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

by Chris Dietzel

  But each time she is sure that one of these possibilities could be the correct one, the following day she wakes up doubting her conclusion. What she thinks most often is that God, if there is a God, does look down on her. And he’s not happy at what he sees. She has been told that God has a master plan for everything, but if God’s plan is for her to be surrounded by dozens of suffering bodies as they all slowly die together, herself included, she wants no part of it.

  How could the God that created the beauty and splendor of the world allow everything to end this way, unless he is spiteful? He would put her in this position, cause this much suffering, just because he can? Nonsense. If that’s the case, she is better without God.

  She is reminded of the things her priests used to say when she was a child, all of them expecting her to believe what they said just because they were saying it. They had been told the same things when they were young, a pattern that had played out for centuries. But just because something is repeated for a long time doesn’t make it true. Mere repetition determined what those men believed. Nothing else.

  She needs something more than that.

  What she thinks is, if there is a God, he doesn’t send you to hell if you commit suicide or if you don’t go to church. A God capable of creating our world would not be petty enough to send you to an eternity of flames just because you didn’t praise him enough. She believes God couldn’t care less if you believe in him or not. God doesn’t care which religion you follow. All God cares about is that you try to have a good life, be nice to the people around you, and maybe appreciate the beauty that surrounds us all. Enjoy life as much as you can.

  There are also times when she doesn’t believe in a God at all, but more of a cosmic energy that controls all living things. Of course, this is what some people think God is, not a white guy with a white beard and white robes, but the energy that controls and binds all things. This is a nice thing to think about.

  She learned in high school that although the universe is always expanding, it always has the same amount of energy. It’s just that the energy changes from one form to another, both on earth and on the cosmic scale. A tree dies. The energy it had goes away from it, but is not gone. It transfers to the grass and plants around it. A star gives warmth to a series of planets, only to explode in a supernova. And all of that energy disperses throughout the galaxy. She thinks of an ant dying and how its body provides the ground with nutrients that the grass needs, which in turn feeds the animals that need to eat grass for their own life. And because energy is always around us in one form or another, always recycling itself, she believes there is something after all to this cosmic energy idea.

  The thought helps her feel like this is not the end, but only a transition from one phase to another. There won’t be a traditional heaven or hell, but those places always seemed a little too human for her—places created by the limitations of the men who wrote them into the Bible, not a place that a god capable of creating our world and the life in it would actually make.

  If there is an afterlife, she wonders how the Blocks will get along in it. Will they be normal then or will they continue to be motionless and quiet? Is their current condition only temporary until they pass on? She likes this as her final thought before she closes her eyes because it allows her to imagine Jeremy and Alokin and Justin finally having a chance to express themselves, to know love, to be happy.

  19

  Each night, she wakes from dreams that leave her filled with dread. Most nights she cannot remember what the dreams were about. She wakes clutching the blanket over her as if it will protect her. Sometimes, she is gasping for air as though she had been holding her breath in her nightmare and that made her hold it in real life too. Each morning, she awakens to feelings of being hunted, scared, unsettled. Her eyes scan the group home for anything that could be creeping up on her, a threat she has not thought of. Maybe her subconscious is trying to warn her of something.

  Maybe, she thinks, her subconscious is trying to tell her to stop killing Blocks.

  During her chores, she pauses alongside Cindy, the comedian, in hopes of hearing something funny. If anyone is able to make her smile after a night of unrest, it’s the woman who toured the final settlements, making everyone laugh and, miraculously, allowing people to forget the end of man was approaching. But there is no joy to be found today. Cindy’s perpetually happy face, a face that could have told a lifetime of jokes if circumstances were just a little different, still stares up toward Morgan, but there is no good humor today.

  “Sorry,” Cindy says, her beautiful blue eyes as large as ever, “even comedians need a break from joke-telling every once in a while.”

  Morgan looks at the over-sized clock on the wall, a remnant of the days when boys and girls, ages 13-17, had gym class in this very spot. At her current pace, she won’t finish her chores until after midnight again.

  Better to get this over with quickly, she thinks, before twisting the nutrient bag’s connector counterclockwise. Cindy’s nutrient bag is no longer feeding into the clear tube that runs into her arm. The nourishment the comedian needs to continue telling jokes is withheld.

  “Is this because I wouldn’t tell you a god damned joke? Is this what I get for being serious?”

  Morgan ignores the outburst and walks away.

  Even with eight fewer Blocks to care for, she is not keeping pace. It’s past midnight when she finishes, exhausted. A light rain trickles down upon the roof. Without thinking of Cindy, she closes her eyes and is quickly asleep.

  But just as quickly, her eyes re-open.

  The gymnasium is quiet and dark. The moon shines through the top windows, allowing a gentle wash of yellow light into the living quarters. The outline of each bed is illuminated. The rain has stopped. The giant room is noiseless, yet something has woken her.

  Immediately, for a reason she cannot determine, her eyes move to Jimbo, the detective who caught the Block Slasher. Located in quadrant 1, Jimbo is lying on his cot only twenty feet away from where Morgan sleeps. There is no reason to focus her attention on him instead of someone else. Even so, she stares at him as if expecting something.

