The wind picked up and the sleeves of the coat were lifted and they flapped dramatically. James felt a cold chill wrap itself around him, and he knew it was not caused by the wind, and he knew then why he had pushed the man, and why he had taken the coat, because the coat had belonged to him; it was the sort of coat he had been born to wear. He had ran from such a thing all his life, but it was his burden, this coat, and it was his past, and it was his. The coat that should lie on his back, the sleeves that should hang on his arms.
The wind blew harder and the rain came in the window with it. The coat, perhaps caught on the wind, stirred, then seemed to leap off the chair, across the bed, and flapped around James, the sleeve of it catching about his neck.
James leaped from bed, screamed, ran wildly, tripped over a foot stool, clambered to his feet, slammed into a wall. The sleeve was tight around his neck, and the rest of the coat lay against his skin, and it was coarse, so coarse. It was his life, this coarse coat, and it wanted him in it, wanted him to claim what he deserved.
He charged into the chair at the foot of the bed, and stumbled over it, fell toward the window, hit it with tremendous force, went through head first, toward the street below, and then he was jerked upwards, his head snapping back, and then the rough, workingman’s sleeve squeezed tight against his throat and stole his breath.
Next morning, bright and early, a homeless man discovered him and pointed up, alerted others. The police came, gave him a look see. The sleeve of the coat was wrapped tight about his neck, had practically tied itself, and the rest of it had caught on a nail in the window, and though the coat had torn severely, the sturdiness of the material maintained, leaving James to hang there in his pajama bottoms which he had soiled in death.
It was most unfashionable.
Fiction: Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind by Rachel Swirsky
The last word ever spoken by a human is said in a language derived from Hindi. The word is trasa. Roughly translated: thirst or desire.
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The second-to-last human to die is a child who lives in the region that was once called the Blue Mountains of Australia. She has the strange light eyes that children are occasionally born with, the way they are sometimes born as triplets or with white hair or with another baby’s empty body growing from their bellies. Her mother calls them water eyes, a sign that the child shares the changeable spirit of the ocean which can shift from calm to storm in the space of a breath.
On the last day of her life, the light-eyed child finds a pair of ancient skeletons exposed in the silt by the river near her camp. She pulls out the ribs with a sucking noise, loosing the foul stench of trapped gas. Pelvic bones lie in the mud below, tangled with metal things no one can make anymore. As she teases them free, the light-eyed child unearths rusted chains and hollow disks the diameter of her wrist.
The light-eyed child rinses the bones clean in the river. She runs her hand over the long femurs, marveling. People no longer grow so tall.
The light-eyed child sets the bones in a loose pile underneath a scribbly gum tree. The skulls preside on top, regarding her with hollow eyes. The light-eyed child kisses each in the center of its caved-in forehead.
Goodnight, Grandpa Burn, she says. Goodnight, Grandma Starve.
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The last major art movement is invented near Lake Vättern in Sweden. With the help of enough processing power to calculate the trajectories of a beachful of sand over a millennium, the artist taps a feeder loop directly into her brain and uses it to shape a three-dimensional holographic image of her father. For the first time, human thought patterns take direct, physical form. Her father’s projection repeats sequences of fragmented memories. His limbs trail into images of people and places he loved when he was alive; his hair winds into the tapestries he was famous for weaving; his face flickers cyclically from youth to gray. It’s not my father, the artist explains. It’s how I think of my father, his imago.
Within five years, her invention revolutionizes art. Artists show the world how they conceive of childbirth, fire, finches, walk bodies, urtists, religion, synthesis and death.
Within twenty years, the technology to create such work is destroyed. Art falls backward. Humanity falls farther.
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The man who will survive to be the last human lives in the region once called Nepal. Amid the still-falling ash from a series of volcanic eruptions, he and his son dig their way free of a cave-in.
Ravens perched on branches overhanging the cave mouth observe their progress. When the son grows weak, the last man tries to scatter the birds by throwing stones. They flap a short distance into the naked trees and witness the boy’s death from there, watching events unfold the way birds do: turning their heads to look first with one eye, then the other, to see which version of life is more appealing.
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The last scientific discovery excites the neurons of an amateur stargazer. Even before the cataclysm, she is the last of an increasingly rarefied breed - air and light pollution have made ground telescopes useless, so she has to pay for satellite time to peer out in an era when almost all of humanity’s technological eyes are aimed inward. One lonely night when all her mates and children are away, she trains her screen to watch the cloud bands on Jupiter’s gaseous surface and glimpses a city-sized object hurtling toward the earth.
Oh, God, she says, an asteroid.
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With near-earth space increasingly militarized, it’s been years since government telescopes have been dedicated to anything but scrutinizing the actions of other nations. The scant handful of under-funded astronomers confirms that the object’s path will bring it into contact with earth.
