The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (3 page)

5

Elaine will be better today; she has to be.

That’s Morgan’s first thought when she wakes up.

Her second is not as hopeful:
Why did we spend all this time creating stories for everyone around us instead of discussing what would happen when one of us died and left the other alone?

After all, their game only started when George, the last male caretaker, walked out of the gymnasium, never to return, and left the two of them to care for everyone by themselves. Had Elaine known what would eventually happen? Had she seen the writing on the wall, that it was a matter of time until either she died and left Morgan alone, or else Morgan died and it was Elaine who was left to care for everyone? Is that why she spent so much time crafting stories for the people all around her, because it took her thoughts away from what would happen next?

The closest she ever saw anyone get to mentioning the topic was when George, back when there were still four caretakers left, had stood in front of the many rows of Blocks in the gymnasium and whispered to himself, “I don’t want to be the final one.”

With the air conditioning off, his statement travelled across the room to where Morgan was able to hear it. The idea, spoke aloud, was so terrifying she had actually shivered. Without realizing Morgan had heard him, George had closed his eyes, maybe envisioning a way to keep from being the last caretaker in the facility, and then grunted and opened his eyes and started moving around again.

For a minute, all Morgan could do was stand there with her mouth open. Only when Elaine tapped her on the shoulder and asked what she was thinking about did Morgan erase the comment from her memory and continue on with her day. There was no way she would be the one to bring up the subject after that. Not even with Elaine.

As she approaches Elaine’s bed, Morgan says, “See? I told you that you’d feel better in the morning.”

She speaks in her most cheerful voice because Elaine needs a positive attitude more than ever. Every part of Morgan’s body is sore. Her knees ache. So does her back. Her hands often seize up. Going to bed later than normal, taking care of all of the Blocks by herself, has been tougher than she imagined. But it’s important to let Elaine know everything will be okay.

When she sees her friend, though, she gasps. The tube allowing the nutrient bag to provide Elaine with water and nutrition has fallen out—or was pulled out. A small puddle of liquid is on the ground where the nutrient bag drips away its hydration.

Elaine’s lips are grey. Her fingers are light blue. Her eyes are open, staring at the ceiling as though that was the last thing she was interested in, but they are glassy and still, focusing on nothing.

“Elaine?”

She does not expect a response, but that does not keep her from repeating her friend’s name.

“Elaine? Come on, Elaine.”

She puts an ear to Elaine’s mouth to listen for breathing. Nothing. She takes Elaine’s wrist in her hands and feels for a pulse. Nothing.

“Elaine?”

Now she’s only talking to hear her own voice because it’s the only thing that can comfort her, keep her from breaking down.

“Elaine?”

She takes Elaine’s hand in her own. However, while her fingers wrap around her friend’s palm and squeeze, Elaine’s fingers remain only slightly curled, do not offer any warmth, do not encircle Morgan’s hand to let her know everything will be okay. They are lifeless.

“Elaine?”

A normal person can survive between three and five days without water. In Elaine’s condition—ninety-three old, already sick and dehydrated—it would only take a couple of hours. It’s very possible the tube came out right after Morgan went to sleep. It’s also possible, even if the nutrient bag had stayed connected, that Elaine would have died anyway.

Morgan rubs her friend’s arm where the IV had been. A slight bruise remains on Elaine’s forearm, pinpointing the spot where her life might have been saved. There is no intelligent reason for this gesture, nothing that can make a difference, but it makes her feel like maybe she can rub life right back into her friend’s body. She might as well be rubbing her friend’s feet or washing her hair, but she is desperate.

“I should have sat up with you. I should have made sure you didn’t pull the tube out. I should have done something else.” She says this to the entire gymnasium, as if defending her need for sleep to the jury of Blocks she is surrounded by.

The only response she gets is the click of the air conditioning unit as it kicks on to provide relief from the warm Miami mornings.

“Oh my God,” she says, looking around.

Sixty-four bodies surround her. Distracted, her fingers relax. Elaine’s hand immediately falls to the side of the cot, where it hangs without swaying.

“My God,” she says again.

She is alone. For the first time in her life, she is utterly and truly alone. With her are a gymnasium full of people relying on her to stay alive. Four quadrants of sixteen bodies depending on her. Sixty-four souls with her as their protector. And yet she is alone.

“Oh my God,” she says again.

Behind her, she hears the imaginary voices of over fifty people say, in unison, “You aren’t alone. You have us.”

