It is never the same person threatening her, never the same Block two nights in a row who holds a grudge. The variety of the Blocks in her dreams makes her feel like they are all against her. One night the offender will be her detective, another night it will be a former teacher, and yet another night it will be the psychologist. Never the people she has let starve to death. Always the people who still remain. Why is that? If anyone should hold a grudge against her, it should be the people she has sent to the incinerator. She is unable to figure out why the people who should be grateful that they are still receiving care are the ones who torture her, while the dead, who should be seeking vengeance, leave her alone.
Even the Blocks who look like they would never hurt a fly, never want to cause anyone pain, are vicious when she sleeps. There is a very sweet-looking old woman, Rachel, in row 3 of quadrant 3. As a veterinarian, Rachel took care of animals her entire life until she was mauled by a pack of feral Wiener dogs. This was in the middle of North Carolina, where it was reported that packs of wild dogs outnumbered the wolves and bears. It was impossible for her to see these little creatures as anything other than sweet animals. It was her own fault that she thought they wouldn’t attack her. The scars on her forearm are probably what made Elaine give her that story.
Although Rachel was permanently scared of dogs after that, she never stopped radiating a love for life in general. She still smiled every time she saw a flock of birds migrating south. She still broke into baby talk every time she saw a cat wandering the streets. Her hazel eyes brightened each time a squirrel saw her and scurried away. She apologized to the flowers before picking them for a vase, and under her watch a spider was ushered outside rather than stepped on.
And yet this same woman appeared in one of the most recent, most murderous dreams that Morgan has had. The nightmare started with Morgan waking from her sleep to the realization that Rachel was staring at her from across the gym. The veins in the veterinarian’s hands were bulging. The fingers curled, showing off the long fingernails that would claw into Morgan’s throat or maybe tear her tongue right out of her mouth. The look on Rachel’s face said she would like nothing more than to rip Morgan’s eyes right out of their sockets. That was when Morgan woke, gasping for air and rubbing her eyes.
The nightmares occur on the nights she has unplugged a nutrient bag, but they also occur on the nights she has announced to the entire gym that she will stay awake as long as it takes to care for every last body. It makes no difference. She still wakes gasping for air, her hands reaching for her throat, sure that a murderer’s fingers must be ripping her neck apart.
Nothing she does matters anymore. She realizes this now. If she is going to have the dreams anyway, she might as well take another Block to the incinerator.
“What message are you trying to send me?” she asks, looking up at the roof.
No one answers.
But that evening, unable to stay on schedule, already tired and functioning ineffectively from the previous day, she knows there is only one option. One of her painters in quadrant 2 will go. Passing by Leonardo and Charlie, she comes upon Jarrett, who specialized in watercolors. It was obvious, when he arrived at the doorstep of the group home with a finely trimmed moustache and van dyke, that that he must be an artist.
Before the Great De-evolution, Jarrett loved painting landscapes of English cottages and Greek ruins. As mankind began to vanish from the Earth, he started painting scenes of abandoned farms, of caravans traveling south on barren landscapes, of jungle gyms that were rusted and falling apart without children to play on them.
Morgan’s hand lingers at the painter’s forearm, provides a soft caress, then disconnects his nutrient bag. The last thing he leaves behind, a painting of a deserted city, will be all that remains to mark that he was ever there.
23
Jarrett is dead when she checks on him in the morning. His fingers, which used to hold paintbrushes, now stick together with the first signs of rigor mortis. Of all the bodies she has disconnected from their nutrient bags, not one has struggled to stay alive. She checks on them even before she brushes her teeth or sips her coffee. None of them have been strong enough to fight on into the next day; they are all too eager to leave this place and go to whatever is next.
She takes him to the incinerator before she has breakfast. It’s what she would want if she were the previous night’s victim. Again, the Golden Rule. Even the killing: yes, she thinks, she would be perfectly willing to be sacrificed for the good of the group if it meant everyone else would stay healthy. Her willingness to be put in their place, in the fire, has become one of the reasons she can justify her actions.
With another bed and body gone, she rushes to eat her breakfast. The cream of wheat and coffee are both produced from the food processor. In these quiet moments she finds herself thinking of everything else she could possibly be doing at the end of her life instead of caring for a giant room full of Blocks.
When she was a little girl, if asked what she would do right before the world ended, she would have said something like, “Get married in Paris to the cutest boy I can find!” This was before she even understood what marriage entailed and before she realized boys’ looks were overrated. As a teenager, she probably would have grimaced at the question and replied, “Put on an Elvis Costello CD and watch the world end from my window.” As a young woman, she might have said, “Get on a plane and see as many European capitals as I can before it’s too late.” Now, she might just go outside and wander the empty, overgrown city streets, look at abandoned building after abandoned building, and glance up at the sky and the sun and the clouds, which have stayed exactly the same through the years while everything else has changed.
