Roger would see a landscape void of cars inching along in rush-hour traffic. No longer are all eight lanes filled with thousands of steady streams of exhaust coming from tailpipes. A series of golf courses and parks have been given back to the animals. A segmented land, divided into municipalities and counties by various roads and highways, is slowly being covered in a blanket of green that makes everything look like it’s less a land of boundaries and more a single continuation of the places we once knew.
He would survey the empty parking lots, the abandoned office buildings, and when he landed he would tell everyone how amazing it was to see the world in this fashion. It was like seeing a hint of what the world must have looked like before man put metal and plastic everywhere.
“You have to see this,” he would say to everyone upon landing. “It’s still the world we knew, but without horns honking, people stuck at red lights, or sirens flashing. It’s beautiful.”
Richard wouldn’t have the same outlook. After taking off, he would see the abandoned cars on the side of the highways. He wouldn’t be able to help but wonder what happened to each family. Did they get to where they wanted to go, or did they get stranded on the way there? What was each person doing in the moments leading up to the flat tire or broken axle that left them stranded away from home? He would see empty theme parks and remember how his favorite memories from childhood were spent on the loud, fast rides. He doesn’t have any children of his own to take to the park. No one does. He would also see a zoo still overflowing with animals, but without anyone to clean up after them or keep them sequestered in their own areas. Zebras and giraffes would quickly be wiped out. Almost all of the cute animals would be eaten. A couple of leopards and tigers would still roam the land, but even these were never well suited to the concrete prison built around them.
This pilot would see cemeteries covered with weeds, the dead forgotten behind a veil of green. There would be a giant hill next to a cemetery, perfectly round in shape. Was it one of the rumored Block mass-graves? Nearby, the roof of a library has collapsed, thousands of books ruined over the course of months. Death, disorder, deterioration—everywhere.
Richard wouldn’t land his helicopter to tell anyone else what he saw. What would he say that could prepare someone for the loss of everything they once knew? It wouldn’t suffice to say, “I hope you’re ready for what you’ll see once you’re up there.” Nor would, “It’s not going to be anything like the world you once loved,” be able to brace them for it.
He wouldn’t be able to stand the sights, wouldn’t think anyone else should have to see them either. His helicopter would take a nose-dive into the nearest lake. If there were still people nearby, they might find bits and pieces of the exploded craft floating on the water’s surface. But most of it, the pilot included, would sink to the bottom, vanishing like the rest of his world.
Elaine would have wanted to be Roger more than Richard. Who wouldn’t? At least she would be happy when she died. Who would want to be Richard and be miserable every day?
She reaches over, disconnects Richard’s feeding tube from its nutrient bag, then begins to walk away. She pauses, though, turns back around, and disconnects Roger’s tube as well. They are twins in almost everything, she reasons, it wouldn’t be fair to take one now and not the other. And, she knows, taking one body away has not done anything to help keep her on schedule with her chores.
Maybe tomorrow, with two fewer people to care for, she will finally get done with her rounds before midnight.
The thought sounds suspiciously like a hope.
25
Another storm. There is no rain this time, though, only wind. It’s the type of storm that idiot weathermen used to stand outside in to demonstrate to their viewers just how strong the winds were. She hears howls as if a great pack of coyotes has congregated in Miami and is looking for any last remnants of mankind to eat. There are screams and shrieks, and they affect her concentration as she moves from cot to cot. She imagines boats being thrown around the city, homes being torn to pieces and tossed down the street. After consideration, she realizes she has no way of knowing if there are any boats left to throw around. They may all have been sunk already in the previous years. Without repairs after each storm, there may not be any houses standing either. There may not even be a city. She could walk outside, look toward the skyline, and gasp at the sight: a wasteland where towers of brilliant steel once cast shadows over the entire area.
“I’d hate to be out in this weather,” she tells Ruiz, the Block she happens to be caring for in quadrant 1 as a sheet of metal whines overhead. Instead of focusing on the roof, something she cannot control, she tells Ruiz this is the exact kind of storm that her grandparents’ house was destroyed in.
“That was back when I was eight,” she says. “Or nine. I don’t know. It was such a long time ago it seems like someone else’s life.”
“I found a kidnapped girl one time in the middle of a storm like this,” he says. “Some guy was trying to sneak away with her, telling people she was his Block daughter. Happened all the time during the migrations, when everyone was making their way south.”
Ruiz always wanted to be important. It wasn’t until the Great De-evolution had been playing out for a decade that he realized his calling in life in the form of a young woman wandering the highway. He found her between Dayton and Columbus. The woman’s family thought she was either dead or had run away to one of the southern settlements. When Ruiz saw her walking down the highway, he knew something wasn’t right. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t remember who she was, didn’t have any identification. Ruiz took her to the closest police station, where they were able to identify her before sending her to the hospital for medical treatment. She had simply gotten sick, the nature of her sickness being one that ravaged her mind. On her own, wandering the streets, it didn’t take long before she looked like she was a drug-addicted loner. A hundred other people had seen her walking down the highway that day, but no one had stopped except for Ruiz.
