A Different Alchemy (11 page)

If only Katherine would have trusted me that everything would be OK.

He sat with the young man on the side of the road. It was just him and the Block for as far as he could see. Nothing else.

There were a lot of things he could do. He could race back and catch up to the group. But for what, to search for one family within the caravan? To have them feel ashamed for a day or a week until they abandoned the Block again a few days later? You don’t abandon somebody once and then take it all back.

He could go back to Newark and try to find the man who had been left behind by the caravan. But why would that man want the burden of this Block? And if the man was foolhardy enough to wait in the middle of the highway until he was too hungry and thirsty to save himself, this Block was just as well here on the side of the road as he would be sitting next to the other man’s dead daughter.

He could take the young man with him. But surely, it was a matter of time until the Block died. What was the difference between the Block dying here or dying further north? No living person would turn to Jeffrey and say, “Oh sure, just strap me to the back of your tank and check on me every hundred miles. Oh, and if a bird shits on me, would you be a good chap and clean it off? Thanks!”

So he sat with the young man, the tank remaining in the middle lane of the highway. How comical it would be if there were still police officers around and one came across a random tank in the middle of the road during his daily patrol. Now, the police cars were just as likely to be abandoned as any other mid-size car.

He put his ear to the Block’s mouth to listen for how often the man was taking breaths. The breathing was so faint Jeffrey couldn’t hear anything at all. He kept his fingers on the Block’s wrist to feel for a pulse. It was soft, barely enough to register, but it was there.

“Don’t worry,” Jeffrey said as he unwrapped his own blanket, lying down only four feet away from where the Block was underneath the other blanket.

If only this were my boy and not a random body. I would trade anything if this were Galen.

Closing his eyes from the light gave him a chance to collect his thoughts. Since leaving Fort Dix with the tank, all he had was time to himself. Yet, he had never taken the opportunity to stop and really think. Instead, he let the tank drown out the yells and torments in his mind. The only problem was, once there was quiet, he didn’t like the thoughts that started racing around. He begged God to bring his boy back, to take him instead, if it meant Galen could be alive again. He cursed Katherine and her fear. He cursed the world. When the thoughts became too much, he rubbed his eyes until they hurt, then opened them once more to the sunlight.

With the body there next to him, he had nothing to do but sit and wait. He thought about telling the Block a story, but the true things about his life—Galen, his wife, the fire—all hurt too much. The only other stories he could think of all involved the horrors of being a Block. One of the men at work had kept insisting there was a man in Chicago who had refused to leave after the city was abandoned. The old man rounded up all the Blocks he could find and rode the subway with them all day, back and forth from one end of the line, to the other, the entire train full of silent passengers. The train would go south until it reached Chicago’s south side. Hundreds of Blocks filling the seats. And then the man would pull a different lever and the train would make its way back through the city until it got to the north end. Day after day, the old man travelled this way, transporting hundreds of Blocks through the city. One by one, the Blocks would eventually die. But still, the old man drove the train back and forth until the entire subway line was a ghost train filled with rotting corpses. It was the type of story you were supposed to tell children at campfires, not the type you told to a Block unless you were an asshole.

If he was going to sit on the side of the road, he needed to find some books to read. It was that or sit and watch the clouds pass by. The Block’s eyes were open again, pointed toward the sky. If the young man had once possessed good vision, the sun would have blinded him by now. Jeffrey leaned over and pushed the Block’s face so his head was looking to his side, away from the sun.

He sat up and checked the Block’s pulse again, still barely there, before pouring more water into his mouth. The water would only prolong the man’s suffering—if he could suffer—but not giving him water would be like sitting around letting another person die for no reason.

His belly was starting to protest, but it wasn’t fair to get food while the Block starved to death in front of him. He closed his eyes in hopes that when he opened them again the Block would have passed away.

It was the middle of the night when he woke the next time. Again, he reached over to feel for the Block’s pulse.

“Jesus Christ. What are you hanging on for? What’s worth fighting for?”

When he woke up the next morning, ants had covered the Block’s eyes and mouth. He brushed them off and put a damp cloth over the young man’s face to keep them away. Each time he touched the man’s wrist he expected the tiny beating to have stopped. Each time, though, the faintest of patters tapped against his fingertip. He climbed into the tank, where he felt less guilty about eating while another man starved. As soon as he chewed the last bit of sandwich, he climbed back out and rejoined the Block.

