The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (14 page)

27

She knows something is wrong as soon as she opens her eyes and looks to her bedside table to see what time it is.

The clock isn’t there.

It’s always there. She is the only one who could have moved it. Thinking she might have brushed it to the floor in her sleep, her eyes scan the ground next to her bed. Nothing there either. It has simply vanished.

That’s when she notices something else that isn’t right: the lights are on throughout the group home. She always turns the lights off before going to bed. Ever since she was a young girl, she couldn’t sleep in a room where there were lights on, no matter how tired she was. It is even more impossible for her to sleep with the gym’s over-sized industrial bulbs glaring down on her. Not to mention how uncomfortable she is when she can see the faces of all the bodies littered across the floor.

Her breathing stops. Leonardo, one of her painters, is looking at her from across the room. She tries to take another breath but her lungs are clenched.

It’s only a dream
, she tells herself. The thought does nothing to help calm her fright, however.

Her hands are balled fists. Even though the blanket is over her, she feels completely exposed. There is no mistaking that Leonardo is looking at her and not simply staring in her general direction. His head could have fallen to one side, but that doesn’t explain the way his eyes focus on her. They leave her just long enough to scan the entire room, then return to her. His eyes are calculating.

She knows exactly what he is doing. He is making sure no one is around to stop him from coming across the room so he can wrap his hands around her little throat. He is making sure a security camera isn’t recording this, verifying no other Blocks are awake to question what is going on. From the way his eyes scan for witnesses, she knows he means to hurt her and hurt her badly.

Maybe he will crush her windpipe and get it over with quickly. She can only pray that whatever he does to her is not drawn out. She doesn’t want to suffer. But, she fears, he might strangle her just hard enough that her throat burns and her vision starts to black out, only to release his grip until she regains her senses, then starting the process all over again. Maybe he will choke her, let her recover, choke her, let her recover, for an entire night, until she is begging him just to let her die. She imagines the way he laughs each time she begins a new round of gagging, the way his chin raises in victory, proud, each time he allows her to gasp for air.

Or maybe he will clench his hands into fists, the way hers currently are, and use them against her. She can do nothing with her hands—she is paralyzed again—but there is an endless list of things he can do to her. He won’t hit her too hard at first. However, as she begs to be left alone, he will begin to strike her with more force. After a while, both of her eyes will be swollen shut. She will no longer be able to see when each strike is about to land, will no longer be able to clench her jaw against the pounding. This won’t keep him from continuing the onslaught. He will keep hitting her until the majority of her teeth are knocked out. Some will bounce off the hard floor. Others will fall back in her throat, resting against her tonsils. Eventually, her jaw will break. She will look like a monster.

Without a working mouth, there is no way she can beg to be left alone. Hard fragments of broken teeth will cut her lips. She will want to plead with him to stop beating her, but he will only look down with scorn and ask if Cindy or Aristotle or Roger deserved to starve to death. Without giving her a chance to answer, he will begin raining more strikes down.

From across the room she can see all of this in his eyes.

Thank God he can’t get up and come over here since he’s—NO! Oh my god, no!

Right as she watches, her hands still clenching her blanket as if it offers protection, she sees, with her very own eyes, that Leonardo can move.

Slowly, one arm changes from being perfectly straight, the hand halfway between his hip and knee, to bending until it is at his waist. The hand, one of the hands that will torture her, braces against the edge of the cot.

He’s coming for me! He’s going to kill me.

The painter steadies himself against the side of his cot, his hand pulling himself upright. His other elbow pushes against the mattress. His eyes never part from hers. They do not even blink. Nor does he smile to let her know this is a joke. He simply looks at her as if she is already dead.

The look in those eyes makes her want to scream, but she cannot. They make her want to flee the gymnasium, go running into the street, but she cannot do that either. There is nothing she can do. Nothing at all except wait for him to move closer and begin hitting her.

Sitting upright, Leonardo pauses to inspect his surroundings, his eyes reminding her that she is nothing.

Maybe he’s looking for something to hit me with.

He will have no problem finding a tool that can do as much damage as his hands. A pair of old pliers are on the ground next to a box of supplies. He can place these on her nose and slowly increase the pressure until the cartilage crumbles away. Or maybe he is looking for gloves so her blood doesn’t get all over him, so that when he covers her nose with one hand and her mouth with the other, none of her snot gets on him.

Please, God, no. Please, no!

Her eyes burst open. The alarm clock is next to her. The gym’s lights are off. Leonardo is lying on his cot like all the other Blocks.

She is drenched with sweat. Her clothes are soaked. Looking down, she realizes she is still gripping the blanket with her balled hands, the same way she was in her dream. One hand releases its grip and feels her face. No bruises. No bleeding. Nothing broken. She sighs and puts her head back on the pillow. There will be no more sleep for the night. Not after that.

She has begun to realize that what happens to her in her dreams is happening when she wakes up. If she is struggling to breathe in her nightmare, she wakes to discover she has been holding her breath. If she is gripping the blanket in her sleep, her hands are in the same position when she opens her eyes. The same thing goes for her sweating, her crying, all of it.

