Authors: Colson Whitehead
There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.
Gary had ceased speaking in his fraternal we. Were the weevils munching through even now, gnawing canals in his brain-stuff? He heard Kaitlyn reenter the shop. He recognized her walk, but he had to double-check. With Gary’s attack, he was one foot in the wasteland again, and nothing could be taken for granted. He felt energized, a reptilian knob at the base of his skull throbbing.
Kaitlyn dropped into the morass of the orange beanbag chair, sinking deeper than she expected, and told them she saw no sign of Bravo. Still only a squall of feedback on the comm. Gary closed his eyes. Mark Spitz said, “Stay awake. Stay awake. There’s one more thing about the highway I want to tell you. You’ll think it’s cool.”
He told his unit how he’d discovered the clandestine heart of the Quiet Storm’s maneuvers. He was aboard the chopper on his way to the Zone. The other wreckers had opted to stay on the corridor. Richie didn’t like “the big city” as he called it, although like many who uttered these words, he had never been. Mark Spitz didn’t point out that what he most likely despised about the city was gone: the people. The Quiet Storm told him she still had work to do, in her weird affect, which he didn’t pay attention to at the time. He finally saw it from above, what she had carved into the interstate. While the other wreckers, indeed all the other survivors, could only perceive the wasteland on its edge, the Quiet Storm was in the sky, inventing her alphabet and making declarations in a row of five green hatchbacks parked perpendicular to the median, in a sequence of black-and-white luxury sedans arranged nose to nose two miles down the road, in a burst of ten minivans in glinting enamel tilted at an acute angle half a mile farther north. The grammar lurked in the numbers and colors, the meaning encoded in the spaces between the vehicular syllables, half a mile, quarter mile. Five jeeps lined up south by southwest on a north—south stretch of highway: This was one volley of energy, uncontained by the routes carved out by settlers two hundred years before, or reified by urban planners steering the populace toward the developers’ shopping centers. Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east—west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching on an arrow aimed at—what? Tomorrow? What readers? Then his chopper was over a midsize city in botched
Connecticut, beyond the margins of her manuscript, and he was halfway to Zone One.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We don’t know how to read it yet. All we can do right now is pay witness.”
She wrote her way into the future. Buffalo huffed over its machinations and narratives of replenishment, and the wretched pheenies stabbed their bloody knees and elbows into the sand as they slunk toward their mirages. And then there were people like the Quiet Storm, who carved their own pawns and rooks out of the weak clay and deployed them across their board, engaged in their own strategic reconstructions. Mark Spitz saw her mosaic, in its immense tonnage, outlasting all of Buffalo’s schemes, the operations under way and the ones yet to be articulated. What readership did she address? Gods and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective. To Anyone Who Can Read This: Stay Away. Please Help. Remember Me.
“Maybe it says: It’s safe now, we’re gone. Maybe it says: I’m still here.” She had told him when she declined to leave the corridor that she wasn’t finished yet.
“Sounds like PASD to me,” Gary said. “In Rainbow Village this one guy wrote Bible verses in his own shit.” He tapped his vest after his sponsor cigarettes, drowsy. “Who’s going to go up and get me more penicillin?”
“I’ll go,” Mark Spitz said.
“Try not to fuck around, going on about how the ash is falling,” Gary said. “You’re not going to mention the ash, right?”
“Yes.”
“I see you looking out the window,” he said. “It’s best to keep it to yourself, I think.” Like a parent telling a kid to lay off the nostril-mining, just for an hour. People might talk.
“You’re not on your deathbed. Death-futon.”
“How am I supposed to light a cigarette with this?”
Mark Spitz waited for Kaitlyn to join him outside. Up the street, Disposal had tossed the bodies of the suicides into the back of their cart. The overcast sky ushered in premature evening and he wondered if it was going to rain, even though the thunder he heard wasn’t meteorological but martial. Kaitlyn emerged from the shop, wiping her fingers with antibacterial wipes. “He says he wants to stay here,” she said. “He doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“I’ll check in with Fabio, hit up the medic for something to make him more comfortable.” The euphemism came easily. “What if he turns quick?”
“I’m ready. I won’t leave him alone. I only came out here in case he wanted a minute to off himself.”
