Authors: Colson Whitehead
Kaitlyn said, “Probably one or two more downstairs and then we’re done with this block.”
“Oy, we need a new street, something,” Gary said. “We’re sick of this block.”
“You need more time, Mark Spitz?” Kaitlyn asked.
He shook his head. He was ready. He had needed a reminder; he had received it. There was no when-it-was-over, no after. Only the next five minutes. Like all city dwellers, he had to accustom his eyes to the new horizon.
Gary zipped up the last of the corpses and lit another cigarette. He asked Kaitlyn for help bringing them down.
She shrugged. “You bag ’em, you drag ’em.”
• • •
For the first few weeks they tossed the bodies out the windows. It was efficient. The likelihood of harming passersby was infinitesimal. The unsuspecting, the caught unawares, the out for a smoke. They lugged the bodies to the sill and heaved them out. Confronted with the beggar’s slit of a safety window, they shot out the glass. Disinclined to lift the window, they shot out the glass. They awaited the sound of glass smashing into a million fragments and the splash of bodies bursting against concrete in equal measure.
It saved time and energy. They belonged to a nation enamored of shortcuts and the impulse persisted. It beat dragging the bodies down twelve flights and then humping back upstairs to resume the sweep. The higher up, the messier, naturally. In due course Disposal complained to the Lieutenant, to whatever brass at Fort Wonton was foolish enough to listen. “What’s that?” the officers asked. It was hard to hear that team through their hazmat helmets.
“Defenestration!” Disposal shouted, louder, accustomed to this indignity. Defenestration unduly aggravated their job. It was disrespectful. It was unhygienic. Frankly, it was unpatriotic. Everything inside was bullied to a lumpy slime, and the zippers oozed a trail of crimson slush on the street, in the carts, the post-pickup staging areas. And that was when the bags remained mostly intact.
Mark Spitz conceded that Disposal had a point. There had been an incident where he had been brooding on the sidewalk when a body bag burst a few feet away, splashing him with ichor and clots of grue. Gary apologized for neglecting to offer a heads-up, but it had slowed the progress of their friendship, those early weeks.
The broken windows put an end to the practice. Disposal could whine until doomsday, so to speak, about contamination risk, but Buffalo wanted the city habitable for the new tenants. Especially given the marines’ rampage through Zone One, necessary though it was. There had been no time for finesse, only the brute exigencies of clearing out thousands upon thousands of the dead. Now, with the introduction of the sweeper teams, they could proceed in a matter befitting the American Phoenix. The new era of reconstruction was forward-looking, prudent, attentive to the small details that will dividend in the years to come. The order came down: No more assaults on the windows of the fair city. The sweepers reconciled themselves to the new regulations. They took the stairs.
Mark Spitz and Gary tackled the heaviest bodies first. Per custom, they lugged, pulled, and kicked them down the stairwell, panting their way through the cinder-block intestine. Any witnesses would have moved their share of corpses and could sympathize. After a few floors, the muffled thump of skel heads bouncing against the stairs was replaced by a moist, unnerving thud. The body bags were equipped with handles on either end, but the realities of plague-era manufacture—the reclaimed factories were reconfigured to produce items outside the scope of their original purpose, often in a shoddy fashion—meant that the tenuously attached straps usually gave way after a few maneuvers. When that happened, the sweepers grabbed the bottom of the bag and felt the corpse’s mulch squish through the plastic.
Gary said, “We’re going to call it the Lasso.”
Mark Spitz didn’t answer. He had no idea what the man was referring to, so he waited for him to provide context. There was time. They were halfway to the street. The emergency lights still worked and they didn’t have to worry about renegades lurching in the darkness. The two sweepers were so noisy that any devil maundering in the stairwell would have already made itself known.
“Our skel-catcher. We’re going to call it the Lasso.”
“I thought you were going to go with the Grabber,” Mark Spitz said.
“The Lasso sounds more sophisticated.”
