The Man Who Watched the World End (21 page)

I don’t want to imagine th
ose things happening to Andrew. I can’t help myself, though. My love for him forces me to think about what I’d do if he was taken from me, inducted into a sex ring, or stored away in the damp basement of a man who abuses him every day. It makes me want to give Andrew a hug that lasts for days, a hug that doesn’t have to end and that can protect him for the rest of his life.

One of the bushes behind my house actually has
the beginnings of some leaves again, a sign that the mild winter has subsided. There wasn’t much of a winter to speak of, except for a couple of days seeming a little chillier than the others. The bare limbs will eventually give way to bright green leaves. My pessimistic side views spring as the time of year when the leaves keep me from seeing into the woods for animalsq? Would about ve been that might be lurking out there. I can still hear them, know they are there, but can’t see them until they are less then twenty feet away. At that distance they would chase me down before I could get back into the house.

The weeds didn’t die during winter
, but they did have a momentary pause in their expansion. In a couple of years, the weeds will come up through the kitchen floor and the living room. When that happens my home would become a glorified tent rather than the solid, impenetrable house it was meant to be.

Every year I am surrounded by more wildlife than I was the year before. I’m sure it’s the same feeling the animals had each year when they saw more people plopped down on top of already overcrowded cities and streets. Every rabbit and squirrel that watched as car after car passed by on newly-widened roads had to be asking itself, “When will the madness finally end?”

There was a time when my front porch was reserved for quiet nights for Andrew and me. This, of course, was back when it was easier for me to move him around. And before the animals learned they didn’t have to fear us. We would sit there on the wicker chairs, noises all around us from the woods and golf course. A howl from one part of the forest would be followed by some barking from another direction. After the barking quieted down a cat would meow or a bear would growl. The animals are the last orchestra the world will know. I sipped iced tea while the music went on around us. Andrew had to be sprayed down with insect repellent before he was allowed outside. The bugs used to love having something sweet to bite that didn’t swat at them.

Now, inste
ad of going outside, we sit at the patio door when we want to watch the wildlife. The other day I saw a pack of house cats that must have been fifty or sixty strong. They grazed on bugs hiding in the tall grass and then fled when a pack of fifteen Rottweilers came charging out of the brush. Today, a bear roamed onto our yard. It sniffed around the incinerator, then wandered off. A couple of minutes later, a squirrel stayed in the open grass for too long. We saw it get snatched away from the ground by a hawk. Its little legs flailed as the hawk carried it to the top of a tree and, presumably, tore it apart. I know that happens all the time—the hawks and owls have to feed on something too—but I had never actually seen it happen with my own eyes until today.

I turned to Andrew as the hawk was soaring back into the sky and said something stupid like, “Holy shit, did you see that!”

A little bit later a pack of dogs squared off against a couple of wolves. The dogs consisted of a German pointer, an Irish setter, two cocker spaniels, and two Labrador retrievers. In the end, both sets of animals thought better of actual bloodshed and were content with displays of aggression such as growling and raising their hind fur. The two gangs eventually backed away from where they had come.qI do

“Wow, that was amazing,” I said to Andrew.

I repositioned him to face the TV.
The
Silence of the Lambs
played on the television the rest of the night. I like to envision Andrew as even more dastardly than Hannibal Lecter, the ultimate evil mastermind, secretly biding his time by pretending to be comatose, then one day taking advantage of his situation by becoming the new leader of the neighborhood. He would be like Keyser Söze, but pretending to be motionless and mute instead of having a limp and a bad hand. At the same time, when watching Indiana Jones with Andrew, I imagine my brother swinging from a whip and finding rare archeological treasures, so the idea of him being super evil doesn’t reflect on how I feel about him personally.

As I was writing this I heard another animal howl from inside the forest. I’ve gotten pretty good at determining which animal is being killed by the sound it makes as it dies. Sometimes I can even guess which animal was doing the killing. Tonight it was a fox being eaten.
Probably by a pack of dogs. The terrified wails made me go back to the living room to make sure Andrew was okay.

On nights like tonight I turn off the lig
hts in my room, power off my monitor, and close the hallway door. My bedroom is thrown into complete darkness. At the window, I have a perfect vision of the woods. The moon decides how much of the surrounding wildlife I get to see. If the clouds are out I can barely make out the outline of the trees or see where the branches end and the sky begins. But if the sky is clear and the moon is full, like it is tonight, I can see animals pacing back and forth at the edge of the woods. If I stare long enough, a series of eyes will line up at the edge of the trees and gaze back at me. One pair of eyes will be there first. Then two. Then three. One time there were eight sets of eyes, all lined up behind the layer of brush at the edge of my lawn, staring at me through my bedroom window. I couldn’t tell if it was a pack of wolves or dogs; they are more similar these days than they are different. The eyes peeking out at me become green or orange depending on the moon’s light. All of them remained there to see if I would be foolhardy enough to leave my house after the sun had set.

It’s funny how different
ly the animals act during the daylight than when it’s dark. If I stepped outside at night the animals, dogs and wolves alike, would run toward me at full speed. My dead body would be dragged back into the forest within seconds. If I went outside right now I might as well jog willingly into the woods to make it easier for them. If it was daylight, though, and I went outside, the animals might growl and hiss at me, but more often than not they would remain at the edge of the woods. They might pace back and forth but they wouldn’t make a move while the sun was out unless they were pq redo articularly desperate for food. But my circumstances are no different between day and night. Maybe they think I can see better than them during the day, or maybe they think my neighbors will come to my rescue (little do they know my neighbors are all gone!), but none of this is true. If a single animal out there, their blazing orange eyes tracking me, was smart enough to realize the sun doesn’t hold special power, they could have me for a meal.

