The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (6 page)

11

She cannot keep up. The first few days of taking care of all of the Blocks wasn’t too bad because the responsibility was still fresh and she was focused on Elaine’s health. The next week, as she waited for a reply from Daniel, she pushed through the chores just so she could finish the day by checking her e-mail. But even then, as she forced her way through each row of beds in anticipation of the little reward she allowed herself, she noticed the rounds taking a little longer each day. The change was almost imperceptible at first. She finished by eleven o’clock at night. The next day, ten minutes later. The day after that, eleven-twenty. By the end of the first week, she wasn’t finishing until midnight. After two weeks, she isn’t done cleaning and repositioning the final Block until one in the morning.

When will it end?

I can’t keep doing this
, she thinks.

But she persists. Another week goes by. She is tired before she even starts her rounds. It is two o’clock in the morning when she finishes. Exhausted, her attention to detail fades. Late at night, only three Blocks away from being done for the day, she looks back at the previous Block she has just finished caring for and realizes she forgot to screw the tube to the Block’s IV back into his nutrient bag. Without it, he would starve and quickly die.

I must be getting tired. Where is my mind?

Little mistakes keep occurring. In the middle of her rounds, she can’t remember which Block she has just finished cleaning and which was to be cared for next. She imagines herself, an old woman shuffling slowly around the room, being recorded on some security monitor in a back office. How absurd she would seem. How futile her task.

I’m killing myself. I can’t take this much longer.

She still gets up at six every morning. If she sleeps in after a long day, it just means she either finishes even later the next night, or some of the Blocks go uncared for.

She has barely begun her chores the next day before the first mistake occurs. When she looks back at a Block she has just finished repositioning, she realizes she left the body facedown. The Blocks cannot do anything for themselves; a mouth and nose pressed into a pillow could very well lead to a slow suffocation for the poor man. She shuffles back to the bed, turns the man’s face to one side, then moves on to the next cot.

I can’t keep doing this. I’m going to drop dead and then everyone here will die.

She spills the contents of an entire nutrient bag on the floor. Clear plasma splashes on two beds, all over her feet, up her legs. Defeated, she walks across the gym and gets a mop. By the time she is done cleaning up the mess she has made in her drowsy, zombie-like stupor, she is an hour behind her already lagging schedule.

I’m not going to get to bed until 4 o’clock.
And then the thought:
I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.

The situation does not seem fair. She has only gotten herself into this spot because she lived when everyone else passed away. It is a burden she was never ready for, does not think she could ever be suited for.

She tries to think of a way to continue caring for each Block. Her predicament only exists because she can’t move fast enough to tend to so many people. Even though they are sixty-four people that require very little attention, a woman of her age was never meant to perform these chores at all, not to one person, let alone row after row of them. She changes their nutrient bags once a day. This gives them hydration and nutrition. She changes their Block diapers once a day. She washes their bodies every other day. They are repositioned twice a week. This is to prevent bedsores. They used to be moved more frequently, back when there were more care workers. She has given up on brushing their teeth. This was the first sacrifice that had to be made so their collective health was sustained.

But even these simple, basic needs—food, cleanliness—have become too much for one person. Beginning her rounds as soon as she wakes up makes no difference. If she wakes at four in the morning, she starts her rounds. Her conscience does not let her go back to sleep because sleep means all of these people, people who are relying on her, are going without care longer than they should.

There are no vacations. She cannot take days off. There is no one to alternate duties with. She no longer bothers to clean her dirty dishes. She pulls a filthy plate out of the sink and puts new food on it because that saves a couple of minutes.

Naively, she once thought if she merely moved faster, she could still care for each person the way she used to when Elaine was here. There is no pace to quicken, though, when you are ninety-three years old.

Maybe if I only clean them once every three days. Maybe if I only reposition them once a week.

