The Man Who Watched the World End (14 page)

The Johnsons suggested leaving the bodies in the backyard so the animals could have them. Mark told the rest of us: “Might as well benefit someone. It’ll keep the animals from trying to eat us.”

Harris Chittendon disagreed. “It’ll just teach them to eat humans.” He cringed when he said this. “They’ll get used to the idea real fast.”

I disagreed for a different reason; if Andrew died I would go crazy thinking about wolves and dogs taking turns picking him apart. The vote between cremating the bodies and leaving them for the animals came out to nine votes to three. Only Mr. Wong, too in touch with nature to'ededo realize that providing animals with an additional food source would encourage them to be more aggressive, voted alongside the Johnsons. The Johnsons were never one
s to hold a grudge, though; after being outvoted, they still helped with the next cremation.

I think about how they showed up after Mr. Landers passed away, offering to help with the cremation even though they weren’t in favor of it, and then I think about how they drove right past my house in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. Something must have happened to them in those final days to make them switch from the friendliest people in
Camelot to the ones who snuck out like felons.

Even though
Camelot is empty now, it took a lot longer for this neighborhood to fade away than it did for some of the others. By the time other nearby communities were ghost towns, our neighborhood still had half its lights on at night. I like to think that was because the people in Camelot knew the importance of remaining a close-knit community.

I thought about all of this today as I stared at the Johnsons
’ house from the edge of my driveway. For a moment, I had the thought that maybe they would come back, that perhaps they had just left to investigate the surrounding areas and would return in a day or two. It was foolish to be hopeful, however, to think of the Johnsons as anything but permanently gone.

In my driveway, in the middle of these daydreams, I heard a soft scuffle against the concrete. A snake was slithering at the edge of the road, only ten feet away from me. I heard
a hiss and then, from out of nowhere, a Siamese cat darted from the high grass and yanked the snake off the ground. Its paws batted and scraped at the snake, punishing it anytime it tried to fight back or get away. Finally the snake resigned itself to death and stopped resisting. I must have coughed then or made a noise because the cat jumped straight in the air, its tail puffing to three times its original size. The animal darted back into the weeds without its prize. The dead snake remained motionless on the broken concrete.

“It’s okay,” I said to the cat, wherever it was. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s all yours
.”

As I walked back to my house I heard the grass bristle again. It could very well have just been the wind, or it could have been another animal stealing what the cat had worked so hard for. I liked thinking it was the cat coming back to reclaim its meal and that if it ever saw me again it would think of me as the guy
who didn’t want to get in its way, the guy who just wanted it to be safe as it got along in the world as best as it knew how.

I wonder where the Johnsons are today. Do they still think about me? Do they have any idea that my chimney has become my last hope for getting Andrew to safety?

I still have a photograph of the six of us—the Johnsons and their two Block sisters next to Andrew and
me—on the coffee table. Three of us are smiling in the nice weather while the other three have blank stares. This was twenty years ago, back when I still had a hint of color in my hair and I could grin for a picture without feeling old, without faking the smile. It was before we had to take any subsequent pictures indoors for fear of the wolves and dogs having enough time to form an attack. The Johnsons had a similar picture in their living room.

It couldn’t have been easy for them to decide to
leave. As I stood by the window the night they drove away, I could have sworn Mark looked over at my house as his Block sisters sat motionless in the back seat. The lights were off inside my bedroom, he shouldn’t have been able to see me standing there. Thinking that he had looked my way could very well be my memory playing tricks on me. It’s just as likely that he never looked in my direction, that he gazed straight forward as he exited the community.

Maybe he and Mindy frequently discussed if they should stop by and say goodbye. Maybe one of them was adamant against telling me they were leaving, thinking I might try and talk them out of it. I wouldn’t have. Everyone is entitled to make their own decisions, to choose their own path. It was also possible that they were on the same side, that they agreed it was best to leave without acting like this was the end of something, even though it was.

After all the times we’d laughed about people quitting on Camelot, they probably didn’t want to hear the same jokes directed at them. I wonder if either of them considered what their Block sisters would have thought of the cloak-and-dagger escape if they had an opinion to voice on the matter. Would Mark and Mindy have been more considerate if the two sets of eyes traveling in the back seat could see what they were doing? If their sisters’ eyes were judging what was taking place instead of being silently oblivious, would the Johnsons still have abandoned their neighbor and his quiet brother?

They couldn’t be blamed for putting their
immediate family before anyone else. The Johnsons were here with me over the years as the neighborhood cleared out and only our two houses were left, but that didn’t mean they signed up to be responsible for me or Andrew once the end approached. They didn’t have to stayq. on thoughsp in the neighborhood. They most certainly didn’t owe me anything. But even so it would have been nice to give them hugs farewell and wish all four of them a safe journey.

It’s a good thing my grandfather isn’t still around. To his dying day, he said the Baltimore Colts sneaking out of town in the middle of the night was the sleaziest thing
he ever saw someone do.

I probably heard him tell me a hundred times: “Those guys were weasels.
All of them. No matter what they did before that night or afterwards, they showed their true colors when they did that. They were rats. Every single one of them. Rats. You don’t say goodbye like that. You don’t turn your back on people who were always there for you.”

He would pause at that point and take a deep breath before finishing his tirade the same way he always finished it: “They can all rot in hell. Rotten Bastards.”

That was usually when my father would remind my grandfather not to use that kind of language in front of little kids. But foul language or not, I knew what my grandfather was getting at. It’s why I wish the Johnsons had done something as simple as say goodbye, and it’s why I’ll never leave Andrew. No matter what.

