August 23, 1981

August 23, 1981, is the date associated with Probo Carrera’s death and the last book of his life: issue no. 899 of Urania, The 2000 Municipalities by Mack Reynolds. The date turns a routine object in a long-running collection into a marker of finality, while the mismatch between the printed date and the book’s earlier arrival preserves the difference between a date on a cover and the day the world ended for its reader.

The Last Book

The issue’s white cover carries a red graphic and a circular illustration of three naked people—a boy and a girl speaking with an older person seated on a bench—with other figures among the trees in the distance. Its title is The 2000 Municipalities, its author Mack Reynolds, and its date August 23, 1981. Probo’s son presents the volume as the ultimate item in his father’s collection, holding it before him as he recounts what that date came to mean.

The book was issue 899 in a collection that ran, almost complete, from number 1 to number 899. Probo had begun collecting again at issue 452, The Secret Service Book, a science-fiction story collection by Asimov, Tucker, Van Vogt, Martino, and Philip K. Dick. From there, he bought 447 consecutive issues, covered each with tissue paper, read it, and returned it to its place on the shelf. The final volume therefore closes not just a sequence of publications but fifteen years of consistent collecting and reading.

A Date Before the End

August 23 is described as the day the world ended for Probo. Yet the issue had already been available thirteen days earlier, on August 10, when that ending could not have been anticipated. Probo’s son reasons that his father must have bought it before mid-August at the Castagneto newsstand where he bought newspapers, and read it within a couple of days, as he usually did. He would read partly on the beach and partly in bed, lying on his right side toward the bedside table, with his back to his mother; in August, the family’s lack of space meant his parents could not sleep separately.

The next issue was due on newsstands from Monday, August 24, though the son allows that it might not have reached Castagneto until Tuesday or Wednesday. That anticipated continuation of the series becomes irrelevant after Probo’s death. The publication schedule points toward another ordinary installment; the date on the book instead becomes the last date in a reading life.

Family Memory and Finality

The account makes the date meaningful through the distance between routine and retrospect. At the time Probo bought and read the book, its cover date was simply part of an ongoing collection. Recalled after his death, the same issue becomes its final volume and the last book he read. August 23 thus names both a calendar date and a boundary that the son can see only afterward.

The passage places this intimate act of remembering beside an appeal to Giacomo Carrera. The son apologizes for having blamed his brother and for helping make family life difficult in the days after the death, then observes that thirty years have passed and that they are no longer boys. He imagines reconciliation over the inheritance left by their parents as a reversal of the usual pattern of siblings fighting over it, and as something characteristic of their family precisely because it would work the other way around. His request for an answer leaves that hoped-for reconciliation open. The book’s finality is certain; the brothers’ response is not.