was actually the most relevant part of the story. In the first microsecond of the universe, as all the gases were cooling and expanding, the intensity of heat and radiation formed quarks, which bundled together according to mutual attraction. The positively charged bundles are called baryons, and the negatively charged baryons are antibaryons. They existed at a precise ratio of one billion negative to one billion and one positive. If they had been perfectly balanced, their respective charges would have nullified each other, ending in total annihilation, which would have produced such expansive, diluted radiation that no new particles could be formed. Instead, because of this imbalance, we got atoms, which later became matter, which became the universe as we know it. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Pretty cool.”
The fire was roaring now. Kurt returned to the sleeping bag. He collapsed next to her, wrinkling the blanket she had so carefully smoothed out, and making rivulets of sand pour in again.
“Come closer,” she said. “I’m cold.”
Kurt lay next to Sarah and held her in an uneasy spoon pose. Then he rolled away and she remained, their backs facing each other and radiating heat. The stars were still absent from the sky, a fact neither one of them wanted to point out. They dropped in and out of sleep, their bodies softening, giving up, then jolting back from the accidental touch of the other’s arm or a foot.
“Look. They’re back.”
“What’s back?”
“The stars.”
A few of them, at least.
The sound of the waves softened and they fell deeper.
“They’re gone now.”
Which one of them said this? Sarah didn’t know.
“I love you,” she said, unsure if these were her last conscious words or the first ones uttered in her dream.
THE NEXT MORNING, they let Yui sleep. Svec gladly conceded to Bear first dibs on the treadmill, though he was otherwise unbothered by his hangover.
“I’m amazed,” Bear said to him.
“We train for this,” Svec said, his typing like rapid gunfire on his laptop. “How to drink in microgravity. No Russian has ever thrown up in space.”
“Really?” Bear adjusted the harnesses and belts strapping him into the treadmill, then increased the speed and lengthened his stride.
“No,” Svec said, smirking again. “Joke.”
It was seven o’clock in the morning for the astronauts, eleven in Star City, and 2 A.M. in Houston. Mission Control never slept, and if there had been raucous partying in any of the command centers (there had been), the crew on the ISS was shielded from it. That morning they downloaded the customary schedule, broken down in certain places to five-minute increments. Bear spent the morning taking pictures of colloidal particles in the Destiny module, and Svec added to the database of bioproductive ocean areas. They worked alone, in silence, with the contentment of men doing what they were put on Earth to do, in their case, to study her from afar.
Bear finished earlier than Mission Control had predicted and decided to spend his surplus eleven minutes of leisure time eati
ng a Last Day snack, a bag of pizza-flavored corn puffs. Svec had also hit a major benchmark in his work and was treating himself to some jelly beans as a reward.
“You know what, comrade,” Bear said, “these puffs have both the ideal structural integrity and volume for—”
“I know what you will say,” Svec interrupted. “But some of us actually prefer to be challenged.”
Bear was already constructing lariats out of dental floss, one each for him and Svec, who examined his, then threw it in the trash. “Will make my own,” he said.
“Practicing your dribbling with a tennis ball can improve overall handling in basketball,” Bear submitted. “Popcorn rodeo is good for the rookies. To get them warmed up. But I’m talking about the big leagues here.”
He tossed a corn puff into the air and flicked it gently, giving it spin. Using their floss lassos, he and Svec took turns trying to harness the burnt orange morsel and return it to their mouths. Svec made contact on his first try but tugged a little too hard and lost the puff five inches in front of his face. Bear failed several times to lasso the corn puff, but once he did manage to get it, he drew it to within two inches of his mouth.
“I win,” Bear said.
“Nyet. We both fail.”
“Jesus.” Bear chomped the air until the puff was in his mouth, his top and bottom teeth clanging too hard against each other.
“We should wake him up.”
“I don’t want to go near his pod. It smells.”
“Loser must get him to lunch,” Svec said, setting a new corn puff in motion. Mission Control murmured into their headsets and both men ignored it. Svec hung his floss lariat gingerly onto the puff and pulled it in a slow, downward motion to his open mouth.
“Do not forget to tell Yui to record my victory in notebook,” Svec offered.
Yui’s crew quarters smelled brackish on a normal day, but Bear was assaulted by a much more noxious scent as he now approached it. Grief, he decided, remembering the particular stench of his clothes as he’d undressed every day that he’d visited his teenage niece in hospice years ago. It was a pituitary nightmare, pain sneaking out through his pores in total defiance of the stolid, supportive presence he was hoping to provide to his sister and brother-in-law during that time. Hygiene was no picnic on the station and forgiveness was critical, but this was something else. Yui would need to do a thorough wipe-down and fast. Maybe even dispose of the clothes he’d been wearing that night. Broaching this would be a psychological challenge, one Bear was not looking forward to, but he rationalized that it would yield interpersonal insights he could use later when debriefing new astronauts before their missions.
“Hey, friendo.” He rapped on the plastic sliding door of Yui’s CQ. There was no answer, only the horrible smell. “I know, friendo,” Bear confessed. “You want to go home, and barring that, you want to stay in bed and dream about it. I want to do that, too, sometimes. We all do. But you need to get up, have something to eat, and, um, clean up.”