A good bet would wager how many more days I can go to the incinerator in my backyard before one of the animals is willing to dart out of the woods and attack in the sunlight.

I don’t want to think about being trapped in this neighborhood. I know we’re stuck here, but everything might be okay if I can just keep t
hinking about better times. It’s becoming more difficult, though, to act like everything will be fine. Instead of focusing on the end, I find myself reminiscing about the relics scattered around the house.

One of my favorite pictures of Andrew is from an amusement park when I was twenty.
The trip was a mini-vacation to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. All things considered, I wasn’t sure how much of an event it could be, but my dad shocked us by saying Andrew should ride one of the roller coasters. My mother didn’t want her son getting on that kind of ride but my father convinced her it would be okay. I soothed her by saying I would be next to him the entire time to make sure nothing happened to him. She didn’t stop worrying, she was a mother after all, but she relented and let him go on the ride.

The roller coaster took forever to climb the first
steep hill. The frantic whispering of people in front of and behind us grew louder as the train of chairs made its way up the sharp incline. Each yard up that giant hill meant the ride would be that much more ferocious as soon as it started speeding down the other side. It took forever to get to the top. Even I was getting nervous. The anticipation created by these rides always made my nerves worse than they needed to be. There would be loops and rolls until everyone could barely breathe. There would be spins and g-force until everybody wanted to throw up. I tensed all of my muscles so the shakes weren’t noticeable. This also helped keep my jaw from clattering. A girl behind me was crying. We were only five feet from the top. My fingers were clasped tightly around the chest guard that held us all in place. Just then, right as we got to the very top of the mountain, not a single thing higher in the sky than us, I turned and looked at Andrew. There was comfort to be found in how serene and unconcerned he was. His eyes were perfectly at peace. He was the only person on the entire ride who looked like he belonged there. Everyone else was screaming, or trying to scream, while heq in Camelot about ve been just sat there and let the roller coaster take us in three consecutive spirals followed by four consecutive loops. Each change in course made me feel like I’d been sucker-punched, but Andrew took it all in stride. He never moved so much as a finger, never made a single noise. When the ride was over he was in the exact same position as when it started. His hair was standing almost completely straight up because of the g-force, but other than that he was an angel.

After the roller coaster
, we went to one of those cutouts where you stand behind it and put your face through a hole to make it look like you’re the one flying a jetfighter, driving a race car, or otherwise doing something more spectacular than you would normally do. My father held Andrew where his head could stick out of one hole. I stood next to him with my head out the other hole. And just like that we became professional baseball players. Andrew was the catcher for the hated Chicago Cubs while I was the all-star slugger for the St. Louis Cardinals. I still laugh at the contrast in our faces. The hitter should be focused and calm, but I was hamming it up by making a face like I was going to charge the mound. The catcher, usually busy giving signs to the pitcher, looked like he was sound asleep.

The picture has been on my bed stand ever since. As much as it was the perfect photo of us as brothers, it has somehow become even more than that for me now. I find myself staring at it for what seems like hours before I go to sleep. Some nights I’m still smiling when I close my
eyes.

I still
constantly mention that picture to Andrew. Sometimes I bring it out of my room and show it to him to remind him how we spent our time as a family. It’s important to show him that, even if it was only for a moment and only for a photo, he was the catcher of a professional baseball team (it was the Cubs, though, so just barely a pro team). Sometimes, when I’m feeling lightheaded with the responsibilities of our lives, I tell him I ended up getting a homerun that day. Other times, when I realize he’s all I have left, I tell him he gave the pitcher good signs and I struck out.

My favorite
t-shirt is also from Andrew’s birthday that year. It doesn’t fit anymore, but I still pull it out of the closet occasionally just because it makes me smile. The shirt has a picture of a sixteen-year old Andrew sleeping (his eyes are closed) with a thought bubble showing that he’s dreaming about walking on the moon. I like to think there were options for what the dream’s picture could have been about—leading an army into battle, being at the beach with a swimsuit model—but that was the one my mom thought most fitting for him.

Three
months after Andrew’s birthday we were invited to a sweet sixteen party that one of our neighbors was throwing for their Block daughter. A hundred other local Blocks and their families were invited. All of the regulars celebrated this girl’s sixteenth birthday by going to the park and eating hot q if he edo dogs and flying kites while the birthday girl sat under a tree so the shade could keep her cool. She never played games, she never rode on the merry-go-round. Nor did she magically become a professional athlete. She remained motionless and quiet the entire time just like all the other Blocks, until the party was over and the Blocks’ parents loaded them back into cars and took them away. It was a nice party but it could never compare to my parents and me taking Andrew to the amusement park.

The amusement park I wrote about
the other day, the one from Andrew’s sixteenth birthday, is no doubt dilapidated and abandoned now. Without men there maintaining the rides, acre upon acre of manmade structures, designed for the sole purpose of entertaining families, would slowly rust, the overly fun characters and graphics plastered all around the park withering away to look like vengeful demons painted all over the rides.

How long would it have taken for the metal
pins holding the rollercoaster’s tracks together to rust and snap? That first hill at the very top of the ride seemed impossibly high when I was young—ten stories, maybe twenty? After falling that far to the ground, I can’t imagine what kind of noise it must have made when it landed on the concrete below.

What a waste it was for everyone to take time out of their lives just to buy cotton candy, watch
teenagers parade around in preposterous costumes, and wait in line for rides that were over a minute later. Even the most deluxe of haunted houses from my childhood must pale in comparison with today’s abandoned theme parks. Those houses just had cobwebs and spooky noises, maybe scarecrows and fake blood thrown on the walls. The ghost town theme parks didn’t have any of that, but they did have bird shit covering every place where children used to laugh on their way to the next attraction and vultures perched at the top of each deserted ride waiting for the next wolf to leave a little bit of bloody guts from a vanquished cat.