The Man Who Watched the World End (15 page)

Fireworks, like new movies
and little league games, were a part of life that faded away as the last normal generation grew older. People didn’t want to be dazzled by explosions in the sky once the end of man was signaled. The bright flashes didn’t seem so entertaining when the crowds were limited to fifty and sixty year-olds watching the waves of color blowing up in the sky. Each boom was a tick of the clock, a reminder to the gathered crowds that they had their hands full with Block siblings needing to be fed, bathed, and cleaned up after. No light or laser show could make audiences forget they were getting older one day at a time.

New Year
’s used to offer a chance for reflection. It used to provide an opportunity to look back at the year and then make resolutions on things you wanted to accomplish in the next one. This New Year’s Eve and all the days that follow it are the same as every other day; the calendar resets to day one, but nothing really changes. Andrew will be the same. The animals in the forest will be the same. The only difference over the years is that the neighborhood has emptied out. This year will be noted as the year the Johnsons left. That’s all. The next year will be noted as my first year being the last remaining resident of Camelot. Maybe the year after that will find Camelot as yet another community that was once packed with cars zooming around, but that’s now barren, devoid of any people.

The animals that
humor me by letting me live near them will finally have the neighborhood back to themselves without that pesky old man and his quiet brother causing weird noises and smells. They won’t have to listen to my music in the evenings. When the end does come, maybe I’ll leave the doors open so the deer or the wolves or any other creature can more easily make a shelter of what was once my home. It’s only fair to turn it back over to where it came from.

The open door could serve a second purpose. I
n the war movies I watch with Andrew, spies are given a poison capsule to swallow before they are captured, or a soldier behind enemy lines saves a single bullet in his pistol in case he needs it for himself. If the end was in sight for me, the pain or sickness too much, the open door would let all the nearby animals know that the first lucky ones through the door would have a feast worthy of kings.

I need to stop myself. All too often these days I catch myself thinking or writing about the end. Yes, I’m older. Yes, I’m alone. But it’s not fair to myself or to Andrew to act like the end is imminent. The end
is
imminent, I know that, but the power of mankindq regularedo has always been in overlooking the finality of things and holding onto optimism even when doing so seems foolish. If I start being consumed with thoughts about the end, I might as well walk into the forest right now and let whatever pack of wild beasts is out there have me for their dinner. Better to stay positive and remind myself of everything we still have.

And anyway, the smoke continues to rise each day from my chimney.
My stack of old Batman comics was today’s fuel. They were the last comics in my collection. Something else will need to go in the fire tomorrow. A band of travelers, heading south to New Orleans or Miami, will find us soon. It will all work out, it always does.

It’s been a month now since the Johnsons departed and I was left as the default king of Camelot. And yet, even after these quiet and uneventful weeks, I still can’t bring myself to make the simple journey down the street to check on their house. There are probably a million empty houses for each traveling family to choose from now—if there are any travelling families anymore, which I’m beginning to doubt. Even when the third to last family left our neighborhood—why can’t I think of their names right now?—I went with the Johnsons and made sure the empty house had a functioning generator and incinerator and that the doors were left unlocked for anyone who might be interested in moving in.

M
aking sure abandoned houses were suitable for new occupants ended up being wasted time. What happened more often than not was a window in these houses eventually cracked, or the roof leaked, and the house was eventually opened for the cats and dogs to sneak inside and use as their own. Back when the Johnsons were still here, I would walk down the street to their house and see a pair of wild Dobermans watching me from the bedroom window of the McPhearsons’ house. Except it wasn’t the McPhearsons’ house anymore, it was the Dobermans’. A family of cats watched me from inside the Smiths’ house.

Gone are t
he days of new families appearing out of nowhere on their way south. Millions of Canadians began filtering down the globe to join the New Englanders and Mid-Westerners as everyone journeyed closer to the Equator. Every once in a while a Canadian family would move into one of the vacant houses in Camelot and I would have a new neighbor until they decided to move even further south. One day a house would be empty and the next day a family from Toronto or somewhere else would have a fire going in the fireplace, and I would take them a bottle of wine as a welcoming gift. Two weeks later the house would be empty again. Camelot would go back to being an exclusive resort for me and Andrew and for the Johnsons. I was sorry to see each family leave, as they all eventually did, but it was nice knowing the ne'sspspjoxt day or week a new family could suddenly arrive, and we would have someone else to meet and share stories with.

Sometimes the
new families stayed for a year or two before continuing their trip. A house would be abandoned one day and the next it would be a genuine home for a family again. It was a fascinating thing to see. Something I noticed when vehicles came into the community for the first time was that the arrivals never drove up and down the street to find the nicest house. Unless a home was noticeably inferior to the other houses on the street, either because the roof was falling in or because all of the windows were broken out, people were just happy to arrive at a new neighborhood and have a place to live.

As the migration played out over the years I got to meet the governor of Maryland, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, a
senator from Indiana, and some guy who said he won an Oscar for special effects, although I think he was starting to lose his mind and didn’t quite know who or where he was. Each family happened upon our neighborhood, raised a red mailbox flag, and made the neighborhood their home for as long as they needed.

The Martins were impossible to forget. The
Pelletiers from Quebec, brother and sister and their Block brother, were a blast to have around. Of course I will never forget LeBlanc and her sister. But the last nomad couple that stopped here, what were their names? And how much longer will it be until I can’t remember LeBlanc, even though forgetting her seems preposterous right now? Vague memories from elementary school through high school still exist, but I can no longer remember many of the teachers’ names or any of their faces. I remember an English teacher who made me smile, a science teacher who always yelled at me, a social studies teacher who always seemed like he wanted to be somewhere else. Each memory is blurred to a shadow, a hint of something that was there but now is unclear.