He was holding his nose now. The smell was overpowering.
“Did you get sick last night, friendo?” There was no answer. “I’m going to open this door now. Okay?”
Yui floated in a sleeping bag strapped to the wall, with his arms crossed over his chest. It was how he always slept, how Tadeshi slept, too, though Bear could not have known that. His skin looked like a mixture of ash and milk, and his eyes, wide open, were not moving. Only his hair floating on end around his still face gave the impression that he had once been alive.
“He’s dead,” Bear told Svec.
The permanent striations of Svec’s mimetic muscles twitched.
“I don’t know when. Or how. Or—”
“None of that matters. NORAD reports that debris from meteor storm is coming toward us. We need to maneuver station out of way.”
“Roger that. Yui’s body can wait.”
“He will be patient.”
“Yes, he will. Poor guy.”
Svec made the executive decision to handle one crisis at a time, and postpone telling Mission Control about the onboard fatality. The two men got to work and in short order had shifted the orbit of the massive station out of harm’s way. Once the station was reoriented, the internet shut down and the satellite connection was lost. This happened from time to time, and while disruptive, it was no crisis. Svec told Bear to connect to CAPCOM via the ham radio.
“No response.”
“Try again in ten minutes.”
He did. Nothing.
They were cruising over the shadow line now, an orbital path where the sun seemed to drift in a restless circle alongside the earth, neither rising nor setting. Bear had always been curious what this orientation looked like, and now that his wish was granted, he felt uneasy. They tried again to reach Mission Control and again they could not connect on any platform. They had never experienced a break in communication this long before. Svec decided to use the time to exercise. He loaded his music player into the sound system and blasted his favorite heavy metal album, Chornoye Utro.
“Self-titled album. Very best one. After 1990 they were shit. Freedom ruins heavy metal. Need iron fist—bad father, bad dictator—to make true metal.” He panted and smirked, sweat beading up on his skin like crystal dewdrops as he pushed his feet down on the treadmill.
“I don’t know what they’re saying,” Bear sighed, biting his tongue to keep from adding and I don’t care.
“This song is about woman. Bigger breasts, bigger problems. It is true.”
“I’m taking some R&R in the Cupola.”
The sound of disconnection hummed low and steady in their headsets. It threatened to seep into the crimped tunnels of their brains, implanting the tiny, psychic seeds of madness such isolation can wreak. Watching the sun as it slowly circled, never crossing before or behind the earth, refusing to offer that one supreme metaphor of renewal—this was madness. Strapping oneself into a treadmill, running toward nothing—this, too, was madness.
DURING A HEAT wave last year, a man at Rosette’s Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses claimed to have received a vision from God. Alfred Guy was a Haitian émigré who worked for an HVAC company, a man as sober and staid as his job, too boring to be selected by God for spiritual ascendancy. But God did come to Alfred, he reported, in the dark of early morning last August, in the form of a man cloaked in blinding light.
“Burn everything you believe,” the monsieur spoke without moving his lips, his face as explosive and formless as time. With his long arm like a ray of the sun, this deific stand-in set fire to Alfred’s Bible just by pointing at it.
Alfred produced the scorched New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures as evidence to the elders at the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in Cambridge, where Rosette was a faithful sister. The leather cover was black and crispy.
The elders told Alfred to go home and get some sleep.
Alfred tried again before a larger audience the following Sunday. They were reading about Peter on the Sea of Galilee, his boat so full of fish it would sink. Alfred leapt to the dais and cried before the other Witnesses, “It’s coming. We are not ready.” His lips were wide and dry from smiling. “It’s time to give up.”
Within minutes the elders were escorting Alfred out the door. Rosette remembered the hush, the feeling of shame that unfurled across the hall, causing many to bow their heads. But a few people could not bow their heads and Rosette was among them. Paralyzed for a moment, she was incapable of looking away from Alfred, a tall handsome man whom she had somehow never noticed before.
One by one, folks left the Jehovahs and joined Alfred, who had spent his own money to rent a space above a Cambridge strip mall between an office-supply chain store and a discount sports clothier. He declared himself Pastor of the Last Kingdom on Earth, which is to say he sat in a left-behind office chair and talked about
his vision for the coming end to anyone who came in through his open door.
There was nothing to fear, he promised. The end would be brief, total, and complete, a heartbeat in time, almost merciful in its efficiency. There would be no pain for the wicked; they would die instantly. Then it would all be over.
“And then what?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” Alfred replied.
“But, but, but…”
“Don’t try too hard to know,” he implored them instead. “If you can help it.”
His lessons were short, often monosyllabic. Sometimes, when plied with existential puzzles, Alfred would offer no more than a sigh. His congregants, however, made up for his silence. That was the point of the Last Kingdom—to fill the last days of this world with a joyful noise. They batted around their stories all at once, talking to and at and over and through each other. The dominant story at Last Kingdom was that there would be a blast that would scorch the earth to ashes, and after everything cooled off, new plants and animals would emerge, hardier and more beautiful than before.
“Or not,” Alfred offered, inspiring a frenzy of discussion, babble, and song, all at once.
“That actually makes a lot of sense,” Karen said when Rosette tried to explain all this to her in the car. “Forest fires are wicked good for the soil. It’s because of the sulfur.”
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