But this is desperation speaking. This line of thought is how the quality of life begins to diminish past the point anyone would consider acceptable. Bedsores will begin to develop if she only cleans them every three days, if she only adjusts their arms and legs a few times each month. Infections will spread. She won’t allow that to happen to her Blocks. She has already stopped shaving the men’s faces and combing the women’s hair. She no longer takes the time to offer a loving caress on each person’s hand or cheek. There is nothing else she can cut back on to help get through all the chores for every Block. Yet continuing with such little sleep is not realistic. It will kill her. If she dies, the people she is caring for will all die too.

I can’t keep doing this.

Only two thirds of the way through her chores, she is already so exhausted that she needs to put her head on the closest cot and regain her balance. The very real thought crosses her mind that she could crawl into bed next to the Block already positioned there and take a week-long nap. The Block does not move over to make room for her. He does not offer an encouraging smile.

She thinks about lying down on the floor and sleeping there, even though her own bed is only a hundred feet away. Too far when she is this tired. Sleep beckons to her. But she is already struggling to finish her chores in one day; a nap would mean she wouldn’t finish until the next morning. And then, the following night, she wouldn’t be done until the next afternoon. Any semblance of a 24-hour schedule would be gone. She would find herself working through the night, through the mornings. Without a boundary of time, she would collapse.

I can’t keep doing this.

It’s not an option to stop at midnight and leave some of the people uncared for. Even if there were only two more Blocks left to be cleaned and fed, she couldn’t go to sleep knowing they have to wait for basic care that everyone else has already received. Her conscience wouldn’t let her sleep. She could walk back to her own cot, but a voice in the back of her head would keep reminding her of the people who were wearing shit-filled diapers. This thought would force her back out of bed. It’s a losing battle. She knows this.

Some days, she thinks the entire group should band together and suffer equally, as long as it means everyone survives. This is how countries unite during wars. It’s how families come together after tragedies. But what is the point of sixty-five people (she includes herself, even though she is the caretaker and the only person in the building with a real voice) suffering each day? What is the point of anyone waking up just to be miserable, go about their business, and go to sleep? Just so they can say they got through another miserable day?

The conclusion seems obvious. One should perish so that the rest can be healthy. That’s how animals in the wild ensure the highest number of their offspring end up living. It’s the foundation of the predator/prey relationship.

She knows what she has to do, and yet she still has nine decades of worries keeping her stuck in inaction. What would her parents think of what she is going to do? What would Elaine say? What would God think? If the history of the world somehow continued after there was no one around to document it, would she be remembered as a savior to the remaining few, or as the world’s last murderer?

She is standing over Justin’s bed. The very last Block of the night. Justin, who has never hurt anyone, neither physically nor emotionally. Justin, who from the first day of his existence to his last, has been quiet and motionless. Justin, who Elaine once said was a mountain climber, the final person ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. He would have stayed on top of the mountain and looked down at the rest of the world for the remainder of his life if he could have. If the weather had allowed it. When you are on top of that mountain, looking out at the expanse of the world, the blur of black earth and white snow mixing everywhere, only the cold and the lack of oxygen can force you away.

“The only reason he had come back down,” Elaine had said, “was that it was simply too cold to live up there. So he surrendered to his own limits and returned to join the rest of humanity in their final days. And now, here he is, with us.”

Morgan takes the tube leading from Justin’s nutrient bag between her index finger and her thumb. Without another thought, she pulls and the tube disconnects from the nutrient bag. Drops of a gelatinous goo drip onto the ground next to Justin’s cot. It has no smell. Or maybe it does and she simply can’t smell it anymore.

His arms, strong enough to pull him up the sides of mountains, do not push her away. The vice-like grip of his fingers, carved from clinging to rocks all of his life, does not encircle her wrist and beg her to stop what she is doing.

Another drip of the nutrient bag hits the floor. She closes her eyes.

His bag was almost empty anyway. There won’t be much to clean up the following day.

Justin is weak as it is, as are all the bodies around her. Without food and water, he won’t last more than a few hours.

It’s the only way,
she tries to convince herself.

The thought is meant to comfort her. The only way she can ensure the health of everyone else, including herself, is if she has fewer people to care for. She simply has too many people to clean and feed and reposition.

