Zone One

A meticulous inventory with a wide embrace. Not so much criteria for diagnosis but an abstract of existence itself, Mark Spitz thought. Once American tongues tangled with the acronym, it got mashed up and spat out into an intriguing shape. To wit: the afternoon he returned to camp after a rainy day working the Corridor, in abominable Connecticut, and was about to check the day’s survivor roll. He hadn’t seen the name of anyone he knew for weeks. Mark Spitz was halfway to the rec center when he discovered one of the comm operators, Hank, crouching by the prostrate body of a teenage soldier whose fresh gear had obviously never been worn before. Probably the kid’s first foray out of camp since he came in from the wild. The soldier sprang in and out of a fetal posture, collapsing and exploding, smearing his body through a clump of vomit.

“What happened,” Mark Spitz asked, “he get bit?”

“No, it’s his past,” he heard the comm operator say. The recruit moaned some more.

“His past?”

“His P-A-S-D, man, his P-A-S-D. Give me a hand.”

That afternoon in Human Resources, Mark Spitz was grateful for Kaitlyn’s empathy in sparing him from ID duty, and it became evident that Gary relished the job. “Ronkonkoma?” he asked, holding one of the HR ladies’ licenses. “Had a lump of that on our crotch once.” Kaitlyn excluded this information from the report.

Inserting corpses into body bags, on the other hand, provoked no symptoms in Mark Spitz. He removed four body bags from his pack and unfolded them, a genie of new-vinyl smell untangling its limbs. “You got Aunt Ethel and Gums over there,” Gary said.

Mark Spitz started with the skel in pink, to get the heaviest out of the way. He grabbed its ankles and dragged it onto the plastic, tucking its feet into the sleeve. Its pantyhose curled back over its toes like a banana peel.

He still had a soft spot for Miss Alcott, all these years later, for it had been in her English class that he realized he was utterly unremarkable. She gave Mark Spitz and his classmates a vocab test every Thursday-“Use this word from the assigned reading in a sentence”-and by December it was hard not to notice the pattern. He was a thorough, inveterate B. It was his road. He studied for hours and there it waited for him, circled in red ink, oddly welcoming, silently forgiving. Or he refused to open his books and gorged instead on a prime-time platter of sitcoms: he’d still get a B. It was a little play he performed each week and he hit his marks instinctively, stalking the boards of mediocrity. He was not unintelligent; in fact, his instructors agreed that he was often quite perceptive and canny in his contributions to discussion, a “true pleasure to have in the classroom.” The adjectives in his report cards, drawn from a special teachers’ collection of mild yet approving modifiers, described an individual of broader gifts than implied by the grades delivered at the end of each term. All the parts were there. Extra screws, even. There was just something wrong in the execution.

Over the years, Mark Spitz reconciled himself to his condition. It took the pressure off. A force from above held him down, and a counterforce from below bore him aloft. He hovered on unexceptionality.

He zipped up the corpse that resembled, under the blood and contorted features, his elementary-school teacher and then he remembered. He looked around and crawled to the copier and retrieved its wig. He unzipped the black bag and dropped it on its face.

He tossed Gary a body bag and the mechanic grabbed the feet of the faceless skel. Mark Spitz got started on the Marge. He looked into her black teeth. His arm still flared in the aftermath of its assault, even though the lattice of fibers in his fatigues had absorbed most of the pressure. He didn’t want to see what his bicep looked like under there. He’d probably have to tape a chemical compress around it for a week.