“I think it might be broken,” she mumbled, clicking buttons on the remote control.
But then Eric came over, switched two of the cables behind the TV, and the picture came in clear and crisp.
“Thank you, Eric.”
He bowed and went back to his seat.
On the screen, a collection of men and women in white lab coats sat on either side of a wooden podium. Behind them, on a tarp hung up from one side of the room to the other, were the names of various corporations and universities around the world.
Even as the Survival Bill was beginning to ramp up, a collective effort to mass produce food processors, power generators, and incinerators for each family in the country, the government had also funded a massive study between twenty different universities and thirty different scientific groups, all sharing their experiments, all trying to find a cure for what was causing the world’s newborns to be blocked from participating in the world around them. It was the largest study of its kind, lasting nearly a decade. Once a year, the group had released its findings—its total lack of progress in identifying a way for newborns to be able to speak and move.
This was the ninth and final year of the organized study. The final report. The one in which everyone hoped and prayed that scientists would announce they had found a way to reverse the new affliction so that mankind didn’t die its slow and gradual death.
Upon receiving a signal from someone off camera, a man with a white beard, sitting in the first seat to the right of the podium, stood from his chair and moved to the bundle of microphones.
The man coughed twice, then sipped his water. He opened his mouth, scratched his neck, then took another drink from his glass.
“Get on with it!” Eric yelled from his desk.
Looking down at his notes, the lead scientist said, “I’m terribly sorry to announce that it is this group’s finding, after nine years of work, with hundreds of scientists collaborating from all over the world… of course, we won’t stop trying to find a cure. We’ll never give up… But I’m very sad to announce”—
All of the air sank out of Ray’s lungs. Her head started spinning and she felt like she were going to pass out. Gripping the sides of the desk she was sitting at, she forced herself to look at the other faces in the classroom. Shawn, her new junior, was staring at the screen while tears made their way, painfully slowly, down his cheeks. Debbie, the other junior, was lurching back and forth as she cried. All four of the senior girls were crying, taking turns between hugging each other and hugging their own knees to their chests. The only one who wasn’t in tears was Eric Tates, her class clown.
She looked at him, silently pleading with him to make a joke, to say something that could turn the sadness into choking laughter.
Instead, he shrugged and said, “I want to be the scientist who finds a cure for all of this.” Then, instead of a smile appearing from his mouth, a dribble of snot ran down his nose and onto his lips. He added, “Still think I can be anything I want?”
Tenth Quiz
Following the broadcast, she had let her students leave class as soon as they wanted. If she were their age, she would have skipped the rest of the day and played video games or gone over to a friend’s house or done whatever kids still did to pass the time. Surely, the ways kids goofed off hadn’t changed just because they knew that in fifty or sixty more years, they would be senior citizens without anyone else younger in the world except the remaining Blocks.
She planned an impromptu quiz for them the next day. It wouldn’t be a real quiz, with results that mattered. And the questions wouldn’t require them to have read any of the material she assigned to the class. She planned questions like, “If The Awakening were written today, how do you think it would have ended?” and “If Meursault shot a man on the beach today, what do you think the headline in the newspapers would be?”
The quiz forced them to do work, to stay structured and keep up a semblance of normality as the society around them began to erode. But it also let them acknowledge that the Great De-evolution, as scientists were calling it, was a real thing. To her, the quiz seemed like the best of both worlds.
When class started that day, however, there were only three students remaining. Debbie Vandenphal, one of the juniors. Kelly Abraham, the girl who looked out the window each time she wanted to cry. And Eric Tates, her class clown.
“There was another migration last night,” Eric said, as if she needed an explanation for why even more seats were empty.
She figured there would be fewer students. Word in the teacher’s lounge that morning was that Harry Rousner, the Biology teacher, was in one of the cars that was heading south. But only three students remaining? She was sure each of them saw the cringe of pain that made the corners of her mouth curl inward.
“Okay,” she said, nodding her head. “No big deal.” She handed out three copies of the quiz.
“What’s this?” Eric said.
Ray smiled and said, “A pop quiz.”
Before she could say anything else, before she could explain what she intended, Eric groaned, crumbled the paper into a ball, and tossed it across the room. If Zack Childers were still one of her students and not travelling south on a major highway, the quiz would have bounced off the side of his head.
“This is lame,” Eric said. “This is like, what, the tenth quiz we’ve had this year.”
“Eric”—
“No one cares about your stupid quizzes. Give me an F. I don’t care.”
“Eric”—
“Do you think it’ll impact what college I get into?”
Kelly’s eyes darted toward the window and her lip started quivering. Everyone had known, prior to the school year starting, that all of the colleges and universities around the country had already stopped accepting new admissions. Her students’ formal education would end with their high school diploma.
Eric was shaking his head and blinking over and over.
