Th Last Book. The Diary of The Last Earthling

The beanie stays on. The last time I took it off was before birth.

I’m not a huge Beatles fan, but John Lennon’s taste in glasses can’t be beat.

I don’t remember much of childhood (accident, will explain), but I’m told I did lots of playing with cars. I never learned to drive as an adult, though.

Portrait of your artist as a young boy: Chubby, ginger, glasses already. I drew little me without a beanie, but that is an artistic lie.

Every time I draw a portrait, I hear my old Cooper Union professors’ slogans. I have no control over this.

I am a fan of wooden pencils—only with them can you truly feel the paper. They need lots of sharpening, but that’s just a matter of practice.

With great pride I present my left hand. That’s the business side. My right just kinda dangles beside me for symmetry’s sake.

I, Noah Jonah Kaplan, begin this diary on a day, month, and year that will mean nothing to you. Since I’m writing now, and you’re reading then, that secret date is the place where your future and my past will cross, and that’s the interesting bit.

When I was fourteen years old, I crashed my bike on a street I no longer remember, and I woke up a week later after traveling across half the cosmos in a coma. Imagine a dream that has more than a night to put itself together, so it isn’t illogical anymore. You start to see the patterns, to understand the new world. It becomes another life, as real as the “real” one, and just as you’ve figured out your role in it, you wake up to a bunch of people who thought you were gonna die.

What they didn’t know was that I already had: I’d lived another life in that week’s dreams, so when they woke me up, everything after that was post-mortem. Or that’s what I felt like, for a while. My mom and dad were good to me, in their way. My mom was frustrated by my insistence that I lived in the afterlife, and my dad, a painter, told me to draw my dreams so they wouldn’t fade away and force me to undergo a second death. So I became an artist like him, as unsuccessful as he was because, also like him, I needed to draw, couldn’t live without it, but had no notion of business. But so the coma, through my dad, gave me my identity.

Dear therapist who has demanded I start a diary, I hope that’s enough exposition for you. I bought this thing at The Strand on 12th Street just after our session. Manhattan’s sweltering today, like walking through smoggy soup. I feel less anxious with every word I write. You were totally right! I’ll let you decide whether that’s sarcastic or not. I am an artist, and by golly I will write to the death for my right to ambiguity.

So now I’m walking from just below Union Square south-westward towards Washington Square. I guess my subconscious is feeling extra patriotic today because I didn’t recognize the squares’ correspondence ‘til I wrote it down. Washington Square Park is more lively—breakers b-boying, violinists fiddling with their tuners, hash-hawkers hocking loogies in the grass from their folding chairs in a haze of kush and frankincense—it’s like a circus, and I want it, ‘cause I feel beat, and when I’m beat, only a big crowd perks me back up.

Two Squares (22)=4 (Shadows)

Washington Square is named, I think, after George Washington. Maybe not. Maybe it’s Denzel. Or George Washington Carver, the peanut butter guy. Lots of people think George Washington was a reptilian alien and that all US rulers after him have been descendents of his space-lizard spawn. I’m still on the fence about it. That is, I’m leaning against the wrought-iron fence that surrounds the green so I can write to you about the place before I dive into specifics. A proud sense of unbiased scientific inquiry I have, me, a proud producer of widgets for the almost-booming doodad market and long-time Wikipedia addict. Economists place my profession squarely within the thingamajig sector, and they’re more or less right. Economists don’t talk about my hobby at all, my drawing and painting, and I appreciate that.

Today there’s a guy selling encyclopedias at a white plastic folding table near the center of the square, surrounded by an eager crowd of NYU art girls with microbangs. His encyclopedias are unmarked, only one volume. “What’re they about?” I ask.

“Everything that’s ever been on Earth,” he says, “and all the know-how we’d need to resurrect civilization after an apocalypse.”

I nod politely and say “Wow, congrats” and walk on, convinced by his planet-sized pupils that he’s on as much acid as he was when he wrote the book. I’ve brought all my paint and pens and stuff with me because I thought maybe I should doodle in this diary, too, and I set up on the edge of a water fountain and paint the guy. It turns out like an insulting caricature—he’s mostly pupils, huge eyes, tiny body—but he’ll never see it. It’s my diary. And yours, I guess, dear Therapist. Is that counter-transference?

My phone dings. It’s a citywide alert message that the Meshugge-in-Chief threatened nuclear attack again. I yawn and put it back in my pocket and touch up the encyclopedist’s portrait. Then, on a whim, pondering George Washington’s scaly tail, I walk over and ask him, “What does your book say about aliens?”

He grins. “Plenty. I’ll give it to you for twenty, and that’s a big discount. I can tell you’re my type of guy.”

