The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (7 page)

13

It doesn’t matter that there is one less Block, Morgan is still nowhere close to finishing before midnight. And every day, she becomes a little slower.

There is only one thing to be done: another body must go so the rest can survive. One less body to clean and feed and reposition means more time for her to sleep and gather her strength. Without rest, she isn’t healthy. If she isn’t healthy, no one else is either.

Is this what her life has come to—killing a living, breathing person each time she is overcome, overburdened? If she lets someone die today, how long will it be until she has to let another go? Letting one more person die won’t put her anywhere closer to being able to care for the rest. All it means is that the remainder of her existence will be marked by how frequently she must go through this.

The thought disgusts her, but at the same time she knows there are no other options. She can refuse to take part in the killings but then every single person in her care begins to suffer. She can sacrifice herself instead of a Block, but it means the rest of the gym’s population, whose health and well-being are tied to her own, die a day or two later anyway.

This is the only way.

She looks down at her Jedi, whom she has named Alokin. Although Alokin was Morgan’s idea, the Jedi became Elaine’s favorite Block creation that either of them came up with. He doesn’t have a lightsaber. He doesn’t have control over the Force. In fact, he is nothing but a normal guy. Maybe that is what Elaine loved about their “Jedi Master.”

For almost as long as Star Wars existed, people thought it was funny to mark their religion in census reports as being a Jedi. In some countries, Jedi made up as much as two percent of the official population. Maybe one or two of these people really thought they could perform Jedi mind tricks, but everyone else simply liked being part of the phenomenon. A census was conducted five years after the Great De-evolution began. Instead of two percent of the population listing themselves as Jedi, seven percent of people marked that box. Ten years later, in the final census ever conducted, twenty percent of the country listed their religion as Jedi.

Alokin was one of these people.

Elaine had burst out laughing the first time Morgan declared the body in row 1 of quadrant 4 was a Jedi. She had only seen the Star Wars movies once, at a boy’s birthday party in elementary school, and they hadn’t seemed like anything special, so she wasn’t sure where the inspiration came from for this Block to suddenly become the next Obi-Wan Kenobi. Nevertheless, she had found herself going home and testing whether her outstretched arm could somehow make a pencil fly across the room. She still remembers her embarrassed reaction, as a little girl, when nothing in her room moved just because she motioned her hand toward it: “This is so lame!” That had been the end of that.

Looking down at Alokin lying in his bed, she realizes she never told anyone how she tried harnessing the power of the Force in her bedroom. And she realizes the inspiration for the story of Alokin’s life was the same thing that made her sit there and test whether she might be able to control objects with her mind: both of them, herself as a little girl and this motionless body next to her in a cot, had just wanted something to believe in. Everyone wants something miraculous to have faith in.

That may have been why people all over the country, people who had never identified themselves as belonging to a specific religion before, gravitated toward being Jedi. They wanted something, at the end, to believe in, even if it just meant believing in the fond memories of being a kid, reminiscing about the things that captured their imagination, allowing themselves to be in awe once more.

It has been many decades since she thought about herself back then. How innocent and naïve she had been! Knowing what she’s about to do, the memory of commanding a remote control to fly across the room is one thing she wishes she could now forget. That little girl, who once believed that anything in a movie might be possible, must now admit the extent of her limitations and the effect that will have.

“It’s okay,” Alokin says. “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine.”

“I’m not in the mood for that tonight,” she says. Then, feeling bad about scolding him near the end, adds, “But may the Force be with you anyway.”

And with that, she disconnects his nutrient bag from the tube running into his arm. Her Jedi will be dead tomorrow.

She cannot stop there, though. Sixty-two bodies is still only a little difference. A long, deep breath goes into her lungs, fills her up. That is all of the pause she can allow herself before her next action, which is to walk down row 4 of quadrant 3 and unplug all four blocks there, too.

Her eyes are closed as she walks back to her bed. Tears are already falling down both cheeks. She does not wipe them away. Her hands are shaking uncontrollably at what she has done. But now, finally, she has a chance to finish her chores each day without driving herself until she drops dead. Maybe now she can finish her rounds before midnight and get enough sleep so that the next day seems reasonable.

Maybe.

