Colson Whitehead - Zone One

“Big game tonight or a concert,” Kyle said.

“They need to chill,” Mark Spitz said. The Monday vise clenched. Here was that end-of-weekend despair, the death of amusement and the winnowing of the reprieve. Everyone on the expressways and turnpikes felt it, he was sure, this evaporation of prospects. What impotent rebellion they enacted, feebly tapping the leather facsimile of their horns and spitting the top-shelf profanities. In retrospect, perhaps the intensity of that moment, the pressure he felt, was the immensity of the farewell, for this was the goodbye traffic, the last latenesses and their attendant excuses, the final inconveniences of an expiring world.

They finally arrived at Mark Spitz’s corner. A small team of boys played basketball at the other end of the street. The game was breaking up, it had been too dark to play for a while now, and he tried to identify the players but they didn’t seem to be part of the block’s pool of well-bred teens. Were they playing basketball? There was a small round shape on the pavement and they bent into a huddle. He didn’t recognize their faces, only that deflated curl of the shoulders that marked Sunday night’s recurring epidemic: Back to work.

Mark Spitz said goodbye to his childhood friend for the last time and walked up the pavestone path, the fruit of a recently completed replacement of the brick walkway that had skinned his knees many times. Except for college and brief, doomed stints here and there—a botched adventure in California pursuing a girl whom he hadn’t believed when she professed to prefer girls, a season on a couch in Brooklyn—he had lived in this house his entire life. Technically, he lived in the basement, his childhood room having long been converted into his mother’s home office, but his father’s subterranean renovation—an undertaking that had kept him afloat when so many of his peers had been capsized by midlife’s squall—made plausible Mark Spitz’s explanation that he had moved down to the “rec room.” This was no mere basement, with its touch-screen climate controls and programmed lighting routines, but a space capsule he piloted to the planet of his life’s next stage.

The house looked normal from the outside. The shades were pulled and the lights were out save for the aforementioned glow of the floor lamp by the media center in the living room, that dependable illumination that had greeted him for years. His mother had been feeling “not so red hot,” in her mom parlance, and he surmised that they were half asleep in front of the upstairs digital video recorder as the final fifteen minutes of last week’s episode droned before them: the verdict of the judges and the expulsion of the latest scapegoat; the obscure precedents cited by the maverick district attorney; the reenactors of real crimes in their shabby thespianship. His parents often retreated to their old honeymoon nest after dinner, ceding to their son the living room, with its high-definition enhancements and twin leather recliners equipped with beverage holsters. The rec room was a marvel in every respect save its television, a rare impulse purchase on the part of his father, who consulted the roundups on the internet with dedication, often contributing his two- and three-star verdicts to the rabble chorus. The set was an off-brand mistake lately afflicted with a black bloom of dead pixels. Its sorry conjurations gave the family an excuse to enjoy the big television spectacles together upstairs, the ones that periodically reunited the riven nation, albeit in staggered broadcasts in the cascade of time zones.

He scowled at the mail on the hall credenza, speculating anew over what misbegotten opt-in had birthed, among other bastards, his identification as a member of the opposite political party. (In the catastrophe, the demonic mailing lists were struck. One was free to choose a fresh affiliation from the rubbled platforms.) He decided to crow about his winnings. He moved up the stairs and was startled by the sound of his sneakers on the naked planks. The pavestone renovation had been part of a larger project that embraced, in its broad manifest, the retiling of the kitchen’s hexagonal expanse and the removal of the stairway carpet. This was a foot-level campaign. They worked on the house constantly, his parents. The projects took time. Although they were relatively young ( young got younger and younger as the gatekeepers of media contemplated their mortality earlier and earlier), their makeover schemes betrayed an attempt to outwit death: Who had ever died during the installation of a backyard water feature, one that might dribble joy from polyvinyl chloride tubing? In bed, they thumbed adhesive notes into the margins of catalog pages and exchanged them like hostages over the sheets. Every room, every reconsidered and gussied square foot was an encroachment into immortality’s lot line. The blueprints, the specs, the back-of-the-envelope estimates. It would sustain them. The guest bathroom was next.

Exhausted by the foot-level transformations, his parents were between renovation projects. Perhaps if it had been otherwise, they would still be alive.

When he was six, he had walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job. A public-television program about the precariousness of life in the Serengeti, glimpsed in passing, had introduced him to dread, and it had been eating at him the previous few nights. Bad dreams. The hyenas and their keening. He needed to slip into his parents’ king-size bed, as he had when he was very young, before he had been banished to his own big-boy bed in accordance with the latest child-rearing philosophies. It was forbidden, but he decided to visit his parents. He padded down the hall, past the green eye of the carbon-monoxide detector, that ever-vigilant protector against invisible evil, and the bathroom and the linen closet. He opened the door to the master bedroom and there she was, gobbling up his father. His father ceased his unsettling growls and shouted for his son to leave. The incident was never referred to again, and it became the first occupant of the corner in his brain’s attic that he reserved for the great mortifications. The first occupant, but not the last.

It was, naturally, to that night his thoughts fled when on his return from Atlantic City he opened the door of his parents’ bedroom and witnessed his mother’s grisly ministrations to his father. She was hunched over him, gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestine, which, in the crepuscular flicker of the television, adopted a phallic aspect. He thought immediately of when he was six, not only because of the similar tableau before him but because of that tendency of the human mind, in periods of duress, to seek refuge in more peaceful times, such as a childhood experience, as a barricade against horror.

That was the start of his Last Night story. Everybody had one.

Mark Spitz and Gary returned to the law office and dragged the other two bodies down, Kaitlyn whistling behind them as they descended. She proposed lunch, and they squatted in the lobby underneath the glass case listing the building’s occupants, which were detailed by easily recombined white letters embedded in black felt. Like most lists of people, it was now a roll call of the dead, an inversely colored obituary page.

“Are they a sponsor?” Gary asked. “We’re hungry.” He held up a chocolate bar retrieved from the spill of candy, breath mints, and hand sanitizer. The gate of the lobby newsstand had been ripped open and looted, probably by the marines, or else a post-evac survivor who’d run out of crackers and dared a raid.

“Not yet,” Kaitlyn said.

“But they might come aboard next week. Could happen. In which case it’s okay.”

Kaitlyn shook her head.

“The marines took what they wanted when they came through. How do you think they got all those NFL jerseys?”