Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.

  • • •

  Forlorn Tribeca. Mark Spitz tracked west on his uptown sojourn and as he passed the corner lounge where he’d met Jennifer for drinks once after work, he allowed that it was possible his subconscious steered. At ten o’clock the bouncers dragged out the velvet rope and started choosing survivors, but early evening the attitude merely simmered. (Another barricade: sorting the sick from the healthy.) Happy hour was impenetrable, as bedraggled drones convened on stools and soft, low-slung couches, whipping out the measuring tape to see who had the biggest complaint and trying to forget that the minute you bury the miserable day it rises from its coffin the next morning, this monster. Jennifer’s invite text received an eager response. She was a quick drinker who bullied and heckled her comrades into keeping pace. She’d make sure he got a full dose of medicine.

  His job hadn’t been unduly bothersome; mostly he hated the commute from the Island and the sense of being becalmed. He worked in Customer Relationship Management, New Media Department, of a coffee multinational. A college buddy tipped him to it: “You’ll be perfect. It doesn’t require any skills.” The coffee company started in the Pacific Northwest with a single café and a proprietary roasting process, inquiries about which never failed to bring a thin, curious smile to the owners’ lips. One storefront divided into two, a dozen brick-and-mortar locations metastasized into an international franchise entity with a disposition, underdog yet indomitable, hawking paraphernalia that articulated in physical form the lifestyle philosophy the customer had unknowingly subscribed to years before, through a hundred submissions and tacit oaths, and was now fully ripened. Every package of beans brewed in the logo-dappled paraphernalia reminded you of the larger mission and the nation-state of like minds. Your home was your own personal franchise. Didn’t even have to post a sign in the bathroom reminding you to wash your hands.

  The enchanted beans were organically farmed and humanely picked, the marketing uncanny in its engineering and ruthless in its implementation. It was his job to monitor the web in search of opportunities to sow product mindshare and nurture feelings of brand intimacy. As his supervisor put it. This meant, he soon learned, scouting websites and social-media apparatus for mentions of the brand family, and saying hello. He dispatched bots into the electronic ether, where they mingled among the various global sites and individual feeds, and when the bots returned with a hit or blip, he sent a message: “Thanks for coming, glad you liked the joe!” or “Next time try the Mocha Burst, you’ll thank me later.” He perched on the high-tension wires like a binary vulture, ancient pixilated eyes peeled for scraps. When he saw meat, he pounced. Sometimes the recipient responded, sometimes not.

  The denizens of the void, chewing on their tails, compulsively broadcasting the flimsy minutiae of their day-to-day on personal feeds and pages, didn’t have to name the products directly. The pale, thin boys two floors down in Implementation broadened the keywords to encompass the entire matrix of coffee consumption and coffee-philic modes of being so that references to caffeine, listlessness, overexcitement, lethargy, and all manner of daily combat preparedness pinged his workstation, whereupon he dispatched a “Why don’t you try our seasonal Jamaican blend next time you’re in the ’hood?” or a “Sounds like you need a hearty cup of Iced Number Seven!” He rationed exclamation points, cursed them by lunch, fell in love with them anew.

  The company software kept tabs on his clients, as they were called, so that if they mentioned a birthday celebration or meaningful life event months later, he transmitted a frothy “Many more!” and offered a gift card redeemable in the contiguous states. Or a “Sorry about the breakup—sounds like it wasn’t going to work out anyway” and a gift card. It felt nice to send out a gift card, providing they sent him their info via secured connection. He was instructed to push the gift cards a certain number of times each day. They were a bit of a racket, when you added up the lost cards, the expirations, and the thirty cents left over here and there that was never used up.

  His supervisor, strictly a tea man, and decaffeinated at that, encouraged him to cultivate an individual social-media persona. No cussing, no politics, use common sense, etc., the e-mail elaborated. He entered into artifice easily, it turned out, a natural at ersatz human connection and the postures of counterfeit empathy. He was helpful (“A sprinkle of cinnamon will add that special zing”), dispensed passive-aggressive admonishments (“Why go to our competitors when we’re up at the crack of dawn trying to make you happy?”), and did not shrink from the anodyne (“Doesn’t a nice cup of coffee make the world live again?”). Without that human touch, he was told, they might as well push that rudimentary artificial-intelligence algorithm the nerd-practitioners cooked up, which everyone knew was a bust even before the battery of focus groups weighed in. No soul.

