The Man Who Watched the World End (10 page)

Hundreds of questions keep me restless at night.
Is it too late to be rescued? Was the Johnsons’ decision to leave better than my decision to stay? Did they make it to where they wanted to go, or did they get stranded halfway there and set up residence in another abandoned neighborhood? What would my parents have thought was the better course of action? Would my mother and father have the foresight to see which destination would give Andrew his longest and safest life? If something happens to me, is Andrew better off living out his last days on the sofa, or would he be better off surrounded by hundreds of other Blocks in a group home?

Perhaps my late night diary entries are the very thing keeping me up at night. They rub my face in
doubt, force me to think about my worries. Maybe if I didn’t sit in front of this computer and concentrate on what exactly was bothering me I would be able to ignore. By the time spspjo future problems. It could be nice to let them sneak up on me, to worry about them at the last minute instead of dreading them as they approach. I could go to bed believing my biggest concern is the leaking roof.

A lot of nights, my mind gets the better of me and I end up envisioning how silly I must look typing away on a keyboard—an old man’s random ramblings. I’m much too old to be self-conscious. Gone
are the days when I got nervous at the thought of asking out the girl I liked. But the silence around me, combined with my loneliness, makes me too aware of my circumstances. If the houses on either side of me were occupied with people throwing parties or having family dinners, I wouldn’t feel so anxious being alone in front of my computer. Hell, I’d settle for quiet neighbors playing board games or reading books if it meant I wasn’t alone in Camelot.

I fantasize about having a brother
who can interrupt my thoughts by barging into my room with pointless banter. I’d act like I was irritated with him, but I would secretly welcome it. My problem—one of my problems—is that I have a brother down the hall, yet I’m still alone. Is it natural for people to put their thoughts and concerns on paper when they get to be my age, or is this something I do because I feel guilty about the way things are turning out?

A lot of my days are spent wishing I could have the same life my father had. He got married. My mother gave him love. He had children. There was always noise and activity in the house. In me, he had an apprentice, someone he could pass along all the
things he knew. Each morning he woke up and went to a job he wasn’t crazy about, but that offered him yet another constant through the years. It was all a man could hope for, and it’s exactly what I yearn for now.

Instead, I have weeds. No wife. No children. Not even a job I would love to hate. Just weeds. Each time I look outside
, the weeds have blotted out more of the driveway and the roads and everything else in their path. From my window, the street looks like it’s covered in algae, however, I know that when I get closer, the green would begin to distinguish itself into thousands and thousands of individual stalks.

When I see the world as it is today, I’m glad Andrew is the only one here with me. I don’t know what I’d do if I had a wife and children to protect. They wouldn’t be allowed to play outside; they wouldn’t know what it was like to go camping or even waste time in a tree house. I’d lose my mind if I looked outside and saw my son’s baseball glove on the ground as the dogs dragged him, still alive and screaming, into the depths of the woods. What kind of life would they enjoy if they were trapped in a house with their father and an uncle
who didn’t talk or move?

I wish for a life in which I could have settled down and yelled, “April Fool!”s ,bell with my childhood sweetheart, married her, had two or three children,
watched them grow into young adults. I fantasize about being my son’s little league coach and cheering louder than any other parent when he gets a game-winning hit. I find myself daydreaming about the interrogation that would take place the first time my daughter brought a boy over to the house. I’d scare that little bastard so bad he’d piss himself right in front of my baby girl. They seemed like stupid aspirations when I was a kid. Maybe I can just get back to the same frame of mind I had when I was twenty and didn’t want to be tied down by crying kids or a nagging wife. I used to burst out laughing when my other friends talked about graduating high school and getting married. Get married? Why? But now, with wrinkled skin and no one to talk to except Andrew, I see the value of what I mocked.

That final high school graduation, many years ago now, might have been when the end was truly signaled, at least for me. It wasn’t when all of the world’s infants were born with non-functioning minds, it was when the other kids around me stopped worrying about what they would be when they grew up and began to focus on taking care of the masses of Blocks.

My mom used to sit by my bed when I was a boy and tell me that anything was possible; I could grow up to be anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough and never gave up. I wonder what kind of message I would tell my own son today—if I had one. It would be a lie to say any wish, any dream, is still possible. Aspiring to be President is pointless because the government disbanded. There are no more actors or baseball players to hang posters of in your bedroom. Astronauts are a thing of the past. As are firemen, lawyers, doctors, and everything else boys used to dream of being at that age when all of life is still ahead of them. There are no more occupations, there is only growing old. You can grow old in empty neighborhoods or in cities that used to hold millions of people and now only hold hundreds, but either way the result is the same.

If the glass is half full: I sort of understand what it’s like to raise a child because I’ve had to take care of Andrew his entire life. I clean him when he needs cleaning, I put him to bed, make sure he’s not cold,
keep him healthy. There weren’t, though, any of the first time experiences a father gets to go through that make fatherhood worthwhile. I’ll never get to take Andrew to the bus stop for his first day of school. I’ll never sit in the stands during his little league games. And I’ll never see him get nervous before his first date. If there is a bright side to be found, I also won’t have to go through him resenting me for making him do his homework before he’s allowed to go outside and play. I’ll never accidently overhear him cursing me under his breath for giving him an early curfew. I get an imposter’s version of what it might be like to be a father. I feed Andrew, watch over him, give him shelter, talk to him all day. I get some of the experiences in disproportionate amounts while never experiencing other aspects at all. It’s almost like a bad lifelong version of an April Fools’ joke.

