The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (15 page)

29

Each day she has one fewer Block to care for, but each day her body endures another round of abuse. There is no way a woman of her age should be on her feet all day. And not just on her feet, but walking from bed to bed, shoving with all her weight behind her just to get each body into a new position. It does not matter if one less Block means she is able to finish by midnight; the amount of work she does each day is just too much. Even if she could somehow get to bed by eight o’clock or even nine o’clock, it wouldn’t matter. Her body is too old for this fight day after day without a break.

Old women aren’t meant to get up before the sun, work all through the day and night, and then do the same thing again for weeks at a time. It is a feat that people thirty years younger shouldn’t be trying. Over ninety years old, her body has no hope of standing up to the fatigue. It’s not long before she is sick.

Her body simply shuts down. The morning after Irving is sent to the incinerator, she opens her eyes, but that is all she can do. Her first thought is that this must be another nightmare if she is helpless in bed, but it is sunny outside and birds are chirping. These are things that don’t happen in her nightmares. And she is able to groan, yet another sign she isn’t about to be tormented by one of her Blocks.

Her body, still on her cot, is wracked with shaking and trembling that is beyond her control. Her arms bounce off her ribs without her being able to still them. Her teeth clatter. She alternates between shivering, even when under three blankets, and feeling like she must be directly under the notorious Miami sun. Her clothes are soaked so that, by the time the shivering starts again, she is even colder than before.

Thoughts enter her mind—
I have to start my rounds
—but just as quickly her eyes flutter momentarily before closing again. The next time they open, half the day has passed. She is feeling no better. It takes all of her strength to reach for the glass of water on her bedside table. She gulps it down without any care that it’s the only water within reach.

The next time she awakens, she reaches for the same glass of water. Only when it’s in her grasp does she remember drinking it hours earlier. Even the small movement of sitting up to drink leaves her head spinning.

An odor hits her. Urine. As bad as her sense of smell is, the piss must be her own if she can smell it. She is lying in her own mess. Too weak and unbalanced to move, there is nothing she can do but close her eyes and go back to sleep once more.

It is the middle of the night when she opens her eyes again. Her stomach is grumbling. Hunger adds to her weakness. Her mouth is dry. There is nothing to eat or drink within reach. The area she uses as a makeshift kitchen is twenty feet away. Just looking in that direction makes her head feel like it will wobble right off her neck and fall on the floor. The room appears to tumble in circles. There is no way she can make it the short distance to the kitchen. With her head still spinning, with no strength, she would end up in the middle of the floor, unable to move back to her bed or inch closer toward the food and water.

If she doesn’t get nourishment soon, though, she will die right in her bed. And, with her, the remaining fifty Blocks. The world will end with one person failing the very people she is meant to care for. It is not an end she will accept.

The only other thing near her is a half-empty box of nutrient bags for her Blocks. She reaches toward them, her eyes closed because that makes the spinning less severe, and withdraws one nutrient bag and one IV. It takes all of her concentration just to uncap the tip of the nutrient bag and then spin its connector onto its feed line.

She moans with exhaustion.

Once the nutrient bag is ready, she uncaps the other end of the tube. A needle is exposed. Without much care, certainly without the care she gives her Blocks when she is healthy, she jabs the needle into her forearm.

The last thought that goes through her head is,
That didn’t hurt at all; just a little prick really.

And then she passes out again.

30

A second day passes in the same haze of sickness and fatigue. On the third day, she is finally able to lift herself out of bed. As soon as she moves, though, she wishes she were back asleep. Her clothes, the sheets, and the mattress all smell like garbage. The smell of urine and shit that she has been able to avoid due to her aging senses finally fills her nose, but instead of being caused by her Blocks is produced by her. There is no way to know how many times she dirtied the mattress while she was asleep.

How ironic that I spend my days changing everyone around me, and now no one is around to help me when I’m filthy.

She remains there, on her back, thinking. The less she moves while she formulates a game plan, the less of a mess there will be to clean up. There is no point to getting out of bed right away just to distance herself from the filth. She has been lying in it for two days; what is another couple of minutes? There is no shame, nothing to be embarrassed about. No one is around to see her predicament or to judge her for remaining in her own excrement.

It’s important to make sure her equilibrium is back. If she were to dart out of bed too quickly, she might become lightheaded and fall flat on the concrete. She props herself up on one arm. The room is not spinning in circles; her vision seems steady.

She looks around the gutted gymnasium, tries to think of the best course of action for her Blocks. The nutrient bags all have the same regulator, meaning they will all provide each Block with the same steady amount of nutrition day and night. Looking down at her own bag, she sees it is nearly empty, meaning that in the two days that have passed, the Blocks have only been without food and water for maybe eight hours. Twelve hours max.