  Two months after he started, there was a five percent uptick in the corporate site’s traffic. Whether this was due to Mark Spitz’s impersonation of caring or the rollout of the new affiliate program was unclear, but he received a pretty nice e-mail from his supervisor’s supervisor, the woman who had invented his job after some deep thinking at the annual retreat, along with a promise that his good work would be recognized come next quarterly review, which was actually going to be two quarters from now, as technically he was still a probationary hire.

  It wasn’t the worst job he’d ever had. He was working there when Last Night slammed down, scratching at his law-exam-prep notebooks at night in the rec room. The New York headquarters of the coffee company was in Chelsea, a mile and a half past the wall. He could only speculate about who had made it out and who still roamed the halls. His social-media persona probably continued to punch the clock, gossiping with the empty air and spell-checking faux-friendly compositions, hitting Send. “Nothing cures the Just Got Exsanguinated Blues like a foam mustache, IMHO.” “Sucks that the funeral pyre is so early in the morning—why don’t you grab a large Sumatra so you can stay awake when you toss your grandma in? Wouldn’t want to sleep through that, LOL!”

  By providence Mark Spitz glanced down Reade and spied the restaurant’s distinctive signage two blocks ahead, instantly reassuring. He was halfway to Wonton. His stomach fluttered. In his head he heard the tumultuous community board meeting where the residents complained over the news of its opening: Not in my backyard, it’ll ruin the neighborhood. Bistros and next-level gastro gizmos served Tribeca’s preferred grub, not vulgar chain operations. No, Mark Spitz thought. This restaurant belonged everywhere. Living out of range of its concoctions was a tragedy. An easily avoidable tragedy, it turned out, given the many convenient locations.

  He had time. He cut the bolt and rolled up the metal grate. Depending on the condition of the back exit, he was the first uninfected person inside since Last Night’s grisly embrace. There were plenty other, easier places to loot. Scavengers stripped the supermarkets and groceries and bodegas first, then restaurants, but the science of higher-level foraging never achieved full flower in the city, given the skel concentration before the marines’ arrival. The dead owned the island. Mark Spitz wasn’t hankering for industrial-size cans of buffalo sauce and powdered potatoes, but they were back there in the freezers, doubtless, next to the rotted maple-apple sausage links and salmon patties that had been squeezed into shape and packaged in the silent factories.

  He listened for the dead scraping into dumb activity at his noise: nothing. He trained his helmet light where daylight failed, scanning the brass railings circling the family-size banquets, the deep dark wood of the bar with its elbow-fretted layers of lacquer. He scanned the checkerboard tile for any creature untangling its limbs from sub-table roost. Red-and-white checks provided faithful trim on the menus and the signs and the staff uniforms as well, wh
ich were not in evidence at this moment, thank God, draping some limp-hoofed wreck bearing plates from the kitchen with a “May I take your order?” gape. The uniforms had made the waiters and waitresses into referees adjudicating obscure food-related competitions. It did get kinda rough on All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp Tuesdays. His father got into a scuffle once re: dibs on a final spoonful of Oriental Shrimp that wobbled in a bath of orange gelatin. The incident became a running joke in his house, called for duty whenever they geared up for a trip to the local franchise. “Feel like punching someone in the face today,” his father said, launching into a stream of mock-trash talk, and Mark Spitz knew where they were eating that evening.