As I walk back toward the fountain, bag of paints and diary and pens swinging from my shoulder, I drop the book because I’m writing in my diary about walking back to the fountain with it, and the oak trees around the square are rustling loud, and people are getting up from the iron benches and running, and there’s a really bright light coming from the east and growing, probably a—

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK

See previous page. I have no way to talk about what just happened, but if you need words to imagine, I just spent the last several hours ripping out my hair and running up and down these long hallways and watching stars pass me by and somehow I’m becoming calm now. It’s all too familiar. Like a replay of the coma. A musician would get a kick out of that. DC al Coma. Ha! Jesus, I’m losing it. Maybe I’ll wake up in a day or week or so. Who the hell am I writing to? I just ended a sentence with a preposition. It’s over for me. For now.

The Last Judgement // in hindsight, which is, I guess, a paradox

Christians used to sum up their morality by saying we should always do what we wanted to be doing “when Jesus comes back.” If Jesus had anything to do with the apocalypse that just flashed me, he didn’t let me know it. But I guess the job of last judgements falls to me now, albeit with deflated stakes.

I’m pretty sure my mom and dad were at the Russian-Turkish bathhouse downtown. The last mikveh. They went on a day-date there every couple weeks after they retired, then walked to a schvitzy dinner at one of the Italian spots in the West Village. My mom was probably joking to my dad that this, well-exfoliated and covered in salty water, was what the fish felt like before he caught them. Look up, honey! She’d say. Check for hooks! Then I bet he told her about his latest drawing. Near the end…lately she’d demanded that he describe the drawings first, and she’d make a doodle of his description, and they’d giggle over how different their pictures were. I tried, as often as I could, to be there when they did the great reveals and comparisons. My biggest ambition, over and above anything professional or even artistic, was to find somebody I could do that with, one day.

Was…I was in the park. My dog, Rivera (after the painter), should have been with me but was not. I’m sure he was home, painting. As ever. Surely he would’ve hidden the painting before I got home, as ever. Someday he’d reveal where he’d buried all the canvases and cobble them together into a grand mural. Every day, when I came home from work, I asked him where he’d stashed away that day’s work, but he never answered. I admired that. He was much better than me at keeping a decorous silence.

Past, tense. That comma’s so heavy and blunt as to be coma-inducing. “Was.” Horrible.

I’m sure Jesus would have approved of all that, even if my parents were secular and my dog was presumably a lapsed Catholic. I can’t imagine him hoping better for the world, as he died, than my parents’ giggles over their drawings of fish, my dad dramatically looking for a hook over his head in the bathhouse, Rivera working doggedly at his mural, driven by humility to hide its progress from his best friend and roommate.

I’d love to think that I could imagine better, now that I’m the last judger, de facto the last representative of my species, so that I wouldn’t seem so narcissistic, holding up my own family as The Pinnacle, but I can’t. We did all sorts of wonderful things. But I can’t think of a way to argue that any one of those things was better, because now I can only think as me, not through anybody else’s eyes.

We weren’t made for this kind of solitude. To have no option of empathy. E unibus pluram, said nobody without an ironic sneer. There’s nobody here. I need someone to giggle with me over this diary and its fish. Otherwise I’m just sitting here taking my own pulse. My friends were at work, slumped over their computers, waiting to leave. Or they were walking around town in the sun. Some of them might have been in the park with me, but I didn’t see them. I was scribbling in my diary—I didn’t want to see anyone I had to talk to!

I thought like that. I had the immense, cornucopian abundance to be able to think like that. All this grey, all this silence…I’ll never have the privilege of getting annoyed by running into a friend again. Never the joy of restlessly craving silence and solitude. Never the relief of coming home to Rivera at the end of a long day and trusting that, even if I didn’t see his mural, stashed in mystery all across the city for all I knew, it was there, waiting to reveal itself in the broken-up collage of weeks, months, years.

Ship of Fool’s Errands

Hallways for days. Two days, by my count, now. But we’re not orbiting the Sun, so my soul is in disarray. They never tell you how your world falls apart when you leave orbit. Hell, how could they? Evolution cannot have prepared me for this. I’m on my own, without even the most material of our religions to help me.

The hallways are long and gray. Maybe they’re all sorts of different colors to you, you Drivers, you dear Aliens, on the spectra you see. Not to me. You couldn’t decorate for your guest? Of course not. No more than I could decorate for you, were our roles inverted.

