Summary:
The narrative returns again to the office building where Mark was attacked. Whitehead describes the difference between “skels” and “stragglers” – whereas skels “came to eat you…stragglers on the other hand, did not move” (p. 60). A number of stragglers countered by the Omega Unit are then described, including a grotesque scene of a woman “wearing a gorilla costume…[that] draped off her shoulder, deflated on her shrunken form “(p. 64).
It is revealed that Mark suffers from “PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder” which includes a wide variety of symptoms, from “feelings of sadness and unhappiness” to “back pain” (p. 67-68).
The Omega Unit proceeds to place the skels into body bags. It is explained that in the “first few weeks they tossed the bodies out the windows” but members of the Disposal team complained (p. 74). The sweepers thus have to carry the body bags to the street, where they’re collected by the Disposal team and incinerated.
Mark is then prompted to remember what happened on the “Last Night” before the plague effectively caused a total societal collapse. As Whitehead explains, Mark “and his friend Kyl had spent a few nights in Atlantic City at one of the new boutique casinos” (p. 81). There, they gambled aggressively and “did not watch the news or receive news from the outside” (p. 83). On their way back to Long Island, they encounter traffic but assume it’s just a rush of people returning after the weekend. When Mark gets back to his parent’s home, however, he walks to his parent’s bedroom and discovers his mother bent over his father “gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestines” (p. 87). Mark compares the scene to an earlier memory of walking in on his mother performing oral sex on his father.
The plot returns to the Omega Unit disposing of the skel’s bodies, before shifting to a description of the early effort to secure New York City, when soldiers “rappelled from sunships into key intersections, eliminating a hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and floating out of the strike zone” (p. 93). The soldiers then established the perimeter of Zone One and largely cleared it free of skels; however, “any structure under twenty stories was left to the sweepers” (p. 98).
Mark then describes the way that skels and stragglers are treated by sweepers. Often the sweepers play games like “Solve the Straggler” and “Name that Bloodstain!” to keep themselves entertained while on duty, but some sweepers do humiliating things like “draw a Hitler mustache on one” (p. 100-102).
The Omega Unit returns to the apartment in which they had been staying, “a former textile warehouse that had been converted into spectacular lofts” (p. 103). Mark struggles to sleep and remembers his arrival at Fort Wanton. Mark recalls his first meeting with Lieutenant, whom he comes to admire, and the two swap stories about the first stragglers they ever saw.
Returning back to the present, where Gary and Kaitlyn are soundly asleep, Mark thinks about Gary’s experience on the Last Night. It is revealed that Gary’s two twin brothers died when someone at their prom started attacking other students and the police “locked the doors of the premises per the measures suggested by the government about the emerging epidemic” (p. 125).
Mark gets ready to sleep, and thinks about “barricades' ' both personal and physical. He admits that “they were his family, Kaitlyn and Gary, and he was theirs” (p. 127). Mark lies in the darkness and the first section of the novel ends with the sentence, “Yes, he’d always wanted to live in New York” (p. 128).
Analysis:
Flashbacks play a prominent role in Zone One. In fact, they take up more of the novel than the action described during the three-day period in which the novel is set. With his description of PASD in this section of the novel, Whitehead cleverly indicates why these flashbacks are so prevalent. That is to say, PASD is what causes Mark to obsessively think about the past, and each of these memories is recorded as flashbacks that interrupt the linear narration of the novel. Mark, however, is not alone in reminiscing about the past. Indeed, the past is what binds all of the characters in the novel together, and the primary social ritual of the novel is the sharing of stories of the Last Night. As scholar Andrew Hoberek observes, the Last Night stories, and the traumas depicted therein, are "the thing that makes everyone unique (because everyone's is different) and the same (because everyone has one)" (p. 412).
It is in this section of the novel that Mark's own Last Night story is revealed. Interestingly, the bulk of Mark's story describes his experiences at the casino. The symbolism of the casino should be obvious enough. Throughout the novel, Whitehead does not shy away from critiquing the society that preceded the plague: a society that closely resembles our own. The casino thus represents the epitome of capitalist greed and excess. Indeed, some scholars, such as Henry Giroux, have even adopted the term "casino capitalism" to describe the risky forms of investing that devastated the global economy in 2007 and 2008. In the novel, the casino is depicted as a place of mindless distraction. It provides Mark and his friend Kylee with such a consuming experience that "their brains fogged over as possibility and failure enthralled them in a perpetual and tantalizing loop" (p. 82). In other words, the thrill of gambling zombifies them to the point that they realize "after thirty-six hours...they hadn't yet left the premises" (p. 82). Here, Whitehead is suggesting–albeit in an exaggerated manner–that many of us are too distracted by the thrill of contemporary capitalism to realize what is going on around us. Indeed, Whitehead seems to be reminding us that the plague of climate change is already "driving primordial species to extinction" (p. 153).
Throughout the novel, Whitehead often distorts linear narration to the point that a memory precedes the progression of action in the present. For example, when Mark returns home after his time at the casino, he walks up to his parent's bedroom. He is then reminded of when he was six and "had walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job" (p. 87). At first, it is not clear why Mark might have remembered this, nor why Whitehead finds it necessary to tell his readers this; however, this memory becomes clear as soon as Mark walks in on his mother "gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his [father's] intestines, which in the crepuscular flicker of the television, adopted a phallic aspect" (p. 88). This comparison between oral sex and cannibalism is intended to make the reader uncomfortable, but more than just the shock factor, Whitehead suggests in this scene that our memories fundamentally impact our experience and interpretation of the world, whether we want them to or not. In this way, Mark cannot help but think back to the memory from when he was six. This key scene unlocks many of the dynamics of the memory at work throughout the novel.
In this section of the novel, we begin to see the depth of Mark's compassion and humanity. This is most evident in the scene in which the Omega Unit encounters the straggler they name Ned the Copy Boy. Here, the narrator describes the kinds of "skel mutilation" that many sweepers perform (p. 101). Mark, however, finds this practice sadistic and abusive. By this point in the novel, it is clear that Mark actually feels compassion toward the stragglers. When they come across Ned, Mark says "What if we let him stay? ... he's not hurting anyone" (p. 102). Thus unlike Gary, Kaitlyn, and most other sweepers, Mark is able to find humanity in these creatures. While he might be lacking in traits common to most heroes, Whitehead suggests that Mark's empathy and ability to care for the stragglers are the traits that make him exceptional.
