Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  One morning Mark Spitz stumbled on some brain-wiped wretch standing at the fry station of the big hamburger chain and had to shoot him on general principles. Out of the abundance of a life, to choose fry duty.

  They were safe in their houses. In front of the televisions, of course, a host of this type biding their time until the electricity came back on, the problem was solved, and the program resumed where it had stopped. All the time in the world. Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment. In the bath, fully clothed before the nippled showerhead and its multiple-flow settings. Tilting a fluted vacuum attachment toward the scrunched curtains and their legendary hard-to-reach places. Underneath blankets and duvets whose number and thickness referred to a different season, a previous winter of mysterious significance. Slipping a disc into the game machine. Crotch-down on the yoga mat. Spooning bran from a bowl. Surfing the dead web. Yawning. Stretching. Flossing. Wound down and alone in their habitat.

  For Omega’s purposes, their habitat was Zone One.

  In Human Resources, Gary corralled purses and read out the ages of the dead. He didn’t bother with the names. No one cared about the names, not them, not the higher-ups. Since they hadn’t maintained records of the dead starting Last Night, there was no point: easier to keep records of the living. Fewer numbers to work with, for one thing, and unimpeachable given the ascension of the survivor rolls to the status of holy register. They endured setbacks—supply lines broke down and refuges were overrun, not so much now, but in the interregnum everyone had been forced to flee a hideout or ill-considered shelter multiple times. No matter the daily advances and reversals, however, the names of the survivors maintained their willful stream into the zones of stability, over the comm, scrawled on paper, recited from memory by the weary emissary of a band coming in from the cold: These are the living.

  Kaitlyn assigned Gary to ID collection, having picked up on Mark Spitz’s aversion grids ago. He recoiled at going into people’s wallets, pawing through their purses. Too much of the dead world floating in there. The detritus that passed for identity, the particulate remains of twenty-first-century existence, fluttered down to settle at the bottoms of wallets and clutches and messenger bags. The indicators of their brief appearance on the planet waited for Mark Spitz: the flavored gums and lip balms that would never again be manufactured, the despised driver’s license photos that were the only proof that they’d had faces, the snaps of the kids and collies and boyfriends, the just-in-case tampons. All those keys to empty apartments now painted in blood, where lovers decomposed on the wall-to-wall. The fossil evidence that there had once been other types of people besides survivors.

  Touching these artifacts nauseated him now, in the latest manifestation of his PASD. The first time he got sick, the unit had completed a sweep of a party-supply store, a narrow nook on Reade that had been washed off Broadway into a low-rent eddy. Dusty costumes hung from the ceiling as if on meat hooks: cowboys and robots from chart-busting sci-fi trilogies, ethnically obscure kiddie-show mascots, jungle beasts with long tails intended for the flirty tickling of faces. Kingdoms’ worth of princesses and their plastic accoutrements, stamped out on the royal assembly line, and the requisite Naughty Nurse suspended in the dead air, tilting in her rounds. Do Not Expose to Open Flame. For Amusement Only. The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn’t take.

  Gary crouched on the floor of the party-supply store and slit open the belly of a goat-shaped piñata with his blade. “We didn’t know they made this candy anymore.”

  Mark Spitz removed his glove and rolled some bonbons in his hand. They were flavor combos of fruit he’d never heard of, the habitués of a jungle on another damp hemisphere. “That stuff has been in there since before you were born,” he said.

  Kaitlyn gently removed the piñata from Gary’s hands. “It’s tiresome, babysitting.”

  Gary proposed that the human body required sugar after periods of extended exertion, and was rebuffed. Kaitlyn pulled out her notebook. “Mark Spitz?”

  He went looking for the creature’s ID. The general theory contended that stragglers haunted what they knew. The where was obvious: You were standing in it. But the why was always somewhere else. This skel they’d discovered by the row of helium tanks, her hand dangling on a valve. She was wearing a gorilla costume. The costume draped off her shoulders, deflated on her shrunken form. She wasn’t wearing the head, which was nowhere in sight.

