The Man Who Watched The World End

by Dietzel, Chris

  It didn’t take long for me to come to the same conclusion. Even with a litter box, that little kitten pissed and crapped all over my house. I cleaned up cat crap and then found more of the same in the next room. I gave it a second litter box but it preferred our carpet. Walking past the living room one day, I noticed it had peed on Andrew’s lap. I petted the kitten one last time, told it I was sorry, and put it back out on the 'medo patio. I returned to Andrew and cleaned him off. When I went back to the patio door the kitten was already gone. I hated myself for knowing how helpless it was, not much different from Andrew when I thought about it, and for what I had let happen.

  Each Christmas I still find myself thinking of that little kitten. Was it really so bad to have a kitten’s piss around the house if it meant I was saving its life while also preserving a little bit of the earlier life I had known? When I was a boy I never would have put that kitten outside, left it to fend for itself. What’s changed since then that now I am willing to?

  I tried to think about the cat growing up to be full-sized, tried to reassure myself by saying it never would have been completely tame. It would claw at our furniture, maybe even claw at Andrew when I wasn’t watching. It might even nibble on him when it got hungry and he was the easiest thing to snack on. In my heart, though, I know it was a tiny, defenseless animal that just wanted to be loved and taken care of, and I put it out to fend for itself, knowing it couldn’t.

  That was the last Christmas present I gave my brother. The past few years I’ve celebrated by making a nice dinner and going to bed early. One of man’s last inventions was the creation of flavored nutrient packs for Blocks. Scientists said it didn’t matter what the nutrient packs smelled like because the Blocks had no perception of taste or smell, and the food was pushed through a tube going into their arms, not their mouths. But the companies marketing the different flavored packs—turkey and gravy, primavera pasta, and birthday cake—tugged on families’ heart strings. It worked. With nothing else to spend my money on in those final days of an organized economy, I ordered a supply of them and still give one to Andrew each Christmas.

  The holiday has morphed into a final chance each year to celebrate your family’s memory. Not many people bothered giving each other gifts because whatever was given would only bog you down or get left behind when you moved further south to join a group community. Sometimes I sit with Andrew and flip through old photo albums of when our parents were alive and we all spent Christmas together. I laugh when I get to the photo of my mom giving my dad a tie that she knew he would think was ugly. She was right. In the picture, you can clearly see him trying to give his best I-like-it-because-you-gave-it-to-me face, but you can see right through him. That tie is still down in the basement in a box somewhere. It will be one of the many things we don’t have room for if someone sees the smoke coming from our chimney and comes to help us get to one of the final settlements. And then there’s the picture of my mother sitting on the floor in front of Andrew as she opened his presents for him. No matter how many more Christmases Andrew and I spend together, that photo album will always come up from the basement, and I will flip through it and laugh about the times we shared when we were young and didn’t have a care in the world. So in that regard at least, something did stay the same when everything else changed and got out of my control.qd.,be,

  Merry Christmas Andrew, I love you.

  December 26The Great De-evolution and the resulting migration south were responsible for the appearance of a new phobia. Where people had once been claustrophobic or agoraphobic, more and more people became unreasonably afraid of not being near enough people. Even people who were in still-populated neighborhoods started panicking. The overwhelming sense held by these people was that a disaster could happen at any moment and they would be too far away from real civilization, whatever that meant, and they wouldn’t have the social infrastructure around them needed to respond to a hurricane or earthquake, or in the case of Boston, a blizzard.

  They packed up their belongings and moved to a more southern city just because it helped them feel secure. There weren’t many benefits from living in Miami that you couldn’t get in Camelot, but it made people feel better to be in large groups. I guess that’s understandable. And, to be honest, it’s probably that exact same fear that has driven me to look for a way out of Camelot. Now that the Johnsons are gone, I find myself afraid, just like the others were, that it’s a matter of time until something bad happens here and I’ll be stuck without the ability to take care of Andrew any longer.

  Mrs. Lee from across the street was one of the most reserved people I knew. She attended every neighborhood cookout but she was always in the corner watching other people engage in conversation rather than participating herself. Then one night, as everyone was drinking beer and all the Blocks in the neighborhood were lined up in patio chairs so they could enjoy the outdoors as well, she asked the group nearest to her if they were worried about being stuck in Camelot when something happened. The group asked her what she thought might happen. She didn’t have a clear answer. One of the people in the group said he felt as safe in their neighborhood as he would in a random city. A different woman in the group said she would rather stay in an area she was familiar with than live amongst people she didn’t know. Mrs. Lee nodded without saying anything. But later in the evening she asked the exact same question again. Todd (I wish I could remember his last name), from down the street, was in the middle of a big bite of his BBQ sandwich as he laughed away her question.

  The next time everyone gathered for a cookout she asked the question a third time. But this time, when people gave the same types of answers, she shook her head and mumbled to herself. Shortly after that she apologized and went home for the evening. Her house was vacant the next morning.

