“The only reason he had come back down,” Elaine had said, “was that it was simply too cold to live up there. So he surrendered to his own limits and returned to join the rest of humanity in their final days. And now, here he is, with us.”
Morgan takes the tube leading from Justin’s nutrient bag between her index finger and her thumb. Without another thought, she pulls and the tube disconnects from the nutrient bag. Drops of a gelatinous goo drip onto the ground next to Justin’s cot. It has no smell. Or maybe it does and she simply can’t smell it anymore.
His arms, strong enough to pull him up the sides of mountains, do not push her away. The vice-like grip of his fingers, carved from clinging to rocks all of his life, does not encircle her wrist and beg her to stop what she is doing.
Another drip of the nutrient bag hits the floor. She closes her eyes.
His bag was almost empty anyway. There won’t be much to clean up the following day.
Justin is weak as it is, as are all the bodies around her. Without food and water, he won’t last more than a few hours.
It’s the only way, she tries to convince herself.
The thought is meant to comfort her. The only way she can ensure the health of everyone else, including herself, is if she has fewer people to care for. She simply has too many people to clean and feed and reposition.
There is no reconciling what she has done, though. She keeps expecting Justin to beg for his life, expects him to plead for someone else to die in his place. He could tell her that if this is about survival of the fittest, there are many Blocks who aren’t as healthy as he is. He could say that the final person to conquer Mount Everest certainly deserves a better ending than being left for dead in front of all of his neighbors. He says none of this, though. He says nothing at all.
Slowly, she makes her way back to her desk, flips each light switch.
It’s the only way, she tells herself.
It’s the only way.
The factory goes dark for the evening.
It’s the only way.
Outside, a bird chirps, oblivious to the suffering within the walls it craps on each day.
It’s the only way.
12
Justin is dead when she checks on him the next day. His lips are grey, his fingers slightly curled. The glossy shine to his skin, that everyone has in the humid Miami weather, is gone. In death, his skin resembles clay more than it does the flesh that used to be there.
His body is removed the same way Elaine’s was: with the forklift. The machine picks up the whole package—bed and body and dirty sheets—and hauls them outside to the industrial-sized incinerator.
On its way there, the forklift rumbles over knee-high weeds, shakes back and forth over potholes and cracks in the pavement. A pavement she can no longer see because everything is covered with prickly grass, dandelions, and leaves, a jungle that reaches up to the forklift’s tires.
It has been done this way for years. Even when there were ten caretakers left, six women and four men, they were incapable of carrying the bodies. The forklift is a necessity.
Indeed, the machine would make many of her other daily chores easier if she were willing to use it for those purposes. It could help in flipping each Block over. It could carry boxes of nutrient bags and dirty diapers. But she knows the more she uses the forklift the sooner it has a chance to break down, and without it she would have no way to transport the dead out of the building, so she doesn’t tempt fate by using it more than she absolutely has to.
She learned valuable lessons from watching George operate the machine. Mainly: always take an extra minute to get the forklift into position. Of course, there was the final Block he tried to carry away, which had fallen to the ground, its skull sounding like a baseball being dropped onto a sidewalk from three stories above. But even before George’s eyesight had failed him, the man had always been impatient to get the job done. How many times had she and Elaine watched as the forklift rammed its arms under the bed, hoisted it up, and then watched as the bed teetered to one side? Instead of finishing his job quickly, George had to lower the bed back to ground, reposition the forklift, and try and try again. The dead bodies jiggled like unenthusiastic dancers as the forklift lurched back and forth. It wasn’t something you could easily forget.
George never failed to let out a string of curses. Elaine acted like she wasn’t paying attention. Morgan, every time she saw the scene unfold, would want to start crying. Why couldn’t George realize the bodies were already dead, that it didn’t matter how quickly they were removed from the building?
And so Morgan takes her time when she is the one operating the forklift. With her behind the controls, the metal arms pick up the bed, Justin’s body still atop it, and carry it across the facility. The other Blocks offer a moment of silence. One of their own has fallen. It is a solemn occasion.
At the incinerator, she pulls a lever and watches the bed rise to the same elevation as the incinerator’s feeder. Once in position, she moves the forklift closer. The bed and the body are both consumed in fire.
The body is engulfed in flames, quickly turns to ash. The bed takes much longer. She gives thought to standing near the incinerator as the bed’s metal frame melts away to nothing, the body already gone, but she cannot do this. She cannot bear to see a spider missing one of its legs or a common housefly stumbling around with only one wing; there is no way she can stay near the flames as they erase something, even a piece of furniture, because it was home to a life she was supposed to protect.
There are sixty-three Blocks now. The result is a facility with perfect rows and aisles, the cots all perfectly lined up, but with one bed missing at the end of quadrant 4. Now that Justin is gone, she wishes she could forget about the life Elaine had created for him. This act she had to perform would have been easier, somehow, if he had been a shell of a person rather than a great mountaineer. Could she send a mannequin to the inferno? Easily. Could she send Reinhold Messner? No chance.
