Zone One: Touring the Past and Cannibalizing the Future, Ecohorror VIII

Black American novelist Colson Whitehead definitely gets it: zombies are a way of understanding the past. Specifically, zombies are away of understanding the past as a thing that clings, that won’t let go. Zombies embody the horrifying idea that humans are fleshy bags of meat, powered by rapacity and the desire to consume up other human beings, willy nilly, without discretion, and that they always have been that, and that our efforts to escape that brutal reality are futile, because it’s coming to get us, day by day, dragging footfall by dragging footfall.

In Whitehead’s luminous 2011 novel Zone One, we meet Mark Spitz, a survivor of a zombie apocalypse who now works with a group of other survivors to try to take out as many zombies as possible, so that New York City can become habitable again. But it’s a hard job, not only because the world is broken and there are flesh-eating monsters everywhere, but also because the survivors are all half broken themselves.

Everyone who survived Last Night—which was the last night on earth before the zombie plague obliterated modern society and most of the human species—suffers from a condition called PASD: Post-Apocalpytic Stress Disorder. Needless to say, this is a gallow’s humor riff on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. But it’s not only that. PASD, pronounced as a word, is homophonous with “past.” People who survived the zombocalypse, then, are all bedeviled by the past. The novel registers this explicitly at the very end: “Not enough memory, with his survival programs running, for his PASD. His past.” (314) What this means, in practice, is that whenever people start thinking about their pasts, they get overwhelmed and make mistakes. Often fatal ones.

This is why the main character, Mark Spitz, has to be vigilant to avoid “the forbidden thought,” a thought never precisely specified in the novel, but that has to do with a desire to retreat into memories of the Times Before. Survivors of Last Night and the subsequent global takeover of the zombies are all at risk of looking too much into the past, hoping perhaps to recreate What Was in the wreckage of What It. For Colson, it’s that commitment to the past—or, rather, the delusional belief that it could somehow be restored as it was—that’s truly dangerous.

But of course, at the same time, the zombies are the past. The zombies are all beings, in this novel, who monotonously carry out whatever their workaday jobs were in the Before Times, right up until “fresh meat” comes their way, at which point their predatory instincts kick in, and they go hog-wild cannibal-corpse, trying to eat their victims’ faces off. Mark Spitz, early in the novel, discovers a room full of zombified Human Resources workers, in a blown-out office building. These HR zombies had become locked in the room and couldn’t figure out how to escape, so they continued to bump around, interacting with familiar objects in basic ways. The zombies are haunted by their own past selves, their own past lives. They stand as shadowy echoes of a world that once was, a world of systems, paychecks, and consumerism. Until they notice Mark, and try to eat his face off.

And of course, ultimately, for this novel, the past that haunts everyone is the past of 21^st century Western capitalism. Everyone had Things and Jobs. Everyone had Family and People. Everyone had the Internet. Everyone had Medicine and Education. Everyone had Government and Structures, Electricity and Food and Supply Chains. Everyone became totally used to and dependent upon these things.

And then, one day, they were gone. All gone. Destroyed by a zombie plague that turned into a cannibalistic scourge on humanity. The survivors remember when they had Things and Institutions and Technologies. Ultimately, what they most remember, though the novel is very subtle about this, is that they used to have a Future. Mark Spitz was gearing up to be a lawyer. Now, since Last Night, there’s really no law, let alone lawyers, let alone law schools. All gone. As a result, Mark Spitz has no future as a lawyer.

This zombie apocalypse is about the overtaking of people by the past, not just in the sense of Post-Apocaylptic Stress Disorder, nor just in the sense that dead people who don’t die are coming after them, but also in the sense that the future isn’t coming anymore. And I don’t mean the glorious future of science fiction films, in which people fly around in clean-energy hovercars and are vaccinated in infancy against every known form of cancer. I’m not even talking about the increasingly improbable looking political future in which every human being is guaranteed a basic standard of dignity and life, and is literate, fed, and housed. What Whitehead’s novel understands very clearly is the precarity of even the most boring future: in his novel, even the mundane, quotidian future—the future we all quietly envision—in which society overall continues to have Things, Structures, Information, Technology, and Laws isn’t going to happen.

Because the nature of the past in this novel is that it eats the future, just as the zombies eat the faces off the uninfected humans.

The seeds of this radical pessimism about the future get sown early and powerfully in the novel, when Mark Spitz thinks back briefly on the Before Times, and quietly perceives that the zombie apocalypse was always already happening, and only given its most concrete and terrifying form by the plague that turned most of the world’s human population into cannibal corpses. The narrative talks about the times before Last Night, and describes how people were “lurching specimens” (4) walking around New York City, their heads glued to their devices. Or it talks about how Mark Spitz’s parents’ hands lay “dead on his shoulder” (4) in family photographs. In one particularly beautiful passage about the Before Times, Whitehead describes Manhattan: “The city as a ghost ship on the last ocean at the rim of the world. It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature” (7). Manhattan, this tenuous creature. Before Last Night, things were already precarious, already disintegrating. Hands were already dead, and people were already lurching about like zombies.

