The Man Who Watched The World End

by Dietzel, Chris

  Without my baseball cards taking up as much space, the basement seems twice as big. I was able to get back into corners of the storage area I hadn’t looked over in years. My dad’s collection of beer-steins was in a box covered with spider eggs. A box filled with my mom’s old sewing supplies was in a corner caked with rat droppings.

  . None of themspspjoThere are probably enough cards to last another week. If someone still hasn’t found us by then, I’ll switch over to my old comic book collection. One of the boxes I found today was of the last set of Topps cards ever produced. There were no rookie cards in that last set. All of the players had been in the majors for a decade by that point.

  I watched that last game on TV with my father and Andrew. It was game four of the World Series. There was never another time, either before or after, when I saw my dad get as upset as he was that day.

  The talent in those final years was vastly inferior to what it had been when I was a little boy; the youngest players were in their late forties. Most teams had a handful of players in their fifties. A relief pitcher for the Mets was sixty-one. The league had contracted to sixteen teams by that point, but the pageantry of the World Series still managed to make everyone forget the players’ ages or that there were only eight teams in the American League and eight in the National League.

  It was the third inning. The Cardinals’ ace was on the mound. He hadn’t allowed any hits yet. My father told Andrew and me that if any pitcher had a chance of throwing a no-hitter in the World Series it was him. A fast ball zipped past the batter for another strike out. And then, that batter walking back to the dugout and the next batter starting toward the plate, a puff of dirt exploded next to the pitcher’s foot. No one knew what it was at first; the crowd’s cheering had drowned out the discharge. The pitcher looked at his feet in confusion. He knew something had happened that shouldn’t normally occur in the middle of a baseball game, but wasn’t sure what it was or why it was happening. Then the pitcher’s head exploded and his body dropped to the ground. The second bullet had entered through the back of his head and exited by his chin. Parts of his face were scattered across the in-field.

  “No,” my dad said with a groan. Just a simple “no” as if disagreeing with what just happened would stop it from having happened in the first place.

  There was a moment of shock on the field as the players looked around for the shooter. A mad scramble for the dugouts ensued when they realized they could be the next person in the bullseye. Only the shortstop, the pitcher’s best friend, stayed on the mound and held the dead man in his arms. There were no more bullets, though.

  “Turn it off,” my father said. I pointed the remote control toward the TV, but something kept me from making the screen go black. “Turn that trash off,” my father said, so softly I could barely hear him.q to see,be,

  When the screen went blank he got up and disappeared into his bedroom. My mother went back to try and comfort him. Even so, he didn’t come out of his room the rest of the night. She told me later that he wasn’t upset because the pitcher was murdered or that it happened at the World Series or even that it was on live television; it upset him that Andrew and I would never be able to have the same kind of awe he had for the game when he was our age. That shot had signaled the end of any hope that we could have the same life, the same possibilities, afforded to my dad. Everything that was great about America’s game was gone after that.

  Police caught the pitcher’s killer later that night. More accurately, he turned himself in after climbing down from the stadium rafters. His job as part of the field crew allowed him to carry an uninspected duffle bag into the stadium. He took it up into the recesses of the ballpark where he assembled his sniper rifle. Reporters were waiting outside the stadium when police escorted him into the backseat of one of their cars. A reporter asked the man why he killed the pitcher. The man turned to the woman holding the microphone and, starting to cry, said he had five children at home, all of whom were Blocks. None of them would ever be able to watch a baseball game, let alone play little league.

  “That’s not fair,” the man said as he was ushered into the back seat of the police cruiser.

  At first they talked about playing the rest of the game a week later. Then they talked about finishing it at the beginning of the next season. But after the shooting, after hearing the shooter’s motivation, everyone suddenly seemed to notice how old the players were and that with only sixteen teams it wasn’t the same as it had been before. They didn’t bother playing any more games after that.

  December 19The major airlines were all shut down by the time I graduated high school. To get overseas you had to know a pilot who also had a reason to want to fly across the world, or you had to know how to fly a plane yourself, or be crazy enough to give it a shot even if you didn’t know. Private planes were actually more difficult to steal than the giant 747s left at airport terminals because the world’s billionaires locked their planes inside steel hangars while the colossal jumbo jets were left at whatever gate they had last arrived at before the airline and airport both closed. Each closed airport was supposed to have at least one security guard patrolling at all times, but sometimes they didn’t show up, and even if they did arrive forqedspspjo their shift, they really didn’t care about preventing someone from taking a plane.

  Every couple of months there was a story on the news of a plane either not taking off correctly and exploding into a nearby field or randomly going down in the ocean when the fuel ran out. These accidents were almost always the result of people wanting to get back to family members living in other parts of the world. You would be surprised how many people attempted to take off from the abandoned airports, having little or no experience actually flying an aircraft, because they thought the plane would basically fly itself.

