The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (16 page)

32

She blinks back into consciousness, realizing she must have been asleep. It’s the middle of the night. She knows this without looking at her alarm clock because the moon is past the highest set of windows in the top corner of the gymnasium. In a couple of hours the sun will be making its way across the horizon.

When she awakes in the morning, she rubs the sleep away from her eyes, moves out of bed, slowly, gauging what part of her body may not want to move that day. There is a sense of resigned determination at how the day must be spent. But every time she wakes in the middle of the night, she is immediately scared. Her jaw is clenched. Her eyes have a panicked intensity.

For once, her body is not sore. And this is one of the indicators she has learned that tells her if she is dreaming or if she is awake; ironically, it’s only in her nightmares that her body doesn’t feel like it’s approaching one hundred years of life. Knowing she is dreaming does not keep the fear from descending upon her. She waits for a voice to call out from across the room and threaten her. Her heart quickens. She looks for a shadow moving toward her in the dark. Her head is throbbing.

Her eyes settle on Rachel, her veterinarian Block in quadrant 3. She is sitting up in bed, staring directly at Morgan. The first instinct that crosses Morgan’s mind is to tell Rachel that she is doing her best, that it wasn’t her fault she got sick and so many Blocks died. No words arrive, though. She is mute again. Her body won’t obey any of her commands. This is why she is terrified.

How long has Rachel been staring at her? Why, she wonders, do the Blocks, when they gaze at her, have such hatred in their eyes? Isn’t it obvious that she is trying her best? For God’s sake, she nearly died in her bed just a few days ago. What else can she do? She doesn’t want to be remembered as a mass murderer. Can’t they see that everything she has done has been with good intentions? She has never wanted to hurt anyone.

Rachel’s eyes tell her that anything she might say to defend herself is pointless. The way the two pupils stare her down tells Morgan just how meaningless her life is to this Block. Less than meaningless. Worthless. The eyes say everything. If Morgan needed help, Rachel wouldn’t be there to provide it. The vet spent her entire life caring for animals abandoned by owners migrating south, but she won’t waste any concern on a piece of trash like Morgan. Never before have a pair of eyes shown such hatred.

She wants to ask Rachel why such hostility exists. If she is given a chance to explain herself, she is sure Rachel will understand. After all, Morgan spends part of each day refilling Rachel’s nutrient bag and cleaning up after her. The Blocks she has had to transport to the incinerator were sent there just so people like Rachel can keep living. Words would make everything better. But she cannot speak.

Please don’t hurt me
, she begs to no one but herself. If she could, she would yell the words so they echoed to every living thing in Miami.

Rachel glances left. Looks right.

She isn’t looking for witnesses
, Morgan thinks.
She’s looking for a weapon. She’s looking for something to cut me with, something to beat me with.

The possibilities are endless. Even in something as vapid as a group home for Blocks, there are countless ways to murder someone. Rachel could use something as simple as Morgan’s own pillow to smother her. Unable to move, to defend herself, there’s nothing Morgan would be able to do but hope she dies fairly quickly. Or maybe Rachel would take a washrag and force it down Morgan’s throat until she’s gagging on her own vomit. Maybe Rachel will fill a nutrient bag with cleaning chemicals and let Morgan feed off of it until her organs shut down. The forklift, the very one Morgan uses to carry each Block to their cremation, might be used to run over both of Morgan’s legs and arms. With all four extremities crushed, she would lie on the concrete, helpless, in agonizing pain, until she died.

There are so many ways she can kill me
.
Please, God, help me.

Rachel moves. It’s a slight movement, barely noticeable in the dark. It looks as though one hand is by Rachel’s neck, one finger extended. There it pauses. She is still staring, ruthlessly, at Morgan, still sitting on the edge of her cot thirty feet away from where Morgan is lying.

Is she holding a finger to motion for silence? Is she mocking me for not being able to scream? Is she telling me she’s going to slash my throat?

She has no idea what the gesture is supposed to signify, but she can tell from its owner’s eyes that it can’t mean anything good.

Please stop,
Morgan wants to scream, but no noise comes from her throat.

A series of clouds move in front of the moon and the room becomes even darker. Now Morgan can barely see Rachel at all, can barely make out her outline in the shadows.

Is she moving? Is she going to get up and come this way? Please, no.

She gasps for air. Just thinking about all the ways Rachel might kill her makes it difficult to breathe. Her chest is burning. She wants to yell, “I didn’t want to hurt anyone. It kills me to do it.” But there are no words.

In the shadows, it looks as though a big smile breaks across Rachel’s face. She is taking delight in Morgan’s helplessness. Maybe the veterinarian can see how badly Morgan wants to plead on her own behalf and likes seeing someone else vulnerable for a change. The coldness in those eyes! It’s as if Lady Death herself is there, taking her time to enjoy the moment.

