Authors: Colson Whitehead
Steady raids had depleted the back room of sponsored energy drinks, but there was good word of mouth about the medicinal properties of an enigmatic foreign beverage, bright emerald cans of which were piled in formidable stacks in the kitchen. The sweepers settled at the tables and crammed into the banquettes, sliding across bloodred vinyl. The menagerie of the Chinese zodiac pursued itself on the place mats beneath glass tabletops. Mark Spitz saw it was the Year of the Monkey. Attributes: Fun-Loving Witty Entertaining. Dead fish bobbed in a chunky murk in the tank by the entrance.
The Lieutenant took his roost at the host’s station and informed them that from now on they had to fill out Incident Reports on every engagement. The decor flashed in his aviator glasses in sparks of crimson and gold. Considering the Lieutenant’s nightly bourbon flights, the sunglasses were precious cover for his sensitive retinas, even in the half-light of the restaurant.
Buffalo, he explained, wanted information on the general outline of each engagement, but in particular they were keen for the sweepers to record demographic data: the ages of the targets, the density at the specific location, structure type, number of floors. Fabio, the Lieutenant’s second, had rummaged Canal Street after special equipment for this very purpose. Fabio handed his boss the carton of kiddie notebooks, and the Lieutenant brandished it over
his head, pointing out that they were equipped with convenient loops that held tiny pencils. The plastic-covered notebooks were candy-colored and palm-size, brimming with the characters and arcana of a prosperous and long-standing children’s entertainment combine. The creation myth of the product line concerned the adventures of a clever, effeminate armadillo and his cohort of resourceful desert critters. Although the parent company was one of reconstruction’s first official sponsors, until now Buffalo had found little use for their tie-in merchandise, apart from the well-branded adhesive bandages. “Doubtless you will appreciate this example of superior Japanese engineering,” the Lieutenant said, sliding the pencil back and forth.
The sweepers groaned and dislodged belches redolent of the mysterious Far East beverage, smudging the air with ginger. The Lieutenant tendered his regrets over the hassle, in his custom. The Lieutenant preferred a light touch, ditching protocol when it served his purposes. Casting himself as the hip young teacher in the high school was part of his strategy for keeping them alive, Mark Spitz theorized. The Lieutenant’s sweepers were a nontraditional brigade to say the least, volunteers from civilian pop. and untutored in the routine malevolence of military code. The training courses and drills of their boot camp had been the split-second decisions and pure, indifferent chance that had permitted them to survive to this moment. (Although it should be added that most of them had received a crash course in basic gun use since the advent of the plague.) Soldiers of the new circumstance. What did it serve to hold them to strict military standards when they were such an unlikely lot: unemployable man-children, erstwhile cheerleaders, salesmen of luxury boats, gym teachers, food bloggers, patent clerks, cafeteria lunch ladies, dispatchers from international delivery companies. People like Mark Spitz, seemingly unsnuffable human cockroaches protected by carapaces of good luck. The Lieutenant’s first priority was keeping their limbs and assorted parts attached to their bodies, free of teeth; then came
the trickled-down objectives; and, finally, servitude to the obsolete directives of an obsolete world.
The Lieutenant’s casual attitude was facilitated by the fact that the sweepers’ primary targets were stragglers. Compared to what the marines encountered in Manhattan during that initial, mammoth sweep, those assembled in the dumpling joint had it easy. Mark Spitz wouldn’t have signed up for the island had it been otherwise, New York homesickness or no.
“Buffalo, as ever, has great plans for you guys,” the Lieutenant said. He tossed the box of notebooks to the mule-eyed hulk slouching at the closest table, a man who went by the handle of the Professor, an appellation that contradicted his dumbfounded mien. He’d been a mate on a sport-fishing boat in sunnier times, steering rum-addled vacationers to schools of snapper via sonar. The Lieutenant motioned for him to pass the box around. “I know what you’re going to say—we need boots and they talk to us about numbers.”
Actually they had boots, and most of the sweepers had raided sneaker stores for more comfortable designer footwear after a round of death marches up high-rise stairwells; fortunately for them, the sneaker sponsor had manufactured several product lines for different ages, aesthetic appetites, and athletic inclinations. It was comforting, in the recesses of buildings, to see your buddy’s heel blink from the tiny red LEDs in a novelty running shoe, although Mark Spitz did not partake because of the obvious ankle-exposure issue.
