Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  The congregation gathered around Karen and Rosette. Someone said, “Let’s ask her the Central Questions,” and everyone murmured in agreement.

  “Sister Karen, do you believe in one all-powerful God?”

  “Do you accept His will totally and completely, even if it means you are going to die in the fiery hell of Armageddon?”

  “Even if you are not among those elected to be saved?”

  “Are you willing to give up everything? To give it all to Him?”

  “And admit that no matter what you do, no matter how good you are, how hard you try, it might not amount to a hill of beans?”

  “Do you promise to die trying?”

  Karen was not at all willing to agree to any of these terms. She could not accept a world in which she was not a co-creator alongside the Divine. She had seen too much—portals to unknown worlds in every puddle of water, winking omens in the highway lights, dented cans baring to her their souls. There wasn’t just one God who took everything away greedily; there was a web of intersecting lines like spider’s silk connecting the souls of all things living, dead, and inanimate in a giant inescapable whole. It was never-ending, and she definitely had the power to affect it by her thoughts and energies and actions. And it wasn’t fair that some people got to go to Rosette’s God’s party in the sky and some people didn’t. She looked at the faces staring at her now, these variegated masks of humanity, all wanting her, all offering her this covenant.

  “Yes!” she cried, and everyone cheered.

  Shayla ran up to Karen and hugged her hip. She reached into her pocket where she had been saving a single package of cherry fruit leather. She ripped off the wrapper and tore it in two, offering Karen half.

  “Cherry is the best flavor,” Karen said.

  “It’s the only one for me,” the girl agreed.

  “Don’t just stand there, girl. You think because everyone is clapping for you, you are some princess now. Hmmph. Clean out those coffeepots,” Rosette said to Karen.

  Everyone was collecting the plastic bowls and spoons to be wiped clean for another use. How nice, Karen thought, that despite the end of the world, these folks were still recycling.

  It was just before dawn when the parish of Last Kingdom arrived at the YMCA. The sky was a flimsy dark tinged by a veil of green. They parked their cars in the handicapped spots, the members-only spots, the fire lane. It was Last Day—who was going to stop them? But Karen urged them and they agreed to file in quietly. There was no need for stealth. Everything they were doing was being recorded on a closed-loop surveillance system. For all her powers and ambitions of vision, Karen had never noticed the cameras installed outside and inside the Y.

  Today she was going swimming with her thirty new best friends! A super-secret pool party at the YMCA. It was a fantasy she had spent hours describing to Nora as they tried to construct a psychic safe place where Karen could retreat to when disturbing memories were triggered. Nora had given her full poetic license in this fabrication, suggesting trip wire and laser guns to keep out bad guys, for comfort a basket of kittens who never ever peed, the visibility and vantage point of a high mountain lair surrounded by a moat teeming with loyal alligators. But for once Karen’s mental landscape remained firmly rooted in reality: the place she always returned to in these therapeutic exercises was the YMCA swimming pool with its high, echoing walls, its pistachio-green tiles, the milky light pouring in from the frosted glass of the windows; and presiding over everything, sitting way up high in the lifeguard chair, solid as a caryatid in an ancient temple, inviolable, loving, and stern, was Rosette.

  Nothing ever hurt in the pool. Here she was neither fat nor clumsy. She was never cold, never hot, and hours could pass before she realized she hadn’t eaten. It was a place where all her limitations and needs dissolved. She looked at her green dress rippling like an anemone around her legs. This dress had been through so much today, and now it was being bathed in chlorine. She would wash it in perfume and fabric softener when she got to her new home, wherever that would be.

  “Pick a song everyone knows,” someone instructed Karen.

  “Everyone?” she cried. “I can’t—”

  “Don’t think about it. Just sing.”

  “Happy birthday to you,” Karen began, and everyone else joined in. This was her baptism! The acoustic effect of the whole congregation in the pool was stunning. Karen felt her blood thicken and slow, the rush-hour pumping of her heart ease, the water surrounding them flatten under the command of their chorus. Musically they harmonized about as well as a flock of shorebirds at sunset, but it was a powerful invocation. As a welcoming ceremony, Karen had to admit, it was working. Maybe the God they believed in was capricious and snobby, but their encouragement was sincere.

