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They called him Mark Spitz nowadays. He didn’t mind.
Mark Spitz’s high school had abolished the yearbook practice of nominating students the Most Likely to Do This or That, in the spirit of universal self-esteem following a host of acrimonious parent-teacher summits, but his most appropriate designation would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category.
The youngest one wore its hair in a style popularized by a sitcom that took as its subject three roommates of seemingly immiscible temperaments and their attempts to make their fortune in this contusing city.
She padded over to the supply closet. Any creature trapped inside would be making a racket at the commotion, but Kaitlyn was a stickler. From her stories, she’d been a grade-grubber before the disaster, and Mark Spitz had watched her maintain a grade-grubbing continuum in the throes of reconstruction, rubbing her thumbs over the No-No Cards and applying a yellow highlighter to the typo-ridden manuals from Buffalo. If she survived, she’d doubtless continue to be a grade-grubber in that coming, reborn world they crawled toward, paying her bills in a timely fashion once goods and vital services
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The insipid slogan popped up in his head, insistent as malware—“We Make Tomorrow!”—and he flinched as he pictured the camp’s administrative assistant handing out the buttons, which were then obediently pinned to scavenged clothing one size too big or too small. Resist. He had to get all that crap out of his head or else it would turn out bad for him. To bolster this argument he made a glum appraisal of the bodies on the floor.
“It’s going to be a lottery,” Kaitlyn sighed. She opened a meat tube and squeezed it into her mouth. “Lottery, shit,” Gary said. “They’re going to put us on Staten Island.” “I thought you liked islands,” Mark Spitz said. Gary was a firm believer in the Island Theory of plague survival. “We like islands. Natural defenses. You know we like islands. But we wouldn’t live on Staten Island if they were giving out vaccines and hand jobs right off the ferry.”
“Shouldn’t be too many hostiles,” Kaitlyn said. They started back up the stairs of 135 Duane. The sweepers gobbled and assimilated the military lingo into their systems with gusto. Mingled with the fresh slang, the new vocabulary of the disaster was their last-ditch armor plate. They tucked it under their fatigues, over their hearts, the holy verses that might catch the bullet.
He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.
By his sights, the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before.
He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.
He missed shame and guilt and a time when something higher than dumb instinct directed his actions.
Bozeman put a bit of spin on this last word, what Mark Spitz would have called ironic if the world hadn’t rendered such a thing into scarcity. Irony was an ore buried too deep in the crust and the machine did not exist on Earth that was capable of reaching it.
Mark Spitz remembered his first ride in a military transport, the armored behemoth that retrieved him from the great out there. When he clambered out of the hatch and blinked at the perimeter lights and sentry nests, order in its accumulated manifestations, he knew he had been cast in a new production. This was no jerry-rigged fortification of depleted wanderers, bolted together by blood and self-delusion, this was government. This was reconstruction. The end in abeyance.
Buffalo has given us some busywork to keep our minds off things. Dig a drainage ditch for the camp, shuck the fucking corn.” He raised his glass to his friends across the table. “Clear some buildings. You have to admit, it passes the time.”
welp, this did not bode well
When the wall fell, it fell quickly, as if it had been waiting for this moment, as if it had been created for the very instant of its failure. Barricades collapsed with haste once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been.
There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns. There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.
