Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,49
to-do list: to the overnight-delivery place to rush the application, jetting to the dry cleaner, to the specialty cheese store for that esoteric hunk after stupidly asking their host if they could bring anything. When they bumped into one another it was a pleasant diversion.
As usual, Gary had history with those they encountered. He served with all three while cleaning out maddening Connecticut before assignment to the Zone. Connecticut with its pustulant hordes sans limit and notorious talent for coining new faces of bad luck, degenerate Connecticut with its starless nights and famished mornings, Bad News Connecticut birthed ragged crews that stuck together. In comparison, Mark Spitz and the few sweepers from elsewhere were green recruits perpetually repeating their first day of duty. He had a particular dislike for No Mas, who bragged around Wonton about his scrapbook of straggler humiliation. “Who’d you see this week?” a sweeper might goad during Sunday-night R & R, whereupon No Mas dutifully chronicled his latest shenanigans. He carried a big red marker in his utility vest and liked to draw clumsy clown grins on the slack faces of the stragglers, christening each with a name appropriate to that profession. Then he pressed the muzzle of his assault rifle to the temple of Mr. Chuckles or Her Most Exalted Highness the Lady Griselda, smiled for the birdie, and had Angela take a picture before he splattered their craniums. Sunday nights at HQ No Mas shared a cot with a young clerk who printed out his souvenirs on glossy paper. “If you find Captain Giggles, give me a call—I hate that guy,” one of his audience offered in return, extending an I Heart New York mug full of whiskey. Just having a little fun.
Angela and Carl were more discreet about their transgressions, at least in mixed company, but Mark Spitz had heard them reminisce about their time together in a bandit crew, ripping off weaker survivors for aspirin and thermal underwear and who knows what other bad acts. He effortlessly pictured their carefree promotion up the American Phoenix to stations of venal authority. Investigating individuals who had been narced on for illicit salvage—“I don’t know how all those shoes got in my closet, officer, but aren’t they divine?”—and then bartering the confiscated goods on the black market. Or working as a New York City landlord, say, assigning apartments to the newcomers according to appetite and mealy whim, accepting the odd bribe or sexual favor for a better building, better block, southern exposure. Two bathrooms, park views, and basement storage would resume their currency in the new order, and insalubrious bureaucracy create its avatars. They came from Connecticut, repugnant Connecticut.
The rain redoubled. The two units huddled under the purple-and-orange awning of a popular doughnut-and-coffee concern and debriefed each other on the week. Bravo related how they lost half a day and filled two packs of body bags clearing out a den of decomposing suicides from the pews of a Ukrainian church. The usual: Gather ’round and grab a cup everybody, it’ll be quick. Halfway through, Bravo stopped trying to pry the crucifixes out of their hands and simply zipped them up with the corpses.
It had been a slow couple of grids for Omega, apart from Mark Spitz’s takedown, and Kaitlyn, in her circumspection, did not mention that episode. She wound up telling them about the secret Chinese nightclub. Omega decided it had been a gangster hangout, up two flights of rickety stairs above a store that sold shriveled herbs that looked like the fingers of the dead. The back room was filled with electronic gambling machines, pistols with taped-up grips, and jail-bait pinups. A high-tech safe crouched in a wall cavity, full of who knew what, opium and sundry incriminations. It was a mobster den out of some movie, she told them. She forgot they’d actually found the place two weeks ago and had already told the story. No one stopped her. It was raining. They were taking a coffee break.
Mark Spitz rubbed his eyes. He would have told Bravo about the sad straggler in the repair shop, but he had a hard time articulating why it fascinated him. They’d found the tinkerer huddled at his majestically cluttered worktable, poised over the guts of a VCR. Around his hands the metal housings of machines abutted, a thin metal skyline. The old man was surrounded by obsolete technology, the ungainly array of devices that had been a previous generation’s top of the line for listening to music