She wishes the voice Elaine had created for him—crisp and clear, nothing mumbled, everything spoken with an intensity—could be quieted, that the things she spoke of on his behalf—unimaginable determination to get where he wanted to go, the breathtaking view once you get there—could be forgotten. These thoughts plague her and she completes her chores.
Maybe life is measured by the first time you have to hurt another living thing and by the moment you can finally live in peace.
She is exhausted and falls into bed. The gymnasium is dark. The moon offers little illumination. Only the faint outline of objects around the group home can be made out. The shapes of each cot can be seen. Each Block fades into the mass of shadows, though. For once, it is not raining. Also, she notices, for once in a long time her hands do not ache.
There is no noise except for the air conditioner clicking on every once in a while to save them from the hot nights. The birds, wherever they go when the sun is gone, are quiet. The feral cat that calls out in the night—she still can’t decide if the calls are to search for a mate or if the cat is scared and alone—is also quiet.
In that moment, she is sure she is being watched. The hairs on the back of her neck tell her this. They stick straight out. She has goose bumps. There is no noise to indicate she is being spied on. No footsteps. No opening and closing of a door. But the hairs on the back of her neck do not lie. They didn’t lie back when she was a young girl watching horror movies, knowing a knife-wielding madman was about to jump out from the shadows and slash a victim to pieces, and they don’t lie now.
She looks toward the main entrance. An old EXIT sign, somehow still working after all these years, offers a reminder of the safety precautions that former generations needed. The red glow of the light illuminates almost nothing. No one is there. She looks to the side door, thought of as the emergency exit. Unlike the other one, the sign above this door has long since burned out. But with the moon’s light, she can see that no one is standing there either.
&nbs
p; I’m going crazy, she thinks. There isn’t even anyone around to spy on me.
But the feeling does not go away. In fact, it only intensifies. Somewhere, somebody in the enlarged room is staring at her. She is sure of it. Squinting, it looks as though the far corners of the gym are motionless. Each one has the same boxes of supplies that have always been there. She even looks up to the rafters, where the moon comes through, with the thought that perhaps someone is up there. Maybe someone crept in through one of the windows and is sneaking around above her.
What am I doing? I’m alone. If anyone were here, they would have to be a hundred years old. They aren’t going to be sneaking around forty feet in the air.
But the feeling of being watched refuses to go away.
After scanning the entrances and rafters, every corner and shadow in the gym, she knows the staring can only be coming from one place. One of the Blocks is staring at her. At least one of them, maybe more.
It’s crazy. It’s impossible. She knows this. But at the same time, she knows if someone is watching her, it must be someone within the four quadrants. Her eyes scan from bed to bed, but even the closest cots are covered in shadow, the Blocks on top of them vague shapes without distinguishable facial features.
The Blocks can only stare at the things their eyes happen to be resting on, and even then they don’t perceive what their eyes are gazing at. But somehow, somewhere, one of them is staring at her. A set of eyes is hunting her. She can feel them casting judgment. The verdict is not good. She feels, from within the dark, hatred directed at her. A plan for revenge is being set.
She wants to call out to whoever is watching. “You there, whoever you are, you don’t know what’s going on. Let me explain. I’m trying my best.”
Right then, her eyes open and she realizes it was only a dream. She was so tired she doesn’t even remember closing her eyes, only falling into bed. But as she lies there, eager for more sleep before she has to begin the day’s chores, she thinks about the response she might have gotten if the dream had lasted another minute.
Would someone have answered her, confirmed her suspicions that she was hated? But she also has the creeping suspicion that she wouldn’t have been able to utter the words she thought to call out. She would have been frozen in place, unable to offer a plea on her own behalf. Instead, her chest would feel like it was weighed down from within. She would be choking on her own silence, helpless.
And that thought, even though the dream is over, makes her shiver. Pulling the sheets tightly around her does no good. Her heart is racing. Perhaps to defy the feeling she had that she wouldn’t be able to speak, she takes rapid, quick breaths before declaring to everyone in the gym: “The start of another beautiful day!”
“It’s the middle of the night!” Cindy calls out in response. “Shut up.”
It turns out that not even a comedian has a sense of humor when everyone should be asleep.
The sun has not yet risen. The clock tells her it won’t rise for many more hours. But the more she talks, the more she can believe it really is the start of another brand new and cheery day. And with that, she gets out of bed and begins her chores.
13
It doesn’t matter that there is one less Block, Morgan is still nowhere close to finishing before midnight. And every day, she becomes a little slower.
There is only one thing to be done: another body must go so the rest can survive. One less body to clean and feed and reposition means more time for her to sleep and gather her strength. Without rest, she isn’t healthy. If she isn’t healthy, no one else is either.
Is this what her life has come to—killing a living, breathing person each time she is overcome, overburdened? If she lets someone die today, how long will it be until she has to let another go? Letting one more person die won’t put her anywhere closer to being able to care for the rest. All it means is that the remainder of her existence will be marked by how frequently she must go through this.
