Zone One (22 page)

He missed shame and guilt and a time when something higher than dumb instinct directed his actions.

He dropped two quarters into the nearest tabletop jukebox. He didn’t have two quarters but that was okay. The jukebox started up without complaint and he listened to the concert of secret levers shifting the 45 into its berth above the dust. The lights in the machine blinked on sprightly, the ones in the corner sconce by the bathrooms, over the bar, in the booths one by one, and then all the lights vocalized.

His machine trembled to life. The speakers picked up the song in the third verse, blaring at the preferred deafening setting marked by a notch of tape. A quarter of the occupants proceeded to hum and bop their heads; it had been a powerhouse single twelve summers ago. No room at the bar. The regulars at their posts groused about when management was going to fix the wobbly stool, they’d been suffering for weeks. The bartender’s girlfriend tried to get his attention but he practiced his trade’s skill of selective vision, which he employed all too often when he was not behind the bar. Then he saw her and grinned. It was their anniversary. Three months. Smeared plates marched up the busboy’s arm; he pretended to drop one, joshing with the elderly couple grabbing a bite before bridge. Same day every week, same dishes, same lousy tip. In the corner, the rambunctious party of eight
started in with “Happy Birthday” and customers in the vicinity were shamed into joining in or at least mouthing the words. The hostess directed the termite specialists to a two-top underneath the high-def and they asked for another table. The game was on in half an hour and they hated the pregame announcer so ferociously that they’d been looking forward to heckling him all day. The hostess’s new diet was doing the trick for a change, everyone kept telling her so and it seemed like they really meant it. Indeed her uniform was too big. Fortunately she still had her old one somewhere, or had she thrown it out? Then another table cooked up a drunken “Happy Birthday,” even though no one in their party was having a birthday, for they were under the mistaken impression that it earned them a free round. They confused this chain for that other chain. The new waitress bore the tepid meat loaf back into the kitchen. Every week her apologies would diminish in sincerity.

His parents were right where he left them, his dad unbuckling his belt one notch and his mom grinning, eyes bright at the sight of him, sipping from the oversize green straw in her banana daiquiri. The red vinyl was still warm. It was their night out.

•   •   •

“Want a lift?”

Now the world was muck. But systems die hard—they outlive their creators and unlike plagues do not require individual hosts—and thus it was a well-organized muck with a hierarchy, accountability, and, increasingly, paperwork. Bozeman’s appointment in the current order was as Wonton’s top military clerk, principal caretaker of the camp’s holistic integrity in all aspects. Every night, Bozeman held the garrison over his shoulder and burped it, cooing work-order lullabies. He knew the secret contents of the parcels in the bellies of the choppers crisscrossing the seaboard, he ensured that designated calibers reached the waiting chambers, he slept nights with the key to the fridge that held the brass’s grass-fed
porterhouse on a chain around his puffy neck. Mark Spitz was surprised to see their steward at the wheel of the jeep, as the man rarely strayed from the second-floor offices of the bank. Surely the farther he strayed from ground zero, the more he shriveled.

In the passenger seat, a civilian wrapped in a black pencil skirt and white blouse sized up Mark Spitz over the rim of her blue-tinted sunglasses. She was a meteor crashed from another part of the solar system, or a place even more remote, life before the agony, strutting from a magazine catering to the contemporary professional woman. The cover lines were scrubbed of compatibility tests and dispatches from the frontiers of How to Please Your Man research, and teased instead testimonials to self-sufficiency, the virtues of a contained existence, the holy grail of complete actualization. She threatened a fly with a glossy white folder and smiled at Mark Spitz, the first bona fide citizen he’d seen since the Zone. “Plenty of room,” she said. It was, in addition, the first time he’d seen someone wearing pearls since he started running.

Mark Spitz did as he was told. Bozeman informed him they were headed to HQ after a brief pit stop on West Broadway. “This is Ms. Macy,” he said. “She’s here from Buffalo doing some recon.” Bozeman put a bit of spin on this last word, what Mark Spitz would have called ironic if the world hadn’t rendered such a thing into scarcity. Irony was an ore buried too deep in the crust and the machine did not exist on Earth that was capable of reaching it. The clerk kept his eyes on the road, swerving around mammoth scorched patches of asphalt where the marines roasted dead skels before Disposal’s implementation. The black spots of buckled tar were no threat to the vehicle. Mark Spitz chalked it up to superstition.

