Authors: Colson Whitehead
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 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. One was free to choose a fresh affiliation from the rubbled platforms.) He decided to crow about his winnings. He moved up the stairs and was startled by the sound of his sneakers on the naked planks. The pavestone renovation had been part of a larger project that embraced, in its broad manifest, the retiling of the kitchen’s hexagonal expanse and the removal of the stairway carpet. This was a foot-level campaign. They worked on the house constantly, his parents. The projects took time. Although they were relatively young (
young
got younger and younger as the gatekeepers of media contemplated their mortality earlier and earlier), their makeover schemes betrayed an attempt to outwit death: Who had ever died during the installation of a backyard water feature, one that might dribble joy from polyvinyl chloride tubing? In bed, they thumbed adhesive notes into the margins of catalog pages
and exchanged them like hostages over the sheets. Every room, every reconsidered and gussied square foot was an encroachment into immortality’s lot line. The blueprints, the specs, the back-of-the-envelope estimates. It would sustain them. The guest bathroom was next.
Exhausted by the foot-level transformations, his parents were between renovation projects. Perhaps if it had been otherwise, they would still be alive.
When he was six, he had walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job. A public-television program about the precariousness of life in the Serengeti, glimpsed in passing, had introduced him to dread, and it had been eating at him the previous few nights. Bad dreams. The hyenas and their keening. He needed to slip into his parents’ king-size bed, as he had when he was very young, before he had been banished to his own big-boy bed in accordance with the latest child-rearing philosophies. It was forbidden, but he decided to visit his parents. He padded down the hall, past the green eye of the carbon-monoxide detector, that ever-vigilant protector against invisible evil, and the bathroom and the linen closet. He opened the door to the master bedroom and there she was, gobbling up his father. His father ceased his unsettling growls and shouted for his son to leave. The incident was never referred to again, and it became the first occupant of the corner in his brain’s attic that he reserved for the great mortifications. The first occupant, but not the last.
It was, naturally, to that night his thoughts fled when on his return from Atlantic City he opened the door of his parents’ bedroom and witnessed his mother’s grisly ministrations to his father. She was hunched over him, gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestine, which, in the crepuscular flicker of the television, adopted a phallic aspect. He thought immediately of when he was six, not only because of the similar tableau before him but because of that tendency of the human mind, in periods of duress,
to seek refuge in more peaceful times, such as a childhood experience, as a barricade against horror.
That was the start of his Last Night story. Everybody had one.
Mark Spitz and Gary returned to the law office and dragged the other two bodies down, Kaitlyn whistling behind them as they descended. She proposed lunch, and they squatted in the lobby underneath the glass case listing the building’s occupants, which were detailed by easily recombined white letters embedded in black felt. Like most lists of people, it was now a roll call of the dead, an inversely colored obituary page.
“Are they a sponsor?” Gary asked. “We’re hungry.” He held up a chocolate bar retrieved from the spill of candy, breath mints, and hand sanitizer. The gate of the lobby newsstand had been ripped open and looted, probably by the marines, or else a post-evac survivor who’d run out of crackers and dared a raid.
“Not yet,” Kaitlyn said.
“But they might come aboard next week. Could happen. In which case it’s okay.”
Kaitlyn shook her head.
“The marines took what they wanted when they came through. How do you think they got all those NFL jerseys?”
“That was before the regs came down. You have chocolate chip cookies in your MRE.”
Gary tossed the candy bar and declined his standard joke. Usually when someone mentioned meals ready to eat, their military rations, Gary pointed out that survivors were MREs to the skels, hardy-har, punctuating it with his gravelly chuckle. Perhaps Gary was exhausted; it was the end of the week. “Just gonna get eaten up by the residents,” he said. “Pheenie bastards.”
“Maybe they’ll put you here,” Mark Spitz said. He didn’t believe it.
