Authors: Colson Whitehead
They passed the time, made the nights as lovely as they could. When they discovered they were out of condoms, she told him to pull out and they came otherwise. “Enough babies,” she said. Before the plague, he’d always thought it weird when people said that, as they croaked about overpopulation, the millions of kids in want of a good home, ever-shrinking planetary resources of manifold aspect. Now Mark Spitz understood plainly what they had meant by “What kind of person would bring a child into this world” and then recited statistics about polluted water tables on the other side of the world, the asphyxiated ecosphere.
The answer was, “Only a monster would bring a child into this world.”
The last snows were a month behind them. They were lying on the roof looking at the stars. He’d grown up after the time when they taught the constellations, but he knew a handful. Mim was acquainted with a few more. They kept their voices down. The reality: if it was warm enough for them to stargaze, it was warm enough to start moving.
“I’ll say one thing about the world today, it really keeps the pounds off,” she said.
“Starvation will do that.”
“I think it was all the running. I haven’t been in this kind of shape since college.” She brought up Buffalo. Mim still believed in Buffalo.
“By the time you hear about a place, it’s gone,” Mark Spitz said. “I think the very act of hearing about a place seems to will its disappearance.”
“This place is different. Someplace has to be.” His head was on her stomach. Her fingertips drew letters on his scalp. Words? A name? Her kids’ names? “Or else we should just end it now.”
“Buffalo.”
“If there’s nothing out there, what’s the point?”
“There’s here.”
“Have to keep on moving, honey. You stay in one spot, you’re just another straggler.”
In the old joke, the intransigent father goes out for cigarettes and never comes back. The family is bereft. These days your companion in oblivion went out on a routine foraging run and never came back. One warm day, Mim left to scare up some pepper for the lentil soup and did not return. Gone, like that. He searched their neighborhood haunts, and the Main Street businesses they had put off raiding until a rainy-day need. Her various go-packs remained in their stashes. He discovered no indication of where it had happened, and it didn’t matter anyway, did it? He waited a
week. And then he moved on.
If there’s nothing out there, what’s the point?
He didn’t have the answer. He laced his boots.
People disappeared. You never knew it was the last time you’d see them. For a long time, he retained most of their names. Before Northampton, he sometimes indulged visions of coming back one day to all the towns he’d stayed in during the catastrophe, in an electric car driven by his surly grandson. Meet the kids or spouses of the kindred he’d met out in the land, sit for a spell and drink a cup of tea on the plastic-covered sofa downstairs in the split-level. As if anyone they had loved would make it through.
Ever since the soldiers rescued him, he started losing them, the names. They were dust in his pocket. Their eccentricities, the moronic advice vis-à-vis food safety, the locations of the rescue centers they’d obsessed over lasted longer than their names. One night he got the urge to record what he remembered in one of the kiddie armadillo notebooks. It passed. He didn’t stir from his sleeping bag. Let them go, he thought. Except her.
Unlike Mim, the Lieutenant commanded a full complement of mourners. Omega and Bravo held the wake in a Brazilian restaurant on Pearl following a quick survey of the nabe. They’d gone out looking for the other sweeper teams to no avail. The comms were useless, unleashing a metallic howling that kindled dread even in their veteran bones. Their comrades would hear about it tomorrow, and the customary Sunday-night hang out would become a second, boozy memorial.
“He’d want it that way,” Carl said.
“Of that I am sure,” Mark Spitz said.
Work was over once Mark Spitz returned with the news. Angela reconfirmed their choice of venue after doing recon on the liquor inventory. She’d become partial to cachaça after a six-month thing with a Brazilian guy whose constant referencing of his nationality was a cornerstone of his personality, and the drink’s foreign
provenance meant it was not subject to the looting regs. Unless the powers had changed the rules these last two weeks they’d been in the field—apparently all sorts of stuff was happening in the world while they roamed the bruises of this necropolis. Camps collapsing, imperiled triplets. The Lieutenant’s troops would produce a worthy memorial. Reggae issued from some dead busboy’s digital music dock, courtesy of Carl’s playlists, and went quite well with the caipirinhas, which didn’t taste half bad, chilled by chem cold packs and infused with the proper measure of lime juice and sugar. At the festivities’ kickoff, Angela was scrounging behind the bar when Kaitlyn started to speak. “Don’t,” Angela said.
“I was going to say, take two bottles,” Kaitlyn said.
