The Man Who Watched the World End (13 page)

More and more of our nights are spent without music or movies playing. Andrew and I still sit in the living room
, but it seems nicer to leave the TV and stereo off and tell him stories late into the night. Usually it isn’t until his eyes randomly shut before I realize I can barely stay awake myself.

It used to be that I would only recount the happy memories from our childhood: the time I hit the game-winning homerun in middle school, the time I got to meet one of my favorite actors, my senior prom. But q, spspjonow I find myself telling him—I won’t say
the bad parts
—the less favorable stories I used to keep to myself.

I remind him about the time I accidently overflowed the
toilet and tried to blame it on him. I’m still ashamed when I retell the story of putting a mouse in the refrigerator so it would startle my mom, but leaving it there too long, and how she found a dead rodent the next morning. I’ll never forgive myself for how that mouse died, or for how I acted as though its wellbeing was something I could play with. Some of the stories I recite, like the one of the mouse, don’t present me in the greatest light, but they were turning points in one way or another. And they each made me into the person I am today.

With
the bears and dogs growing more aggressive every day, and with our health declining, there’s a good chance Andrew might feel bad about his lot in life if he could understand the stories I tell. He never takes anything to heart, though. He sits there with a blank expression, unaffected by everything I say. He even sat that way when I told him that our father had passed away. The absurdity of the Blocks is that there will never be a single thing I can say or do that will make one of them gasp with shock or break out in a giant smile. They get to skip the bad parts of life, but they also miss the good parts. Life is neither pleasant nor depressing for them; it passes them by as though everything were a completely neutral shade of grey.

It forces you to ask what the point of their lives is if they can’t participate in their existence. Why would nature create life that can’t interact, can’t do anything? The Blocks are like flowers or trees: they hope for food and water but are unable to ask for either. The end result of their life is completely out of their own hands
—like us being found by someone travelling south.

I try not to think about it because I know it’s out of my hands. Periodically, throughout the day, I find myself forgetting to keep the fire active, and I know that deep down I’m doing this because I doubt anyone will ever come and find us. For Andrew’s sake, I make myself get up and add something else to start a new fire.

Christmas.
Where has the time gone? It certainly doesn’t feel like Christmas. Each day takes forever for the sun to rise and set, but then I look back at the culmination of days and it seems like just last week it was still summer. It makes me wonder if Andrew has any perception ofq before about ve been time or if his life is one never-ending day.

I a
m glad, though, that he isn’t able to understand the waiting game we’re playing. The baseball cards are gone. The supply of comics shrinks each day. Through it all, no engines have approached the community. I would thankfully spend Christmas in the backseat of a pick-up truck if it meant we were on our way to one of the final settlements.

M
y parents constantly reinforced the idea that Christmas was the most important family day of the year. There were times when my father had to miss my birthday, but he never missed a Christmas. Each year on my birthday, my mother made my favorite meal, but the portions of food she made at Christmas outdid anything she prepared the rest of the year. The bowl of mashed potatoes lasted us a month. The platter of stuffing was high enough to block my view of Andrew sitting on the other side of the table. Now, Christmas is a time for me to sit alone with my brother in silence. Jingles echo in the empty house to remind me of how alone I am. Listening to the carols is depressing, but it’s even more disheartening to have silence, so when the CD gets to the end I push PLAY again and listen to it all over.

I used to make
a present for Andrew each year. Sometimes it was a decorated picture of the two of us, other times it was a painting I made to give our house more color. Many of these are still hanging in Andrew’s bedroom. I rarely take him back to his room anymore, however, so he never sees them. Layers of dust have collected on each one, turning the happy, vibrant colors into muted, historic-looking relics.

One Christmas
Eve I found an abandoned kitten on our patio and presented it to Andrew as his present. He stared through me and through the kitten without any reaction. I took care of the miniature cat as best as I could. If I didn’t, if I left it outside to fend for itself, it would be eaten by a dog before it ever had a chance to freeze to death. It dawned on me right away that I had almost no idea how to take care of a pet. Pets lost all of their charm sixty years earlier when the first generation of Blocks were old enough to resemble adults. The elderly were bogged down with taking care of thirty and forty year-old Blocks; they couldn’t manage, or didn’t want to manage, the additional responsibility of iguanas, parrots, hamsters, or something larger. Not many people wanted a dog if they didn’t have children to offer as a playmate. Brothers and sisters who couldn’t take care of themselves and needed constant attention took the place of needy cats.

I
t didn’t take long for me to come to the same conclusion. Even with a litter box, that little kitten pissed and crapped all over my house. I cleaned up cat crap and then found more of the same in the next room. I gave it a second litter box but it preferred our carpet. Walking past the living room one day, I noticed it had peed on Andrew’s lap. I petted the kitten one last time, told it I was sorry, and put it back out on the 'medo patio. I returned to Andrew and cleaned him off. When I went back to the patio door the kitten was already gone. I hated myself for knowing how helpless it was, not much different from Andrew when I thought about it, and for what I had let happen.

Each Christmas
I still find myself thinking of that little kitten. Was it really so bad to have a kitten’s piss around the house if it meant I was saving its life while also preserving a little bit of the earlier life I had known? When I was a boy I never would have put that kitten outside, left it to fend for itself. What’s changed since then that now I am willing to?

I tried to think about the cat growing up to be full-size
d, tried to reassure myself by saying it never would have been completely tame. It would claw at our furniture, maybe even claw at Andrew when I wasn’t watching. It might even nibble on him when it got hungry and he was the easiest thing to snack on. In my heart, though, I know it was a tiny, defenseless animal that just wanted to be loved and taken care of, and I put it out to fend for itself, knowing it couldn’t.