  “What do I do now?”

  “Go,” Rosette said, splashing her. “Go swim under and come back up.”

  Karen dove headfirst under the water and swam as deep as she could. She opened her eyes and saw a million fractured beams of light flashing everywhere, like a star had fallen from the sky, broken open, and scattered too fast to dissolve in the water. She felt the pressure around her building, trying to lift her to the surface. She flapped her arms, fighting to stay underwater. She thought about Dennis. Just his name. She thought about her mother and how she had floated anxiously like this inside her once, wanting to be born but waiting for her mother to push her out.

  Dennis was never going to be okay, and neither was she. No one was. This moment was as good as it was ever going to get. If the world ended right now, Karen thought, it would be okay, but it needed to happen quickly. Right now. I don’t want to be here anymore. Come take me. Us. Come, she said in her head, until it was no longer a word. Her eyes were burning. The pressure was building inside her lungs. Come right now. Right now.

  “Baaaaah,” Karen screamed as she surged to the surface.

  “Sister Karen,” an old Haitian man shouted. “Byenveni lakay ou.”

  “Look at her.”

  “Did you feel it?” Rosette asked.

  Karen, gasping for air, dog-paddled weakly to the side of the pool. She threw her arms over the edge and held the concrete side like a favorite pillow in the aftermath of a nightmare. She didn’t know what was real anymore. Everything she believed in this life had drained out of her body, been siphoned through the pool’s filter, disinfected, and pumped back out invisible as water.

  “I’m still here,” she said, unsure if even this was true.

  IN FRENCH, LAST Day is called le jour d’infini rien or, more simply, le jour rien. In Italian, giorno di nient’altro. In Spanish, el día de la entrega. In Japanese, mokushi hi. In Slavic tongues, some variation of the gate of no dawn. In Nordic cultures, the day time takes a nap. Tom tried his best to spell these words right, to angle the strokes of the kanji appropriately, but he was very drunk and very tired and even letters in English looked alien as he scraped them into people’s skin.

  THAT NIGHT SARAH dreamed she had a baby with no body. It was a large smiling head she kept swaddled in a yellow blanket. She was ashamed of her genderless little imp but filled with love for it, too. A mutant and a mistake, it had her eyes and nose and mouth, and it was so happy, its smile inextinguishable. “Cantaloupe,” she named the baby. “You can’t name a baby Cantaloupe,” Kurt said to her; he was ostensibly, in the logic of the dream, her baby’s father. “Please?” she said, but he was walking away from her and into the vaporous corridor of her unconscious. “Please?” she kept shouting in the empty hallway, until the sound of her own voice woke her up.

  She was on the beach. The sun was a muted white light behind a screen of clouds. The ocean was churning, the color of dull utensils. It was day, and she was still alive. But Kurt was gone. She peered into the horizon, as if he had walked on water and would be waiting for her at the edge of the sea. She shook herself more awake, stood up, sc
anned the length of the beach left and right. In the far-off distance, she saw the abandoned campfires of last night releasing strings of smoke into the morning air. Kurt’s helmet was gone. A fresh pile of sand had been poured onto their fire.

  THE FIRST RAYS of morning seeped through the cloudy glass.

  “We used to baptize everyone at Carson Beach,” the hairy-knuckled man explained to Karen. “This is much better. You think we can use this pool from now on?”

  “Definitely,” Karen promised. Carson Beach was home to used tampons, syringes, and plastic bags containing the occasional mobster body part. Even the seagulls who fed there looked disgusted and ashamed.

  She practiced her butterfly stroke for a few laps, then decided to join Moira and her grandchild Shayla in the shallow end, where they were pretending it was the Olympics.

  “Rate my handstands,” Shayla begged Karen. “But take it serious. Grandma is bullshitting me because I’m a kid. I’m not playing around here. I need a real friggin’ judge. Capiche?”