  Without moving, without the slightest motion or even a single word, she continues to look at him. She has been the sole caretaker in the group home for over three weeks now, has not had another living person to speak to within the gymnasium’s walls in that time.

  And then it happens.

  Jimbo’s head rolls to the side. Morgan gasps. He is staring straight at her. As impossible as this simple gesture is, she is sure it is not an accident; his head did not just happen to roll to one side, his eyes just coincidentally happening to fall upon her. Against all possibilities, he has turned to face her. And he is not smiling.

  In shock, her first instinct is to bring her hand to her mouth. But her hand won’t move. Confusion almost outweighs the shock she was just feeling. Maybe her arm fell asleep. If she rubs it with her other hand—but her other hand won’t budge either! She cannot move. Not even her fingers will twitch.

  Stay calm. Stay calm.

  Panicking would be completely understandable. She would not blame herself for screaming. It would be perfectly reasonable, upon seeing a Block turning and staring at her and her realizing she cannot move, for her mind to shut down, for her to black out, maybe even piss herself from pure fright.

  Stay calm. Stay calm.

  Instead of panicking at her paralysis, though, she forces her mind to think of how this could be happening. Little whispers of fear creep into her head: what if this isn’t temporary, what if she will never be able to move again? She forces these thoughts away. In their place, she tries to appreciate Jimbo as a silent partner in the ordeal they have been going through.

  His eyes tell her he wants no part of being associated with her, though. His eyes show disgust, hatred.

  She tries to stay positive, forcing her breathing to remain slow: Now I know what it’s like to be motionless and silent. Now I know what they
’re going through.

  Jimbo blinks but does nothing else. He does not speak. His narrowed eyes, not wavering from her, stare coldly in her direction, letting her know what he is thinking of saying: “Did it make you feel good to pull the plug on Cindy today? Did you feel good about yourself the other day when you killed Jeremy? Did it make you feel powerful?”

  Morgan wants to yell, “Of course not! I didn’t want to, but I had no choice.” No words come, though. She is mute.

  “You make me sick,” Jimbo would say. “I used to arrest freaks like you every day. You’re no better than the Slasher.”

  “No! No!” she wants to scream. “You have it all wrong.” But as hard as she tries, she cannot make her tongue move in her mouth, cannot force her throat to push sounds forward. Instead, she remains quiet, motionless, staring back at Jimbo. Sweat forms on her forehead.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Jimbo says. “How does it feel knowing you can’t defend yourself?”

  She wants to explain how awful she feels each time she disconnects a feeding tube. If she walks away without crying, it’s only because she needs to keep moving, keep going with her chores without thinking, in order to continue caring for everyone else. But these are things she cannot say.

  She feels herself begin to panic, to lose control.

  If only she could prop herself on one elbow and explain how she can’t even bring herself to kill a spider or a cricket, but that killing one Block made more sense than having all of the rest of them suffer. Surely, even a police detective can understand that. She cannot move, though. Her body is paralyzed. No words are spoken. No defense is offered.

  Jimbo’s eyes become tiny slits. “How would you like it if I walked up to someone you loved and strangled the life out of them? Would you like that? Would you like to watch as I forced the air out of their body and they died right in front of you?”

  “No! Of course not,” Morgan wants to say, but she can do nothing but blink.

  “I ought to come over there and take away all your food and water. How long do you think you could last if I left you to die? A couple hours? A day? You’re old and weak, just like us; it wouldn’t take long for you to die. Would you beg me to put you out of your misery?”

  “No!” Morgan wants to scream.

  “You’re lucky I’m not the Slasher. You’re lucky I’m not like you.”

  Finally, her body listens to her. Her eyes open. She bursts up from the bed in a sweat. She is sitting upright, breathing heavy. Sweat runs down her forehead and into her eyes until she wipes it away. In the dark, only the moon offering light, she looks over at Jimbo, whose head is staring up at the ceiling.

  The nightmare is over.

  Except for the sound of droplets of rain hitting the metal roof, the gym is silent. All of her Blocks are quiet and motionless, the way they always are. Her entire body is trembling. Pulling the blanket over her, rubbing her arms, taking deep breaths—none of it works to calm her down.

  The clock says it is only three thirty in the morning. She tries to close her eyes and go back to sleep. It’s useless. After a dream like that, she’s not even sure she wants to go back to sleep. With a groan, she rolls out of bed and begins performing her chores for the day.

  Jimbo’s words echo in her head as she splashes cold water on her face and begins shuffling from cot to cot: “Would you beg me to put you out of your misery? You’re lucky I’m not like you.”

  20

  Cindy, like the others, is dead the next morning. Her mouth is slightly open, stuck in the pose of someone who wanted to say one final thing. Her eyes are open but have no gloss to them. The forklift appears at the comedian’s bedside, rumbling and ready to go to work.

  Morgan still hears the imaginary words that would be spoken from the bed: “I’ve heard of comedians being booed off stage, but this is ridiculous!”