There is no reconciling what she has done, though. She keeps expecting Justin to beg for his life, expects him to plead for someone else to die in his place. He could tell her that if this is about survival of the fittest, there are many Blocks who aren’t as healthy as he is. He could say that the final person to conquer Mount Everest certainly deserves a better ending than being left for dead in front of all of his neighbors. He says none of this, though. He says nothing at all.

Slowly, she makes her way back to her desk, flips each light switch.

It’s the only way,
she tells herself.

It’s the only way.

The factory goes dark for the evening.

It’s the only way.

Outside, a bird chirps, oblivious to the suffering within the walls it craps on each day.

It’s the only way
.

12

Justin is dead when she checks on him the next day. His lips are grey, his fingers slightly curled. The glossy shine to his skin, that everyone has in the humid Miami weather, is gone. In death, his skin resembles clay more than it does the flesh that used to be there.

His body is removed the same way Elaine’s was: with the forklift. The machine picks up the whole package—bed and body and dirty sheets—and hauls them outside to the industrial-sized incinerator.

On its way there, the forklift rumbles over knee-high weeds, shakes back and forth over potholes and cracks in the pavement. A pavement she can no longer see because everything is covered with prickly grass, dandelions, and leaves, a jungle that reaches up to the forklift’s tires.

It has been done this way for years. Even when there were ten caretakers left, six women and four men, they were incapable of carrying the bodies. The forklift is a necessity.

Indeed, the machine would make many of her other daily chores easier if she were willing to use it for those purposes. It could help in flipping each Block over. It could carry boxes of nutrient bags and dirty diapers. But she knows the more she uses the forklift the sooner it has a chance to break down, and without it she would have no way to transport the dead out of the building, so she doesn’t tempt fate by using it more than she absolutely has to.

She learned valuable lessons from watching George operate the machine. Mainly: always take an extra minute to get the forklift into position. Of course, there was the final Block he tried to carry away, which had fallen to the ground, its skull sounding like a baseball being dropped onto a sidewalk from three stories above. But even before George’s eyesight had failed him, the man had always been impatient to get the job done. How many times had she and Elaine watched as the forklift rammed its arms under the bed, hoisted it up, and then watched as the bed teetered to one side? Instead of finishing his job quickly, George had to lower the bed back to ground, reposition the forklift, and try and try again. The dead bodies jiggled like unenthusiastic dancers as the forklift lurched back and forth. It wasn’t something you could easily forget.

George never failed to let out a string of curses. Elaine acted like she wasn’t paying attention. Morgan, every time she saw the scene unfold, would want to start crying. Why couldn’t George realize the bodies were already dead, that it didn’t matter how quickly they were removed from the building?

And so Morgan takes her time when she is the one operating the forklift. With her behind the controls, the metal arms pick up the bed, Justin’s body still atop it, and carry it across the facility. The other Blocks offer a moment of silence. One of their own has fallen. It is a solemn occasion.

At the incinerator, she pulls a lever and watches the bed rise to the same elevation as the incinerator’s feeder. Once in position, she moves the forklift closer. The bed and the body are both consumed in fire.

The body is engulfed in flames, quickly turns to ash. The bed takes much longer. She gives thought to standing near the incinerator as the bed’s metal frame melts away to nothing, the body already gone, but she cannot do this. She cannot bear to see a spider missing one of its legs or a common housefly stumbling around with only one wing; there is no way she can stay near the flames as they erase something, even a piece of furniture, because it was home to a life she was supposed to protect.

There are sixty-three Blocks now. The result is a facility with perfect rows and aisles, the cots all perfectly lined up, but with one bed missing at the end of quadrant 4. Now that Justin is gone, she wishes she could forget about the life Elaine had created for him. This act she had to perform would have been easier, somehow, if he had been a shell of a person rather than a great mountaineer. Could she send a mannequin to the inferno? Easily. Could she send Reinhold Messner? No chance.

She wishes the voice Elaine had created for him—crisp and clear, nothing mumbled, everything spoken with an intensity—could be quieted, that the things she spoke of on his behalf—unimaginable determination to get where he wanted to go, the breathtaking view once you get there—could be forgotten. These thoughts plague her and she completes her chores.

