The Man Who Watched the World End (18 page)

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?

My 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 th
at 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.”

She didn’t have to sayXle,be, anything else. My father turned the movie off. The evening news took the place of what we had been watching.

“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.

The 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.

Of course
, the things I say are to settle my own nerves too. More and more I find myself checking to make sure Andrew isn’t scared when the lights flicker or when a bear lumbers up to the patio and sniffs around. He has never been scared of these things, so my motive for checking must have more to do with me than with him. Still, I can’t help myself.

The dog sat there for a while, rest
ing on the warm wooden planks as though there weren’t predators all around. It tilted its head side to the side a couple of times, amused by my interest in it, before repositioning itself to watch me a giant brown bear lumber anything thoughsp through the glass. Other times, it had its back to me so it could watch the woods, make sure it wasn’t attacked.

If it was domesticated—if there were still pets—I’m confident I could have brought it inside and it would have sat next to Andrew. It would protect my brother from anything that could cause him harm. I thought about leaving a bowl of water for it or using the food generator to make it something that resembled dog food, but when I came back from the kitchen it was gone. A while later I heard barking from the forest and found myself hoping it wasn’t that same dog because what ever dog was making the noises was soon yelping and crying before going silent. A pack of wolves howled
then. I knew they had made a meal out of the unlucky animal. The only way I’ll know if it was that dog or a random Dalmatian or Pit-bull is if the yellow pup comes back to my patio again tomorrow or the next day. I have to admit, I hope it does. Having the dog around makes me feel like things could go back to normal if I could just get through this rough patch.

I don’
t like mentioning it, but I’m almost out of books to burn. After the books, there won’t be much of anything left to set on fire. I refuse to sit at the window all day with the hope that a truck will pull into our community. I do, though, find myself turning the TV’s volume lower just in case an engine announces our salvation.

W
hy do I sneak off after dinner each night to record my thoughts? Is it merely to keep track of them?

There are probably thousands of similar diaries scattered around the country, in every abandoned little Midwest town, in every metropolitan area, and all the places in between. Before the Great De-evolution, diaries were passed down through the generations. Mine will stay here without anyone to inherit it. But mine is no different from thousands of others. There are forgotten pages all around the world, abandoned, each one containing stories of what
their daily life was like, of dreams that were longed for, some achieved, others left to remain fleeting fantasies. All of them will go unread.

How many other prized memories around the world are being forgotten on a daily basis? The last of my
books are gone. My baseball cards and comics were already turned to ash in the fireplace. Is this what other diaries talk about?