A sense of guilt immediately invades her each time she lets herself daydream of other ways to spend her time. The Blocks cannot change their situation. None of them would volunteer to be helpless. She knows she shouldn’t resent them for how everything is turning out. Her father would be proud of the Catholic guilt he instilled in her. Once it’s there, it’s almost impossible to get rid of.
Looking around, the aisles of Blocks aren’t what they used to be. Justin’s cot is gone. So are Alokin’s and Algernon’s and Jarrett’s. An entire row is gone from quadrant 3. Is it possible, she wonders, for someone to see the way things are going and give her credit for trying her hardest, or would they take one look at the blank spaces and accuse her of being a murderer?
She passes by Eduardo, who would have been a world famous soccer player in Europe if the leagues hadn’t ended due to the Great De-evolution. She passes by Leonardo, who tried to pattern his artwork after the great master, only with a Mona Lisa who possessed slightly less expression and a Last Supper with people sitting idle in their chairs instead of enjoying a meal—Block versions in place of the people the real Leonardo had once captured.
She pauses at Karen’s cot.
Karen was sure, since the first signs of the Great De-evolution, that it was being caused by genetically modified crops. There was no proof that this was true—scientists never proved a link between the engineered foods and the mutated protein which caused the onset of the Great De-evolution—but Karen held firm: “Do you think you can genetically alter food and expect it to not impact you?” She asked this of anyone who would listen.
There were people who said God created the Great De-evolution, the same way he created everything else. Some said Satan was to blame. Some scientists put out a paper saying it must have been caused by a long dormant gene that had spread across the world over hundreds of years until it was finally triggered. They did not hazard a guess on what may have caused it to finally trigger. (This is where Karen would yell at whoever was next to her: “It was the genetically engineered foods!”) Others said it might be the human body’s failed way of trying to fight off environmental toxins. There was too much pollution in the air and people couldn’t handle it anymore.
Through all of these possible reasons, Karen never wavered in h
er claims: “Do you think you can go in a lab, inject plague cells into the foods we put into our bodies, and everything will be normal? People amaze me! We aren’t consumers, we’re lab rats.” Karen couldn’t speak about the subject for more than a minute or two before getting exasperated and cussing out the entire world.
Instead of finding an excuse for why it happened, Morgan tries to relate the Great De-evolution back to the past she knows. History always repeats itself. As soon as she heard this for the first time she became a history buff. All through her life, events could be made to seem a little more bearable if she could relate them back to things that had happened in the past.
So is the Great De-evolution close to how the dinosaurs became extinct? Maybe it wasn’t a meteor at all. Maybe all the dinosaurs woke up one day unable to produce baby dinosaurs that could move. She knows this isn’t true, but the idea makes her feel better because it lets her believe something else will eventually evolve from man’s ashes and claim the earth for itself in another million years.
What other parts of the Great De-evolution, she wonders, might have something in common with world history? Her food processor comes to mind. It was only created because calamity inspired invention. The same way the atomic bomb was created out of a necessity to end World War II, the food processor, a machine capable of keeping her well fed without farms or grocery stores, was created to end man’s reliance on anyone else as everyone slowly disappeared.
The baby boom that occurred after World War II was mirrored by a comparatively small baby boom that took place when the Great De-evolution was signaled. Everyone with any inclination to have a child decided to have one as quickly as possible before the percentage of normal babies declined and the chances of having a Block became too great.
The treaties that followed the Great War’s conclusion were similar to the ways various countries and continents came together to deal with the end of man. World leaders met one last time to share ideas, shake hands for photographers, and feel important. The European Union disbanded in favor of a truly borderless Europe. In America, the Survival Bill, in which a single-minded effort was put forward to create food processors, energy generators, and incinerators for every family, was passed.
She tries to think of some lesson that can be learned by history repeating itself throughout time until she is here, now, alone. But as much as she tries, she cannot see any lesson in previous species becoming extinct or the suffering that others have faced in earlier generations. She does not see how history repeating itself could have prevented the Great De-evolution or put her in a better situation in her final days. There was no lesson that would have changed the course of her life, that would have kept her from ending up as the caretaker of more people than she can look after.
There must be a lesson, she tells herself. Maybe not to be learned from history, but there has to be a lesson somewhere. Or else, what’s the point?
She knows absolutely nothing, except for understanding that she doesn’t know anything. What is the point of everything? If she just keeps trying, an answer has to be found eventually. Then everything will make sense.
24
She finds herself wondering if it’s good to be hopeful for better days, for a happy ending, for something to take her away from all of this. Or is being hopeful only going to lead to disappointment? Her current predicament does not give her much to be optimistic about. Hoping for someone to come and rescue her is a waste of time; there is no one else left. Equally pointless is hoping for something, other than human extinction, to end the Great De-evolution. The days of praying for a cure are long gone. Any hope that the same process which caused the Blocks to appear in the first place will somehow reverse itself has long since passed.