Maybe life is measured by the first time you have to hurt another living thing and by the moment you can finally live in peace.

She is exhausted and falls into bed. The gymnasium is dark. The moon offers little illumination. Only the faint outline of objects around the group home can be made out. The shapes of each cot can be seen. Each Block fades into the mass of shadows, though. For once, it is not raining. Also, she notices, for once in a long time her hands do not ache.

There is no noise except for the air conditioner clicking on every once in a while to save them from the hot nights. The birds, wherever they go when the sun is gone, are quiet. The feral cat that calls out in the night—she still can’t decide if the calls are to search for a mate or if the cat is scared and alone—is also quiet.

In that moment, she is sure she is being watched. The hairs on the back of her neck tell her this. They stick straight out. She has goose bumps. There is no noise to indicate she is being spied on. No footsteps. No opening and closing of a door. But the hairs on the back of her neck do not lie. They didn’t lie back when she was a young girl watching horror movies, knowing a knife-wielding madman was about to jump out from the shadows and slash a victim to pieces, and they don’t lie now.

She looks toward the main entrance. An old EXIT sign, somehow still working after all these years, offers a reminder of the safety precautions that former generations needed. The red glow of the light illuminates almost nothing. No one is there. She looks to the side door, thought of as the emergency exit. Unlike the other one, the sign above this door has long since burned out. But with the moon’s light, she can see that no one is standing there either.

I’m going crazy
, she thinks.
There isn’t even anyone around to spy on me.

But the feeling does not go away. In fact, it only intensifies. Somewhere, somebody in the enlarged room is staring at her. She is sure of it. Squinting, it looks as though the far corners of the gym are motionless. Each one has the same boxes of supplies that have always been there. She even looks up to the rafters, where the moon comes through, with the thought that perhaps someone is up there. Maybe someone crept in through one of the windows and is sneaking around above her.

What am I doing? I’m alone. If anyone were here, they would have to be a hundred years old. They aren’t going to be sneaking around forty feet in the air.

But the feeling of being watched refuses to go away.

After scanning the entrances and rafters, every corner and shadow in the gym, she knows the staring can only be coming from one place. One of the Blocks is staring at her. At least one of them, maybe more.

It’s crazy. It’s impossible. She knows this. But at the same time, she knows if someone is watching her, it must be someone within the four quadrants. Her eyes scan from bed to bed, but even the closest cots are covered in shadow, the Blocks on top of them vague shapes without distinguishable facial features.

The Blocks can only stare at the things their eyes happen to be resting on, and even then they don’t perceive what their eyes are gazing at. But somehow, somewhere, one of them is staring at her. A set of eyes is hunting her. She can feel them casting judgment. The verdict is not good. She feels, from within the dark, hatred directed at her. A plan for revenge is being set.

She wants to call out to whoever is watching. “You there, whoever you are, you don’t know what’s going on. Let me explain. I’m trying my best.”

Right then, her eyes open and she realizes it was only a dream. She was so tired she doesn’t even remember closing her eyes, only falling into bed. But as she lies there, eager for more sleep before she has to begin the day’s chores, she thinks about the response she might have gotten if the dream had lasted another minute.

Would someone have answered her, confirmed her suspicions that she was hated? But she also has the creeping suspicion that she wouldn’t have been able to utter the words she thought to call out. She would have been frozen in place, unable to offer a plea on her own behalf. Instead, her chest would feel like it was weighed down from within. She would be choking on her own silence, helpless.

And that thought, even though the dream is over, makes her shiver. Pulling the sheets tightly around her does no good. Her heart is racing. Perhaps to defy the feeling she had that she wouldn’t be able to speak, she takes rapid, quick breaths before declaring to everyone in the gym: “The start of another beautiful day!”

“It’s the middle of the night!” Cindy calls out in response. “Shut up.”

It turns out that not even a comedian has a sense of humor when everyone should be asleep.

The sun has not yet risen. The clock tells her it won’t rise for many more hours. But the more she talks, the more she can believe it really is the start of another brand new and cheery day. And with that, she gets out of bed and begins her chores.