In his downtime, Gary worked on an instrument for neutralizing skels. He recruited Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn into the only extant focus group on the planet, spitballing for weeks. The latest iteration involved a long rod with a ratcheted collar at the business end. The collar, in turn, was attached to a mesh bag, made of the same tear- and tooth-resistant material as their fatigues. When you came across a skel, you manipulated the collar around its head, then jerked back. The collar cinched tight like handcuffs, detached from the rod, “And voilà: Skel in a Bag.” The captured monsters couldn’t bite through, or see. They were neutralized. You could do what you wanted with them.
The problem was that the only thing to do with a captured skel was to put it down.
Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn had pointed this out to Gary on numerous occasions, among their other criticisms of the invention. The skel-catcher, or You-Grab-It or Lasso, whatever name Gary settled on (there had been brief flirtation with the Gary), was useless in close quarters. It required a low density of hostiles—with two or more creatures in the area, too many variables complicated execution. It tied up both your hands so that you couldn’t pull off a last-second head shot if need be. But those were concerns of implementation. The main problem, of course, was that no one wanted a captured skel. In the early days, the government required a stock of the recently infected and the thoroughly turned for experiments, to search for a cure, cook up a vaccine, or simply investigate the phenomenon “in the name of science.” The vaccine work continued—what were they going to do, boot out the epidemiologist now that priorities had shifted to infrastructure?—and in their subterranean labs Buffalo certainly still rode hard on the centrifuges and electron microscopes, but the market for fresh skels did not exist, the odd hillbilly torture dungeon aside. No one
used the word “cure” anymore. The plague so transformed the human body that no one still believed they could be restored. Sure, rumors persisted that a team of Swiss scientists were holed up in the Alps working on processes to reverse the effects, but most survivors had seen enough skels to know the verdict of the plague could not be overturned. No. The only thing to do with a lassoed skel was to put it down. As soon as possible.
Gary was undeterred. He had been making diagrams for a patent, despite the small matter of there being no patent office in the land to process it. “I’m going to be rich,” he maintained, as he sulked over his unit’s lack of enthusiasm. Spoken like a true pheenie, Mark Spitz thought. Despite other contrary vectors of his personality, Gary maintained his own reservoir of pheenie optimism, a hazy vision, after all this time, of his insertion into the dreamscape of American prosperity. There would be room enough in his fabulous mansion for chambers devoted to his dead brothers’ memory, along with the standard lap pool and 5,000 Btu gas grill. The sketches of his invention reminded Mark Spitz of cave paintings, but this was only appropriate given the culture’s precipitous regression.
“The Lasso,” Mark Spitz said. “You’re really onto something there.”
Although the sign at the exit informed them that an alarm would sound, this was not the case. They tugged the heaps across the black-and-white tile of the lobby and lurched into the slurry that passed for rain these days.
They left the bags in the middle of the street for Disposal, Gary darting back into the building to avoid the downpour. Mark Spitz felt the rain on his face. This was not stuff you wanted on your skin, to see the residue from the rain when it dried. It reminded Mark Spitz of when he visited his cousins in Florida and he emerged from the ocean with brown globs of oil on his chest and legs, the stuff still drifting ashore so long after the big spill. As a frigid worm of water snuck under his collar, he saw that this
block of Duane Street appeared unruined. It was any city block on a normal day of that expired calendar, five minutes before dawn, say, when most of the city was still sleeping it off. Duane had not been allocated, so the army mechanics hadn’t cleared it, and the spectrum of vehicles popular at the time of the ruin were lined up at the curb, waiting for the return from the errand, the commute, the trip home. Nothing had been boarded up, there were no firefight traces or other signs of mayhem, and a finicky wind had kicked all the litter around the corner. From time to time Mark Spitz happened on these places in Zone One, where he strolled down a movie set, earning scale as an extra in a period piece about the dead world.
The swiftness of the evac, and the fact the island hadn’t endured a major engagement—been firebombed like Oakland or nuked like St. Augustine or whatever the hell happened in Birmingham—meant that entire stretches of the city were pristine. Not everywhere, of course. Storefronts had been hastily fortified, and the defenses were still fixed in place or piled on the sidewalk in disassembly. There had been collisions: streetlamps and mailboxes tombstoned over the corpses of crashed cars, and delivery trucks and police vans had beached themselves on the sidewalk like sad behemoths. And they strolled down plenty of blocks where the marines had really gone to town on a throng of skels, as the broken windows and bullet holes testified. Nonetheless, it was remarkable how well the skin of the city had survived the catastrophe. The exploratory missions sent in their reports and the committees in Buffalo concurred: The city was an excellent candidate for early reboot.
