The Hauntings of Playing God
Chris Dietzel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidence.
THE HAUNTINGS OF PLAYING GOD, Copyright 2014 by Chris Dietzel. All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by CreateSpace Independent Publishing.
ISBN-13: 978-1500548261
ISBN-10: 150054826X
Cover Design: Truenotdreams Design
Author Photo: Jodie McFadden
Also by Chris Dietzel
The Man Who Watched The World End
A Different Alchemy
The Hauntings of Playing God
1
Morgan’s mother once said that a life starts the first time you tell another person you love them. That same life ends, she had said, no matter when your heart actually stops beating, the last time you make an announcement of love. Her mother was, obviously, a romantic at heart. But what about people that never find love? Surely, they are still alive. Aren’t they?
Her father, much more practical, said life starts with your first heartbeat and ends with your last heartbeat. Too smart for her own good, even as a little girl, Morgan had immediately replied, “What if someone gets a heart transplant? Are they the person who’s still alive, or is it the person that the heart originally belonged to?” Morgan’s father did not bother with a response.
Her mother used to roll her eyes at these literal types of answers offered by her husband. Any time Morgan’s father said life started with a breath of oxygen or with brain activity, Morgan’s mother would pat her on the head and say you only truly lived as long as you were curious: life started the first time you asked ‘Why?’ and ended when you stopped asking such questions.
“If you keep telling her things like that,” Morgan’s father would say, giving a deep sigh, “she’s going to grow up to be a hippie. Or worse, a journalist.”
Little did Morgan’s father know that journalists would be one of the many extinct vocations after the second decade of the Great De-evolution. With the end of man signaled, no one was interested in reading the same daily reports of human misery and tragedy they had been seeing for the previous hundred years. There were better ways to spend your time than hearing about corruption, needless death, and celebrity scandals.
Instead, people finally took time to start the books they had always wanted to read, spent time learning the hobby that had always interested them, or else they had actual conversations with the people they were sitting next to rather than watching the TV in silence. In those days, even though the world seemed to be going to hell, a lot of people would say their lives were more fulfilling after the Great De-evolution began than before it started.
One day, during her sophomore year of high school, a teacher—who she still isn’t sure to this day if he was a good teacher or an awful one—asked the class if life ever really began or ended. He smirked and asked if life might be endless. Given that there were no freshman and she was part of the final graduating class, this seemed unlikely. Or, he offered a spooky face, is it all a figment of God’s imagination. Maybe, he suggested, none of his students were actually there in his classroom, none of them were even alive, because they were part of a higher being’s dream. The class stared back at him in silence; none of the teenagers knowing what to make of these comments. Maybe, if there had been more than three other students in class with her, someone would have raised their hand and offered a smart-ass reply. Being that they were in a room meant for twenty-five kids and only four desks were occupied, the kids all remained silent.
Following high school, one of the boys she dated said life began for men when they got their first erection and ended when they could no longer get it up. The boy smirked as he said it, as if that was her cue to start making out with him. It wasn’t even sexist, it was just asinine. (There was no second date.) Was she to assume her life didn’t start until she got her first period and ended when she was in her fifties? It was proof that people didn’t stop saying stupid things just because the world’s population was getting a little smaller each day.
Did her life start after her first breath? Maybe she truly began living once she understood that two people were looking down at her in her bed, ensuring she was safe and healthy. Or did her life start the first time she smiled? Did her life actually begin later, when she started asking her mother questions like, “Where do babies come from?” and “Will I have a little sister someday?”
She thinks of these possible benchmarks, takes stock of how many of these options indicate that her life is still progressing and by how many has it already ended.
She is still breathing. Check.
Her heart is still beating. Check.
It’s been years since she has told someone that she loved them. Trouble.
And considering she is surrounded only by people who cannot talk or move, not by anyone who can love her, she does not see herself making the proclamation of love anytime soon. More trouble.
She has no idea if her high school teacher’s comments about being part of a dream, about really existing, can ever be measured, so she strikes that out.
To this day, even at the age of ninety-three, she is still trying to figure out how she has arrived at this point, why she is one of two regular people left in the group home. Maybe her mother was right: maybe asking all of these “why” and “how” questions is keeping her alive.
None of the definitions she attempts to measure her own life with, save the ones about someone’s first breath and their heartbeat, can apply to Blocks. No one knew what to do when babies all around the world were being born without the ability to move or speak or do anything at all, as if they were obstructed, or blocked, from the rest of the world. Not only were they born this way, they would remain motionless and mute the rest of their lives. It wasn’t necessarily their appearance that signaled the end of humanity, it was the absolute disappearance of regular people who could create new, self-sustaining life. Now, except for Elaine, the only other caretaker working alongside Morgan, Blocks are the only people she knows.
