Whitehead shows his skill for poetic cadence, but because the sentences give the reader little information about the characters, they end up feeling hollow. For example: “[O]n Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing.” The slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing. Beautifully rendered, but what does this sentence tell us about Gary or the narrator, Mark Spitz? The dominant presence here is Whitehead, not the characters or the effect they have on one another.
Another example: “What impotent rebellion they enacted, feebly tapping the leather facsimile of their horns and spitting the top-shelf profanities.” Spitting the top-shelf profanities. Lovely, but can we hear the profanities, please? Can we see Spitz interacting with his surroundings? I kept waiting for Spitz to lose control, to dissolve into the chaos that spawned his new-found identity. Instead we get Whitehead’s measured prose, his bloated language and heartless characters.
I continued to read. Each night I would open the book and let lifeless sentence after sentence wash over me. I felt apathy toward the characters and their fate. And yet when I fell asleep, I would dream exclusively of the dead. For weeks after I finished the book, they haunted my dreams, invading my apartment, crashing into windshields, dodging shotgun bullets. I would awaken, sweat-drenched and afraid, and fall right back into the same dream. I lost hours of restful sleep in breathless flight.
At the same time that I was reading Zone One, I was finishing Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn’s memoir about becoming and not becoming his father. Surprisingly, I noticed many congruences. As Spitz sweeps Manhattan’s high-rises, searching for dead to eliminate, Flynn navigates Boston’s streets, plucking the homeless from park benches. Both Spitz and Flynn work for government agencies, both voluntarily confront that which others would prefer to ignore.
I used these parallels to trace a path to the underlying cause of my nightmares. Like the protagonists in these stories, my dream-self was caught in a running loop, motivated by fear. In one of the latter nightmares, I dreamed the dead approached my apartment, and I had to make a split decision, leave or die. I wedged one cat beneath each armpit, confident of our escape, and looked down only to discover my lovelies had slipped into the realm of the undead. Heartbroken, horrified, I watched my life transform into something unrecognizable, something that I could not maneuver into a recognizable place, and so I ran.
