by James Reich
She fumbled at the radio and heard the static-drenched voices advising that her rogue car should not be apprehended. The car hissed with radiation. She, as all children of Chernobyl, had become untouchable. Now time was out of joint. The SCRAM was premature. She was supposed to have been there. She was supposed to be the catalyst, except that Indian Point was not meant to burn. Her specter ran along the metal gantries ripping holes in men with her silent pistol, gritting her teeth in the control room, removing her wig and wiping away her sweat as the alarms wailed around her. The atoms of her body shook apart. She could feel psychosis coming down on her, threatening to tear her apart.
The first hatched gas coiled over the suburbs, fingering the latches and breathing on the dissolving window seals, searching for vents. Those delicate, probing, invisible tendrils, the detached licks of the fire, were followed by an unstoppable wave of radiation, a wall like the blade of a bulldozer, miles across, shaving the land, seemingly without touching it, wiping the life away, or sentencing it to wither, fail, and perish. The inhabitants of Buchanan fled as the sirens began howling in their ten-mile perimeter, a spectral air raid. Fire set the night aglow. The smoke vapor passed over the reddening trees, dripping into the dirt, infiltrating the flora, the neat lawns, and tingling in the tissues of animals that sniffed the orange-black sky. Creatures twitched in dropping needles.
21
APRIL 19, 2011. THE SUN WAS RISING AS DRESNER DROVE INTO Manhattan, against the early flow of the evacuation. The red light poured over the inert vehicles on the opposite side of I-95 as he drew closer to the Lincoln Tunnel. There had been little official, definitive information regarding the incident at the Indian Point nuclear plant, but there was a fire and something had leaked, and the rumors had swollen into a chaotic sprawl of fear. The Soviets had waited three days before admitting their problem, he remembered. His phone vibrated in his breast pocket, and as he flicked it open The Voice said: “Varyushka Cash kidnapped a cop and had him drive her to Indian Point. She released him and turned south again. We have spoken to NYPD and all concerned. No one will touch her before we do.”
Car horns and sirens blared in the early morning, a mechanical scream of traffic that moved achingly through the abandoned tollbooths. Some of the cars across the median had black or silver gaffer tape at the edges of their closed windows. Inside the cabins, he witnessed the origin of a wave of psychosomatic coughing. He regarded the light flashing from a car interior that had been lined with silver foil at the windscreens and windows, leaving only a small hole for the driver to watch the road. Motorcyclists swerved between the slow cars. The scene looked like a movie. He wondered if that was the reason why he felt so calm. Dresner remembered the sense of distance he experienced when he watched the television reports of the evacuation of New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, anonymous black figures walking amid the congestion of slow cars in the wet furnace of those mornings, flotillas of slat board and dead dogs, shotgun shacks and eruptions of violence across the causeways. He did not feel that it was real. He had seen so many fictional disasters in popular culture that the prospect no longer terrified him. He was no longer even certain of his memory that the year had been 2005.
Dresner remembered more. The Chernobyl meltdown had not been the only fireball of 1986. Three months before, almost to the day, on January 28, the space shuttle Challenger had disintegrated in plumes of liquid hydrogen, water vapor, and a mosaic of heat shield tiles, roiling across the cerulean Kennedy sky, spume from a blown champagne bottle. Wreckage from the shuttle disaster would wash up along the Florida coastline: black wires twisting in the sand, tiles floating in the surf. Fallout drifted over Merritt Island in the sunlight lancing the lagoons, jeweled with luxuriating alligators and the glittering spray of mosquitoes. In New Mexico, an ivory airstrip blown over with gypsum, named the Northrup Strip, inside the Jornado del Muerto, had previously been designated as both an abortive landing site and an end-of-mission site for the program. The stricken shuttle never got that far. An eerie plume extended, hanging in the Florida airspace barely one minute after the launch. In 2011, the Virgin Galactic spacecraft waited in the hangers of the now commercialized spaceport of Northrup Strip, heavy with omens. All seven of the dead crew were discovered in their amputated compartment on March 7, sunk to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, emergency abort systems activated but inadequate. Torn chutes draped the delicate coral like skin over bone. In the flash of hydrogen, as with many of the workers at Chernobyl, they had not been killed instantly. Dresner projected himself five months forward in time to September 2011, when he would watch ten years collapse with a pair of burning buildings. For him, that sorrow, too, had passed. He would watch dispassionately, his feet in his slippers resting on the glass coffee table, a can of beer becoming warm from his groin where he rested it as the flat planes repeatedly exploded against the towers, fuel flowing down the stairwells and sending jets of fire from the tall windows. Men and women tumbled in the bright vertiginous daylight, dead birds falling to earth, a day like this one. This tenth anniversary, he decided, would probably be the last time that many people would be certain of the year when catastrophe struck. He might remember the day for the inception of the Cross Spikes Club rendition group. If he were to be honest with himself, he would probably forget that, also. He recognized the sense in which he had himself existed inside a black and smothering hood of violence and dead questions, quite uncertain of his place against the backdrop of the CIA theater, a place where he had striven to remain unsentimental, cavalier, and robotic.