Boots
was the Lieutenant’s catchall term for truly clutch materiel, the elusive, the vital. Mark Spitz heard the others shifting in boredom at the reference. What did boots symbolize for the man? Order. Sturdy rules. His trove of bygones. All survivors had them, the pet names and metonyms they used to refer to their pasts. Bagel, java, baseball cap, the object that was all objects, the furnishings of the good old days. Why couldn’t the Lieutenant maintain his shrine? Everyone else did.
Mark Spitz flipped through the pad. Faint pink-and-purple cacti sprouted in the margins. He recognized the sense of Buffalo’s plan. With the assembled data, their supply of eggheads could start projecting how many of the dead they’d find in your typical twenty-two-story corporate flagship, five-floor tenement, fifteen-story apartment complex, what have you. Every structure sheltered its likely trajectories and scenarios; they’d figured that out early. Take residential buildings, for example. Walk into one of the wizened tenements of downtown Manhattan and you could bet on finding at least one citizen who’d barricaded himself inside, turned, and then couldn’t get out. In the first wave, people got infected, barely making it home ahead of collapse. Then the plague wiped and reformatted their brains and they were trapped in their abodes, the most pathetic kind of city shut-in, their hands eventually groping their way toward expensive security locks but incapable of reaching them for the passel of splendid contemporary furniture they’d piled against it. Mark Spitz cursed his luck when he realized they were going to have to remove the door and get all that shit out of the way before they could put the skel down: the particle-board media centers laden with layaway plasmas, limited-issue replicas of Danish-modern wardrobes, the beloved go-to recliners grimed at the armrests from summers of sweat. These specimens were your average skels, not harmless stragglers but a reliable if small percentage of what you’d find in Zone One, so you had to stay frosty.
By now, Mark Spitz could look at a building and know what kind of weather was brewing inside. Office towers were the least populated. The nine-to-fivers had stopped coming to work when it went down, and most of the rabid skels were lured out by the marines, which left stragglers. (Perhaps, he thought, there will be a study of the farthest a straggler had traveled to its haunting grounds—across streams! quicksand! perilous canyons!—but that was far in the future.) A building like 135 Duane, with its
panoply of enterprises, had its idiosyncrasies but nonetheless conformed to the prevailing narrative. Department stores, multinational coffee chains, half-constructed condos. Churches and banh mi shops. Although every address, every new chunk of the grid assigned to them, contributed its special embroideries, the story never changed.
2.4 stragglers per floor in this type of structure and .05 there. Numbers permitted Buffalo to extrapolate the whole city from Zone One, speculate about how long it will take
X
amount of three-man sweeper units to clear the island zone by zone, north to south and river to river. Then on to other cities. There was no other entity like New York City, but the silent downtowns bided across the country with their micropopulations, acolytes of the principles of the grid. The truths of the grid’s rectilinear logic, its consequences, of how people moved and lived inside boundaries, had already been applied to cities across the country through the decades, anywhere human activity and desire needed to be tamed and made compliant. Gangs of high-rises in Southwest municipalities flush with internet money, sterile pedestrian malls in Midwest cities of a certain size, run-down waterfront districts of fabricated historical import that had been tarted up into tourist mills. Sure, there was the problem of scale, but Manhattan was the biggest version of everywhere.
The city bragged of an endless unraveling, a grid without limit; of course it was bound and stymied by rivers, curtailed by geographical circumstance. It could be subdued and understood. Soon sweeper teams would roam the rural areas on an identical mission to that of the metro sweepers, concocting the equations of the countryside, putting numbers to nascent theories about skel dispersal patterns, and in time these numbers would deliver end dates and progress and the return to life before. As he sat in the restaurant, Mark Spitz pictured the Lieutenant’s box of tiny notebooks, overflowing with half-legible sweeper scribbling, being
off-loaded from a military helicopter upstate and rushed by a harried private into an underground chamber at Buffalo HQ. Like it was someone’s liver being delicately transported to the waning recipient. He’d never been to Buffalo, and now it was the exalted foundry of the future. The Nile, the Cradle of Reconstruction. All the best and brightest (and, most important, still breathing) had been flown up to Buffalo, where they got the best grub, reveled in 24-7 generators and uncurtailed hot showers on command. In turn, they had to rewind catastrophe. Rumor was they had two of the last Nobel laureates working on things up there—useful ones, none of that Peace Prize or Literature stuff—chowing down on hearty brain-fortifying grub, scavenged fish oil and whatnot. If they could reboot Manhattan, why not the entire country? These were the contours of the new optimism.
