The Man Who Watched the World End (26 page)

It
drank from the bowl until there was no water left. It did seem like a happy animal. A pleasant vision—the dog becoming the third member of our family—often makes me smile, as it did at that moment. It would be a perfect pet. I was broken out of my fantasy when the dog growled at a noise coming from the woods. The true scenario, if this animal were let into our home, would be discovered the next morning: I would wake up with a justly deserved premonition of violence, go out to the living roomqte I sp to check on Andrew, and find him in the middle of the floor with the dog on top of him. The animal would be feasting on my brother’s intestines after tearing open his stomach. Andrew would still be alive, just barely, while all of this was happening. He would never be able to scream.

“You almost tricked me,” I said to the dog, the closed patio door still between us.

A noise must have sounded that the animal could hear but that I could not because its head bolted upright and its nose pointed toward the forest wall. It stayed perfectly still for a second, then jumped over the patio railing and disappeared into the trees. A moment later, from a different corner of the yard, a brown bear lumbered out of the woods. It walked across my lawn until it was in the middle of my backyard. The bear looked at me, then at the forest, curious as to which way the dog had vanished. I got the feeling the bear was reminding the nearby animals that it could go where ever it wanted. It was nobody’s servant. I opened the patio door just far enough to bring the water dish back inside. It was important to make sure nothing outside would entice the bear to stay any longer than it already wanted. The last thing I needed was a pet bear in addition to my new Labrador.

I turned toward Andrew. “He seems like he would make a nice pet, don’t you think?”

Andrew stared straight ahead. I’m not too senile yet to forget the Labrador will do whatever he needs in order to survive. Sure, he would probably rather be sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of my home, eating processed food and enjoying the protection that the walls and roof provide, but he obviously has the skills to survive however he needs. I like to think my new friend is civilized, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he came to my patio door tomorrow with another animal’s blood plastered to his fur. If that’s what the dog has to do to survive, then more power to him.

The dog is undoubtedly doing a better job of surviving out in the wild than its old masters would have. Throw me out in the woods and see how long I last. Even if I had a backpack filled with flint, beans, a tent, and a blanket I still wouldn’t last longer than a week. Give me an additional
assortment of survival tools—a knife, a compass, a canteen—and I might last a month. Every predatory animal would laugh hysterically at my attempts to pitch a tent or catch food once my can of beans ran out. It would be funny enough for them that every enemy would put down arms for an hour, a sixty-minute truce, in order to enjoy my performance. A fox would sit next to a pit-bull. On its other side would be a pack of cats. Then a bear. All of them would be united by this ridiculous newcomer, grey-haired and wrinkly, that snores during the night, whose tent falls over when the wind brushes against it, whose knife sits unused. The poor old guy would have no chance at all.

This animal, whose great, great grandparents used to lie on someone’s living room carpet and sleep all day, has only itself and other 'on. other like-minded dogs to rely on, and yet they thrive in the woods as though the bears and wolves should have taken them more seriously all along.

Of all the times people looked to religion for support, none was more important than when the Blocks started appearing: humanity’s future was in doubt. Instead of giving a unified message of comfort, though, each religion stumbled. Some ministers stuck to the same stories they always told, saying it had to be part of God’s greater plan. No one wanted to hear that. Some rabbis continued saying the Lord works in mysterious ways and who were we to question his will
? People groaned when they heard this. Some priests told their followers not to question how God works. This brought another round of sighs.

The most common reaction was for church, mosque, and temple leaders to throw their hands in the air with exasperation. What kind of joke was being played on them where the end wasn’t approaching with horns sounding from the heavens but with the birth of people
who couldn’t hear or say prayers, couldn’t attend church services, couldn’t pass church doctrine to another generation? What were the clergymen supposed to do with these people—they
were
still God’s children after all. The Blocks didn’t attend mass, they didn’t read the Bible or Koran, they didn’t attend Sunday school. How were the churches supposed to accept the Blocks if they preached that regular people were supposed to do all of those things, all the while knowing Blocks couldn’t do any of them? Some leaders from each religion modified their teachings to accommodate the Blocks, but mostly the religions turned their backs on these people. The Blocks were left to find salvation for themselves.

A few
clergymen, not satisfied with the speed of their congregation’s discontent, took a proactive approach to alienating themselves from their followers. Some said stupid things (that Blocks didn’t have souls) that enraged every family with a Block child. Seeing as how a hundred percent of the children were Blocks when this outrage was spoken, huge portions of each congregation stopped going to church, quit volunteering their time, and withheld donating a portion of their income.

There were
people, however, who didn’t care what negative things were said about the Blocks, they simply cared about getting their own ticket to heaven. Other people, people like myself and my parents, saw how concocted these holy men were and stopped paying attention to them. Attendance at churches and temples plummeted. People stopped praying for something to save them or to changeq normal about ve been their circumstances. Religion went from being the second most important social influence in the world (nothing could ever topple the family unit as the most important), to becoming completely irrelevant.

I think about how I reacted in those days and about how the people around me reacted. We could have given up and started feeling sorry for ourselves, it would have been understandable to do so—there was a
noticeable spike in suicides—but most people, myself included, accepted what was happening and continued on. I played on the neighborhood baseball team until we didn’t have enough players to play anymore. I went on with my life as I would have if there were still kids in the neighborhood. I acted like Andrew would answer me when I asked him questions.