Black silhouettes of blade-leafed jungle plants were painted on the walls, more goofy than exotic as they shape-shifted in the frothy light of their lamps and candles. They toasted the Lieutenant. They swapped remembrances of their first day in the Zone, their initial meetings with their eccentric superior officer, each taking a turn at the canvas. The instant Mark Spitz drained his second drink, No Mas grabbed the glass from his hand and mixed another. No Mas had been smiling at Mark Spitz and over-chuckling at his jokes since Mark Spitz walked in on him and Gary in the bathroom. From their furtive expressions, Mark Spitz assumed he’d interrupted some nouveau hand-job ritual, possibly of wretched Connecticut derivation.
“Don’t worry,” Gary told No Mas. “He’s cool.”
Gary explained their side enterprise. Scavengers plundered the pharmacies of the famous painkillers first, the good stuff, and then the proven downers, the tranquilizers road-tested by generations of glum moms. Entrepreneurial salvage and distribution of the numbing agents didn’t begin in earnest until the universal diagnosis of PASD exposed the unfortunate gap in Buffalo’s roster of pharmaceutical sponsors—for those willing to go on the hunt for the indispensable medley of benzodiazepines and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, this was a primo market opportunity.
Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time. It was unwise to take a pill out in the wastes, as you might not wake up when you were supposed to, at the sound of the dead multitude clawing against the barn door, for example, but in Happy Acres and its ilk one was unburdened of the curse of eternal vigil. Miss a day here and there, zonked out on this or that—they’d earned it. “Someone’s got to step in,” No Mas said. “People are hurting.”
“What do you charge?” Mark Spitz said.
“Sliding scale, needs-based. Juice boxes accepted.”
The pharmacies and residential medicine cabinets were empty of narcotics and antibiotics, but the antidepressants in their plastic cylinders sprouted like orange mushrooms behind the mirrored doors, ready for harvest. Gary and some dependable players in other sweeper units delivered their booty to No Mas, and on Sunday No Mas rendezvoused with his Wonton connection, who got the pills out on choppers to the camps. A shadow Buffalo executing course corrections for reconstruction.
Mark Spitz told them he’d keep his mouth shut. Yes, it was a necessary service. Perhaps the Lieutenant could have benefited from the cutting-edge mood stabilizers. Perhaps not.
“You’re sure he wasn’t bit?” Carl asked for the third time.
“No,” Mark Spitz said.
“Leave a note?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
They suicided themselves in the homes they loved, surrounded by their beloved objects, or out in the wasteland they despised, alone in the cold dirt. Some arrived at the decision when they were safe in the camps, the semblance of normalcy permitting the first true accounting of the horror, its scope and unabating adversities. The unforgivable in all its faces. The suicides accepted, finally, what the world had become and acted logically. Buffalo was not enamored of the statistics, and ordered Dr. Herkimer to add a longer
Prevention/Understanding Ideation unit to the PASD seminars. Killing yourself in the interregnum was understandable. Killing yourself in the age of the American Phoenix was a rebuke to its principles. “We Make Tomorrow!”—if we can get that far, Mark Spitz thought—so tomorrow needs a marketing rollout, hope, psychopharmacology, a rigorous policing of bad thinking, anything to stoke the delusion that we’ll make it through.
Now and again, Mark Spitz held desultory debates with his own forbidden thought, most recently the previous afternoon on Duane Street. He wished the fallen a safe journey.
“Maybe he was bored.”
One of the snipers observed the Lieutenant walk out to the helipad atop the bank. It was a quiet evening, sparse with the dead all day, one of the last quiet evenings before the devils started accumulating in their recent density. The sniper waved at the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant waved back and jammed a grenade into his mouth.
“Can you even fit a grenade into your mouth?” Carl asked.
“Gag reflex,” No Mas said.
“One of those little thermite jobs, sure,” Gary said.
“It’s sad,” Kaitlyn said.
Fabio had installed himself at the man’s desk. Fabio knew himself to be a pretender, from the way he started and almost knocked over his coffee when Mark Spitz showed up. He looked terrible, as if he’d been living in a hamper. He spoke fast, on high rev, as he apologized for not informing the sweepers earlier. With the whole eastern seaboard lit up and scrambling the last two weeks to cover the recent blips, Buffalo thought it best if the sweepers kept to their timetables.
“Blips?” Mark Spitz asked.
“Reversals, complications,” Fabio told him. “Blips.” Fabio was in command until they sent down a replacement. Buffalo had already missed the last two food drops.
