Last Day on Earth

by Eric Puchner

She rang the bell, and Mrs. Winters’s daughter answered the door, dressed in a tunic with little paisleys on it, her long ferny lashes seeming to stick together for a second when she blinked at us. She looked, I thought, like the sort of woman a movie monster might snatch from a crowd.

There were paintings everywhere, leaning against some of the weirdest furniture I’d ever seen. One chair looked like a bunch of curtain rods with a strip of brown-spotted hide stretched across them, as if a lunatic had tried to make a trampoline out of a cow.

My father, for his part, seemed to accept my mother’s judgment. He was an internist at the hospital and grateful enough that my mom had dinner waiting when he came home, treating each incarnation of stroganoff or turkey Tetrazzini as if it were the Second Coming of Christ.

Other times he’d enter one of his “funks,” as my mother put it, retreating to his office in the attic and failing to emerge for dinner, but we’d come to accept them—like the sour-refrigerator smell he brought home from the hospital or the scratchy brown beard he sometimes groomed with a little comb—as part of the unremarkable mystery of his life.

“A person of unsound mental fitness,” Theo said. At fourteen, he considered himself something of a liaison between generations.

He hadn’t bothered to change after lacrosse practice, and the giant shoulder pads he was wearing made his head look like a voodoo hex.

I had an erection that felt like a wound.

She glanced at the tennis ball, which I was holding in front of my crotch. She stopped smiling. Her shirt was soaked with sweat, and I could see the black butterfly of her bra showing through it. She smelled pleasant and unpleasant at the same time, like the inside of a pumpkin.

We were all relieved when the cicadas began to disappear. They dripped from the trees like snow and carpeted the sidewalks. Suddenly we could hear birds singing again. We could hear the scrape of our own shoes. We could hear the hum of the electrical wires festooning our street. We could hear the sprinklers chk-chk-chking on the lawns, the shrieks and splashes of swimming pools, the kurraaang of basketballs missing their baskets. We could hear snatches of music drifting on the breeze. We could hear the planes buzzing overhead and the bees buzzing in the flowers. We talked normally, without shouting, and our voices seemed like new and powerful instruments. For a day or two, we listened to whatever anyone had to say. My dad whispered in my mother’s ear at dinner, and it was like I could hear the corny things he was saying, so badly did I want them to be true. Out with you, my mother said to us, giggling, No kids allowed, and we climbed the trees and walked barefoot in the grass, and it seemed like we might stay outside forever.

But the boy’s favorite part is hearing about the disease itself: how exciting it was for the man to watch himself change, to grow tall and hairy and dark-headed, as strong as a beast. To feel ugly sometimes and hear his voice deepen into a stranger’s. To fall in love with a woman’s body and watch a baby come out of her stomach, still tied to her by a rope of flesh.

Still, Jess was here now. Lending a hand. It was not too late to win Margot back. All she needed was to prove she was well, or at least well medicated: a good aunt, who keeps her motherfucking desperation to herself. The first step was to get Ellory to like her.

One of the few perks of major depression was that your lifestyle—excessive TV watching, a reluctance to bathe or brush your teeth—impressed children.

Margot stared at her, and for a moment something moved between them, as slow and silent as a breath. Jess looked into the damp lamps of Margot’s eyes and saw for the first time in however many years the brain that was lighting them, the accumulation of fears and longings and regrets that somehow formed a substance, the mysterious thing that distinguished us from zombies and saber-tooths.

There was a dwelling inside the tree, an amazing contrivance of planks and ladders. It looked like something a lunatic, or a happy person, might build.

Jess let herself be bossed. This was what being a mother was, pretending to cast a spell when you were really under someone else’s.

We were like a family: a triracial, incestuous, downwardly mobile family, but a family nonetheless.

That’s when I see him, Rogelio, through the open window. He’s walking down the sidewalk with his face in a book. God knows what it is: Calvino, maybe, or Pynchon, or Highsmith. He’s skinnier than I’ve ever seen him—which is very skinny—and his hair looks greasy and disheveled. People have actually stopped looking at their phones and are moving to get out of his way. He clears a path down the sidewalk—probably he has no idea where he is—and there’s something beautiful about him, something rare and slow and possessed: a man lost inside a book. I open my mouth to call to him, but I don’t. I don’t. I just miss him when he disappears.

I listened more carefully, wondering how the hell a trombone was going to fart its way into a ballad. The saxophone that had been playing feathered out and then there it was, the clumsy blat of a trombone, except that it wasn’t clumsy at all but steady and beautiful and full of tenderness. It was like a walrus in mourning.

I had the feeling of being very close to something, something better than I was though it came from my own brain; if I leaned an inch further, I could touch it. If I didn’t touch it soon, or try to, it would disappear.

He fetched a beer out of the cooler and then scanned the crowd of twenty-somethings who tragically believed him to be older than they were. Sometimes he fantasized about meeting Charlotte’s double, someone who didn’t know him yet but was filled with all the Charlottey things that made her unique.

So it was a joke. The guy in the leopard-print vest was playing a part. The name of the show, Famouser Than You, made sense to him now: this was a show that made fun of talk shows, or perhaps even a show that made fun of shows that made fun of talk shows. It was hard to be sure.

Bennett lurched up from the bed and strapped his guitar over his shoulders and began to play it as if he were a robot, jerking his hand up and down so that it sounded like a radio tuning in and out. “Ev . . . ry . . . lit . . . tle . . . thing,” he sang, in a robot voice, “gon . . . na . . . be . . . all . . . right.” This was very funny. The opposite of Bob Marley was robot, but Josh had not realized this before. Josh laughed so hard his eyes watered. He could actually feel the tears forming behind his eyeballs, a region he’d never mentally explored but which he sensed as vividly now as the rug between his toes. The air was a haze of colors, warm and sculptural and all right, meaning every little part of it was right, and he began to understand why so many songs had “all right” in the chorus. The all rightness of the world was so well hidden that you needed to be reminded it was there. Feeling all right. Don’t think twice, it’s all right. Every little thing was going to be all right.

She seemed angry, though it was hard to take her seriously with the Slurpee in her hand.