The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (11 page)

21

There are days she thinks God is keeping her alive until she believes in him. Why else has she lived on after everyone else has died? She must live until she understands his master plan for the world, until she grasps her role in that scheme. There are also days she thinks God is keeping her alive until she understands her sin and repents for it. He is giving her time before it’s too late. And then there are also days when she doesn’t think God cares one way or the other; he just created the universe, he doesn’t have a preference as to what she does in these final seconds. There are times she thinks God must regret the blunder of creating man in the first place. If God is the cause of all things, she reasons, the Great De-evolution is his doing as well. He must be biding time until she, the very last person left, goes away to join Adam and Eve and their descendants, all the way up to Morgan’s own parents and everyone else who has ever lived.

There are, of course, also many days in which she doesn’t think God is out there at all. She was created by an accident of the universe, nothing more. She has no role, no destiny. It is nothing more than a cosmic joke that she is overburdened with the care of too many people. She has no sin to repent, nor does she have to understand a master plan. Everything is mere chance.

This spectrum of beliefs follows her from the time she wakes up until the time she finishes caring for the final quadrant of Blocks. The ideas flow one to the next, merging together, drifting off. During breakfast, she believes God has a purpose for her. While she is caring for the Blocks in quadrants 1 and 2, she is sure that she’s alone and that no deity is watching over her. By dinnertime, she is back to thinking there is a God but that he simply doesn’t care what happens to her. Except for the Blocks around her, she might as well be alone. By the time she is done cleaning the face of the last Block in quadrant 4 and turns the gymnasium lights off for the night, she thinks her day isn’t about sinning or understanding or anything else; it is void of meaning. Or, maybe, it is whatever she makes of it.

She has never bothered McArthur, her Block who suffers through his own religious doubts, with these worries. He has enough to think about each day, about heaven and hell and previous lives and next lives, without being troubled with Morgan’s own concerns. She passes by him each day without a single word spoken between them, only an understanding that neither of them knows very much.

Every once in a while, he offers her tidbits of wisdom: “Religion is only flawed because the men who created each religion were flawed,” and “Faith is nothing more than knowing there is something greater than ourselves, something we cannot see or understand, but it’s out there.”

She is never sure if these are arguments for or against one way of thinking. McArthur probably isn’t sure either. She wants to ask if he thinks she is being judged for her actions in these final days, or if he thinks God is understanding of what she is going through, but she doesn’t ask such questions out loud. He is looking for his own answers. Any response he can offer would be weighed down with doubt.

His cot is between two other people who he has never been able to speak to. His entire life has been spent in a chair or a bed.

Without asking, she knows what he wants to say:
“What kind of God would create a life like mine, a life that can’t support itself? Surely not a loving God. But at the same time, nature doesn’t create life that can’t support itself because that goes against the very nature of evolution and survival of the fittest, so maybe this
is
due to a higher power.” He scowls before adding, “So many questions.”

Without saying anything, she nods at him as she passes by his bed.

After finishing up at the last cot, she looks back at the rows and rows of people in front of her. Her watch says it’s one in the morning. She is losing the battle again. There are eight fewer Blocks in her care today than there were when Elaine died, and yet she is still an hour behind where she used to be.

She looks back at a man named Algernon in row 1 of quadrant 1, the very first Block Elaine ever named. Next to him sits a woman named Paula, one of the first Blocks Morgan gave a name to.

She still remembers the way Elaine’s eyes rolled when she said, “I named this one Algernon, and you pick something like Paula for this one?”

Elaine had gone on to say Algernon was a scientist who refused to give up on finding a cure for Blocks. Morgan frowned and said Paula was a scientist who didn’t bother trying to find a cure and had moved south before anyone else.

“Are you serious?” Elaine had asked. “You’re awful at this game.”

As Morgan looks at the two Blocks now, she knows the two bodies are approximately the same age; everyone who was older has already passed away. The same thing goes for Morgan. She was born when 99.9999% of babies were Blocks. She has never met anyone born later. Elaine had been two weeks older. But a common age is all that the two Blocks in front of her share.

She looks at Algernon, then Paula, then back at Algernon. Algernon, with his tiny mouse-like nose and mouth, has the facial features of someone who was never happy or unhappy, someone who was too determined to waste time with emotion. His strong jawline, his lack of wrinkles, reveal his character. In contrast, Paula has gray hair, some of which refuses to give up the final remnants of the blonde that used to get her so much attention.

Morgan’s eyes remain on Algernon. This part, the indecision, is the thing she tries to avoid. Once her mind is made up, she acts. She must move fast or else she second-guesses what she is doing, and that makes it all the worse in the end.

Her fingers twist and disconnect Algernon’s feeding tube. Instead of leaving and going back to her own bed, though, she remains there, watching him, holding his hand in her own. Maybe this compassion will help the nightmares go away. Maybe it’s her guilty conscience at letting them die alone that causes her so much torment.

