Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,29

atrocious and shaming, of that pantheon of traffic encountered when one is late to a wedding or other monumental event of fleeting import. Surely an accident unraveled its miserable inevitabilities ahead and now all was fouled, decelerated, the vehicles syllables in an incantation of misfortune. Drivers and their passengers misbehaved, steering onto the shoulder and jetting past the stalled unlucky, even seeming to abandon their vehicles. Figures lurched through the median. Fire trucks and police cars galloped past in their standard hysteria. Kyle and Mark Spitz traded playlists, which were broadcast from their digital music devices over the car speakers. The traffic did not cease when they emerged from the tunnel, the Long Island Expressway a disgrace in either direction.

“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.

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