But if the measure of breathing or of a heart beating is the only indication that Blocks are alive, does that really mean they are living? Does it mean that life is only about how long your lungs can take in new oxygen? Surely not. Deep down, in the set of core beliefs she has never shared with anyone else, she knows life is about more than just a heart beating or blood flowing. It has to be, or else there is no point to everything the human race has ever accomplished. Why mold steel, control electricity, conquer mountains, go into outer space, if all that matters is taking another breath of air?
What else is there, though? What else can there be? These are the questions that plague her. They follow her as she walks through the aisles of Blocks, caring for each one. The questions follow her to bed, no matter how exhausted her physical body is, and torment her dreams. They also greet her in the morning when she wakes up.
And the thoughts follow her now as she stands up, pushes her chair from under her, and turns around to face the Blocks whose health she is responsible for. She scans the many rows, each with a cross-aisle every twenty feet so she can easily move about, make her way in-between them.
Her desk and her computer are in the same over-sized room as her Blocks. The desk has probably been here since the building was first constructed, decades and decades earlier. The computer once belonged to a caretaker who arrived thirty years ago and has since passed away.
; She has never been able to get over the guilt she feels the few times each week that she takes a couple of minutes away from caring for the bodies all around her so she can track the weather, e-mail the few other caretakers remaining around the world, or write in her diary. Having the rows of bodies behind her is a constant reminder she does not want. She feels their eyes on her back as she types an e-mail or looks at the weather reports for possible hurricanes. Their eyes pull her away from relaxation, force her to begin another round of chores.
“Relax,” Elaine says when she sees Morgan stand up from the computer after only resting for five minutes. “I can handle it.”
But Morgan doesn’t sit back down. It’s not possible when others rely entirely on her. The reason she has never been able to come to terms with these brief reprieves is that every minute away from the rows of beds means sixty-four mouths that can’t chew their own food, that require nutrient bags, are not getting the attention they need. It means sixty-four Block diapers filled with excrement need to be changed. Each body needs to be washed and, to prevent bedsores, repositioned. Without her, sixty-four people begin the process of dying. And in her guilty conscience, they start dying as soon as she turns her back to look at her computer. She knows this is an over-dramatic simplification; it’s not as though each body begins starving to death as soon as she washes her own hands or puts food in her own mouth. And they certainly don’t begin to die just because she stays in touch with someone from the Los Angeles group home or checks for another storm.
It does feel that way, though.
2
Morgan and Elaine weren’t always alone. There was a time when they were but two of the many caretakers walking aisles at the final Miami group home. During her first years working at the home for Blocks, Morgan had been assigned a four-hour shift. Four easy hours. And she had only been responsible for one quadrant. Each quadrant consisted of four rows with four Blocks in each row. She only had to feed and clean sixteen people. Looking back, she didn’t know those were the days she should have considered herself lucky.
As the population slowly shrank, as more and more caretakers passed away, as no new people entered the city who were willing to volunteer their time, she took on more responsibility. At first, her four-hour shift turned into an eight-hour shift, but still caring for a single quadrant. A while later, the caretakers each became responsible for thirty-two Blocks during their eight hours. Then thirty-two Blocks for a twelve-hour shift. She stopped keeping track of her time once there were only four caretakers left. After that, there were no longer enough people to keep a sustained schedule of duties, so each person worked until they simply couldn’t work anymore and had to rest. Each person took care of as many Blocks as they could until they collapsed from fatigue.
“Four people can’t take care of so many bodies,” George, the last remaining male caretaker, had said. “It’s just not possible.”
The other three had just looked at him, not wanting to ask what he was getting at, not wanting to admit they might be thinking the same thing.
He added, “Maybe if we gently assist a couple quadrants into the next life, we can do a better job of caring for the rest of them.”
It had been Morgan who had stepped forward, said she would care for all of them by herself if she had to, and then began walking the rows to do just that. Even as she refilled the first nutrient bag, she couldn’t think of a better reason for her outburst or her devotion other than the knowing that if she were one of the people who needed care, she wouldn’t want to be neglected or tossed aside so easily. She refused to look behind her to see if the other three caretakers would follow her lead. Eventually, Elaine and the others shrugged and joined her. The topic hadn’t come up again.
So focused were they on caring for the Blocks at that point that they stopped caring for themselves. A woman who took over after Morgan went to sleep simply fell over dead one day. Then there were only three caretakers left. That was when George either decided he had been right all along or else experienced what Morgan and Elaine think must have been a nervous breakdown. He simply walked out into the empty city streets without saying goodbye and was never seen or heard from again.