  Each time Shayla’s head plunged underwater, Moira fired at Karen rapid disjointed installments of her life story. There were three ex-husbands, a dead son, a daughter in assisted living because she’d overdosed so many times she’d lost her gross motor skills. Shayla was not even her biological granddaughter. Moira had inherited the child from—

  “How was that one? Were you even paying attention?” the child cried, eyes burning red with chlorine.

  “Good, Shay. Do another one.”

  “Eight point five,” Karen said, an honest assessment, which the child took as a personal challenge to try harder. She dove under again.

  “So, that was the last time I bailed his sorry you-know-what out of jail,” Moira went on. She was a petite muscular woman with long blondish-white hair and a gold hoop in her left nostril. Her skin was inscribed all over with shamrocks and mermaids, clipper ships and anchors. One tattoo inked onto her shoulder was a lot brighter than the others: the image of a sapling, spindly and leafless, embracing with two branch-like arms a two-by-four board of knotty pine bearing the yellow price tag of a hardware store.

  “Got that one for free nine years ago,” Moira explained. “Couldn’t choose the picture, just had to accept what I got. Never met the artist before in my life. Hardly said two words to him, but he sure knew me all right.” She kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the little sapling on her shoulder.

  “Oh,” Karen said. She had so much to say but couldn’t find her voice. It had slid down her throat and was curled up and hiding somewhere beneath her stomach. Tears fell down her dripping wet face but for once she couldn’t make a sound.

  “Come here, sweetheart,” the old woman said, and pulled Karen into her for a long, weightless hug. Karen felt her feet slipping down at the drop-off point where the deep end began. She held on to Moira.

  “I never had a real mother,” she whimpered.

  “I know, baby,” Moira said. “Neither did I. A lot of us here didn’t.”

  If Dennis died, which she knew he would, probably soon, would she feel his soul leaving the earth, or would it get lost in all the garbage floating around, the lies people told and the hateful things they said? Even the spiritual realm was vulnerable to pollution, and it was getting worse every day.

  “Rose,” Karen called, her voice smacking against the walls and bouncing off. She spotted Rosette and Alfred pulling a stiff and soaking Mr. Cox out of the pool. They laid him on the floor beneath the lifeguard’s chair. There were so many voices caroming off the tile, colliding into each other, expanding in air. “Rosette!” Karen shouted. Karen tried to run to her, to run across the shallow end of the pool. Her legs dragged behind her. She’d had dreams like this. Was this one of them? Rosette was crying, wringing her hands, and Alfred was whispering to her. He knelt down by Mr. Cox and pumped his chest. Through the windows Karen saw a blue flashing light. Then red. She heard the single chirp of a siren, turned on and then just as suddenly turned off, as though by mistake.

  “I KNOW THE ham is working,” Bear said when he returned, “but I’m not getting anything back. They can hear us, we just can’t hear them.”

  “We should not wait for CAPCOM. Need to handle his body.”

  “Agreed.”

  “The MELFI locker is cold. He will fit in there.”

  “We’d lose all our samples. That’s a lot of data.”

  “Could jettison his body. What I would want if I died in space.”

  “But we don’t know that is what he would want. We have his family to consider. And JAXA. It would be an international disaster.”

  “Even in cold locker, we will have smell.”

  “The new crew is coming in two weeks. We could preserve him in a spacesuit, tether him outside, until we can send him back with the return capsule.”

  “Like bad dog? On leash?”

  “Heck, I don’t know.”

  “Okay. For now we wait,” Svec said.

  He wiped the sweat from his body and took off his shirt. Over his heart was tattooed in blocky Cyrillic MAXIM.

  “Never knew you had a tattoo.”

  “You like?”

  “That smirk, man. I know you don’t mean it, but it just looks like you’re making fun of me.”

  “Never. Here, comrade.” Svec handed Bear a plastic pouch of vodka.

  “How many of these do you have?”

  “Enough.”

  “I don’t drink. I told you that months ago.”

