Authors: Colson Whitehead
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 that evening’s server, whereupon he tried to imagine what he or she looked like from their voice. The waiters had longer mustaches than he pictured, the waitresses larger breasts. Until he hit puberty anyway. In their orbits, replicas of gold and platinum records, momentous front pages, concert posters, and sports trophies tracked across the walls. He didn’t recognize any of the celebrities, the historic occasions or bands or teams, the backstories of the big playoffs and names of the pop hits. But they had to mean something if they were up on the walls. Why else would they be there? He was crestfallen when he ate at another location for the first time and saw the same stuff on the walls. His introduction to the nostalgia industry. Memento factories overseas stamped out these artifacts utilizing cheap unregulated labor, his sitter explained later. She was a college junior and her eyes were open for the first time. The individual operators were free to choose their memorabilia, but the inventory sheets contained only so many boxes. Overlap was unavoidable; it was built into the mechanism. He’d taken the signed baseballs and mounted guitars as originals, strangely heartened that he ate in the establishment of a world traveler, a collector of curiosities who’d had adventures. The summer before he went off to college, he’d read in the paper how the local franchisee had been sent to jail for embezzling. A love nest, pics uploaded to an amateur porn site. The man’s cousin took over and when Mark Spitz returned for winter break it was as if nothing had happened. The restaurant shambled on.
Classic rock had greeted them every time, scrabbling beneath the chatter of work deadlines nailed or ignored, unsettling confidences,
the roundup on that afternoon’s couples therapy, power tools. Newer artists occasionally muscled their way into the pantheon, along with risqué confections; closer to midnight the place achieved its full sour blossom as a pickup joint, and the array compressed at the bar required inspiration for their boasts and well-trod inducements. The cracked jukeboxes at the tables never worked, but he borrowed two quarters from his dad without fail. The sound of chinking metal was music enough. The place was the stage for cherished theater. Each visit his parents scrutinized the menu as if for the first time and Mark Spitz inquired if they had crayons, even though he knew they kept a whole army hospital ward of them, a whole drawer filled with bacteria-smeared, half-chewed nubs in mutilated cardboard holders. His mother always wondered aloud if they had any specials, when whatever misbegotten entrée corralled into the night’s fare would surely recoil from such a designation. As he waited for his food, he’d drag a green fragment through the Kidz Circle place mat, connect the dots to de-atomize the zoo’s menagerie animal by animal, undo the effects of the alien ray that had torn things apart. He ravaged the children’s menu, cycling through the tenders and star-shaped recombined fish parts and syrupy seltzer concoctions, wolfing them down hideously. This was fine American fare.
Today, Mark Spitz snagged a menu from a station, his arm vibrating with pain from the previous day’s assault. He had let them get a piece of him. Corporate had finally tampered with the lineup, adding a Mediterranean Festival Salad and a Lemongrass Chicken plate to the roster of cholesterol delivery systems that crowded the oversize dishes, glued in place by sauces thick and suspect. Calorie counts and government guidelines catcalled next to the selections, jeering at customers’ waistlines. His father had often joked that when he had to meet his maker, he prayed for a quick heart attack in his sleep after one of their giant flame-broiled double cheeseburgers. His mother tut-tutted those statements,
disapproving of this so-called humor. It wasn’t a heart attack that got him.
He dragged his hand along the brass railing, roving. He had been here before and not been here before. That was the magic of the franchise. Small differences in layout aside, the mandated table-and-chair arrangements survived the Manhattan dimensions, the vermillion shades clasped the ceiling bulbs in old-timey elegance, sconces camouflaged as lanterns were nailed into the walls at prescribed intervals. He had been here in other lives that were now pushing into this one. He pressed his forehead against the glass and gazed down upon himself: a five-year-old lump of boy-matter; the slovenly tangle of him at sixteen; some vague creature attending his parents’ thirtieth who pinched balloons when he thought no one was looking. He grew dizzy in his mesh. He felt like a little kid who’d split for the restroom and then forgot where his parents were sitting. Another family had replaced his own when he reached the table, no kin of his at all, they hailed from the badlands, sizing him up, suspicious and foreign. An elemental horror roiled in his skull and he swiveled his head, sweeping his light across the darkness and dust. Search as he might, this time he was not going to find them.
He was a ghost. A straggler.
The monster-movie speculations of his childhood had forced him, during many a dreary midnight, to wonder what sort of skel he’d make if the plague transformed his blood into poison. The standard-issue skel possessed no room for improvisation, of course. He’d hit his repugnant marks. But what kind of straggler would he make? What did he love, what place had been important to him? Job or home, bull’s-eye of cathected energy. Yes, he loved his home. Perhaps he’d end up there, installing himself in his worn perch on the right-hand side of the sofa (right if you are facing the entertainment center, and where else would you be facing). Perhaps there.
