The Man Who Watched The World End
Page 13
January 6My old copy of Steinbecker’s Mapping the Great De-evolution, the book that described what the progression of the Great De-evolution would be like, was in a box in my basement. I flipped through some of the chapters, telling Andrew what the Johnsons might be up to and also what we might expect in the coming days. Part of Steinbecker’s final chapter says:
“The final group settlements will experience a emotional surges each time there is an increase of people due to the migrations. This increase will provide the city with a sense that the urban area is once again bustling, a return to the city they knew in previous years. The crime rate will experience a very slight rise as these people are brought together in the confines of a couple of city blocks. This influx will be limited to minor crimes such as petty burglary and littering. There will be no violent crimes amongst the final inhabitants. Because material possessions will have little or no value, pick-pockets and thieves will become normal members of society. Only the mentally ill will persist in acting out against others. People will notice more revelry and noise in the streets. Drug and alcohol dependence will increase. This feeling will only last momentarily, though. Toward the end, it could last as little as a few minutes or an hour before the emotional surge wears off. The high of seeing new people will be replaced by the low of witnessing another round of senior citizens passing away. The inhabitants of the finals settlements will experience a constant bi-polar swing in which they experience the up of seeing new people arriving to their community, followed by the down of seeing familiar faces pass away. As the Great De-evolution progresses, and fewer new people arrive to the final settlements, these highs and lows will become less dramatic.
In contrast, those members of society who have remained on their own in the now barren suburbs and rural areas will find themselves experiencing what life was like for the first settlers. These people will witness no influx of visitors, will see no new faces. There will be no crime of any kind, even petty crimes, in these desolate parts. These inhabitants will not go through the bi-polar highs and lows seen in the urban areas. These inhabitants risk isolation due to physical and mental infirmity. Material possessions hold no monetary value here either, but may serve to provide a sentimental purpose for the isolated few. Alcohol and drug dependence could sky rocket. The absence of humans in various areas around the world provides too many variables for the issues these people may experience due to local wildlife. The local predators might become a security threat, while a seemingly ordinary beetle may either become extinct or grow in numbers until it has destroyed the entire surrounding eco-system. The environments are too volatile to determine how the animals might affect each region’s transition back to a human-free world.”
“What do you think?” I said to Andrew when I was done reading. “He got a lot of things right. But hopefully he got a couple of things wrong too.”
I guess we’ll see. I wonder what choice Steinbecker made as his own end approached. Did he stay in the home he was familiar with, or did he abandon it for one of the final settlements?
January 7I’ve seen too many things in my old age to be afraid of an empty house. I’ve witnessed the migration of mankind southwards. I’ve seen countries collapse. I’ve seen Blocks murdered and abused as though they were mannequins instead of real people with real hearts. I once saw wild dogs drag an unattended Block woman from our neighbor’s patio into the woods where she was torn apart without struggling or crying out for help. I cried out for her because she couldn’t save herself. There was nothing I could do besides scream. By the time Dan heard me and came running, it was too late. His sister was already disemboweled. It took me a long time to get over witnessing that.
I’ve seen all of that, yet each time I try to convince myself to go down the street to check out the Johnsons’ house, I can only make it to the edge of my driveway before I become stuck. The first night, I turned back without needing much convincing. Last night I was all set to go down the street when I thought I heard a pack of dogs in the woods. The late hour meant too little sun, too much cover of darkness for the nearby animals. The bat I had with me would do little good against a pack of feral house cats, let alone a pack of Dalmatians or Labradors. There was a time when I used to be too proud to back down from a band of kittens! Now, though, I concede they would get the better of me. And then there are the wolves and Rottweilers—the animals I thought I heard growling from the edge of the forest—that I was never foolhardy enough to think I stood a chance against.
From somewhere in the forest I heard a roar that made me think of a Tyrannosaurus rex, a roar much too great for a bear or even a pack of bears in unison. For a moment it made sense: the world had become so unbalanced that there might in fact be three-story tall monsters roaming in the woods. Anything was possible. Just as quickly, I had the thought—I’m not sure why—that the sound was either a normal growl, one that hadn’t been nearly as menacing as the one I thought I had heard, or else the roar had never sounded at all, my mind had imagined the entire thing.
The odor from down the street, the smell of filth and sickness, overwhelmed me then, kept me planted at the edge of my driveway. Like the roar, the odor might not be real, might only be a f a giant brown bear lumberpsW,igment of my imagination, some peculiar display of my nervousness. Maybe if I become even more worried and anxious I’ll begin hearing voices. I’ll know the end is near when all of my senses are being tricked. Sometimes I have to remember I’m an old man. Kids never get scared. Old men get nervous; they get paranoid. Their minds are overactive like their bladders.