“It should be a beautiful day.”

They stayed like that, in silence, for an hour before Jeffrey spoke again.

“I don’t know how you’re doing it. I’d have died after the first night. What point are you trying to prove?”

He snuck back to the tank later in the day for another sandwich. Any time he had a drink of water, he also poured a sip into the Block’s mouth. The drops of water splashed in and around cracked, blistered lips.

He spent part of the day reading the few documents left inside the tank. For an hour he actually read the tank’s standard operating procedures. For another hour he walked around the highway, always keeping the tank and the body in sight. When he awoke from his next nap, he again checked the young man’s pulse. It was still there.

“What are you trying to prove? What’s keeping you here? Just go. Put yourself out of your misery. You don’t owe these people anything.”

Yet, there was no sense of pain or anguish on the other man’s face. It was Jeffrey who was shouting and irritated, not the dying, starving Block.

Before going to sleep, he snuck inside the tank and had the last of the sandwiches. He woke up in the middle of the night expecting the body beside him to finally be cold, but the heart was still beating, and he groaned and wished he could be spending these nights under the stars with Galen.

The next day, he finally reached over, touched the man’s wrist, and felt nothing. No beat. No life. The young man’s family would never have any idea how long their Block brother or son had fought to stay alive. Would they have acted differently if they knew how long it would take for this man to fade away? Probably not.

A body was on the ground, as peaceful in death as it had been in life. Never once could it complain about its circumstances. The young man had never been able to think:
If only I had different parents. If only I had been normal. If only they had understood that I wouldn’t make them sick; I was just another person trying to get by each day.

He thought to bury the young man, but didn’t have a shovel. A warrior’s pyre was possible, but the thought of starting any fire, let alone one in which to burn a Block, made him shake uncontrollably. In the end, he arranged the body so it was flat on its back, arms by its side. He covered it first with one of the blankets, then with a collection of sticks and leaves. The Block deserved more than simply being left to rot under the sun, but he didn’t know what else he could do for it.

An animal would come along in the next day or two, pull the blanket away, and start eating the body. The peaceful pose would be ruined as the wolf or bear dragged and tore the carcass apart.

The tank’s engine roared to life. As much as Jeffrey tried to convince himself the water and blanket had been all he could offer, he thought about everything else he might have done if it were Galen on the side of the road. He would have talked to the boy all night long. He would have forced food down his son’s throat. He would have found a way to give his son a proper burial.

As the tank continued north, he tried not to think of Galen’s burnt flesh or of how long remnants of his son’s charred body would remain in the open air.

Chapter 7

People never stopped whispering that if you spent too much time around Blocks, you could become a Block yourself. It never happened, but the old wives’ tale persisted and kept people scared. A dot-com billionaire was so fearful of the possibility that he decided to escape to the one place his money could take him and only him: outer space. As soon as the Great De-evolution started, he left his offices in Silicon Valley and paid just over one billion dollars to have a Russian aeronautical company build him a space shuttle. The shuttle, he told his wife and kids, was only big enough for one person. His plan was to return as soon as a cure for the Blocks was discovered or a vaccine was created to prevent regular people from turning into part of the quiet masses.

Having the spaceship built was the easy part. It was more of a pod, really, than a ship. After the rocket carried it up into space, the roughly ten foot by ten foot room would give him just enough headway to live out his days. A modified version of the food processors, less than half the size of the regular version, was installed in the pod. He was given an extra small power generator as well. After the toilet and bed were installed, there wasn’t much room left.

But while armies of scientists all around the world labored to find a way to stop the Great De-evolution, none of them bothered to work on a vaccine because they all knew the Block condition was something you couldn’t catch. The “Block disease” was an urban legend, like the man riding the Chicago subway, meant to scare you once the lights were off, nothing more.

So the billionaire stayed in space. His family remained in constant contact with him. Each time he asked if a cure had been found, they shook their heads. The billionaire orbited earth again and again, receiving the same answer each time he spoke to his wife and kids. But then a transmission wasn’t made from the pod one night. The next day’s transmission was also skipped. The family told the media how concerned they were. The billionaire was never heard from again.

The heart monitor he wore, originally thought to have malfunctioned, told everyone he had suffered a major heart attack while orbiting somewhere over Kenya. And for the rest of time, as the world’s population got older and older, as the billionaire’s wife died, then, eventually, his children, and even later, the very last people in the final settlements, the billionaire’s dead body kept circling Earth over and over again. As dead as everyone below it.