The astronomers agree: there’s nothing to be done. A century of attrition has withered space programs. Early iterations of space-faring technology were cannibalized to fund defense and weapons aimed at earthly targets. Remaining resources are primitive and useless. The object is too close to fire missiles at or deflect or drag into the gravity well of the sun.
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Wealthy global governments convene. If they can’t stop the asteroid, they agree to let it hit. Calculations demonstrate it will impact near the southern tip of Chile. Industrialists working on technology for deep-sea exploration believe they can adapt their pressure shield mechanisms to protect a few major cities from the global fires, earthquakes and tidal waves that will result from impact. With nuclear, wind, and solar power operating at full capacity, there should be enough energy to protect key sections of Asia, Europe and North America. First world populations that live outside protected urban centers are herded in en masse, crowding like cattle into emergency shelters.
As for those who won’t be included in the rescue plan, global leaders mumble about regrettable losses then do what they have always done: sacrifice the good of the many for the good of themselves.
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The last act of malice lights in the eyes of a pathologist who works in a secure facility in a dome on an island in an untraveled sea. When it becomes clear their government has abandoned them, the other scientists drink and screw on the lab tables. He unlocks his deadliest specimens, flees the building to the rhythm of unheeded alarms, and looses genetically manipulated spores like fairy dust onto the wind.
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The last heroes desert their homes in wealthy nations and travel south to stand with their impoverished brothers and sisters.
Like everyone else, they die.
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By the time the cataclysm strikes, more words have been forgotten over the course of human history than remain known.
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The city-sized object hits.
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Wealthy northerners watch the event through cameras on surviving satellites. Milliseconds after impact, their screens go black as the asteroid’s collision displaces earth and rock in a hundred mile radius. Radioactive waste illegally buried in poverty-stricken Puerto Natales flies into the air, joining the plume of dirt that whirls into the
chaotic weather systems caused by impact. Soil sewn with radioactive dust distributes across the globe in a storm that blocks the sun for three months.
Human folly has made a bad natural occurrence into an untenable one. It is as if the planet has gone to global nuclear war. Toxic heavy metals rain into the surface water systems and poison the springs of civilization.
Pressure shields are helpless against nuclear fallout. For those not killed by the fiery rains of impact, dying lingers. Bones weaken; teeth fall out; skin loosens in long, slender strips like fruit peels.
Before she dies, the Swedish artist tries to redraw her father’s imago on a flat sheet of pulped tree. Her shaking hand is raw and bleeding, but her lines fall true. The drawing fails anyway. She can’t remember what her father looked like. She can only remember her art.
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The last man’s people survive by moving underground. Caves shelter them from fiery rains and pathogens and tidal waves. Underground, they have access to subterranean water sources that remain temporarily pure.
His people’s luck lasts a century, until the geological instabilities set in motion by impact bubble up from the earth’s molten heart. Sudden, violent tremors herald chains of volcanic eruptions that transform the caves into tombs.
The last man and his son dig their way free, but it takes so long that the already weak child grows weaker. He breathes dust and ash. Once, as they work to pry loose a stubborn boulder, a rain of debris showers down on the son. He seems fine when he gets up and shakes himself off, but who knows what injuries can afflict a malnourished boy?
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The light-eyed child’s people believe they escaped the fiery rains because the earth protects them. Unlike the mining-scarred, ecologically damaged area of Nepal where the last man’s people live, the light-eyed child’s people enjoy a paradise of native species and pristine cliffs. Even some kangaroos survive to provide the light-eyed child’s people with food.
The light-eyed child’s grandmother tells her the bones she finds sometimes are not the bones of people, but of devils. They made the cataclysm happen by hating and ignoring the earth, she says, Most of them died, but the ones who survived - Grandpa Burn and Grandma Starve, Grandpa Hate and Grandma Bullet - they chained us and hurt us and tried to take our land. We had to use their tools on them instead.
The light-eyed child’s people initially triumphed over their enemies, but their luck ran out some four score years after the cataclysm. A species of bird which hadn’t been seen since impact arrived during the annual migration, carrying the pathologist’s bequest.
One illness killed the elderly. A second attacked the healthiest. A third killed one tenth of the population in a single night. The fourth wiped out the men.
No one tells the light-eyed child directly, but she hears talk of the plagues as our curse, sometimes brought by the earth spirits, sometimes by the ghosts of the demons. The light-eyed child asks her mother, who pauses while gathering roots to explain, Being favored by the spirits is both a blessing and a burden. They won’t forgive us for acting in ignorance as the demons did. They haven’t yet decided the punishment for our transgressions.
The light-eyed child’s mother gets a strange, wistful look on her face and goes on. You’re our last hope.
The light-eyed child’s people have a legend that girls with water eyes can sometimes turn into boys. They need her to do so; that is what they mean when they say she is their last hope.
