by James Siegel
Tartars, most of them, part of the ethnic soup Stalin liked to stir to a slow boil, occasionally skimming the fat off and dumping it somewhere in Siberia.
The Tartars came out of their houses and stared at the smoke billowing out from the tree line downwind from them.
Forest fire, they thought.
A huge, hellacious inferno of a forest fire.
But a forest fire.
They didn’t know what it really was because the secret city was so secret that they had no idea it was there.
None.
They had no clue there was a massive atomic city sitting just twenty-two miles away from them in a deep dark wood.
That the forest fire wasn’t a forest fire.
They couldn’t know that the cooling system of the secret nuclear reactor in the city with no name had unaccountably shut down.
That the heat had ballooned in a storage tank filled with toxic radioactive sludge.
That it had finally and irrevocably blown sky-high.
That it had exploded with the power of seventy tons of TNT.
Of four Chernobyls.
Of ten Hiroshimas.
That it had torn the roof off the storage building and sent radioactive debris hurtling miles into the atmosphere.
They only knew what their eyes told them.
By the next morning, thick orange-black soot covered everything in Karabolka.
Every single thing.
That’s when a squad of Red Army soldiers showed up and sealed off half the town.
The Tartar half.
No one in. No one out.
Because there were really two Karabolkas. The Tartar Karabolka and the native Russian one.
The native Russians were told the truth. They were immediately evacuated in long black lorries. They never came back.
The Tartars were told a lie.
They remained.
Once there were two villages. One village where they always told the truth. Another village where they always lied.
Crude oil had seeped into the groundwater. This was the lie the Tartars were told.
That’s why their cows and sheep and pigs and horses were all dead or dying.
That’s why their well water tasted like metal.
That’s why orange-black soot covered everything.
That’s why the Red Army was there.
Crude oil.
Someone had to clean it up.
They’d been elected.
The Red Army soldiers marched them out to the fields, where they ripped potatoes and carrots and yams out of the ground with their bare hands and buried them in long pits.
They were led single file into the now-deserted Russian half of Karabolka, where they scrubbed the soot off bricks and tore down the single-room clapboard houses.
They were taken into eerily silent barns, where dead livestock was pulled out by the tails and thrown into pits of noxious lime.
Most of the workers were children-8, 9, 10, 11.
Boys and girls.
Making daily class excursions into the hot zone.
Their hands began to bleed.
Lesions soon covered their bodies like mosquito bites.
They vomited green bile.
No problem, said the soldiers.
It’s the oil. Clean up the town and everyone will feel better. All the sickness will go away.
All the headaches and the nausea. All that rectal bleeding and green vomit. All those open sores and bald scalps. Gone.
The cleanup continued for an entire year.
When winter came, snow refused to stick to the ground.
The well water remained brackish, foul. It tasted like tin.
A kind of sleeping sickness took over the town.
It didn’t matter.
They stayed put.
The children kept going into the fields, into the dead barns and deserted houses.
Later on, they’d be referred to as the young liquidators-much later, when things became known.
The children with radioactive hands. The children of the damned.
An entire generation that simply dropped dead.
Five thousand Tartar children eventually dwindling to under a hundred.
Including the newborns.
The ones born weeks, months, even years later.
Children unlike any other children on earth. Children that belonged in a traveling carnival or suspended in specimen jars.
Which is where some of them ended up. You can go to the Chelyabinsk Museum of Embryology today and see them there.
The ones torn from polluted ovaries, pickled in formalin, and arranged into rows on long wooden shelves.
Faces of fish. Legs of newts. Eyes of eels. Scaly skin, hoofed feet, and puppy-dog tails.
Like an ancient curse come calling.
As if it hadn’t been radioactive sludge in that secret storage tank at all, no, but a witch’s brew spewed out onto the innocents.
That was the secret.
The secret that couldn’t be told. Must not be. Can’t ever be.
Except…
Every so often, when the children were out there in the fields, digging their bare hands into soil the color of night. Every so often a noise. Up over their heads, somewhere in the heavens. Like a whisper from God. Loud enough to hear even if it was soft enough to forget.
But there.
The Red Army men watching over them with rifles never seemed to hear it.
But they did.
Maybe God whispered only to children.
To the young liquidators who were fast becoming the liquidated. Maybe it was for their ears only.
A promise.
A vow.
An acknowledgment of their suffering.
I will not forget.
I won’t.
God sees everything, doesn’t he?
Someone was watching.
It wasn’t God.
It was a single glass eye.
It was a shutterbug zipping along at five hundred miles an hour.
Clicking away at fifty frames per second in a belly of aerodynamic steel. Whooshing above the radar, like Icarus on his way to the sun.
The U-2.
The secret plane.
Take a moment to marvel at the symmetry, to bask in the ironic glow before you laugh yourself sick.