Please, no!

Her scream—there is one this time—is still echoing in the gym when her eyes fly open. Finally, she’s awake. Rachel is lying on her cot, motionless, thirty feet away. Morgan’s scream echoes back and forth from one wall to the other, as if it will never end.

“Please, no!” followed by a softer, “Please, no!” and then another, “Please, no!”

She cries into her pillow while the echo fades and she is left, once again, to the silence of the gymnasium.

33

Moving from cot to cot, she cannot help but wonder where all the souls have gone since the Great De-evolution started. Whatever people call it, their soul or their life energy or whatever, she is inclined to believe more exists of people than the little you can see of them. It isn’t an issue of missing loved ones but of wondering what is in store for all of mankind, especially all the Blocks who populated the earth. What happens to their souls? She doesn’t ask if they have souls, the way some clergymen did when the Great De-evolution began; she knows the only difference between herself and the people around her is that they cannot speak or move. In all other things they are the same. If she has a soul, they have souls, too. If she doesn’t, neither do they.

Different people around the world believe—believed—in different things. This was obvious, even when she was young. But it wasn’t until she went to college that she learned about other beliefs than the ones her parents had taught her. That was when she changed from automatically accepting what her parents said and learned to respect the unique beliefs each religion held sacred. It wasn’t that she had thought other religions’ ideas were silly prior to that, it was simply that she didn’t know anything outside of her own sheltered life. Her professor reminded the class that the majority of his students only held their religious views because they had been taught to them at an early age.

As he walked the room, the professor said, “If you were born somewhere else in the world, you might believe that spirits are reborn over and over again, just as kids on the other side of the world might be attending a class similar to this and learn all the crazy things you believe. This doesn’t make what they hold to be true any more or less correct than what you believe.” Her professor smiled. “Just different.”

Morgan didn’t leave the class believing she would come back in her next life as a zebra or a bird. Nor did she come away believing there were a hundred different gods, a single god, or no god at all. She left the class understanding that any of it was possible. All she could be sure of were the things she saw and learned for herself. For everything else, for all the things she didn’t know, how could she be so egotistical to think one thing was right and another thing wrong?

Sometimes, she finds herself walking amongst what is left of the group home’s population, thinking about what it will be like to meet each of these Blocks in the next life and finally be able to experience them as normal people. Instead of pretending what Cindy and Irving and Algernon might have said, they would actually be able to speak to her.

And sometimes she thinks about how everyone might die and simply stop existing. The Blocks she has sent to the incinerator will never have a chance to hear her apologize for selecting them. Everything will go quiet. There won’t be pain in hell or joy in heaven, there will only be an absence of everything. Their entire lives will have consisted of being motionless in bed until Morgan sent them to their deaths. Nothing else.

She is also fond of imagining her Blocks and herself as far-off animals in their next lives. Occasionally, instead of carrying on fictitious conversations with the men and women she looks after, expanding the story of their lives, she imagines them as reincarnated animals in the Serengeti or the Amazon. She thinks of Richard, the grumpy pilot, as a snake, and Roger, the happy pilot, as a prairie dog. She thinks of Aristotle, her world traveler, as a dolphin, and Justin, her mountain climber, as a goat.

When she’s in a particularly good mood, she imagines that all the Blocks in the world were people who reached enlightenment in their previous life. Her Blocks have never complained about anything. They have given up everything that could cause sorrow. Maybe the Blocks, she fancies, are those people who were more spiritual than everyone else and reached a higher consciousness. They are the ones who have reached nirvana.

“I like that thought,” her Zen master Block says. “You know, desire is nothing but the search for pleasure, and fear is nothing but the memory of pain. Both lead to suffering. And the Blocks are free of both.”

“Very true,” she says.

But on the occasions when she is tired or can’t stop coughing or is feeling sorry for herself, she thinks humanity was a waste, that people never came close to reaching the potential they were given. Surely, humans hadn’t evolved enough if they spent thousands of years killing each other. What was the point of human invention and ingenuity if it only led to more brutal ways of killing someone or to the corrupt and ruthless ruling over everyone else with more efficiency?

Too many people spent their entire time on this planet living thoughtlessly, giving in to impulses without having a meaning to their lives. These are the times she thinks the Great De-evolution came about because humans were a failed creature. Everyone she once knew, all the spirits that were recycled for thousands of years, have one less species to inhabit now.

She has no idea what she really believes.

