The Man Who Watched The World End

by Dietzel, Chris

  February 26What will happen to my diary once I’m gone? And how many other diaries, pages filled with thoughts and fears like mine, are scattered in abandoned neighborhoods all around the world? Are the diaries of people from Japan and Greenland filled with the same concerns I have? Does a man in rural Spain wonder if he should have taken the train to Portugal with his Block brother before it was too late, before the tracks deteriorated and no one else could join the community in Lisbon? Does a woman in Australia write about the unbearable heat, about her broken AC and how long she and her Block sister can tolerate the hundred degree days before they succumb? Surely there was another man, maybe in Russia, maybe in Peru, who wondered if he had made the right choices. Were they okay with how things ended up? Would they have done things differently if they could have seen where they were at the end, when they and their Block sibling could no longer take care of themselves?

  What would they have done differently in their lives' on thoughsp, not just in the final days or years, but when they were young and believed anything was possible in the world? What had these people thought when they were in middle school and still dreamed of being famous actors or rock stars? Would they have taken that trip abroad with their friends if they knew the opportunity would never repeat itself? Would they have told the girl down the street whatever she wanted to hear just so they could cop a feel, or would they have understood that that girl was also looking for something meaningful in the world? Would they, as little boys, have held a magnifying glass to ants walking on the sidewalk? Or would they appreciate that the ants were here before them and would be here after them, and because of that, and because they were living things, no matter how small they were, would they have been left alone?

  Were there people in each corner of the world scribbling down all of their thoughts while their Block brothers or sisters sat quietly in another room? What was the point? Why not just be honest and tell their Block relatives what they were thinking? Why do I write about all the things I would never think to tell Andrew even though he can’t hear what I say? Why do I protect his ears from the harsh truths of the world? Is that why I leave the room any time my hand hurts or when I can no longer resist the urge to cry and don’t want him to see me break down in tears? I know, deep down, he can’t hear the concerns I voice or see the tears I shed, but even as an old man I can’t help but shield him from them.

  Maybe that’s what the other diaries around the world talk about. Maybe a man in Korea used his diary as a way to have all the conversations with his Block sister that he could never have with her in real life. Maybe a woman in South Africa used her diary to describe what it was like for a Block to grow up in a land that never stopped trying to learn how to treat everyone as they deserved to be treated. Hell, maybe one or both of the Johnsons was keeping a diary while they lived down the street. Maybe each night after their Blocks were asleep, they would head to different rooms and write down all of their thoughts from that day.

  If Andrew could read what I write here, would he understand where I’m coming from? Would he tell me to buck up, or would he simply give me a hug and, like he does now, say nothing?

  February 27My hand is black. It hurts so bad I keep from doing anything with the entire arm. I type with one hand now, the other arm sitting uselessly by my side because any movement sends shooting pain to my shoulder. If Andrew could help me and if I knew how to do it, I would cut my arm off at the elbow to stop the pain. The discoloration has spread past the bandages wrapped around my wrist. The purple and black are slowly moving and yelled, “April Fool!”anspspjoup my forearm. I don’t need a medical book to tell me the infection is going to keep spreading until it kills me.

  The dog still appears once or twice a week. I see it through the kitchen window, but I don’t refill the water dish anymore and the dog doesn’t come all the way up to the patio like it used to. The days I do see it, it’s always at the edge of the woods, looking at my house as though wishing to explain a terrible miscommunication between the two of us. I stare at it and it stares at me, but neither of us does anything else. I want to go outside and shake my crippled hand in the air to show it what it did. I would yell at the Labrador until it felt bad and whimpered. If the dog is still around after I’m dead and Andrew’s nutrient bag begins to run out, it will get to see my brother go hungry and will understand the extent of the betrayal it brought on me. It’s one thing to trick me, to cause my downfall—I deserve the rotting hand if I can be fooled by a common dog—but my brother has never done anything to deserve this fate. Andrew has never lifted a hand to an animal. He has never cursed the forest animals or wished for their deaths. I watch the dog until it disappears back into the line of trees, then I take more aspirin, hoping it will numb my hand. It never does.

  One of my dreams from last night was so vivid I still feel like I was actually there. It didn’t involve the neighborhood, the animals in the forest, or my hand, which feels like it’s going to fall off. Those things, or symbols of those things, were all covered in other dreams I’ve had recently. No, of all the things it could have been about, the entire dream was me sitting in my second grade class with my old classmates. The classroom was exactly how it had been when I was little: four rows of chairs perfectly arranged to face the teacher, pictures of former presidents on each wall. All of the chairs were occupied by the same students who had used them seventy years earlier. The only difference was that we were all eighty years old. Our teacher, Mrs. Peirson, wasn’t in the classroom. We sat patiently on our chairs and waited for her to come through the door. If we were eighty in our dream, Mrs. Peirson would have been 130 years old, obviously much too old to be alive, but we still expected to see her walk into the classroom at any moment.