  The restaurant was his family’s place for the impulse visits and birthdays and random celebrations, season upon season. As a child he clambered into the booth and hid behind the gigantic menu until the first “Hello, my name is” from that evening’s server, whereupon he tried to imagine what he or she looked like from their voice. The waiters had longer mustaches than he pictured, the waitresses larger breasts. Until he hit puberty anyway. In their orbits, replicas of gold and platinum records, momentous front pages, concert posters, and sports trophies tracked across the walls. He didn’t recognize any of the celebrities, the historic occasions or bands or teams, the backstories of the big playoffs and names of the pop hits. But they had to mean something if they were up on the walls. Why else would they be there? He was crestfallen when he ate at another location for the first time and saw the same stuff on the walls. His introduction to the nostalgia industry. Memento factories overseas stamped out these artifacts utilizing cheap unregulated labor, his sitter explained later. She was a college junior and her eyes were open for the first time. The individual operators were free to choose their memorabilia, but the inventory sheets contained only so many boxes. Overlap was unavoidable; it was built into the mechanism. He’d taken the signed baseballs and mounted guitars as originals, strangely heartened that he ate in the establishment of a world traveler, a collector of curiosities who’d had adventures. The summer before he went off to college, he’d read in the paper how the local franchisee had been sent to jail for embezzling. A love nest, pics uploaded to an amateur porn site. The man’s cousin took over and when Mark Spitz returned for winter break it was as if nothing had happened. The restaurant shambled on.

  Classic rock had greeted them every time, scrabbling beneath the chatter of work deadlines nailed or ignored, unsettling confidences, the roundup on that afternoon’s couples therapy, power tools. Newer artists occasionally muscled their way into the pantheon, along with risqué confections; closer to midnight the place achieved its full sour blossom as a pickup joint, and the array compressed at the bar required inspiration for their boasts and well-trod inducements. The cracked jukeboxes at the tables never worked, but he borrowed two quarters from his dad without fail. The sound of chinking metal was music enough. The place was the stage for cherished theater. Each visit his parents scrutinized the menu as if for the first time and Mark Spitz inquired if they had crayons, even though he knew they kept a whole army hospital ward of them, a whole drawer filled with bacteria-smeared, half-chewed nubs in mutilated cardboard holders. His mother always wondered aloud if they had any specials, when whatever misbegotten entrée corralled into the night’s fare would surely recoil from such a designation. As he waited for his food, he’d drag a green fragment through the Kidz Circle place mat, connect the dots to de-atomize the zoo’s menagerie animal by animal, undo the effects of the alien ray that had torn things apart. He ravaged the children’s menu, cycling through the tenders and star-shaped recombined fish parts and syrupy seltzer concoctions, wolfing them down hideously. This was fine American fare.

  Today, Mark Spitz snagged a menu from a station, his arm vibrating with pain from the previous day’s assault. He had let them get a piece of him. Corporate had finally tampered with the lineup, adding a Mediterranean Festival Salad and a Lemongrass Chicken plate to the roster of cholesterol delivery systems that crowded the oversize dishes, glued in place by sauces thick and suspect. Calorie counts and government guidelines catcalled next to the selections, jeering at customers’ waistlines. His father had often joked that when he had to meet his maker, he prayed for a quick heart attack in his sleep after one of their giant flame-broiled double cheeseburgers. His mother tut-tutted those statements, disapproving of this so-called humor. It wasn’t a heart attack that got him.

  He dragged his hand along the brass railing, roving. He had been here before and not been here before. That was the magic of the franchise. Small differences in layout aside, the mandated table-and-chair arrangements survived the Manhattan dimensions, the vermillion shades clasped the ceiling bulbs in old-timey elegance, sconces camouflaged as lanterns were nailed into the walls at prescribed intervals. He had been here in other lives that were now pushing into this one. He pressed his forehead against the glass and gazed down upon himself: a five-year-old lump of boy-matter; the slovenly tangle of him at sixteen; some vague creature attending his parents’ thirtieth who pinched balloons when he thought no one was looking. He grew dizzy in his mesh. He felt like a little kid who’d split for the restroom and then forgot where his parents were sitting. Another family had replaced his own when he reached the table, no kin of his at all, they hailed from the badlands, sizing him up, suspicious and foreign. An elemental horror roiled in his skull and he swiveled his head, sweeping his light across the darkness and dust. Search as he might, this time he was not going to find them.

