The Man Who Watched The World End

by Dietzel, Chris

  I can’t imagine what it’s like for the caregivers at the group homes where three or four regular people take care of thousands of Blocks. How do they do it? I saw one of the group homes on a webcast a few years back. It was the Cleveland community before they packed up and joined with the Cincinnati group. Their group home was a converted incinerator factory, which, in turn, had been a converted elementary school at one point. The entire inside was gutted, so there was nothing resembling classrooms, a gymnasium, or a cafeteria. Instead, the brick walls became one giant coliseum of Blocks.

  Thousands of them were arranged on the floor in neat rows, each one with a blanket underneath its motionless body so it wasn’t directly on the hard concrete. The video showed a woman talking and smiling to each Block as she made sure their nutrient bags were full. A different woman, this one in the background, could be seen wetting a sponge and rubbing it on the lips of the motionless Blocks. It was supposed to show how humanely the Blocks were being treated. Aisles provided the caretakers with paths to walk up and down the different quadrants of the facility. The camera panned back and the hundreds of Blocks on the screen became a thousand, then five thousand, then ten thousand. It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen.

  The thought of Andrew becoming just another body in a giant mass of nameless people was enough to never let him out of my sight. I didn’t mind the thought of the Johnsons taking care of him if I died first, but leaving him in the middle of that gigantic horde of lifeless people seemed like an injustice. Worse, it was something my parents would have abhorred. These rows of men and women were people’s sons and daughters. They were people’s brothers and sisters. And they were just abandoned. I thought back to the way my mother answered my questions when I was a boy—about taking Andrew on vacation with us if he didn’t know what was going on around him—and I understood that her worst nightmare would have been seeing Andrew lined up as part of a row of a hundred Blocks.

  When I think of whether or not I made the right decision for Andrew, I remember that footage. It was impossible not to imagine him as a random body—line 17 in row 57—surrounded by people he didn’t know, and I tell myself he would rather be here with me, even if it’s just the two of us fending for ourselves. If he could have heard the way my mother and father spoke about him, about the importance of family, if he could have seen my father holding him above the waves as they crashed, there would be no other place my brother would want to be than right here.

  January 15I have casual thoughts (very quickly discounted) about leaving Andrew outside to fend for himself. They aren’t serious ideas, just whimsical I-could-do-this kind of thoughts that are gone as soon as they arrive. Like driving head-on into an approaching car, or grabbing a cop’s gun out of its holster. Leaving him outside is the same as turning him over to the dogs and vultures. The thought makes me sick to my stomach. Andrew will never be able to smile at one of my jokes, know the highs and lows of growing older, or be able to put a hand on my shoulder and tell me everything will be okay, but I’ll never leave him to that fate. It doesn’t matter if he can’t understand his surroundings, he’s my brother and'B, chimney I’ll stay with him to the end. Better this than to have him surrounded by people who could take advantage of him.

  There have always been people who said Blocks weren’t really people at all. They argued Blocks could be left outside to die because they don’t know and don’t care what happens to them. The people saying this would have made great Spartans since the ancient army was in the practice of throwing deformed babies into a chasm, but they also forgot about the potential of those wasted lives. These people tried to equate an indifference to Blocks as being no different than thinking abortions were okay. A regular fetus, they argued, probably has more sensory capability than an adult Block, it’s just that Blocks have the advantage of looking like the rest of us. I never thought this was a well-reasoned argument. I was swayed, though, by an old woman I saw on TV one time who asked if we would be indifferent to Blocks if one of them could hold the key to fixing the Great De-evolution. Surely, she said to the studio audience, we have to be around Blocks, we have to understand them, if we want to have any hope of correcting the problem.

  There were more stories than I care to remember of people abusing or abandoning Blocks. Blocks were cursed from birth by being easy to abandon, but as they became teenagers and then young adults, more of their numbers were left to the abuses that normal people could impart. Some of these Blocks eventually ended up at the front doors of group homes like the ones who were abandoned at birth, most arriving either beaten or diseased. Newborn babies could cry for attention. Little kids could hold onto their parents’ clothes and beg not to be abandoned. The Blocks, though, could be abandoned just as easily when they were teenagers or senior citizens as when they were first born. They were further cursed by not being able to state their case for why they shouldn’t be left behind; even a newborn baby could reach out for its mother. Any parent struggling with the decision to abandon a Block child would never be swayed by pleading looks or tear-filled eyes. They could load middle-aged Blocks into the backseat of their car and leave them any place at all, even a landfill. The Blocks would never cry or ask where they were being taken. They wouldn’t try to hold onto the safety belt as they were dragged out of the backseat to be left on the roadside. Even a kitten would do more to preserve itself.

