Particularly, this comment from Bryant woke me from my un-novelised slumbers:
I no longer understand the world I inhabited on my last day of class prior to Spring Break. In our home we call that time “the before time”. There is no longer a tomorrow. There is just this listless present where one day bleeds into the next and where each day is the same. We must therefore distinguish between the same and the continuous. The continuity of the world or Open paradoxically allows change to take place, but in the shadow realm of the same there is no change. All projects are suspended. It is limbo, like the airport in Spielberg’s film The Terminal.
First of all, it uncannily echoes the feel of the suspended time of my unwritten novel. The character telling the story describes how the sun has turned a reddish hue and never sets anymore, so that all is eternal daylight, but of a late afternoon/early evening hue that the character calls Redlight. I had noted that he would eventually ruminate on how the world was stuck at a red light, waiting to see if it ever turned green. Indeed, the proposed denouement in my notes is that the world experiences a second apocalypse: a Greenlight of unimaginable, post-human, post-world renewal. So unimaginable that the novel ends without describing it. Or describes it in some unknown, invented language.
Secondly, the characters of the novel divide time into BTZ and ATZ. They call the zombie event The Zomb. Thus, they refer to the pre-event time, Before the Zomb, and the now-time, After the Zomb. I doubt this is a unique idea amongst post-apocalyptic literature. It's just my iteration of it.
Still, I was struck by the resonance between Bryant's reference to 'the before time' and my unwritten novel's 'Before the Zomb'.
Are we living in year zero of ATZ?