  “Today is exception. Today is too much for any man. Even you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Bear said. “My father died in a drunk-driving accident.”

  “My father, too.” Svec sucked on the nozzle of the drink pouch, tempering the ridiculous indignity of the apparatus by his audacious sense of comfort and ease with it. “Crashed car into brick wall.”

  “Well, my father wasn’t drunk. Someone’s selfish drinking took his life. I won’t mess with this stuff.”

  “Think of it like medicine.” Svec held the pouch out to Bear. “To Yui. Our fallen friendo.”

  Madness, Bear thought, and took the drink.

  “Yowww!”

  “Now you feel fire. Good. Fire burns all rubbish. Make you new.”

  The men drank their way through one pouch and opened another. It was a mutiny, Bear thought, vomiting into his favorite baseball cap. There would be hell to pay once they got linked up again to the ground.

  It was still possible, Svec countered, to put in a half-decent day’s work, and Mission Control would be none the wiser. He fiddled with a spectrometer for a few minutes and began to laugh. “I don’t know what we are measuring with this thing. Probably trying to make new weapon. To destroy U.S.A. To kill your whole family! Ha-ha!”

  “I don’t know what half of our experiments are doing, either. They told me it was intentional, so I don’t fudge the data. But we’re probably trying to kill you guys, too.” He grabbed the pouch of vodka out of Svec’s hand and pulled hard. “I like the beginning of drinking, when I feel like all the screws in my brain just got blasted with WD-40. I do not like the end of drinking, when I—” He wretched some more, shuddering in the hollow places of his body, heaving from what felt like the bones of his feet.

  “If you drink often enough, it is never beginning or end,” Svec explained. “But is harder up here. Vestibular system already confused. Me, I do not vomit in test flights. Not in parabolic flight. Not in high-G training. Okay, comrade. I will help to clean you now.”

  Bear was pawing at the bullets of floating bile he had managed to produce. His eyes were the color of ripe strawberries and brimming with unmoving tears. Svec dabbed Bear’s face with a soft towel. He captured the wayward stomach matter and disposed of it, made his friend a batch of weak reconstituted grapefruit juice, and instructed him to sip slowly.

&n
bsp; “I’m going to the Cupola,” Bear said. “I always feel better in the Cupola. Just saying the word cupola makes me feel better.”

  “Okay, comrade. You go. I will clean some more.”

  Svec wiped down all the places where Bear’s vomit might have splattered. He wondered about his life in retirement. He’d spent so much time striving toward one goal or another. What would he do now? Of course he would always be a representative of Roscosmos, talking to people about space, delivering speeches and lectures, cutting ribbons, shaking hands with men who envied him. But beyond that? There was nothing. Only life, which, as far as Svec could see, boiled down to eating. You chewed on the thread of life until you met your end. He could spend his days hunting big game. There would always be a tiger or a bear to stalk and kill. But then what? Stuff it? Hang the dead thing above a fireplace? It was disrespectful to turn an animal like that into a decoration or a toy. He could chase young women. It would not be so different from the bears and tigers after a while. His mentor, Gregori Borisovitch, had died three months into his retirement. Without a mission to prepare for, his heart had grown weak and stopped beating in his sleep. This is what will happen to me, Svec said to himself. I will go home and be dead in three months.

  “Come quick, Svec. You got to see this.”

  “Your face is white.”

  “Just look.”

  Bear grabbed Svec’s hand and tugged him along like a child pulling a parent to the site of his latest accident. Svec tried to free himself but Bear would not let go. They entered the Cupola one at a time and there beheld the earth they had been unable to reach for several hours. Flimsy clouds swirled in tatters over Central America.

  “What?” Svec asked.

  “Just look.”

  The clouds disintegrated and blew apart, revealing what looked like another layer of clouds beneath them, brown ones, piling up and spreading in liquid spurts over the horn of Brazil. All of North and South America, every square mile of it, was covered with brown suppurating sores. They oozed and dribbled in thick brown rivers, swirled in brown eddies, spilled into the sea.