Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > Zone One

”He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information on the big matters of the day, like dead concentrations, and small things like the state of the world. A few months into the collapse, only the fools asked about the government, the army, the designated rescue stations, all the unattainable islands, and the fools were dwindling every day. He hung with them until they decided on divergent destinations, got into an argument over skel behavior theories or how to spot lurking botulism in a dented can. People were invested in the oddest things these days. He hung with them until they were attacked and they died and he didn’t. Sometimes he ditched them because they talked too fucking much.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.”

Mark Spitz keeps living.

The end of the world has come and gone and somehow he has survived. The zombie apocalypse (Those of you who don’t read zombie books don’t quit reading yet.) has pared the world down to the core, to the ones that instinctively have found ways to survive.

There has never been anything special about Spitz...until now.

”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.”

Names are unimportant now. No one calls themselves by their given name. Their full names have disappeared replaced by nicknames or names evoking a nostalgic bit of pop culture. When Mark and a couple of his friends are trapped on a bridge by a herd of Skel (aggressive zombies) his compadres jump in the river to escape. He stands and keeps shooting. When they ask him later why he didn’t jump he said he couldn’t swim, but in reality it is because he truly believes he can’t die. His name was conceived in that moment. If you don’t remember Mark Spitz here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Spitz.

Spitz meets a girl named Mim, and even though he knows better he falls in love with her. They hole up in a toy store which certainly added a bit of that lost world magic to their burgeoning romance.

Skull faces had replaced human faces in his mind’s population, tight over the bone, staring without mercy, incisors out front. The stubborn ordinariness of her soft eyes and round, vigorous features were a souvenir. The yellow bandanna tight around her scalp tokened weekend chores, plucking acorns and twigs from the sputtering gutter, scraping last summer’s black residue from the grill. The ancient rites. She was like him, one of the unlikely ones, pushing through, normal.”

She goes out to get pepper and he never sees her again.

[after surviving the bus explosion]
Annie: You're not going to get mushy on me, are you?
Jack: Maybe. I might.
Annie: I hope not, 'cause you know, relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.
Jack: Oh yeah?
Annie: Yeah, I've done extensive study on this.
From the 1994 movie Speed.

Everyone has lost so much that with each new loss it becomes harder to tabulate the true cost anymore. Scars can be picked at, but it is difficult to make them bleed anymore. Some reviewers have noted that the prose comes across as flat. I agree. I think that is exactly what Colson Whitehead intended. This is a survivor’s journal. I have talked to people who have experienced long term trauma, in a war, with drugs, with disease etc and one thing that usually happens is their eyes harden and their voices flatten out. They are achieving distance. I’ve also talked to people who tell those stories with animation, with the rat tat tat of the machine gun and the Hollywood explosions. I wonder if that isn’t another way of achieving distance.

”Judge not the dysfunctions of others, lest ye be judged.”

”Two of them got the old man down and then all of them were on him like ants who received a chemical telegram about a lollipop on the sidewalk. There was no way the old man could get up. It was quick. They each grabbed a limb or convenient point of purchase while he screamed. They began to eat him, and his screaming brought more of them teetering down the street. All over the world this was happening: a group of them hears food at the same time and they twist their bodies in unison, that dumb choreography. A cord of blood zipped up out of their huddle, hangin--
that’s how he always recalled it….”

The skels are dangerous, but so are people. Messianic people are maybe the most dangerous of all. Spitz has finally found a community where it feels like civilization is returning.

”Their idyll was terminated by one of the number. Abel, who had developed some theories about the plague and its agenda. He was one of those apocalypse-as-moral-hygiene people, with a college-sophomore socialist slant. The dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure, with its doilies, helicopter parenting, and streaming video, return us to nature and wholesome communal living. No one paid much attention.”

Until he opened the gates, in an act of further purging the earth. It might have been more apt if he had taken the name Cain.

Buffalo has emerged as the new capital and after sending the Marines through Manhattan killing skels and wanderers (zombies that return to their work or home and stay), they have decided to turn over the rest of the cleanup to contract civilians. Spitz volunteers, not because he believes in the job, but because he remembers his uncle’s beautiful apartment and wants to see it one more time. I’ll paraphrase Spitz from the first quote above. “People are invested in the oddest things.” As they move through the corridors of Wall Street he starts to ennoble the process.

”He was performing an act of mercy. These things might have been people he knew, not -quites and almost-could-be’s, they were somebody’s family and they deserved release from their blood sentence. He was an angel of death ushering these things on their stalled journey from this sphere. Not a mere exterminator eliminating pests.”

Just as they start to believe they have control of the city.

”Looking down at them through the twisted ash, Mark Spitz shuddered. The dead streamed past the building like characters on an electronic ticker in Times Square…. Close to the ground, almost at their level, he read their human scroll as an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town.”


Colson Whitehead chowing down while he can. You can’t see it, but there is a backpack on the seat beside him with all the essentials...just in case.

I’ve been pondering why I like to read post-apocalyptic books. It can be zombies or a threat to our food supply ( No Blade of Grass) or pandemic flu. If it is well written I’m game to read it. I’ve been reading this book called Red Mars which didn’t really take off for me until the expedition actually lands on Mars and they start building a community. They are fighting an internal battle between various factions with different visions for the direction of the colony. They are contending with a harsh, unforgiving climate. Every day they fall into their bunks absolutely exhausted, but contented with the knowledge that they did something; they built something. I had an epiphany.

There must be a yearning in me for the opportunity to do what my ancestors did. I have a strange need to carve out a place for myself in the wilderness, or out of chaos. I want to pit myself against the elements and figure out a way to survive. Luckily I don’t need civilization to fall for me to have that experience. I can read books like this one, and think about what I would do; what would be important to me; could I become who I needed to become? So we can scoff at the idea of a zombie apocalypse, but really it is just a vehicle for a fine writer like Colson Whitehead to do some intelligent speculating. I can place yourself in these worlds. For a few hours I can heed the call, try to beat the odds, be relevant, and earn a place among a new set of pioneers who are rebuilding the world in our image...without the clutter.