The experience changed his life. Without a family of his own, without a job that society needed anymore, he set about traveling all across the country trying to reconnect missing people with their families. Sometimes he had to deliver bad news—a body found in a trash dump, the remains of a missing person found in a burned out car—but there were also times that made it all worth it: a report that a long lost brother was living happily in San Diego, the knowledge that a daughter had moved to Houston where she was married and working in a food processor factory.
It was only because of the Great De-evolution and the abundance of missing people that resulted from it that Ruiz found a way to feel important, found a way to live a life that he considered worthwhile.
Maybe life is about how long it takes you to find your true calling, and all the good you can do after you discover it.
“It’s perfect weather for covering up a murder,” he tells Morgan. “Or for disappearing yourself and having everyone think you were a victim of the storm.”
A loud scream of wind rattles the group home as if agreeing with him.
“Why would anyone want to do something like that?” Morgan asks.
“You’d be surprised.”
This is how Ruiz speaks, as if his time looking for people has taught him valuable lessons about human nature, lessons that might be better off if they were kept private.
“Well, I’d certainly never try to do something foolish like that,” she tells him.
“And I thank you for that.”
“Why would you thank me?”
“Because if you’re trying to sneak out in the middle of the storm,” he tells her in his sober monotone, “it means the rest of us here are pretty much fucked.”
“Of course,” she says, thinks about saying something else, but a terrible shriek of wind shakes the metal, tempts it to rip away.
It takes a full minute for the gust to pass. She watches the roof the entire time, suspecting that this will be t
he storm that is finally victorious. But after the wind has gone, the roof is still intact. She has forgotten what else she was going to say.
“It’s okay,” Ruiz says. “Just yell if you think of it later. I’ll still be here.”
“Thanks, Ruiz. I will.”
She moves to the next bed. There are forty more men and women who need to be cleaned and repositioned. She cannot spend too much time talking to each one or else she will fall behind schedule again.
26
In her care, she has a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Hindu. They are all in the same row in quadrant 2. Elaine had groaned at their inclusion in the game of assigning identities to each Block, saying they were supposed to be surrounded by celebrities and by people who never got a fair shot at a normal life, not by people that would just as soon judge you for your beliefs and look down on you if you didn’t believe the same things they did.
“It’s not like that,” Morgan had protested.
Elaine’s passive-aggressive response to Morgan’s four religious Blocks was the creation of an atheist Block. She resides in the next row over from the ones Morgan created—Elaine’s payback for tainting her game.
Elaine had offered a devilish smile before saying, on behalf of her Block, “She refuses to believe in God just because it irritates the people in the row in front of her.”
“Don’t be like that,” Morgan had said. “I’m just trying to get as wide a variety of people as possible.”
Elaine shot back, “How do you know the detective, the painter, or the singer aren’t religious? Their religion doesn’t define them.”
“But neither does their occupation.”
Elaine rolled her eyes and said, “Oh my god, you are so awful at this game.”
That had been the end of the conversation. And while Elaine was always eager to hear more details about the comedian, the mad scientist, and the world traveler, she never asked for more tidbits on those four religious Blocks.
What Elaine had failed to understand was that Morgan’s four religious Blocks didn’t care what anyone else believed. None of them had ever tried to push their views on the others around them, and none of them ever would. They got along with each other as though there was no real difference at all. None of them think to themselves that they belong to the correct religion, and none of them pity the rest for not being so fortunate. None of them think they are going to heaven while the others will be excluded just because they belong to a different religion. She admires them for being adamant in their beliefs while being accepting of other faiths. That is why she had wanted them included in the Block game even though Elaine had protested.
She has no core beliefs of her own, doesn’t, really, believe in anything. Maybe that is another reason she wanted to be amongst them. In the back of her mind she can’t help but think it’s odd that she has created a Christian who was raised by Christian parents, a Muslim who was raised by Muslim parents, and so on, yet her own parents were very religious and she never grew up believing the same things they believed in. If there is a difference between them, between the believers who learned from their parents and herself, who was unable to believe what she was told, she is unable to identify it. Maybe they were better students. Maybe her parents weren’t persuasive enough. Does the reason make any difference?
She wonders if her Blocks realize how different their beliefs might be if they had been born to another set of parents who belonged to a different religion. Do they realize they wouldn’t be any more right or wrong if they grew up believing in something else? Or do they simply rationalize that their God’s plan started for them by putting them in the wombs of mothers who lived in a country where the correct religion was practiced?
She has never been able to ask her religious Blocks this question for fear that each of them would tell her she is a murderer in the eyes of God.