There were a plethora of movies available to her as she grew up, movies in which a jaded, former professional killer or a still-working hitman confesses that the first kill is the hardest. After that, they all agree that you become accustomed to it; killing becomes easier each time you do it. She knows now that this is not true. There is no way this could ever become easier. She hates herself this time just as much she did the first time.

A list of hopes goes through her head in a cycle:
Please, let God understand why I’m doing this
; and,
Please, don’t let there be a God if he sends all murderers to hell
; and,
Please, let something happen so I don’t have to keep doing this
.

They are the same thoughts she has the next evening when she makes her way to row 1 of quadrant 4 and to Alokin’s bed. He, along with all the Blocks in the back row of quadrant 3, have passed away. The forklift roars to life again. On the way to the incinerator, she finds herself resenting anyone, even an actor playing a role, who tells her it gets easier to kill the more you do it.

It does not get easier.

14

With fewer bodies to care for, she finds herself focusing less on her immediate situation and has more time to think about how she has arrived at this point.

From when she was thirty, when she and her parents arrived in the settlement, to the time she was eighty, there was a steady stream of people migrating south to Miami. New faces would appear at the entrance to the group home. Most of these new arrivals were Blocks, but some were people just like her and Elaine, people who would ask if they could lend a hand. Each new face was a chance for Elaine to tell someone the same old jokes she had told everyone else already and a chance for Morgan to get new suggestions of recipes to experiment with on the food processor.

But the stream of people eventually slowed until it was a trickle, and then, only drops. A single man or woman might appear on the horizon, struggling to make the final mile of their journey on the broken roads. Eventually, even the single new stranger stopped appearing. After that, nature went about its business, making each person a little older every day, sporadically taking someone due to a heart attack or pneumonia.

Not just in her settlement, but in all of them. In addition to the e-mails she wrote to Daniel in Los Angeles, she used to exchange notes with caretakers in New Orleans, Houston, and San Diego. There was a lovely woman working at the San Diego settlement, a West Coast reflection of herself, that Morgan could share all of her sorrows with. This woman, Alaida, had grown up with the same kind of life as Morgan. A life of knowing what it was like to be the only normal child in a room full of children who couldn’t talk; years of knowing a different kind of childhood had once been possible but no longer was. This bond united them.

But then, one morning, Alaida’s next e-mail wasn’t waiting for her. An entire day went by without a message, but Morgan tried to pass this off as the growing responsibilities of a caretaker in the final settlements. She knew how busy she and Elaine were as more caretakers passed away, so she could sympathize with Alaida’s tardiness. But no message came the next day either, or the day after that. Alaida had either taken sick and was spending her last days being cared for herself, as she had cared for so many others, or she was already dead. That was the last contact she had with the San Diego settlement. Six months later, Daniel told her that the woman he stayed in contact with from there also stopped e-mailing him, and he assumed the entire settlement was finally gone.

The same thing happened to her friend in Houston. They exchanged messages about what their respective settlements were like, about how the new faces appearing from the north seemed to have finally subsided, and then one day that man also went quiet.

They all did, eventually.

Everyone Morgan has ever known has passed away. With Daniel’s death, the Los Angeles settlement is void of human life now, too. She alone is the final person in the world able to form words, capable of articulating her fingers. She alone continues the human lifeline for another day.

This realization does not bewilder her. If anything, she is oddly numb to the fact that she is all that remains. Maybe because she has had a lifetime of endings to prepare for this. Maybe because she is so overwhelmed with her current responsibilities. There is nothing she can do about being the last person other than continue caring for the remaining Blocks in the gymnasium with her. Knowing she is powerless to bring Elaine or Daniel back, helpless in her ability to create new life, allows her to focus on the task of providing for those who cannot provide for themselves.

Their care
—the
idea that convinces her that what she has had to do to Justin and Alokin and the others is the right thing. As long as she can give these remaining Blocks the best care she is capable of offering, everything else can be forgiven. She forces the thought into her mind, keeps it trapped there, believes it.

In a way, her life is easier with only limited time to contemplate her actions. Hobbling as quickly as she can from bed to bed allows few moments for reflection on the missing row of Blocks in quadrant 3. But it also gives her little time to think of all the things she has lost during her lifetime and little time to assess all the things she has given up to care for others instead of herself. She has lost everything except the actuality of her life. Even her virtue has been lost; she is a murderer.