  He was exhausted—they’d hit two res high-rises back-to-back, and there had been a lot of dead pets to lug down—but he couldn’t help sleuthing. Why did this cipher stake out this store, and this particular spot? On the wall by the register, next to the taped-up first-day-of-business good-luck dollar bills, a photograph captured a burly man surrounded by smiling children who nipped at the bag of candy he held an inch out of reach. The owner, let’s say. Mark Spitz glimpsed no family resemblance before he eliminated the straggler’s face. Was she the spouse, an employee or former employee, and if so, what about this place shouldered its way into her mentality, past the plague, summoning her here? Then there was the suit. Had she been infected while wearing the gorilla outfit, or put it on as she got sicker and sicker with the disease, and if this was the case, what made her select it as her shroud? Before the plague, the sight of someone walking the street in that costume wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow—Manhattan was Manhattan—and in its aftermath, such a vision added only a small portion of the prevailing macabre. Why her post by the helium tank, the paw on the valve that complicated the mystery? When Mark Spitz shot her in the head she brought down the tank with her. The gong of the thing hitting the floor was the loudest sound they’d heard in weeks, in that silent city. They jumped.

  Mark Spitz unzipped the suit to check for a wallet. The skel was nude, her body mottled with brown plague spots. An apple-size chunk of meat was missing from her forearm. Perhaps the explanation of her outfit and how she made it to this spot was plausible in the context of her former life. But there was no one to tell her story. Mark Spitz’s bullet had transformed everything above her neck into globules of toxic fluid, gristle, and shards of bone.

  Kaitlyn suggested Mark Spitz take a look-see in the back for an ID. He went into the recesses of the store. No light seeped from the street. He switched on his torch. The office conformed to the familiar disarray of small downtown businesses. Management had piled invoices, overstock, and decades of tax returns into a fortification of clutter that might protect them from extinction. The light from his helmet traveled over the file cabinets and boxes of seasonal merchandise, the lifeblood plastic Easter eggs and jack-o’-lantern streamers. He didn’t find her clothes, or any clues, and the next moment he was weeping, fingers curled into a nautilus across his face and snot seeping into his mouth, sweetly.

  The next time they needed to fill out an Incident Report, Mark Spitz begged off, and eventually Kaitlyn took note and removed him from the detail. He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension. He was not alone. “Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,” or so the latest diagnoses droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague.

  Buzzwords had returned, and what greater proof of the rejuvenation of the world, the return to Eden, than a new buzzword emerging from the dirt to tilt its petals to the zeitgeist. In the recent calm, experts of sundry persuasion reconnected with their professions, hoping to get out of custodial duty and earn a ticket to Buffalo with the rest of the royalty. One
canny psychotherapist—Dr. Neil Herkimer, who’d made a fortune in the days before the flood with a line of self-help books imparting “The Herkimer Solution to Human Unhappiness”—delivered the big buzzword of the moment: PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Dr. Neil Herkimer climbed aboard a Buffalo-bound chopper soon after his diagnosis. As the chopper disappeared into the sky, he could be seen through the tiny window giving his buddies at Camp El Dorado a vigorous thumbs-up. Mark Spitz heard people jabbering about it over pea soup in the mess tents, or as he handed crates of powdered milk and vitamin supplements to eager survivors in the scattered camps from an armor-plated supply truck: Everyone suffered from PASD. Herkimer put it at seventy-five percent of the surviving population, with the other twenty-five percent under the sway of preexisting mental conditions that were, of course, exacerbated by the great calamity. In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.