  All across the country Blocks were stolen or specifically raised for unspeakable purposes. Some were prostituted as sex slaves, others were used as punching bags until they died. Little boys, teenage girls, every type of Block adult, were, at one time or another, found by police raids in dirty houses owned by sex offenders. Some of the Blocks found by police had blisters and sores covering every inch of their bodies. Some had been beaten so badly it was surprising they were still alive. And yet these beaten and abused Blocks never uttered a cry, never tried to fight off their attackers, never knew what was happening to them. During their trials, the men who took advantage of them complained that it wasn’t rape because the Blocks never said no, that it wasn’t any other crime because the Blocks didn’t understand pain or fear. Communities all across the world, even in Philadelphia, were outraged. The offenders were either sent to prisons or were executed. The pXmedo unishments handed down didn’t factor in whether or not a Block could feel pain or humiliation. Rightfully so. It was blind justice in the most beautiful sense possible. Most of the rescued Blocks had their injuries and diseases treated. Some were so badly beaten they were euthanized in order to put them out of the misery they would have felt if they could acknowledge pain.

  One controversial part of the Survival Bill was its proposal for how prisons would be handled. Traditional prisons wouldn’t work as the inmates and guards became geezers and the last convicted felon, initially a kid who had murdered an old woman when he was eighteen, grew up to be an old man. Congressmen relied on a group of sociologists to come up with a viable solution for handling those citizens deemed unsafe within the general community. After much debate, the solution they came up with was to redistribute the inmates to different prisons based on the type of crime they had been convicted of. Murderers were sent to the same prisons. Arsonists, robbers, and those convicted of vehicular manslaughter were handled the same way. Pedophiles and rapists were sent to prisons with the murderers. Each prison was given food generators, electrical generators, incinerators, and anything else they needed to survive. Once each prison was fitted to be a self-contained facility, the inmates were left to fend for themselves. With the gates sealed but each individual cell unlocked, the inmates spent the rest of their lives in prison the way they had been sentenced. The inmates at each facility were left to create their own rules, to govern themselves as much as their various dysfunctions allowed. The saner of these inmates were quoted as saying they missed the days when security guards would break up fights and confiscate any shanks they might find. Without a security presence, inmates quickly began walking around with knives
and axes in clear sight. Some of the prisoners might have escaped the madness by living in nearby abandoned homes, but all of the stories I heard had the inmates staying on the prison grounds in a daily fight to rule the facility. The prisoners at one prison burned the entire building to the ground while they were still inside. Everyone died. The inmates at another facility formed into two armies that fought until every single person was dead.

  Rumors got out in various internet chat rooms that all the prisoners in a facility in Minnesota had escaped and were beginning to filter into the general population. Similar rumors were sometimes heard about a prison in Kansas or one in Maryland, and always seemed to coincide with the migration talks going on in those places. No sooner would a city, already in favor of joining a more southern settlement, begin having talks about abandoning their homes than more rumors of freed convicts would begin slipping out. It took one person to say something—the supermax jail was empty after everyone escaped—and no matter how unreliable the rumor was, no matter how little evidence there was to support it, the whispers scared people into wanting to head south to the final communities a little sooner than they would have before.

  There was talk of re-opening the infamous Alcatraz and sending California’s deadliest inmates there. The abandoned jail would be a perfect place for these men, capable of hurting anyone around them, to be isolated from the general population. And while theq livingedo y would have an opportunity to swim to safety, none of the inmates had the stamina anymore to make the swim across the channel. One of Alcatraz’s historians actually laughed when asked if senior citizens, albeit senior citizens who happened to also be serial killers, could make the swim back to the mainland. The bodies of seventy and eighty-year old inmates would be found off the banks of San Francisco’s settlement, the historian said. In the end, they decided it wasn’t worth the hours of labor it would take to install power, a food generator, and incinerator, and the idea was scrapped in favor of shipping the inmates off to a maximum security prison in Nevada.

  In Russia, there was talk of transporting violent offenders into the middle of Siberia, then building a giant wall around the frozen tundra so they couldn’t rejoin the general population. The idea was discarded once plans for the wall illustrated how resources were already becoming limited. Not to mention there was a noticeable shortage of middle-aged men willing to spend their time constructing a wall hundreds and hundreds of miles long if there was nothing in it for them.

  As for the Blocks who were taken advantage of, I can’t begin to imagine which is worse: being a molested Block who doesn’t know what is happening, or being a regular person who can fight back, but also has to deal with the pain and fear that is forced upon them. Would I rather be tortured and abused my entire life without understanding what was happening, or would it be better to have the chance to fight back even if the abuser was still successful in his attack? If I had to spend the rest of my life living with the pain of what had happened, would I rather not be aware of it at all? In all the years I’ve thought about that question I’ve never been able to determine that one might not be as bad as the other.

  I don’t want to imagine those things happening to Andrew. I can’t help myself, though. My love for him forces me to think about what I’d do if he was taken from me, inducted into a sex ring, or stored away in the damp basement of a man who abuses him every day. It makes me want to give Andrew a hug that lasts for days, a hug that doesn’t have to end and that can protect him for the rest of his life.

  January 16One of the bushes behind my house actually has the beginnings of some leaves again, a sign that the mild winter has subsided. There wasn’t much of a winter to speak of, except for a couple of days seeming a little chillier than the others. The bare limbs will eventually give way to bright green leaves. My pessimistic side views spring as the time of year when the leaves keep me from seeing into the woods for animalsq? Would about ve been that might be lurking out there. I can still hear them, know they are there, but can’t see them until they are less then twenty feet away. At that distance they would chase me down before I could get back into the house.