After describing the kind of data that Buffalo expected of them and shooing questions of various pertinence (“No, Josh, we don’t need their weight unless it is something truly spectacular,” “Home addresses? What are you going to do, forward their mail?”), the Lieutenant shifted to his favorite pastime, the delivery of the Nightly News. He held that morning’s feed to the light. It was all positive, in line with the trend of late. To wit: “Organic-food fans will rejoice that Happy Acres claims this year will bring their biggest harvest yet—”
Grateful noises filled the dumpling house, for who among them could forget the return of fresh corn last year? Never in human history had so many delighted in removing a bit of kernel from between canines and bicuspids. Mark Spitz stumbled upon the Happy Acres crops his first night in camp. He’d ditched the mess hall for some air, dizzy from the laughter of the army guys and the other new recruits. It was in those dwindling days before the looting regs went into effect and scavenger crews had routed a den of bandits who had taken over one of the mega-drugstores. Half the bandits died in the gunfight and the other half eagerly
took oaths of loyalty to the provisional government upon surrender. They returned with three trucks’ worth of medicine. Needless to say everyone took their cut, filling their utility vests and packs with booty, the favorite anti-tartar toothpaste and allergy tablets, travel size if possible. These products had kept them running in the old world, if only by placebo effect. The soldiers availed.
After they finished trading glory stories over their personal hauls, the conversation turned to speculation about the cigarette-salvage possibilities of Manhattan. A lot of people had taken up smoking lately. News of a potential NYC operation was starting to get out, and that morning’s couriers from Buffalo disseminated gossip about the latest operation down South, a hydroelectric plant brought online. Then one of the snipers—Gibson was his name—told a story about a skel bonfire gone awry, which broke everybody up. The skel on top had been neutralized, but a chunk of his brain was still sending orders, apparently. The fire activated the creature so that it looked like the skel was “break dancing” in the flames. Mark Spitz had been laughing with the rest of them, more on account of Gibson’s deadpan delivery than the anecdote, when his head was suddenly encased in lead and his vision went on the fritz. It was as if he’d been hit on the head with a pipe—he’d actually been hit in the head with a lead pipe in college, when a gang of townies had invaded the Spring Concert looking for trouble. In retrospect, this drowning sensation was the first indication that something started to go wrong with him when he came in from the wasteland.
He needed air. Mark Spitz ducked through the plastic tent flaps and lost himself in the rows of cabins, staggering between the red-and-yellow nylon tents containing the new arrivals who were also spending their first night at Happy Acres. He sensed them stiffening at his slow footfalls, which made him sound like one of the dead. They poked a head out, then calmed themselves and withdrew. He wandered toward the line of sodium lights at the far edge of camp. There they were, behind the fence, lit up,
regimented, droopy with promise: the holy stalks, up to his chest and disappearing into the darkness. He’d been eating three squares a day, listening to actual jokes, seeing whole ragamuffin gangs of kids—when was the last time he saw more than one kid at a time? And now, fresh corn. The miracles turned routine. They pushed up like weeds.
“Back away from the fucking corn, dude.” The two guards pointed their weapons at his head, at two of the five recommended skel-dropping points. The sentries couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He didn’t begrudge them their duty. The crops were important. The crops separated today’s iteration of humanity from last year’s. He waved the rifles away and gaped. It was funny: up against the gate, shivering in the slight wind, they were almost an army of skels approaching the camp’s delicious signs of human life. Half the stuff was probably going to Buffalo, but that didn’t matter. It was still a wonder. Mark Spitz backed away from the fucking corn.