America’s secret plane. On a secret flight. Over a secret Russian village. Which had just suffered the biggest secret nuclear explosion in history.
We won’t tell if you won’t.
We won’t tell because we’re not flying secret planes over Russian airspace. No.
You won’t tell because you’re not churning out secret plutonium that has just gone up in smoke. You’re not murdering your own children. No.
Deal.
God wasn’t whispering to the children.
It was the whisper of two enemies unable to scream.
Back home where the secret film was blown up and pored over and analyzed and dissected, they took what lessons they could. If something should ever happen here-not that it would, not that it could, but just supposing it did, just preparing for any contingency, no matter how preposterous, how blatantly ridiculous, but still-if it did, we’d know the drill. We’d understand how to deal with it.
We’d take the proper measures.
Then it did.
FIFTY-ONE
Snapshots.
My days passed like an album being flipped quickly to the back page, little pictures that were sometimes blurry, sometimes not. Sometimes I was even able to remember them.
“How did it happen?” I ASKED HERMAN WENTWORTH.
Stay in a hospital long enough and eventually you get to meet the head doctor. Okay, the retired head doctor.
The head doc emeritus.
“Human error,” Wentworth said. “A little problem with the cooling system. It was trial and error back then.”
A little problem… trial and error. Talking about a nuclear plant blowing sky-
high as if they’d been building a volcano in science lab and the teacher ended up with some black on his face.
Just a little accident.
It happens.
“That’s what happened in Russia,” I said. “The same thing. The cooling system malfunctioned.”
“Yes.”
Wentworth was injecting me with something. I was staring up at the father of our country up on the ceiling.
Hello, George.
“The Aurora Dam plant was just a cover,” I said. “They needed the water to cool down the core.”
“They had their secret plants,” Wentworth said. “So did we. It was a different time. We lived under the shadow of nuclear Armageddon. Hard to imagine now. The pervasive fear.”
“And when the plant blew, it was just a dam bursting. A flood. Only the water wasn’t swimming with dead bodies and microbes-not just dead bodies. It was swimming with radioactivity. You covered it up. Took whoever survived that day and hid them away. American’s own little Karabolka.”
“What do you think? It was 1954. Tell the world we’d just had a twenty-two megaton nuclear accident? Tell the Russians? Tell the American people? Like I said, it was a very different time.”
“There were a lot of things you didn’t tell the American people about back then. That boys’ school in Rochester. The pregnant women in Vanderbilt. And this place. When it was Marymount Central. By the way, VA Hospital 138-was that an inside joke? Uranium 138-where mushroom clouds come from.”
He didn’t answer me; he was pulling out the syringe.
“You let one go,” I said. “One survivor. The little girl-Bailey Kindlon. Why?”
“Ahh… Bailey. So scared, so little. She’d mostly stayed out of the water. Radioactively and relatively speaking, she was clean. And she was only 3-that too. She maybe wouldn’t have seen things some of the older ones did-or understood them.”
“When you told me you were in the 499th, I should’ve known right then. The good old days in Hiroshima. What’s in that shot? It hurts.”
“Something new. Think of it as sodium Pentothal. Times ten.”
“All those mutations in Japan. Then in Karabolka. They scared the hell out of all of you.”
“They educated the hell out of us.”
“Not enough. You needed more.”
“Everything has its price. Lab rats will tell you only so much.”
“So you used human ones. In Rochester. And here. Then Littleton Flats happened and you knew what to do. You knew where to bring them. You castrated them-no baby gargoyles to offend your sensibilities, to give birth to other mutations down the line. You drugged them into oblivion. Benjamin. And the other vet who got away, who wandered back to Littleton like a homing pigeon. You never forget the way home, do you? — even with your brain fried, you still know. Wren found him sleeping in the gazebo. Later he found his name there on the black wall in Washington. People can’t die twice, can they?”
“Is that what you read in Wren’s article? The one he wrote about the Aurora flood?”
“There was no article about the Aurora flood. Wren never finished it. It never ran.”
“Of course. It never ran. But maybe it was written. Maybe he left it somewhere?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’ll see.”
On to the next page.
Rainey.
I didn’t know whether Rainey was in on it or not. Probably not. Just a soldier doing his job.
I asked him how I could be swallowed up. Legally. Not that anyone was playing by the rules. But just suppose they were.
“We are playing by the rules. People who are a danger to themselves or to others,” he recited. “I think you qualify.”
“I’m not a vet. This is a VA hospital.”
“ROTC. You qualify.”
“There was a psych who came to see me with the real Detective Wolfe. He thought I was perfectly sane. Maybe I can see him?”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a problem. But if I run into anyone who thinks you’re perfectly sane, I’ll let you know.”
“How’s Dennis doing?”
“Hard to tell. He doesn’t say much.”