  Buffalo shipped out “Living with PASD” pamphlets to the settlements in the packages containing work orders, dietary guidelines focusing on the realities of this age of scarcity (scurvy was a recurring character), and, of course, classified status reports on new reconstruction initiatives. The pamphlets were left on bunks and mess-hall seats; Buffalo knew exactly how many to print from the survivor rolls. Mark Spitz mulled the literature in the latrine. According to the specialists, symptoms included feelings of sadness or unhappiness; irritability or frustration, even over small matters; loss of interest or pleasure in normal activities; reduced sex drive; insomnia or excessive sleeping; changes in appetite leading to weight loss, or increased cravings for food and weight gain; reliving traumatic events through hallucinations or flashbacks; agitation or restlessness; being “jumpy” or easily startled; slowed thinking, speaking, or body movements; indecisiveness, distractibility, and decreased concentration; fatigue, tiredness, and loss of energy so that even small tasks seem to require a lot of effort; feelings of worthlessness or guilt; trouble thinking, concentrating, making decisions, and remembering things; frequent thoughts of death, dying, or suicide; crying spells for no apparent reason, as opposed to those triggered by the memories of the fallen world; unexplained physical problems, such as back pain, increased blood pressure and heart rate, nausea, diarrhea, and headaches. Nightmares, goes without saying.

  A meticulous inventory with a wide embrace. Not so much criteria for diagnosis but an abstract of existence itself, Mark Spitz thought. Once American tongues tangled with the acronym, it got mashed up and spat out into an intriguing shape. To wit: the afternoon he returned to camp after a rainy day working the Corridor, in abominable Connecticut, and was about to check the day’s survivor roll. He hadn’t seen the name of anyone he knew for weeks. Mark Spitz was halfway to the rec center when he discovered one of the comm operators, Hank, crouching by the prostrate body of a teenage soldier whose fresh gear had obviously never been worn before. Probably the kid’s first foray out of camp since he came in from the wild. The soldier sprang in and out of a fetal posture, collapsing and exploding, smearing his body through a clump of vomit.

  “What happened,” Mark Spitz asked, “he get bit?”

  “No, it’s his past,” he heard the comm operator say. The recruit moaned some more.

  “His past?”

  “His P-A-S-D, man, his P-A-S-D. Give me a hand.”

  That afternoon in Human Resources, Mark Spitz was grateful for Kaitlyn’s empathy in sparing him from ID duty, and it became evident that Gary relished the job. “Ronkonkoma?” he asked, holding one of the HR ladies’ licenses. “Had a lump of that on our crotch once.” Kaitlyn excluded this information from the report.

  Inserting corpses into body bags, on the other hand, provoked no symptoms in Mark Spitz. He removed four body bags from his pack and unfolded them, a genie of new-vinyl smell untangling its limbs. “You got Aunt Ethel and Gums over there,” Gary said.

  Mark Spitz started with the skel in pink, to get the heaviest out of the way. He grabbed its ankles and dragged it onto the plastic, tucking its feet into the sleeve. Its pantyhose curled back over its toes like a banana peel.

  He still had a soft spot for Miss Alcott, all these years later, for it had been in her English class that he realized he was utterly unremarkable. She gave Mark Spitz and his classmates a vocab test every Thursday—“Use this word from the assigned reading in a sentence”—and by December it was hard not to notice the pattern. He was a thorough, inveterate B. It was his road. He studied for hours and there it waited for him, circled in red ink, oddly welcoming, silently forgiving. Or he refused to open his books and gorged instead on a prime-time platter of sitcoms: he’d still get a B. It was a little play he performed each week and he hit his marks instinctively, stalking the boards of mediocrity. He was not unintelligent; in fact, his instructors agreed that he was often quite perceptive and canny in his contributions to discussion, a “true pleasure to have in the classroom.” The adjectives in his report cards, drawn from a special teachers’ collection of mild yet approving modifiers, described an individual of broader gifts than implied by the grades delivered at the end of each term. All the parts were there. Extra screws, even. There was just something wrong in the execution.

  Over the years, Mark Spitz reconciled himself to his condition. It took the pressure off. A force from above held him down, and a counterforce from below bore him aloft. He hovered on unexceptionality.

  He zipped up the corpse that resembled, under the blood and contorted features, his elementary-school teacher and then he remembered. He looked around and crawled to the copier and retrieved its wig. He unzipped the black bag and dropped it on its face.