“Are you going to put this on my permanent record?” he said. “Well, let me know if you do. At least something I do will be around forever, right?”
Debbie Vandenphal put her hands to her face and began to tremble.
“Eric, it wasn’t that type of quiz,” Ray said quietly, her words barely audible.
She wanted to explain her intention, to inspire them while acknowledging what was going on around them, to help them get through being a teenager with as little damage as possible. But instead, she said nothing.
“Screw this,” Eric muttered, standing from his desk, hauling his backpack over his shoulder, then walking out of her classroom.
Kelly Abraham was still looking out the window. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, collecting at her chin, then dripping onto her desk. Debbie Vandenphal’s face was still buried behind her palms.
Ray picked one of the many empty seats, halfway between either girl, and sat down. From where she sat, the teacher’s desk seemed impossibly far away. Traces of things that had been written on the chalkboard over the years, only to be erased, offered glimpses of a different world. Sitting there, she tried to think what she would want a teacher to tell her if she were a teenager facing all of the problems they knew were coming their way.
Then, with a sigh, she said, “Class is dismissed. Have a good day,” and she watched the two girls collect their things and leave, just as Eric had done.
Eleventh Drink
She got roaring drunk. Of course she did. It wasn’t something she normally did, or even something she planned on doing, but no one could blame her for stopping by the liquor store after a day of teaching like the one she had just had.
Her cat—not really her cat but the cat that had shown up on her doorstep after being abandoned when its owner left during one of the migrations—walked back and forth over her lap as she sipped from the next can of beer.
In a way, the cat was no different than her students. It had shown up in her life one day, needing to feel
as if everything would be okay, and she had done her best to make that happen. It was much easier with the cat, however—a bowl of food, a gentle rub under its chin—than it was with her kids.
With another can empty, she put it on the table beside her and popped open the next one.
What was she supposed to tell her students, that everything was going to be okay? They all knew that wasn’t true. Sure, there was no war or starvation or suffering, but mankind was slowly disappearing from the world all the same.
Why was she bothering to teach them about classic literature while the human population kept declining? In another few years, the population would dip below five billion. Then four billion. It could only end one way. Would any of her students care about The Awakening or The Stranger when they were wrinkly and old and alone? Definitely not. So why was she insisting on teaching them about those things instead of the few subjects that would really matter to them for the rest of their lives?
Another can was empty. She put it aside, scanned the cans next to her, counted ten, then opened the eleventh.
On Monday, she would go back into her classroom, toss a copy of a book, any book, out the window, and ask her three remaining students what they wanted to learn about. If they named something that she didn’t know anything about, well, then they could look it up on the internet and she would learn about it along with them. Or they could just talk about life, about everyone they knew who had headed south so far, about the people they knew who refused to migrate even if it meant they would eventually be all alone. They would talk about anything the kids wanted.
That was the last coherent thought she had before the room started wobbling. When she closed her eyes, the room still felt as if it were spinning around her. With all the proof she needed, she knew it was time to fall asleep and worry about the future another day.
Twelfth Call
“Ray, honey, if you’re there, please pick up. It’s your mother.”
All of the messages had been similar. As if Ray needed her mom to identify herself on the voicemail twelve different times.
She hadn’t bothered to turn her ringer back on the next morning until her headache went away. After listening to one message after another, each more worried and anxious than the previous one, the pain in Ray’s temples started to pulse again.
She was still in the process of getting the nerve to call her mother back when the phone rang again. The cat, her cat, jumped off her lap and disappeared.
“Hello?” she said.
“Ray?”
“Hi, mom.”
“Ray?”
“Yes, mom, what do you need?”
“I’ve been trying to call you all night and all morning. I thought something might be wrong.”
“You’re talking to me now, mom. What do you need?”
“I thought something might be wrong.”
Ray pulled the phone away from her ear, took a deep breath, then put the receiver back up to her mouth.
“Nothing’s wrong, mom. I didn’t want to be bothered. It’s been a long week.”
“You’re telling me. We just had two more caravans arrive.”
“That’s good, mom.” But even as she said it, she knew what was coming next.
“When are you coming down, honey?”
“I don’t know. I guess after the school year is done. I don’t want to abandon my students.”
“When will it be done?”
“I don’t know, mom. When it’s over.”
When she closed her eyes, she thought of Eric storming out of her class, of Kelly and Debbie doing their best to be quiet while they cried. When she re-opened her eyes, her cat had returned and was rubbing against her ankle.
A steady stream of purrs could be heard after she offered her hand and the cat started pushing the corner of its mouth against her knuckles.
For some reason, she had never gotten around to naming it. It hadn’t been wearing a collar when it arrived at her doorstep, and she wasn’t sure if it was because the owner didn’t want anyone to know who had abandoned it or if it was because the cat had always been more of a neighborhood cat than a house pet. Instead of coming up with a new name for it when it arrived at her doorstep, she had simply begun calling it You.
