The Man Who Watched the World End (20 page)

I only have one brother, yet I find myself exhausted each evening from taking care of him.
I find myself bringing his toothbrush into the living room and brushing his teeth there. My shoulders ache from the simple act of keeping the electric shaver running back and forth over his cheeks. The days I skip shaving him he actually resembles a man going through the normal stages of life rather than someone drifting along for almost eighty years. When I was younger I could yank him up from the sofa and carry him in my arms to the bathroom. At the time, I liked thinking it must have resembled a scene from an old movie in which a firefighter was the protagonist. My mom used to laugh hysterically when I would carry Andrew under my arm like he was a heavy suitcase. Now, though, on the few occasions when I still think it worthwhile to move him, it takes me the better part of an hour to keep repositioning him off the sofa and onto his wheelchair.

Oscar, always more observant and passive-aggressive than we gave him credit for (he was, after all, the same dog that routinely crapped on the carpet if he felt slighted), would have been jealous
of the treatment Andrew receives. The dog wasn’t allowed on the sofa, let alone allowed to sleep and crap on it.

This
just goes to show how my priorities change depending on my circumstances. Fifty years ago I wouldn’t let my dog jump up on the sofa because I didn’t want to get fur on the fabric. Now I let my own brother sit on the same sofa that he has shit on a hundred times over. If you had told me back then that this is how things would turn out I probably would have joined everyone else in New Orleans or Miami. It’s amazing how much one person can stand if there are only small changes from one day to the next. My circumstances here don’t seem too terrible today because I saw what it was like yesterday and the day before that. Changes to Andrew, to me, to our house, to the neighborhood, are all at a snail’s pace. If I could magically go from how life was forty years ago to how life is today, I would pack my things as quickly as possible and see if I could get to the settlement before the Johnsons.

I can’t imagine what it’s like for the caregivers at the group homes where three or four regular people take care of thousands of Blocks. How do they do it? I saw one of the group homes on a webcast
a few years back. It was the Cleveland community before they packed up and joined with the Cincinnati group. Their group home was a converted incinerator factory, which, in turn, had been a converted elementary school at one point. The entire inside was gutted, so there was nothing resembling classrooms, a gymnasium, or a cafeteria. Instead, the brick walls became one giant coliseum of Blocks.

Thousands of them were arranged on the floor in neat rows, each one with a blanket underneath
its motionless body so it wasn’t directly on the hard concrete. The video showed a woman talking and smiling to each Block as she made sure their nutrient bags were full. A different woman, this one in the background, could be seen wetting a sponge and rubbing it on the lips of the motionless Blocks. It was supposed to show how humanely the Blocks were being treated. Aisles provided the caretakers with paths to walk up and down the different quadrants of the facility. The camera panned back and the hundreds of Blocks on the screen became a thousand, then five thousand, then ten thousand. It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen.

The thought of Andrew becoming just another body in a giant mass of nameless people was enough to never let him out of my sight. I didn’t mind the thought of the Johnsons taking care of
him if I died first, but leaving him in the middle of that gigantic horde of lifeless people seemed like an injustice. Worse, it was something my parents would have abhorred. These rows of men and women were people’s sons and daughters. They were people’s brothers and sisters. And they were just abandoned. I thought back to the way my mother answered my questions when I was a boy—about taking Andrew on vacation with us if he didn’t know what was going on around him—and I understood that her worst nightmare would have been seeing Andrew lined up as part of a row of a hundred Blocks.

When I think of whether or not I made the right decision for Andrew, I remember that footage. It was impossible not to imagine
him as a random body—line 17 in row 57—surrounded by people he didn’t know, and I tell myself he would rather be here with me, even if it’s just the two of us fending for ourselves. If he could have heard the way my mother and father spoke about him, about the importance of family, if he could have seen my father holding him above the waves as they crashed, there would be no other place my brother would want to be than right here.

I have casual thoughts (very quickly discounted) about leaving Andrew outside to fend for
himself. They aren’t serious ideas, just whimsical I-could-do-this kind of thoughts that are gone as soon as they arrive. Like driving head-on into an approaching car, or grabbing a cop’s gun out of its holster. Leaving him outside is the same as turning him over to the dogs and vultures. The thought makes me sick to my stomach. Andrew will never be able to smile at one of my jokes, know the highs and lows of growing older, or be able to put a hand on my shoulder and tell me everything will be okay, but I’ll never leave him to that fate. It doesn’t matter if he can’t understand his surroundings, he’s my brother and'B, chimney I’ll stay with him to the end. Better this than to have him surrounded by people who could take advantage of him.

The
re have always been people who said Blocks weren’t really people at all. They argued Blocks could be left outside to die because they don’t know and don’t care what happens to them. The people saying this would have made great Spartans since the ancient army was in the practice of throwing deformed babies into a chasm, but they also forgot about the potential of those wasted lives. These people tried to equate an indifference to Blocks as being no different than thinking abortions were okay. A regular fetus, they argued, probably has more sensory capability than an adult Block, it’s just that Blocks have the advantage of looking like the rest of us. I never thought this was a well-reasoned argument. I was swayed, though, by an old woman I saw on TV one time who asked if we would be indifferent to Blocks if one of them could hold the key to fixing the Great De-evolution. Surely, she said to the studio audience, we have to be around Blocks, we have to understand them, if we want to have any hope of correcting the problem.

