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

by Chris Dietzel

  “It’s okay, Mom. It just goes into the ground or into the sewers until it becomes rain again.”

  Her mother stood in the doorway, her eyes closed, until she could respond without being mean. When she finally did say something, right after reaching over and turning off the water faucet, she had smiled and said, “The amazing things they must be teaching in school these days! It’s a shame your science teacher didn’t teach you about water bills.”

  And with that, Morgan had been sent to the kitchen to help clean dishes.

  If it keeps raining this way, the entire city will be washed away.

  She looks over at one of her Blocks, who promptly says, “If you think this is a lot of rain, you should have seen the concert I played in the Philippines. Now that was a lot of rain.”

  Jasmine is one of Morgan’s favorite Blocks. Inspiration found people in many different ways during the Great De-evolution, but maybe none in such a haunting fashion as Jasmine. In her earlier years, she had been part of a girl band. She and four other girls had hit single after hit single and sold out stadiums all over the country to screaming kids. She tried a similar act, albeit by herself, a couple of years later after the group broke up, but no one in the States seemed to like one girl singing and dancing when there had previously been five. She was hugely popular in Europe and Asia, though. For the next decade, none of her American fans saw her again.

  “Great people overseas,” she tells Morgan. “It’s a shame you never got to go over there.”

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Sorry,” Jasmine says. “My bad.”

  Forgotten in America but as famous as ever overseas, Jasmine continued singing to crowds that could tell she meant everything she said in her songs. When the Great De-evolution began, a new song started playing back home, different from anything she had done previously. It had a ghostly piano, only a couple of notes, accompanied by what sounded like an opera singer bellowing about broken hearts and lost loves. The song reminded everyone of all the people they had ever known that they might never see again. The most requested song in the country, it brought about another round of fame for Jasmine in America.

  Sometimes, when Elaine was tired of hearing the rain fall, she would sing a couple of lines from one of Jasmine’s songs. Now that her friend is gone, Morgan finds herself humming the lyrics, too:

  Saw him every day of my life

  Until one day he wasn’t there,

  Guess he made up his mind, just like all the others

  If I go south too, will he even care?

  Jasmine had a song for every part of the Great De-evolution that could upset a lovesick teenager. Any time a boy or girl had to say goodbye to their first love because their parents said it was time to move south, they could listen to one of Jasmine’s songs and cry themselves to sleep.

  What’s the point of being sad today

  When the world will be different tomorrow?

  When the world keeps changing every day

  Maybe everything can turn out to be okay.

  When people wanted to remember the good times, they listened to her song about how everyone’s parents want a better life for their kids. When someone wanted to take their mind away from being scared about the future, they listened to her song about how tragedy spawns the greatest loves mankind can ever know.

  And now, finally silent after years of singing, of bringing people to tears with nothing more than her voice, she joins Morgan’s other Blocks in quadrant 3.

  Jasmine offers the best encouragement she can muster: “I wrote the lyrics to When the Lights Go Out during a rain storm just like this one. I always found it inspiring to listen to the rain fall.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Morgan finishes cleaning the retired singer, reconnects the nutrient bag to the line running into her arm, makes her way to the next bed. Jasmine will live another day.

  But while it rains through the rest of the night without pause, Morgan is unable to find anything thrilling about massive floods that threaten to wash them right out of the only place they can all live together. Humming another of Jasmine’s songs provides little comfort.

  17

  Although she has assigned lives, accomplishments, and personalities to each of her Blocks, made them into complete people, reality always defeats imagination when she tries the same for herself.

  She tries to envision herself, not as an old woman alone in Miami, but as a young British nurse. She is in Dunkirk, taking care of scores of soldiers while waiting for the evacuation. The boats never arrive, though. She is Mother Teresa, caring for India’s sick and poor. However, Mother Teresa never had to sacrifice one of the wretched for the greater good. She places herself in a science fiction novel, Arthur C. Clarke’s last work, unfinished before he died. She and the people she cares for are stationed on a remote moon base, isolated from the rest of mankind. That is why she cannot leave the room with her Blocks. Try as she might, she is unable to forget she is in the remnants of a gutted gym, not a far-away crater.

  Every fantasy has a problem. The historical, the pure fiction, it doesn’t matter. They are all counterfeit and, eventually, begin to unravel. And each time her daydreams collide with her real life, she is left worse off than before because she realizes her circumstances will never improve. They cannot be altered, can only get worse.

  As a nurse, waiting for Churchill’s boats to arrive and save them, she cares for the wounded. “I’ll get you home safely,” she tells one. “Don’t worry, the allies will regroup and defeat Hitler,” she tells another. She calls her Blocks sir, salutes them, pretends their frail bodies are the result of limited rations or injuries in the trenches. The thunder above her is not thunder at all, but German shells bombarding their encampment.

  Although she sometimes feels silly putting on this act, it adds a little excitement to a day’s worth of chores. Not a single soldier goes unattended. Each will be cleaned and cared for as if the soldiers’ loved ones were right there doing the nursing.

