by James Reich
They went hurrying along Lesya Ukrainka Street, or Lenin Street, desperate to escape the radioactive raindrops, weeping at the desolate ticket booths at Yanov Railway Station, and not knowing if there would ever be another train to bear them out of the holocaust. They clutched her to their breasts on the poisoned platform, with wind through the wires, distant whistling, and bizarre new birds curling their talons around the signals. Irradiated cloaks of steam and hot rain mutated and killed the Wormwood Forest. The pines turned blood red and resembled rusted pylons as the radioactive shroud settled in their branches and began to drip into the soil of the forest floor. Everything turned red. The dirt cackled back at Geiger counters. The wild horses that the evacuation abandoned had their thyroid glands eaten away by fallout and they died in the prickly grass. Radiation penetrated the dairy herds. The thyroids of the surviving cattle ceased to function, leaving strange stunted animals. The limbs of the red forest contorted toward the dirt, tangling into cages of unnatural agony. Thousands of hectares of brushland, scrub, and small flora died. What remained was mutated, ultra-thin birch and spruce, and discolored pines with gigantic needles.
She watched as the contaminated trees of the Red Forest were bulldozed into mass graves of blood-colored leaves, needles, and twisted limbs. Long trenches were carved from the ground to the west of the sarcophagus. Machines operated by remote control to collect vast dunes of ash and carcinogenic rubble, the colorless detritus of the evacuated city. And she saw that men and women also worked at the decontamination as if the radiation could be swept away, hosed down, incinerated, or buried; a million Soviet drones clothed as human beings toiled fearlessly, disregarding their flesh. These Liquidators were imported from all across the Union. Their work took their lives by the tens and hundreds of thousands. The few survivors would wear a badge of honor in their lapels, a button-sized image of a drop of blood on a blue field, crossed by broken branch lines symbolizing the progress of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation particles into their bodies. It was an unofficial medal of death. Many of the Liquidators were conscripted to Pripyat from their military service, and others were miners, firemen, engineers, scaffolders, and builders. Cash suspected that all of the firemen were dead. No one could understand compulsory bravery of this nature anymore, work of unimaginable futility and fatality . . .
Cash would endure nightmares like these as she lay in her musty bed in Portland, at the Herland house as she was growing up. The cold rain and Northwestern winds would rattle the old windows as she contemplated her small plastic hospital identification bracelet by candlelight, its tiny Cyrillic loop returning her again and again to the coordinates of her birth in space and time. The older girls, Nona, Janelle, and Zelda, might still be awake, punk rock girls singing from cassette players through the nostalgic peeling walls. She would imagine the Soviet gypsies, who had moved into desolate areas surrounding the radioactive city, and she knew that Europe was still desperate and dark; swathes of totalitarianism and fascism were still cast across her map of the world. Europe is an orphanage without walls, she thought. The contaminated countryside, Ukraine, womb of the Amazons, was filled with skinhead girls who had lost all hope. Wolves pissed against the yellow telephone booths outside the hospital. Weird birds laid eggs in the eaves of the metal and concrete sarcophagus of Chernobyl. Yet, what of America? Cash would ask herself. How was she to discover her place within it?
April 8, 2011. Cash awoke to the humidity of a Shreveport motel room. Silver-gray wallpaper and a black television cabinet blurred into her view. The bed was damp from perspiration. She had made it out of Texas and into Louisiana. Something brushed her cheek. Beside her on the pillow was the photograph of herself and Zelda in San Francisco that she had taken from her refrigerator door in Madrid and brought with her. She rose and checked the air-conditioning unit that protruded from the window. It was barely functional. After fifty push-ups and 100 crunches, she switched on the television and found it tuned to a porn channel before she found the news. She switched on the small electric kettle and ripped open a packet of instant coffee while she waited for any news about her mission, or the killing of Kern. Nothing. Downstairs, she paid $35 cash for the room. She needed more gas for the car, and pulled into the nearest station.
