The Devil Next Door

There was nothing Louis could say to that. It was wild and impossible, but it was probably also true. And that was the most disturbing thing of all. For man was a beast at heart and civilization, at best, was an illusion. As Earl said, a fancy cloak you could drape over the ugly monster within…and you could hide those claws and those teeth and that bloodthirsty appetite in its folds, but it was still there. Waiting to get out. As Earl also said, it got out pretty commonly on an individual basis and now and again on a communal level. But this, what was happening here, was probably one of the first times it had reached such a proportion, had infected and degenerated so many in such a short span of time, gone global. But it had always been coming, right from the beginning. Now and then the gene was activated-accidentally, no doubt-and you had a serious body count. But the big one, the Big Bang, the Doomsday Effect, of the human race had not come until now.

To think that all man had strived for and accomplished was now being destroyed by a primitive gene, by biochemical reactions deep in microscopic cells. That was scary.

“I’m frightened for the race, Louis. Terribly, deeply frightened. For what if this regression continues?” Earl pondered. “What will a year bring? Will we continue to devolve? Those people out there, they still have language skills and reasoning powers. But I’d say they’re rapidly devolving from Homo sapiens to Homo erectus. That’s just a guess, of course. But what will we be like in five or ten years? Will our culture completely have been forgotten? Will we have degraded into Australopithecine hunting groups, forging tools from animal bones, roaming the veldt, forest, and grassland with our ancestral bloodlust intact while our cities slowly turn to rubble and memory?”

“I don’t know, Earl. I can’t think anymore.”

Earl shook his head. “This is what the Greeks call hubris, Louis.”

“Hubris?”

“Yes, hubris. If man lifts his head too high or raises his achievements and ambitions to a godlike level, the gods will be threatened. And threatened, will react in kind by destroying him. And we’ve-all of us-have certainly acted like gods, haven’t we? Killing one another, waging wars, raping the planet, exterminating other species, crushing any that stand in our way…yes, certainly the province of gods not men. And now nature or God or what have you is putting us in our place. If that’s not karma, I don’t know what is.”

Louis felt like crying as he waited here on the threshold of doomsday. He wanted to weep at the sullen marble grave of civilization and mankind. Jesus, the absolute horror of it all.

Earl sighed. “My head hurts. Dear Christ, but my head hurts. I need to use your bathroom, Louis. I have to wash my face. And piss. Yes, piss in a toilet like a man and not against a tree to mark my trail.” He got up, started walking out of the living room and then turned back. “You’ve been a good neighbor, Louis. The very best. I always thought you were special and now I know that you are.”

But Louis shook his head. “I’m not. I’m nothing special.”

“Oh, but you are,” the old man said. “You haven’t lost it like the rest of us. Not even for a moment. It hasn’t been able to get its claws in you and that makes you special, Louis. Very special. You may be the last of the reasonable men. A species nearing extinction. The last man to study other men rather than simply killing them. What a waste. The nature of man is to study the nature of man, I always thought. But I was wrong. The nature of man is to kill. The territorial imperative, Louis.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Earl. I don’t understand.”

“Learned response, cultural instinct, my friend. These things make up the basis of any creature’s behavior. You have to be taught how to make a paper airplane, but no one has to teach you how to make a weapon. You know. It’s instinctive. Just like the desire to kill.”

“They are making weapons, Earl…spears, clubs, you name it. And you know what? They work. I would think making a spear that could be thrown and actually hit its target might be an art form of sorts. There’s engineering involved. You wouldn’t think those savages could figure it out so quickly.”

“They didn’t have to, Louis. They knew instinctively.”