There were more stories than I care to remember of people abusing
or abandoning Blocks. Blocks were cursed from birth by being easy to abandon, but as they became teenagers and then young adults, more of their numbers were left to the abuses that normal people could impart. Some of these Blocks eventually ended up at the front doors of group homes like the ones who were abandoned at birth, most arriving either beaten or diseased. Newborn babies could cry for attention. Little kids could hold onto their parents’ clothes and beg not to be abandoned. The Blocks, though, could be abandoned just as easily when they were teenagers or senior citizens as when they were first born. They were further cursed by not being able to state their case for why they shouldn’t be left behind; even a newborn baby could reach out for its mother. Any parent struggling with the decision to abandon a Block child would never be swayed by pleading looks or tear-filled eyes. They could load middle-aged Blocks into the backseat of their car and leave them any place at all, even a landfill. The Blocks would never cry or ask where they were being taken. They wouldn’t try to hold onto the safety belt as they were dragged out of the backseat to be left on the roadside. Even a kitten would do more to preserve itself.

All across the country Blocks were stolen or specifically raised for unspeakable purposes. Some were prostituted as sex
slaves, others were used as punching bags until they died. Little boys, teenage girls, every type of Block adult, were, at one time or another, found by police raids in dirty houses owned by sex offenders. Some of the Blocks found by police had blisters and sores covering every inch of their bodies. Some had been beaten so badly it was surprising they were still alive. And yet these beaten and abused Blocks never uttered a cry, never tried to fight off their attackers, never knew what was happening to them. During their trials, the men who took advantage of them complained that it wasn’t rape because the Blocks never said no, that it wasn’t any other crime because the Blocks didn’t understand pain or fear. Communities all across the world, even in Philadelphia, were outraged. The offenders were either sent to prisons or were executed. The pXmedo unishments handed down didn’t factor in whether or not a Block could feel pain or humiliation. Rightfully so. It was blind justice in the most beautiful sense possible. Most of the rescued Blocks had their injuries and diseases treated. Some were so badly beaten they were euthanized in order to put them out of the misery they would have felt if they could acknowledge pain.

One controversial part of the Survival Bill was its proposal for how prisons would be handled. Traditional prisons wouldn’t work as the inmates and guards became geezers and the last convicted felon, initially a kid
who had murdered an old woman when he was eighteen, grew up to be an old man. Congressmen relied on a group of sociologists to come up with a viable solution for handling those citizens deemed unsafe within the general community. After much debate, the solution they came up with was to redistribute the inmates to different prisons based on the type of crime they had been convicted of. Murderers were sent to the same prisons. Arsonists, robbers, and those convicted of vehicular manslaughter were handled the same way. Pedophiles and rapists were sent to prisons with the murderers. Each prison was given food generators, electrical generators, incinerators, and anything else they needed to survive. Once each prison was fitted to be a self-contained facility, the inmates were left to fend for themselves. With the gates sealed but each individual cell unlocked, the inmates spent the rest of their lives in prison the way they had been sentenced. The inmates at each facility were left to create their own rules, to govern themselves as much as their various dysfunctions allowed. The saner of these inmates were quoted as saying they missed the days when security guards would break up fights and confiscate any shanks they might find. Without a security presence, inmates quickly began walking around with knives and axes in clear sight. Some of the prisoners might have escaped the madness by living in nearby abandoned homes, but all of the stories I heard had the inmates staying on the prison grounds in a daily fight to rule the facility. The prisoners at one prison burned the entire building to the ground while they were still inside. Everyone died. The inmates at another facility formed into two armies that fought until every single person was dead.

Rumors got out in
various internet chat rooms that all the prisoners in a facility in Minnesota had escaped and were beginning to filter into the general population. Similar rumors were sometimes heard about a prison in Kansas or one in Maryland, and always seemed to coincide with the migration talks going on in those places. No sooner would a city, already in favor of joining a more southern settlement, begin having talks about abandoning their homes than more rumors of freed convicts would begin slipping out. It took one person to say something—the supermax jail was empty after everyone escaped—and no matter how unreliable the rumor was, no matter how little evidence there was to support it, the whispers scared people into wanting to head south to the final communities a little sooner than they would have before.

There was talk of
re-opening the infamous Alcatraz and sending California’s deadliest inmates there. The abandoned jail would be a perfect place for these men, capable of hurting anyone around them, to be isolated from the general population. And while theq livingedo y would have an opportunity to swim to safety, none of the inmates had the stamina anymore to make the swim across the channel. One of Alcatraz’s historians actually laughed when asked if senior citizens, albeit senior citizens who happened to also be serial killers, could make the swim back to the mainland. The bodies of seventy and eighty-year old inmates would be found off the banks of San Francisco’s settlement, the historian said. In the end, they decided it wasn’t worth the hours of labor it would take to install power, a food generator, and incinerator, and the idea was scrapped in favor of shipping the inmates off to a maximum security prison in Nevada.

In Russia, there was talk of transporting violent offenders into the middle of Siberia, then building a giant wall around the frozen tundra so they couldn’t rejoin the general population. The idea was discarded once plans for the wall illustrated how resources were already becoming limited. Not to mention there was a noticeable shortage of middle-aged men willing to spend their time constructing a wall hundreds
and hundreds of miles long if there was nothing in it for them.

As for the Blocks
who were taken advantage of, I can’t begin to imagine which is worse: being a molested Block who doesn’t know what is happening, or being a regular person who can fight back, but also has to deal with the pain and fear that is forced upon them. Would I rather be tortured and abused my entire life without understanding what was happening, or would it be better to have the chance to fight back even if the abuser was still successful in his attack? If I had to spend the rest of my life living with the pain of what had happened, would I rather not be aware of it at all? In all the years I’ve thought about that question I’ve never been able to determine that one might not be as bad as the other.