Hands had slapped and punched against the glass of Dresner’s car, faces imitating those of drowning passengers from a sunken ship swam before his windshield, eyes bulging in a brine of terror, mouths gaping final admonitions and curses. His heart jerked in his breast as the crush tightened about him, and they pointed for him to turn and leave with them. Finally, they had formed an impassable wall of flesh and bone, and he had struggled from his vehicle, breaking through the sunroof under the strip lights of the Lincoln Tunnel, clawing from the marooned wreck with his CIA identity badge and nine-millimeter pistol. Dresner continued to force his way, against the grain, feeling the cold wind from the northeast. He thought of the phone conversation he had as he crossed out of Maryland into Delaware on the JKF Memorial Highway. He asked:
“For my perspective, how many SCRAMs have there been at nuclear plants that the public was never made aware of?”
The metal tone of The Voice returned: “Dozens. In this decade, several. The operators contain them, or they are resolved without incident, minor steam leaks, small bursts, easily dissipated and forgotten.”
“What about Indian Point, anything new?”
“ . . . Negative.”
“So, you have no reason to suspect . . . ?”
“Remember, for your perspective, that Three Mile Island led to an evacuation. But it blew over, so to speak. Yes, we almost lost Detroit, but everyone went home again. So please don’t become overwrought.”
“Affirmative.”
From Hell’s Kitchen, he had moved northward on foot, between columns of people in paper respirator masks. Jesus Christ, he thought, they’re taking it seriously. Some had fashioned improvised HAZMAT suits from black plastic refuse sacks, with rubber bands at their wrists and ankles. Others concealed small dogs and cats protectively inside the lapels of their coats and jackets. Children wept along the claustrophobic procession, dragged along Ninth Avenue by grim-faced parents. The funereal march came down from Harlem and wound in from Soho, constricting at the narrow exit points. The extreme crush at the subway stations left pedestrians suspended, their feet not even touching the cement staircases as they descended in a knot of bodies. More than anything, Dresner observed, the evacuees watched the sky. Their feet shuffled along the obstacle-littered sidewalks and between the stalled traffic, but their faces were turned upward. It was a dejected somnambulistic mass, staring, scrutinizing the blue-gray spaces between the high-rise buildings fo
r something they expected yet could not see, as though looking for a single insect leg on a vast pane of glass, an eyelash in a drained swimming pool. Tears glossed their cheekbones and passed salt into their mouths as the procession scanned the skies for death, for any sign of the fallout from Indian Point, a narrow black phantom of turbine smoke, the faintest sparkle of rain, or a baleful alteration in the scent of the metropolis.
When Dresner eventually reached his hotel, the Meridian, on West Fifty-sixth Street, he found it deserted. He might have gone to any hotel, but he remained disciplined to his itinerary. Beyond the chrome-glass doors, the marble floor still gleamed before the unattended curve of the reception counter. Superstitiously, he took the key for the room he had reserved from a tray of white envelopes behind the desk without considering seeking out a more luxurious suite. He rode the elevator, ascending the ambient shaft of the building, studying the planes of his reflection in the mirrored doors. The elevator opened onto his corridor on the fourth floor, sage-green carpet and magnolia walls; a vending machine with sodas, candy, and water bottles hummed refrigerator noises. Sliding his keycard into the lock of his room, he opened the door to a small space with a double bed and a roaring air-conditioning unit in the narrow window. Suddenly discovering himself fatigued, Robert Dresner collapsed on the green sheets of his bed and closed his eyes, feeling the bite of grit behind his lids.
