Colson Whitehead - Zone One

Socks. Yes, socks. The prospect of a nice new three-pack of athletic socks never failed to hearten Mark Spitz.

The Lieutenant said, “An irritating number of you have been bugging me from the field for updates, even though I keep telling you to keep the comm channels clear, so here’s the deal: The Tromanhauser Triplets are out of ICU.”

Everyone applauded. Kaitlyn thanked God. Mark Spitz had walked in on her praying their first night in the Zone. She had stopped to talk to her God in the middle of flossing, the minty white thread looped around her index finger. Kaitlyn was embarrassed, although most people had started praying, or increased the frequency of their prayers, for obvious reasons. Religion had been a taboo subject in former times, but now impromptu proselytizing sessions broke out in besieged department-store stockrooms, in the attics of crumbling Midwest Victorians, as the holed-up survivors swapped deities and afterlife hypotheses. It passed the time until morning and the resumption of the gauntlet. Kaitlyn apologized, saying “I just want them to be safe,” and he knew she was talking about the Triplets. Even Gary expressed concern in their progress, as they were fellow, natural multiples in an age where such a thing had been “cheapened by that IVF crap,” as he put it. “They’re gonna know what we know,” Gary said, “how it is for our kind.”

Mark Spitz clapped his hands desultorily. Doris Tromanhauser whiled away the ruination holed up in the Trenton branch of a respectable international bank, as part of a bunkered-down ensemble who’d given their fealty to an easily fortified brass-studded front door and impressive stone construction, both holdovers from a time when customers preferred impenetrability over glass-walled transparency in their neighborhood reserve. (Current events put an end to that debate for good.) The plucky band dwindled as they were forced to make the inevitable forays outside; all those present in the dumpling house were versed in this scenario, the relentless subtractions. Finally it was just Doris and one of the men who could have been the Triplets’ father, until in due course he, too, ventured out for supplies. (A sequence of ménages made paternity impossible to establish, and a DNA test was, alas, impossible.) He never came back. The familiar story. After six months on her lonesome, surviving on who knows what, high-fiber deposit slips and credit-card brochures, she was rescued by a Bubbling Brooks recon unit. She did not survive the delivery, and the Triplets were in a bad way, bank literature being devoid of nutrients essential to prenatal development.

New life in the midst of devastation. Corn, babies. Word of the Tromanhausers spread through the Northeast settlements quicker than any uplifting news of this or that reconstruction effort, or contact with some faraway country that had been written off long ago. The babies even diverted survivors from delight in the discovery of the latest kill field, that phenomenon encountered with increasing regularity, the mystery that pointed to an ebbing of the plague. Did you hear that Finn opened his eyes, that Cheyenne is still unresponsive, they’re not sure but they suspect that something may be amiss with Dylan’s heart, a hole or a bump? Mark Spitz was pulling for them, rooting for them, or whatever it was that one did when the world was ending and a statistically meaningless fraction of the planet’s extant population encountered a slightly larger daily portion of misfortune. He didn’t want to get too invested. He was a firm believer, in the absence of any traditionally recognized faith, or even nontraditional and gaining traction in these murderous days, in the reserve tank. It was important to maintain a reserve tank of feeling topped off in case of emergency. Mark Spitz was not going to spare any for these cubs. A year ago, in the middle of the collapse, these babies would have been another miserable footnote, too small an item on the list of atrocities to merit more than a sad shake of your tragedy-boggled head. (And a footnote to what, for that matter. No one was writing this book. All the writers were busy pouring jugs of kerosene on the heaps of the dead, pitching in for a change.) But now things were different. To pheenies, these babies were localized hope, and they needed the Triplets to pull through. Buffalo could announce a vaccine tomorrow, or a process for reversing the tortures of the plague, and they’d still be talking Tromanhauser Triplets.

“We’re all glad to hear this news, I’m sure,” the Lieutenant said in a monotone. “If you want to donate part of your rations to their care, put your X on the sign-up sheet before you head out.” He pressed his fingers to his temples and started rubbing in slow, assuaging circles. “Last but not least in this bona fide gusher of good tidings, your heavy loads be lightened by the news that USS Endeavor embarked safely and is en route to the summit.”

The Endeavor was a nuclear sub. After what happened on Air Force One, it was the only way His Excellency would make the journey, and who could blame him.

“Get ’em, Gina!” Gary howled, earning guffaws. Gina Spens was Italy’s emissary to the summit. Before the catastrophe, she had been a pornographic-film star of nimble and well-documented prowess, a Top 25 search string on adult sites across three hemispheres. She had her fans. Her comeback as it were, for she had retired from the business, was occasioned by the End of the World As We Know It, that epic saga to which all were audience and supporting cast. Still shooting, rewritten on the fly on account of the discouraging dailies. Gina performed her own stunts in a series of action sequences throughout Italy’s contest against the dead—the Encounter at Horror Gorge and the legendary Ambush of the Wretches, among other credulity-testing adversities. Her feats trickled out with the reestablishment of communications with the European powers, and for her exertions she had become a player in her homeland’s provisional government. Provisional governments were really big these days, an international fad in the grand old style.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires. Gina was that new species of celebrity emerging from the calamity, elevated by the altered definitions of valor and ingenuity. They walked among us, on every continent, in the territories of every depleted nation. What American had not thrilled to the inspiring story of Dave Peters, who spent six months drifting in a catamaran in a Michigan lake, living off a carton of cashews and paddling away whenever he drifted too close to shore, which teemed with the dead. Everyone thrilled to the story of Wilhelmina Godiva and her grain-silo fortress, how she’d battled her way to the Maryland settlements armed with nothing but her famous rusty pitchfork, which was now enshrined over the front gate of Camp Victory’s Sword. Her mind was gone, sure, but she made it through, and her followers took care of her, wiping spittle from her lips as she murmured her prophecies into her digital recorder. Across the ocean, Gina Spens masterminded search-and-destroy missions in southern Italy and became a worldwide sensation, whispered about in the dancing glow of scavenged antimosquito candles. The more unlikely the tale of survival, the absurd extremity of one’s circumstances in a world of extreme circumstance, the greater one’s fame. Gina had made some spectacular kills. Yes, she had her fans.

“I’ll keep you posted on how that goes, natch,” the Lieutenant said. It was their last bulletin from beyond the island until next week. He distributed their new grid assignments. He closed with his standard “Now run along like good little pheenies,” his sardonic pronunciation of the slang drawing grins. The Lieutenant’s strategic informalities comforted his troops when they were out in the field. One of them worked on reconstruction, a real fucking human being among the abstractions doling out pronouncements and paradigms in Buffalo.