The office’s digital player, enthroned on a doily in the microwave/coffeemaker
nexus by the watercooler, had been playing a set of old pop and Mark Spitz was startled by the DJ’s sudden bluster: “Hey! All you out there. Hope you’re getting a chance to enjoy this sunshine today!” Surely there were no radio stations up yet. The DJ forecast fair skies for the rest of the afternoon, and Mark Spitz realized it was a recording of a radio block from some random afternoon before the disaster, a ghost transmission of yesterday’s deals on teeth bleaching, ads for movies playing in dead theaters, and last-minute invitations to join class-action suits.
A new recruit Mark Spitz hadn’t seen before, one of the teenagers from the camps, entered the office and dropped himself at Fabio’s old desk. Distribution may be a mess right now, but Buffalo had a lot of spare parts lying around.
“We can’t believe Fabio’s been our man up there and we didn’t even know it,” Gary said.
“It’s disgraceful,” Kaitlyn said.
They quickly ran out of remembrances. Honestly, they didn’t know him that well. “Pretty cool boss,” Carl said. They waded into deep, frigid silences and drank. Carl changed the mix on the digital music player, saying, “This one’s remixes.” It had been rare to memorialize someone’s passing. You were on the run; you left the bodies behind to leak fluids in the sun. This was the first time since the world ended that most of them had the luxury to do things in the old style. They had little to say.
The drinks executed their mission. No Mas saluted the silhouettes on the wall, slow, catching on his gears, and Mark Spitz guessed the man was performing his Lieutenant impression for his inner audience. No Mas smiled faintly. Kaitlyn strangled a loop of hair on her index finger. She caught Mark Spitz looking at her and said, “The subway.”
Seven weeks into their mission, the Lieutenant had Fabio summon them from the field. This was unprecedented, as they only returned to Wonton on Sundays and were now deep in the rhythms of their work flow, replete with Monday-morning despair,
hump-day torpor, and a fragile strain of muted Friday-afternoon euphoria. The comms still worked back then, providing a tether to a mending civilization. For his part, Mark Spitz appreciated the interruption of that week’s grid. Omega wormed through the intestines of a starter-apartment rental tower, and floor after floor of beige carpet, noise-permeable walls, and fingerprint-smudged doorways soured his disposition. His friends in the city lived in buildings like that, and the hallways reeked of the dead ambitions decomping behind the doors. They’d had hopes. Now the cheap, emptied construction signified the complete eradication of aspiration, all luminous notions.
In the dumpling house, the Lieutenant told them that Buffalo wanted them to sweep out the subway tunnels.
“I thought the marines already did that,” Metz said.
“Mostly,” the Lieutenant explained. When the marines landed, they’d locked up the black gates and turnstiles to the platforms. The thinking was, they’d clear out the tunnels later. But once they cottoned to the fact that the top of the island was uncapped and the northward rails were wide open, the brass grew apprehensive. Even though skel migration patterns didn’t work that way, everyone started having nightmares of miles and miles of tunnels brimming and bursting with the dead, envisioning the uptown lines as umbral channels rerouting these very, very sick passengers to right beneath their tamed Zone boulevards. Ghoulish faces smeared into the bars and verminous mitts clawed through the metal grating in a hellish rendition of the worst rush hour ever, gates wrenching free from the concrete platforms … In their final mission before redeployment to the latest, more fashionable instability up or down the coast, the marines blocked the underground tunnels at the northern edge of the Zone, as if the Great Wall of Canal extended through the asphalt and deep into the Earth’s crust. Then the marines swept through the downtown shadows after the trapped skels.
It was the Lieutenant’s first week in the Zone. Buffalo was all
paperwork; he wanted a proper posting. He led a platoon down the Lexington Avenue line. “Sketchy is the word I’d use. We’d tamed aboveground. Put them down. Underground was skel territory—as if it still belonged to the interregnum, even though it was just under our feet. Even with the subways blocked off, there was this feeling that the other end of the tunnel, its terminus, was in the dead land. Claustrophobic as hell, despite the trolleys we had on the tracks carrying the spots—the brass had reallocated our night-vision gear for some op up north, so we had to bring our own light. You’re not in the city anymore down there. It’s medieval. Water streaming down the wall like a catacomb, rats running around, and then you’re lurching in the pits between the tracks. The third rail’s dead, but it’s still creepy, like it could come on any second and zap you.