She reached New Orleans after another five hours of driving. On her map, the city of New Orleans was constructed in triangular pieces, reminding her of the shape of Pripyat. Both cities had seen disaster and were haunted and strange. Time was overlaid. She drove slowly past Cemetery No. 1, seeing the palm trees growing between the graves, the statuary pale as a clarinet reed and plain, the faces missing, worn as sugar skin under rains. Blood-red bricks split like muscles, drowned in avenues of the dead, pale sentinels dreaming another Egypt as St. Charles flooded. Brown waters filled the neutral ground between the trolley tracks. Mardi Gras beads hung from streetcar cables and dueling oaks, and everything dripped with star-kissed seed. The dead swam in their ripped cloaks on Canal Street; red lanterns bled and smoldered from enervating balconies and tombs broke open against the sky, the Nile hanging death cult dark. Cash pulled out the old postcard that she had received years ago and hoped that her friend would still be at the same address that she had given then. She crawled the car beneath the overhanging trees, trying to read the house numbers in the humid twilight.
Cash needed to see Nona Laveau one last time. The prospect made her nervous, recognizing the fact that there would be silences, things that she could not reveal, even as she interrogated her own motives for wanting to see her. Nona was the closest semblance that Cash could find to a mother figure, more so than Molly Pinkerton, who was split across the sexes; more so than Janelle Gresham, who was cooler; and more so than Zelda, who had become her lover. Cash knew that this deception would be the most difficult: refusing to reveal Zelda’s death, the perverse guilt that it conferred upon her, her fear of the look of sorrow and disappointment she would have to face in Nona. Since she had nourished Cash’s obsessions in childhood, it was now more important than ever that Nona should proffer Cash her approval.
Nona Laveau lived in a shotgun house on Oak Street, in the Garden District. Cash had not seen her in ten years. At the end of their time in Portland, when Cash and Zelda had moved to San Francisco, Nona had returned to her birthplace in New Orleans. There was a knocking at her door, and a female voice called her name. Nona pulled one of her blinds aside to regard the girl on the porch before opening the door.
“Oh. My. God. Cash? Baby girl!” Swift tears shone across Nona’s eyes.
“Nona! You’re still here.” Cash swayed slightly from motion sickness, the nausea of the goiter hidden beneath her necklace.
“Shit, girl! Of course I’m still here! Come here, and then let’s get you inside before the mosquitoes eat you alive. You got a bag?”
“Just this one.” As she spoke, an ache formed in Cash’s throat. Inside the ache was a scream: Zelda is dead! And I am dying! Flickering images of the cop, burning in his patrol car at Pantex; a flash of herself running on the gantries of Indian Point. They embraced in the lamplight and spinning insects of the wooden porch. The swell of Nona’s flesh ameliorated like a maternal drug. Cash felt the pain of suppressing the confession passing from her, the beating near her larynx slowing and dissipating.
“Come on in.”
“Wait.” Cash stopped at the threshold, “Do you have a car cover that I could use?”
“You mean like a tarp? Sure.” Beside her house was a fiberglass storage shed. Nona returned from there with a blue plastic sheet. “That is one hell of a car.”
“I borrowed it from a friend, and I promised to take care of it.”
They spread the sheet over the low-rider and Nona placed a sandbag on the roof to hold it in place. “It ain’t gonna be windy tonight. That’ll fix it,” Nona said, tugging at the fringe of the tarp.
The interior of Nona’s narrow house resembled an uprooted voodoo shrine interrupted with a comic book store and a library, and this collision was
being restored to a form of chaotic beauty. Wonder Woman memorabilia and rare issues broke piles of familiar books. Candlelight from wax-encrusted bottles illuminated framed prints of the Widow Paris and Wonder Woman. Plastic figurines stood garlanded with bright shining beads. The air in the house was redolent with sugars, chicory, and turpentine. Red and purple gauze curtains hung at the screened windows. Ceiling fans rotated while a swamp cooler unit hummed overhead. Exhausted, Cash leaned against a cream-painted wall.