34

On her walk through the rows—she keeps forgetting she can no longer call them that; they are a mere splattering of dots—she breathes deeply, trying to take in the incense wafting through the air. After an hour of the little stick burning, sending its puffs of smoke every which way, she is able to convince herself that the smell of death and human waste are slowly drifting away. The entire gymnasium begins to smell like
Arabic Cinders
or
Ocean Salt
or whatever fragrance she picks for the day. Every corner of the enormous room must smell like a campfire in the desert or the mist coming in from the ocean. The smells were assigned names by random people decades earlier, but they still somehow seem to fit.

Taking in the flavorful smoke, she closes her eyes and imagines herself under a tarp so the sand doesn’t get in her eyes, or with a blanket around her so the mist doesn’t get her too wet. It’s a nice thing to imagine. When
Bay of Bengal Breeze
is wafting through the gym, she imagines herself walking through an endless marketplace, baskets full of fish and herbs, instead of walking by what remains of the world’s quiet population. When
Mount Everest Air
is sending little bits of smoke throughout the facility, rather than seeing herself surrounded by Blocks who are all as old as she is, she imagines herself amongst little Tibetan boys and girls, all eager to be old enough for the day that they too can attempt to climb the great mountain.

Her mood depends on how exhausted she is as she makes her way from cot to cot. The smells can make her feel like she is able to live out one tiny aspect of the world that not even mankind’s extinction could take away from her. But they can also make her lonely, cause her to long for the days when a group of thirty caretakers would laugh and joke with each other as they replaced nutrient bags and changed bedding.

The incense belonged to a helper who passed away nearly ten years ago. Morgan uses the sweet-smelling sticks frugally because there aren’t many left, and once they are gone another aspect of life will fade away. The food processor can do many things, but it can’t make her anything resembling scented sticks to burn. Back when the processors were first distributed through the country, everyone took turns finding new codes and recipes to make items that the machine’s creators hadn’t intended. She can go online and find codes to make just about every over-the-counter medication and just about any illicit drug. Never, though, did anyone waste time trying to figure out if the machine could produce incense. Understandable, given how many more important things there were to think about in those days. But these little things are all she has left.

No one has arrived in Miami for twelve years. The final nomads have long since passed away. Family, everyone she has ever loved, is dead. Everything Stanley Steinbecker wrote about in
Mapping the Great De-evolution
, the nonfiction account of how one sociologist thought the declining population would play out, has already happened. His last chapter, about the world’s last people, about even the final settlements becoming ghost towns, has already come to fruition. And yet, she is still here. Leave it to Morgan, the last of the last, to live past what even Steinbecker could foresee. Leave it to her to live through the unwritten chapter, after everyone else has passed away and not a single other person is there to offer support, not even on the other side of the world. She has thought of trying to write her own chapter to his book, an addendum to the last New York Times Bestseller ever published, a chapter which summarizes the little things that not even a sociologist could fathom: rows of Blocks dying when the only living caretaker falls ill, the way her music echoes through the empty gymnasium, and yes, even the last sticks of incense.

By the time the final bit of the wood burns to ash, she is done caring for twelve of her sixteen Blocks. It makes her happy, though, that the smell lingers the rest of the day. Even at seven o’clock, as the black of night begins to creep through the rafters, the smell of
Turkish Wood
still floats in the air.

She imagines walking the streets of Istanbul, even though she really has no idea what the city is like—was like, when people still lived there—and, discouraged, realizes, her mental Istanbul is the same as her mental Bangladesh and her mental Budapest. They are all the same place in her daydreams because she never got to see them and distinguish them for herself.

For the duration of her life, the majority of the earth’s wonders have been accessible to her only in pictures. It is impossible for this realization not to upset her. As the odor dissipates, her chest feels heavy and she cannot help but feel like the smell might as well have been named
Smell 237
or
Smell 4-F6
because random laboratory names mean as much to her as any far-off land’s name. And she resents ever finding pleasure in a smell just because it’s different than the smell she has to breathe every other day.

None of her Blocks care what the gymnasium smells like anyway. Why should she? They all probably think she is crazy for burning the scented sticks of wood in the first place. With three-quarters of her Blocks dead, she finally has time to slow down, can finally finish her chores at a reasonable hour. And what does she do? She doesn’t cook herself a grand meal. She doesn’t go for a walk in the neighborhood. No, she burns a stick of wood and makes herself sad.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

She turns and looks behind her to see who has said this. Gault, her mad scientist, the one who tried to cause chaos during the end of the world, is lying there.

She tries to smile, says, “You know I’m one step away from madness when an evil mastermind is concerned about me.”

With his feelings hurt, he doesn’t offer a reply. Probably, he is plotting how to blow the entire group home to smithereens.

When she sleeps that night, her dreams are fitful. She wakes in a sweat, gasping for air, but cannot remember what the dream was about. Her clock tells her it’s the middle of the night. There are still another three hours of possible sleep remaining if she wants it.

Please don’t let the nightmare start right back up.

She closes her eyes again.