They jetted past a row of upscale clothing stores, the final displays and markdowns pouting in the jaundiced light. Ms. Macy said “Oh!” and then “Never mind” as she realized that her current escorts would not be simpatico with an impromptu raid. Mark Spitz smiled. It was like being on a long road trip, moving through
the city, whether on foot or in a car, with Kaitlyn and Gary or anyone else. Your fancy dangled coyly through a shopwindow and the old consumer electrons agitated with purpose. Then you squashed the impulse at the reality that you were not stopping, it was too late to stop, there were other passengers besides you and your whim. The moment disappeared. You’d be disappointed anyway. The store at the side of the road was not so eccentric now that you got a good look at it, that authentic mom-and-pop fare curdled on the tines, and the oldest roller coaster in the state closed down years before and the rat-poison warnings prevented even a quick look-see of the dilapidated premises. Like all mirages, they evaporated up close.

Anti-looting regs kept the world-renowned shopping of New York City off-limits, but he suspected Ms. Macy had enough pull to arrange an after-hours spree, for a price. Four juice boxes.

She turned to Mark Spitz. “Let me take this opportunity to thank you on behalf of Buffalo for all the great work you men and women are doing,” she said. She tucked a sprig of hair behind her ear. “You have a lot of supporters up there.”

“Thanks.”

The jeep shot left and Ms. Macy clutched her seat, perfect nails pinioning the cushion. He’d call the nail polish light blue but a more fanciful appellation no doubt decorated the bottle. “It’s not often I’m out in the trenches,” she said. “Mostly we sit around our little conference table with our sad little plant and our wipe board and come up with our grand plans. But that’s changing.” Grit infiltrated her eyes and she twisted around to massage them in the cracked mirror of her compact, tilting it to find a workable angle.

Bozeman pulled up in front of a boutique hotel, caressing the curb as he parked. The army had cleared the cars from this side of the street since the last time Mark Spitz was here. The dark metal sheeting of the façade was artificially stressed, striated and pocked with calculated imperfection that in this depleted
era implied foresightedness. Surely this was the forward-looking architecture they had all been waiting for. Mark Spitz recognized the humble inn from its regular invocations by the extinct gossip pages. It was home to premiere parties of dud movies and the desperate pell-mell drug binges of celebrities and rich children who had never been hugged properly. Ms. Macy and her escort stepped to the sidewalk, the young woman scampering ahead for the glass awning that kept the rain at bay with bone-white glass and stainless-steel ribbing. “Why don’t you come with,” Ms. Macy said, bowing to see Mark Spitz’s face. “I could use your expertise.”

He didn’t know what she meant, as his only expertise was his cockroach impersonation, the infinite resilience of said critter he had down cold. A continuous grumble of gunfire from the wall uptown murdered the silence. They walked over the sparkling cubes of glass that had once been the front doors, Ms. Macy tentative in her pumps and frowning and making clucking sounds. Bozeman tracked ahead to scout the first-floor lounge, that dim sac nestled into Reception like a tumor. Mark Spitz made a quick survey of the hallway feeding into the restrooms and hidden employee preserves. He sensed the three of them were alone but beat it back to the lobby just in case. The place was clear of skels, but it wouldn’t make anyone happy if he were wrong and one of Buffalo’s own got her face eaten, in such beautiful shoes.

Ms. Macy paced the cold tile, slow and pensive. He liked the sound of her heels on the floor. They echoed with enticing glamour, like the growling of a promising party behind the door at the end of the hall. She said, “Five blocks.” It was five blocks to the wall, he calculated, and twenty-plus floors above before they ran out of rooms. She was looking for housing.

Bozeman emerged from the lounge and shrugged when Mark Spitz looked at him for an explanation.

“I thought you said the doors were fixed,” Ms. Macy said. “We don’t want squirrels and rats and God knows what else moving in here.”

“We’re working on finding a proper glazier, ma’am,” Bozeman said.

“Glazier?”

“Window-makers, dealers in glass. So far the only ones we’ve turned up are in the far camps. They’re really cracking down on nonessential air travel lately, what with the operation gearing up.”