“This is an amazing place,” she said, running her fingers along the bookshelves. The room shifted beneath her feet and the walls pulsed. Motion sickness and fatigue threatened to catch her off balance. Cash had reached the point of being unable to take any tiredness for granted: always, the goiter at her throat, the seemingly endless hangover of radiation contamination swam within her. She heard Nona calling to her from the kitchenette. In the corner of the room was an easel with an abstract painting in progress. Cash noted the thick red pigment. Perhaps she could use it, mixing up the bloody powder with water in plastic bags.
“You’re a painter, now,” Cash called out.
“Not much of one, but I’m trying. You look tired. Are you doing okay?”
“I’m holding it together. You know how it is when everything feels as if it’s floating away down a long dark river?”
“That’s New Orleans, girl. I’m bringing you some tea.”
“It’s been a rough few days from New Mexico.”
“Oh yeah?”
“A cop even tried to feel me up.”
“What the fuck? What happened?”
“I shot him,” Cash laughed, for a moment impressed with her own ease. “You look so beautiful, Nona! It’s been too damn long.”
Nona stared at her, deciphering. “Oh, come on. Don’t tease. It has been a long time, though. Remember that old house in the Portland rain, our little shack-board island?” Her voice was full of the music of nostalgia. Then she picked up one of her figurines, waving it for Cash to see. “Hey, you remember Wonder Woman, of course. We’re still tight.”
“Always,” Cash agreed, sipping at her tea and lounging against a red velvet pillow on Nona’s antique chaise lounge.
Nona leaned forward, smiling. “How’s Zelda?”
Cash stared at the floor, paralyzed by regrets and desolation. She heard the grinding of her skull upon her vertebrae. She saw herself floating on her back in a cooling reservoir, suspended above 10,000 radioactive fuel rods glowing beneath her. She rolled over in the water, diving down toward the burning spears of her anguish. “I lost her. I don’t know where she is.” Forcing herself into the present moment, Cash raised her eyes to Nona’s and fixed a disingenuous, encouraging smile. “So, you came home to Louisiana.”
“I always told you that, at heart, I was a Creole woman. I had to come back down here to do any real good. Stuff that I couldn’t do in Portland, so much.”
“What like?”
“I work with young women, providing education in reproductive health. There are still taboos that prevent them getting cancer screening. Last week I met a woman whose mother told her that Pap smears were for married women only. The kid came to my office with cervical cancer that had gone undetected. When we finally managed to get her diagnosed, her husband left her, because he said she must be a whore. You know what I’m talking about. I don’t need to lecture you about the dangers of ignorance.”
“Oh, I know about it, alright.”
“Yeah. I deal with preventable disease, but the women in these communities are susceptible. Some of them don’t even know what their cervix is. Many of the women I counsel think that all cancer is terminal, so they don’t want to get screened. They’d rather just not know about cancer, period, because they’re fatalistic about it. They’ll shrug and ask me what difference it makes if they know they’re going to die—that kind of bullshit.”
When they had finished the tea, Nona went to the kitchen, returning with a tarnished silver tray, arranged with glasses, a bottle, and a kitsch oriental sugar bowl. “Let’s drink this. It’s absinthe, imported. Not the fake shit that has no wormwood. Look at this spoon . . . ” The spoon had the twisted image of a skull punched through it. Cash watched Nona balance the spoon across her glass and add a single sugar cube to it. In gentle increments, she poured chilled water onto the deliquescent lump, watching it drip through into the liquor in her glass. “We can stay up all night,” Nona announced. “If the house is swimming, we might as well swim with it.”
