by James Reich
Shivering with pain and shock, Cash ripped the T-shirt from her torso and pushed it into the steel mailbox at the corner of Cedar Street. Moving between the red brick and brown façades, she wrapped her small and disfigured breasts in a coil of bandages and hung her backpack by one strap on her left shoulder. Paper blew between her boots, some of it evacuation warnings that the helicopters had dropped on the city. The name Indian Point whispered from the creases of New York. Vapors of alcohol rose from her body, as though she were being embalmed in half-life, she thought. The rats would drip into the salt waters of the Upper Bay and the hollows of this giant irradiated mausoleum would rattle and ring and decay in thousands of years of alienation. As she moved north, Cash found the ramps of Brooklyn Bridge choked with abandoned vehicles where the inhabitants of the city had finally despaired of the congestion and had forced themselves out on foot toward the relief flights from La Guardia and JFK or down to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge over to Staten Island and the uncontaminated continent. Possessions lay strewn about the Brooklyn Bridge ramps: sacrifices, totems of birdcages, cat carriers, baby strollers, eviscerated suitcases, all mangled and crushed between the silent tract of vandalized cars and looted trucks. Slow mounds of food waste lapped against bloody hubcaps as the ravens poured in like a funnel of black smoke. She thought of the birds carrying the fallout, imagined grotesque mutations and ebony corpses raining on Jersey City. Lying on its side, in the shadow of vast gunmetal girders, Cash discovered a white Lambretta scooter. The keys had been dropped into the estuary of trash, yet now they caught the sunlight as she approached. With her injury, Cash knew that pulling the scooter upright would be agonizing, but if she could free it, she could be more certain of reaching Central Park, where she was resolved to kill Robert Dresner. She hauled the scooter from the gathering dunes of junk and it howled through the deserted streets.
The city of her future was conforming to the city of her past.
As he made his way on foot, Dresner was gripped by that vital moment of recognition between him and his prey, as though tapes of it were projecting and looping behind his eyes. She had been invisible to him, misidentified, and then an image on his sometime fiancée’s cell phone. Standing there, before the bullet, she had recognized him without emotion. How could it be that weird girl, this alien, this possessed Ukrainian skinhead, had come so far to destroy his life? He traversed back along Fulton Street toward the crater and stem of the World Trade Center. It would be necessary for him to comb the city this way, in case she had collapsed and died in any of the streets between the Winters Corporation building and Central Park. Why Central Park, he wondered? Cleopatra’s Needle perhaps? From Trinity, New Mexico, through Washington, D.C., to Central Park, this sphinx of a terrorist seemed drawn to a zodiac of obelisks and needles. His progress was slow. It was, he told himself, like weaving through a film set in the final hours before it was to be torn down. In the West Village he pulled hunks of meat from a warm deli counter and snapped stale batons of bread. Contrasted with the wild motions of the city at any previous time, he might have enjoyed the solitude, or found it eerie at worst, yet he knew that the unseen fallout, an infinitesimal glitter of heavy metal, shrouded every last precinct. The atoms of his body swam in it, and it passed through him as heat through glass. Dresner swilled down doses of Alka-Seltzer, trying to ease his migraine and nausea. He searched the streets, looking for her corpse, the two of them marooned on a fatal island. Finally, exhausted, he slept on a leather couch in the lobby of a hotel.
As darkness fell, Cash took refuge in a sporting goods store, surrounded by athletic mannequins. She dressed herself in black cycling shorts, found new white ankle socks and a pair of lime green climbing shoes, standing before a chrome framed mirror, changing the stained bandages wrapped around her breasts. The oxidized blood had turned black. The pain was now only a series of regular dull pulses. Her bicycle chain necklace was around her neck with the trinitite and gris-gris bag. She studied herself as she tried to swallow a protein bar and a pouch of orange formula without vomiting: black smeared eyes, the dark fuzz of her scalp, the shiver in her upper lip, her narrow muscles under a sheen of sweat, the slow ritual of her twenty-five years was shutting down.