She shook her head. “Don’t get caught up in the deprivation game. That’s the old days.” She appeared vexed, and dumbfounded as to the source of her vexation. Then she looked up at the ceiling, where a crude map of old Dutch New York unscrolled in slapdash yellow strokes. The amateur nature of the rendering was intentional, to ameliorate the bloodless deliberation on display everywhere else. Her shoulders sank. “How are the rooms?”

“Fine. Apart from what’s in the folder.” He added, “As far as I know. I wasn’t here during the inspection. But they’re very good at their jobs.”

“In Buffalo all we have to go on is what you tell us.”

“Evacuated in the first wave. Whole place locked up.” He paused. Locked up except for the front doors. “But we can go upstairs and conduct a personal inspection if you like.”

“With the elevators out?” She made some notes. “Those will have to go,” she said, pointing to the wall art. Two monstrous canvases hulked above the black leather couches, depicting the metropolis at night from a vulture’s vantage. In the first, fires burned at intersections, faint but unsettling in their even dispersal through the grid, while the companion piece maintained the angle but captured the rapacious fires gnawing their way up the buildings, the inhabitants curled over windowsills watching the progress of the flames. The hungry catastrophe, creeping apace. Wall art.

“They are a bit gloomy,” Mark Spitz said. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to speak, if he was employing his expertise, but he wanted to let Bozeman off the hook. During their first weeks in the Zone, the sweepers hit the grids without the new mesh fatigues. An indispensable bit of gear, to say the least, but the
sweepers were not at the top of the list. When the shipment was finally en route, Bozeman tipped Mark Spitz and he was first in line at distribution. “You’re a Long Island boy,” he explained later, “like me.”

“The thing about these boutique hotels is that you can be anywhere in the world,” Ms. Macy said. “They really had it down before the plague—the international language of hospitality.”

“Ever been to Barcelona?” Bozeman asked. “They stay up all night.”

“I’m thinking kids,” Ms. Macy said. She slashed a red marker across her mental wipe board: Let’s put our heads together, team. “Pictures of pheenie kids in the camps, cavorting and pitching in. Pressing seeds into the soil and sharpening machetes. No machetes—kid stuff. Smiling and laughing and doing kid stuff. They’re the future, after all. That’s what this whole thing is about, the future.”

The future required many things, but it had not occurred to Mark Spitz that it needed interior decorating. Yes, kids would really tie the room together. He hadn’t been aware that he missed the sleek argot of the urban professional class. It was like a favorite sweater pulled out at the first autumn chill, tested and reassuring and cozy. The future was what formerly had been called a transitional neighborhood. Essential services in short supply, the poodle-grooming salons and scruffy cafés, but if you got in at the right time it didn’t matter that the building next door was writhing with skels. Eventually they’ll be displaced three subway stops away by rising rents and you’ll never see them again. The boîtes are coming, be patient, my pet. “Why are you here, Ms. Macy?” Mark Spitz asked.

The visitor deliberated. “I’m not supposed to say anything yet,” she said, “but you guys are safe. We’ve been lobbying for it, and we just got word last week that Manhattan is going to be the site of the next summit. Great news, right?”

Mark Spitz and Bozeman marshaled an appropriate response.

“New York City is the greatest city in the world. Imagine what all those heads of state and ambassadors will feel when they see what we’ve accomplished. You’ve accomplished. We brought this place back from the dead. The symbolism alone. If we can do that, we can do anything.”

“We might even be in Zone Two at that point, if we stay on schedule,” Bozeman said, taking the advantage.

“This is America.”

“Shoot.”

“I know,” she said. She had a halo, trick lighting. “Isn’t it great?” She ran her fingers along the top of the reception desk, fiddling the dust between her fingers. “An oasis, as soon as they set foot in the Zone. I can sign off on this place, I think. They’ll enjoy their stay. As they used to say.”

They returned to the jeep. Ms. Macy walked backward, pinning the details into her mind’s scrapbook. “Rip up the carpet and put in something red,” she ordered her invisible assistant. “Some kids losing their baby teeth, grinning and doing what they do.” She slapped the pages of her notebook until she found a fresh page. “First thing at Wonton I’m going to get on the comm and have them send a photographer to Happy Acres and Rainbow Village to snag some head shots. There must be some good kids somewhere.”