On clear nights, you could still take your telescope outside and, at just the right time, catch a glimpse of the billionaire’s tiny shuttle passing in front of the moon. On cloudy nights, death is still orbiting the planet, you just can’t see it.

These were the types of stories Jeffrey and Katherine never spoke about. The nights he did see the pod drift by in front of the moon, he didn’t point it out to her. It became another topic, along with whether or not having Galen had been the right decision, that they couldn’t talk about to each other.

Although he never voiced his thoughts, he could never completely stop wondering how things would have been different if they had tried having a baby earlier in their marriage. Every time he had tried to convince her, she had balked. Every time he had tried to bargain with her, she had walked away from the table. It was almost guaranteed that Galen would have been born normal if Katherine had gotten pregnant when she was twenty. Waiting until she was thirty, when the epidemic of Blocks had wiped out any good chance of having a regular baby, just didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t she ever admit that all of her complaints could have been squashed if she’d just trusted him earlier? He still remembered having to beg, literally, on both knees, saying stupid things like, “I’ll never ask you for another thing if we do this,” or “If you agree to this, I’ll do a hundred percent of the diaper changing.”

If only he could have convinced her to believe in him earlier. He still sat up some nights wondering what he could have said, what agreement he could have made or what confidence he could have instilled in her that would have gotten her to agree just a little bit sooner. Why had she fought him over it, why had she delayed, just to eventually give in?

He didn’t like to think about the other side: what if they hadn’t had a child at all? So focused was he on the idea that they should have become parents earlier that he didn’t allow the other possibility to seem feasible. Each time he was on one side of the house, wondering why it had taken so long to convince her, she had been, at the very same moment, on the other end of the house asking herself why she couldn’t have held out just a year or two longer.

Each time he thought Katherine might bring the topic up, he took Galen outside on the porch for the evening. And no matter how many times he sat outside and listened to the birds with his son, no matter how many times he noticed the dead billionaire’s pod as it passed in front of the moon, he never realized there was more than one way to escape your fears. You didn’t have to fly to outer space; you could simply walk to another room.

**

Further up the road, he came to a bridge, only two or three hundred feet in length, that was entirely gone. Only a single beam remained to offer a reminder of what had been there. Truly, a bridge to nowhere. Down at the bank of the river he saw rusted support beams that had snagged against the embankment and refused to wash out to the ocean after the bridge collapsed.

His map said there was another bridge, slightly west of this one. That second one, when he came upon it, was intact and easy to cross. On the other side, he came to a park with trees lining a river. The birds’ chirping could be heard even before he powered the tank’s engine off. As much as he tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about sitting on the porch with his boy.

If only the people had been less scared. If only he had listened to Katherine and taken his family south earlier. None of this would have happened.

He watched a squirrel pack its mouth full of nuts before scampering to the top of a tree. Winter would be coming soon. Without his own plan for where he would be when it did arrive, he found himself wondering instead where Katherine might be when it got cold. A colony of ants took turns carrying crumbs from his sandwich. He had always thought of these little creatures as being clueless, completely oblivious to everything except the immediate world around them. The truth was they all had a better plan than he did. The birds migrated south for the winter. The squirrels hibernated. Who knew what the ants did? But they surely had some scheme because they were here now and would be again the next summer. And, more importantly, they would be here long after man was gone.

He rode northeast the rest of the day, ending up in the city of New Haven. He spent the night in an abandoned hotel room, then the next day roaming the streets.

The windows of an old supermarket were boarded up. Most likely, a storm had come through all the way back when people still lived here, but the owner had known it was a matter of time until they traveled south and that replacing the windows would be a waste. The front door was still unlocked, and the shelves still had some old cans of food. He missed walking by the bakery near his house and smelling warm chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon bagels, and fresh loaves of bread.

After breakfast, he toured the museums and historic buildings. Old paintings still littered the museum walls; no one had bothered to protect them or take them on the trip south when the city was vacated. At the water’s edge, there was a sign for a famous old boat that was no longer there. Either it had sunk to the bottom of the bay or someone had been foolhardy enough to attempt the journey south on a creaky, historic relic rather than a modern vessel.

After being in the tank for so long it was nice to spend the day doing nothing but walking. As he made his way through the city, he saw a car upside down in the road, a suitcase hanging from a lamppost, and a cemetery entrance with a bright red X painted on it. There was never an explanation for these things, and he chalked it all up to the madness of slowly becoming extinct.