The story she learned about him, through Elaine, was that he had been fascinated by science for as long as he could remember. On his seventh birthday, his parents bought him his first telescope. His favorite Transformer had been the one that changed into a microscope. In ninth grade, his science fair project beat the best efforts put forth by all the juniors and seniors.

When the Great De-evolution began, he joined scientists all around the world in trying to formulate a cure for the Blocks. And if not a cure, then at least a vaccine. Decades went by. His colleagues, the greatest minds of medicine, neurology, and biology, passed away or disappeared. He e-mailed a chemical compound formula to a doctor in Sweden only to receive a crudely worded reply, typed by the doctor’s assistant, saying her boss had died the night before, at the age of seventy-nine.

He e-mailed a series of chemical compound chains to a doctor in Paris without ever receiving a reply. The doctor, like so many others around the world, disappeared from normal life and became just another nameless person trying to get themselves and their families closer to the equator and to warmer weather. One day, the Parisian doctor had been a Rumford Medal winner and a recipient of the Marcel Benoist Prize, and the next day he was just another old man driving through long stretches of forgotten grape fields on his way to meet family in Spain.

Through it all, Algernon persisted. He was not deterred when his peers passed away. He was not discouraged when they gave up the fight and decided to vanish with their families. Each morning, he sipped a cup of coffee, read the paper, and then went about the business of finding some way to create a baby that could cry, reach for its mother, laugh, learn. Possible cure after possible cure failed. He never would have predicted that one altered protein could cause this whole mess and lead to mankind’s end.

A promising experiment to make the protein regenerate itself turned out even worse than the tests he hadn’t expected decent results from. But he never gave up. Day after day, year after year, he attempted to save the human race. And while he never did find a cure—no one ever would—he tried and tried until it wasn’t humanly possible to try any more.

But, she thinks, still holding his hand, his life wasn’t any less meaningful just because a cure wasn’t found. He still dedicated himself to something he believed in. That counts for a lot. He still managed to wake up every day and go to sleep every evening with a passion for something. She admires this about him. It is a more respectable life, looking back, than Paula’s, who gave up the first time she was overwhelmed and became one of the many people looking out only for herself and for no one else.

Morgan understands now why Elaine had rolled her eyes at the way Paula had supposedly lived her life. Elaine had been right: Morgan wasn’t very good at their game.

Algernon’s nutrient bag begins to drip onto the floor. Any respect she has given his life is tainted by the groan she lets slip, knowing she will be the one to clean the mess up the next morning.

Drip.

It’s always her; there is no one else. And yet she leaves the bag to continue dripping on the floor rather than letting it go into a bucket or onto Algernon’s blanket.

Drip.

She leaves Algernon there, cursing herself for letting that thought of inconvenience, the sound of dripping, ruin a memory as pure as someone’s life being dedicated and determined.

Maybe the next day will be better. There is always that hope. Even McArthur would have to agree with her on that.

22

A voice echoes across the gymnasium: “Remember what it was like after gym class when you were tired and thirsty?”

Her muscles clench up. Her heart beats so fast she has trouble breathing.

“Remember the way your dry tongue kept sticking to the roof of your mouth?” the voice says. “Remember how good it felt to feel the cold water from the fountain?”

The voice does not have to speak loudly for her to hear it. Even the softest noise echoes from one end of the gutted room to the other. In a different setting, a happier setting, the room would be perfect for an orchestra. Beautiful music would bounce off every wall. Instead, she wishes, as this voice continues to speak, that there were a way to block out what she is hearing.

“You can forget about that water. You’re going to know exactly what it’s like to feel your body shutting down. Even if I did have extra water, I wouldn’t give it to you. I’ll pour it on the ground right in front of you and laugh.”

She wants to defend herself, wants to yell that torturing her isn’t fair, that she is doing the best she can. No sounds will form, though. Her hands are motionless. Her mind screams all the things she wants to say on her behalf, but there is no actual noise.

“Your lips will crack open. You’ll feel shooting pains in your stomach. Your throat will burn. How do you think it’ll feel to know you’re slowly dying? Twenty-four hours doesn’t seem like a long time until you’re begging for a drop of water every minute. It will feel like an eternity. You know water will never come. You’re going to die here, and it’s not going to be pretty. I can’t wait to see how you suffer.”

She feels herself almost lose control of her bladder, knows she is coming very close to pissing herself right where she lay. Ashamed, one of her thoughts is actually that the urine might be the only thing around to keep her hydrated.

The voice bursts into laughter. He, whoever he is, can either sense what she was thinking and takes delight in how hopeless she feels, or else he simply enjoys being able to taunt her for as long as he wants without any protest.

The last thing she hears, before opening her eyes, is, “We’ll see how long you can live. You’ll be trapped on your bed with all of us looking down at you, and we’ll all be laughing at your misery as you beg us to let you die.”

Then her eyes open. Gasping for air, she realizes her mouth is completely dry. Her tongue feels like sandpaper until she drinks from the glass of water on her bedside table. The glass is empty after four eager gulps.