Nothing changed just because the minister down the road was one of the first people to leave
Camelot in favor of New Orleans. The rest of the neighborhood woke up the next day and continued with their lives just as they had the previous day and just as they would until they passed away or joined the minister at the group community. That was all.

A year after the minister left, a family from Michigan moved into his old ho
use, took down the few religious relics that had been left behind, and made it their own home. Life went on.

I wish the Johnsons could have remembered that.

W
ithout a hope of someone new coming to the neighborhood, I catch myself creating imaginary friends much the way I did when I was four years old.
I could go online right now and chat with someone from San Francisco or Dallas, inquire about how they’re doing. Do I really need to see and hear other people going through the same thing, develop a bond with a random someone on a random Saturday, get to know their life and their struggles, just to have them pass away days or weeks later?

So I create people that will never have to die.
Most of the time these friends are newcomers to Camelot who saw the lines of empty homes on their way to one of the final communities, thought the area looked nice, and decided they would stay for a while. I imagine them being happy to listen to my stories while I prepare dinner. There’s more to making a good meal than pressing a button on the food processor; you still have to get the a nice, quiet neighborhoode about ve been seasoning right and serve it with a nice wine. When I venture down to the basement, these new visitors provide an extra set of eyes to look out for bugs. I prepare a list of things to tell them about while they sort through random boxes like curious kids.

“T
hat box? That’s filled with notes I passed my girlfriend in class when we were seniors… That picture? My mom painted it… She was quite the artist. I wish I had more of her paintings.”

I don’t actually say these things out loud. When I imagine friends spending the day with me, I think about the conversations we would have but I keep the actual words to myself. If he was alert and could hear my voice, not even Andrew would know I was spending my day talking to people
who aren’t there. I do talk to myself as much as I ever have, I can’t help that—I even find myself mumbling these words out loud as I type them—but when I talk to myself, it’s more about acknowledging my thoughts than it is speaking to someone who isn’t really there.

I’m left wondering why I would create additional make-believe people in my life, none of
whom can talk or provide me with feedback, when I already have Andrew in the other room. Here I am with a brother who’s alive and breathing, has been with me through the worst times, and I could talk to him from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. I don’t, though. He would never get bored with me or yawn and tell me to give it a rest. Maybe it’s because Andrew already knows all the things that worry me, has already heard all my stories.

Looking back, that moment when I went from sharing all
my daily concerns with him, to protecting him from them, was the point when I went from feeling like Andrew was helping me carry the hardships to feeling absolutely and completely alone in a wilderness that had grown up around me.

Something inside me wants someone new to share these things with. Is that human nature? If I suddenly did have new people in my life, would I crave different people
as soon as I had once again exhausted my stories with the people around me? If Andrew passed away, would I have a make-believe version of him that appeared in my thoughts to keep me company? And if this is the case, why aren’t I out in the living room talking to him right now instead of muttering and typing? Something has to take my mind off the animals that intrude on our property. Something needs to take my mind off our house, which is falling apart while we still call it home.

There is the dog, but even he reminds me of my predicament. T
hat dumb animal could probably read me for a sucker from a mile away.

qlsedo “Look at that old man,” it
was probably telling its friends. “I’m going to go on his patio and he’s going to give me water every day, just because he’s lonely.”

“No way!”
the rest of his pack would say.

“Oh yes,” the dog would say, a canine grin spread from one side of fangs to the other.

“No human is silly enough to befriend a dog anymore,” the other dogs would say. “Those days are long gone.”

“Oh yeah? You sit and watch. And you know what? I’ll even get
him to pet me like humans used to.”

My dreams with the dog kept occurring night after night. It was only normal that I developed a kinship with the animal, even if the relationship I nurtured was based
upon dreams and from outdated ideas of how man and animal could get along. It knows me as the thing that gives it water; it has no idea I dream about it every night or that I share a bond with it because it talks to me when no one else can. Looking back, I guess I can understand why it was puzzled when I opened my patio door earlier today after it had arrived for water. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have seen that it was a bad idea. Whether it was because I’m alone or because of what I saw at the Johnsons’ house, I didn’t act the way I normally would—with caution. It’s clear as day now that I should have stayed on one side of the glass door and it on the other side.

Not trusting me, it backed away
at first, prepared to flee at any sign of danger. I stood in the open doorway. We stared at each other like that for a while. Then it blinked. Once our tense stare-down was broken it remembered the water and its daily habit kicked in. When the dish was half empty, its head rose and looked at me again. I was still in the same spot. This calmed the dog, and it seemed to begin trusting me. I started talking to it then.

“Hello, little guy… are you
okay?… What did you do for water before I started leaving it here for you?”

It
didn’t answer back the way it had in my dreams, but it also didn’t growl. The dog simply stayed. It stayed like dogs used to stay when they were pets, staring at me as if waiting to be given the okay to move again. If I’d had a milk bone in my hand I would have whistled, and the dog would have eaten it out of my palm.

That was probably why I did what I did next: I
stepped forward and joined the animal on my deck.

I offered reassurances to sooth
e the dog’s nervousness. “It’s okay, little guy. I’m your friend. I give you water. I’m your friend.”

It stayed where it was. It had some brambles caught in the thick part of its fur. I reached down to pet its head and stroke the brambles off its back. I
t was easy, after decades of not having a pet, to forget how to treat animals. Instead of leaving my hand out to let the dog smell me and get used to me, I reached straight for its fur.