Most nights, if people were up for it, they shared provisions in the tiny breakfast room off Reception, lentils or jam, and it was there he met the Simons. They were that rare thing in the wasteland, an intact family unit. Or they pretended to be. Rob and Lonnie, their kids Harold and Jennie. How they made it this far, he could not imagine. He was past curiosity, and at any rate Mom and Dad packed serious heat, ammo belts traversing their chests, tense hands never straying far from the holsters at their hips, explanation enough. Harold and Jennie were eleven and thirteen, respectively. They favored their father, especially in the eyes, and rarely spoke.
They stayed two nights. The second night they joined the small feast in Reception. Over stringy game-bird chili, Lonnie told the group they were headed to Buffalo. They had heard good things, met real soldiers who’d been there and spoke of putting it all back together. No one believed them. The Simons didn’t care. They contributed five chocolate chip cookies, if he remembered correctly, which were broken into quarters and distributed around.
Before returning to their room they asked Mark Spitz to take their picture. “We like to keep a record,” Rob said, placing the camera in his hands. It must have been a hassle to keep the device charged up; it was one of the last models, a buttonless cube out of Japan that did everything. The family posed by the dingy coffee machine, arranging themselves into what he took to be their standard pose, not smiling but not put out or melancholic, either. Then they asked if they could take Mark Spitz’s picture.
“What for?”
“So we can remember what you look like,” Lonnie said.
The Simons checked out at first light. The next day, not long after noon, bandits swept through. They executed some of the residents of the motel, tortured others in a long game they’d been working on, testing the logic of the body. Eventually an escape opportunity presented itself and most of the guests made it out intact. They knew the drill, this far into the miseries. But that was the end of the wedding party, and it was on to the next human settlement.
There was no other reality apart from this: move on to the next human settlement, until you find the final one, and that’s where you die.
The parable of his journey back to the city. To keep moving, in the Mim sense. He’d always wanted to live in New York but that city didn’t exist anymore. He didn’t know if the world was doomed or saved, but whatever the next thing was, it would not look like what came before. There were no intersections with the avenues of Buffalo’s shimmering reconstructions, its boulevards did not cross their simulations and dioramas of futurity. It refused the shapes Mark Spitz conjured in his visions of reinvention in the big city.
He dropped his new rifle and picked up his old one. It had gotten him through the Zone. It would get him out of it. Why they’d tried to fix this island in the first place, he did not see now. Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.
Mark Spitz got his gear together. He stripped Gary’s pack of what he could use. He tucked Corsica in his back pocket. He waved to his friend and shut the door to the apartment.
In the stream of the street the dead bobbed in their invisible current. These were not the Lieutenant’s stragglers, transfixed by their perfect moments, clawing through to some long-gone version of themselves that existed only as its ghost. These were the angry dead, the ruthless chaos of existence made flesh. These were the ones who would resettle the broken city. No one else.
He was ready. He didn’t like his chances of making it to the terminal. Who knew how many of the others had made it there, the band from the truck, the sundry personnel of the garrison. Officers, cooks, and clerks. He hoped the sweepers split skel heads as they beat their way downtown, or else contrived the flawless plan that eluded everyone’s desperation. Kaitlyn. And if Mark Spitz did somehow blast, bludgeon, and dodge his way to the terminal, what then? It was foolish to dream of rescue.
The music sailed between the buildings, the tinkling bell and the demented melody produced at the animal’s every step. Mingled with the dead, Disposal’s horse drew his empty cart down the street. The animal clopped across the asphalt, mascot of ruin, without care or master. Even when it withdrew from sight, Mark Spitz heard it, the cheerful jingle insistent before the pitiless rock face of the metropolis. That’s how he interpreted the melody: cheerful and undying.
On to the next human settlement, and the one after that, where the barrier holds until you don’t need it anymore. He tightened the strap of the armadillo helmet. He strummed his vest pockets one last time and frowned at the density beyond the glass. They were really coming down out there. No, he didn’t like his chances of making it to the terminal at all. The river was closer. Maybe he should swim for it. It was a funny notion, the most ridiculous idea, and he almost laughed aloud but for the creatures. He needed every second, regardless of his unrivaled mediocrity and the advantages this adaptation conferred in a mediocre world.
Fuck it, he thought. You have to learn how to swim sometime. He opened the door and walked into the sea of the dead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and Sag Harbor. He has also written a book about his hometown, a collection of essays called The Colossus of New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he lives in New York City.
Colson Whitehead, Zone One
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