A room every twenty feet or so. All the rooms I’ve found so far are empty, but for the halls’ same gray. Some pipes, sometimes, a wire or two, all gray, all attached to the walls. Once there was a jar with nothing in it. Looked new-scrubbed. But there’s no dust here, so who knows? Not me, therefore not anyone. Whew. The royal “we” has never been more valid and invalid at once. Am I really all there is? Not possible. Hell, that’d be the end of “possible.”

But then…it’s only fitting. Earth should end with that kind of joke. “A rabbi’s grandson walks around an alien space-ship…” Jesus, it’s ridiculous. But surely there’s something on this ship aside from me. Why have all the rooms, if they’re empty?

Yes. I affirm. Earth is gone. I am mindful of this. I am here. I am mindful of this. Nothing else seems to be here, but something or someone must be. I am extra mindful of this. What did Hannah Arendt say—the difference between good solitude and poisonous loneliness is that the person in solitude has the peace to talk to himself? I think that was it. I hope this diary counts as part of me, because otherwise I’m chopped and screwed.

Three days, now. Or four. Something like that. I hope my strange tally-marks on the wall and on this page express my confusion well. Funny how numbers work when the world that birthed them has exploded, leaving no remainder but one neurotic New Yorker. I can’t be the one basis of numbers. Wasn’t math supposed to be God’s language? But it’s three days, or four, and nobody alive can say which. We’re done.

Done. Just a body in space. Cold. Math was supposed to be God’s language, but now…coldness be my god. I’m supposed to adapt, right? There must be somebody, something, some-un-thing, here, aside from me. I’ll find company. I know it. A premonition! Diarist’s foreshadowing! Hoping, rather. I’m just another body in space, after all. No way to say I’m alive if it’s only me.

The Seventh Day

I rested yesterday. Didn’t find a single new room in the hallways. But in my rest, I felt the rest of the people you saved calling to me. Oh, no I didn’t. Can’t I be honest in my own diary? Good, yes, well, then: I thought both things, I’ll find them and I won’t. They’re there and they’re not. And I know for a fact that I’m right.

Ha! I’ve become my own quantum mechanics: I’m the particle-wave duality of light: Either I’m totally atomized, or I’ll find somebody to wave at. How would it feel to say “hello”? We took so many little goods for granted. God, that’s a horrible cliché. Forgive me, dear Aliens.

Seven days. Long enough for God to create the universe then space out for a day of vegging, but for me…I’ve just spaced out. But at least I know, now, why he created it all. Loneliness is the worst. You lose everyone else, and it makes you lose yourself. Not you. Me. Give me a ring, dear Aliens. I’ll keep searching the halls tomorrow. I know I haven’t hit every room. But give me some sign that I’m not all that’s left, aside from whatever power brings my meals and takes away the waste they make in me.

For thou hast cast me into the deep. You put me here. Don’t you feel some sense of responsibility? Of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t have beamed me in. So there must be another. It’s just one plus one, simple. Gotta. Ah yes. I see your design. Smart! Dear Aliens, I see what you’re doing now. I hope I do.

The New Encyclopedist

Another four days, now, more or less, and I know that guy at the square, the encyclopedist, knew something. That way he grinned at me as I walked away. Was he one of you in disguise? Like your scout? Ignore the question. I know you won’t tell me anything.

But I still haven’t found another person, and I’ve run miles up and down your hallways. Does this ship have an end? Doesn’t matter. I can’t think like that. Not sure how I can think at all. You clearly don’t know what it does to us to be torn away from everyone we love. You would have a much better study of my species if there were two of us. Three, now that’d be heaven. We can’t exist in a social vacuum. I barely remember which way’s up. Another day or two, and I’ll forget how to breathe.

No. My therapist was right. I should be mindful. That’ll help, I’m sure. So what I’m gonna do is become the encyclopedist (whom I know you planted there, you greasy slicks) and make my diary the last encyclopedia of the Earth, as I knew it.

Oh, I was a Wikipedia addict like any other, and I read all sorts of other stuff, at least for the last few years—really the last few years, I guess—after my therapist told me I was getting too much screen time for optimal mental wellness. I never thought about it before, but…maybe I was the perfect person for you to pick up.

But no, I was the right guy. I can tell you exactly what you saved—and since you beamed me up (or however you did it) with all my paint and pens, I can draw it for you, too, or at least, I can draw you how I remember and imagine it. You want a sample of humanity, dear Aliens? Here it is. My requiem for humankind and the planet we lived on. Or, something like a requiem, or an elegy, but more celebratory, like an anthem. An Anquiem for Humankind! An Elethem? In any case, the last book. All systems go. Or went. I guess I should shift to past tense. I’ve got it! A Paean to Humankind. No, no, no one has had to write something like this before. There can’t be a word for it—no word that anyone but I could’ve written. Anquiem it is.