The Man Who Watched the World End (29 page)

As soon as our costumes were finished, I would get the camera out and take a series of pictures with us acting out our new identities. When I was Larry Bird and h a nice, quiet neighborhoode . other e was Michael Jordan, I filled our old basketball with air and took pictures of Andrew shooting over top
of me. It was difficult to prop his arms against the table to keep them in a realistic position. And of course he was sitting down in his wheel chair while I was crouched on the floor to make it look like he was able to jump over me. Needless to say, that year’s pictures didn’t turn out very well. When I was Hulk Hogan and he was Ric Flair, however, we had pictures of him giving me a cheap eye gouge followed by a picture of me dropping a giant leg on him as he lay in the middle of the living room floor. If he had his own opinions, Andrew might think this behavior was silly, and I’m usually conscious of not pushing my appetites on him, but I prefer to think that on this one day of the year he would love dressing up with his brother and acting like we were famous movie characters or historical figures.

The thing I noticed
this afternoon when looking at these pictures was that I wasn’t laughing uncontrollably like I normally do when I pull this particular album off the shelf. Instead, I was doing my best not to cry. I excused myself from the sofa where Andrew was sitting, went to my bedroom, and cried for a good ten minutes. I’m not even sure why I was crying, let alone why I was crying then and not any other time in the past twenty years. Lord knows I’ve had plenty of reasons to do so. Every day I’m given a new excuse to cry if I ever needed one. I could have cried when the Canadian sisters left or when the Johnsons snuck away in the night. I could have broken down after the dog showed its true colors or when a rat ate holes in my birth certificate. Who would have guessed that it would be a photo album of Andrew and me wearing hilarious costumes that would finally break my spirit.

Time hasn’t done anything to make m
y hand feel better, nor have the few medicines I still have lying around the house. The spreading purple skin convinces me I’m not just being pessimistic. The pain keeps my fingers from moving. I clank away at the keyboard like an ogre. The days of my precision typing, as taught to me by Mrs. Jenkins in high school, are long past. One hand performs with the fingers dashing around half the keyboard. The other hand makes giant lurching movements. One hand belongs to Jekyll. The other belongs to Hyde.

Compared to the energetic
and capable man I used to be, I’m only a partial human being. Before, I had sore knees and a bad back, but I could still take the trash out and put my clothes on like a normal person. With a worthless hand, I struggle to do anything. I’m one-fourth the person who used to host neighborhood cookouts and take Andrew outside to watch the sun set. I’m one-eighth the person who used to carry a bag of golf clubs from one hole to another in the blazing sun. How much more of myself can I lose before I‘m incapable of 'inon thoughsptaking care of myself and my brother? What will I do when that day arrives?

T
here have been more noises than usual coming from my patio ever since the door shattered. I was crazy to think a dining room table would keep the wilderness out. A bear comes to the other side of the wooden table and growls at the smell of forbidden food. I can’t tell if it’s the same bear every day or different bears all sensing the same delicious treasure. Yesterday, two bears fought over the right to sit outside my broken dining room door. The loser went back into the woods to take care of his wounds. The victor remained on my deck until he eventually lost interest and sauntered off. At other times, when the bears aren’t here, wolves make their approach, checking for gaps in our defenses, then let out howls. The animals have always known Andrew and I are here, but now they can smell us at night, and might even be able to hear me snore.

T
he table won’t keep a bear out of our house. Not if it gets frustrated and rams its full weight against the barrier. It would stumble over the table before approaching Andrew. It might not recognize him as food if he doesn’t move or cry out. It might get confused and look for something more entertaining. Knowing Andrew was out there, defenseless, I would have to yell and draw the bear’s attention. It would see me as the moving and frightened target it wants. It would probably leave Andrew alone after it was satisfied with me in its belly, but the wolves and dogs wouldn’t have the same hesitation. They wouldn’t give two thoughts about whether or not he was food just because he wasn’t screaming. And just like that, our house, the final occupied house in the neighborhood, the last house in Camelot, would be empty too.

What will happen to my diary
once I’m gone? And how many other diaries, pages filled with thoughts and fears like mine, are scattered in abandoned neighborhoods all around the world? Are the diaries of people from Japan and Greenland filled with the same concerns I have? Does a man in rural Spain wonder if he should have taken the train to Portugal with his Block brother before it was too late, before the tracks deteriorated and no one else could join the community in Lisbon? Does a woman in Australia write about the unbearable heat, about her broken AC and how long she and her Block sister can tolerate the hundred degree days before they succumb? Surely there was another man, maybe in Russia, maybe in Peru, who wondered if he had made the right choices. Were they okay with how things ended up? Would they have done things differently if they could have seen where they were at the end, when they and their Block sibling could no longer take care of themselves?

What would they have done differently in their lives' on thoughsp, not just in
the final days or years, but when they were young and believed anything was possible in the world? What had these people thought when they were in middle school and still dreamed of being famous actors or rock stars? Would they have taken that trip abroad with their friends if they knew the opportunity would never repeat itself? Would they have told the girl down the street whatever she wanted to hear just so they could cop a feel, or would they have understood that that girl was also looking for something meaningful in the world? Would they, as little boys, have held a magnifying glass to ants walking on the sidewalk? Or would they appreciate that the ants were here before them and would be here after them, and because of that, and because they were living things, no matter how small they were, would they have been left alone?

Were there people in each corner of the world scribbling down all of their thoughts
while their Block brothers or sisters sat quietly in another room? What was the point? Why not just be honest and tell their Block relatives what they were thinking? Why do I write about all the things I would never think to tell Andrew even though he can’t hear what I say? Why do I protect his ears from the harsh truths of the world? Is that why I leave the room any time my hand hurts or when I can no longer resist the urge to cry and don’t want him to see me break down in tears? I know, deep down, he can’t hear the concerns I voice or see the tears I shed, but even as an old man I can’t help but shield him from them.