I have to remind myself that Andrew isn’t a child, but my brother. I take care of him, but that do and yelled, “April Fool!”s ,bellesn’t define his life or my own.
When you go without many people to talk to, you start forgetting what you really feel. You find yourself hoping someone else can remind you of who you used to be and who you’re becoming. Maybe this diary will do that for me now.

A god damn snake tried to fight me today. The first few boxes of baseball cards didn’t last very long, so I went down to get some more to use for fuel in my chimney. I should have known there would be trouble because I sat up last night listening to a mouse crying for help from under my feet. Who would have guessed such a little animal could wail in fear so loud? I wasn’t able to find the mouse when I went down there today, it wasn’t whining to be saved anymore, so I assume a snake finally flushed it out of its hiding spot and finished the job.

Maybe it was the s
ame snake that attacked me. It wasn’t content with attempting a simple striking bite; it wanted a full on duel where only one of us would be alive at the end. I gave a nice cat-like jump away from its strike. After my jump I was only two feet away from where I had started—in my youth it would have been five or six feet—but it was still more than I thought my old body capable of.

The
snake moved toward me. When I backed away, it followed. I stomped the ground to let it know a large predator was in front of it, but instead of deterring the reptile, it got more aggressive and came right at me with its tongue firing in and out. It slithered at me faster than I thought a snake could move. I turned and ran back upstairs as quickly as my creaky knees would let me. That fucking snake slithered up the steps, one step at a time, until it was right on the other side of the closed basement door. As I collected my breath, I could hear it slithering there. Waiting. The snake was too big to fit under the gap between the floor and the door. With my foot, I pushed the towel back in front of the door. The snake remained there for a while to see if I wanted to give round two a try, then hissed and slithered off in irritation. I gave it the middle finger as it departed. I’ve never seen a snake act like that before. I guess all of the animals, not just the wolves and bears, want me for food. Or the snakes are mad that I’m slowly removing boxes from down there.

Without my baseball cards taking up
as much space, the basement seems twice as big. I was able to get back into corners of the storage area I hadn’t looked over in years. My dad’s collection of beer-steins was in a box covered with spider eggs. A box filled with my mom’s old sewing supplies was in a corner caked with rat droppings.

. None of themspspjoThere are probably enough cards to last another week.
If someone still hasn’t found us by then, I’ll switch over to my old comic book collection. One of the boxes I found today was of the last set of Topps cards ever produced. There were no rookie cards in that last set. All of the players had been in the majors for a decade by that point.

I watched
that last game on TV with my father and Andrew. It was game four of the World Series. There was never another time, either before or after, when I saw my dad get as upset as he was that day.

The talent in those final years was vastly inferior to what it had been when I was a little boy; the youngest players were in their late forties. Most teams had a handful of players in
their fifties. A relief pitcher for the Mets was sixty-one. The league had contracted to sixteen teams by that point, but the pageantry of the World Series still managed to make everyone forget the players’ ages or that there were only eight teams in the American League and eight in the National League.

It was the third inning. The Cardinals
’ ace was on the mound. He hadn’t allowed any hits yet. My father told Andrew and me that if any pitcher had a chance of throwing a no-hitter in the World Series it was him. A fast ball zipped past the batter for another strike out. And then, that batter walking back to the dugout and the next batter starting toward the plate, a puff of dirt exploded next to the pitcher’s foot. No one knew what it was at first; the crowd’s cheering had drowned out the discharge. The pitcher looked at his feet in confusion. He knew something had happened that shouldn’t normally occur in the middle of a baseball game, but wasn’t sure what it was or why it was happening. Then the pitcher’s head exploded and his body dropped to the ground. The second bullet had entered through the back of his head and exited by his chin. Parts of his face were scattered across the in-field.

“No,” my dad said with a groan. Just a simple
“no” as if disagreeing with what just happened would stop it from having happened in the first place.

There was a moment of shock on the field as the players looked around for the shooter. A mad scramble for the dugouts ensued when they realized they could be the next person in the
bullseye. Only the shortstop, the pitcher’s best friend, stayed on the mound and held the dead man in his arms. There were no more bullets, though.

“Turn it off,” my father said. I pointed the remote control toward the TV
, but something kept me from making the screen go black. “Turn that trash off,” my father said, so softly I could barely hear him.q to see,be,

When the screen went blank he got up and disappeared into his bedroom. My mother went back to try and comfort him. Even so, he didn’t come out of his room the rest of the night. She told me later that
he wasn’t upset because the pitcher was murdered or that it happened at the World Series or even that it was on live television; it upset him that Andrew and I would never be able to have the same kind of awe he had for the game when he was our age. That shot had signaled the end of any hope that we could have the same life, the same possibilities, afforded to my dad. Everything that was great about America’s game was gone after that.

Police caught the pitcher’s killer later that night. More accurately, he turned himself in after climbing down from the stadium rafters. His job as part of the field crew allowed him to carry an uninspected duffle bag into the stadium. He
took it up into the recesses of the ballpark where he assembled his sniper rifle. Reporters were waiting outside the stadium when police escorted him into the backseat of one of their cars. A reporter asked the man why he killed the pitcher. The man turned to the woman holding the microphone and, starting to cry, said he had five children at home, all of whom were Blocks. None of them would ever be able to watch a baseball game, let alone play little league.

“That’s not fair,” the man said as he was ushered into the back seat of the police cruiser.

At first they talked about playing the rest of the game a week later. Then they talked about finishing it at the beginning of the next season. But after the shooting, after hearing the shooter’s motivation, everyone suddenly seemed to notice how old the players were and that with only sixteen teams it wasn’t the same as it had been before. They didn’t bother playing any more games after that.