“Is that why the game was so important?” she says, looking down at Elaine.

What else can she say? Her head falls into her hands. She sobs over the body of the only other person who knew what she was going through, who helped care for the Blocks. It is only when she has cried so long, no new tears able to fall, that she remembers to brush her hand over her friend’s eyelids.

The eyes, which had been staring up at the rafters, or beyond, finally close.

6

The forklift starts on the first try. Even so, Morgan sits atop it, motionless, until she assesses what she is supposed to do and judges whether or not she can do it. A wood block has been added to the pedal so her miniature legs can reach it. It takes both of her hands to move a lever that a normal driver is supposed to be able to throw around with ease. She only knows how to operate the damn thing because she watched George use it so many times.

“Dear lord,” she mutters.

The machine’s loud rumble cancels any noise created by the power generator and air conditioner. A pile of blankets conceal her friend’s body so she doesn’t have to see it. The same stack of blankets makes it impossible for Morgan not to think about the times, as a kid, when she hid in the laundry during games of hide-and-go-seek, waiting to see if her mother could find her. Now, the bundle of blankets hides a body from sight before it goes into the incinerator.

There is no other way to dispose of bodies. Certainly, she cannot dig a grave. The body has to be removed from the area
some
way, though, or else disease will creep in and spread throughout the entire gymnasium. And she can’t simply abandon the body outside the gymnasium. Predators would be attracted to the remains and begin circling the building she calls home. Instead, anyone who dies is carried to the flames.

The duty used to belong to George. Any time a Block passed away, George would climb up into the forklift, position it in place, and take the body to the fire. Every once in a while he had to reposition the forklift three or four times before it was aligned with the bed correctly, and Morgan and Elaine realized George’s eyesight must have been failing him more than he was willing to admit.

“Would you like help?” they would ask him.

“I’m fine,” he always replied, moving his thick glasses up on his nose and squinting.

“Are you sure?”

But instead of answering, he would shake his head and narrow his eyes and try again. Some people, no matter how old they get, don’t want to admit their limitations.

The very last time George took a body to the incinerator, he powered up the forklift and moved it into place. But when he raised the forklift’s arms, only the back end of the bed raised, and before George saw his mistake and could pull the lever back, the bed had been flipped upside down. The poor body that had been atop the bed had gone crashing over the side, head first, and was left in an ugly position that not even the most dedicated yoga practitioner should attempt. If the Block hadn’t already been dead, it would have been then.

“Damn it!” George had yelled.

“Let me help you,” Morgan had said, but George was already shifting the forklift’s gears again. Instead of getting out and saving the body some dignity and respect, George had lowered the forklift’s arms so they were at ground level, and then he cranked another lever so the machine moved forward, pushing the body and the bed across the floor instead of carrying it. By the time it was halfway across to the door and the incinerator outside, a pile of dust had collected under the poor Block.

“It’s okay,” Elaine had told him after the whole thing was over. “We all get old. One of us can start doing the forklift.”

The next day, though, George had opened the gymnasium door, walked away, and was never seen again. Some people are inclined to face the harsh realities of life, while others simply are not. Or, as Elaine had put it, “That old bastard should have just admitted he was blind as a bat and stopped punishing himself.”

Morgan is older than she ever imagined herself being, but her eyesight has not deteriorated. Her sense of smell is almost gone. With it, her sense of taste. Parts of her are deadened to sensation while other parts constantly cry for a reprieve from her chores. But she can see exactly where she needs the forklift to be in order to carry her friend away. She doesn’t even need to squint.

The forklift’s arms move under the blankets and scoop up the hidden body beneath them.

How absurd I must look
, she thinks.
An old woman in the driver seat of a warehouse machine.

She imagines one of her Blocks calling out, “If you think this is bad, I once had to drive a replica of the Batmobile all the way from Boston to Baltimore.”

“Not now,” she says, determined to get this job over with as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, the forklift’s motor drowns out the noise of Elaine’s body catching on fire and then sizzling into ash. When the forklift’s arms come out of the flames, they are slightly orange, like a welder’s anvil.

She tries not to think about being the only person left to care for an entire gymnasium full of bodies. But she knows that isn’t the only thing bothering her; she is also the final normal person in the entire city. There’s a chance George is out there in the city, alone. Not a strong chance, though. As bad as his eyesight was, he wouldn’t be able to see the buttons on a food processor and would starve. And that’s if he was able to see the potholes on his way to another home. Probably, he would only get a few hundred feet before stepping right into a hole and either twisting his ankle or falling face first onto the concrete. It’s likely he died a day or two after abandoning the shelter. There is no telling what animals stalk the city streets looking for food.

