Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,21

desolate consumer-electronics showroom, the up-selling floor salesman halted mid-pitch, as if psychoanalyzing a skeptical rube who was simply, ever and always, not in the room, not in the market for purchases big-ticket or otherwise. A man bent before a mirror that perched on the glass counter of a sunglasses store, his fingers holding on the arms of invisible shades. A woman cradled a wedding dress in the dressing room’s murk, reenacting without end a primal moment of expectation. A man lifted the hood of a copy machine. They did not move when you happened on them. They didn’t know you were there. They kept watching their movies.

One morning Mark Spitz stumbled on some brain-wiped wretch standing at the fry station of the big hamburger chain and had to shoot him on general principles. Out of the abundance of a life, to choose fry duty.

They were safe in their houses. In front of the televisions, of course, a host of this type biding their time until the electricity came back on, the problem was solved, and the program resumed where it had stopped. All the time in the world. Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment. In the bath, fully clothed before the nippled showerhead and its multiple-flow settings. Tilting a fluted vacuum attachment toward the scrunched curtains and their legendary hard-to-reach places. Underneath blankets and duvets whose number and thickness referred to a different season, a previous winter of mysterious significance. Slipping a disc into the game machine. Crotch-down on the yoga mat. Spooning bran from a bowl. Surfing the dead web. Yawning. Stretching. Flossing. Wound down and alone in their habitat.

For Omega’s purposes, their habitat was Zone One.

In Human Resources, Gary corralled purses and read out the ages of the dead. He didn’t bother with the names. No one cared about the names, not them, not the higher-ups. Since they hadn’t maintained records of the dead starting Last Night, there was no point: easier to keep records of the living. Fewer numbers to work with, for one thing, and unimpeachable given the ascension of the survivor rolls to the status of holy register. They endured setbacks—supply lines broke down and refuges were overrun, not so much now, but in the interregnum everyone had been forced to flee a hideout or ill-considered shelter multiple times. No matter the daily advances and reversals, however, the names of the survivors maintained their willful stream into the zones of stability, over the comm, scrawled on paper, recited from memory by the weary emissary of a band coming in from the cold: These are the living.

Kaitlyn assigned Gary to ID collection, having picked up on Mark Spitz’s aversion grids ago. He recoiled at going into people’s wallets, pawing through their purses. Too much of the dead world floating in there. The detritus that passed for identity, the particulate remains of twenty-first-century existence, fluttered down to settle at the bottoms of wallets and clutches and messenger bags. The indicators of their brief appearance on the planet waited for Mark Spitz: the flavored gums and lip balms that would never again be manufactured, the despised driver’s license photos that were the only proof that they’d had faces, the snaps of the kids and collies and boyfriends, the just-in-case tampons. All those keys to empty apartments now painted in blood, where lovers decomposed on the wall-to-wall. The fossil evidence that there had once been other types of people besides survivors.

Touching these artifacts nauseated him now, in the latest manifestation of his PASD. The first time he got sick, the unit had completed a sweep of a party-supply store, a narrow nook on Reade that had been washed off Broadway into a low-rent eddy. Dusty costumes hung from the ceiling as if on meat hooks: cowboys and robots from chart-busting sci-fi trilogies, ethnically obscure kiddie-show mascots, jungle beasts with long tails intended for the flirty tickling of faces. Kingdoms’ worth of princesses and their plastic accoutrements, stamped out on the royal assembly line, and the requisite Naughty Nurse suspended in the dead air, tilting in her rounds. Do Not Expose to Open Flame. For Amusement Only. The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn’t take.

Gary crouched on the floor of