Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,28
sit where you wanted to in the movie theaters, if you could suffer sitting in the dark, where monsters occasionally shifted their thighs.
This street looked normal. It was a façade. Beyond the wall, more streets like this awaited, and beyond the city, expanses of formaldehyded territory, old postcard specimens of America preserved in tidy eddies. Expertise had been employed to produce the illusion of life in the cadaver, a kindness. Then you made a sound, Mark Spitz thought, and you saw the movement of creatures.
A worm of gray water slithered down his back. The last time he saw his childhood home was on Last Night. It, too, had looked normal from the outside, in that new meaning of normal that signified resemblance to the time before the flood. Normal meant “the past.” Normal was the unbroken idyll of life before. The present was a series of intervals differentiated from each other only by the degree of dread they contained. The future? The future was the clay in their hands.
On Last Night, the sprinkler had pivoted and dispensed in its prescribed arc on his lawn. The floor lamp next to the living-room television transmitted its reassuring cone through the powder-blue curtains, as it had for decades. He was not a loser of keys, and held twenty-year-old front-door keys in his hand. When he fled the house minutes later, he would not stop to lock the door behind himself.
He and his friend Kyle had spent a few nights in Atlantic City at one of the new boutique casinos, adrift among the dazzling surfaces. Inside the enclosure, they imagined themselves libertines at the trough, snout-deep and rooting. The banks of machines trilled and dinged and whooped in a regional dialect of money. At the hold ’em tables, they visualized the hand rankings from their poker bibles and nervously joked about the guys who were overly chummy with the dealers, the local sharks on their nocturnal feed. They tipped the waitresses with chips, deducting these from their night’s tally in the spirit of thorough accounting, and slid their fingers around the dice in superstitious motions before launch in the craps arena. They were heroes to strangers for a time, ticker-taped during sporadic rushes. On barstools they ogled the bachelorettes in the club and discussed their chances, recalling near-conquests from previous visits. In the buffet lines they foraged from the heat lamps and steam trays, and impaled and then swirled wasabi around tiny ceramic saucers, tinting soy sauce. After thirty-six hours they realized, according to custom, that they hadn’t yet left the premises, and submitted happily to the artificial habitat that is the modern casino. They did not want. It was all inside. Their brains fogged over as possibility and failure enthralled them in a perpetual and tantalizing loop.
The casino was emptier than it had been on their earlier missions. The fresh casinos burst from the gaping, rebar-studded lots where the past-prime establishments had stood, and perhaps that explained it, they thought, the law of competition and the lure of the latest bauble. Everyone was at the new place they hadn’t heard of yet. Fewer people milled about the tables, there were subdued shrieks at the craps, roulette stands shrouded in plastic, although it should be noted that the slots maintained their sturdy population of glassy-eyed defectives, the protohumans with their sleepless claws. Their favorite blackjack dealer, Jackie, a weather-beaten broad who dispensed smiles beneath a slumping orange beehive, was out sick, and the creature in her place kept fucking up the deal, but they decided against complaining to the pit boss after consideration of his imposing, deflecting mien. To be sure, this trip’s pod of bachelorettes was a trifle depleted, running through their pantomime of excess with weary affect and listlessly brandishing the rubber penises on the dance floor. It occurred to them more than once that this trip would not live up to their lore, and they mourned over sips of subsidized liquor. Maybe they had outgrown these enthusiasms. Maybe those times were dead and they were only now aware of their new circumstances.
They did not watch the news or receive news from the outside.
They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout. They inserted themselves into the Sunday northbound stream and devoured the under-carbonated colas and turkey wraps purchased at the turnpike conveniences. The wraps were sealed, according to the label, in a plastic that degraded into eco-friendly vapor in thirty days. The traffic was