“Okay.”
“Run.”
He beat it uptown. Two blocks uptown he realized he’d forgotten his pack; he decided not to go back for it. The thunder of the artillery intensified, cleaved from the lightning that might have, for an instant, lit his passage through the worsening gloom, livened his ash into brief fireflies. The thunder has lost his brother, he thought. When was the last time they enjoyed a proper dinner as a family? Done it right, without griping about the brass at Wonton, complaining about blisters, had a dinner devoid of one person’s brooding or sullen reverie about the time before the flood. Omega had taken it for granted, the family meal. It came to him as he skidded onto Broadway: Kaitlyn’s birthday. They were yo-yoing up and down the stairwells of a corporate megalith and she’d dropped no less than three anecdotes detailing some of the key birthday parties of her youth: the educational visit to the eco-friendly ranch where alpacas nibbled gray pellets from her tiny palm, their rough tongues tickling; the excursion to the mad scientist’s laboratory where her third-grade friends had spun filaments of cotton candy; the surprise party it seemed the whole town was in on, so elaborately did the charade about the “visit to the dentist” unfold. Eventually Gary had no choice
but to ask when her big day was. “Today,” she said, as the body bag in her hands spontaneously unzipped, loosing chunky gallons of fluids and innards.
Omega cut their biscuits in half for buns, lit a ball of C-4 to make a fire, and grilled up some spamburgers, which they consumed happily in the private room of an upscale Italian restaurant off Laight. “Fancy,” Gary said, belching. A pinch of cumin and coriander made all the difference, it was unanimous. Omega drank some of the Long Island cabernet that had been circulating around Wonton, after one of the generals dispatched a search-and-rescue team to the Bridgehampton vineyard. The vintners were ensconced at Camp El Dorado, became sponsors, patriots.
It was after they opened the cellophane on the coconut cupcakes and crooned the mandatory song that Kaitlyn told them the Last Night story she had held back for so long. Hers was no numb recital; she did not tell them out of compulsion to indulge in the cheap catharsis of the Big Share. She told them to eulogize to the disaster. She said, “Let me tell you about the night I started running, and make a toast to the end of that race.”
He ran. Uncle Lloyd’s building reared up as he turned the corner, one of the garrison’s spotlights fixed on the sheer blue metal of its midsection. He flagged: What was it trying to tell him? He’d pressed his nose to the thick glass of airliner portholes for a glimpse of the building when he returned from a trip, sought its profile in the rows of skyscrapers when he was caught on one of the expressways that fed the metropolis, and when he finally rescued it from the crowd, its blue skin soaring over the bores never failed to cheer him. Each time he thought: One day I will live in a place like that, be a man of the city. Now the shimmering blue moon the spotlight punched out of the night sky was alien and unnerving. It was not the same building. It had been replaced. He ran through the ash, which was really coming down now, in his mind or everywhere, in slow, thick flakes that eased to the sidewalk in implacable surety. He was close enough to the incinerators
that it was possible it was real ash. The Lieutenant was in that stuff, smithereened by the Coakleys.
The night of her birthday, in the Italian eatery, Kaitlyn explained that she booked the train even though it was more expensive than flying because there was so much of the country she had never seen. The invigorating virtues of the scenic route. While the world outside the windows was inspiring, the one inside the car was less so. Erratic shooting pains traversed her calves after three hours in her stiff seat, and the wifi whispered in and out so capriciously that she gave up on the half season of the lawyer show she’d intended to stream. The final queasy indignity occurred when a person or persons three rows back unleashed a sort of casserole salute to cheese that filled the car with a reluctant-to-dissipate stench, almost corporeal, another passenger. But her friends were waiting for her on the platform when she arrived for their reunion weekend, beckoning from beyond the metal barriers, where the steel-eyed German shepherds of the security teams chafed on their chains. Kaitlyn forgot the train’s farrago of torments until her pals returned her to the station three days later.