I still wonder what could make the Johnsons feel like they had to pack their things, buckle their sisters into the backseats, and sneak away without saying where they were going. Each time the Johnsons and I discussed the possibility of leaving Camelot, they were the ones against going. Maybe, when it came down to it, they had one priority: taking care of themselves and their Block sisters, not taking care of an old man and his Block brother.
It’s also quite possible they were deceiving me the entire time. Andrew is the only person I spend my days with and he’s incapable of telling a bold-faced lie or even a little white lie, so it’s definitely feasible I’m just not used to sensing when someone is swindling me. It’s possible the Johnsons gave every indication that their intentions didn’t match with what they were saying, but I never picked up on it. They could have been passing knowing looks back and forth in between bites of pork chops or chicken wings. If all of those conversations were replayed again, maybe I would pick up on how their tone didn’t match their words or how they never looked me in the eye when they said they were staying in Camelot to the very end.
After they left the neighborhood I rewatched every mobster movie in my collection. Each gangster movie had a scene where one of the criminals was being lied to, recognized the deceit, and did something about it. Every time I tried to identify the same telltale signs that the gangster noticed when being lied to, I thought the other character had been telling the truth.
Of course it’s also possible that the Johnsons weren’t lying, that they really did want to stay in the neighborhood, but an emergency made them leave as quickly as they could. If that happened it wouldn’t matter if it was the middle of the night when they needed to leave. If Mark thought his sister was dying, he would have packed his three siblings in the SUV and raced as fast as he could toward one of the settlements where better care awaited them.
So now that I’m the only one left, what keeps me from going six doors down the street to their old property the way I did for a hundred other houses? It’s a simple thing to do. And yet I remain at the end of my driveway, staring down the street at the Johnsons’ two-story Elizabethan as though just looking at it is the same as going there.
I’m reminded once again of my neighbor’s Block sister who waqy do s dragged into the woods and eaten by dogs. The funny thing is, after it happened it was the Johnsons who pulled me aside and told me I did the right thing, both for myself and for Andrew
. I got the feeling Dan had expected me to go into the woods to try and save his sister, to put his family’s wellbeing above my own responsibility to Andrew. I could never put someone else before my brother. Dan left Camelot a week later without saying another word to me. The Johnsons repeatedly told me, both before he left and then again after he was gone, that they would have done the same thing if they were in my place. That was how I finally came to terms with what I saw that day, because the Johnsons made me feel I hadn’t done anything wrong. So how did things change from them being the ones to reassure me when I had doubts, to being the ones who left here so suddenly it was almost as if one more day spent in Camelot would mean their downfall?
January 8My mom used to tell me the Blocks appeared because there were too many people on the planet. “The world has a way of restoring its natural order. Earth was never supposed to have this many people.”
Knowing my father didn’t approve of her telling me that sort of thing, she always made sure to make these comments when he wasn’t around. The one and only time she said something like that in front of my dad when I was there to hear it, he told her not to say such things. Then, later that night when he and I were watching TV with Andrew and my mom was somewhere by herself, he told me the world didn’t work that way.
“Your brother isn’t a Block because the world is trying to even things out. That’s ridiculous. I love your mother but when she gets scared, she says things she doesn’t really believe.” He raised his voice when he told me that, I think, because he hoped she was listening nearby.
So after that, instead of not saying those things, she just didn’t say them around him. But me, I got to hear all of her thoughts on how it was a matter of time until God or the universe or nature—the exact force behind it depended on her mood that day—decided to balance things again. That explained the history of great diseases and plagues throughout the centuries.
“How many people did everyone think could inhabit the earth?” she would say. “People are just too selfish. If you dropped a couple of billion people on earth out of nowhere, everyone would see there wasn’t enough room for everyone, that the world wasn’t supposed to be filled with buildings on top of buildings and roads dividing every section of land, people shoulder to shoulder no matter where they stood. But because it was a gradual increase, slow enough that 'ssget spschools could always have additions built to make room for more students, more houses could be built for families to live in, people never noticed. Everyone was living for the day. No one cared about the future. Sure, your father and I could have had ten kids, but is it fair to have ten kids living where the previous family had two kids? Imagine if everyone did that. What were those parents thinking when they had kids that often, that they were building armies? There’s no need to have ten kids. What’s the point of having more than two or three?”
When she went on this version of her rant, I never interrupted. The Dixons were the only family I knew that reproduced like bunnies, and most of their seven kids were assholes, so I liked hearing her talk bad about them by association. And I knew what she meant about not noticing something was going bad if it built up slowly. The old stories of people going into debt never had them jumping immediately into bankruptcy; they built their debt slowly so it seemed manageable at first, something that could be corrected. Gambling addicts didn’t just go from not having a problem to betting their entire livelihood in one hand; it took a series of ups and downs to make it seem like there might be a time when one final bet could fix everything. Most problems were that way. Hell, that’s how I ended up alone with Andrew in Camelot. If I went from being with my parents in the lively neighborhood of my childhood, then got transported here—no one around, my old body deteriorating—I would have immediately put Andrew in the car and we would have been driving to New Orleans. But because the isolation built up slowly, a single family leaving one month, then another the next month, my knees creaking just a little bit more each year, I never became shocked at my own situation. So yes, I can understand what my mother was trying to say.
