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for briefings and strategy sessions, spreading out from Wonton Main at Broadway and Canal according to their disparate appetites. General Summers, for example, claimed an elegant and cavernous dim sum palace on Bowery, rescuing it from the enlisted men’s amusements. For months, the establishment had been used as a drag-racing track, the dim sum carts caroming across the linoleum. Friday nights became quite bleak when Summers put a stop to the competitions, until the marines relocated their arena to the roller rink. (Mark Spitz came across the roller rink’s gigantic disco ball at random intersections as it made its journey through the metropolis, their scapegoat tumbleweed, kicked and shoved and rolled around the streets by the inebriated soldiers, shedding squares like mirrored tears.) Corporal Brent of the U.S. Army Corps, for his part, conducted his daily planning sessions at a noodle house, addressing his men and women from behind the counter as if serving up strands of udon instead of baroque strategies of city planning (or, more accurately, reconfiguration). The officers spread out, homesteading. Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, Mark Spitz noted, and already gentrification had resumed.
    The signage was in Chinese save for the Health Department regulations hectoring beneath the pictograms. His mother’s logic held that a strong congruency between patron and cuisine signaled an “authentic place” and that they must serve up primo Chinese, Greek, or Lithuanian cuisine, what have you. Which had never made sense to Mark Spitz: Plenty of American restaurants with a majority-American clientele served crap American fare. Perhaps the emphasis was on the authenticity of its mediocrity.
    In their meager bid at becoming regulars, Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn returned to the table they’d occupied at the previous briefing. Gary joined them in the coming weeks, but at that point they’d only been together for one grid, a bland residential stretch on Water Street. Omega hadn’t clicked yet, hoisting their own personal three-person foxhole around wherever they went. That afternoon, Gary squeezed in with some guys he’d served with in Stamford securing abandoned gasworks. The majority of those in the sweeper units had been stationed in the Northeast doing infrastructure work, cleaning out the Corridor as Mark Spitz had been, or doing recon in the key metro areas and industrial clusters, which had been Gary’s previous posting. Mark Spitz arrived at the island without a crew, the only one from the I-95 detail to transfer to the sweep.
    The dumpling joint was prepped for service when they shuffled in for their first briefing, but the soldiers knocked the settings into incremental disarray week by week, as if across a single, slow-motion lunch shift. There were thirty of them, teenagers and men and women in their twenties, with exceptions in the form of characters like Metz. Metz looked fifty-something, but of course the late miseries had aged them so Mark Spitz couldn’t say for sure. He had what Mark Spitz had come to call the Wasteland Stare. On special ops, the sweepers were equipped with night-vision goggles that featured gecko protuberances allowing them to see into different spectra; Metz and his brethren were equipped with additional lenses, and through them they gaped at stumps, shreds of structures, a blasted plain, as if through a visor of devastation. Whatever Mark Spitz saw—a typical downtown slop joint, fly strips twisting in the corners—Metz gazed upon an entirely different and cruel landscape. Given the vast galaxy of survivor dysfunction—PASD in its sundry tics, fugues, and existential fevers—the Wastelanders’ particular corner of pathology was, Mark Spitz decided, unremarkable. Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one’s individuality.
    Steady raids had depleted the back room of sponsored energy drinks, but there was good word of mouth