He consulted the tattered ledger containing his employment history. He didn’t see himself maundering around the cashier of that artisanal sandwich joint he worked in for two summers, that loser gig, or so emotionally imprinted on his time slinging coladas that he’d devote his existence to swabbing the bar with a gray rag until his body disintegrated into flakes. Or the American Phoenix mobilized past Zone One and the next zones and starting cleaning up the rest of the country, and some future sweeper on a future crew shot him in the head. If he got infected when alone, that is—the tacit death pact was the new next-round’s-on-me. Put me down if I get bit. And he certainly wasn’t going to troop up to Chelsea and pretend to type perky encomiums into the dead web. Maybe he’d come here.
One Sunday night early in his tour, he was sipping sponsored wine with Kaitlyn in the dumpling shop when the Lieutenant bounded through the door. Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn had ditched the gathering in the dim sum palace after a platoon recharging en route to Buffalo started in with the stale skel jokes endured a hundred times before. (“I told you to give me head, not eat my head.”) Then the Connecticut gang, Gary included, tried to compete with the marines, enumerating baroque skel mutilations and beheadings, and it was time to go.
“This is my real office,” the Lieutenant said. “Sanctum sanctorum.” He waved them down when they rose. “But you may join me. I have wisdom, and I see you are seekers.” Mark Spitz knew the Lieutenant was bombed come nightfall, smelled the sweetish, boozy wisping from his pores in the daytime, and now it was late in the evening. On this matter, Mark Spitz remained true to his policy of judge not the dysfunctions of others, lest ye be judged.
The Lieutenant weaseled into the booth next to Mark Spitz, across from Kaitlyn. “Irish wake,” he said. The label on his whiskey
was missing to hide the name of the unsponsored distillery, snotty yellow bands of glue levitating on the bottle.
Kaitlyn shivered and drew her arms to her chest.
The Lieutenant said, “Gooseflesh. The night breeze or the drifting rads?” He rubbed the corner of his mouth. “We secured our nuclear plants against mishap—secured the nuclear plants and Fort Knox and the bigwigs’ bunkers—but not everyone did. Now we got all this misty meltdown stuff, flying over the Pacific. Like invisible snow.”
“Or ash,” Mark Spitz said.
“Or ash.” The Lieutenant inquired about the Zone and they delivered upbeat reports about how unexpectedly easy the job was turning out to be. Pop this one here, that one there. Zip ’em up. Hardly any trouble at all. Kaitlyn told him they might finish ahead of Buffalo’s projections. “I’m glad it’s just stragglers,” she said.
“We’re all glad,” the Lieutenant said. “Bless ’em. Imagine what the world would be if the plague made
them
ninety-nine percent of the skels, and not the other way around. That’d be some shit.” Had they ever thought about that?
The sweepers admitted they hadn’t. The Lieutenant grabbed two water glasses and filled them with whiskey, tinking them against the wineglasses. “Mix and match,” he said. He hunched over the table. “Help me out, picture ninety-nine percent straggler. Never mind how everyone’d get bit—let’s say it was airborne instead. What would we do with them? All these skels standing around. Can’t cure them. Bring ’em home into ‘familiar surroundings’ and they’d probably just get up and walk back to where you found them. You leave them there, it seems to me. Wherever they chose. Let them sit in the cubicles, let them ride the bus all day and night and in the depot after hours. Chillin’ on the beach catching some rays. They don’t know what’s going on—they probably think it’s business as usual. Going about their day like they always did.”
“That’s sick,” Kaitlyn said, crossing her arms. “You’re sick.” Kaitlyn invariably described her parents in the past tense, resisting the scenario where they walked slowly through her hometown, muddle-minded and peckish. Mark Spitz figured she imagined Mom and Dad at the backyard gas grill, frozen and damned on the slate patio.
Frenetic honks came from the street: the driver of a jeep warning Sunday-night drunks out of the way. The Lieutenant leaned back into the vinyl banquette with his customary sluggishness. “No, you’re right. Mustn’t humanize them. The whole thing breaks down unless you are fundamentally sure that they are not you. I do not resemble that animal, you tell yourself, as you squat in the back of the convenience store, pissing in a bucket and cooking up mangy squirrel for dinner.” The Lieutenant took a loud slurp. Mark Spitz couldn’t tell if the man was belittling Kaitlyn or his own trodden illusions. “You’re still the person you were before the plague, you tell yourself, even though you’re running for dear life through the parking lot of some shitty mall, being chased by a gang of monsters. I have not been reduced. ‘Hey, maybe this dead guy has some stuff in his shopping cart I can eat.’ ”
Kaitlyn moved her mouth and then checked herself. She had dealt with deadbeat teachers before and prevailed. “If the plague transmits through the air,” she said, “you wouldn’t keep them around.”