No one knows how to make it happen. Send the girl out on her own, her grandmother says, Boys like to be on their own. So every morning, the light-eyed child’s mother sends her off to explore the remnants of the rainforest.
The light-eyed child thinks being a last hope is both a blessing and a burden. She enjoys being special. She hates the disappointment in everyone’s eyes when she comes home every day, still a girl.
Sometimes she squats over the river, her eyes squeezed shut as if she’s trying to shit because it’s the best way she can imagine to force a penis out of her vagina. She clenches and grunts, clenches and grunts. Sometimes when her eyes get so tired she sees bright sparkles over the scribbly gums on the horizon, she feels her vaginal walls pinch together and she knows - just knows - that something has come out. But when she reaches down, she finds only soft, yielding flesh.
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The last man cries over his son until he realizes his sobs are tearless. He stops.
The ravens won’t leave them alone, so he throws more stones. He must watch the birds constantly or they try to pluck out his son’s eyes.
His trousers are soiled, but he urinates at a marked spot near the cave mouth to maintain a semblance of civilization. He has nothing to defecate. When he gets too hungry, he sucks on stones.
In all the deprivation the last man has suffered in his life, he’s never lacked for water. Even now as he starves, puddles pock the stony landscape. They taste brackish, but they keep him alive longer than he wants.
He gives up sleep, but dreams awake. He sees mirages on the horizon, machines his father told tales of: great silver birds with hearts like ticking clocks; blood-heated covers to keep him warm; android doctors with needle-covered palms injecting life back into his bony chest.
He remembers the first time he came to the surface as a boy, with his own father. His people’s men folk had a tradition of sending males to the surface to prove they had the courage to tread across the lip of a dead world. All around the valley grew the red-stemmed ban mara daisies which choked out the trees until the hills blanched white as the clouds.
When I was young, they said the flowers showed the hills were dying, the last man’s father said. They came from a far-away land over the sea and when they got here, they grew so thick and fierce that they killed all the plants that had been here already, the ones that had lived here forever.
Once, the last man and his father explored the mountains beyond the hills and found the remains of a fabric shop. Bolts of durable synthetic cloth tumbled across each other, like the discarded sheets of a giant. The last man and his father brought them home for the women to make clothes out of. They were greeted like heroes.
Before the eruptions, the last man never brought his son to the surface. He was a sickly baby, like all the newborns conceived in the past few years. Many of them died, but the last man prayed over his son every minute until he was a year old. His son’s hair grew in scraggly patches across his scalp. When he ate, his gums bled into his food. Even after the boy had passed the most dangerous point, the last man refused to let him sleep alone, afraid he’d get lost in his dreams and forget to come home. The last man’s wife told him she would leave him for another man if he didn’t return to share her pallet. He let her.
The setting sun reflects pink off the upturned petals cloaking the hills. The last man regrets not taking his son up here before, sickly or not. He thinks his son would have liked to explore these hills, feel his bony feet slip in the mud. He would have run through the ruins and hollered at the vast, free sky. At least, he would have liked a length of the gray cloth the last man and his father found so many years ago: sewn with golden strands for the sun and red strands like the stems of the ban mara daisies.
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Literacy fades years before the last man dies. The older generation of his people remember how to read, but they don’t teach the young ones. Reading seems frivolous, indulgent, a luxury like brocade or peacock feathers or reminiscing about long summer evenings when men chewed betel nuts and women chattered while the lowering sun lengthened their shadows until an ordinary human presence had the heft of a god’s.
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Two generations before the light-eyed child was born, her grandmother would have screamed at Grandpa Burn and kicked his skull downstream. Her mother would have cried over Grandma Starve’s aged bones, cursing the fact she would never live to acquire a stoop.
The light-eyed child places her hands over their hollow sockets and returns to playing.
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The last lie is not a single lie but a group of lies, uttered by the last man’s people and the light-eyed child’s people, by children and elders, by men and women, by the stoic and the red-eyed.
Don’t worry, Mama, Grandpa, sir, honey, lover, child, heart-keeper, mine. You’re going to get better. You’re going to be all right.
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The last man leaves his son awhile and climbs a formation of rocks on the other side of the cave mouth. The tallest one leans on a pair of others like an old man asking for support. Below, a thousand foot drop sinks into a ravine blanketed in daisies.
The last man selects a small gray stone and pitches it down. As it plummets, he tries to fit the idea of such distance into his head: how things so high can fall so far.
Before it hits, he’s distracted by a rush of wind as a raven flies past him. He waves it away. It dives past the cave, headed for his son. The last man climbs down to chase it off and misses the moment when the rock hits the ground.
By the time the last man reaches his son, the boy’s left eye is gone. The thread of his intestines trails across the stony ground.
He remembers sitting with his son, then a five year old, coaxing him to eat yak meat and lichen. The little boy turned away, fanning his hands in front of his face.
Summer 2007 Page 16