Colson Whitehead: Zone One

He stepped over the Marge and examined the lock. He hadn’t noticed it was smashed when he kicked it in. Some quick thinker had busted it after locking the four of them in. The dead could turn a doorknob, hit a light switch—the plague didn’t erase muscle memory. Cognition was out, though, once it overwrote the data of self. These creatures had been stymied for years by the broken lock. Bumping into each other and ricocheting around the desk and chairs and cabinets, losing wigs, rings, and watches as they grew more and more emaciated. Pratfalling over their accessories and then rising again like the mechanical entities they had become.

Kaitlyn pulled out her notebook. “Not trying to get on your case.”

“For the Incident Report,” Mark Spitz said.

“Gotta make sure the paperwork is right,” Gary said.

“What’s she, fifty?” she asked, scrutinizing Human Resources and scribbling. “Fifty-five? Can you look for IDs, Gary?”

The info-gathering directives came down from Buffalo a week after they were deployed to the island. The ten sweeper units were crowded into a dumpling joint on Baxter Street, the restaurant the Lieutenant staked out for his briefings. All the COs had annexed Chinatown turf for briefings and strategy sessions, spreading out from Wonton Main at Broadway and Canal according to their disparate appetites. General Summers, for example, claimed an elegant and cavernous dim sum palace on Bowery, rescuing it from the enlisted men’s amusements. For months, the establishment had been used as a drag-racing track, the dim sum carts caroming across the linoleum. Friday nights became quite bleak when Summers put a stop to the competitions, until the marines relocated their arena to the roller rink. (Mark Spitz came across the roller rink’s gigantic disco ball at random intersections as it made its journey through the metropolis, their scapegoat tumbleweed, kicked and shoved and rolled around the streets by the inebriated soldiers, shedding squares like mirrored tears.) Corporal Brent of the U.S. Army Corps, for his part, conducted his daily planning sessions at a noodle house, addressing his men and women from behind the counter as if serving up strands of udon instead of baroque strategies of city planning (or, more accurately, reconfiguration). The officers spread out, homesteading. Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, Mark Spitz noted, and already gentrification had resumed.

The signage was in Chinese save for the Health Department regulations hectoring beneath the pictograms. His mother’s logic held that a strong congruency between patron and cuisine signaled an “authentic place” and that they must serve up primo Chinese, Greek, or Lithuanian cuisine, what have you. Which had never made sense to Mark Spitz: Plenty of American restaurants with a majority-American clientele served crap American fare. Perhaps the emphasis was on the authenticity of its mediocrity.

In their meager bid at becoming regulars, Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn returned to the table they’d occupied at the previous briefing. Gary joined them in the coming weeks, but at that point they’d only been together for one grid, a bland residential stretch on Water Street. Omega hadn’t clicked yet, hoisting their own personal three-person foxhole around wherever they went. That afternoon, Gary squeezed in with some guys he’d served with in Stamford securing abandoned gasworks. The majority of those in the sweeper units had been stationed in the Northeast doing infrastructure work, cleaning out the Corridor as Mark Spitz had been, or doing recon in the key metro areas and industrial clusters, which had been Gary’s previous posting. Mark Spitz arrived at the island without a crew, the only one from the I-95 detail to transfer to the sweep.

The dumpling joint was prepped for service when they shuffled in for their first briefing, but the soldiers knocked the settings into incremental disarray week by week, as if across a single, slow-motion lunch shift. There were thirty of them, teenagers and men and women in their twenties, with exceptions in the form of characters like Metz. Metz looked fifty-something, but of course the late miseries had aged them so Mark Spitz couldn’t say for sure. He had what Mark Spitz had come to call the Wasteland Stare. On special ops, the sweepers were equipped with night-vision goggles that featured gecko protuberances allowing them to see into different spectra; Metz and his brethren were equipped with additional lenses, and through them they gaped at stumps, shreds of structures, a blasted plain, as if through a visor of devastation. Whatever Mark Spitz saw—a typical downtown slop joint, fly strips twisting in the corners—Metz gazed upon an entirely different and cruel landscape. Given the vast galaxy of survivor dysfunction—PASD in its sundry tics, fugues, and existential fevers—the Wastelanders’ particular corner of pathology was, Mark Spitz decided, unremarkable. Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one’s individuality.

Steady raids had depleted the back room of sponsored energy drinks, but there was good word of mouth about the medicinal properties of an enigmatic foreign beverage, bright emerald cans of which were piled in formidable stacks in the kitchen. The sweepers settled at the tables and crammed into the banquettes, sliding across bloodred vinyl. The menagerie of the Chinese zodiac pursued itself on the place mats beneath glass tabletops. Mark Spitz saw it was the Year of the Monkey. Attributes: Fun-Loving Witty Entertaining. Dead fish bobbed in a chunky murk in the tank by the entrance.

The Lieutenant took his roost at the host’s station and informed them that from now on they had to fill out Incident Reports on every engagement. The decor flashed in his aviator glasses in sparks of crimson and gold. Considering the Lieutenant’s nightly bourbon flights, the sunglasses were precious cover for his sensitive retinas, even in the half-light of the restaurant.

Buffalo, he explained, wanted information on the general outline of each engagement, but in particular they were keen for the sweepers to record demographic data: the ages of the targets, the density at the specific location, structure type, number of floors. Fabio, the Lieutenant’s second, had rummaged Canal Street after special equipment for this very purpose. Fabio handed his boss the carton of kiddie notebooks, and the Lieutenant brandished it over his head, pointing out that they were equipped with convenient loops that held tiny pencils. The plastic-covered notebooks were candy-colored and palm-size, brimming with the characters and arcana of a prosperous and long-standing children’s entertainment combine. The creation myth of the product line concerned the adventures of a clever, effeminate armadillo and his cohort of resourceful desert critters. Although the parent company was one of reconstruction’s first official sponsors, until now Buffalo had found little use for their tie-in merchandise, apart from the well-branded adhesive bandages. “Doubtless you will appreciate this example of superior Japanese engineering,” the Lieutenant said, sliding the pencil back and forth.

The sweepers groaned and dislodged belches redolent of the mysterious Far East beverage, smudging the air with ginger. The Lieutenant tendered his regrets over the hassle, in his custom. The Lieutenant preferred a light touch, ditching protocol when it served his purposes. Casting himself as the hip young teacher in the high school was part of his strategy for keeping them alive, Mark Spitz theorized. The Lieutenant’s sweepers were a nontraditional brigade to say the least, volunteers from civilian pop. and untutored in the routine malevolence of military code. The training courses and drills of their boot camp had been the split-second decisions and pure, indifferent chance that had permitted them to survive to this moment. (Although it should be added that most of them had received a crash course in basic gun use since the advent of the plague.) Soldiers of the new circumstance. What did it serve to hold them to strict military standards when they were such an unlikely lot: unemployable man-children, erstwhile cheerleaders, salesmen of luxury boats, gym teachers, food bloggers, patent clerks, cafeteria lunch ladies, dispatchers from international delivery companies. People like Mark Spitz, seemingly unsnuffable human cockroaches protected by carapaces of good luck. The Lieutenant’s first priority was keeping their limbs and assorted parts attached to their bodies, free of teeth; then came the trickled-down objectives; and, finally, servitude to the obsolete directives of an obsolete world.