April 25, 2011. Dawn broke over a dead horse at the perimeter of Central Park. It was still hitched to its baroque tourist carriage. The animal’s thyroid dissolved inside its distended brown body, fallen in rigor yet suspended inside its harness, rubber lips drawn back from wooden teeth, gelatin and glycerin dripping from cracked hooves into the viscid tarmac. Mercurial glimmers of radioactive dew formed on the grass, trickled on the bronze statuary of Shakespeare and Alice and bayoneted soldiers; golden peaks of buildings glimmered in sunlight. Automatically, the flora revolved and oriented toward the light as though the park were controlled by machines of chlorophyll. These things also would be lost, irretrievable, under the amplified locust wing beat of Geiger counters as Manhattan Island became a necropolis. Above it all, the Indian Point aurora blazed spectral light. Cash could not recall a more strange and beautiful morning, the almost unfettered freedom and incorruptible solitude. It was the silence of the New Mexico desert, where she would dream of being a fallen alien. In the dislocated Manhattan dawn, she felt herself to have been delivered to voided territory between the prefabricated structures of a new planet, where she was custodian and conquistador. There were haunts of pain to be undone, shafts of wasted flesh to be exhumed, decolonized states to be disinfected, the vivisection of the century, a clean line of lobotomy drawn from inside the decaying cities of the East Coast, lexicons and symbols to be reinscribed, and landscapes to be preserved and remembered as they were. Cash thought of Zelda, her girlfriend now five years dead. It was the flowers. Cash inhaled deeply. This city was the reconstruction that her body had promised. There was an ache in her throat. This body was the reconstruction that her city had promised. The cities were the same, Chernobyl, Manhattan. Then she thought of the intruder, Robert Dresner.
She located the crude gray generator console and set the Ferris wheel in motion; droplets of stiffening grease studded the metal box. Across her back, she had slung her khaki pack and the long canvas parcel she had taken during the night. The giant metal wheel jerked on its axis before it began to turn slowly. She ran from the generator console and climbed into one of the swinging yellow gondolas as it began to rise. As the gondola rose, she aimed her silent pistol at the generator, relaxing, slowing her heartbeat for the shot. When she reached the zenith of the wheel’s rotation, she fired her remaining ammunition into the console, killing the power. Deliberately, she dropped the weapon, letting it fall the hundred feet to the concrete below. She had no more need of it. Sinister mist drifted across the reservoir. Occupying the yellow gondola, she was an Amazon in a burnished chariot, verdant land beneath her, her city unassailable. She kept her vigil, watching for the male to arrive, the nuclear envoy of a dead time.
He approached from the direction of Columbus Circle, hesitating at the black iron gates before slipping stealthily into the park with his pistol drawn. Now alone with her on the radiation-sick atoll of Manhattan, he wondered, momentarily, if it might be possible to subdue her without killing her. Even in the agony of his illness, his arousal informed him that he was alive. He told himself that men would dream of being so stranded, on such a weird island, of lovers brought together by necessity at the end of the world, by the profound force of their loneliness and the macabre beauty of their fading. They could breed a race of mutant children in the neon canyons of their city. He almost found it funny. No, he resolved bitterly. One man and one woman remained. This was the end of the Sex War that had erased his future. He seethed with the proud violence of his sex, his alienation, the invasions and insults of analysis. Her death should be terrible. He would waste no savagery upon her. In the distance, he glimpsed fragments of the motionless Ferris wheel through the shifting branches of trees. Moving with primal purpose, his contaminated muscles were pulsing cables in the vivid sun.
