Zone One

As a kid, Mark Spitz executed Chinatown runs for fireworks and bootlegs, and the congestion had always overwhelmed him, the way it had many sons and daughters of Nassau County. Grow up on Long Island living off one of the spiral arms of the expressway, and nothing kicked up the vertigo more than a visit to Chinatown, with its discordant and jostling multitudes. It was the stereotype of fast-talking, fast-walking, eagerly lacerating New York distilled into a potent half mile. You do not belong. You will be devoured by this monster. Outside the dumpling house, in this resettled northern edge of Zone One, the tiny chaos-the sudden shock of a supply truck’s horn or a jeep backfiring-was the sound of promise, of a civilization stepping clear of the charnel house. The welter of Chinatown had been the larger hustle of the entire city condensed, and now the echo of that noise in this handful of streets spoke of a vanished order that might reassert itself. If you believed in the mission. The neighborhood would never be that roiling and exuberant again-at least in Mark Spitz’s lifetime. They needed Tromanhauser Triplets and their ilk, the repopulating engine of babies, the unborn. But for a second, Mark Spitz glimpsed something of the new city they had been sent to build.

Omega walked downtown to their next assignment: Grid 98, Chambers x West Broadway, Mixed Residential/Business. “Here’s to it’s all walk-ups,” Mark Spitz said.

“We wouldn’t mind some more parking lots,” Gary said.

“Or a big gas station,” Kaitlyn said.

Parking lots were freebies. No one ever knocked a gigantic parking lot, snug in the bosom of that week’s grid.

“It’s about one and a half clicks,” Gary said.

“Twenty blocks,” Mark Spitz corrected.

“Clicks.”

“Blocks.”

“Clicks,” Gary said as they marched toward West Broadway. Adding, “We hate that armadillo. Creeped us out since the crib.”

Kaitlyn didn’t mind the ludicrous notebook and in fact relished the opportunity to divert her companions down her nostalgia’s alley. “I used to have all that stuff, I had everything,” she said, proceeding to deep-caption the plushies, posters, and plastic statuary on display in her childhood’s museum, the manifold tie-in merch of the effeminate armadillo’s brand family. Gary smuggled his distinct bit of home under his fingernails, and their unit leader carried hers in the errant conversational tidbit or dimpled inflection that made it possible to pretend the three of them had been whisked away from the dead city and were riding in her family minivan, bouncing in the bright and splendid past, en route to the mall to meet up with the gang by the fountain in the middle of the food court, or queue up for the latest 3-D smash.

Kaitlyn’s native herd had grazed on the sweet berries of gentility. Mark Spitz didn’t have a complete dossier on Kaitlyn that day, but he was working on it. She had been bioengineered in the birthing vats of a sanctified midwestern principality, an upper-middle-class Kingdom of Bruiselessness. Here she was, long curls peeking out of her helmet, head cocked as she double-checked orders over the comm and absentmindedly wiped gore from her knife, when she should have been braiding the hair of one of her fellow sorority pledges, in her favorite pad-around-the-dorm sweatpants, sexually ambiguous pop avatar crooning from the computer speakers. Of course she had been elected Secretary of the Student Council twice: Who would make up such a thing?

Their unit might be standing before a line of hair dryers in a tony hair salon, nigh shod in jellyfish clumps of brains, and Kaitlyn would perkily chatter on about how she’d spent summers at her grandparents’ cabin “doing the usual stuff, you know, riding horses and lifeguarding,” or earning cosmetics money at the ice-cream store with her “Best Friends Forever Amy and Jordan.” You don’t say? Mark Spitz saw it clearly: Kaitlyn’s implacable march through a series of imaginative and considered birthday parties-her parents were so thoughtful, here was a blessing bestowed from one generation to the next-each birthday party transcending the last and approaching a kind of birthday-party perfection that once accomplished would usher in an exquisite new age of bourgeois utopia. They strove, they plotted, they got the e-mail of that new magician in town, with his nouveau prestidigitations. Maybe, he thought one night, it wasn’t utopia that they had worked toward after all, and it was Kaitlyn herself who had summoned the plague: as she cut into the first slice of cake at her final, perfect birthday party, history had come to an end. She had blown out the candles on the old era, blotted out the dinosaurs’ heavens, sent the great ice sheet scraping forth, the blood counts zooming up into madness.