The apocalyptic future is already here, Whitehead warns. Look around you.

And it’s been here for a long time: “Their mouths could no longer manage speech yet they spoke nonetheless, saying what the city had always told its citizens, from the first settlers hundreds of years ago, to the shattered survivors of this garrison. What the plague had always told its hosts, from the first human being to have its blood invaded, to the last victim out in the wasteland: I am going to eat you up.” (305) For Whitehead, the zombie apocalypse has been in progress, in various manifestations, for as long as their has been colonization. I am going to eat you up.

So, in Whitehead’s novel, the past eats the future. But what’s worse is that it also eats the present. In the wasted zombie world of Mark Spitz and his comrades, whose job it is, in fact, to destroy any zombies that they can find, to try to give surviving humans a better chance at rebuilding the world, we learn that “There was no more gossip and no more news.” Think about that. No more news. The news isn’t the future. The news is the present. The news is the idea that novel things can happen, be reported, and transform by that reportage into our understanding of Where We Are Now. All gone. So the future is eaten by the past, and the present is not representable in language, first because it’s not happening and second because there’s no good way to communicate it.

There is no gossip, there is no news.

I will tell you quite honestly, that was the line in the novel that made me the most afraid. What would it be like to live in a world with no news? I mean, on one level, it’d be great: I can’t tell you how many times lately I’ve regretted looking at the New York Times, because it’s totally nuked my chill for the day/weekend/week. But we’re talking in the novel about a world where there is no news. Nothing new happens. It’s all the same, day in and day out: stay alive, kill zombies, stay alive, kill zombies; make alliances, watch them falter, make alliances, watch them falter.

That, my friends, is some scary, scary shit.

Most zombie narratives of the 21^st century focus closely on the physical violence and horrific dehumanization of cannibal corpses. And for good reason: it makes a great, gross film. But the best zombie narratives of the 21^st century—and this novel is certainly among them, as are The Last of Us, The Girl with All the Gifts, and The Walking Dead—focus our attention more on the utter wasting of our Lifeways, our Systems. What would we do if the basic mechanisms by which we sustain individual and—more important—social life were suddenly ripped away.

“Where was The System now, after the calamity? It had been an invisible fist floating above them for so long and now the fingers were open, disjointed, and everything slipped through, everything escaped.” (21)

The survivors and a provisional government based—of all places—in Buffalo, New York have decided to try to clear New York of “skels,” the popular word for zombified people. The reason they want to do so? “The symbolism. If you can bring back New York City, you can bring back the world.” (121) Except, of course, they can’t bring back New York City. Just when it seems the zombie killers are making real headway, there’s a zombie surge: the skels break through the barricades, tear down the walls that separate the living from the dead (how’s that for a metaphor?), and overrun the resistance. The novel ends with our hero, Mark Spitz opening a door and “walk[ing] into the sea of the dead.” (322)

There is no escaping the past. It will come for you and absorb you, like it or not. Because it’s bigger than you, and, in a very deep sense, it’s more powerful than you.

This is what the brilliant Black American poet Claudia Rankine means when she talks about the relationship between a “historical self” and a “self self”: we want to think of ourselves as “self self”: agential, autonomous, present agents and subjects of our own volition. But our “historical self,” which is how our individual self carries forward and conveys the history of how we got here—our racial identities, our gender identities, our family histories, our class position, our geographic location—has a tendency to shout down and crowd out our “self self” in certain situations. Is that good? Is it bad? No, it simply is. Whitehead conveys this idea beautifully in the novel by cross-fading zombocalypse language with the language of race-based enslavement in American history: he talks about the idea of getting rid of the zombies as “reconstruction,” and he notes that “untold Americans still walked the great out there, beyond order’s embrace, like slaves who didn’t know they’d been emancipated.” (48)

The past is bigger than you are, and it’s stronger than you are. It has much more intrinsic pull on who you are than you might want it to. The past can—and will, eventually, in Whitehead’s novel—eat you up, pick the flesh off your bones, and convert your wonderful “self self” into rotting meat.

And in the end, ponders Whitehead, maybe that’s just fine. Maybe what the world really needs is a purge of humanity. No matter how hard the clean-up crews of surviving humans have tried in the novel to get rid of zombies and the unwanted presence of living death in the shell of a city that is Manhattan, Whitehead reminds us that “the elements and microbes were doing a swell job of cleaning things up on their own.” (174) And this is why, in addition to being a harrowing zombie narrative, this novel also qualifies as ecohorror: we’re seeing a world in which humans have ultimately to buckle to their subservient status in the larger ecosystem of natural processes and decay. The System can’t beat Nature forever. The zombie apocalypse merely accelerates and literalizes that already-present truth.

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