  He was a ghost. A straggler.

  The monster-movie speculations of his childhood had forced him, during many a dreary midnight, to wonder what sort of skel he’d make if the plague transformed his blood into poison. The standard-issue skel possessed no room for improvisation, of course. He’d hit his repugnant marks. But what kind of straggler would he make? What did he love, what place had been important to him? Job or home, bull’s-eye of cathected energy. Yes, he loved his home. Perhaps he’d end up there, installing himself in his worn perch on the right-hand side of the sofa (right if you are facing the entertainment center, and where else would you be facing). Perhaps there.

  He consulted the tattered ledger containing his employment history. He didn’t see himself maundering around the cashier of that artisanal sandwich joint he worked in for two summers, that loser gig, or so emotionally imprinted on his time slinging coladas that he’d devote his existence to swabbing the bar with a gray rag until his body disintegrated into flakes. Or the American Phoenix mobilized past Zone One and the next zones and starting cleaning up the rest of the country, and some future sweeper on a future crew shot him in the head. If he got infected when alone, that is—the tacit death pact was the new next-round’s-on-me. Put me down if I get bit. And he certainly wasn’t going to troop up to Chelsea and pretend to type perky encomiums into the dead web. Maybe he’d come here.

  One Sunday night early in his tour, he was sipping sponsored wine with Kaitlyn in the dumpling shop when the Lieutenant bounded through the door. Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn had ditched the gathering in the dim sum palace after a platoon recharging en route to Buffalo started in with the stale skel jokes endured a hundred times before. (“I told you to give me head, not eat my head.”) Then the Connecticut gang, Gary included, tried to compete with the marines, enumerating baroque skel mutilations and beheadings, and it was time to go.

  “This is my real office,” the Lieutenant said. “Sanctum sanctorum.” He waved them down when they rose. “But you may join me. I have wisdom, and I see you are seekers.” Mark Spitz knew the Lieutenant was bombed come nightfall, smelled the sweetish, boozy wisping from his pores in the daytime, and now it was late in the evening. On this matter, Mark Spitz remained true to his policy of judge not the dysfunctions of others, lest ye be judged.

  The Lieutenant weaseled into the booth next to Mark Spitz, across from Kaitlyn. “Irish wake,” he said. The label on his whiskey was missing to hide the name of the unsponsored distillery,
snotty yellow bands of glue levitating on the bottle.

  Kaitlyn shivered and drew her arms to her chest.

  The Lieutenant said, “Gooseflesh. The night breeze or the drifting rads?” He rubbed the corner of his mouth. “We secured our nuclear plants against mishap—secured the nuclear plants and Fort Knox and the bigwigs’ bunkers—but not everyone did. Now we got all this misty meltdown stuff, flying over the Pacific. Like invisible snow.”

  “Or ash,” Mark Spitz said.

  “Or ash.” The Lieutenant inquired about the Zone and they delivered upbeat reports about how unexpectedly easy the job was turning out to be. Pop this one here, that one there. Zip ’em up. Hardly any trouble at all. Kaitlyn told him they might finish ahead of Buffalo’s projections. “I’m glad it’s just stragglers,” she said.

  “We’re all glad,” the Lieutenant said. “Bless ’em. Imagine what the world would be if the plague made them ninety-nine percent of the skels, and not the other way around. That’d be some shit.” Had they ever thought about that?

  The sweepers admitted they hadn’t. The Lieutenant grabbed two water glasses and filled them with whiskey, tinking them against the wineglasses. “Mix and match,” he said. He hunched over the table. “Help me out, picture ninety-nine percent straggler. Never mind how everyone’d get bit—let’s say it was airborne instead. What would we do with them? All these skels standing around. Can’t cure them. Bring ’em home into ‘familiar surroundings’ and they’d probably just get up and walk back to where you found them. You leave them there, it seems to me. Wherever they chose. Let them sit in the cubicles, let them ride the bus all day and night and in the depot after hours. Chillin’ on the beach catching some rays. They don’t know what’s going on—they probably think it’s business as usual. Going about their day like they always did.”