That
was the last Christmas present I gave my brother. The past few years I’ve celebrated by making a nice dinner and going to bed early. One of man’s last inventions was the creation of flavored nutrient packs for Blocks. Scientists said it didn’t matter what the nutrient packs smelled like because the Blocks had no perception of taste or smell, and the food was pushed through a tube going into their arms, not their mouths. But the companies marketing the different flavored packs—turkey and gravy, primavera pasta, and birthday cake—tugged on families’ heart strings. It worked. With nothing else to spend my money on in those final days of an organized economy, I ordered a supply of them and still give one to Andrew each Christmas.

The holiday
has morphed into a final chance each year to celebrate your family’s memory. Not many people bothered giving each other gifts because whatever was given would only bog you down or get left behind when you moved further south to join a group community. Sometimes I sit with Andrew and flip through old photo albums of when our parents were alive and we all spent Christmas together. I laugh when I get to the photo of my mom giving my dad a tie that she knew he would think was ugly. She was right. In the picture, you can clearly see him trying to give his best I-like-it-because-you-gave-it-to-me face, but you can see right through him. That tie is still down in the basement in a box somewhere. It will be one of the many things we don’t have room for if someone sees the smoke coming from our chimney and comes to help us get to one of the final settlements. And then there’s the picture of my mother sitting on the floor in front of Andrew as she opened his presents for him. No matter how many more Christmases Andrew and I spend together, that photo album will always come up from the basement, and I will flip through it and laugh about the times we shared when we were young and didn’t have a care in the world. So in that regard at least, something did stay the same when everything else changed and got out of my control.qd.,be,

Merry Christmas Andrew, I love you.

The Great De-evolution and the resulting migration south were responsible for the appearance of a new phobia. Where people had once been claustrophobic or agoraphobic, more and more people became unreasonably afraid of not being near enough people. Even people
who were in still-populated neighborhoods started panicking. The overwhelming sense held by these people was that a disaster could happen at any moment and they would be too far away from real civilization, whatever that meant, and they wouldn’t have the social infrastructure around them needed to respond to a hurricane or earthquake, or in the case of Boston, a blizzard.

They packed up their belongings and moved to a
more southern city just because it helped them feel secure. There weren’t many benefits from living in Miami that you couldn’t get in Camelot, but it made people feel better to be in large groups. I guess that’s understandable. And, to be honest, it’s probably that exact same fear that has driven me to look for a way out of Camelot. Now that the Johnsons are gone, I find myself afraid, just like the others were, that it’s a matter of time until something bad happens here and I’ll be stuck without the ability to take care of Andrew any longer.

Mrs. Lee from across the street was one of the most reserved people I knew. She attended every neighborhood cookout but she was always in the corner watching other people engage in conversation rather than participating
herself. Then one night, as everyone was drinking beer and all the Blocks in the neighborhood were lined up in patio chairs so they could enjoy the outdoors as well, she asked the group nearest to her if they were worried about being stuck in Camelot when something happened. The group asked her what she thought might happen. She didn’t have a clear answer. One of the people in the group said he felt as safe in their neighborhood as he would in a random city. A different woman in the group said she would rather stay in an area she was familiar with than live amongst people she didn’t know. Mrs. Lee nodded without saying anything. But later in the evening she asked the exact same question again. Todd (I wish I could remember his last name), from down the street, was in the middle of a big bite of his BBQ sandwich as he laughed away her question.

The next time everyone gathered for a cookout she asked the question a third time. But this time, when people gave the same types of answers, she shook her head and mumbled to herself. Shortly after that she apologized and went home for the evening. Her house was va
cant the next morning.

She left her garage door open with a spray painted message for the rest of us: “You’re all going to die.” I picked up the can of spray paint and blurred out her words so they wouldn’t upset anyone else in the neighborhood. Once the message was painted over I added a nice little smiley face on her garage wall. There’s no way to know if she made it to New Orleans or Miami, but I hope she did. And I hope she’s happier there than she was here.

People like Mrs. Lee left Camelot of their own accord. More often, people simply passed away, their house becoming an unintentional mausoleum. A different woman from down the street, Mrs. Wilson, gradually cut down on the number of cook-outs she attended. It wasn’t until she was absent for two weeks in a row that we realized she had finally passed away in her living room. The same thing happened to Ed Whimsley, who lived at the end of the street, and to the Anderson couple one street over.

The bodies could have been left in the house, there were enough empty houses that no one would ever care if a few homes on the street hosted decomposing corpses, but the remaining citizens always took it upon themselves to wrap the bodies in a blanket and give them a proper burial. The
Stevensons, from down the road, were in their fifties when they moved to Camelot. Jimmy Stevenson passed away at the age of 78 from a heart attack. His wife followed six months later.

It was a bonding experience for the last of us to dig their graves. The hour of digging was good exercise, and the common effort gave our friend
s the burials they deserved. Mrs. Stevenson was the last burial we did ourselves. After that we were too old to continue—a bunch of old men in their seventies standing around a hole, each waiting for the next man to pick up the shovel and continue digging. From then on we started using a small excavator to dig each grave. The Dietrichs’ front yard became the official spot for the neighborhood cemetery. Later, when the excavator broke down and there was no one else left to repair it, we dragged the bodies out to the back of the Dietrichs’ house and had them cremated.