  All of my fellow students had the same features as when I knew them in second grade. The eighty year-old version of Sarah Siller still had chubby cheeks and boogers at the edge of her nose, only now she was hunched over and drowning in wrinkles. Bobby Morrows was still covered in freckles and had bushy red hair, but now his teeth were mostly gone and even when he squinted he could barely see anything. I recognized all of them immediately, no matter how long ago I had last seen them. And they all knew me. Betsy Hendrickson passed me a scribbled note asking if I would be her boyfriend during recess that day. I circled YES before sliding it back across the desk.

  Each of us had lived our lives the way they had actually been spent. I had worked on a road crew instead of going to college, then come home and taken care of Andrew the rest of my life. Sarah Siq%. other ller grew up and volunteered at a shelter for Blocks, where she took care of hundreds of people who were abandoned or orphaned, until she had a heart attack and passed away. Bobby Morrows moved to Mexico after high school and was never heard from again. Everyone assumed he had been murdered, but no one knew for sure. Betsy married her high school sweetheart, even though that was the extent of the family they would ever be able to have. She accidently got pregnant a couple of years later. Knowing it would be a Block and not knowing what to do with it, she killed herself with a gun. And yet, there we all were, all of us elderly, all of us back in elementary school as though it was just another day of learning math and history.

  Mrs. Peirson never did arrive to teach us. It didn’t matter, though. Each of us was happy to sit there and wait. The bell never rang for the next class. That didn’t bother us either. We sat at our desks for what felt like an entire day. I’m not sure how long dreams really last, if the entire dream was over and done with two seconds after it started, or if I spent a couple of hours of my sleep in that state. It felt like I must have started dreaming as soon as I went to sleep and didn’t stop until I woke up the next morning.

  The dream ended the same way it started, with us in our seats waiting for the day’s lesson to begin. We passed notes and gossiped about all the other kids the same way we had when we were little. Some kids made deals as to which parts of their lunches they would trade with each other. No one talked about what it was like to gr
ow old without any kids of our own. There was no talk of our younger siblings who couldn’t attend their own classes or play catch with us after school. We were all happy just to be where we were. And that was the entire dream.

  I woke up amazed at the amount of detail my mind had processed. Bobby Morrows’s hiccups sounded exactly as they had seventy years earlier. His lips had tiny cracks at the corners because they were always too dry. Betsy smelled like overripe fruit. Her eyes were bright blue, and she had a small imperfection on one iris. They were details I hadn’t remembered for seventy years, they may not have existed at all, but in my dream my senses were alive. I was able to see exactly how the sky transitioned from a shade of light blue to a shade of light grey as it got closer to the horizon. I heard the crickets outside in the grass.

  After the dream was over I stayed in bed with my eyes closed because I knew as soon as I opened them I would be back in my bedroom in Camelot. It was still dark when I woke up, even though it was the next morning. The shades were down and the sun was only starting to come up over the trees. I stayed motionless as long as possible so the intense sights, sounds, and smells in my dream could linger without interference.

  My true senses came back when I opened my eyes and looked around my bedroom. I couldn’t identify the two figures in the framed picture han of my drivewayh,be,ging on the wall in front of me. I knew it was Andrew and me, but we no longer resembled the people in the photograph, wouldn’t have been picked out of a police lineup for possibly being the men in that picture. I inhaled deeply but didn’t smell anything. Our house had to be stale with mildew, probably much worse, but none of the odors registered. I heard a dog bark from off in the woods. There were probably a hundred other sounds around me that I didn’t hear anymore. It made me wish I could stay in my dream where I got to experience more of the world around me and be content doing so.

  It was at that moment, under the blanket in my bedroom, that I realized I’ve said everything in this diary that I need to say. In the dark room, with the memory still fresh in my mind of the dream that had just played out, I finally understood why I’ve been recording how our lives have unfolded here in Camelot.

  It wasn’t for me, it was for Andrew.

  It was to make sure there was a record of what life was like around the sofa where he lived. It was to record how the world fell apart around him even though he never complained or seemed inconvenienced by it. It was to show that even if he couldn’t talk or hear, he had someone who loved him, would do anything for him.

  The dream also made me wonder if Andrew has ever had his own dreams. The doctors all agreed that Blocks didn’t have significant brain activity, but I never completely believed that. And what is ‘significant brain activity’? Maybe he doesn’t have enough capacity to talk or move, but maybe there’s enough for him to have some semblance of a dream. They might not be dreams the same way I experience them, in full color and sound, detailed and expressive, but maybe Blocks still get taken to some other world when they close their eyes.

  I like to think Andrew closes his eyes for a reason, that when he goes to sleep he too is taken to a world where his senses allow him to experience the world the way I do. He could play catch with me. He could laugh with his classmates and slide a note across his desk that says he’ll be a girl’s lunchtime boyfriend. I like to think that for at least a portion of his life he has the opportunity to be a part of another world, a world where he can do whatever he wants: get off the sofa, remove his nutrient bag, shake his joints out, walk right out the front door and go for a jog, explore the neighborhood, or go back to the beach that my parentaid="14K">