The thought disgusts her, but at the same time she knows there are no other options. She can refuse to take part in the killings but then every single person in her care begins to suffer. She can sacrifice herself instead of a Block, but it means the rest of the gym’s population, whose health and well-being are tied to her own, die a day or two later anyway.
This is the only way.
She looks down at her Jedi, whom she has named Alokin. Although Alokin was Morgan’s idea, the Jedi became Elaine’s favorite Block creation that either of them came up with. He doesn’t have a lightsaber. He doesn’t have control over the Force. In fact, he is nothing but a normal guy. Maybe that is what Elaine loved about their “Jedi Master.”
For almost as long as Star Wars existed, people thought it was funny to mark their religion in census reports as being a Jedi. In some countries, Jedi made up as much as two percent of the official population. Maybe one or two of these people really thought they could perform Jedi mind tricks, but everyone else simply liked being part of the phenomenon. A census was conducted five years after the Great De-evolution began. Instead of two percent of the population listing themselves as Jedi, seven percent of people marked that box. Ten years later, in the final census ever conducted, twenty percent of the country listed their religion as Jedi.
Alokin was one of these people.
Elaine had burst out laughing the first time Morgan declared the body in row 1 of quadrant 4 was a Jedi. She had only seen the Star Wars movies once, at a boy’s birthday party in elementary school, and they hadn’t seemed like anything special, so she wasn’t sure where the inspiration came from for this Block to suddenly become the next Obi-Wan Kenobi. Nevertheless, she had found herself going home and testing whether her outstretched arm could somehow make a pencil fly across the room. She still remembers her embarrassed reaction, as a little girl, when nothing in her room moved just because she motioned her hand toward it: “This is so lame!” That had been the end of that.
Looking down at Alokin lying in his bed, she realizes she never told anyone how she tried harnessing the power of the Force in her bedroom. And she realizes the inspiration for the story of Alokin’s life was the same thing that made her sit there and test whether she might be able to control objects with her mind: both of them, herself as a little girl and this motionless body next to her in a cot, had just wanted something to believe in. Everyone wants something miraculous to have faith in.
That may have been why people all over the country, people who had never identified themselves as belonging to a specific religion before, gravitated toward being Jedi. They wanted something, at the end, to believe in, even if it just meant believing in the fond memories of being a kid, reminiscing about the things that captured their imagination, allowing themselves to be in awe once more.
It has been many decades since she thought about herself back then. How innocent and naïve she had been! Knowing what she’s about to do, the memory of commanding a remote control to fly across the room is one thing she wishes she could now forget. That little girl, who once believed that anything in a movie might be possible, must now admit the extent of her limitations and the effect that will have.
“It’s okay,” Alokin says. “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”
“I’m not in the mood for that tonight,” she says. Then, feeling bad about scolding him near the end, adds, “But may the Force be with you anyway.”
And with that, she disconnects his nutrient bag from the tube running into his arm. Her Jedi will be dead tomorrow.
She cannot stop there, though. Sixty-two bodies is still only a little difference. A long, deep breath goes into her lungs, fills her up. That is all of the pause she can allow herself before her next action, which is to walk down row 4 of quadrant 3 and unplug all four blocks there, too.
Her eyes are closed as she walks back to her bed. Tears are already falling down both cheeks. She does not wipe them away. Her hands are shaking uncontrollably at what she has done.
But now, finally, she has a chance to finish her chores each day without driving herself until she drops dead. Maybe now she can finish her rounds before midnight and get enough sleep so that the next day seems reasonable.
Maybe.
There were a plethora of movies available to her as she grew up, movies in which a jaded, former professional killer or a still-working hitman confesses that the first kill is the hardest. After that, they all agree that you become accustomed to it; killing becomes easier each time you do it. She knows now that this is not true. There is no way this could ever become easier. She hates herself this time just as much she did the first time.
A list of hopes goes through her head in a cycle: Please, let God understand why I’m doing this; and, Please, don’t let there be a God if he sends all murderers to hell; and, Please, let something happen so I don’t have to keep doing this.
They are the same thoughts she has the next evening when she makes her way to row 1 of quadrant 4 and to Alokin’s bed. He, along with all the Blocks in the back row of quadrant 3, have passed away. The forklift roars to life again. On the way to the incinerator, she finds herself resenting anyone, even an actor playing a role, who tells her it gets easier to kill the more you do it.
It does not get easier.
14
With fewer bodies to care for, she finds herself focusing less on her immediate situation and has more time to think about how she has arrived at this point.
From when she was thirty, when she and her parents arrived in the settlement, to the time she was eighty, there was a steady stream of people migrating south to Miami. New faces would appear at the entrance to the group home. Most of these new arrivals were Blocks, but some were people just like her and Elaine, people who would ask if they could lend a hand. Each new face was a chance for Elaine to tell someone the same old jokes she had told everyone else already and a chance for Morgan to get new suggestions of recipes to experiment with on the food processor.
The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) Page 6