“The older ones belonged to my grandmother,” Dan said. “She took good care of them.”
“How many can you bring?” Josh said, his voice sounding thick from the smoke. He passed the joint to Dan, who traded it for a box of crackers and stuck it between his lips.
“I can’t believe you’re even bringing the record player,” Averill said absently as she pulled a Radiohead album from the stack and flipped it over to look at the track listing.
“We all get the same amount of square footage,” Dan said. “The rest of you have photo albums and knickknacks and erotic paperbacks…”
“Why”—Josh ate a cracker, then passed the box to Samantha—“did you look at me when you said that?”
“Why did you look bashful when I said that?”
Dan offered her the joint, which she took, because there were two weeks left on Earth and there seemed no reason not to.
She drew a tentative breath of smoke. It tasted like dirt. She coughed and stuck her hand in the cracker box after passing the joint to Averill.
“Anyway, because I have neither photo albums nor knickknacks,” Dan said, “I am bringing albums. I’ve already picked the ones I want most, but I also want you guys to have your favorites, if we’re all going to be listening together for, oh, the rest of our lives. So everybody pick one.”
It was generous, Samantha thought. Unspeakably generous, in fact, to give away their most precious commodity—space—to friends he had made only a few months before. She ignored the prickling behind her eyes as she turned her attention to the records spread over the floor.
“The question is,” Averill said, “do you pick the album with the song you love most, or do you want a band with a more consistent oeuvre to represent yourself?”
“Ugh,” Dan said. “Don’t say the word ‘oeuvre’ in my room.”
The cracker was bland but salty, and it made Samantha’s mouth feel dry. The weed was settling in now, making her head feel like it was being squeezed between two giant palms.
“Don’t be that guy,” Samantha said. She closed her eyes. “You know, the one who says he’ll bring Ulysses as one of his desert-island books.”
“I like Ulysses,” Josh said.
“Nobody likes Ulysses,” Dan said, wrinkling his nose. “She’s right, just pick an album you love. Even if it’s not the best one by some objective standard.”
They all went quiet for a few seconds. Smoke curled around the lamp in the corner. Samantha craned her neck to see the records spread out around Averill, who sat cross-legged now, surrounded by old album covers with worn corners.
“Fine,” Josh said. He rolled over on the bed and flopped to the floor next to Averill. He sorted through the stacks until he found what he was looking for, an album with a photograph of a woman smiling on it with red lipstick, her arm flung over her forehead. “Hotels. My wife and I—”
“May she rest in peace.” Averill held up her wineglass in acknowledgment. Josh’s wife had died in a car accident five years before.
“May she rest in peace,” Josh said solemnly. “My wife and I met at a dance in college, and ‘Into the Hudson’ was the first song we danced to.”
Dan sang the first few bars in a surprisingly high falsetto, making everyone laugh. Samantha closed her eyes and felt the room turn around and around.
“By that logic, I choose the Argument’s ‘You’re in a Cult.’” Averill retrieved the album, with its illustrated white peaks that looked oddly like the Svalbard horizon, from where it rested at the foot of the bed. “My brother Oliver made me listen to it when he drove me to school. I hated it. But after he died it was all I could listen to.”
Samantha sorted through the music around her. Most of it was older, the records from Josh’s grandmother: stacks of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones. Averill had started stacking the records by band name, so she flipped through the Pink Floyds, the red writing on a white wall, the light passing through a prism and scattering into a rainbow. She found the man shaking hands with his twin self, the latter self on fire, and held it up as her selection.
“Wish You Were Here,” she said. “Pink Floyd. It was my dad’s favorite, because it was his mom’s favorite. He used to play the title song over and over.” She twirled a finger in the air. “Made him cry, sometimes.”
Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she smiled.
“How’d your dad die again?” Averill asked.
“Suicide,” Samantha said. “Couple years after my mom. I think he was just… done.”
She thought of what she had told Hagen earlier, that he had been dying since his wife passed away, and his body hadn’t caught on yet. When she was younger, she had been angry at her dad, thinking she wasn’t enough to keep him around. But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.
Not like her, she thought. She wanted to see it all come apart.
Averill stopped the record that was playing, a neo-folk song called “Spite, Thirst, Money,” by NICU. She eased the needle away from the grooves of it, slid it back into its jacket, replacing it with Metallica.
Samantha wondered if, after the Ark launched, they would spend all their time looking backward—at Earth, at the life they had built there. If the Ark itself was all the time capsule they needed, its inhabitants living in their memories as they coasted toward a distant planet, and then dying with them.
“So many samples,” Dan moaned. “And no one will ever see them again.”
They were sitting in the lab, on the stools. The equipment they needed for the Ark had been packed away and taken to the ship, which was perched on a massive aircraft carrier just beyond the bay—former military, from God knew what country; it didn’t matter anymore. Samantha’s bag was packed, sitting at the end of her bed. Dan had brought the record player into the laboratory because he played music constantly now, like he didn’t want to hear his own grief.
Reality was setting in, Samantha thought. She had heard Averill sobbing in the shower that morning. Josh kept stopping in the middle of sentences, in the middle of steps, in the middle of thoughts. Now that she didn’t have any pressing work to do, Samantha went every day to see Hagen, who was steady as ever, tending to his plants.
He told her about them as she helped him. About the Rhizanthella gardneri, which grew underground in Western Australia. And the Caleana major, which looked like a white bird in flight, its petals frayed at the edges, featherlike. Anguloa uniflora, which curved around its center column like cupped hands keeping a match from going out. There was no end to the flowers’ variety, and he listed them with increasing frequency, every day, showing pictures when he had no living example to present to her. She didn’t know why, of all the last words he could have chosen, he chose these, and he chose her to say them to. But she listened.
“Let’s each do one more,” Samantha said.
“What?” Averill said. “Why? It’s not like any more samples can be stored.”
“So?” Samantha shrugged.
“All right,” Josh said. “I mean, the computers are still hooked up.”