But how can they believe so staunchly in the things they have been told if they only believe them because they were taught to? Is that what faith is? There is nothing in her life that she trusts just because she has been told that she should trust it. She hadn’t even believed it when, in elementary school, her science teacher said a feather and a rock fall at the same speed. She had raised her hand and demanded that he either stop joking around or perform the experiment in front of the class. Of course, the feather and rock had landed on the ground at the same time.
Maybe she would be better off after all if she could have faith in something the way they do.
Only her Buddhist Block has come to terms with his religion on his own. As a child, her Buddhist was taught to believe in one thing, but as he grew up he thought about why that religion had been created in the first place, thought of all the people that had been kept down by its beliefs, and how the teachings had changed over the years to try and explain science’s latest discoveries. The other Blocks snicker at the Buddhist for believing that you can be reborn in another life, without realizing the idea of reincarnation was in the Bible for hundreds of years before it was removed. It turns out that allowing people to think they could be reincarnated, allowing them to make up for their sins in future lives, made it unnecessarily difficult to control them in their current life. So, Morgan wonders, were the original Christians wrong to believe in reincarnation, or are current Christians wrong to mock it? And who had the authority to remove that idea from the Bible if the Bible was God’s word? This is exactly why she’s glad she doesn’t have anything to believe in.
There are days in which she tries to decide if it is better to believe something just because it offers comfort, or if it’s better to go through her days just trying to get by as best as she can. Will she get to the end of her life and realize she was wrong the entire time? Will she get to the gates of heaven and realize she won’t be allowed entrance because she was a skeptic?
Afterlife? Ha! It’s rapidly approaching and yet she still doesn’t know whether to be afraid or to look forward to it. Both of her parents died knowing exactly what they believed—that they would go to heaven and be reunited with loved ones. This knowledge comforted them. Why can’t Morgan believe the same thing? What is it that makes her doubt that possibility when the Blocks in front of her have always accepted what their parents taught them?
Is it too much to ask for some little bit of proof? If she could just be given a glimpse of heaven or of the existence of God she would be a staunch believer, too. Does needing some bit of proof make her a heathen? Does it mean she is going to hell? She doesn’t even believe in hell. Does that mean she will have one of the best seats in the fiery house?
If asking for a sign is asking for too much, how else are you supposed to truly believe on your own? The only other way is to believe what you are told, and that hasn’t worked for her. Even when there were others around, each trying to convince her that their beliefs were the ones that would earn her salvation, none of it sounded convincing.
How is one book of beliefs better than another? They were all written by men and taught by men. Doesn’t that make them all the same? Throughout history, they have each gone to war with the others simply because men of faith told them to. Doesn’t that make them all questionable?
Elaine’s atheist is no better. Elaine made a point by saying the non-believer just wants to be different, just wants to piss people off. Not believing in something just because you are stubborn is just as bad as believing in something for no better reason than you are told to believe it. There has to be a middle ground. There has to be something she can find that makes sense for her. Her Blocks won’t help her find it, though.
She thinks Elaine’s atheist would have been more convincing if she had turned away from religion because of all the pain and hurt and suffering she saw everywhere. The atheist might have swayed Morgan if she hadn’t been so smug. If she had offered a pained smile and, while looking at the Blocks littered everywhere throughout the gymnasium, said, “Why would I waste any time thinking about God if this is what He does to us?” then that would hav
e been something Morgan could consider.
How could God be good if he allowed millions to die of starvation and genocide in Africa, allowed war to ravage the earth, without interruption, for hundreds of years, and created diseases that would destroy good-hearted people while avoiding the wicked? These are the things Elaine could have said on behalf of her Atheist Block if she hadn’t been so busy trying to prove a point. Everything this Block saw was a reason not to believe in God: a family traveling south that got stuck on the side of the road; a man trying to take care of his brother, only to be eaten by wolves; a woman trying to get her family back to her homeland, drowning in the middle of the ocean after a small leak turned into a big leak.
If she assigned herself a story, what would it be? Would it be that she became disillusioned by the stupid things her clergymen said, as if the Bible should be taken literally? Would she see herself as the girl in high school who had gone out on a date with a Jewish boy only to find out his parents wouldn’t allow their son to marry outside their religion? Uh, marry? She had only been a freshman in high school—that one date hardly called for a marriage announcement. But at least she knew how they had felt about her. Would she see herself as the roommate of a Muslim girl who was extremely happy, but only after getting away from the horrific men who thought girls shouldn’t be allowed to go to school? Or is her story that she found Buddhism shortly after college and liked it, but didn’t like any wisdom that taught you to be walked over?
She wants to believe in something, she just isn’t sure what.
Aristotle, her world traveler, seems to feed off her doubt: “I’ve seen the entire world, and yet I feel like I still have so much more to learn.”
The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) Page 12