It was her other tirade I didn’t care for so much: “If it’s not war or famine, it’s disease. There will always be something to control the human population, some natural mechanism that saves people from their irresponsible selves. I love your brother as much as I love you or your father—he can’t help what the world has done to him—but the Blocks are just another attempt by nature to bring the world back into synch. People got too good at curing all the other diseases the world passed our way. Scientists got too good at prolonging the average lifespan. People who were supposed to die kept living. People who were never supposed to have children started having eight or nine kids. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can only tinker with the natural order of things for so long before nature gets the last laugh. Say a scientist figured out how to stop aging forever—I wouldn’t be surprised if people were so short-sighted they all didn’t just go on living, having kids, acting like there would never be any consequences. How long would it have taken for the world to realize there were just too many people everywhere? Would ten billion people have been too much? Twelve billion?”
I never bothered to tell her that people said similar things all throughout history. In some people’s minds, the bubonic plague had been sent to punish everyone. Same with malaria. I never bothered to tell her that all the wars men engaged in—one of the ways she thought the world controlled populations—only resulted inqut. other population increases, not decreases. Sure, there was a lot of death on the battlefield, but then all the survivors went home and made as many babies as possible. I saw a story on the news one time that said the world’s post-war population was always back up to pre-war numbers within nine months—nine fun months—of soldiers returning home.
I never asked her how she could claim to love an embodiment of the current plague, as she saw my brother, as much as she loved my father and me. I didn’t ask because I knew she really did love him as much as the rest of us. And I knew what my dad said was right: she was just saying these things because she was scared, and scared people don’t really mean what they say, they’re just looking for ways to rationalize everything so they have someone or something to blame. They need to have a reason for what’s happening because when they have that they can take comfort in knowing it’s out of their control.
While my mom was sneaking in these monologues any time my dad wasn’t around, my dad was doing things my mom wouldn’t agree with when she wasn’t watching. He knew, as did I, that zombie movies irritated her. She saw the mindless bodies marching down streets, terrorizing people, and thought it was, in its own way, insensitive to her as the parent of a Block. It wasn’t just her. It seemed that half the people I talked to in those days thought zombie movies were in poor taste. Any depiction, she would say, of a mindless person wandering neighborhoods for brains to snack on should be banned from homes where Blocks reside. When I reminded her that zombie movies existed well before Andrew was ever a sparkle in my parents’ eyes, my father shushed me and said he was sorry. Yet, every time she was gone and Andrew was in his room, my dad and I would pop on a zombie classic and share some father and son time. It wasn’t tossing the baseball in the backyard or going fishing, things he probably did with his father when he was my age, but it was nice—we watched people get their brains eaten.
A big part of what offended my mother was a new breed of the zombie movie genre in which the mindless bodies weren’t like traditional zombies, they didn’t turn into zombies once their brain was eaten by another member of the undead. The new breed of zombie was born deaf, mute, and motionless, until one day they woke from their slumber and began eating the brains of the very families that had been raising them.
“These movies are awful. Do they really think Andrew is going to wake up one day and try to kill us?”
“It’s just a movie, Mom.”
“Just a movie? Just a movie? They’re making fun of your brother and people like him.”
“That’s better,” my mother said, smiling. My father returned her smile. That evening’s news reported on a police raid on a prostitution ring in which the cops found twelve Blocks lying on top of various mattresses in an Atlanta basement. All of the Blocks had AIDS and a slew of various other STDs by the time the cops found them. The next story recounted how a group of boys, only slightly older then myself at the time, had made a game out of setting a Block on fire in the woods behind their house. That was in rural Kentucky. The next story focused on a grandmother in San Francisco who could do nothing but watch in horror as her house burned to the ground while her two Block grandchildren sat motionless in an upstairs bedroom. She hadn’t been able to move them before needing to escape the smoke. The Blocks were engulfed in flames by the time the fire department showed up.
“Christ,” my father said. “Turn this trash off.”
The next time my mother was out running errands and Andrew was upstairs in his room, my dad and I watched another zombie movie until he heard the garage door. Then he clicked it off.
January 9The Labrador sat outside my patio door again today, panting on the welcome mat like a throw-back to the days of house pets wandering in and out of homes. The dog is like the ones you used to see chasing down tennis balls at the park, or in the backseat of a car with its head hanging out the open window to get fresh air. I caught myself glancing over at Andrew to make sure he wasn’t scared, but he was sitting there with the same blank look he always has. I’ve spent my entire life with a brother who doesn’t talk, hear, or move, yet I still catch myself telling him something and then half expecting a response. We could live for another hundred years and I would still say things just to comfort him.