An electronics store had working computers and an internet connection. They probably had working phones too, but he didn’t want to talk to his parents or anyone he knew. He wasn’t ready for that. What he could handle were their written words.

Jeffrey,

Do you remember the cardinal you found in the backyard when you were a little boy? You were six years old. I remember your age because you were seven when you lost your front teeth and that hadn’t happened yet. Parents don’t forget those things. Anyway, you came in crying because its wing was broken and it couldn’t fly away. You wanted to run over and pick it up because you were a child and thought that if you could just carry it back inside the house, your father and I could make everything better. But when you got close to it and reached to pick it up, it screamed and tried to fly away even though it couldn’t get off the ground. I still remember how hard you cried when this little thing, in its terror, was hurting itself even worse because it couldn’t understand that you just wanted to help it. That screaming bird gave you nightmares for a month.

To make you feel better, we told you that your father took it to the vet, where its wing was healed and it flew away a couple of weeks later. Our lie did the trick: you cheered up and you believed the bird was somewhere better. I still cringe when I remember how angry you got, as a teenager, when you demanded to know the truth. Years went by without you thinking about that bird again, but something at school one day must have triggered those memories because you came home with the realization that our story was a little too nice. I was so sad to see my little boy demand the truth even though it would upset you. Probably, you wanted to hear it just because you knew it would upset you. Teenagers are a pain in the ass that way.

Anyway, your father finally admitted he broke the bird’s neck and buried it in the backyard. He barely got the confession out before you started yelling at us. If you had yelled at us like that for any other reason, you would have been grounded until your next birthday, but there was something at the core of what was upsetting you that we couldn’t punish. After seven years, you still wanted justice for the poor little bird that had somehow broken its wing and needed help but was too scared to be saved.

You didn’t care at the time that your father hated himself for what he had to do. He couldn’t even punish Critter when the damn dog wouldn’t stop barking. You should have seen his shoulders collapse when he realized he had to put the poor bird out of its misery. The same nights you were having nightmares about the cardinal, your father was lying awake in bed, unable to sleep because even though he wanted to help it, just like you had wanted to, he couldn’t.

When I think about that story now, I don’t think about our lie or about how angry you were when you found out the truth, or even about the effect it had on your father. I think about the one thing that was more important than anything else: my little boy saw an animal that was hurting and all he wanted to do was help it. Nothing else mattered.

You will find, as you get older, that the key to being happy is being able to turn those bad memories into treasured ones. I used to cringe at the thought of you being so angry with us. Now, you couldn’t give me all the gold in the world to take that memory away, because it reminds me of the type of person you were and still are.

And now you have to help yourself, however it is you think that’s possible. Nothing else matters.

We love you. Be safe. We don’t say that as parents simply wanting the best for our son, we say it as the mother and father that saw you cry because you wanted to pick up a defenseless animal and save it.

He didn’t reply then because he didn’t know what to say. If she had been there in the computer store, he would put his arms around her and hugged her until they were both done crying. Instead, he could do nothing but power down the computer and turn the store lights off.

Eventually, he found the local library and spent the day looking through shelf after shelf of dusty books. By the time he walked through the first three rows he already had a stack he wanted to take with him. Instead of loading the entire stack in the tank, then stocking up on even more, he put most of the books down, taking only the two he most wanted to read, and left the others on the shelf closest to the entrance for the next time he stopped by.

An old radio was sitting by the librarian’s desk. He flipped it on to hear static. Slowly turning the dial, he found four stations with music still playing on a loop. No real, live human voices ever came on the air. Everything else, besides the cycle of music beginning again every ninety minutes, was static.

A house on the beach gave him a clear view of the waves and the ocean. The grocery stores gave him natural food to mix in with what the food processor produced. He had access to all the books he could ask for. And he had a reprieve from the tank. After a long day inside the machine, he couldn’t stand up straight for ten minutes. After weeks of traveling inside it, he was sure he looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The leaves were turning color and beginning to fall. He would stay at the beach through winter. Each night he looked out at the ocean, watching the waves crash until only the light from the moon kept them visible. If the clouds were covering the moon, only the sound of crashing water let him know the ocean was still there.

Instead of sitting on the porch with Galen every night, he imagined taking his son to the beach.

If only my boy could be here to see this with me.
Over and over he thought that.