Cash smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Hell, I’ll do whatever voodoo that you do, Nona. Especially if it will stop the feeling of the road under my ass.” Cash reached for a second slotted skull spoon and a cube of sugar. In time, as she continued to sip the absinthe, her consciousness swam. Nona’s dark skin spread out, hot, maternal, her words formed a whirlpool. For a moment, Cash felt suspended in the funnel, in a gyrating wall of memories that were not hers: April 26, 1961. Twenty-five years before her birth, the regular beat of darkness: French nuclear weapons testing in the desert at Reganne and In Ekker. It was the morning after. Rupturing the crust of the northern range of the test mountain, the atomic blast had broken into the open desert, immersing the Tuareg in radioactive fallout. Some were eating beghrir pancakes with honey from Algerian bees when the crackling cloud shifted across the hot winds and fell upon them. Jerboas hopped between the tents like rats fleeing a sinking desert ship. Thousands of nomads and soldiers were penetrated with cancers and slow mutilation of their flesh, bones, and brains. The device had stretched out its perverse limbs of welcome over the dead ground. A voice said: “Allez, walk toward the bomb!”
Nona’s voice filtered back in, and Cash focused on the New Orleans room again. She rubbed her eyes and took another drink.
“Yes, but I couldn’t do this in Portland, right?” Nona said. “Here, I can do direct community outreach, plus I do some work at Tulane. I try to raise community awareness of the need for screening, and for the vaccine, the simple damn vaccine . . . ” She broke off. “Oh, Christ, look at you, Cash! It’s been ten years! Okay, I don’t want to be rude, but really, what the fuck are you doing in New Orleans? And in that asshole car?” She laughed.
“That car is trouble, but it got me here.” Cash studied a streak of gray in Nona’s thick hair. “So,” Cash began, “what happened with Janelle? Did you both leave Portland at the same time?”
“Oh, man. Shit, I miss Janelle. I have so many, many regrets, because back then, I was an angry young woman. I think it got bad after you left.” Nona caught herself. “It’s not your fault of course, but with you and Zelda gone, things weren’t the same, and even though Janelle and me agreed on so much, I made it seem as if we didn’t. I was frustrated, and I hurt her. I called her a sellout. She went to Olympia and we lost touch for several years. It was sad. Finally, Janelle moved to D.C. Anyway, we’re back in touch now. It’s really infrequent, but it’s all good.”
“She didn’t understand what was going on for you?”
“She totally did understand. You were very young, so maybe this won’t make sense. Janelle once said something like, ‘What will become of our scene when the music stops?’ Well, she was right: The music stopped and we all just . . . dispersed.” Nona made a sweeping, flattening gesture with her hands. “What our parents or our younger selves had known as feminism was suddenly so fragmented. It was barely even a thing anymore. In some ways, it was like a defeat, or a failure. Maybe it was a victory. I’m still not certain what happened. We all scattered in a thousand directions. For a while, Janelle and I lost our friendship in the panic.” Nona stared at Cash. “What were you doing in Nueva Mexico?”
Cash said: “After what happened in the Tenderloin, I needed to get off the map.”
“What happened in the Tenderloin?”
She concealed a jolt of fear. In one plain sentence, in the green faints of absinthe, she had said more than she had intended. She felt herself suffocated by the weight of Nona’s surrogacy. Guilt
closed her throat. In the candlelight, fires passed across Nona’s gleaming eyes. Her lips had settled into a soft, imperturbable calm. Her body, shrouded in a cable-knit shawl of gold, radiated a subtle heat. Cash remembered falling asleep against her, more than a decade ago. Nona’s entry into the void left by Cash’s real mother left a sphinx at the shadows, a gatekeeper. Nona had taught her about truth. She struggled for the words.
“Maybe we talk about the future, instead? I have to tell you something important about the future. I’m driving to New York, where I plan to kill a man.”
Nona laughed and looked to the window where rain had begun to rattle against the sill. “There’s the rain.”
Cash said, “It’ll be the anniversary soon.”
Nona misunderstood her. “One year since the oil spill, you’re right.” A great and terrible snake had shimmered in the waters off Louisiana, eighty miles of oil. Li Grand Zombi. “April twentieth.”