  He tossed Gary a body bag and the mechanic grabbed the feet of the faceless skel. Mark Spitz got started on the Marge. He looked into her black teeth. His arm still flared in the aftermath of its assault, even though the lattice of fibers in his fatigues had absorbed most of the pressure. He didn’t want to see what his bicep looked like under there. He’d probably have to tape a chemical compress around it for a week.

  The Marge’s broken teeth tilted hideously from its gums. He thought of the crumbling pilings across the water. Last month they’d swept the big apartment complexes of Battery Park, that crop of edifices jabbed deep into landfill. The western face of the buildings bristled with rows of terraces overlooking Jersey City. The week they worked that development, he stepped out on the balconies for air and stared at the withered stunts of the old Jersey docks. Remnants of a dead, seafaring era of trade and commerce. What a view. Make it to the edges of the island and the Palisades, Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty scrolled before you in their stillness. (Give me your poor, your hungry, your suppurating masses yearning to eat.) What percentage of the residents’ lips had formed, at one point or another, the syllables of a sweet, awestruck “What a view”? How could it be any less than a hundred percent. It was a banality no one could elude. What percentage of the residents surged with pride as they darted between the kitchenette and the living room to replenish the hors d’oeuvres when their guests whispered “What a view”? One hundred percent. The citizens were programmed by the vista-less city to utter such things at the correct triggers, so diminished were they from crippled horizons.

  After four flights, Mark Spitz had the complex’s blueprints in his pocket, a super’s knowledge of the identical layouts of the apartments in their distinct lines. Windowless office nook or nursery, bathroom on the right, second bedroom at the end of the hall with a coffin-size closet. He recognized the area rugs and sconces and accent tables, for the residents had all shopped at the same popular furniture emporiums the rest of the country shopped at. They had shambled through the identical outlet showrooms and tested the same sofas with their asses, clicked through the dropdown menus of the same online purveyors, broadband willing, zooming in on See in a Room and mentally arranging the merchandise according to the same floor plans. In the D-line apartment on the sixth floor he discovered the plaid ottoman he came across in the A-line apar
tment on the fourteenth floor, an identical distance from the flat-screen television. They had been a community.

  The only thing that truly changed was the view of Jersey, easing in perspective as his unit moved down the stairs from penthouse god to grub eye. Omega disposed of the bodies from the big Battery Park buildings the same way they disposed of bodies anywhere else. The vantages affected price per square foot, not their jobs. The bodies were equally ungainly in the black polyurethane, whether recovered in rooms that overlooked cliffs, or air shafts, or more extravagant apartments across the street. On the other bank of the Hudson River, the old pilings stuck up abjectly, rotten teeth in a monstrous jaw. Revolting gray water sloshed around them like saliva. Teeth everywhere. You make it across the water, Mark Spitz thought, and you’d get eaten up.

  He zipped up the Marge, hastening when he arrived at the bloody mophead of her scalp. Was this skel a native New Yorker, or had it been lured here by the high jinks of Margaret Halstead and her colorful roommates? One of those seekers powerless before the seduction of the impossible apartment that the gang inexplicably afforded on their shit-job salaries, unable to resist the scalpel-carved and well-abraded faces of the guest stars the characters smooched in one-shot appearances or across multi-episode arcs. Struck dumb by the dazzling stock footage of the city avenues at teeming evening. Did it work, the hairdo, the bleached teeth, the calculated injections, did it transform the country rube into the cosmopolitan? Mold their faces to the prevailing grimace? The city required people to make it go. When citizens flee or die, others must replace them. As it expanded its magnificence, out over landfill or up in its multifarious and towering honeycombs, it required bodies to fill the vacancies. When the sweepers finished their mission, who would be the new residents of the island, bellies up to the boat rail, gaping as expectantly as those other immigrants who had come to the harbor, that first fodder? Where had all the previous tenants gone, what number would have been spared if they had remained in their stifling hometowns? How many had been indoctrinated by that enervating glow?