In the Penultimate Sigh

Akemi was utterly exhausted. Somehow, after a sleepless night in the laboratory, the day's news, and the evening report from Raifenberg following the meeting, she made it home. Even the lack of air conditioning no longer bothered her. Outside, as always, it was oppressively stuffy. The tram slowly carried her through green avenues, and all she could muster the energy to notice was that this green corridor was thinning with each passing day.

"So, a year," she thought. It was the last thing she wanted to believe, but statistics are stubborn, and when backed by well-founded scientific forecasts, even more so.

"You need a healthy natural sleep," she muttered to herself like a mantra, quoting some movie. She simultaneously wanted to sleep forever and never sleep again.

Maybe take a day off? No, wait, tomorrow is Saturday anyway.

"Saturday!" she mentally jolted herself. "What kind of time off can there be when this is happening..."

"This" slowly blurred before her eyes. Black-and-white graphs, cross-sections of leaves glistening with green sap, endless analysis results under the microscope, the all-encompassing confusion, bewilderment, and panic that engulfed the laboratory the day they realized that, yes —this is no coincidence, it's serious and here to stay...

Akemi exhaled heavily. Hold on.

"You need a healthy natural sleep," she repeated the mantra to herself.

"Look," she bargained silently with her conscience, "okay, let's say you're right, let's say it's a year, just a year — but can we at least do something?"

Her conscience remained silent.

In the evenings, it was slightly easier to breathe, and when Akemi stepped off the last tram, a nearly fresh breeze greeted her. It seemed like her thoughts were coming into order. She slowly walked from the stop to her home through a dark alley, illuminated by sparse, flickering streetlights. She passed by the parking lot, entered the courtyard, mechanically took out her keys —one for the entrance door, another for the mailbox, a third for the apartment.

There was a letter in the box.

"Spam?" she thought. "No, doesn't look like it."

The letter was addressed to her, warning about the ongoing decrease in oxygen levels in the air and suggesting the purchase of necessary equipment. "Oxygen levels are decreasing... your health is in your hands..." It was no illusion—although the letter bore her name, Akemi was sure identical ones lay in all her neighbors' mailboxes. Still spam. As if she wasn't already aware. Oh, the times, oh, the morals! If anyone knew about the inevitability of the impending disaster, it was Akemi.

She crumpled the letter and tossed it into the bin. She opened and closed the entrance door behind her, kicked off her sneakers, groped her way to the couch without turning on the light, shed her clothes, and collapsed into the arms of sleep.

"Akemi! Akemi!"

She shivered irritably.

"Miss Streuch!" the teacher called out with a feigned tone, slapping the journal on the desk. A chuckle swept through the class.

"Dozed off again..."

"Yes?"

More laughter. The teacher repeated the question. Akemi answered without hesitation.

Now they finally shut up. She was pleased by the absence of laughter, but the fact that she had dozed off in her favorite biology class — not at all.

"Miss Streuch!" one of the students called out to her.

"What kind of 'miss' am I to you," Akemi thought. She hadn't fully adjusted to the role of a teacher, even if she was only entrusted with conducting seminars for undergraduates.

Her surname — Streuch — came from her father; the name — well, not literally, but its Japanese essence — from her mother. Her father took them from Japan to Germany when she was six. During summers, on vacations, Akemi still visited relatives on her mother's side in Japan, but as she grew older, she visited less frequently, and the memories of the quiet country house, the singing of cicadas at sunset, and the tall green grass along the river began to seem unreal. Maybe none of it happened, and it was just a dream?

Akemi slept soundly, and in her mind, black-and-white graphs of declining oxygen levels mingled with vivid, almost childlike memories of her grandmother, the village house, grasshoppers leaping in the grass, and times when the grass hadn't yet dried up.

A nasty beep woke her in the middle of the night. The oxygen sensor — a small device on the ceiling, formerly used as smoke detectors but recently repurposed to monitor oxygen levels in the room — had gone off. Akemi stretched irritably, got up from the couch, groped in the dark for a chair, climbed up, stretched her arm as far as she could, and managed to reach the button on the sensor to finally silence it. The sensor beeped sadly, and silence returned. Akemi climbed down and immediately sank to the floor next to the chair — still half-asleep.

"Window" — she was already nodding off but jerked awake — "the kitchen window! I forgot it, what a scatterbrain!"

Akemi got up, went to the kitchen, turned on the light, closed the window, drank a glass of cold tap water, turned off the light, and collapsed back onto the couch. She had forgotten to close the kitchen window two days ago when she left for the laboratory. Didn't forget the door, but forgot the window...

"What a scatterbrain, and the stuffiness, it just evaporated all the air..." she scolded herself, drifting back to sleep.

"So, a year," Raifenberg was relentless, staring sternly at Akemi and Thomas from the monitor screen.

"Without a doubt," Akemi replied, and it took immense effort to conceal the very doubt and tremor in her voice.

"Everyone confirmed," Thomas chimed in, as if sensing his partner needed support.

"Saratov too?" — it was more of a rhetorical question; all three understood this, but Raifenberg couldn't help but ask.

"Them too," Akemi replied, rustling papers, "they also have a steady decline in saturation; initially, it was half a percent per month, now — one percent every two weeks, and the rates are increasing."

Raifenberg removed his glasses and wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Just as I thought. Alright. I'll try to persuade our brave idiots somehow."

The persuasion didn't go too well. Akemi had a feeling that nothing would come of Raifenberg's conversation with the military, even though he was a minister. It wasn't her fault that he failed, not her fault that they didn't get it, not her fault that everything was happening as it was, yet she still blamed herself for only being capable of recording the inevitable impending fate, like that stupid sensor on the ceiling, recording readings, compiling reports, and silently chronicling the last days.

That’s why, at that moment, realizing what was what, she instantly dashed out of the laboratory. And that’s why Thomas hunched gloomily over the graph, calculating percentages, while she tried to catch her breath outside the lab door — but it was in vain. The stifling, sticky heat seeped into every cell of her body.

Memories of the last few days flickered before her eyes in a chaotic kaleidoscope. At least no lab tomorrow. At least not tomorrow. That thought comforted Akemi even in her sleep, and her brain obligingly refused to count how many such weekends were still left.

The oxygen tank in the corner of the room released a silent stream of gas; on the blue display, dim black numbers flashed: "94%".