Her parents are gone. But they would be gone anyway, she tells herself. Everyone’s parents have to pass away eventually. However, any other family she could have had is also gone without ever having existed. The man she might have married decided to stay, many decades earlier, when she left with her parents to head south. It hadn’t seemed like that big of a deal at the time because Morgan was convinced that if they were meant to be together, life would find a way to reunite them.

Instead, they never spoke again. She thought about calling him or sending an e-mail, but as time went by, she began to question if she hadn’t loved him more than he had loved her. Why else wouldn’t he contact her? It didn’t cross her mind until weeks later that he might have been waiting for the same sign from her. Only then did she realize that she could have made her own fortune instead of relying on the world to determine it for her.

By the time she did call, a year later, there was no answer at his house. Nor did he reply to her e-mail. She used to wonder if he ever got her messages and simply ignored them, spurned by the belief that he must have loved her more than she had loved him, or if he had left her similar messages and wondered why she never replied to them. For a long time after that she tried to picture where he might have spent the remainder of his life, if he lived his final years in a group community, or if he liked being by himself in the forgotten lands that had been abandoned by mankind.

Whereas she is able to create a name and personality and life story for each of her Blocks, she was not able to agree on what might have happened to the young man she loved many decades earlier. He may have only lived another couple of years, or he may have lived to be a hundred. He may have had a completely different sense of humor by the time he passed away; those fifty years in between the last time they saw each other is a long time for someone to change from the person she once knew. It’s possible that neither of them would be able to make the other smile anymore. Decades later, she may not even have recognized the man she once loved. That is why she avoids thinking about how he may have died or where he may have spent the remainder of his life. Although she does not try to put together a story for his final years, the one thing she does allow herself is the hope and belief that he thought about her in his last days the way she thinks fondly of him now.

In addition to preventing her from romantic love, the Great De-evolution ensured that any chance she might have had at having children also fell by the wayside. This, at least, is okay with her, though. Growing up during the Great De-evolution, she didn’t have the chance to see parents taking their sons and daughters to little league games or to picnics, so it never seemed important to have those same experiences. The charm of having a life growing within her own belly seemed odd because the life she saw all around her was quiet and needed to be cared for. Any appeal at the thought of changing diapers and having someone be dependent on you seemed like an unnecessary burden when she saw Blocks all around her that needed the same thing.

It’s not just family, however, that has disappeared from her life. It’s also the mundane things, the things she never used to think about. There is no excitement over a new song, movie, book, or TV show, nothing that can take her away, even for five minutes, to another world. The final years of television had nothing but re-runs. It’s not fun to turn on a TV when all you see are things that originally aired thirty years earlier.

There aren’t even new meals to experiment with on the food processor anymore. At her age, she has had a chance to go through every meal from 001-African Peanut Soup, to meal 999-Ziti. And she has tried every variation for each meal. African Peanut Soup with extra garlic. African Peanut Soup with no chili powder. Ziti with only mozzarella cheese. Ziti with only ricotta cheese. Ziti with only Parmesan cheese. Ziti with all three cheeses. You name it and she has tried it.

With no one else to talk to, she tells her Blocks about the plates of food she makes and then imagines their responses.

“Spaghetti with vodka sauce is pretty gross,” she tells the Block who used to be a gardener.

“Why are you telling me? All I get to have is the shit that comes out of this nutrient bag.”

The gardener was never very good with people. He was happy when everyone started migrating south because it meant he had entire parks that could be turned into flowerbeds, entire golf courses that could be turned into rose-colored artwork.

It’s a shame his family forced him to come down to Miami with them. He has never smiled since then.

She tells a Block who used to be a lifeguard how cream of crab soup is superior to Maryland crab soup.

“Variety is the spice of life,” the Block says. “Just make sure you wait thirty minutes before you go swimming. You don’t want to get cramps.”

The only people her lifeguard ever had to save from drowning were Blocks who had been left too close to the shore during low tide and were forgotten about by absent-minded family members when the tide started to rise again.

From his peaceful face come the words, “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw dolphins in the water, thought they were sharks, and caused a massive panic?”

She looks at the giant clock on the wall. Even with six of the Blocks gone, she is having trouble keeping the pace she needs.

“I’m sorry. I need to keep moving.”

“I understand,” he says. “Stay safe.”