New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example. The main difference was that there were fewer people. It was easier to walk down the street. No grim herds of out-of-towners shuffled about, no amateur fascist up the street machinated to steal the next cab. There were no lines at the mammoth organic-food stores, once
you reached checkout after stepping over the spilled rice and shattered jars of bloody tomato sauce and environmentally conscious package of whatnot thrown to the floor during the brief phase of looting. The hottest restaurants always had a prime table waiting, even if they hadn’t updated the specials since the winnowing of the human race got under way. You could sit where you wanted to in the movie theaters, if you could suffer sitting in the dark, where monsters occasionally shifted their thighs.
This street looked normal. It was a façade. Beyond the wall, more streets like this awaited, and beyond the city, expanses of formaldehyded territory, old postcard specimens of America preserved in tidy eddies. Expertise had been employed to produce the illusion of life in the cadaver, a kindness. Then you made a sound, Mark Spitz thought, and you saw the movement of creatures.
A worm of gray water slithered down his back. The last time he saw his childhood home was on Last Night. It, too, had looked normal from the outside, in that new meaning of normal that signified resemblance to the time before the flood. Normal meant “the past.” Normal was the unbroken idyll of life before. The present was a series of intervals differentiated from each other only by the degree of dread they contained. The future? The future was the clay in their hands.
On Last Night, the sprinkler had pivoted and dispensed in its prescribed arc on his lawn. The floor lamp next to the living-room television transmitted its reassuring cone through the powder-blue curtains, as it had for decades. He was not a loser of keys, and held twenty-year-old front-door keys in his hand. When he fled the house minutes later, he would not stop to lock the door behind himself.
He and his friend Kyle had spent a few nights in Atlantic City at one of the new boutique casinos, adrift among the dazzling surfaces. Inside the enclosure, they imagined themselves
libertines at the trough, snout-deep and rooting. The banks of machines trilled and dinged and whooped in a regional dialect of money. At the hold ’em tables, they visualized the hand rankings from their poker bibles and nervously joked about the guys who were overly chummy with the dealers, the local sharks on their nocturnal feed. They tipped the waitresses with chips, deducting these from their night’s tally in the spirit of thorough accounting, and slid their fingers around the dice in superstitious motions before launch in the craps arena. They were heroes to strangers for a time, ticker-taped during sporadic rushes. On barstools they ogled the bachelorettes in the club and discussed their chances, recalling near-conquests from previous visits. In the buffet lines they foraged from the heat lamps and steam trays, and impaled and then swirled wasabi around tiny ceramic saucers, tinting soy sauce. After thirty-six hours they realized, according to custom, that they hadn’t yet left the premises, and submitted happily to the artificial habitat that is the modern casino. They did not want. It was all inside. Their brains fogged over as possibility and failure enthralled them in a perpetual and tantalizing loop.
The casino was emptier than it had been on their earlier missions. The fresh casinos burst from the gaping, rebar-studded lots where the past-prime establishments had stood, and perhaps that explained it, they thought, the law of competition and the lure of the latest bauble. Everyone was at the new place they hadn’t heard of yet. Fewer people milled about the tables, there were subdued shrieks at the craps, roulette stands shrouded in plastic, although it should be noted that the slots maintained their sturdy population of glassy-eyed defectives, the protohumans with their sleepless claws. Their favorite blackjack dealer, Jackie, a weather-beaten broad who dispensed smiles beneath a slumping orange beehive, was out sick, and the creature in her place kept fucking up the deal, but they decided against complaining to the pit boss after consideration of his imposing, deflecting mien. To be sure, this trip’s pod of bachelorettes was a trifle depleted, running through
their pantomime of excess with weary affect and listlessly brandishing the rubber penises on the dance floor. It occurred to them more than once that this trip would not live up to their lore, and they mourned over sips of subsidized liquor. Maybe they had outgrown these enthusiasms. Maybe those times were dead and they were only now aware of their new circumstances.