  She left her garage door open with a spray painted message for the rest of us: “You’re all going to die.” I picked up the can of spray paint and blurred out her words so they wouldn’t upset anyone else in the neighborhood. Once the message was painted over I added a nice little smiley face on her garage wall. There’s no way to know if she made it to New Orleans or Miami, but I hope she did. And I hope she’s happier there than she was here.

  People like Mrs. Lee left Camelot of their own accord. More often, people simply passed away, their house becoming an unintentional mausoleum. A different woman from down the street, Mrs. Wilson, gradually cut down on the number of cook-outs she attended. It wasn’t until she was absent for two weeks in a row that we realized she had finally passed away in her living room. The same thing happened to Ed Whimsley, who lived at the end of the street, and to the Anderson couple one street over.

  The bodies could have been left in the house, there were enough empty houses that no one would ever care if a few homes on the street hosted decomposing corpses, but the remaining citizens always took it upon themselves to wrap the bodies in a blanket and give them a proper burial. The Stevensons, from down the road, were in their fifties when they moved to Camelot. Jimmy Stevenson passed away at the age of 78 from a heart attack. His wife followed six months later.

  It was a bonding experience for the last of us to dig their graves. The hour of digging was good exercise, and the common effort gave our friends the burials they deserved. Mrs. Stevenson was the last burial we did ourselves. After that we were too old to continue—a bunch of old men in their seventies standing around a hole, each waiting for the next man to pick up the shovel and continue digging. From then on we started using a small excavator to dig each grave. The Dietrichs’ front yard became the official spot for the neighborhood cemetery. Later, when the excavator broke down and there was no one else left to repair it, we dragged the bodies out to the back of the Dietrichs’ house and had them cremated.

  The Johnsons suggested leaving the bodies in the backyard so the animals could have them. Mark told the rest of us: “Might as well benefit someone. It’ll keep the animals from trying to eat us.”

  Harris Chittendon disagreed
. “It’ll just teach them to eat humans.” He cringed when he said this. “They’ll get used to the idea real fast.”

  I disagreed for a different reason; if Andrew died I would go crazy thinking about wolves and dogs taking turns picking him apart. The vote between cremating the bodies and leaving them for the animals came out to nine votes to three. Only Mr. Wong, too in touch with nature to'ededo realize that providing animals with an additional food source would encourage them to be more aggressive, voted alongside the Johnsons. The Johnsons were never ones to hold a grudge, though; after being outvoted, they still helped with the next cremation.

  I think about how they showed up after Mr. Landers passed away, offering to help with the cremation even though they weren’t in favor of it, and then I think about how they drove right past my house in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. Something must have happened to them in those final days to make them switch from the friendliest people in Camelot to the ones who snuck out like felons.

  Even though Camelot is empty now, it took a lot longer for this neighborhood to fade away than it did for some of the others. By the time other nearby communities were ghost towns, our neighborhood still had half its lights on at night. I like to think that was because the people in Camelot knew the importance of remaining a close-knit community.

  I thought about all of this today as I stared at the Johnsons’ house from the edge of my driveway. For a moment, I had the thought that maybe they would come back, that perhaps they had just left to investigate the surrounding areas and would return in a day or two. It was foolish to be hopeful, however, to think of the Johnsons as anything but permanently gone.

  In my driveway, in the middle of these daydreams, I heard a soft scuffle against the concrete. A snake was slithering at the edge of the road, only ten feet away from me. I heard a hiss and then, from out of nowhere, a Siamese cat darted from the high grass and yanked the snake off the ground. Its paws batted and scraped at the snake, punishing it anytime it tried to fight back or get away. Finally the snake resigned itself to death and stopped resisting. I must have coughed then or made a noise because the cat jumped straight in the air, its tail puffing to three times its original size. The animal darted back into the weeds without its prize. The dead snake remained motionless on the broken concrete.

  “It’s okay,” I said to the cat, wherever it was. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s all yours.”

  As I walked back to my house I heard the grass bristle again. It could very well have just been the wind, or it could have been another animal stealing what the cat had worked so hard for. I liked thinking it was the cat coming back to reclaim its meal and that if it ever saw me again it would think of me as the guy who didn’t want to get in its way, the guy who just wanted it to be safe as it got along in the world as best as it knew how.

  December 27I wonder where the Johnsons are today. Do they still think about me? Do they have any idea that my chimney has become my last hope for getting Andrew to safety?

  I still have a photograph of the six of us—the Johnsons and their two Block sisters next to Andrew and me—on the coffee table. Three of us are smiling in the nice weather while the other three have blank stares. This was twenty years ago, back when I still had a hint of color in my hair and I could grin for a picture without feeling old, without faking the smile. It was before we had to take any subsequent pictures indoors for fear of the wolves and dogs having enough time to form an attack. The Johnsons had a similar picture in their living room.

