Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  “There’s no rain forest. We used to be able to see the rain forest.”

  “Maybe there was fire?”

  “Over the whole continent?”

  “It is everywhere.”

  They checked the photos captured earlier in the day. At 13:41 P.M. GMT the brown clouds had begun mushrooming all over the earth. If there was a point of origin, Bear and Svec could not find it.

  HARDLY ANYONE WAS looking at the sky when it happened. That posture of curiosity and awe was reserved symbolically for the night before, May 27, when heads tilted upward in waves across the globe as darkness descended one meridian at a time in the Great Hush. It was a reenactment, conscious or not, of the moment those terrified Babylonians had watched the sky in the aftermath of the eclipse that they were sure was ushering the end. May 28 was devoted to more timid celebration. Pouring water on the ashes of last night’s fires, cleaning the syrup of spilled drinks, munching on cold pizza, nursing hangovers, running a commemorative 5K.

  But An Chu was staring at the sky. It was evening in Hong Kong, past her bedtime. She knew that today was special but she did not know why. She was exhausted by the past two days of celebration, vacillating between elation and rage. The sugar in her blood had spiked and fallen in rapid cycles from all the candy she’d been allowed to eat. When the doorbell began ringing with another round of holiday guests, she slapped her nanny across the face. An was done with them, and her nanny kept insisting, as her mother had instructed, that she give each guest eight kisses for good luck.

  An Chu’s nanny, Dai, hated An Chu. She hated the child’s flat-faced mother and her ubiquitous string of fat black pearls. The father was a grumbling suit who did not strain his eyes even to glance in the nanny’s direction. Dai was saving up to get her teeth fixed. They were crooked and irregularly sized, as though Dai’s mouth had been assembled with spare parts. Her top right incisor sprang out with the alacrity of a diving board. That night, waiting for An to fall asleep, Dai calculated how much longer it would take, in terms of hours, days, months, before she would have enough money to get her teeth fixed. The thought so depressed her that she lay down beside An on the bed, and as the din of the party outside rose to a clamor, she cried herself to sleep.

  An watched her nanny’s face soften, listened for the delicate gurgle of sleep to take over, then climbed over Dai to the floor. She put on her shoes without buckling them—buckles were still beyond her—and stepped awkwardly into the fray outside.

  “Until night falls,” she repeated, not knowing why everyone laughed in response. It had been the refrain of last night, so why not tonight? The adults touched her head and face, tugged on her pigtails, and told her she was pretty. She’d heard this so often—how pretty she was—that the sentence felt like a long surname. Hello, my name is An Chu the-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World.

  She skated across the polished wood floor in her shiny unbuckled shoes, navigating the crowd of giants, not finding her parents among them.

  The sliding glass door that led to the deck was open. An knew as well as she knew anything else in her flowering, inchoate mind that she was not allowed to go onto the deck alone, but she was doing it anyway, a cerebral explosion between impulse and thoughtful decision-making inching her closer to autonomy.

  A strong wind lifted the strands of hair that had fallen out of the elastics Dai had wound so tightly just a few hours earlier. Her cheeks were pink and warm. The sky was a cloudy black stained blue at the horizon where day smoldered on the other side of the world. The moon was a filament of light outside of An’s line of vision. She watched, instead, the billboard across the street blinking purple and gold. It was a sign for a parking lot and was made of twisted neon bulbs, an antiquated spectacle in the largely digital lumisphere of the city.

  The light blinked on and off from the top stroke of the first character to the bottom, pausing at dead bulbs where the neon had burned out, a flickering that transfixed the child. She noticed how the purple and gold light reflected on the glass of her building, and kicked her foot in a confounding ache to be closer to the pretty sparkles reflected on the window below. Her shoe flew off her foot and tumbled from the balcony, falling thirty-seven stories to the ground below. An looked down in terror, then back at the parking lot sign as if its mysteries would now be revealed. She looked behind her into her apartment. A man grabbed a woman by the hips and pulled her close; the woman pulled away from him, arching her torso like a wind-bent reed. An Chu looked out again, down at the ground, then up at the sky.

  * * *

  —

  NICOLE JOHNSON MET the man of her dreams at a bar with a broken neon sign. Six years later she married that man, Luke, and two years after that he left her for another woman. Luke had been walking their dog, a chocolate labradoodle named Tallulah, when a car on their street got rear-ended, spun out of control, and crashed into a retainer wall. The car immediately burst into flames and Luke, letting go of Tallulah’s leash, dashed into oncoming traffic to pull the driver out to safety. He rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital, Tallulah long gone, never to be seen again, and after the woman had been stabilized Luke continued to call the ICU to check on her.

  Nicole watched her husband fall in love with this woman over the next six months, like another car accident happening, this time in slow motion. She’d told herself she was paranoid, she was insecure, she should have a baby, she should not have a baby, she should be sexier, she should focus on her career, she should be empathetic, she should trust. Nine months after the accident Luke had moved out and filed for divorce.

  Now Luke and this woman were getting married in Palm Springs, on Last Day, Nicole had learned from a bout of social media stalking. Of all the clichés.