I find myself trying to keep semblances of our old life together from before we were alone. It used to be that any time I misplaced the remote control I would turn to Andrew and tell him he needed to work on how much effort he put into his practical jokes. If a DVD isn’t in the right case I ask if that was his April Fools’ joke from the previous year or if a bear snuck in and is playing a joke on both of us. I know I sound like my grandfather when I say these things, but I don’t care. So today, when I spilled my dinner, I turned to him and said that was my April Fools’ joke on myself… only a couple of months early. He never grins at how lame my jokes are.

I prank dialed 9
-1-1 as a kid one time. It was an act done in the name of fun and mischievousness, but in actuality was really more about me just being an extremely dumb kid. I laughed when the operator asked what my emergency was. Being four or five at the time, I’m not sure what I expected to happen next. What did happen was the operator said he was sending a police unit over to the address that the phone number was registered to. There may have been a hint of crap in my pants when he said that. The giggling definitely stopped. Kids aren’t known for responding well in the face of panic; my best plan was to p a nice, quiet neighborhoodmeget sput the phone in Andrew’s non-moving fingers and hope he would take the blame. Needless to say, my father wasn’t amused, nor did he buy that his son, who couldn’t say a single word, let alone dial the phone, had pulled the prank. I spent the night in my room without any dinner.

And yet, like the dumb kid I was, I still managed not to learn my lesson because w
hen I was six my April Fools’ joke on my mother consisted of sneaking into Andrew’s room when she wasn’t looking and repositioning my brother’s arms and legs so it looked like he was moving on his own. I snuck back out of the room, but stayed nearby so I could see her reaction. It was difficult to contain my snickering. A couple of minutes went by with me laughing in the hallway closet. The next time she went in and checked on him she started yelling. She kept screaming and screaming until my father ran up the stairs to see what was happening. They were the kind of yells I would have expected to hear if someone was holding a winning lottery ticket and their life was changed forever. She didn’t have a chance to explain things to my father before I ran into the room and yelled, “April Fool!”

The
effect my joke would have was lost on me until it was too late. Until that moment, I had never seen my mother so happy. Immediately afterwards, she had never seemed so defeated. She reached out and balanced against the wall for support so she didn’t collapse. My father groaned. Even without an explanation he could guess what my prank had consisted of. He put his arm around my mother but she didn’t notice.

As soon as I
realized what I had done, I wished I’d been born like Andrew. That way I wouldn’t say or do dumb things. Either of my parents could have slapped me across the face. I would have accepted it as fair punishment. Part of me wished that was exactly what they had done instead of simply standing there, devastated. My dumb, little grin vanished as I stood in the doorway. There I stayed, at least a minute passing by, before offering a weak apology. Neither of them acknowledged me. I said I was sorry a second time, but my mother’s face was buried in my father’s shoulder while he whispered soothing words. Then I walked down the hall to my room and spent the rest of the day there by myself.

Neither of them ever punished me for what I had done. Neither of them even mentioned it that night
as we sat around the dinner table. When I asked my mom if I should eat dinner by myself up in my room, she shook her head and, while not saying anything, pulled out my normal chair between her and my father. None of us spoke that night as we ate, and I found myself wishing the entire time that one of them would scream at me, tell me to stop being so stupid and to grow up. They never did, though.

I came to hate
April Fools’, not just because it reminded me of my earlier idiocy, but because I got paid back for my earlier pranks by falling for every subsequent prank that was pulled on me. My parents and friends kq normal,be,new I was an easy mark so they all targeted me. When I was seven my dad put on a bear costume, stood outside my bedroom window, and banged on the glass. I pissed myself. The last laugh would be on him if he were still around to see how casual the bears are these days. If he were still alive it wouldn’t take long before he woke up to find a real bear at his window.

When I was nine my mom said our dog had given birth to puppies overnight. The dog wasn’t even pregnant, wasn’t even female, but in my youth I didn’t put any of those dots together
before yelling with delight. When I ran into the living room Oscar was lying on the floor by himself. My mom burst out laughing and yelled, “April Fool!” I don’t think I’ve ever felt so stupid. Although decidedly mean-spirited, part of me thinks she did that because it was the only way for her to get over the hurt I had caused a couple years earlier on the same day.

When I was in high school, a girl I liked asked me out on April 1
st
. I really should have known better. I didn’t even get my answer out (of course I was going to say yes) before she started snickering and then ran down the hall, bursting with laughter as she went. A different girl had to come up and say “April Fool!” on her friend’s behalf because the girl I liked couldn’t stop laughing.

After I graduated from high school and was working on a road crew, one of the guys on my team buried my lunch in wet concrete. There really wasn’t anything to fool me, I knew exactly where my
god damn lunch was, but the other guys still chuckled at my April Fools’ misfortune. I had to decide if wet concrete on my hands was a bigger hassle than an empty stomach. As far as I know, a perfectly preserved ham and swiss sandwich is still sitting under I-95.

Fortunately
, Andrew never conceives of real pranks to pull on me. I’m sure I’d fall for every single one. If the Johnsons were still here and Andrew could be my partner in crime, we might team up by filling a brown paper bag with our feces, sneaking up to their house, setting the bag on fire, and leaving it on their front porch. They would hear me howling with laughter, sharing a congratulatory high-five with Andrew, as they opened the door and had to stomp on it. Lucky for them, they’re gone.

There are only a handful of minutes left until this year passes and the new one begins. Times Square doesn’t exist anymore; New York was vacated more than twenty years ago, and even if it was still around, there are no people left to gatherqmp about ve been, let alone to watch a silly ball drop. I remember seeing the festivities on TV as a boy and laughing at how preposterous it was for people to cheer as the illuminated ball slid down the side of a building. Now I wish I could see it happen again if it meant everything would magically go back to the way it was.