  As the forklift scoops the bed up, Cindy adds, “And I thought the crowd in Los Angeles was tough. At least they just threw tomatoes at me. Can I please just say one last thing? Yes? Thank you. What do Blocks and the bubonic plague have in common? They both really fucked mankind!”

  With Morgan’s guidance, the forklift arrives at the incinerator.

  “Oh well,” the comedian says. “It’s been fun.”

  Morgan can’t help but think, as the bed disappears into the flames, that the comedian still had a wry grin on her lips, as if slightly amused by her final exit. Then she is gone and Morgan has one less person to care for as she makes her rounds.

  Ever since Elaine created the game of assigning lives and personalities to each Block, Morgan has been around extreme instances of almost every imaginable occupation. Jimbo isn’t just a regular police detective, his strict adherence to the letter of the law makes him incredibly gruff: “Like them or not, laws have to be obeyed during the Great De-evolution, just like they had to be obeyed when there were still young punks to arrest.” Another example was their brash lawyer, convinced of his own brilliance: “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that I could get a jury to convict a Block of a crime.” One was a prodigy on the piano and another was a zookeeper. They had it all.

  So many people filled the rows that Elaine and Morgan’s imagination couldn’t think of additional careers. In these cases, they created different temperaments for the people with duplicate jobs. That was how she had one pilot who was always happy to go into the clouds and another that hated everything about his job. Jimbo, surly as ever, was joined by an introverted detective and also by an alcoholic private investigator. The brash lawyer, located in quadrant 2, was in between a divorced public defender and a corrupt federal judge.

  In addition to Leonardo, her famous painter, she also found herself taking care of Nathan. Nathan was her Block who had always dreamed of being a famous artist but never had the belief in himself necessary to pick up a brush. “Maybe tomorrow,” he would say while imagining all the things a blank canvas could contain, none of which would ever be turned into reality.

  And there was Charlotte, a struggling artist who sold her works on the corner of the street for barely enough money to pay her rent, but who loved painting, knew it was her purpose, and continued on that path her entire life. “I’d rather starve doing what I love than be rich doing what I hate.”

  And there was Charlie, her artist who was loved for his collection of paintings titled Block Consciousness, and who became famous in various art circles for being the final heir to Jackson Pollock. Nobody could figure out what each painting was supposed to be until Charlie provided the title. “Block Horrors” gave viewers an idea of what the swathes of black and red across the tan canvass might represent. “Block Dream” explained why the black canvass had splashes of the entire color spectrum with what might be an eyeball in the very middle.

  She has even had the fringes of society in her midst. One of the men who lives in quadrant 4 is an anarchist whose only outlet for expressing himself was various acts of mild mischief, like spray-painting walls with anti-government slogans and putting stickers on street signs. “If you believe what your government tells you, you’re a fool!”

  A stripper resides in quadrant 1. Her plan was to strip only until she got her degree, but, the only kid in her class without student loans to pay back after she graduated, she realized she would be better off financially if she kept removing her clothes for strangers than if she put her degree to use. That’s how she came to spend three decades of her life giving men lap-dances. “It’s not the life I imagined for myself, but my Block customers can’t move so I don’t have to worry about being groped.”

  Quadrant 3 has her most infamous Block of all. Gault was the world’s last evil mastermind.

  “Personally, I think you’re handling yourself fabulously,” he has told her on more than one occasion.

  She never knows if he is serious or joking. Maybe he likes being around this lottery of death. Perhaps he is jealous that he isn’t the one in charge of deciding who lives and who dies.

  He doesn’t l
ook like much of a threat to the world—no one does when they are almost a hundred years old—but in his earlier life he made plans to buy enriched uranium from Russian terrorists so he could build a nuclear bomb. When the FBI arrested him—this was around the same time New England and the Northwest states began to migrate south toward the final settlements—they found an apartment full of elaborate schemes to produce mass destruction. Gault had plans to bomb railroad tracks and destroy famous landmarks. He wanted to blow up group homes and contaminate lakes. If it caused wide-spread death and suffering, he wanted it.

  Morgan has never asked Gault, and he has never volunteered, how he feels about ending up in one of the very group homes he wanted to destroy. (Elaine was always the one who liked expanding on Gault’s life and adding details to what the mad scientist would be thinking.)

  The closest he has come to speaking to Morgan was the veiled comment, “It wasn’t actually about blowing up this or destroying that, it was about the pandemonium. Nothing is more pure than chaos.”

  She is pretty sure he lost his mind a long time ago. And yet she never thought to disconnect his nutrient bag before Alokin’s or Justin’s.

  As if sensing this thought, he laughs and says, “Don’t try and make sense of madness, my dear. It’ll leave you crazy.”

  Even with all these people and all their roles, there are still a few characters in her life that she has never been able to manufacture amongst her Blocks. None of them are extended members of her family. She had a mother and father. No one in her care can become her make-believe parents. She never had a brother or sister, but she has also never found someone she thought resembled her enough in the group home to play the part. She is kindred spirits with the Block who is still trying to find her place in life. But that Block’s long, slender nose and thin, black eyebrows prove there never could have been a blood relation between the two of them, not even as cousins.