“Hey, You, you want some food?” and “You’re so cute, You,” and so on.
She couldn’t think of what was keeping her from giving the cat a name. It wasn’t as if she were going to leave it behind when she migrated south. The cat had come to depend on her. And her on it. She couldn’t just put it back out on the street when she decided it was time to start travelling down the highway with the rest of the caravan.
Trixie? No. Sprinkles? No. Fluffy? Definitely not. She looked around at all of the empty beer cans. Tipsy? Maybe.
Then the name came to her and she was discouraged she hadn’t come up with it earlier.
Holding the phone away from her mouth, she whispered, “Where did you come from, Stranger? Where do you want to go?”
In response, Stranger purred and circled, purred and circled.
A thought occurred to Ray then, and she pulled the phone back to her mouth: “Hey, mom, what did I want to be when I was little?”
“Is everything okay, honey?”
“Everything’s fine, mom. I’m just curious what I wanted to be when I was young.”
“When you were little?” her mom said, her way of repeating something to make it sound absurd.
“I was trying to tell my students what I wanted to be when I grew up and I couldn’t remember.”
“Well, that’s easy, honey. A teacher.”
“No, mom. Not what I’m doing. What did I want to be when I was little?”
“A teacher!” her mother said again. “A teacher! A teacher!”
Ray shook her head, unsure why she bothered to ask questions like that when the conversation never went the way she wanted it to go.
Her mother added, “You came home from your very first day of Kindergarten and told your father and I that you wanted to be a teacher when you grew up. We laughed and thought it was the funniest thing in the world. But then you said the same thing in first grade when you were asked. And second grade, too. You don’t remember that?”
“No,” Ray said, frowning. “I don’t remember that at all.”
Rubbing the back of Stranger’s head, she wondered how she could forget something like that.
“You never said what subject you wanted to teach,” her mom added. “You didn’t even know teachers could focus on a certain subject back then. All you knew was that you wanted to be a teacher.”
“Are you making this up, mom?”
“No! I’m being serious. I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”
As if joking about becoming a teacher was something that should be off limits if you had any decency.
“Thanks, mom.”
“For what, honey?”
“For remembering.”
Final Chance
The rest of the weekend was spent thinking about the scientist’s report and the diminishing student population. She remembered the things Eric Tates had said before storming out of the room, and she also replayed the conversation with her mother over and over.
By the time school started on Monday morning, she was on a warpath. She stormed into the teacher’s lounge, ready to tell everyone there exactly what she thought about Al Flanagan and Harry Rousner and all the others who had left before the school year was finished.
The only person in the lounge, however, was Mr. Turkow, the janitor.
The man, hunched over his mop, looked up from the wet floor and said, “Another migration this weekend.”
“Oh.”
Next, she went to the principal’s office. She was on her way into Principal Wachowski’s office, without knocking, when a voice called out behind her: “She’s not in yet. If she’s coming in at all, that is.”
Ray turned around.
The mousy-looking secretary was standing behind her, next to a metal filing cabinet. The secretary had a stack of folders in her hands. Looking down, Ray saw that two trashcans were already full of the folders.
“Permanent records?” Ray said, rolling her eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing.” If her class clown had been there, he would have laughed—or cried. Ray said, “It doesn’t matter if Wachowski is here yet. I’ll leave a note.”
She wrote down everything she had planned on saying to Wachowski’s face. She wrote so quickly that when she was done, she had to go back and make some of her handwriting more legible so the principal would be able to read it all. Her fingers gripped the pen as if it were a sword and she were fighting for her life. In a way, maybe she was.
Dear Principal Wachowski,
You may think it’s wrong to tell the students they can be anything they want. Some of their parents might even get upset and call you when I say such things to the kids. Make one thing clear, though: I will not stop telling my students that they can achieve anything they dream up in their young heads.
Yes, the human population is steadily declining. And yes, unless the scientists make some miraculous discovery, which none of us expect to happen, the decline will continue until there are only a few people scattered around the world. And then, no one at all.
However, that does not mean the students can’t be anything they want! It turns out I wanted to be a teacher when I was little. Can you believe that? A teacher! I didn’t want to be a teacher who won awards or a teacher who had a full class of kids every day. I just wanted to teach.
So, if one of my students wants to be a hockey player when he grows up, he can sure as heck be a hockey player. I admit, the NHL won’t be around. My student will never win a Stanley Cup. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a hockey player, of some sorts, all the same.
If one of the girls in my class wants to become a lawyer, then she can do that! I’ll be the first to acknowledge the Supreme Court has already discussed disbanding and that some local courts have already begun to turn their lights off. But until the very last pockets of society break down, everyone will rely on people who can mediate differences.