Without sound, she unzipped the canvas sheath that she had worn on her back, easing the javelin from the black material, wrapping her fingers expertly around the adhesive grip tape. Finally, her nemesis walked below her, arrogantly examining the cracked plastic of the empty gun she had discarded, watching for her yet not seeing her. Now he was the first and last man. A current throbbed through her wounded breast, passing into the flesh and bone bulb of her shoulder, shaking down the long muscles of her arm, a fluid serpentine coiling about her wrist, heating the electrified plexus of her flesh. Instinctively, from an ancient insinuation of hunting, she put the fingers of her other hand to her lips and gave a sharp wolf whistle. Below her, the male whipped around, turning his face upward, his stricken eyes meeting hers. He raised his arm to shoot. Her muscles projected beyond the motion of throwing, prosthetic ghosts unraveling from the violence of it, ectoplasm hanging from her empty hand for an instant before recoiling into her. The Amazon’s javelin entered him at the neck, penetrating, drilling esophagus, sternum, cartilage, and lung; tissues and bones bisected, nerves misfired. He opened like cloth beneath a needle, dark blood vomiting from his mouth as he collapsed. Bloody tendrils of hair dripped from his scalp, and a terminal pallor bloomed coldly in his pores. High above him, she watched the hollowing body, impaled, motionless, except for the automatic processes of an evacuating death.
She was alone in the city.
She had come home.
WHAT IF I AM DEAD, RIGHT NOW? WHAT IF I DIED IN THE DELIVERY room, or in the incubators of Pripyat Hospital in a slow rain of radiation, dust falling into my open mouth, and this is the haunted transit of a zombie? I see things that I should not see. I see the present moment in the Zone of Alienation as though I am still there, watching it degrade.
In the micro-districts of the atomograd, the superstructures of the farmers’ glassless greenhouses sag toward the razor-sharp soil. The Prometheus Cinema is surrounded with barbed wire; Prometheus, the thief of fire. Books of state stamps are blown in silent tatters across the central plaza, exposed brickwork and metal window frames hanging off decayed hinges, a factory lathe entangled in vines. Pink dolls sprawl in yellow pools of urine in the splintered doorways of the doghouse, deformed limbs, wet moss, recalling a Hans Bellmer photograph, a carpet beater. Tall trees press against the high-rise buildings like a nuclear Macbeth. Dormitories are invaded by strange flora; shining rats shake in the rain. Sick cats walk across the keys of an eviscerated piano. A crippled excavator hollow with radioactivity makes weird angles at the police station, broken desks and steam radiators.
I see Klavdia Luzganova and Yakaterina Ivanenko, two translucent women of the Pripyat police standing in the flaming darkness on the night of the meltdown, maintaining their guard positions beside Reactor IV as cancerous waves penetrated their soft uniforms. They are watching the dying firemen on the irradiated roofs of the reactors, pulses of obscene light entering their breasts, moving through their throats, probing the matrices of marrow.
I regard the gymnasium at the Culture Palace, pallid blue walls of diseased paint and balconies of asbestos, a vaulting springboard consumed by the slow, ineffable hiss of hot dust, rotting paper on the information boards as though scorched by time, and plants growing through the delicate games courts, rust dripping in flakes from the netball hoops. The knots of a rope swing, strip lights in cages of wire. The soccer field is overgrown with thin trees, the bricks of the stadium crumbling into piles of old teeth. The fragile, corroded goalposts are tattooed with weeds. The white and rose tiles of the evaporated swimming pool cracking apart from their stained grouting, sheets of peeling paint and disintegrating fabric across the floor, a crowbar in the voided shallows.
At Rossokha, the mechanical graveyard for the radiation-contaminated vehicles, I stare at the scarlet fire engine disintegrating in the polluted weeds. The firemen lean against the engine like ghosts; Kibenok, Titenok, Vashchuk, Telyatnikov, and Pravik, whose brown eyes mutated their color to blue in the coruscating beams of radiation even as they fought the reactor blaze in the poverty of their overalls, the inadequacy of their archaic helmets.