The ash shifted in pallid ripples about his shins, the powder coating his black trousers. Voodoo wind shifted through the smashed windows of derailed trolley cars, their structures contorted and stripped of color. Telephone poles draped broken wires resembling disconnected intravenous drips collapsing between burning trees. The exposed girders of a department store looked like a warped roller coaster, melting down toward vacant avenues of debris. Palm trees thrashed against splitting architectures and everywhere a weird mercurial soil filled the cavities of the city. He moved with the painful convulsions of a zombie. The ash that had been people, animals, and unknowable things ran into his shoes. This world appeared red through his aviator sunglasses. He kicked a fragment of human jawbone through the dust. Spicer, he realized. Scorched masonry remains disintegrated at the periphery of his vision, where the skeleton of a domed structure whistled and droned as the disturbed air passed through its frame. Cinder trees smoked from tiny red embers still alight in their stripped trunks. Suddenly, he understood that he was standing in the monochrome dust that had been the Shima Hospital. Almost nothing of its structure remained beyond fragmented walls and the steel phantom of a dome. There was only ash interrupted by bright white bones, as though boiled and bleached, projecting from the silt, and twisted metals that had been hospital machinery, scattered scalpels glinting in the sunlight, forceps contorted by the bomb. He thought that he might vomit. Ground zero for Hiroshima, he told himself, under ravens like a Japanese silk, one of the cradles of the Cold War.
Dresner opened his eyes, painfully focusing on the cracked ceiling plaster of his hotel room. Looking at his wristwatch, he realized that he had drifted into sleep for only a few minutes. He swung his legs from the bed and stood to switch off the air-conditioning unit, imagining the air outside to be contaminated. He felt lost. The emptiness of the building pressed against him. He thought of Jack Torma, the transsexual, his face obscured by a black towel, drowning on the steel interrogation table at Los Alamos. As he watched, the image of Torma was replaced in his mind by the woman who had been his fiancée. The water poured from her blond hair onto the hard floor below the table. Janelle! She thrashed beneath his gaze. He had only to stop, but he could not.
After returning from the vending machine with a chilled cola, he listened to the beginnings of the riots: improvised bombs cascading from the windows of the Plaza Hotel as the helicopters dropped sheets of warning paper. With the air-conditioning unit deactivated, he could hear the distant conflagrations of the streets below. He tried to imagine where Varyushka Cash might be, if she was waiting as he was, and he thought of what The Voice had said about the draining of lakes. He felt aroused by the proximity of death, the radioactive breath warming his collar. He undressed and began to run the faucet in the cramped bathroom adjoining his bedroom. He took one of the small plastic bottles of complimentary foam bath and poured it into the rising water. He breathed the steam in, experiencing the heat collecting within his lungs, and felt himself dissolving finally into the febrile vapor, weeping with a new knowledge: For twenty-five years with the CIA he had been slowly working at ripping himself from the face of the earth; every rendition had been the gradual rendition of Robert Dresner.
IN THE STOLEN POLICE CAR, VARYUSHKA CASH CAME DOWN THROUGH Hudson and Washington Heights. She did not know yet that the city was drawing her back in. She did not yet comprehend the gravity the vacant, irradiated city would exert on her. With images of Indian Point in flames, with the knowledge of her failure, she knew only an abyss of sorrow and the searing of a molten depression dragging her into the darkness. The traffic crawled at the George Washington Bridge as it drained the first evacuees to the west like an immense stent. Lights glared from tenement and high-rise windows as people alerted their neighbors and filled suitcases. The ATM machines would be emptied by dawn. Many would hear nothing of the incident at Indian Point until the following day when they turned on their televisions for the morning shows. By then the aurora would be at work in the boroughs, and the panic would spread unrestrained. For now, the flow was urgent, yet not in full spate. Decisions arose unconsciously, irrationally. She experienced the aimlessness of a detached spirit. Ditching the cruiser on Malcolm X Boulevard, she drifted south along Lenox toward Central Park.
