Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,65
admonishments (“Why go to our competitors when we’re up at the crack of dawn trying to make you happy?”), and did not shrink from the anodyne (“Doesn’t a nice cup of coffee make the world live again?”). Without that human touch, he was told, they might as well push that rudimentary artificial-intelligence algorithm the nerd-practitioners cooked up, which everyone knew was a bust even before the battery of focus groups weighed in. No soul.
Two months after he started, there was a five percent uptick in the corporate site’s traffic. Whether this was due to Mark Spitz’s impersonation of caring or the rollout of the new affiliate program was unclear, but he received a pretty nice e-mail from his supervisor’s supervisor, the woman who had invented his job after some deep thinking at the annual retreat, along with a promise that his good work would be recognized come next quarterly review, which was actually going to be two quarters from now, as technically he was still a probationary hire.
It wasn’t the worst job he’d ever had. He was working there when Last Night slammed down, scratching at his law-exam-prep notebooks at night in the rec room. The New York headquarters of the coffee company was in Chelsea, a mile and a half past the wall. He could only speculate about who had made it out and who still roamed the halls. His social-media persona probably continued to punch the clock, gossiping with the empty air and spell-checking faux-friendly compositions, hitting Send. “Nothing cures the Just Got Exsanguinated Blues like a foam mustache, IMHO.” “Sucks that the funeral pyre is so early in the morning—why don’t you grab a large Sumatra so you can stay awake when you toss your grandma in? Wouldn’t want to sleep through that, LOL!”
By providence Mark Spitz glanced down Reade and spied the restaurant’s distinctive signage two blocks ahead, instantly reassuring. He was halfway to Wonton. His stomach fluttered. In his head he heard the tumultuous community board meeting where the residents complained over the news of its opening: Not in my backyard, it’ll ruin the neighborhood. Bistros and next-level gastro gizmos served Tribeca’s preferred grub, not vulgar chain operations. No, Mark Spitz thought. This restaurant belonged everywhere. Living out of range of its concoctions was a tragedy. An easily avoidable tragedy, it turned out, given the many convenient locations.
He had time. He cut the bolt and rolled up the metal grate. Depending on the condition of the back exit, he was the first uninfected person inside since Last Night’s grisly embrace. There were plenty other, easier places to loot. Scavengers stripped the supermarkets and groceries and bodegas first, then restaurants, but the science of higher-level foraging never achieved full flower in the city, given the skel concentration before the marines’ arrival. The dead owned the island. Mark Spitz wasn’t hankering for industrial-size cans of buffalo sauce and powdered potatoes, but they were back there in the freezers, doubtless, next to the rotted maple-apple sausage links and salmon patties that had been squeezed into shape and packaged in the silent factories.
He listened for the dead scraping into dumb activity at his noise: nothing. He trained his helmet light where daylight failed, scanning the brass railings circling the family-size banquets, the deep dark wood of the bar with its elbow-fretted layers of lacquer. He scanned the checkerboard tile for any creature untangling its limbs from sub-table roost. Red-and-white checks provided faithful trim on the menus and the signs and the staff uniforms as well, which were not in evidence at this moment, thank God, draping some limp-hoofed wreck bearing plates from the kitchen with a “May I take your order?” gape. The uniforms had made the waiters and waitresses into referees adjudicating obscure food-related competitions. It did get kinda rough on All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp Tuesdays. His father got into a scuffle once re: dibs on a final spoonful of Oriental Shrimp that wobbled in a bath of orange gelatin. The incident became a running joke in his house, called for duty whenever they geared up for a trip to the local franchise. “Feel like punching someone in the face today,” his father said, launching into a stream of mock-trash talk, and Mark Spitz knew where they were eating that evening.
The restaurant was his family’s place for the impulse visits and birthdays and random celebrations, season upon season. As a child he clambered into the booth and hid behind the gigantic menu until the first “Hello, my name is” from