I move between the pebbledash apartments of the five micro-districts of the city, the regular windows appear oil-smeared and monotonous, and Lesya Ukrainka Street is narrowed by encroaching foliage and the crawl of the forest, oil drums, rusting blockheads from abandoned cars. There is the high-rise mall of the House of Communal Services, snow drifting through the sockets of its missing windows, an interior of broken tiles and gray-green walls, where the workers and their families posed for photographic documentation, and were measured by tailors and shaving blades.
Sometimes I observe them in positions where they might be waxworks, target dummies, working automatons, even Valery Khodemchuk, whose body has never been recovered from the sarcophagus. They watch from the cracked windowpanes of the micro-districts. At other times, they are stationed randomly, riding the yellow Ferris wheel or sleeping in the yellow phone booths, faces burned by steam and rads; I saw Aleksandr Grigoryevich at the swimming pool and he seemed to be dreaming of swimming through radioactive water and falling masonry to the levers to shut down the hydrogen flow, over and over in laps of heat and collapsing structures. The control room technicians, the turbine machinists, operators and scientists, Akimov, Toptunov, Baranov, Orlov, Novyk, Brazhnik, Perchuk, Degtyarenko, Kurguz, Proskuryakov, Vershynin, Konoval, and others visit the bookstore, get haircuts, or read the newspaper in a gentle fall of snow.
Floodlights hang from skeletal metal towers close to the frozen signals of Yanov Railway Station, where the evacuations took place. There is a red-roofed pavilion collapsing and sinking into the lake. On Kurchatov Street, I stand beneath the steel pylons and megaphone shapes of the Tree of Friendship sculpture. Inside the school, state illustrations, watercolor posters resemble aircraft emergency cards, depicting women in factories making linen respiration masks for children who wear them at Cold War school desks. They illustrate how to use a carpet beater to remove fallout from clothes left on a washing line, how to occupy a stark bunker during a nuclear attack, a soldier holding a Kalashnikov in front of the red and yellow hammer and sickle of the flag. Looking up from Lenin Street, I watch birds hunt on the dull balconies of bureaucracy along the Pripyat Executive Committee Building. The concrete swan necks of streetlights crane over the pocked asphalt.
Fading cartoons of Marx and Lenin on yellow wallpaper, military exercises in dead notebooks. Overgrown lots with red machines, torn conveyor belts beneath pylons. The winter sun floods Futurist stained glass, smashed panes of bright workers, snow gathering in the yellow public phone booth close to the hospital steps, fallen cartographies of building plaster. There are the empty livestock pens, the yellow corrugated metal, ice on the occluded railway tracks, a tractor tire in the red berries; stopped clocks on the high-rise towers. Gas masks collapse like octopus sacs rolled in fields of pale powder and ghostly stairways. Frozen particles blow through the bleached news kiosks of the Union Press. The walls of the bus station peel in the manner of sardine cans. Broken glass and ash occupy the cavities of the ticket booths. I see the X-ray machine and the glass bricks of the hospital corridors. The place of my birth.
CASH LAY BACK INSIDE HER GENTLY ROCKING GONDOLA, ARRANGING the thermal foil sheets that she had taken from the sports store, along with the javelin. It reminded her of the foil she had worn in the desert for her first attack. She thought of Valerie Solanas, expiring between the interrogating voices in the flophouse of her skull, sometime in the transit from this date to the next. She remembered the nights when the poster of Valerie over her bed would curl down and their lips would meet. High in the crucible of the gondola, below the red sun, a chill found her. The exertions of killing had opened her wound. Bright red blood showed through her bandages. She pulled on the black polar jacket that she had stuffed inside her bag. Around her, as luminous fallout dripped from the aurora that shivered between the buildings, Central Park would conform to the red Wormwo
od Forest of Pripyat. She took out the antique Walkman Janelle Gresham had given her. Untangling the headphone cable and inserting one of her cassette mixes, she waited for the long day to pass into the night of her birth, and her death, twenty-five years later, April 26, 2011.
Trembling, Varyushka Cash pressed the play button.
Listen, the Snow Is Falling . . .
