Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,23

buzzword emerging from the dirt to tilt its petals to the zeitgeist. In the recent calm, experts of sundry persuasion reconnected with their professions, hoping to get out of custodial duty and earn a ticket to Buffalo with the rest of the royalty. One canny psychotherapist—Dr. Neil Herkimer, who’d made a fortune in the days before the flood with a line of self-help books imparting “The Herkimer Solution to Human Unhappiness”—delivered the big buzzword of the moment: PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Dr. Neil Herkimer climbed aboard a Buffalo-bound chopper soon after his diagnosis. As the chopper disappeared into the sky, he could be seen through the tiny window giving his buddies at Camp El Dorado a vigorous thumbs-up. Mark Spitz heard people jabbering about it over pea soup in the mess tents, or as he handed crates of powdered milk and vitamin supplements to eager survivors in the scattered camps from an armor-plated supply truck: Everyone suffered from PASD. Herkimer put it at seventy-five percent of the surviving population, with the other twenty-five percent under the sway of preexisting mental conditions that were, of course, exacerbated by the great calamity. In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.

Buffalo shipped out “Living with PASD” pamphlets to the settlements in the packages containing work orders, dietary guidelines focusing on the realities of this age of scarcity (scurvy was a recurring character), and, of course, classified status reports on new reconstruction initiatives. The pamphlets were left on bunks and mess-hall seats; Buffalo knew exactly how many to print from the survivor rolls. Mark Spitz mulled the literature in the latrine. According to the specialists, symptoms included feelings of sadness or unhappiness; irritability or frustration, even over small matters; loss of interest or pleasure in normal activities; reduced sex drive; insomnia or excessive sleeping; changes in appetite leading to weight loss, or increased cravings for food and weight gain; reliving traumatic events through hallucinations or flashbacks; agitation or restlessness; being “jumpy” or easily startled; slowed thinking, speaking, or body movements; indecisiveness, distractibility, and decreased concentration; fatigue, tiredness, and loss of energy so that even small tasks seem to require a lot of effort; feelings of worthlessness or guilt; trouble thinking, concentrating, making decisions, and remembering things; frequent thoughts of death, dying, or suicide; crying spells for no apparent reason, as opposed to those triggered by the memories of the fallen world; unexplained physical problems, such as back pain, increased blood pressure and heart rate, nausea, diarrhea, and headaches. Nightmares, goes without saying.

A meticulous inventory with a wide embrace. Not so much criteria for diagnosis but an abstract of existence itself, Mark Spitz thought. Once American tongues tangled with the acronym, it got mashed up and spat out into an intriguing shape. To wit: the afternoon he returned to camp after a rainy day working the Corridor, in abominable Connecticut, and was about to check the day’s survivor roll. He hadn’t seen the name of anyone he knew for weeks. Mark Spitz was halfway to the rec center when he discovered one of the comm operators, Hank, crouching by the prostrate body of a teenage soldier whose fresh gear had obviously never been worn before. Probably the kid’s first foray out of camp since he came in from the wild. The soldier sprang in and out of a fetal posture, collapsing and exploding, smearing his body through a clump of vomit.

“What happened,” Mark Spitz asked, “he get bit?”

“No, it’s his past,” he heard the comm operator say. The recruit moaned some more.

“His past?”

“His P-A-S-D, man, his P-A-S-D. Give me a hand.”

That afternoon in Human Resources, Mark Spitz was grateful for Kaitlyn’s empathy in sparing him from ID duty, and it became evident that Gary relished the job. “Ronkonkoma?” he asked, holding one of the HR ladies’ licenses. “Had a lump of that on our crotch once.” Kaitlyn excluded this information from the report.

Inserting corpses into body bags, on the other hand, provoked no symptoms in Mark Spitz. He removed four body bags from his pack and unfolded them, a genie of new-vinyl smell untangling its limbs. “You got Aunt Ethel and Gums over there,” Gary said.

Mark Spitz started with the skel in pink, to get the heaviest out of the way. He grabbed its ankles and dragged it onto the plastic, tucking its feet into the sleeve. Its pantyhose curled back over its toes like a banana peel.

He still had a soft spot for Miss Alcott, all

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