She has the option to hope for a quick, painless death, but that’s not something she would ever look forward to because she only knows how to survive. Her days are filled with disorder and a staggering amount of chores, with being so tired and busy that she barely has time to daydream, but nothing can change that she was raised to think each day is a treasure. Nothing that has ever happened or will ever happen can dent this lesson. Anticipation of the next day is something that should always be treasured.
She is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but someone who simply accepts the world for what it is and gets by each day as best as she can. If she were an optimist she would not be able to kill any of the Blocks, not even for the greater good of the entire group, because a hope would linger that their circumstances might change. She would be paralyzed by the prayer that things could, somehow, get better. She would be blindly cheerful as the Blocks in her care started to die anyway because she wouldn’t have enough time or energy to continue caring for all of them. That is what optimism would do. Blind hope is not everything it’s cracked up to be.
But likewise, if she were a defeatist, she would have nothing to look forward to. Each day would be filled with suffering for the sake of suffering. Nothing else. She might as well kill all the Blocks in one great massacre. What would be the point to keeping them alive? So they can suffer alongside her? There would be no hope that circumstances could get any better. She might as well kill herself, too. That’s what pessimism does.
No. Neither extreme will get her through this.
She is afraid of even a small dose of either outlook. If a little optimism sneaks in, how would she handle the eventual deflation when she has to send another Block to the incinerator? But on the other hand, if she notices the first traces of pessimism hovering over her, how would she ever find something positive to counterbalance the hopelessness? All she has is the group home and her wards. That is not enough to wash away dark thoughts if they began to creep in. Before long, she wouldn’t care what happened to her Blocks or to herself.
That is why she remains objective and tries, sometimes without much success, to get through each day as though she is witnessing someone else’s life rather than controlling her own. Almost clinically, she refuses to allow herself to be swayed toward either direction. She wakes each morning, not with hopes or fears, only determination. She goes to sleep each evening, not with prayers or begging demands, but exhaustion. There is nothing else.
There was a Canadian woman, back when Morgan was first volunteering at the group shelter, who had stayed in contact with her brother, who has remained behind. She had come south during the first waves of migrations. He had stayed behind until everyone else was gone. Over the years, she gave up any hope of ever seeing him again, until one day he wrote and said he had found a way to travel south and would see her soon. Progress was slow, but month after month he told her of the cities he passed on the way to Miami.
The woman, filled with hope for the first time in a long time, looked younger and happier than Morgan had ever seen her. And then, her brother, somewhere between Maryland and North Carolina, stopped sending updates. She never heard from him again. She never found out what happened to him, and the joy she had experienced with the anticipation of seeing him again turned to anguish at not knowing how he died. Was it a heart attack? Did animals kill him? Had he fallen through a weakened bridge, or had he simply given up the quest in an area without internet access? She drove herself crazy thinking of all the ways her brother might have died. The once rejuvenated women suddenly looked not only as old as she had prior to the excitement, but many years older. After allowing herself that hope and then having it taken away, she gave up on everything. She died a month later.
That woman’s fate is why Morgan doesn’t want anything to look forward to and also why she doesn’t allow herself any pity. Just to make sure Daniel never replied, she still checks her e-mail occasionally. But even this is done with a cold indifference; she doesn’t expect to find a response and thus doesn’t feel let down when there are no new messages.
The Blocks encompass the two extremes of being hopeful and being melancholy on her behalf. In the middle of quadrant 2 is her pair of pilots. Although not from the same parents, the two men could be mistak
en as twins. Both Blocks have bushy eyebrows, hazel eyes, and pointed chins. Both have sagging earlobes and small nostrils. She can only tell them apart because Richard has a slight dent between his eyebrows that makes him look like he is constantly frowning, while Roger does not.
She marvels at how two different sets of parents in different places of the country could have children that ended up looking so alike. And not only that, but that the two families ended up in the same final community and the same Block group home within that final community. The coincidence is a daily reminder of how amazing the world can be sometimes.
Looking at the two pilots, she wonders what it must have been like to fly a plane or helicopter and survey the earth as the population declined. The couple of times Morgan flew on planes when she was younger, she remembered being eager to look out the window during takeoff and landing to see what the city, the farm land, the roads, all of it, looked like from the sky. How different the experience must be without people bustling about everywhere. Her two pilots have vastly different outlooks on what they saw as they flew over the land.
Roger and Richard were the last pilots healthy enough to fly helicopters. They knew how to fly planes, too, but runways deteriorated, preventing successful takeoffs and landings. With their helicopters, though, these two pilots would get to see a landscape that once held so much life but now resembled an artist’s rendition of life. Each town they saw would be more of a model of what a town once was than a real place where people lived.
They would take off at the same time. Both pilots would see the highways are still there. However, now all eight lanes of these super-sized roads are empty, except for where cars were abandoned in the places they broke down. The shopping centers are empty. So are the fairgrounds. The churches are still there, but now only for show. Giant sports stadiums sit unoccupied. They look just like the real thing, albeit rusted and faded, but no fans cheer on their teams. This replica of a real world would either be fascinating or upsetting.
The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) Page 11