Will the day arrive when the same thing happens to memories of my mother and father? It has, after all, been decades since they were alive. If I live for another ten years—doubtful I know—will I cease to remember exactly what it was that my dad liked to say before each meal or what my mother smelled like each time she woke me up in the morning?

Will I forget what it was like to live in a normal world where every house was filled with a different family, no two families alike, each one with their own ambitions and goals? Can I even remember what my own ambitions were when I was little? Does it matter if I can’t remember?

The migration
s did have at least one perk I can’t pass up mentioning: it allowed me to lose my virginity. I never had another serious girlfriend after the girl I was dating in high school left with her family, but the stream of new visitors allowed me to manage a couple of flings.qis. other

The nice thing about the migratory herds was that people cared less about what they did in a particular town since they would move further south a week or two later. Sometimes the family moving in
to our neighborhood would have a daughter my age. This was, obviously, back when Andrew and I were still quite young and living in our old neighborhood with our parents. The girl and I would sneak away and do all the things adults did back before mankind started dying off. I know it sounds silly but that’s how we felt back then; everyone was still adjusting to the idea that the human race was going to end. It didn’t matter that the end wouldn’t occur for another sixty or seventy years, after all of us had grown old, died of heart attacks or cancer. The future on the horizon, so foreign from what we were used to, struck a nerve with everyone wanting to make all their unfulfilled dreams come true. The overwhelming sense back in those days was that time was running out quicker than before the Blocks appeared, even though this part of the nightmare wasn’t true at all. It just
felt
like time was speeding up.

The abundance of empty houses made sneaking off for a fling even easier than driving to a make-out spot. All we had to do was walk down the street until we found a house with the red flag
down and then go inside. The vacant beds were more of an invitation than I needed back then, although I’m grossed out now at the thought of all the germs that might have been on the mattresses. At the time, however, I couldn’t have been happier.

One of the girls I snuck off with asked me if I loved her after we were done having sex. I wish I could remember what her name was. I’m not proud of it now, but I told her what she wan
ted to hear.

“Say it again,” she said.

“I love you.”

She smiled. “Keep saying it.”

So I did. She could have told me to say I was king of the world and I would have said it. I would have said it with so much conviction that even I believed it.

“We should get married,” she said.

My heart skipped ten beats.

Her eyes, glistening with tears of happiness, told me she wasn’t joking.
My response was based on the knowledge that her family was going to keep moving south in a couple of days. Knowing that, I got on one knee, still naked and with half an erection.

“Will you marry me?” I said.

There was no ring to put on her finger or anyone to witness the ceremony, but she said yes as if that stuff wasn’t important.

I don’t know why I said those things or why I got down on my knee
, other than it made her happy and that seemed important even though I would never see her again. I felt just as silly then while I was actually doing it as I do now when I close my eyes and remember my youthful stupidity. God, I was dumb back then. But it made her happy enough to burst into tears and tell me she loved me, so maybe it was worth it. We made love again while she was still crying tears of joy. I watched from my window a couple of days later as her father drove them away.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the proposal that day on the dirty wood floor of the abandoned house was for my benefit too. Years later, while staring out the window at a momma bear walking with a young cub behind her, I re
alized that, for a split second, even though I felt ridiculous being completely buck naked, I had the sense of what the previous generations had. For that one moment I was on the path to getting married and having a family. My life instantly readjusted back to the course that has led me to today, but for that moment, if it could be paused, I had the possibility in front of me of having my parents’ life. The life I have always wanted.

A big smile breaks across my face every time I imagine what
that girl’s car ride to Miami must have been like. The first time an argument broke out in the minivan she probably dropped the M-bomb and told her parents that she had gotten engaged to a random kid in the last neighborhood and, in her heart at least, was married to him. I doubt either of her parents would have been happy for her.

And like I said, Andrew and I participated in the migration south to a limited extent as well
. After mom passed away, a year after our dad had already gone, I looked around and realized our old neighborhood didn’t hold anything important for us anymore.

It seemed critical at the time that we move to a different community, not so we could be closer to other people, but so our old house and street weren’t the only ones Andrew and I knew. I didn’t want to live my entire life in the same place where I was born and where I watched my parents grow old. So I packed up a minivan with our family’s belongings, loaded Andrew into the passenger seat, and drove south a couple
of hours until IqRedo saw the brick sign introducing us to Camelot. The rest is history.

It didn’t take long for the same migrations that had occurred
in our old neighborhood to start up around us at Camelot. I was still unpacking boxes of clothes when I saw the first pickup truck drive out of the golf community, stacked to the top with suitcases and boxes taped closed, as it made its way south.

A pair of Canadian sisters moved in next door to us when I was in my late forties. I got into the habit of leaving Andrew for a while, getting my fun in, and then returning later to make sure he was okay. It was nice being in their house because it was just the two of them—no Block sibling sitting quietly in the corner to remind us of things we didn’t want to be reminded of. The sisters came over for dinner just about every evening. We would sit and talk until late into the night, the three of us drinking wine in the living room while Andrew sat motionless on the sofa. By the end of every night we would be piss drunk and falling over the sofas. Sometimes one of them would stay over, but more often
than not they would head back to their house together. Those were some of the best nights of my life.