Summary:
The novel’s second section, “Saturday,” begins with a description of the bad dreams that Mark frequently experiences. Essentially, he dreams that he’s back in his old life but that “the other students and the teachers, fellow employees, and bosses were dead” (p. 131). Indeed, everything appears as it once did, except that the world is now populated by skels.
Mark then wakes up and the Omega Unit prepares for another day on the job. Mark and Mark begin to talk about the “kill fields” which are “meadows and mall parking lots brimming with the fallen dead” who have collapsed for no obvious reason (p. 135). The kill fields give some survivors hope that the plague is subsiding.
The narrator describes Mark’s approaches to telling the story of his Last Night. He has three versions of the story which increase in the amount of detail: “The Silhouette,” “The Anecdote,” and “The Obituary” (p. 138). Mark selects a version based on how comfortable he feels with the person he is telling the story.
Back in the present of the novel, the Omega Unit bumps into another team of sweepers, the Bravo Unit, on Fulton Street. The Bravo Unit consists of Angela, No Mas, and Carl, and Mark dislikes them because of No Mas’s cruelty towards the stragglers and because Angela and Carl liked to “reminisce about their time together in a bandit crew” (p. 142).
The two units discover that they have been assigned the same area to sweep, something which has never happened before. After some bickering, they decide to return to Fort Wanton to clarify the instructions.
In another flashback scene, Mark’s first meeting with Mim is described. After wandering alone for weeks, Mark arrived at a toy store in Connecticut where Mim had been hiding out. The two begin sharing stories of their life after the plague, and Mark grows “half in love with her before twilight” (p. 157). Mim shares her Last Night story and tells Mark about her three children who were killed at a birthday party. While she doesn’t say anything about her husband Harry, Mark knows that “you never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story” (p. 160).
Returning to the present, the Omega Unit walks back to Fort Wanton and Mark thinks about New York City, and how the rich were able to escape from the city when the plague began to intensify. Mark also thinks back to the “disaster flicks and horror movies” which he used to watch with the belief that “he’d survive the particular death scenario” (p. 165).
Mark Spitz tells Kaitlyn and Gary the origins of his nickname, which takes the form of another flashback. Back during his time at Happy Acres, Mark signed up to be a “wrecker” tasked with clearing the highways which were “clotted with paralyzed vehicles” from the people who had tried, and failed, to escape the plague (p. 168).
Mark is assigned to work on a section of the I-95 highway in Connecticut and goes to live at Fort Golden Gate, which had once been “one of the largest retirement communities in the state” (p. 170). Mark’s wrecker crew was led by Quiet Storm, a serious and solemn character who “had spent a year locked in a basement jail of a small-town police station” when the plague broke out (p. 174).
One day, the wrecking crew was sent to clear a bridge full of cars. One of the wreckers opened the back of a semi-truck and a “stupendous troop of skels” were released (p. 180). Seeing no other way to escape, members of the wrecking crew jump from the bridge down to the water below. Mark, however, does not jump because he is unable to swim. Instead, he jumps on top of a car and shoots down the skels, convinced that “he could not die” (p. 182).
The narrative shifts to another flashback, this time of Mark’s professional life before the plague. It is revealed that Mark “worked in Customer Relationship Management, New Media Department, of a coffee multinational” which seems to be modeled on Starbucks (p. 184). His job was to communicate with customers on social media on behalf of the brand. Notably, Mark and the customers are compared to zombies themselves as “denizens of the void…compulsively broadcasting the flimsy minutiae of their day-to-day on personal feeds and pages” (p. 185). Still, Mark admits that “it wasn’t the worst job he’d ever had” (p. 187).
In the present time of the novel, Mark visits a restaurant and is prompted to have yet another flashback, this time of a restaurant that he often visited with his family: “his family’s place for impulse visits and birthdays and random celebrations, season upon season” (p. 189). Caught up in these memories, the narrator observes that “he was a ghost. A straggler” (p. 192). Mark then begins to think of the future, and realizes that he’d never want to work the jobs he did before the plague.
The narrative shifts to another, more recent, flashback describing a ritual that developed between Lieutenant, Kaitlyn, and Mark. Each Sunday the three gather together to drink Whiskey and talk. Mark then thinks back to all the things he misses about life before the plague, including “the stupid stuff everyone missed, the wifi and the workhouse chromium toasters…His people. His family and friends and twinkly-eyes lunchtime counterfolk. The dead” (p. 198).
Analysis:
This section of the novel contains the first significant foreshadowing of the impending collapse of Fort Wanton: the confusion between the Omega and the Bravo Units. While each sweeper unit is normally given its own area to cover, this is the first time that two units have been assigned the same area. At this point in the novel, this confusion might seem unremarkable; however, as will become clear shortly, this is an obvious signal that the organizational structure at Fort Wanton is beginning to fail. One of Whitehead's greatest strengths as a writer in this genre is his ability to foreshadow without ever being too obvious.
Much of this section of the novel consists of flashbacks. Prominent amongst these flashbacks is the story of Mark and Mim. While Mim had been referenced in passing up to this point, this is the first time that her significance is explained in detail. The interesting thing about Whitehead's structuring of time in the novel is that the reader knows that something is going to happen to Mim because she is absent in the novel except for these flashbacks. The objective for the reader, then, is to find out what happened to Mim. As usual, Whitehead continually delays this big reveal.
From their first meeting, it is clear that Mark and Mim share a connection. It is worthwhile to note that the two meet at a toy store, a rather unlikely venue. Whitehead is never too explicit with the explanation of symbols in the novel; however, Mim's choice to hide out in a toy store could be interpreted as a way of mourning the loss of her children. Indeed, before the plague Mark and Mim lived very different, even incompatible, lives. Nonetheless, they develop an intensely close bond. In this way, Whitehead suggests that trauma can cut across all differences and forge new kinds of connection. The reader knows, however, that the connection between Mark and Mim will be severed, but Whitehead shifts the narrative before revealing any specifics.
This section also touches on a motif that runs through the novel. At several points, Mark describes watching apocalyptic movies as a child, often with his father. In the context of an actually apocalyptic world, these movies seem so strange. Whitehead seems to be interrogating the fixation with disaster that manifests in these “disaster flicks and horror movies” (p. 165). Given that Whitehead is writing in the disaster genre himself, he is acutely aware of the fact that many of us enjoy such cultural works, even if they depict a reality that we would never want to experience. This is a complex and perhaps inexplicable attraction, yet Whitehead offers up a rationale in that perhaps this genre is so popular because, like Mark Spitz, we imagine that we could "survive the particular death scenario" (p. 165).
