Morris

Morris recognized his neighbors heading his direction and hurried across the parking lot to avoid them. He muttered past ladies failing at loading groceries into trunks with one hand while talking on the phone with the other hand; and divorced, middle-aged men trying to impress everyone with their ability to hold up traffic so that they could back into the angled parking spots; and idiot children running too far ahead of their oblivious parents behind the phone-talking ladies who were now backing out of their spaces with one hand. He glowered at the carts strewn haphazardly across the lot, behind cars, rolling into the drive path. He cursed audibly. Everyone was a disaster in the offing – a bustling chaos waiting for the something bad that Morris knew was just around the corner. He gripped his keys tightly, as if by doing so, they would magically transport him into the quiet solitude of his nondescript, grey Ford sedan. Away from the crowd. Away from the common nonsense. He hated grocery shopping in the broad daylight.  Safe inside his car, he pulled out onto a congested road, built without the foresight of exploding growth in a city quickly sinking under its own weight. Morris watched the Lexus in front of him swerve twice into the oncoming lane. He could tell from her posture that she was a phone-talking lady. She held the phone flat in her right hand, parallel to her shoulder and nowhere near her mouth. At the next intersection, Morris heard a cheerful honk and turned to find his neighbors waving and motioning for him to roll down the window. He held his breath, clenched his jaw and pressed the button on his door, but only just a little.

“Yes?” Morris huffed through the narrow opening in his window.

“Hi, Morris! We’ve been following you since the grocery store! How funny is that? We’re going to put some patties on the grill if you want to stop by. See you in a few minutes, neighbor!”

Morris rolled up his window and decided to take an alternate route home. 

There were two kinds of people as far as he was concerned: Those who never pay attention to anything but themselves, and those who pay too much attention to everyone but themselves. Morris hated both kinds. Neither kind paid attention to the imminence of the end of the world like Morris did. They were all results of poor planning. They would all be instruments in their own doom.

Morris had all the company he needed at home with his collections in his cozy little cave. In his workshop waited his best friend, Ziggy, and about ten other companions. Ziggy was a Bluetick Coonhound. In life, he was Morris’s only friend. He only left his side to retrieve a ball or bark at the intruders who dared to approach the front door. He kept all the people away and listened to all of Morris’s woes. Now, he was posed as Morris always pictured him: Upright in an armchair, with his legs crossed in a gentlemanly manner, a pipe hanging from his mouth and a glass of scotch wired to one of his paws. He wore spectacles fitted perfectly to his proud snout and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches over a cornflower blue sweater vest. He was still the ever-attentive listener. He was still Morris’s best friend.

Mr. and Mrs. Quarrel were a squirrel husband and wife who were in the throes of eternal marital turmoil. Mrs. Quarrel wore tiny rollers and a flower-print calico duster, dangled a tiny cigarette from one delicate paw and clutched a tiny rolling pin in the other. Mr. Quarrel sat slouching in a tiny recliner, holding a tiny TV remote in front of a tiny TV. He wore a white tank shirt and blue –and-green plaid boxer shorts. On the floor were miniature empty red-and-white beer cans. Three house finches all named Joe were lined up in single file, each one posed with their right leg in the air mid-march. They wore identical drab green jackets, and each had identical black armbands on their left wings. Craig, a white mouse, drove a tiny red Mustang convertible and Tyler, a grey mouse, revved a tiny, white Camaro. They eyed each other at a forever red light. A slender rat in a pale blue workplace polo and pleated navy skirt pointed at a fat hamster who had a huge brown stain on the front of his white button-up. Her face was pulled into a menacing laugh, but his face was pointed down.

Each diorama was as rich in set design as they were in character and costume. Morris loved to live between the details.

Each night, Morris would come home and chat with his once-chattering friends. He would replay snippets of conversations he had heard throughout the day or vent about some run-in he had had. One night, The Quarrels might fight about him not getting her some trinket she wanted, but the next night it would be about who she was always texting. The Joes repeated slogans from political campaigns or the latest buzzword Morris had heard. Sometimes Craig and Tyler would get into car accidents, sometimes very heated arguments, or sometimes, the race would go well and be fairly played. The rat said all manner of cruel things to the hamster, but the hamster never said anything back.

Morris was thinking about getting some rabbits.

“Ziggy, boy, what a day!” Morris pulled the tab on a soda can as he entered the workshop from the kitchen. “It get’s harder every day!”

“Morris,” Ziggy said. His voice was gruff and just a little lower than Morris’s voice. “Don’t worry so much about the people. It doesn’t have to be your problem.”

“But they’re not paying attention! They could really injure me. I have to make it my problem. Someone has to pay attention!”

“Morris,” Ziggy said. “You worry too much. You should try to enjoy going out of the house. I always did. Besides, if the people come too near you, you can just bark.”

“I do,” Morris admitted. In his head, Morris also admitted to a hundred little sabotaging misdeeds he sometimes did to undermine other people, like hawking up phlegm and spitting it too near a passerby’s feet or turning on his brights while tailgating a phone-talking lady. 

At that moment, a blinding light interrupted  Morris’s confessional and poured in through the open door of the workshop. Vertical rays of white shot from behind the edges of the blackout curtains. Beams of radiance bounced off all the metal tools and empty stands, and jumped from every glass eye. The room dazzled with reflection. Starting very softly and very slowly, a low, vibrating hum louder than anything climbed up Morris’s feet to his knees. It rumbled in his groin and filled his belly full of bees and pushed hard on the insides of his ribcage.

And then it stopped.

