Summary:
The third section of the novel, “Sunday,” begins with the declaration that the Wall around Zone One had fallen, and that “the barricades collapsed with haste once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been” (p. 275). The narrative then backtracks to the morning of the day on which the wall fell.
The Omega Unit begins another day of duty, and they encounter two people who had killed themselves “identically laid-out junior one-bedrooms two floors apart” (p. 276). After taking the bodies down to the street, they continue on their route and come across a fortune-teller’s business. Immediately, Whitehead begins foreshadowing that something is about to happen, writing, “if it hadn’t been Omega’s last stop before R & R, perhaps Gary wouldn’t have been in such a jovial mode” (p. 279).
Gary begins playing and posing with the fortune teller straggler. After he places his hand in the fortune-teller’s hand, the fortune teller awakes and chomps deep into the meat between the index finger and thumb” (p. 284). She eats his thumb before Kaitlyn shoots her in the head.
Kaitlyn and Mark frantically give Gary antibiotics in the futile belief that the medicine “snuffed out the plague if you swallowed it quickly enough” (p. 285). Mark helps move Gary to a couch and warps him in a quilt. They begin talking to distract Gary from the gravity of the situation. Mark reveals that his nickname derives from “an Olympic swimmer in the previous century,” hence the joke about Mark not being able to swim (p. 287). Mark explains that the name has extra meaning because of “the black-people-can’t-swim thing” (p. 287). Gary responds, “they can’t? You can’t?” which indicates for the first time in the novel that Mark is black. Mark then suspects that Gary holds racist views, and thinks that it is unlikely that racism will be eliminated in the new society.
Gary begins fading in and out of consciousness. Mark tells him that when he worked as a wrecker on Quiet Storm’s crew, he later discovered “the clandestine heart of… [her] maneuvers” (p. 288). On a helicopter ride to Zone One, Mark saw that Quiet Storm had secretly been rearranging all the cars on the highway into a cryptic message but that “we don’t know how to read it yet” (p. 290).
Mark leaves to get Gary to retrieve more medicine, and Katilyn follows him outside, saying “I only came out here in case [Gary] wanted a minute to off himself” (p. 291). Mark then hurries over to the headquarters of Fort Wanton.
The narrative then transitions to the description of Kaitlyn’s experiences on the Last Night which happened on the weekend of her birthday. Kaitlyn had traveled by train to visit friends. On the way back, her train was delayed on the tracks for hours. She then notices “soldiers spilling onto the gravel shoulder of the right-of-way in their hazmat suits” (p. 295-296). She later discovers that a passenger on the train had “turned feral in his seat” and started biting other passengers (p. 296). Although the train is quarantined, Kaitlyn escapes and comes to “master the new lessons” of life after the plague (p. 297).
Mark returns to the headquarters and notices that the soldiers guarding the wall of Zone One had started to shoot their guns “without cessation” (p. 298). He begins to smell the “magnitude of the stench” of the bullets and the gore (p. 299).
Mark goes to the Lieutenant’s office which is now occupied by Fabio. Mark tells Fabio about Gary, and both men realize that stragglers, which had previously been inert, had suddenly transformed into skels. Bozeman appears and reveals that Fort Wanton has “lost communication with everyone” (p. 302). They go to the roof and see a horde of skels “shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the avenue” (p. 303).
Mark realizes that he has to return to Kaitlyn and Gary, but before he can leave, he sees “the concrete slab hit the ground” as the wall collapses (p. 305). The skels start charging into Zone One. Bozeman proposes that they try to escape to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, but the others believe that it would be futile to believe they would be reduced there. Dejected, Ms. Macy admits that the leaders in Buffalo are “probably trying to figure out which island to settle on” (p. 311).
The group sees a truck on the street and runs to reach it. Along the way, Mark sees that “four blood-streaked hands snatched [Fabio] into the vortex” (p. 313). Bozeman drives the truck down North Main Street, swerving to avoid the skels. Mark realizes that he cannot leave his unit behind and hops off the truck near the fortune-teller’s. He then hears the truck crash in the distance.