  But in the morning, exhausted after a day of ensuring there are no more casualties, of putting her head down each time a bomb goes off overhead, she looks around and sees the same track and field banners hanging above her that have always been there. The banners are covered with a lifetime of dust, are barely legible, yet they still hang overhead to remind her of what high schoolers used to do with their time. Some of the felt letters are missing. A random R, a misplaced C. She finds them, periodically, after they have fallen from the banner and drifted down to the floor. Although not a historian, she can guarantee none of the soldiers at Dunkirk ever looked up and saw a banner declaring who the state champion was in track and field.

  In one corner of the group home, parts of the old factory line are pushed into a pile, a reminder of when hundreds of men and women constructed food processors here. Maybe, if she squints her eyes, the scrap metal can be confused for mortars or spare parts for a tank. It always seems to look like remnants of a factory, though.

  To add to this, there are no other nurses. Nor does she see soldiers coming and going, checking on their friends periodically in-between preparing for the retreat. Boats never arrive. The storm passes; the blitzkrieg is gone for one more night. The Germans have stopped firing on them for a while. She is returned to the only life she has for herself. History will not remember her as gallant. Sore, she pushes herself out of bed and begins caring for the Blocks as nothing more than an old woman who has outlived everyone else.

  It’s no more useful to envision herself as Mother Teresa, caring for the poor and the sick. Like those near death, her Blocks do not cry for help. They do not ask for anything. But while she is old and unbelievably wrinkled—that much of the alternate life is easy to believe—she lacks any kind of faith. She cannot, in good conscience, tell her sick and dying that God loves them, that they will soon be in heaven where they will never feel pain again, because she doesn’t know if this is true or not.

  A wet compress is
wiped across a Block’s head as the air conditioning struggles to keep the enormous room comfortable. She offers little affirmations of love in each person’s ear. Little additions to her care, such as wet cloths, whispers of love, gently rubbing their hands, only put her behind schedule. She tries not to notice the day slipping away just because she is offering love to each person. For a few hours, nothing is more important than feeling as if each Block is not only being cared for, but is receiving true compassion.

  Occasionally, she offers them prayers. But doing so immediately makes her feel guilty because she isn’t sure what she believes and what she doesn’t. She has no idea what lies in store for her or anyone else. How, then, is she supposed to help make them feel like they are getting ready to pass into the next world? She doesn’t even know what she thinks will happen when she dies, so telling them they will soon be reunited with loved ones leaves her feeling like an imposter. She finds herself apologizing for the prayers she offers, as if no prayer at all is better than one that has skepticism behind it.

  She is sure Mother Teresa never apologized for one of her blessings. No matter what Mother Teresa believed, her words meant more than anything Morgan can say simply because there was conviction behind them.

  The days she is on a remote moon base, she can create a world without being bothered by history or by real-life humanitarians. Sometimes, her spaceship is quarantined from the main outpost. Other times, she is the only survivor after an asteroid has exploded into the mother ship.

  Just because the Great De-evolution ended life on her own planet doesn’t mean life has to stop all together. Other planets have been colonized. Astronauts are beginning to explore past the Milky Way. Sure, she and the injured astronauts she cares for will eventually meet their end, either after running out of oxygen, getting too close to the sun, or some other routine ending for unlucky space explorers, but at least man has established bases on Mars, on the moon, and will continue to spread out amongst the stars. Mankind will reach out and live on planets that were inconceivable during Morgan’s childhood.

  But she looks at her laptop, unused since Daniel’s death, and knows no one else is out there. Not on the moon, not on Mars. Especially not on Earth. Instead of flourishing, mankind is on the verge of extinction. There is nothing to explore and no one to explore it.

  It is painful each time she realizes there is no other reality for her than the one she is in. She is old. She is caring for the last Blocks. That is all there is. As she makes her way through her rounds, refilling each Block’s nutrient bag, tears drip onto her shirt and then onto the floor. This is not acknowledged. Instead, she goes on caring for each person as if she isn’t crying at all.

  Maybe life starts the first time you play make-believe and ends the moment you admit you can no longer imagine something better for yourself than what you have.

  18

  It’s still well past midnight by the time she finishes caring for the Blocks in quadrant 4. There is one bed missing from quadrant 2, four from quadrant 3, and two from quadrant 4, but she has not made up many minutes. Any time gained from having one less Block to care for is lost, the very next day, in the time it takes to power up the forklift, drive it into place, and carry everything to the fires. It’s a losing battle.

  Her legs feel like they have finished a marathon. Her hands feel like they have broken stone all day at a quarry. And yet all she has done is hobbled from bed to bed and offered basic care to those who need it. She needs more rest than she is getting. Used to being hunched over beds all day, her back refuses to let her stand up straight. Even her fingers betray her. After a day of refilling nutrient bags, pushing Blocks into new positions, wiping bodies down with washrags, her fingers seize up. Some don’t move again, no matter how much she rubs them, until she soaks them in warm water.

  Sacrificing some of the people she was supposed to be caring for has accomplished nothing.