Morris thought he must have fainted. He woke up in his armchair across from Ziggy’s. Ziggy was there, but something was off. Morris glanced around the room. Everything seemed almost right, but not quite. Not enough dust in the corners. Not enough shadows on the walls. Morris turned full around to look out his workshop door into the kitchen. But instead of his kitchen, the doorway framed the view of very plain-looking, average-sized man wearing pink scrubs.

 Morris screamed. Then he called out for his dog. Faintly, beneath the cacophony of horrible thoughts in his head, he thought he heard Ziggy say, “What?”

“Don’t be alarmed,” the normal-looking man in the pink scrubs hummed. “I am Andy. You are Morris. I will answer your questions now.”

Unease tugged at Morris’s bowels. He grabbed a scalpel from a table to his left and hurled it at Andy.

“Don’t,” Andy said. “I am not alive and you are not dead. I am simulation of a human made for your comfort and you are somewhere safe.”

With these words, Morris’s guts began to quiver less, but he didn’t know why.

“We are collectors. We’ve been watching you. Watching everybody. For a long time, at least a long time to you.”

“Who are you?” Morris tried to sound demanding and put out, but instead, he squeaked.

“We are galactic field scientists. We travel the galaxy looking for, observing, collecting, and preserving life forms from all over.

“Am I being collected?”

“Yes!” Andy said brightly. “Congratulations! We liked you so we decided to collect you and a few others before Earth is no more. You are very welcome.”

“Before the earth is no more?” Morris warmed at the thought. He felt validated.

“Oh yes, Morris. But I should clarify, by our calculations, the earth will last roughly 250 million more years, but the planet’s ability to sustain life will be ending nowish. We collected you just in time. But we can’t be sure that we understand time like you do. The earth is ending right now, as we speak, but for you, it might seem to end in a week or a year. We’re not sure what it looks like to you. But it’s definitely ending and it’s definitely because of something your species is doing.”

“Why me?”

Andy gave a hint of a chuckle. “All the kinds in your subtype ask that question. Well … we chose you specifically for a nice profile of reasons. We noticed that you’re always paying attention. You’re a noticer. We like that. For you, it might be like how you choose a rodent to collect. One looks smarter than the others. Or has an attentive face. That’s another reason we chose you; we believe you can relate to the kind of work we do. Other humans might be bothered by being part of a collection.”

“Are you going to stuff me? Mount me in a pose?” Morris was surprised that the thought didn’t really bother him too deeply.

“No, Morris. We like to keep our specimens with all their biological functions intact so that we can study your processes better. But we will give you a little shadowbox to live in to make you comfortable here in our facilities. How do you like it?”

Andy swept one hand across his body to the replica of Morris’s workshop.

“My workshop? I’ll stay here until I die?” Morris was giddy. He’d never have to leave his favorite place or his favorite quiet companions.

“Not until you die. You won’t die now. We’re preserving you, just as you were in life on earth. All your basic needs will be met without worry from you. We will observe you and collect data on your processes. We may occasionally require you perform activities so that we can monitor your biofeedback; for example, a rigorous walk on a treadmill. We may need to see how you respond to certain stimuli. Nothing too taxing.”

Morris thought this sounded like a fair trade for an indefinite lifetime of never having to drive somewhere for groceries, or worry about how to get the money for the groceries in the first place. He nodded his assent, but somewhere deep within the writhing throng of thoughts in his head, he understood that his compliance was never requested. The Collectors did not require his permission.

“Morris, there is one significant alteration that we made to your habitat and we think you will be delighted. You see, we’ve discovered for a fact that every biological organism in the galaxy needs other organisms in order to survive. They depend on each other for sustenance in the form of food, of course, but they also depend on similarly-structured organisms in order to thrive. No living creature can exist alone. We understand that you have already selected and collected the similarly-structured companions that help you thrive; however, we noticed that they were no longer functioning biologically. Unfortunately, when life is gone from a biological being, it is not retrievable. The energy immediately dissipates and is reabsorbed into other energies. But, not all beings are biological. For example, I am a simulation. I am a fair facsimile, am I not?”

Morris had forgotten he was not talking to a person, but Andy’s statement, and the fact that Morris did not want throw an angry glance at him, quickly reminded him.

“Morris, We are sure you’ll find that your companions are also reasonable facsimiles of how you always imagined them to be.”

Andy waved a hand across his body again and Morris was distracted by a quiet commotion behind him.

Mrs. Quarrel chattered loudly, “but why do you still follow her on social media?” while Mr. Quarrel turned the television up just a little louder. The Joes in unison twittered, “God and country, land and soil.” Craig and Tyler were standing in between their cars, dancing in a combat circle and yelling, “You wanna go?” The rat laughed and laughed and laughed at the hamster who stared down at his shoes.

Morris felt his shoulders crouch closer to his ears when he heard a voice eerily like his own, but familiar like an old friend’s.

“Morris!” Ziggy huffed.

“Ziggy, oh boy, oh boy, oh my good boy!”

“Morris, you were going to tell me again about Beatrice. Was she working at the store today? Did she look pretty again? Did she look pretty in her blue skirt? Did she pay attention to you today?”

“Oh, Ziggy, how I missed you. But can we just sit here and roll the ball around? I don’t want to talk about Beatrice. I really, really missed you.”

“But Morris, I want to talk about you and all the people who bothered you today. Pour a drink for us. Did you ever make up with your mother after yelling at her last week? Did you give her a treat, like I told you to?”

Morris looked at his companions, but they never glanced up. They were locked into their scripts, except for Ziggy, who was locked into Morris.

Morris sunk into his armchair and looked down at his hands. And there he remained for a very long time.