  It couldn’t have been easy for them to decide to leave. As I stood by the window the night they drove away, I could have sworn Mark looked over at my house as his Block sisters sat motionless in the back seat. The lights were off inside my bedroom, he shouldn’t have been able to see me standing there. Thinking that he had looked my way could very well be my memory playing tricks on me. It’s just as likely that he never looked in my direction, that he gazed straight forward as he exited the community.

  Maybe he and Mindy frequently discussed if they should stop by and say goodbye. Maybe one of them was adamant against telling me they were leaving, thinking I might try and talk them out of it. I wouldn’t have. Everyone is entitled to make their own decisions, to choose their own path. It was also possible that they were on the same side, that they agreed it was best to leave without acting like this was the end of something, even though it was.

  After all the times we’d laughed about people quitting on Camelot, they probably didn’t want to hear the same jokes directed at them. I wonder if either of them considered what their Block sisters would have thought of the cloak-and-dagger escape if they had an opinion to voice on the matter. Would Mark and Mindy have been more considerate if the two sets of eyes traveling in the back seat could see what they were doing? If their sisters’ eyes were judging what was taking place instead of being silently oblivious, would the Johnsons still have abandoned their neighbor and his quiet brother?

  They couldn’t be blamed for putting their immediate family before anyone else. The Johnsons were here with me over the years as the neighborhood cleared out and only our two houses were left, but that didn’t mean they signed up to be responsible for me or Andrew once the end approached. They didn’t have to stayq. on thoughsp in the neighborhood. They most certainly didn’t owe me anything. But even so it would have been nice to give them hugs farewell and wish all four of them a safe journey.

  It’s a good thing my grandfather isn’t still around. To his dying day, he said the Baltimore Colts sneaking out of town in the middle of the night was the sleaziest thing he ever saw someone do.

  I probably heard him tell me a hundred times: “Those guys were weasels. All of them. No matter what they did before that night or afterwards, they showed their true colors when they did that. They were rats. Every single one of them. Rats. You don’t say goodbye like that. You don’t turn your back on people who were always there for you.”

  He would pause at that point and take a deep breath before finishing his tirade the same way he always finished it: “They can all rot in hell. Rotten Bastards.”

  That was usually when my father would remind my grandfather not to use that kind of language in front of little kids. But foul language or not, I knew what my grandfather was getting at. It’s why I wish the Johnsons had done something as simple as say goodbye, and it’s why I’ll never leave Andrew. No matter what.

  December 28I find myself trying to keep semblances of our old life together from before we were alone. It used to be that any time I misplaced the remote control I would turn to Andrew and tell him he needed to work on how much effort he put into his practical jokes. If a DVD isn’t in the right case I ask if that was his April Fools’ joke from the previous year or if a bear snuck in and is playing a joke on both of us. I know I sound like my grandfather when I say these things, but I don’t care. So today, when I spilled my dinner, I turned to him and said that was my April Fools’ joke on myself… only a couple of months early. He never grins at how lame my jokes are.

  I prank dialed 9-1-1 as a kid one time. It was an act done in the name of fun and mischievousness, but in actuality was really more about me just being an extremely dumb kid. I laughed when the operator asked what my emergency was. Being four or five at the time, I’m not sure what I expected to happen next. What did happen was the operator said he was sending a police unit over to the address that the phone number was registered to. There may have been a hint of crap in my pants when he said that. The giggling definitely stopped. Kids aren’t known for responding well in the face of panic; my best plan was to p a nice, quiet neighborhoodmeget sput the phone in Andrew’s non-moving fingers and hope he would take the blame. Needless to say, my father wasn’t amused, nor did he buy that his son, who couldn’t say a single word, let alone dial the phone, had pulled the prank. I spent the night in my room without any dinner.

  And yet, like the dumb kid I was, I still managed not to learn my lesson because when I was six my Apr
il Fools’ joke on my mother consisted of sneaking into Andrew’s room when she wasn’t looking and repositioning my brother’s arms and legs so it looked like he was moving on his own. I snuck back out of the room, but stayed nearby so I could see her reaction. It was difficult to contain my snickering. A couple of minutes went by with me laughing in the hallway closet. The next time she went in and checked on him she started yelling. She kept screaming and screaming until my father ran up the stairs to see what was happening. They were the kind of yells I would have expected to hear if someone was holding a winning lottery ticket and their life was changed forever. She didn’t have a chance to explain things to my father before I ran into the room and yelled, “April Fool!”

  The effect my joke would have was lost on me until it was too late. Until that moment, I had never seen my mother so happy. Immediately afterwards, she had never seemed so defeated. She reached out and balanced against the wall for support so she didn’t collapse. My father groaned. Even without an explanation he could guess what my prank had consisted of. He put his arm around my mother but she didn’t notice.