The Man Who Watched the World End Read Online Free PDF Page A

use condoms, kept bringing countless Blocks into the world. Public outrage sparked new laws to charge these inconsiderate assholes with punishments to fit the crime. Mothers who were already on welfare and had already been charged with neglect of their Blocks, continued getting pregnant every year because they didn’t know how to do anything else. These Blocks were eventually taken into state custody where they made up a large percentage of the population at group homes.
    My parents had Andrew a couple of months after the first Blocks were identified, when well under five percent of babies were Blocks. They loved him as though he were the same as me, but they also got disgusted with one of our neighbors for having a baby after a hundred percent of the newborns were Blocks. Even as a young boy I picked up on my parents suddenly not talking to this one pair of neighbors.
    “It’s just irresponsible,” my father said.
    My mother shook her head in agreement and said to me, “We love your brother and we never regretted having him, but we’ll never try to have another baby until they find a cure for this.”
    Being a kid, not completely understanding the situation, I asked how they made babies. My father ignored my question and chose instead to answer the question I should have asked. “It’s not fair for the people who will have to take care of that baby when it grows up and its parents have passed away, but it’s also not fair for the baby. That kid will never know what it’s like to have friends or have its own children.”
    I wanted to ask more questions , but we had to go inside and check on Andrew. Another time, I asked my dad how long he would have gone before he didn’t try to have my was overflowing. I ignored it aof brother. The rate of regular babies versus Blocks changed completely within a matter of years, so I wanted to know if they would have tried if the rate was twenty-five percent or fifty percent.
    He put his hand on my shoulder and ushered me out of the room ; he didn’t want to have to answer in front of Andrew. “I’m not sure,” he said. “We wanted a duplicate of you. We wanted you to have a brother to play baseball with.” He cleared his throat, then excused himself to my parents’ bedroom and closed the door.

 
December 7
    It rained all day—a massive hurricane-type rain. For the first three hours, I was able to keep watching movies with Andrew, an occasional break taken to empty the buckets scattered throughout our home. Each one had a steady pitter-patter of water dripping into it. Anytime a major scene ended, I would pause the movie, go around the house to empty buckets, then return to watch more of the DVD with Andrew.
    But as the rain continued in a steady downpour, I found myself unable to keep up with the barrage of buckets strewn throughout the house. By the time I had emptied the first ten buckets, with still another ten to go, the fi rst one would be reaching capacity again. In my younger years I could have kept up the shuttle drills all day. Today, though, with my knees the way they are, with a back that screams after bending over more than two or three times, I quickly became overwhelmed. The bucket in the bathroom was overflowing. I ignored it and focused on the ones in the living room. The bucket in the kitchen was overflowing. I ignored it to focus on the ones in my bedroom.
    One drop at a time, my home was becoming lost to me. I have never wished that my brother could come alive more than I did today during those moments of helplessness as water filled various rooms around our house. His help emptying buckets would have made up for a lifetime of stillness.
    Just when I was done praying that he could help lend a hand, the rain let up. Water continued to make its way through the holes in the roof, but the stream slowed to a trickle. By that time, I was too tired to move, could do nothing but watch helplessly from the sofa as drops of water plopped down all around me. Only