The priorities she comes up with, in order, are: get food and water for herself so she can regain her strength and function properly, determine the living from the dead, refill the nutrient bags of the living, get herself cleaned off. After all of that is done, she can worry about getting the dead Blocks to the incinerator. The luxury of not having the living in beds next to the dead will have to be put on hold for a while.

If she tries to do any more than this, if she tries to work around the clock until everyone is cared for again, she will relapse into a bedridden mess. Her body is weaker than it has ever been. She is used to hobbling to get from one place to another. She is even used to arthritic fingers and not being able to taste much of the food she eats unless she adds a spoon full of salt to it. But she is not used to feeling utterly and completely feeble in her old age. This is how people die without realizing they have deteriorated away to nothing. Her dry mouth, her dirty clothes, the nutrient bag still connected to her arm, all remind her she is no longer the young person she used to be.

Maybe life starts the first time you understand your own limitations and is measured by the ways you exceed those boundaries.

The stench of shit reminds her that she needs to start moving.

The living Blocks, however many are left, won’t be repositioned and cleaned until the following day, maybe not for two more days. It depends on how much she can manage before she needs rest. It also depends on how many of her Blocks are dead and how long it takes her to transport each one to the incinerator. By the time she gets to caring for the living again, four days could easily pass. She has no idea how long it takes for bedsores to develop or for maggots to harvest from within shit-filled diapers. Hopefully, it is longer than four days.

She fills a glass with water, drinks it, refills it, and drinks that too. From the food processor, a bowl of soup is generated. It does not have much taste.

How did Daniel deal with his frailty and with the overwhelming responsibility he surely faced? Did he accept his fate, his age, his weakening body? Did he resign himself to defeat? Or did he fight the way Morgan fought until she got sick? Is his body lying on the floor in the Los Angeles group home, where he finally crumpled in exhaustion, never to get back up? Toward the end, was Daniel forced to sacrifice a couple of his Blocks for the well-being of the majority, or was his un-doing that he tried to force everyone to keep living until there was too much sickness and suffering to recover from?

Are the things that are happening to her the same things that happened in Los Angeles, Houston, and New Orleans? Did the group home in Los Angeles finally go quiet when Daniel worked himself to death? Did the final group home in Houston incur a mass starvation after the final caretaker there went to sleep one night and never woke up again? Did the caretaker at the New Orleans group home fear this possibility so much that she took matters into her own hands by burning the entire home to the ground before taking her own life?

She pushes these thoughts from her head. They are not helpful. After getting food and water for herself, she walks through the four quadrants. It’s worse than she feared.

There are dead bodies everywhere. Some died with their eyes and mouths open, giving them the appearance of being frightened as life left them. These are the bodies she finds herself looking away from. Others died with their eyes closed, as if they were aware of what was happening and had resigned themselves to not being saved. To these, she apologizes.

A surprising amount of the dead are already grey, a series of grotesque sculptures aligned in rows. A few of the bodies, still with rosy flesh, trick her into thinking they are still alive. It’s only when she feels for a pulse and meets the resistance of rigor mortis that she knows there will be no heartbeat. These are the bodies that make her shudder. She is used to touching these people, but touching a wrist or fingers that are locked in the freeze of death always makes her yank her hand back. It’s not something she is proud of. On the contrary, she apologizes each time it happens.

The pungency of shit and death and sickness are everywhere. So pervasive is the stench of human excrement that she cannot tell which Blocks need to be changed and which merely released whatever waste they had when they died.

She can use the forklift to transport dead bodies to the incinerator, but removing a corpse does not erase the smell of death. If only the food processor could make something resembling air fresheners. For the first time in a long time she is thankful for still having good eyesight while the rest of her senses faded away.

For the Blocks that still seem healthy, she refills their bags and tells them she will be back soon to finish caring for them. For the ones that are already dead, she marks an X on one of their hands and continues on to the next bed.

Only sixteen of the fifty Blocks are still alive. Three of these appear so weak that bringing them back to health might be more torture than simply letting them die.

With her headcount done, with the nutrient bags of the living refilled, she powers up the forklift. One by one, the dead are transported to the flames, bed and all. The work takes longer than she thinks it should. Only half of the dead are gone, into the incinerator, by the time midnight comes around.

The last thing to go in the incinerator that night is her own bed. It would take more energy to change the mattress and sheets than it would to simply burn the entire cot. She can put a blanket down on one of the spare beds and sleep there. The days of being picky are gone.

The last thing she says before going to sleep is, “I’m sorry.” She says this to those still living. And then, “I wish I could do more, but for one night you’ll have to be stuck around the less fortunate.”