Back inside the fortune-teller's, Mark discovers that Gary had killed himself before he could be converted by the plague. Mark lights a candle, and goes through Gary’s pockets, finding a “picture of Corsica” taken from a magazine (p. 317) Mark then thinks back to the last time someone had taken his own picture. He remembers meeting a family, the Smiths, at an abandoned hotel. After staying together for two nights, the Smiths ask to take a photo of Mark. The following morning, after the Smiths have departed, bandits attack the hotel, killing and torturing many.
Mark then thinks about his dream of living in New York City and admits to himself that “that city didn’t exist anymore” (p. 320). He also comes to realize that “the world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place” (p. 321). Finally, with the building surrounded by skels, Mark concludes that “you have to learn to swim sometime” (p. 322). He then walks out into the horde of skels, and the novel ends with his fate left unknown.
Analysis:
The number three plays a prominent role in Zone One. Mark's family had three members, each unit of sweepers has three members, the Tromanhauser children are triplets, and the novel is divided into three parts set across three days. Here, Whitehead appears to be making connections to the importance of the same number in Christian theology. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity holds that God is divided into three coequal parts – the Father, The Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. It is also believed that after being crucified, Jesus was resurrected three days later. After the third day in Zone One, however, the exact opposite of resurrection occurs: the wall collapses and Fort Wanton falls.
This is revealed in the first sentences of the novel's third section. By then tracking back to the events before the wall fell, Whitehead fills the final pages with a sense of inevitability such that whatever happens, the outcome is already known. This sense of suspense builds when the Omega Unit enters the fortune-teller's room. Immediately, there is a sense of irony in the existence of a fortune-teller straggler – surely, she should have been able to predict the plague and save herself. Yet, as the narrator observes, "any séance was doomed" in the face of such a powerful plague (p. 282). Along with the casino earlier in the novel, the fortunate-teller is also a potent symbol. By joking around with the fortune-teller straggler, Gary has effectively tempted fate. Of course, Gary does not deserve the fate that he experiences, yet there is a sense in which he is being punished for his lack of humanity toward the stragglers. After all, it is Mark–who views such behavior as "disrespectful"–who survives the longest in the novel.
In the conversation between Gary and Mark after Gary has been bitten, Whitehead explicitly addresses the racial dynamics at work in the book. Up until this point, Mark's race had not been identified. This is an entirely intentional element of the novel. In an article on Zone One, scholar Grace Heneks reads the novel as a critique of the notion that the election of Barack Obama served as "proof that the U.S. is at last post-racial" (p. 63). Indeed, Whitehead makes it clear that racism was not eradicated by the plague, just as it has not disappeared in our present world. Again, Whitehead pushes back against the notion of an optimistic post-apocalyptic potentiality, for "if they could bring back paper-work...they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns" (p. 288). This scene refigures the entire novel as an allegory for race relations in contemporary America; several other scholars, such as Jessica Hurley, have offered analyses to this effect.
Gary's death corresponds to the broader collapse of order and structure in Zone One. Shortly after his death, the wall collapses. Of course, the wall–as the divide between order and chaos, human and skel–was an important symbol throughout the novel. Yet at this point, Mark finally comes to realize that the project of resurrecting New York had been impossible all along. While "the wall had kept this reality from him," Mark now sees that "it would not hold, it was obvious" (p. 304). Sure enough, the wall collapses and brings Fort Wanton–and all hope for societal regeneration–with it.
The novel's final scene contains several important dimensions. First, Mark is left all alone. While he had been surviving in cooperation with others for most of the novel, this is no longer possible. The illusion of a reconstituted society–with capitalism and a central government–has ultimately been defeated. At this point, Mark finally realizes that his dream, to live in New York as it once was, will never happen. In turn, he acknowledges that "that city didn't exist anymore" and that "the world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place" (p. 321). It is with this understanding that Mark concludes, "you have to learn to swim sometime" (p. 322). Here, Whitehead circles back to the racial commentary implicit in the novel, with the subtext being that Mark might finally be able to overcome the trappings of the old world with its racism and everything else. Ultimately, however, it's up to the reader whether or not they believe that Mark will survive the skels in Zone One. Rather than offering a definite conclusion to the novel, Whitehead leaves many possibilities open.