She moved listlessly along the broad Central Park mall, flanked by tall elms that corkscrewed beyond the railings and peeling paint of the bench lines on either side of her. Pigeons picked at dried-out French fries beneath the black iron electric lamps, imitation gaslight. The trees reached across the promenade toward each other. At the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir there was a red-roofed pavilion collapsing and sinking into the lake; willows mourned into the green water; cherry trees interrupted the buttresses of concrete gatehouses; fowl bent their necks on the surface of the mirror. The park was quiet. Beyond it, from the banks of the lake, a proud panorama of towers and skyscrapers, hotels, apartments that would soon be as deserted as the microdistricts of her birthplace. As one day shifted into another, she alone watched the viridescent aurora haunting the cityscape, for she was the only one who could see it as it truly was: a deathless apparition that would enshroud this place for millennia. It was here, as she moved toward the small fairground area that had been set up in Central Park for some centennial or other, for Reagan, for Easter, as Taurus wheeled and fell into place in the paling night, that she understood. Cash stood beneath the radiant Ferris wheel, its canary yellow gondolas whining on their corroded hinges. She was afraid to touch it. Close by, the disintegrating deck of the simple carousel, an octagonal steel frame suspending a few wide benches. The electric dodgem cars on their rink resembled Cold War fantasies of rocket cars and hovering sedans, cracked fiberglass and broken headlamps, and everywhere were the threads and canopies of encroaching wilderness. If she had been able to ride the yellow gondolas from their zenith, she would have been able to look out across the white tower blocks and to see the opulent stone and steel, gray, black, and gold buildings that held Central Park in their cradle. Hot waves surged through her flesh and bones. There was the pulse inside her throat. It was a sickness that was synchronized with the meltdown at Indian Point. It beat against her interior, fanned by the thin wings of memories of Chernobyl, natal charts disintegrating in an abandoned hospital. The city was emptying.
And the empty city, this vast and vacant sarcophagus, was a gift.
The body of her birth had been recast.
She need only survive it.
Pripyat, Chernobyl, Reactor IV, the Zone of Alienation, the Zone of the Amazons, all located in Manhattan . . . Now her home revealed itself under th
e coruscating pollen of a solar wind, reactor flares, the phosphor of St. Elmo’s fire flaring down the canyons of New York. Her fear had always been the fear of her origins, and now the fear was gone. If she could survive it, she might finally live physically where she had always lived in her unconscious. She smiled as she envisaged the evacuation. In a matter of hours, she would be alone. Under the immensity of the Indian Point aurora, Varyushka Cash felt herself washed in a green and starlit pleasure.
22
APRIL 20, 2011. TAURUS. THE EMPTYING OF MANHATTAN RECALLED the destruction of Dreamland, Coney Island, 100 years earlier, a carnival of tears acted in spasms before the eviscerated façades. It was like a deluge of skin, a wave of flesh pouring through the avenues, overturning hot dog stands and screaming in the boiling brine. Cleavers shone with blood in the Bowery. Gunfire erupted on Fifth Avenue. Vehicles loaded with possessions stalled or were hijacked by pedestrians in white cotton masks. In some choked districts, innumerable processions scuffed together at a funereal pace, bearing in the coffins of their own irradiated skulls the terror from the air and the imminent violence they could hear echoing through the streets. So long as the doom would remain ineffable, the crackling aurora of radiation invisible, the city adopted a surreal aspect. The radiation probed unseen like a translucent weed, a poisonous anemone reaching along the river great tendrils of deformation, sickness, cancers, and death. Otherwise, the glittering gauze of rain became a blade, amputating city blocks, cutting the cement with strontium like cocaine on a cheap glass table. Plutonium swarms broke against the Empire State Building, pitting the superstructure with billions of microscopic holes like the needle holes discovered in the helmets of astronauts from storms of radioactive particulates, the skyscraper resolving into pumice. Hundreds of thousands of the dispossessed made for the bridges leading off the island, drenched in the unseen ectoplasm of radiation sickness, cesium making glowing lacework of their bones. The defects, the stillbirths, and the mutations to come would burn in the carnival light at the new perimeters of New York. Thousands of radium girls and sterile boys would flop against each other in voided sex. The eerie subtlety of the disaster seemed to demand violent expression. While it remained invisible, the evacuees enacting a mass neurosis, a hangover from plague cities, worked to render it manifest with spray cans, arson, looting, rape, and murders so unstoppable that entire streets lost their definition to rivers of broken glass and brilliant detritus, torn clothes, televisions thrown from high windows, smeared food, ripped and weeping bodies under sodium lamps, reservoirs of alcohol running in the gutters with diapers, dentures, condoms, and sanitary napkins. A skateboard protruded from the windshield of a police car. Oxygen tanks and saline and plasma bags rolled and burst outside an overturned ambulance.