  She drove around for hours that night, making herself sick. Even her car was now tainted. She had bought it with Luke when a much less dramatic accident had totaled her old car. They’d brought Tallulah home from the breeder in that car. They’d made love in the back seat once when Luke’s parents were visiting from Ohio and they had nowhere private to go. It still smelled faintly of Tallulah’s fur, like a mixture of corn chips and rainwater.

  Nicole had to get rid of it. Now.

  She pulled off at a dealership called Hugo’s that every year hosted a famous Last Day sale, plastering the city with ominous billboards, signs, flyers, and airplane banners, always a bleak biblical nightmarescape of the end and the words IT’S NOW OR NEVER AT HUGO’S. Nicole traded her Honda in for an even older Toyota, plus two hundred dollars in cash. Worth it, she felt, her heart clanging against the bones of her chest like a prisoner with an empty tin cup. This new car smelled like Lysol, fake cherries, and ash, someone else’s ghosts.

  She drove past all the Last Day parties she’d been invited to, past all those pitying, insistent friends who’d vied to be the one to hold her together right now. None of them understood that she didn’t want to be held—she wanted to disintegrate, she wanted everyone and everything to break apart. Thinking about it did not depress her at all. The Last Day holiday had never made more sense.

  She stopped to refill her tank, get a Diet Coke, pee, then hit the road for another two hours. If she ran into traffic on the highway, she got off at the very next exit without caring where it led. She traced asymmetries all over Los Angeles, following a tangle of invisible lines.

  At one point she thought she saw Tallulah being walked by a fat teenager juggling the dog’s leash and a slice of pizza.

  “That girl is me,” Nicole gasped, wondering if her life was being lived in a multiverse and if her body, in this car driving around in unfinished circles, was its nucleus. She’d seen something like that in a creepy documentary Luke had made her watch years ago, about time and space and particles and intentions. There had been a bit about jars of water expressing sadness and rage in the arrangement of their molecules, and earnest talk of the possibility that every living moment of
your life was occurring simultaneously on different planes of existence. It had given her nightmares, she remembered, and Luke had had to rub her back so she could fall asleep. Right now she wished it were all true, that on some plane of existence she was in bed, dreaming this last year and a half, and that she would wake up and Luke would still be there holding her. If she only kept driving she might find the portal back to him and then, back home.

  And where was she when this realization dawned? Right smack in front of the bar where she’d first met Luke. She parked her car in front, the same broken pink of the neon sign glowing in the window. It was around six o’clock in the morning. The world had not ended. The bar was still open. She sat at the same stool she’d sat at years ago.

  “Do you have anything to eat?” she asked the bartender.

  He was reading on his phone and refused to look up, pointing with his elbow toward a stack of pizza boxes on a side table. Nicole opened each box and found only chewed-up bits of crust until she reached the very last box at the bottom of the pile, where a single slice was left. Pineapple and chicken, her favorite.

  “I just don’t know what I did wrong,” Nicole said to the bartender. He wasn’t the same man who had tended bar the day she’d met Luke. Even though no one else was there, she had to ask him twice for a glass of water. The bartender all those years ago had been old and bearded, not terribly big but saddled with a fat, round belly, a tired, dispirited Santa Claus sort of man. This kid was barely old enough to drink. His hair was shaved to a pale golden-white fuzz except for a long swoop of bangs that fell into his eyes.

  “Luke is half-white and half-Korean and I’m half-black and half-Mexican, and that both matters a lot and doesn’t matter at all in our breakup.”

  At hearing the word breakup, the boy looked up and flung his bangs out of his face with a sudden jerk of his neck. His eyes were light and colorless and Nicole was febrile and exhausted.

  “She’s white. The other woman. Just white. And not as pretty as me, but younger. Though only five years younger, which isn’t that significant, right?”

  His bangs had returned to his face, shielding his impassive, unearthly eyes once again.

  “I was a good wife. I stayed in shape. I kept things interesting in bed. I looked up exotic recipes for dinner. I cooked, for God’s sake! I said yes to sex even when I was exhausted. I did that thing with the scrunchie all the women’s magazines say will ‘drive him wild’….”

  “What’s a scrunchie?”

  “It’s a glorified rubber band.” It amazed her that she was talking about all this in complete sobriety and not a single tear was in production. Maybe she’d finally cried out her life’s allotment of tears and now there were none left. She felt chalky inside, as if her bones could be rinsed away by a light rain. Her head clanked. Maybe she’d spent her life’s allotment of love and there was none of that left, either.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I am being punished for something, and I have to make it right, which I’d do, gladly, if only I could remember what it was I did wrong.”

  The bartender stabbed the ice in his drink with a straw, his face solemn and intent. She couldn’t tell if he was even listening. He harpooned a maraschino cherry at last and slowly, patiently dragged it to the lip of the glass. He balanced the cherry on the straw and brought it to his mouth without dipping his head to meet it.

  “The universe doesn’t care enough about any one being to punish it,” he said after he’d swallowed. “You need to think bigger.”