  This thought stays in her head as she lies on her cot before sleeping. Like those all around the gym, her body is perfectly still. If someone else were alive and happened to walk into the gymnasium, they wouldn’t be able to distinguish the caretaker from the Blocks until she spoke or until they noticed she was the only one without a nutrient bag.

  Her mind is almost never as exhausted as her body, which is unfortunate. If it were, she could go to sleep at night, too tired to worry about the next day and the days after that. Instead, with a body that refuses to move, but a mind that races, she is trapped on her bed, forced to think of how things will play out. She envisions herself killing another Block every day until she is left with one or two people. She imagines herself as the final murderer the world would ever know.

  A swirl of life’s questions keep her trying to figure things out before it’s too late. Is there a God? If there is, what is he thinking as he looks down upon her? Are her actions understandable, given her situation? Or is there no excuse for the things she has done? Is there life after death? If there is, what form does it take? Not just for her, but for her Blocks as well. If there is a heaven, there must also be a hell. Is that where she will spend eternity for what she has done? If it was up to her Sunday school teacher, most certainly. If there isn’t heaven, what is there? Is there anything at all, or just nothingness?

  She has been told all of her life that murderers go to hell, that only God has the right to take a life. Kill someone: hell. Help someone die: hell. Suicide: hell. Only God can inflict suffering and death as he sees fit. But what she witnesses with her own eyes tells her something different.

  She sees life that cannot sustain itself. She sees how an entire group home would be living in misery and filth, each body covered in flies and maggots, if she tried to care for the entire population. It’s only when she has slightly more manageable numbers that everyone can live without infections and sores, can have clean clothes. The death of a few pays for the well-being of the many. Somehow, she doubts her Sunday school teacher would have approved of this scenario.

  Maybe it’s a test. Maybe God really is the only one with the right to take away the life he has created, and this is the apple she has been told not to eat. Well, if that’s the case, she is eating every bite and asking for more.

  Will she go through all of this just to spend eternity in hell? What would be the point of suffering in this life if she’s just going to suffer in the next as well? What was the point of creating Blocks? What was God’s reason for turning mankind into a motionless mirror of what it had been? Surely, if God is omniscient, he had to know there would be a point when the last regular people would be overburdened with the task of caring for the silent masses. Is this what he wanted, is it his will?

  It’s easier to believe there is no God at all. No one is looking down upon her. There is no heaven and there is no hell. She will not spend eternity in fire because she did what she thought was best for her people. Her Sunday school teacher, if he were around, would smack her wrist with a wooden ruler for these ideas. Thankfully, he is not around.

  Murderers do not go to hell, and saints do not go to heaven. She will end up in the same place as everyone else—people who have killed others, people who have killed themselves, and people who never killed anyone or anything. Suffering happens because the world is filled with death and pain and agony, not because of a plan from higher up.

  As a six-year old girl, she watched a nature show on TV in which the narrator said half of all wild animals in Africa die in their first year of life. Some starve to death. Others are eaten. Some have disease. Some are killed for no better reason than there were people who could kill them. Half of all life. She watched a little cheetah cub die of starvation. She saw a lion cub die by itself in the brush, calling out for its mom. One clip showed a baby rhino being carried away in the jaws of a tiger. Oh my God, she had thought. That one show, even for a six-year old, was enough for her to question how there could be a God.

  It’s not something she likes, this killing of Blocks. But it’s necessary. Doctors didn�
��t operate on patients because they liked cutting people; rather, they liked healing them. This, she tries to believe, is why it’s okay to have already sacrificed some of her Blocks and why it will be okay to sacrifice more. She is not being tested, she is just getting by as best as she can, just like everyone else before her got along as best as they knew how.

  God did not turn people into Blocks. God did not cause the Great De-evolution. It just happened.

  As if remembering her Sunday school teacher, she rubs her wrists. Both hands would be bloody and swollen if that old bastard were here and knew what Morgan was thinking.

  She can’t help but think, though, if there is no hell for her to rot in, if all people, killers and normal people alike, end up in the same place, what place is it? Is it a mix of heaven and hell? Is it just like this life, only another continuation of it? Or will everyone be reincarnated as various animals, half of which will die within a year of their birth? What’s the point of all of this suffering?

  Her Zen master Block calls out from across the gym, “Your brain betrays you. It tells you that you were born and that you will die, but this is not true; you are eternal. You have always been here and you will always be here.”

  She does not know what to say to this, and so she says nothing.

  Sometimes she is able to fall asleep feeling as though she has the answers to all of the questions that trouble her. Following the rare day in which she has time to watch the sun set and is well-rested enough the next morning to also see the sun rise, she is sure there must be a God, and a glorious God at that. The days she watches a Block turn to ash in the incinerator, she still thinks there could be a God, but he is vengeful and cruel. If she happens to remember something pleasant from her childhood, only to look up and see a Block’s gaze coincidentally focused upon her, sharing in her happiness, she thinks they are alone in the universe. She is fine without a God. When she comes back from the incinerator, the smell of the metal bed frame sending a bitter chemical stench through the air, she feels accused and guilty if that same Block from earlier is staring at her. This is when she wishes she did believe in something greater than herself.