  It was for this reason that I never went to Europe to see the Eifel Tower or Pantheon, never went to Africa to see the pyramids or Mount Kilimanjaro, never trekked across Asia to see the Great Wall or the Taj Mahal. Never, really, did I go anywhere. Not even up to Canada or down to Mexico. My parents always told me I wasn’t missing much, but their honeymoon had been spent travelling all across England, France, and Italy, so I knew they were only trying to spare my feelings.

  The one time I did leave home, other than for senior week or other random trips with my friends, was the two years I spent on the road crew. My time supporting that aspect of the Survival Bill took me all the way out to Washington State, all the way up to New York City, and all the way down to Texas. I zigged and zagged across the country wherever they needed the roads fortified.

  Spokane was a lot nicer than I expected. Being used to mostly flat grounds and fields, I immediately fell in love with the mountains in the distance. Each time we were due for a day off I tried to get one of the other guys to go hiking with me. But no matter who I spoke to they all said they were exhausted from paving roads for six days straight; their idea of fun wasn’t walking around in the wilderness with sore feet all day. They would rather, they said, get drunk and pass out.

  In Chicago, most of our time was spent repaving the roads leading south out of the city. We never paved roads in any other direction, only south. All of us knew this was because the city’s population would only want to head in one direction once the city was abandoned and they joined up with another community further down the road. By the time we arrived there, Wrigley Park had already been converted into a group home for Blocks. Without security guards, anyone at all could walk right in and go wherever they wanted. Of course, that was how I spent my day off. But when I got to the field, instead of seeing the pitching mound and home plate, I saw hundreds of Blocks lined up across the entire ballpark. A massive tarp was tied from the stands on one side of the stadium all the way to the other side. This was to keep rain from landing directly on the bodies. The famous homerun wall was void of its ivy and moss. In its place were hundreds of messages spray-painted by vandals. Some of the graffiti mentioned Block sisters who were suppose
dly slutsqpl,be,. Other obscenities explained exactly why God hated the Blocks, and still other messages said the Cubs sucked. None of the volunteers bothered trying to remove the graffiti; none of them even seemed to notice it.

  In Dayton we came across a bridge that was only half completed. Intended to cut down on commute times, it connected two different suburbs leading into the city. Construction had started right before the Great De-evolution began and then quickly stopped. Even without being told, I could guess the reason why the bridge had a basic frame in place but stopped halfway over the water: everyone started thinking, “Why build a bridge to cut down on our commutes if we aren’t going to be here much longer?” So instead of finishing the bridge for them, our road crew repaved the path heading south, and the bridge forever stood half complete and half open.

  We never bothered with side streets and auxiliary roads when we arrived at our assigned cities. Each job we started was for the major highways running in and out of the city. We saw neighborhoods similar to Camelot off in the distance, but we only ever paved roads like 95, 495, and 66, the roads that would get the most people going where they needed to go. In almost every city we went to we found people parking their cars on the exit ramps of these major highways. For these people, the people who still had to travel but no longer trusted the integrity of most roads, it was easier to park their cars on the exit ramp and walk a mile or two home than it was to get a flat tire every day. In the time it took to change a flat tire, they could already be sitting on their sofa. And anyway, the supply of spare tires would eventually run out, so why tempt fate?

  I got to see the Rocky Mountains and part of the Appalachian Trail. I got to see the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi River. But although I got as far as Spokane, the road crew I was attached to never went out to Seattle. Nor did they go south to California. I’ve heard the Pacific Ocean looks exactly like the Atlantic, that if you’ve seen one ocean, you’ve seen them all, but I would have liked to discover that for myself. I’ve seen pictures of Mount Rushmore, but never had a chance to see the faces on the mountain in person. I tell myself I saw more than most people in my generation got to see, but I can’t help but think of all the places still out there. Las Vegas and Boston. The California beaches. But at least I got to see some of it. And, I tell myself on the nights when I can’t help but think about the rest of the world out there, Tokyo is probably a lot like New York, and the French Riviera is probably just like Ocean City. And so on.

  And on the nights that doesn’t help, when I still feel like I never truly got to see what the world had to offer, I think about Andrew sitting on the sofa and how he got to see even less than I did. I’m comforted to know that, while I might not have gotten to see the Sphinx or float down Venice, I did see some things. And for the rest, Andrew and I have our movies to take us anywhere we want.

  December 20My yard has no more twigs or sticks. And I certainly won’t be stepping into the forest to get more firewood. That would be suicide. All of my dining room chairs have been disassembled and burned, as have my small end tables. My baseball cards are almost gone. In the fire today went my set of 1984 Topps. I threw a handful of cards in at a time. While they are worthless now, I still wasn’t able to see my Don Mattingly or Daryl Strawberry rookie cards go in the fire. I set them aside on the end table to be preserved. I did the same with my Bo Jackson and Greg Maddux rookie cards the other day when I set fire to my sets of 1987 Donruss, Fleer, and Topps. The rookie cards do absolutely nothing for me these days except remind me of how happy I was collecting them as a child. When the last of my cards are burned, I’ll start burning Andrew’s collection. Growing up, each time my parents got me a set of cards for my birthday they made sure to get Andrew an equivalent set for his birthday. The same year I got the 1983 set of Topps, they gave Andrew the 1982 set. When the time comes to burn that box, there’s no way I’ll let Andrew’s Cal Ripken Jr. rookie card go in the flames. I’ll set it aside with the small stack of other cards I’m keeping.