  “Yeah, but—” she began.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS NOT Last Day on the island of Bali. Last Day had never been celebrated there. It was simply the evening of May 28, time to set out the last canang sari offering of the day. A woman shook the branches of a Japon tree and collected the fallen blossoms in her shirt. She added them to the folded-coconut-leaf dishes full of betel, lime, cigarettes, and gambier, decorated with plumeria and marigolds, and laid them before her doorstep and on the dashboard of her husband’s parked car. The smell of incense drifted through the air, mixing with the smell of burning trash. A stray dog ambled down the street. He lifted his leg to pee on the canang sari that had just been laid out. A little boy watched him and laughed. A black butterfly took flight.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON in Addis Ababa. Zelalem Jember slumped over his piano with his head in his hands, scratching an itch that did not exist. Somewhere beneath his hair, the dermis of his scalp, and his obdurate skull, the music wriggled between his synapses, little electric eels of melody stinging him with one note, then vanishing, leaving him bereft, in that simultaneous longing and dread known to all artists in the middle of difficult work.

  “You have no idea what it’s like to compose an opera with the sound of giants pounding behind you!” he had screamed at his wife before she’d left for the day.

  She couldn’t stand him when he was like this. “You do this all the time. Why don’t you try relaxing?” she’d suggested as she tied the lacings of her shoes. “Listen to some Kebede. Take a nap.”

  Zela did exactly as she’d said, in part to spite her, to prove that she was wrong and her advice inane and futile. The great Kebede scowled at him through the speakers of their stereo. You simpleton, his bust of Bach mocked him, oaf. Yared’s framed portrait simply shook his head, his face wrinkled with disappointment. Specters of the great composers hovered around him as he lay writhing on his bed. He had won a sizable international grant to write an opera about genocide. It was to be his magnum opus. Now the prize money and the unfinished second act conspired to strangle him. For the past month he’d refused all social engagements, eaten too little, slept like the dying, clinging to his sandy-eyed insomnia as though the skeins of life itself were unraveling before him, and he had no choice but to bear witness.

  But he was not dying. He was just a disgruntled fifty-nine-year-old man slamming up against the limitations he’d created out of fear. This nap was not helping. The masters were not inspiring. He couldn’t wait until his wife returned, so that he could tell her that she was wrong.

  It was the opera, Zela decided. Who wouldn’t be angry, miserable, hopeless, spending hours a day amid the hell of humanity? And yet he loved this opera so much, even its slow, painful birth. How could he love something so elusive, so violent, so heartbreaking and out of control? A sweet breeze lifted the dark curtains in his bedroom window, and the sizzling light of day flashed for a moment like a young girl offering a glimpse of the thighs beneath her skirt.

  Zela yanked himself out of bed and trudged to the kitchen, where he stood slack-jawed for a long moment. He opened a tin of cookies and shoved them into his mouth two at a time. He wasn’t hungry, he just wanted to feel something churning in his stomach besides envy, despair, and fear. “You’re too dramatic,” his wife said all the time. Instead of replying, “You’re right,” which he knew she was, he said, “Then you were a fool to marry me.”

  He ate two more cookies, hardly tasting them. In the apartment next door a baby was shrieking. Zela chewed and listened to the pulsating wail. Whatever it is, baby, it will pass and then return, he thought. Pass and return. He reached for another cookie but just held it in his hand. “Feed that baby a lullaby,” he whispered to the desperate parents on the other side of the wall. Pass and return. He hummed to himself and walked to his piano. He would not work on his opera today, Zela decided. He would write a lullaby instead. A lullaby for the world. He began pressing chords into the keys. But the fear returned, the despair, the futility. No, not for the world, he sighed. Just for a baby, that baby on the other side of the wall. The song was flowing through him.

  * * *

  —

  VAL CORWIN HAD a satisfying, almost mystical sense of her work as an artist: stories and pictures came to her from worlds unknown and she set them free on the populace just as soon as s
he was able, urging them, like children of a certain age, to live a life of their own, apart from her. While there were plenty of accolades, there was just as much censure, some of it nasty and personally damning. To keep working was her only goal, that and enough money to pay her half of the bills, and this was best accomplished by insulating herself from certain social scenes. But she was by no means reclusive. She was on her third husband—the one, she joked, who just might stick around—and they had lived together for forty years in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She had two grown sons and a network of stepchildren, former and present, who had given her five biological grandchildren and sixteen more she doted on without any legal or biological reason. She and her husband traveled several months of the year, visiting family and friends across the country and abroad, and attended about one-third of the parties they were invited to, depending on their energy that day.

  There were so many rumors surrounding the reclusive author, including the mythology of reclusiveness, that when Val Corwin was awakened that morning by a phone call from her agent, her first instinct was to ignore it. “Did you know you are a man?” her agent had said, laughing, many years ago. “Breaking news, Val: you are actually a gay man,” he informed her years later. She was a Communist, a Canadian, a Trappist monk, and a fugitive. It was mostly funny, but in her eighties now, Val was tired and wanted to sleep in. When she didn’t answer the phone, her agent called back immediately, something he never did, so Val, her mind up and running already, answered him at last.

  “Val, they’re giving you a Pulitzer.”

  “La-di-da,” Val said, and hung up.

  * * *