“I didn’t see that coming,” Elaine had said.
Morgan didn’t say anything. She was too busy trying to remember if there had been any signs that someone she had spent almost every waking hour with for the past five decades could turn on her like that. Had he said or done anything in the days leading up to his disappearance that would signal a nervous breakdown? She didn’t think so. Was it his way of excusing himself from a situation he didn’t agree with? More likely.
Then there were only two caretakers left.
Two caretakers for sixty-four Blocks.
But then, a month earlier, Elaine began showing the first signs of sickness. Before the Great De-evolution, the cold probably would have been treatable. A doctor would have prescribed some pills and Elaine would have been back to feeling her usual self. After all, before the Blocks appeared, people had been routinely living to be one hundred years old. Men on TV had announced the birthdays of all the new centurions each morning, welcoming them to the growing club. But as the population declined and medical experts faded away, the average life expectancy slowly started to decline as well. Now, there is no one to diagnose whether Elaine’s fever is a symptom of something more serious or just a bug she needs to sleep off.
At first, she had woken up with a cough, was sluggish through the day, complained of being too hot. Morgan wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t even a nurse. She just took care of people because no one else was around. That didn’t make her qualified to diagnose her friend’s sickness.
“Go to bed. Rest.” That’s all she could offer.
Two days later, Elaine was back on her feet, helping Morgan with the chores as best she could.
“I used to have the immune system of a lion,” she said.
Morgan looked down at her wrinkly hands and arthritic knuckles before saying, as if shocked, “I guess we’re not as young as we used to be.”
The comment did the trick. Elaine has always loved vastly understated cynicism. She is predictable that way. She smiled and shuffled ahead to the next bed and to the Block residing there.
Elaine has been healthy since that last bout of sickness. Now, as they make their way through the rows of Blocks, rain falls steadily on the metal roof three stories above them. They have to speak louder to hear each other above the constant barrage of water pinging off metal. The group home was originally a high school gymnasium. That was before it was gutted and turned into a Survivor Bill facility that made food processors for everyone.
Sixty-four beds seems like a lot when you have to care for the bodies occupying each one, but it does little to make an old basketball court and the expanse of rafters above it feel like a cozy place to live. The gymnasium used to house hundreds of Blocks. Now, only a fraction of that number remains. In such a large room, with so little to fill it, the pitter-patter of the rain echoes throughout each corner of the home.
“I was never a fan of the rain,” Elaine says. “Not even as a kid when my brother used to think it was fun to play baseball during storms like this. I’d watch him from the window and think he was crazy.”
Morgan listens to the water droplets pounding away at the roof and closes her eyes. “I used to love lying on the ground when I was a kid and it was raining like this. The ground starts off really hard and dry, but after a couple of minutes you feel like you’re sinking right into the earth.”
“Morgan?”
“Yeah?”
“You have a lot of issues.”
This is how Morgan knows Elaine is feeling better again.
3
It was Elaine’s idea, back when she and Morgan became the final two caretakers, to begin naming each Block. Not only that, but to create a story for each Block’s life, as if they were an additional normal person occupying the group home rather than a body needing daily care. Before
that, they had just seemed like random bodies.
“Jimbo, here,” Elaine would say from the bed she was standing over in quadrant 1, “was the cop who finally decoded the Block Slasher’s letters and brought him to justice.”
It was a source of amusement that made Morgan uncomfortable. She was reminded of dumb make-out games from middle school, like spin the bottle and seven minutes in heaven—games that even as a girl she had thought were a waste of time. Although she had gone along with them at more than one party.
She didn’t say it, but her first thought was, He doesn’t look like a cop. He looks like a frail old man who’s never moved from that bed or eaten a solid meal.
“This one,” she said instead, calling across the gym from the cot she was standing by in quadrant 3, “was—“
“This one?” Elaine said, unhappy with how the game was being played. “What’s her name?”
“Cindy.”
“Okay. What did Cindy do?”
Morgan tried to think of something a little more positive than a story involving the Great De-evolution’s most notorious serial killer. “She, uh, she was a comedian.”
Elaine gave a nod, as if that was what she had been thinking too.
The next day, as Elaine refilled Jimbo’s nutrient bag, she yelled over to Morgan, “He had to shoot the Block Slasher five times. There was no way the killer would allow himself to be taken alive.”
In response, Morgan said, “Cindy’s whole act revolved around the Great De-evolution. Anyone who was sad about the human race dying out could go to one of her shows and, after a couple minutes of jokes, would think our extinction was the funniest thing in the world.”
The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) Page 1