  Soon, I’ll turn to our collections of old comics. Boxes of Uncanny X-Men and Amazing Spiderman comics will go up in flames. Although I hate to see my childhood collectibles shrivel to ashes, I’m actually quite pleased with the result. One of the chemicals in the baseball cards, maybe the colored ink, gives off a thick black smoke while it burns that the wood wasn’t producing. A smoggy version of a lighthouse lingers in the air above my home. Anyone travelling south in the vicinity of Camelot will see the smoke and know Andrew and I are here, ready to be saved.

  It will have to happen soon. I don’t know how Andrew and I will make it through another year. If the swarms of animals don’t get us, old age or sickness will. While my brother has a fever every other week, my old body is growing too feeble to move him to the bathroom when he needs to be cleaned. Burning trash in the incinerator takes me twice as long as it used to. Please let someone find us soon.

  All those doomsday movies had it wrong the entire time. Each one that came out through the years imagined a young man or a small group of men wandering the earth in search of another pocket of civilization. Even after the nuclear war or plague or whatever it was that wiped out most of Earth’s population, a few still existed here and there. During their travels they always managed to run into attractive young women. They also managed to find evil gangs who thought ruling the few remaining a nice, quiet neighborhoodrdspjo humans was a good way to spend the last years of their lives. How difficult it must have been for the people writing those movies to think of a time when humans wouldn’t exist at all. Even in the far corners of their creative, inspired minds, they couldn’t think of a scenario where every man was wiped out, just most of them. There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive. Someone has to survive.

  December 21When the Great De-evolution began and traditional jobs started vanishing, my parents thought that leaving the city and moving back to the country was the prudent thing to do. Housing prices were already beginning to plummet in the northern states. This was before the housing market vanished completely and you couldn’t sell an empty house for the price of a loaf of bread. The fear-mongerers were already calling for the end of the world, saying it was only a matter of time until riots and war broke out and disease and starvation ran rampant. The evening news was filled with these pessimists saying the same thing every night. They were completely wrong: there were never any riots, there were no wars. There were just families wanting to get by as best as they knew how.

  We lived, the four of us, a couple of hours north of here until my parents passed away. There wasn’t much to it really. We found my father on the ground in the backyard with the lawn mower still running. Heart attacks ran on his side of the family. My mother was already chronically coughing by that time. A year later she died of lung cancer, even though she had never smoked a single cigarette. That was about forty years ago. Andrew and I moved here shortly after, and have lived in this house by ourselves ever since.

  Other than the two houses we grew up in with our parents, this is the only house I have ever lived in. Vacant houses were already free of charge by the time Andrew and I moved here, with everyone heading south having the understanding that anyone else could walk right in and start living in their old home, and knowing, too, that they could do the same thing in any empty house they happened to find during their travels. Travelers knew an empty house as soon as they saw it because the mailbox flag would be down. If the flag was up, it meant people were living there already. My own mailbox flag has been standing straight up every day for the last two decades, even though mail stopped being delivered more than twenty years ago.

  It was a courtesy during the southern migrations that vacated houses remained unlocked for possible newcomers to take their spot, but if the vacating family was animal friendly they sometimes left their doors ope
n as an invitation to former house pets to enjoy the comforts of a roof again.

  I never bothered to ask my new neighbors who the previous owners were or where they had gone. That was the type of question that could only lead to them planning their own departure. No one wanted to be reminded that their new golf community had already started transforming into a ghost town before construction was finished on the final row of houses in the far corner of the development.

  And anyway, it was easy enough from the leftover possessions still scattered around the abandoned house to piece together exactly who had lived here prior to my brother and me. Nobody would take the time to package up everything lying around their home, load it into a moving truck, and make sure the house was clean for the next family. Only the most essential items—clothes, food, Block relatives—were valued enough to fill a van with. Leftover were boxes of Christmas ornaments and gardening tools, old magazines and scribbled-on calendars.

  As I walked around the house that first day, I found images of a mother and father and their two children. Like my parents, this couple also had one normal child and one Block. The married couple’s courtship was recounted in a box of love letters left behind in the attic. The mother’s journal said what it was like to finally have the first of many children she had always dreamed of. In later journals she shared her disappointment at having to stop after her second child, four short of the enormous family she had always wanted, because the second child was born without the ability to speak, move, or think. A box filled with military photographs showed a career officer who had never been sent to war, never had a chance to earn medals. The photos of their children showed them growing up from little kids to teenagers to young adults and then, like Andrew and myself, to middle-aged men. The parents’ bedroom was still full of clothes. The shirts and pants wouldn’t have been there if the parents had been alive when their two children migrated south.