This realization leads to a second thought: if what she is doing in her dreams actually happens in real life, what will happen when one of these Blocks makes good on their promise to kill her? If she is being strangled in her nightmare, will she stop breathing in real life? If she is poisoned in her dream, will her very real, very critical body organs begin to shut down? Will she awake to find her eyeballs have been ripped from her face or her tongue lying on the pillow next to her bloody mouth? Will she awake at all? A feeling in the back of her head, one she can’t shake, says the moment one of her Blocks kills her in her nightmare, she will die in real life.

“What do you want from me?” she yells to the entire room. The only response is the sound of her voice echoing back at her, asking her the same question. “I’m trying my best. What more can I do? I’m trying my best.”

She begins crying then. Not because of the dream she just had, but because she knows this plea to everyone and everything that can hear her won’t be enough to keep her from having a similar nightmare the next night.

28

Her job is made somewhat easier by her wards’ inability to complain. In her care, she has people from every walk of life, possessing every possible political ideology, coming from every ethnicity, and yet there has never been even a hint of an argument between them.

It was obvious that if a new generation couldn’t speak or move, they wouldn’t be able to bear arms. The appearance of the Blocks marked the first time in over three centuries that humans didn’t try to kill each other over some kind of trivial argument. No war between countries, no war between a country and its rebels, not even fighting between two warring tribes. It took the emergence of humans that couldn’t do anything for themselves for everyone else in the world to stop killing each other. Anything else—rampant disease, enlightenment toward a higher consciousness—had failed to be enough for people to stop blowing each other up.

It was for this reason that the final Nobel Peace prize ever awarded was given to the Blocks. Not to a specific Block in a specific country, but to the entire generation of people that didn’t become indoctrinated to hate those of other colors, from other countries, or holding different beliefs.

There was nothing intentional about the peace they created, however, and this caused everyone else to resent the world’s most prestigious award being given to the very people that were causing mankind’s extinction. It wasn’t as though the Blocks were leading a peaceful resistance by marching through the streets or having a sit-in until their pleas were heard. They weren’t going on hunger strikes or declaring themselves conscientious objectors. If they were, the award would have had some merit behind it. The Blocks weren’t refusing to continue fighting in wars, they were simply incapable of doing anything.

Although it received more hate mail than it had ever received before, the Nobel committee stood behind its decision. It was, though, the last year they gave the award. They said this was because the Blocks brought about true and everlasting peace, that no more awards were necessary because there was no more injustice to stand against. The Blocks had done that.

Her literary Block in row 3 of quadrant 1 grumbles at the thought of the Nobel committee ending its awards. Irving swears that if it hadn’t been for the Great De-evolution, he would have eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature. Even with the Great De-evolution in full swing, he managed to write the Great American Novel and became regarded as the final generation’s version of Hemingway and Steinbeck. Had the publishers still been around, his books would have been translated into every imaginable language, would have made girls in Malaysia weep, made farmers in the Ukraine compassionate, made monks in Argentina laugh.

All of Irving’s stories revolved around the end of the world.

“Yeah? Like what?” Elaine had asked the first time she heard of this Block’s achievements, causing Morgan to scramble for the details.

At thirty, Irving broke onto the literary scene with a romantic story of star-crossed Block lovers, who, although their families were no longer around to care one way or the other about a budding romance, were still separated: the lovers came from rival group homes. The caretakers from one home despised the caretakers from the opposing home and vice versa. For years, the pair of enemy houses had minor quarrels. They didn’t even allow the Blocks from one home to be near the Blocks from the other home.

But two caretakers, one from either house, set about ending the feud. To do this, one of them brought a young woman from her group home and the other brought a young man from his group home and they had the two Blocks attend a dance together. This didn’t bring about an end to the feud, however. It escalated it. To stop the fighting that ensued, the pair of caretakers decided to give their respective Blocks a fake poison in order to make the other house think the Block was dead. But, alas, a different caretaker, one who didn’t realize the Block was still alive, had the young lover put into an incinerator. If PEN awards were still being given, this would have received one.

Later in his career, Irving wrote of a king with three Block daughters for whom he divides his kingdom. The Block daughters don’t try to outwit each other or the king, but their caretakers do. With one of the Block daughters and her caretaker banished, the king begins to go insane. By the end, all three of his Block daughters have been murdered and the king dies full of despair. If Pulitzers were still being awarded, this would have been the unanimous winner.

At the peak of his career, Irving wrote a novel about a group home for Blocks in which one of the caretakers tries to be the dictator of all the others. Most of the other workers celebrate having someone so passionate about their cause, but three of them conspire to assassinate the ambitious man. After his death, another group of three forms, but this one seeks revenge for the caretaker’s murder. Amongst rows of Blocks, each lying peacefully in their cots, the two triumvirates of caretakers quarrel until one of them, guilt-ridden, commits suicide. The novel ends with the last remaining caretaker declaring how noble his fellow caretakers were. The only people to hear this speech are the hundreds of bodies that require nutrient bags in order to stay alive. And this is where, if they were still awarding Nobel Prizes for literature, Irving would have received one.

And yet no one has read Irving’s novels. Nor will they ever read them. His audience is dead. What remains is a group of impostors that resemble an audience. So very unfair.

It is already noon and Morgan has barely made any progress in the day’s chores. She reaches over and disconnects Irving’s nutrient bag from the line running into his forearm. Without waiting her feet shuffle across the concrete to where the next Block waits for her care.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking back at her writer.

Irving does not reply.