Summary:
Back in the present of the novel, Mark is walking around the camp when he is offered a ride by Bozeman, “Wonton’s top military clerk” (p. 201). In the jeep with Bozeman is Ms. Macy, a representative from the government in Buffalo. Mark is struck by her beauty and glamor.
Bozeman takes Mark and Ms. Macy to an old luxury hotel. They walk around the lobby and Ms. Macy begins inspecting the property. When Mark asks her why she is visiting Fort Wanton, she says that “Manhattan is going to be the site of the next summit” (p. 207). They then drive back to the headquarters.
The narrative then shifts to another flashback scene describing Mark’s experience at a farmhouse in Northampton, Massachusetts. While the timeline is not made clear, it is subsequently revealed that this happened after his time with Mim, during which time Mark had been wandering alone for weeks. Approaching the farmhouse, he notices that it had been well-fortified and was in good condition. He then sees a skel in the distance, and is about to shoot it before a woman opens the door and tells him to “‘get inside’” (p. 212).
In the house, he meets Margie, Tad and Jerry. While Tad and Jerry are suspicious of Mark, Margie convinces them to let Mark stay. They trade stories about their lives and begin to grow close to one another, though while “Mark Spitz’s hosts began to air their post-plague plans and schemes” Mark believes that “hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it” (p. 222).
A group of skels begin to gather around the farmhouse, forcing them to stay inside. After three days, Margie secretly climbs onto the roof and begins to throw bombs at the skels below. Alerted to the presence of people in the farmhouse, the skels begin to attack. Mark begins to shoot at them, but they quickly destroy the fortifications around the farmhouse. Jerry climbs onto the roof, but falls “into their hungry” but Mark speculates that Margie might have pushed him (p. 229). Just as the skels enter the house, a group of soldiers arrive to rescue them. On the way to Camp Screaming Eagle, Margie escapes from the group alone into the woods.
Back in the present of the novel, Mark walks around Fort Wanton with Bozeman and Ms. Macy. They come across the Disposal unit, who are tasked with incinerating the bodies of skels. It is revealed that Mark continually sees ash falling around Zone One but that “it could not be said [that] others in Zone One shared Mark Spitz’s perception of the ash” (p. 232). Mark’s perception of the ash is revealed to be a “particular face of PASD” (p. 233).
Just as he is parting from Bozeman and Ms. Macy, Mark overhears Bozeman say that “the gates were breached” at the Bubbling Brooks settlement camp and that the status of the Tromanhauser Triplets is unknown (p. 237). This piece of news makes Mark realize that ‘Wanton was off-kilter” (p. 239).
Another flashback returns the narrative to Mark and Mim at the toy store. They continue to stay together through the winter and Mark feels that he was in “the healthiest relationship he’d ever had” (p. 241). Together, they outfit the toy store with goods scavenged from surrounding stores. One day, however, Mim goes out to “scare up some pepper for the lentil soup” and never returns” (p. 237). Mark never sees her again.
The narrative then abruptly shifts to the present, where everyone at Fort Wanton is mourning the Lieutenant at a wake. While it had been said that the Lieutenant had been ordered to travel to Buffalo, it is revealed that he had actually “jammed a grenade into his mouth” and committed suicide (p. 251). Everyone proceeds to get drunk, and Kaitlyn and Mark speculate as to why the Lieutenant might have killed himself. Kaitlyn simply says “the subway” and the narrative is thrown into yet another flashback.
It is revealed that several weeks into Mark’s time at Fort Wanton, the Omega Unit was paired with the Gamma Unit to clean up the subway system around Zone One. One day, the Lieutenant joined them on the job. When the Gamma and Omega Units split up to clear different lines, the Lieutenant decides to stick with Omega. Moments later, the Omega Unit hears shots in the distance. When they ran back to join them, they discover a “face decorated with gore” and a “feeding huddle” devouring the Gamma Unit (p. 265).
Mark remembers the last time he’d seen the Lieutenant during their weekly Sunday night drinking sessions. He recalls the Lieutenant saying that he thought the plague was “comeuppance for a flatlined culture” (p. 271). The second section of the novel concludes.
Analysis:
The introduction of Ms. Macy into the plot highlights a prominent feature of the novel: the persistence of an elite class and the continuation of inequality after the plague. Indeed, while Mark and the rest of the sweepers are tirelessly and gruesomely cleaning up Zone One, Ms. Macy is scouting luxury venues to host a summit of global leaders. As Whitehead writes earlier in the novel, "the big groups were in again: the elite antsy to drop their pawns, and the pawns hungry for purposes after so long without instruction" (p. 110). Whitehead is thus insistent that the plague will have fundamentally changed some parts of society while leaving others intact. One of the most dystopic elements of Zone One is the fact that residents in Zone One are only able to buy products from companies that have signed sponsorship agreements with the government in Buffalo. Even the goods they scavenge while on duty must be from these approved brands.
It is all but absurd that such formalities still exist even after the world has collapsed, yet here Whitehead is making an important argument. Often, post-apocalyptic narratives have a utopian dimension. That is to say, they offer a vision of how a world can be remade, even improved, after total disaster. Whitehead, however, is skeptical of this notion. In Zone One he suggests that our powers to imagine, let alone create, a new world are narrower than we might like to think. More than forging an opportunity for change and new ways of living, the plague in Zone One merely intensifies old power structures. Corporations, in close cooperation with the government, are able to secure monopolies, while the government elite, in the safety of the fortified bunkers in Buffalo, are able to order citizens to do dangerous but necessary tasks like sweeping on their behalf. In this way, Zone One seems to take up the famous claim made by cultural theorist Fredric Jameson that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."
In this section of the novel, we finally discover what happened to Mim. The tragedy of her disappearance is made more pronounced by the description of her and Mark's happy relationship, which Whitehead identifies as "the healthiest relationship he'd ever had" (p. 241). It might seem strange that it took an apocalypse for Mark to finally have a functional relationship. Here, however, Whitehead is suggesting that certain circumstances might force us to appreciate others in a way we haven't before. While Mark might have "had a habit of making his girlfriends into things that were less than human" before the plague, he is now finally able to appreciate the humanity of his partner (p. 241). He might be able to do so precisely because he understands the fragility of human bonds after the plague. Once Mim goes, the narrator solemnly declares, "people disappeared. You never knew it was the last time you'd see them" (p. 247).
Interestingly, Mim's disappearance is juxtaposed with the Lieutenant's death. This sudden, startling succession of losses expresses to the reader the sheer amount of grief that survivors had to face. Yet while both Mim and the Lieutenant meant a great deal to Mark, he responds to the loss in a stoic way. In this sense, Whitehead again incorporates the presence of Mark's PASD into the construction of the novel itself, given that one of the key features of Mark's experiences of PASD is "an invisible layer [that] divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension" (p. 66). Mark's traumatic experiences have thus insulated him from feeling further grief. In this way, much of Mark's character can be read through the lens of the symptoms of PASD.
