Zone One

She wrote her way into the future. Buffalo huffed over its machinations and narratives of replenishment, and the wretched pheenies stabbed their bloody knees and elbows into the sand as they slunk toward their mirages. And then there were people like the Quiet Storm, who carved their own pawns and rooks out of the weak clay and deployed them across their board, engaged in their own strategic reconstructions. Mark Spitz saw her mosaic, in its immense tonnage, outlasting all of Buffalo’s schemes, the operations under way and the ones yet to be articulated. What readership did she address? Gods and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective. To Anyone Who Can Read This: Stay Away. Please Help. Remember Me.

“Maybe it says: It’s safe now, we’re gone. Maybe it says: I’m still here.” She had told him when she declined to leave the corridor that she wasn’t finished yet.

“Sounds like PASD to me,” Gary said. “In Rainbow Village this one guy wrote Bible verses in his own shit.” He tapped his vest after his sponsor cigarettes, drowsy. “Who’s going to go up and get me more penicillin?”

“I’ll go,” Mark Spitz said.

“Try not to fuck around, going on about how the ash is falling,” Gary said. “You’re not going to mention the ash, right?”

“Yes.”

“I see you looking out the window,” he said. “It’s best to keep it to yourself, I think.” Like a parent telling a kid to lay off the nostril-mining, just for an hour. People might talk.

“You’re not on your deathbed. Death-futon.”

“How am I supposed to light a cigarette with this?”

Mark Spitz waited for Kaitlyn to join him outside. Up the street, Disposal had tossed the bodies of the suicides into the back of their cart. The overcast sky ushered in premature evening and he wondered if it was going to rain, even though the thunder he heard wasn’t meteorological but martial. Kaitlyn emerged from the shop, wiping her fingers with antibacterial wipes. “He says he wants to stay here,” she said. “He doesn’t want to see anyone.”

“I’ll check in with Fabio, hit up the medic for something to make him more comfortable.” The euphemism came easily. “What if he turns quick?”

“I’m ready. I won’t leave him alone. I only came out here in case he wanted a minute to off himself.”

“Okay.”

“Run.”

He beat it uptown. Two blocks uptown he realized he’d forgotten his pack; he decided not to go back for it. The thunder of the artillery intensified, cleaved from the lightning that might have, for an instant, lit his passage through the worsening gloom, livened his ash into brief fireflies. The thunder has lost his brother, he thought. When was the last time they enjoyed a proper dinner as a family? Done it right, without griping about the brass at Wonton, complaining about blisters, had a dinner devoid of one person’s brooding or sullen reverie about the time before the flood. Omega had taken it for granted, the family meal. It came to him as he skidded onto Broadway: Kaitlyn’s birthday. They were yo-yoing up and down the stairwells of a corporate megalith and she’d dropped no less than three anecdotes detailing some of the key birthday parties of her youth: the educational visit to the eco-friendly ranch where alpacas nibbled gray pellets from her tiny palm, their rough tongues tickling; the excursion to the mad scientist’s laboratory where her third-grade friends had spun filaments of cotton candy; the surprise party it seemed the whole town was in on, so elaborately did the charade about the “visit to the dentist” unfold. Eventually Gary had no choice but to ask when her big day was. “Today,” she said, as the body bag in her hands spontaneously unzipped, loosing chunky gallons of fluids and innards.

Omega cut their biscuits in half for buns, lit a ball of C-4 to make a fire, and grilled up some spamburgers, which they consumed happily in the private room of an upscale Italian restaurant off Laight. “Fancy,” Gary said, belching. A pinch of cumin and coriander made all the difference, it was unanimous. Omega drank some of the Long Island cabernet that had been circulating around Wonton, after one of the generals dispatched a search-and-rescue team to the Bridgehampton vineyard. The vintners were ensconced at Camp El Dorado, became sponsors, patriots.

It was after they opened the cellophane on the coconut cupcakes and crooned the mandatory song that Kaitlyn told them the Last Night story she had held back for so long. Hers was no numb recital; she did not tell them out of compulsion to indulge in the cheap catharsis of the Big Share. She told them to eulogize to the disaster. She said, “Let me tell you about the night I started running, and make a toast to the end of that race.”