During her rounds, she has found herself avoiding eye contact with the Blocks who have appeared in her nightmares. This voice was not distinguished enough, however, to know which of them was taunting her. It could have been any of them. Unsure which man was laughing at the fact that she almost pissed herself, she finds herself hurrying past half the beds. The men still need her care, but she barely touches them, refuses to look at them, repositions them as quickly as possible, refills their nutrient bags as fast as her old hands will allow. She finds herself replaying conversations she has had with each person, trying to think whose voice may have been echoing in her nightmare.

Why does it even matter? It’s not like I’m going to let them die just because I had a nightmare about them.

But maybe, she thinks, she can convince them that she is trying her best, that maybe if she speaks to them during the day, when she isn’t terrified and can form words, they will understand where she is coming from.

Outside, it rains all day. It was raining when she woke up and it’s still raining as she cares for the Blocks in quadrant 3. An amazing amount of water falls on the group home. If it continues to rain like this, the entire facility will be flooded and she won’t have to worry about which Blocks are threatening her and which ones are innocent.

Her Zen master is one of the few men who cannot be the culprit. In his soothing voice, he says, “You are not so different from the rest of us and we are not so different from you. Experiences are shared between all of us more than you realize.”

“Thank you, Coelho.”

But one Block’s sympathy does not fool her into thinking the nightmares will stop. The bad dreams occur almost every night now. A few kind words will not change that. Sadly, the frequency of the dreams does not make them less terrifying. No matter how many times she has a nightmare of being motionless and mute, of having the very Blocks she cares for threaten her with death, she always wakes in a sweat or in the middle of screaming the words she is trying, with futility, to bellow.

It is never the same person threatening her, never the same Block two nights in a row who holds a grudge. The variety of the Blocks in her dreams makes her feel like they are all against her. One night the offender will be her detective, another night it will be a former teacher, and yet another night it will be the psychologist. Never the people she has let starve to death. Always the people who still remain. Why is that? If anyone should hold a grudge against her, it should be the people she has sent to the incinerator. She is unable to figure out why the people who should be grateful that they are still receiving care are the ones who torture her, while the dead, who should be seeking vengeance, leave her alone.

Even the Blocks who look like they would never hurt a fly, never want to cause anyone pain, are vicious when she sleeps. There is a very sweet-looking old woman, Rachel, in row 3 of quadrant 3. As a veterinarian, Rachel took care of animals her entire life until she was mauled by a pack of feral Wiener dogs. This was in the middle of North Carolina, where it was reported that packs of wild dogs outnumbered the wolves and bears. It was impossible for her to see these little creatures as anything other than sweet animals. It was her own fault that she thought they wouldn’t attack her. The scars on her forearm are probably what made Elaine give her that story.

Although Rachel was permanently scared of dogs after that, she never stopped radiating a love for life in general. She still smiled every time she saw a flock of birds migrating south. She still broke into baby talk every time she saw a cat wandering the streets. Her hazel eyes brightened each time a squirrel saw her and scurried away. She apologized to the flowers before picking them for a vase, and under her watch a spider was ushered outside rather than stepped on.

And yet this same woman appeared in one of the most recent, most murderous dreams that Morgan has had. The nightmare started with Morgan waking from her sleep to the realization that Rachel was staring at her from across the gym. The veins in the veterinarian’s hands were bulging. The fingers curled, showing off the long fingernails that would claw into Morgan’s throat or maybe tear her tongue right out of her mouth. The look on Rachel’s face said she would like nothing more than to rip Morgan’s eyes right out of their sockets. That was when Morgan woke, gasping for air and rubbing her eyes.

The nightmares occur on the nights she has unplugged a nutrient bag, but they also occur on the nights she has announced to the entire gym that she will stay awake as long as it takes to care for every last body. It makes no difference. She still wakes gasping for air, her hands reaching for her throat, sure that a murderer’s fingers must be ripping her neck apart.

Nothing she does matters anymore. She realizes this now. If she is going to have the dreams anyway, she might as well take another Block to the incinerator.

“What message are you trying to send me?” she asks, looking up at the roof.

No one answers.

But that evening, unable to stay on schedule, already tired and functioning ineffectively from the previous day, she knows there is only one option. One of her painters in quadrant 2 will go. Passing by Leonardo and Charlie, she comes upon Jarrett, who specialized in watercolors. It was obvious, when he arrived at the doorstep of the group home with a finely trimmed moustache and van dyke, that that he must be an artist.

Before the Great De-evolution, Jarrett loved painting landscapes of English cottages and Greek ruins. As mankind began to vanish from the Earth, he started painting scenes of abandoned farms, of caravans traveling south on barren landscapes, of jungle gyms that were rusted and falling apart without children to play on them.

Morgan’s hand lingers at the painter’s forearm, provides a soft caress, then disconnects his nutrient bag. The last thing he leaves behind, a painting of a deserted city, will be all that remains to mark that he was ever there.