Buffalo had not yet divulged who was going to get resettled in Manhattan once the sweepers were finished, but Gary had long been skeptical that he would be among them. “You think we’re going to end up here? We ain’t special. They’re going to put the rich people here. Politicians and pro athletes. Those chefs from those cooking shows.”
“It’s going to be a lottery,” Kaitlyn sighed. She opened a meat tube and squeezed it into her mouth.
“Lottery, shit,” Gary said. “They’re going to put us on Staten Island.”
“I thought you liked islands,” Mark Spitz said. Gary was a firm believer in the Island Theory of plague survival.
“We like islands. Natural defenses. You know we like islands. But we wouldn’t live on Staten Island if they were giving out vaccines and hand jobs right off the ferry.”
“They screen for DNA, you’ll be lucky they don’t turn you out the gates.” Trevor, one of the sweepers in Gamma Unit, maintained that he’d heard that Buffalo was working on a system of screening settlers according to their genetic desirability. Mark Spitz didn’t believe it but rationalized that he had a decent chance of getting a nice spot somewhere. Surely many of the high-functioning members of society had been killed off, allowing mediocre specimens such as himself to move up a notch.
Kaitlyn tapped her headset distractedly, as if she’d been trying to make a weekend plan with one of her gal pals and her cell dropped the call. Did you lose me or did I lose you?
“Anything?” Mark Spitz asked.
She shook her head. They’d been out of contact with Fort Wonton for a week, ever since they departed for this grid. The comms went out with nettlesome frequency. It was hard to get a signal through on the best of days—the buildings bounced the waves between each other like kids playing keep-away—but the big culprit was mischievous bugs deep in the military communications software. The machines froze, chronically, and then they’d have to
be rebooted and it took forever for the equipment to reinitialize. It was highly unlikely that the defense contractor awarded the bid would be prosecuted in the future, but this was the case even if the plague hadn’t cleared the halls of justice of everyone save the odd robed straggler gripping a gavel in the empty chamber.
The comm failures were annoying, but fortunately the sweepers didn’t need any orders apart from what grid was up next, and they got that every week when they returned to Wonton. “Let’s get going,” Kaitlyn said. “We’ll check in when we go back on Sunday.”
As they packed their gear they saw that the bodies were gone. Disposal had picked them up without the sweepers observing, with the eerie efficiency that was their trademark. Outside Wonton, the most you ever saw of Disposal was their cart disappearing around a corner a block or two blocks ahead, as they slumped in their bright white hazmat suits. The carriage and the horse had been players in the Central Park tourist-ride industry, the former enduring the elements as it waited for reassignment—obviously, sightseeing had taken a hit the last few years—and the latter presumably living off weeds in the Great Lawn until they established Fort Wonton. The horse had been choppered to the Zone after it was spotted during an early uptown reconnaissance mission. “It seems like the right thing to do,” General Tavin said, and indeed the rescue operation’s planning and execution had fostered a great deal of morale, even more than news of the beer distributor’s sponsorship.
The chopper pilot who brought Mark Spitz from the Northeast Corridor sustained a tour-guide spiel the whole trip down, narrating the eastern seaboard’s points of interest with an oddly perky flair. Mark Spitz suspected he was on drugs. When they reached Manhattan, he took them for a quick circuit over Central Park, “laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in one of the greatest landscaping undertakings Jesus has ever seen.” Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers
crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches, and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way and then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.
Diesel supply being what it was, the horse made sense, and the nag was game enough to lug the big metal cart attached to the carriage as Disposal made their circuit downtown, cleaning up after the sweeper units. Bring out your dead. The guys and gals in Disposal never removed their hazmat suits, in public at least, even when off the clock and prowling around Wonton with everyone else. Maybe they know something we don’t, Mark Spitz thought, as he saw them take their rations and scurry back to whatever building they’d staked out. They had duct-taped a shower-curtain rod to the carriage’s dashboard and tied a brass bell to it, which somehow ended up sounding more cheerful than macabre, sounding off in the distance.