“I didn’t do that to him. I brought him in. I saved his life.”
“I’ll tell him to write you a thank you note.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“Sure thing, Pinocchio.”
A storm.
I could hear it raging outside the walls. Thunder. Like standing too close to a bass amplifier at a small club. The vibrations making my ribs rattle.
It’s a hard… it’s a hard… it’s a hard rain… gonna fallllll…
I sang.
I was my own iPod.
I stayed with the canon of Dylan.
You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.
Anna’s favorite quotation. Remember? Listed on AOL: Kkraab.
Maybe it had been another clue for the clueless.
The Aurora Dam Flood.
You better start swimming.
Benjy must’ve swum like a motherfucker that day.
And Eddie Bronson, whoever he really was.
And the plumber’s mom-her too. Swimming out of one kind of trouble and right into another. Right into the jaws of a shark.
Swallowed whole.
Who was Anna?
If she wasn’t Anna Graham, then who was she? Really?
Some of what everyone tells you is true. The first rule in the Liar’s Handbook. It’s what makes it believable. It’s what sells it.
I would have to ponder that one.
I really would.
The middle of the night.
A faint red glow seeped through the door like blood.
I heard footsteps-more like a soft shuffling.
Stopping and starting, like a mechanical toy that moves two steps before it stops and needs rewinding.
Someone was working their way down the hall. Stopping at each cell before moving on.
It wasn’t Rainey, or the Samoan, or one of the other orderlies. I knew their footsteps by now. They had distinctive walks-jaunty, heavy, purposeful.
This was different.
I heard someone’s breath just outside my door.
The grill was moved to the side-the red poured in, turning my cell into a darkroom.
A strange sound.
Part speech and part moaning and part something else.
I sat up and stared at a single eye peering into my room.
That sound again.
Half-human.
Or maybe the opposite.
Too human.
“Dennis,” I whispered. “It’s me, Tom.”
The eye nodded.
I tiptoed to the door, put my face up against the open grill. “Look. They’ve locked me up, Dennis. They’re gonna throw away the key. Understand?”
Dennis stared at me without answering one way or another. It was possible that understanding and Dennis were mutually exclusive now.
“Your friend Benjy. That’s what they did to him. Then they killed him. There’s something they don’t want to get out.”
I couldn’t tell whether Dennis was digesting any of this. Whether I was as indecipherable to him as he was to me.
“Dennis, I need to get out of here. Help me.”
He made that sound again. A deaf person who’s never heard human speech. Like that. He could’ve been saying yes. Or no. Or maybe. He could’ve been asking for his meds.
“Dennis, you understand what I’m saying? They’re burying me.”
The eye moved. The grill closed shut. I heard that soft shuffling moving off down the hall.
I was allowed a shower.
The shower stall was open so they could watch you. It had metal hand-grips attached to the wall to keep doped-up vets from falling down and killing themselves.
On the way in, I passed someone on the way out.
Maybe this was the marine fucker Dennis had spoken of.
The one who’d gone AWOL searching for his kids’ bodies on Route 80.
I said hello.
The marine stared through me as if I wasn’t there. As if I’d turned invisible. I had.
No one could see me.
I was the invisible man.
I asked Seth how he did on bowling night.
Who’d replaced my irreplaceable 132 average?
If he’d gotten his revenge on the Judas Priest-tattooed A-hole who’d sucker-punched him in the alley?
If Sam had successfully peddled any insurance policies lately?
Seth wasn’t really there, of course.
Which was kind of scary.
Seth answered me anyway.
Which was scarier.
One night I dreamed I was back in Queens.
The night of the blizzard.
When my mom put away an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When I heard her muttering to herself about the toys Jimmy had left scattered around the living room. When I herded Jimmy into the bedroom and tried to shut the door, because I knew what was coming.
So did he.
Jimmy, who was smaller than me and therefore more vulnerable and much easier to fling around like a rag doll. Who looked more like my father, the father who’d deserted us for a younger and prettier woman who always brought us extra pancakes in the Acropolis Diner. Jimmy, who always took it from her with a stoic look of what… defiance maybe, even at 6, somehow finding that grown-up emotion within him-which enraged her even more. Of course it did. Made her do things to him with scalding bathwater, the bedroom radiator, my dad’s old belt buckle.
Things that eventually made Jimmy scream and wail and whimper, and me cover my ears in the false sanctuary of my bedroom, because defiance will get you only so far.
I herded him into the bedroom that night and shut the door. Thinking, this time, I will not let her in. I won’t. She’ll huff and puff but I will not let her blow the door down. I tried, tried as much as a 9-year-old can. Not enough. She pushed her way in and grabbed him by the arm, dragged him kicking and screaming out of the room.
And I could hear it.
I could hear all of it.
Even with my head in a vise of my own making, down on the ground, ears covered up.