“This is an abstract thought process.”
Mark Spitz said, “After a while we wouldn’t even notice them.”
The Lieutenant worked up a mealy grimace. “That’s why I like stragglers. They know what they’re doing. Verve and a sense of purpose. What do we have? Fear and danger. The memories of all the ones you’ve lost. The regular skels, they’re all messed up. But your straggler, your straggler doesn’t have any of that. It’s always inhabiting its perfect moment. They’ve found it—where they belong.” He stopped. “Mark Spitz, I see you’ve taken to the whiskey. It’s nice, right?”
They finished the bottle. The next week, the three of them wandered in one by one and it became a Sunday-night custom.
In the restaurant months later, after more contact with the creatures, grid after tedious grid, he wondered if they chose these places or if the places chose them. No telling the visions wrought by the crossed wires in their brains, that bad electricity traipsing through their blighted synapses. He thought of that first straggler, standing in the disappearing field with his stupid kite. The easy narrative held that he played there as a kid, gazing up at the sky, oblivious to the things that made him stumble. Maybe it wasn’t what had happened in a specific place—favorite room or stretch of beach or green and weedy pasture—but the association permanently fixed to that place. That’s where I decided to ask her to marry me, in this elevator, and now I exist in that moment of possibility again. The guy had only spent a minute in that space but it had altered his life irrevocably. So he haunts it. This is the hotel room where our daughter was conceived and being in here now it is like she is with me again. It wasn’t the hotel room itself that was important, with its blotched carpet and missing room-service menu and pilfered corkscrew, but the outcome nine months later. The straggler was in thrall to Room 1410, not the long nights in the nursery making sure those diminutive lungs continued to rise and fall, or the sun-kissed infinity pool of the resort where they spent their best four days/three nights, the steps at stage left where they hugged after the school play. So she haunts it, Room 1410. Relieved of care and worry, the stragglers lived eternally and undying in their personal heavens. Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility.
He stripped off his poncho and dropped his pack. He laid his weapon on the bar and walked to the wall. He’d forgotten the homilies in silver frames scattered among the paraphernalia. “Love to one, friendship to many, and good will to all.” “Every
guest leaves happy.” “To the good old days, which we are having right now.” Text-size affirmations. The antecedents of his coffee-company dispatches, as communication caught up with the tried-and-true commonplaces and the benighted adopted the ways of the old sages. Keep it brief and keep on message, please. Use the symbols. It’s how we speak to each other these days.
He missed the stupid stuff everyone missed, the wifi and the workhorse chromium toasters, mass transportation and gratis transfers, rubbing cheese-puff dust on his trousers and calculating which checkout line was shortest, he missed the things unconjurable in reconstruction. That which will escape. His people. His family and friends and twinkly-eyed lunchtime counterfolk. The dead. He missed the extinct. The unfit had been wiped out, how else to put it, and now all that remained were ruined like him. He missed the women he’d never get to sleep with. On the other side of the room, tantalizing at the next table, that miracle passing by the taqueria window giving serious wake. They wore too much makeup or projected complex emotions onto small animals, smiled exactly so, took his side when no one else would, listened when no one else cared to. They were old money or fretted over ludicrously improbable economic disasters, teetotaled or drank like sailors, pecked like baby birds at his lips or ate him up greedily. They carried slim vocabularies or stooped to conquer in the wordsmith board games he never got the hang of. They were all gone, these faceless unknowables his life’s curator had been saving for just the right moment, to impart a lesson he’d probably never learn. He missed pussies that were raring to go when he slipped a hand beneath the elastic rim of the night-out underwear and he missed tentative but coaxable recesses, stubbled armpits and whorled ankle coins, birthmarks on the ass shaped like Ohio, said resemblance he had to be informed of because he didn’t know what Ohio looked like. The sighs. They were sweet-eyed or sad-eyed or so successful in commanding their inner turbulence so that he could not see the shadows. Flaking toenail polish and
the passing remark about the scent of a nouveau cream that initiated a monologue about its provenance, special ingredients, magic powers, and dominance over all the other creams. The alien dent impressed by a freshly removed bra strap, a garment fancy or not fancy but unleashing big or small breasts either way. He liked big breasts and he liked small breasts; small breasts were just another way of doing breasts. Brains a plus but negotiable. Especially at 3:00 a.m., downtown. A fine fur tracing an earlobe, moles in exactly the right spot, imperfections in their divine coordination. He missed the dead he’d never lose himself in, be surprised by, disappointed in.