Maybe that’
s what the other diaries around the world talk about. Maybe a man in Korea used his diary as a way to have all the conversations with his Block sister that he could never have with her in real life. Maybe a woman in South Africa used her diary to describe what it was like for a Block to grow up in a land that never stopped trying to learn how to treat everyone as they deserved to be treated. Hell, maybe one or both of the Johnsons was keeping a diary while they lived down the street. Maybe each night after their Blocks were asleep, they would head to different rooms and write down all of their thoughts from that day.

If Andrew could read what I write her
e, would he understand where I’m coming from? Would he tell me to buck up, or would he simply give me a hug and, like he does now, say nothing?

My hand is black. It hurts so bad I keep from doing anything with the entire arm. I type with one hand now, the other arm sitting uselessly by my side because any movement sends shooting pain to my shoulder. If Andrew could help me and if I knew how to do it, I would cut my arm off at the elbow to stop the pain. The discoloration has spread past the bandages wrapped around my wrist. The purple and black are slowly moving and yelled, “April Fool!”anspspjoup my forearm. I don’t need a medical book to tell me the infection is going to keep spreading until it kills me.

The dog still appears
once or twice a week. I see it through the kitchen window, but I don’t refill the water dish anymore and the dog doesn’t come all the way up to the patio like it used to. The days I do see it, it’s always at the edge of the woods, looking at my house as though wishing to explain a terrible miscommunication between the two of us. I stare at it and it stares at me, but neither of us does anything else. I want to go outside and shake my crippled hand in the air to show it what it did. I would yell at the Labrador until it felt bad and whimpered. If the dog is still around after I’m dead and Andrew’s nutrient bag begins to run out, it will get to see my brother go hungry and will understand the extent of the betrayal it brought on me. It’s one thing to trick me, to cause my downfall—I deserve the rotting hand if I can be fooled by a common dog—but my brother has never done anything to deserve this fate. Andrew has never lifted a hand to an animal. He has never cursed the forest animals or wished for their deaths. I watch the dog until it disappears back into the line of trees, then I take more aspirin, hoping it will numb my hand. It never does.

One of my
dreams from last night was so vivid I still feel like I was actually there. It didn’t involve the neighborhood, the animals in the forest, or my hand, which feels like it’s going to fall off. Those things, or symbols of those things, were all covered in other dreams I’ve had recently. No, of all the things it could have been about, the entire dream was me sitting in my second grade class with my old classmates. The classroom was exactly how it had been when I was little: four rows of chairs perfectly arranged to face the teacher, pictures of former presidents on each wall. All of the chairs were occupied by the same students who had used them seventy years earlier. The only difference was that we were all eighty years old. Our teacher, Mrs. Peirson, wasn’t in the classroom. We sat patiently on our chairs and waited for her to come through the door. If we were eighty in our dream, Mrs. Peirson would have been 130 years old, obviously much too old to be alive, but we still expected to see her walk into the classroom at any moment.

All of my fellow students h
ad the same features as when I knew them in second grade. The eighty year-old version of Sarah Siller still had chubby cheeks and boogers at the edge of her nose, only now she was hunched over and drowning in wrinkles. Bobby Morrows was still covered in freckles and had bushy red hair, but now his teeth were mostly gone and even when he squinted he could barely see anything. I recognized all of them immediately, no matter how long ago I had last seen them. And they all knew me. Betsy Hendrickson passed me a scribbled note asking if I would be her boyfriend during recess that day. I circled YES before sliding it back across the desk.

Each of us had lived our lives the wa
y they had actually been spent. I had worked on a road crew instead of going to college, then come home and taken care of Andrew the rest of my life. Sarah Siq%. other ller grew up and volunteered at a shelter for Blocks, where she took care of hundreds of people who were abandoned or orphaned, until she had a heart attack and passed away. Bobby Morrows moved to Mexico after high school and was never heard from again. Everyone assumed he had been murdered, but no one knew for sure. Betsy married her high school sweetheart, even though that was the extent of the family they would ever be able to have. She accidently got pregnant a couple of years later. Knowing it would be a Block and not knowing what to do with it, she killed herself with a gun. And yet, there we all were, all of us elderly, all of us back in elementary school as though it was just another day of learning math and history.

Mrs.
Peirson never did arrive to teach us. It didn’t matter, though. Each of us was happy to sit there and wait. The bell never rang for the next class. That didn’t bother us either. We sat at our desks for what felt like an entire day. I’m not sure how long dreams really last, if the entire dream was over and done with two seconds after it started, or if I spent a couple of hours of my sleep in that state. It felt like I must have started dreaming as soon as I went to sleep and didn’t stop until I woke up the next morning.

The dream ended the same way it started, with us in our seats waiting for the day’s lesson to begin. We passed notes and go
ssiped about all the other kids the same way we had when we were little. Some kids made deals as to which parts of their lunches they would trade with each other. No one talked about what it was like to grow old without any kids of our own. There was no talk of our younger siblings who couldn’t attend their own classes or play catch with us after school. We were all happy just to be where we were. And that was the entire dream.

I woke up amazed at the a
mount of detail my mind had processed. Bobby Morrows’s hiccups sounded exactly as they had seventy years earlier. His lips had tiny cracks at the corners because they were always too dry. Betsy smelled like overripe fruit. Her eyes were bright blue, and she had a small imperfection on one iris. They were details I hadn’t remembered for seventy years, they may not have existed at all, but in my dream my senses were alive. I was able to see exactly how the sky transitioned from a shade of light blue to a shade of light grey as it got closer to the horizon. I heard the crickets outside in the grass.