Colson Whitehead - Zone One

They were dismissed. On their own. “We ain’t doing no homework,” Gary said as Omega walked out of the dumpling house. He said it loud enough for the guys in his old unit to hear, Mark Spitz noticed, to show them that he was the same man, even though he was saddling up with characters of questionable mettle, the kind of saps they used to rob for rice in the dismal days of the interregnum.

“I’ll do it,” Kaitlyn said. “I was elected Secretary of the Student Council twice.” Mark Spitz shuddered as if bitten: to admit such a thing without a smidgen of self-consciousness. To say it with pride. Who on the planet had put those words together in that sequence since the outbreak: Secretary of the Student Council? It was a half-recalled lullaby overheard on the street, cooed by some young mom bent over her kid in the summer glare, rekindling innocence: Secretary of the Student Council. The effect was abetted by a rare appearance of the sun, slumping out from the gray. Not too much ash in the sky even though they were only a few blocks from the wall.

He had been here before. It wasn’t the Chinatown of old, but in the corners of his perception the pixels resolved themselves and reduced to zero the distance between Old Chinatown and New Chinatown. The crooked streets had been cleared to give the military vehicles access and soldiers walked slowly on their rounds, making jokes, cracking wise over a shop sign’s mangled English, debating the attractiveness of the lady corporal who had arrived on that morning’s transport. This section of Zone One contained the busiest streets in the city now. (Or the busiest streets where the people were still people—he retreated from the shadow that crept up, of uptown corners where the uncounted hordes gallivanted mindlessly.) The grunts and commissioned officers, the sweepers and the engineers, were nattily decked out in fresh, unblemished fatigues, in the new puncture- and tear- and abrasion-proof mesh, totally deluxe, they wore utility vests and carried weapons held in place by an assortment of snaps, buckles, and holsters, but they were doing what people did in a city: catching a breath between errands. And that was life.

As a kid, Mark Spitz executed Chinatown runs for fireworks and bootlegs, and the congestion had always overwhelmed him, the way it had many sons and daughters of Nassau County. Grow up on Long Island living off one of the spiral arms of the expressway, and nothing kicked up the vertigo more than a visit to Chinatown, with its discordant and jostling multitudes. It was the stereotype of fast-talking, fast-walking, eagerly lacerating New York distilled into a potent half mile. You do not belong. You will be devoured by this monster. Outside the dumpling house, in this resettled northern edge of Zone One, the tiny chaos—the sudden shock of a supply truck’s horn or a jeep backfiring—was the sound of promise, of a civilization stepping clear of the charnel house. The welter of Chinatown had been the larger hustle of the entire city condensed, and now the echo of that noise in this handful of streets spoke of a vanished order that might reassert itself. If you believed in the mission. The neighborhood would never be that roiling and exuberant again—at least in Mark Spitz’s lifetime. They needed Tromanhauser Triplets and their ilk, the repopulating engine of babies, the unborn. But for a second, Mark Spitz glimpsed something of the new city they had been sent to build.

Omega walked downtown to their next assignment: Grid 98, Chambers x West Broadway, Mixed Residential/Business. “Here’s to it’s all walk-ups,” Mark Spitz said.

“We wouldn’t mind some more parking lots,” Gary said.

“Or a big gas station,” Kaitlyn said.

Parking lots were freebies. No one ever knocked a gigantic parking lot, snug in the bosom of that week’s grid.

“It’s about one and a half clicks,” Gary said.

“Twenty blocks,” Mark Spitz corrected.

“Clicks.”

“Blocks.”

“Clicks,” Gary said as they marched toward West Broadway. Adding, “We hate that armadillo. Creeped us out since the crib.”

Kaitlyn didn’t mind the ludicrous notebook and in fact relished the opportunity to divert her companions down her nostalgia’s alley. “I used to have all that stuff, I had everything,” she said, proceeding to deep-caption the plushies, posters, and plastic statuary on display in her childhood’s museum, the manifold tie-in merch of the effeminate armadillo’s brand family. Gary smuggled his distinct bit of home under his fingernails, and their unit leader carried hers in the errant conversational tidbit or dimpled inflection that made it possible to pretend the three of them had been whisked away from the dead city and were riding in her family minivan, bouncing in the bright and splendid past, en route to the mall to meet up with the gang by the fountain in the middle of the food court, or queue up for the latest 3-D smash.

Kaitlyn’s native herd had grazed on the sweet berries of gentility. Mark Spitz didn’t have a complete dossier on Kaitlyn that day, but he was working on it. She had been bioengineered in the birthing vats of a sanctified midwestern principality, an upper-middle-class Kingdom of Bruiselessness. Here she was, long curls peeking out of her helmet, head cocked as she double-checked orders over the comm and absentmindedly wiped gore from her knife, when she should have been braiding the hair of one of her fellow sorority pledges, in her favorite pad-around-the-dorm sweatpants, sexually ambiguous pop avatar crooning from the computer speakers. Of course she had been elected Secretary of the Student Council twice: Who would make up such a thing?

Their unit might be standing before a line of hair dryers in a tony hair salon, nigh shod in jellyfish clumps of brains, and Kaitlyn would perkily chatter on about how she’d spent summers at her grandparents’ cabin “doing the usual stuff, you know, riding horses and lifeguarding,” or earning cosmetics money at the ice-cream store with her “Best Friends Forever Amy and Jordan.” You don’t say? Mark Spitz saw it clearly: Kaitlyn’s implacable march through a series of imaginative and considered birthday parties—her parents were so thoughtful, here was a blessing bestowed from one generation to the next—each birthday party transcending the last and approaching a kind of birthday-party perfection that once accomplished would usher in an exquisite new age of bourgeois utopia. They strove, they plotted, they got the e-mail of that new magician in town, with his nouveau prestidigitations. Maybe, he thought one night, it wasn’t utopia that they had worked toward after all, and it was Kaitlyn herself who had summoned the plague: as she cut into the first slice of cake at her final, perfect birthday party, history had come to an end. She had blown out the candles on the old era, blotted out the dinosaurs’ heavens, sent the great ice sheet scraping forth, the blood counts zooming up into madness.

Working the island with Kaitlyn, Mark Spitz received steady dispatches from the extinguished world, weathered but still legible. That place lived on and persisted in her, in the minuscule tumult of Chinatown, and as long as she breathed, and others like her, perhaps it might return. When Omega wound down at night after their shift, Kaitlyn fired up the transporter and materialized these pristine artifacts of normalcy into their bivouac. “One time at Model UN, we pulled the fire alarm after hours because there were these cute boys from Michigan and we wanted to see them in their pj’s.” Gary and Mark Spitz traded incredulous glances: After all they had witnessed, whole realms of the peculiar had been held in reserve.

She had made it through. Just as Gary couldn’t picture how in the hell a galoot like Mark Spitz bumbled through the host of menaces unscathed, so was Kaitlyn’s journey impossible to imagine. No one at Fort Wonton, man or woman, failed to experience an episode of cognitive dissonance on meeting Kaitlyn, being subjected to her buoyant giggle. But she had done the same things they all had been forced to do. She had been hunted, and she had escaped. She had killed and had watched as the cast of her anecdotes was cut down, her former fellow pledges and debate partners. Her parents, who had obviously trained her in more than just the ways of a sunny disposition for her to have made it this far. She had survived, and that’s why she was here in Zone One. No matter what her life had been before.