  The weeds didn’t die during winter, but they did have a momentary pause in their expansion. In a couple of years, the weeds will come up through the kitchen floor and the living room. When that happens my home would become a glorified tent rather than the solid, impenetrable house it was meant to be.

  Every year I am surrounded by more wildlife than I was the year before. I’m sure it’s the same feeling the animals had each year when they saw more people plopped down on top of already overcrowded cities and streets. Every rabbit and squirrel that watched as car after car passed by on newly-widened roads had to be asking itself, “When will the madness finally end?”

  There was a time when my front porch was reserved for quiet nights for Andrew and me. This, of course, was back when it was easier for me to move him around. And before the animals learned they didn’t have to fear us. We would sit there on the wicker chairs, noises all around us from the woods and golf course. A howl from one part of the forest would be followed by some barking from another direction. After the barking quieted down a cat would meow or a bear would growl. The animals are the last orchestra the world will know. I sipped iced tea while the music went on around us. Andrew had to be sprayed down with insect repellent before he was allowed outside. The bugs used to love having something sweet to bite that didn’t swat at them.

  Now, instead of going outside, we sit at the patio door when we want to watch the wildlife. The other day I saw a pack of house cats that must have been fifty or sixty strong. They grazed on bugs hiding in the tall grass and then fled when a pack of fifteen Rottweilers came charging out of the brush. Today, a bear roamed onto our yard. It sniffed around the incinerator, then wandered off. A couple of minutes later, a squirrel stayed in the open grass for too long. We saw it get snatched away from the ground by a hawk. Its little legs flailed as the hawk carried it to the top of a tree and, presumably, tore it apart. I know that happens all the time—the hawks and owls have to feed on something too—but I had never actually seen it happen with my own eyes until today.

  I turned to Andrew as the hawk was soaring back into the sky and said something stupid like, “Holy shit, did you see that!”

  A little bit later a pack of dogs squared off against a couple of wolves. The dogs consisted of a German pointer, an Irish setter, two cocker spaniels, and two Labrador retrievers. In the end, both sets of animals thought better of actual bloodshed and were content with displays of aggression such as growling and raising their hind fur. The two gangs eventually backed away from where they had come.qI do

  “Wow, that was amazing,” I said to Andrew.

  I repositioned him to face the TV. The Silence of the Lambs played on the television the rest of the night. I like to envision Andrew as even more dastardly than Hannibal Lecter, the ultimate evil mastermind, secretly biding his time by pretending to be comatose, then one day taking advantage of his situation by becoming the new leader of the neighborhood. He would be like Keyser Söze, but pretending to be motionless and mute instead of having a limp and a bad hand. At the same time, when watching Indiana Jones with Andrew, I imagine my brother swinging from a whip and finding rare archeological treasures, so the idea of him being super evil doesn’t reflect on how I feel about him personally.

  As I was writing this I heard another animal howl from inside the forest. I’ve gotten pretty good at determining which animal is being killed by the sound it makes as it dies. Sometimes I can even guess which animal was doing the killing. Tonight it was a fox being eaten. Probably by a pack of dogs. The terrified wails made me go back to the living room to make sure Andrew was okay.

  On nights like tonight I turn off the lights in my room, power off my monitor, and close the hallway door. My bedroom is thrown into complete darkness. At the window, I have a perfect vision of the woods. The moon decides how much of the surrounding wildlife I get to see. If the clouds ar
e out I can barely make out the outline of the trees or see where the branches end and the sky begins. But if the sky is clear and the moon is full, like it is tonight, I can see animals pacing back and forth at the edge of the woods. If I stare long enough, a series of eyes will line up at the edge of the trees and gaze back at me. One pair of eyes will be there first. Then two. Then three. One time there were eight sets of eyes, all lined up behind the layer of brush at the edge of my lawn, staring at me through my bedroom window. I couldn’t tell if it was a pack of wolves or dogs; they are more similar these days than they are different. The eyes peeking out at me become green or orange depending on the moon’s light. All of them remained there to see if I would be foolhardy enough to leave my house after the sun had set.

  It’s funny how differently the animals act during the daylight than when it’s dark. If I stepped outside at night the animals, dogs and wolves alike, would run toward me at full speed. My dead body would be dragged back into the forest within seconds. If I went outside right now I might as well jog willingly into the woods to make it easier for them. If it was daylight, though, and I went outside, the animals might growl and hiss at me, but more often than not they would remain at the edge of the woods. They might pace back and forth but they wouldn’t make a move while the sun was out unless they were pq redo articularly desperate for food. But my circumstances are no different between day and night. Maybe they think I can see better than them during the day, or maybe they think my neighbors will come to my rescue (little do they know my neighbors are all gone!), but none of this is true. If a single animal out there, their blazing orange eyes tracking me, was smart enough to realize the sun doesn’t hold special power, they could have me for a meal.