Daniel, in Los Angeles, is the only other person she knows of in the entire world who is still alive. This, more than anything, is what she tries not to think about because it means all the other final settlements have gone quiet. And if they have gone quiet, it’s a matter of time until hers does as well.

The seemingly endless amount of cots in front of her offers all the distraction she needs. If she doesn’t make her way through all four quadrants each day, someone else will begin to suffer. This thought is what pushes her up and down the aisles without a chance to stand in front of Elaine’s empty bed and feel sorry for herself. As she makes her way through the rows, her fingertips touch the heads and feet of the bodies she cares for. Such smooth skin. So soft. There is no scientific proof, but she has always thought that everyone, Block or not, is healthier if they have human contact. Even the simple touch of a human hand once a day.

Maybe, she thinks, life is about the first time you touch another person, and the last. This thought is comforting.

For one day, at least, it’s easy not to focus on her aching back as she bends over each Block. It’s easy to ignore her rumbling stomach. She knows she must be tired, must be hungry, but doesn’t feel it. She moves from bed to bed in anticipation of e-mailing Daniel as soon as she is done. She will not allow herself to stop halfway through the rows of Blocks. It would be like opening Christmas presents early. She needs something to look forward to in order to get through the day.

Finally, when she is finished, she washes her hands and puts food into her belly. If asked the next day, she wouldn’t even be able to say what meal she ate. She has learned that there are few things you really need to focus on and many things you can get through without much thought.

Finally, eagerly, she moves to her computer and opens her e-mail. She looks for the last time she sent him a message and frowns when she sees it has been more than a month. His latest e-mail to her, from two days before that, is still there, still waiting for a real response.

The only thing she had written at the time was:
Soooo busy. Really sorry to hear you’re alone. Wish I had time to write more. Will write again when things slow down.

Part of her blames the lack of a response on how busy she has been. But she knows he was the final remaining caretaker at the Los Angeles group home for the last month, meaning he has been even busier than her. Yet he still found time to e-mail someone. The other part of her blames her lack of response on not knowing what to say to him. That sounds immature and childlike, she knows that. It’s not a quality she is proud to display as an old woman. She is no better than a teenage girl who has received a love note and doesn’t know how to tell a boy who is interested in her that she doesn’t share the same feelings, and so simply tried to brush him off.

Daniel’s message had been straight forward enough. In only a few lines he had stated that the only other caretaker in the Los Angeles facility had passed away the night before, and that now he was left alone to care for roughly forty Blocks by himself. He ended the e-mail by asking how she was doing, how the Miami home was doing as a whole, and by stating that, as far as he knew, his Los Angeles group home and her Miami group home were the only two remaining in the country.

Instead of writing anything meaningful, she had been a coward and said she was overwhelmed with her own Blocks.

There were a lot of things she had thought to say in her response. She could have told him that not only were they the last two settlements in the States, but also that her contact in the Lisbon group home had gone quiet six months earlier and that Europe may not have anyone left either. She could have told him that her pen pal in Caracas had gone silent nine weeks ago. There was a very good chance no one was alive in South America either. As far as she knew, she and Daniel were the last two living people in the entire world.

Except for all of their Blocks.

Every time she has the thought about being the last person in Miami or on the East Coast, she corrects herself and includes the bodies she cares for, complete with their made-up lives and personalities.

She wonders what Daniel will think to finally get a real response from her. She will not tell him right away that she is only replying in depth now that she is in the same situation he has been in for over a month. Maybe she can offer him some sense of comfort, and maybe he can tell her it’s not too bad being the last person in an entire city.

She is usually careful in crafting her e-mails, strict about being grammatically correct, using the active voice instead of the passive, sounding like she has everything under control. Tonight, though, she is too restless to have someone to communicate with, too eager to send her e-mail so she can receive another message from him. And so she doesn’t even check for misspelled words or run-on sentences, she just types it up and clicks SEND as quickly as her gnarled fingers will let her.

She does not ask him how he thinks life is measured. Nor does she ask if he ever thinks about what happens after you die. Those things can wait for another day. Tonight, she merely wants to know how he is getting on by himself and what it’s like to know there is nobody else—she corrects herself: no other regular people—around for hundreds or maybe thousands of miles.