For once, her Blocks are not talkative. Not a single one of them offers a reply.

The next day she transports the rest of the dead to the incinerator. With only a couple of hours left in the day, she begins cleaning and repositioning the few Blocks who have survived with her. And when she grows weak and needs a break from repositioning bodies, she sits and enjoys some food and water.

Everywhere she looks, there are pitiful reminders of what used to be an organized group home. Quadrant 4 is no longer four neatly aligned rows with four Blocks in each row. There are no more rows in quadrant 4 at all, only three bodies scattered like a misaligned constellation. Quadrant 3 only has five Blocks.

She considers reorganizing the remaining beds into neat lines, one final quadrant of survivors. It would offer a semblance of the life she once knew, maybe even fool her into being able to believe that life can continue as it had before she fell ill. But she knows this act would only be for aesthetics, would be wasted time and needless energy. And so, because of this, there are large patches of bare concrete between each body. Instead of looking like they are part of a group, each Block looks like it is slowly floating out in space, carried in random directions by other stars, by black holes, by whatever invisible forces control everything that is happening all around them.

31

A storm approaches. Its wind sounds like a plane’s engine, like a great jumbo jet must be parked right outside the group home. But instead of taking her to safety, the booming noise ensures she is trapped.

The roof whines against the wind’s force. The sheets overlap so that if one goes most will go. The design is intended to prevent minor leaks and to ensure the roof lasts as long as possible. Unless, of course, an entire panel is torn away. If that happens, most of the roof would fly apart and so much water will be channeled into the room that she will have to flee with whatever supplies and Blocks she can transport. She either won’t get wet, or a flood will wash them away. There is no in-between.

It rains for two days straight. It thunders too, but this she barely acknowledges compared to the downpour of water and the force of the wind. She fears looking out the windows. If the streets are flooded, if the weeds are drowned under a newly formed lake, it’s a matter of time until water starts rushing in. If water doesn’t start coming down through the roof, it will surely come in under the doors. She will have to decide if she sticks it out with her Blocks, knowing full well that none of them will survive the sickness and mold that will get them, or if she will pack what little she still calls her own and head for the nearest suitable place to live by herself.

If it weren’t for the power generator, ensuring she doesn’t have to try caring for the remaining Blocks without any lights or air conditioning, they would be lost already. She would be bumping into cots until her shins were purple and she was limping everywhere she went (more than she limps already). Without music echoing through the giant room, she would be forced to hear her own feet shuffling across the floor, would have to acknowledge how loud her breathing is just from performing simple chores all day.

For two days and two nights, the rain and wind sound like they will surely wash the gym away.

This is it
, she thinks, preparing herself for the end.

A splattering of water showers down on random parts of the gymnasium floor where the metal sheets are briefly lifted by the wind. The gust subsides, though, and the roof settles again. The structure remains firm.

Eventually, the rain recedes. Only after she looks up and sees sun pouring through the clouds does she allow herself to look outside at her surroundings. Further down the road, the streets are flooded. A cat, separated by an impromptu body of water from the kittens it has left inside a gutted warehouse, lets out long cries. The kittens inch to the edge of the factory, their little paws almost touching this new lake that has appeared out of nowhere, each young animal wanting only to be back with its mother. But the adult cat will not risk swimming to her kittens, and the kittens cannot force themselves to step into this world of water that they know nothing about, no matter how much they want to suckle and be comforted and warm. The only thing they can do is cry.

Morgan closes the door and returns to her Blocks. She knows suffering is everywhere, that life was like this before the Great De-evolution and will continue to be this way after she is no longer here. But to see the suffering, to see animals, her and her Blocks included, that want nothing more than to get along as best as they can, only to be tormented by loss and anguish, is too much sometimes.

Maybe life begins the first time you understand the magnitude of suffering around you, and ends the last time you witness that sorrow.

It has only stopped raining for an hour before drops of water begin tinkling against the metal roof once again. Another storm already. And within seconds of those first drops, another barrage begins pouring down on the city. She does everything she can to get the thought of that cat and her kittens out of her mind. The worst part will be in the morning when the meowing has stopped and she knows the mother cat had to leave her kittens to die. That’s exactly why she shouldn’t have looked out the window in the first place.

“You’re a trooper,” she tells one of her resilient Blocks, patting him on the shoulder.

To another, she says, “I’m glad you’re still here with me,” and lets her hand brush over the woman’s shin as she walks past.

Everywhere she goes, she tells each person how glad she is to have them around. But no amount of endless banter with her Blocks can get the sound of those sad cats out of her head.

The rain keeps falling.