Her homebound train stopped outside Crawfordsville. The name of the town lilted in her brain all this time later, singsongy, the locale in a country-and-western song where the singer met her unexpected love, or lost it. The Sunset Dayliner did not budge, the lights stuttered, the circulated air loudly chugged on and off—a moment of turbulence, as if they had passed through a bad pocket. On the other side of this disturbance, one of the conductors hustled between the seats toward the front of the train, ignoring questions, eschewing eye contact, and mumbling in code to his crackling handset. A pair of Concerned Passengers huddled by the handicapped-access bathroom in consternation, and she heard the time-honored threat of the impotent consumer:
I’m going to
get to the bottom of this
. They had God-given rights as paying customers, the phone numbers of corporate hotlines awaited in their smartphones, beckoned from the internet, consumer-protection apparatus listed helpful e-mail addresses to capture their appeals and apply remedies.
The woman in the window seat, a birdlike thing who hadn’t removed her beak from her tablet’s screen since boarding, looked at Kaitlyn for the first time as the static-y voice hit the intercom: We are being held here momentarily. The woman tugged the earbuds from their inputs in the sides of her skull. “Where are we, anyway?” she asked. Later, a national guardsman shot her six times in the back with a machine gun as she tried to make a break for the woods.
After the announcement, the first person on his feet was a fifty-something man garbed in a blue denim suit, his beard mashed through red-and-green beads. He tried to transfer to the next car; the door did not budge. They were locked in. An hour passed. The bars on Kaitlyn’s cell dropped one by one and the wifi shut off for good. Before the other passengers lost reception with their personal networks (in one sinister moment, a cascade of disappointment), the news blogs filled in what the conductor withheld: The train was under quarantine. A passenger had been “acting strangely” in the café car, attracting the attention of train personnel. After a scuffle, the terrorist barricaded himself in a bathroom and threatened to release a biological agent. “They have to let us out,” someone wailed. A woman shouted, and everyone in the car looked out the windows at the military trucks and jeeps, the soldiers spilling onto the gravel shoulder of the right-of-way in their white hazmat suits. Kaitlyn couldn’t see their faces.
The terror plot remained the cover story for the first couple of hours, plausible and self-organizing. Later, when Kaitlyn was on the run, she discovered what the rest of the country heard from the news media, before the news media was reduced to a numb
scroll of rescue stations and an evanescent list of contradictory infection procedures. Before the media sighed into the depths, senescent, dumb. The train’s Patient Zero had turned feral in his seat—dropped out of humanity’s codes and into the solemn directives of the plague—and bit three people before being restrained; the conductor’s call for aid triggered a local military response. The authorities were on alert for certain keywords on the emergency channels, as it was early in the death of the world and the military still mobilized to distress calls. Some calls, anyway.
No one was getting off that train. On that Eve of Last Night, some of the passengers in Kaitlyn’s car tried to make a break for it—chute out the emergency window and sprint through a perceived weakness in the cordon. Thus did Kaitlyn first encounter that interregnum cliché, wherein the alpha male or female recruits support for a nutty plan and organizes the doomed sortie: pell-mell out of the surrounded Victorian; bursting from the collapsible door of the trapped school bus in a whirlwind of ad hoc truncheons, ladles, and chimney pokers. Out of the quarantined train car that had been plucked from its steadfast route and deposited forty-eight hours in the future, into the collapse. On the last night before the Last Night, the machine guns dispatched these intrepid; after that, it would be teeth.
When the soldiers suddenly bugged out the following evening—the armored vehicles spinning out into AWOL missions after loved ones or vain ops intended to keep it all from flying apart—Kaitlyn started running. She and the other passengers extricated themselves from the dead mass transit to master the new lessons, or else perished in their scattered elementaries. Eventually her run took her to Zone One, to Gary and Mark Spitz, the birthday celebration in the function room of an Italian restaurant, where on panels of dark wood the caricatures of the deceased regulars promenaded, famous and not famous, distended chins and knob noses protuberant and gross. Kaitlyn told them her Last
Night story not to enter into ritualized mourning but to say: This is a story of how it used to be. When we didn’t know what was happening and were defenseless. Kaitlyn made a toast to Zone One and the new world they chipped from the stone, building by building, room by room, skel by skel. The intent of the caricature, Mark Spitz thought as he listened to her story, is to capture the monstrous we overlook every day. Maybe, she said, we can unsee the monsters again.