Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Across the street in front of the school, a tree was growing up from beneath the sidewalk. I climbed through an open window and crossed the classroom without touching anything. I passed through a solarium with an empty swimming pool. A kindergarten with little gas masks in a crate. Much had been looted and tossed about, including a surprising number of toys. At the front of one room over the teacher's desk someone had written on a red chalkboard, There Is No Return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986.

  Self-Improvement

  The territory exposed to the radioactivity, we now knew, was larger than one hundred thousand square kilometers. Many of those who'd worked at Chernobyl were dead. Many were still alive and suffering. The children in particular suffered from exotic ailments, like cancer of the mouth. The director of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow announced that there hadn't been one documented case of radiation sickness among civilians. Citizens who applied to the Ministry of Health for some kind of treatment were accused of radiophobia. Radionuclides in large amounts continued to drain into the reservoirs and aquifers in the contaminated territories. It was estimated that humans could begin repopulating the area in about six hundred years, give or take three hundred years. My father said three hundred years. He was an optimist. Nobody knew, even approximately, how many people had died.

  The reactor was encased in a sarcophagus, an immense terraced pyramid of concrete and steel, built under the most lethal possible circumstances and, we'd been informed, already disintegrating. Cracks allowed rain to enter and dust to escape. Small animals and birds passed in and out of the facility.

  I left the schoolyard and walked a short way down a lane overhung with young pines. Out in the fields, vehicles had been abandoned as far as the eye could see: fire engines, armored personnel carriers, cranes, backhoes, ambulances, cement mixers, trucks. It was the world's largest junkyard. Most had been scavenged for parts, however radioactive. Each step off the road added a thousand microroentgens to my dosimeter reading.

  The week after Mikhail died, I wrote my father a letter. I quoted him other people's moral outrage. I sent him a clipping decrying the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, corruption and protectionism, narrow-mindedness and self-serving privilege that had created the catastrophe. I retyped for him some graffiti I'd seen painted on the side of an abandoned backhoe: that the negligence and incompetence of some should not be concealed by the patriotism of others. I typed it again: the negligence and incompetence of some should not be concealed by the patriotism of others. Whoever had written it was more eloquent than I would ever be. I was writing to myself. I received no better answer from him than I'd received from myself.

  Science Requires Victims

  My father and I served on the panel charged with appointing the commission set up to investigate the causes of the accident. The roster we put forward was top-heavy with those who designed nuclear plants, neglecting entirely the engineers who operated them. So who was blamed, in the commission's final report? The operators. Nearly all of whom were dead. One was removed from hospital and imprisoned.

  During his arrest it was said he quoted Petrosyants's infamous remark from the Moscow press conference the week after the disaster: “Science requires victims.”

  “Still feeling like the crusader?” my father had asked the day we turned in our report. It had been the last time I'd seen him. “Why not?” I'd answered. Afterward I'd gotten drunk for three days. I'd pulled out the original blueprints. I'd sat up nights with the drawings of the control rods, their design flaws like a hidden pattern I could no longer unsee.

  But then, such late-night sentimentalities always operate more as consolation than insight.

  I could still be someone I could live with, I found myself thinking on the third night. All it would take was change.

  A red fox, its little jaws agape, sauntered across the road a few meters away. It was said that the animals had lost their skittishness around man, since man was no longer about. There'd been a problem with the dogs left behind going feral and radioactive, until a special detachment of soldiers was bused in to shoot them all.

  Around a curve I came upon the highway that had been used for the evacuation. The asphalt was still a powdery blue from the dried decontaminant solution. The sky was sullen and empty. A rail fence ran along the fields to my left. While I stood there, a rumble gathered and approached, and from a stand of poplars a herd of horses burst forth, sweeping by at full gallop. They were followed a few minutes later by a panicked and brindled colt, kicking its legs this way and that, stirring up blue and brown dust.

  “Was I ever the brother you hoped I would be?” I asked Mikhail toward the end of my next-to-last visit. His eyes and mouth were squeezed shut. He seemed more repelled by himself than by me, and he nodded. All the way home from the hospital that night, I saw it in my mind's eye: my brother, nodding.

  Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian

  It's a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I'm trying every so often to stay out of it. Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin, doing his improv thing with a stick.

  My father's beside himself because he thinks my mother threw out the Newsweek he's been saving to show my brother. It had war casualties on the cover. “You couldn't find your ass with both hands and a banjo,” he tells her, though she's not looking.

  “Go take a shit for yourself,” she tells him on her way through to the living room. He slams drawers in the kitchen. When he gets like this he stops seeing what's in them. We have to double-check everywhere he's looked to find anything. All of this is probably going to make my brother go off and we all know it, but none of us can stop.

  He was institutionalized at sixteen and released eight months later. It was at Yale-New Haven, a teaching hospital, and they either didn't have much of an idea of what to do with him, or they were totally at a loss, depending on who you talked to.

  “God forbid we should go somewhere,” my mother says from the living room. She's smoking and keeping to herself. “What we need to do instead is show each other magazines.”

  “Maybe you should go somewhere,” my father tells her.

  My brother and I are playing 500 rummy. He's kicking my ass.

  For a while I was kicking his. He's quiet like he's trying to concentrate. He hates when my father goes out of his way to do something for him. He pats his hair, which is falling out because of the medication, the way you check your pockets for something before you leave the house. His eyes are getting scarier, distracted and unfocused.

  He takes a break to make a tuna sandwich. White bread, no mayonnaise: he forks it out of the can and tries to spread it around. The tuna doesn't cooperate. He clears his throat a lot. My mother's still talking to herself. I try a joke. He gets that look you get when bile backs up. He's at this point eighteen or nineteen and has, as he puts it, his whole fucking life ahead of him.

  I ask my father why he's home from work today. “What're you, a cop?” he goes.

  I'm flipping my cards and debating whether to look at my brother's while he makes the sandwich. I'm also poking through a book I took out from the library. It has a giant scorpion on the cover, and you have to take something out and do a report, every week. It always takes forever to find something that's even halfway interesting. I get good grades, which is what I do instead of talking to people. My parents think I'm going to college. My father says when people ask that it's the one thing this family hasn't fucked up.

  Prearcturus gigas it says was over a meter long. I try pronouncing the name under my breath.

  “You're all right,” my brother says, eyeing me.

  That turns out to be a scorpion three feet long. There's a life-size picture of the fossil's pedipalps—movable things near the mouth that help shovel the prey in—next to a photo of ones from the largest scorpion today. It's like hunting knives next to fingernail parings.

  My father starts rooting th
rough the garbage under the sink, swearing. My mother calls it saying the rosary. “Don't go through the garbage,” she tells him. “It's not in the garbage.” Nobody's watching the TV in the den.

  Scorpions apparently went nuts during the Carboniferous period, which was way before the dinosaurs. According to what the book calls the fossil record. But our science teacher says the fossil record's a joke. That it's like saying we can figure out who lived in the U.S. by going through twelve dumpsters. Sitting there at the table, waiting, I come across these things from before the Carboniferous that weren't even scorpions. Proto-scorpions. They have like no eyes, no claws. Who knows. They may just be lousy fossils.

  My father starts shaking the plastic garbage can upside down into the sink. We can smell it from where we are. “I have no idea what you're doing,” my brother tells him. My mother says he better not be making a mess.

  “There, you son of a bitch,” my father goes, pulling out the magazine.

  “What do you want from me?” my brother says when he holds it up. “A dance?”

  After a minute my father starts cleaning everything up, dropping stuff back into the can's liner. I start winning at rummy.

  “Fucking Cincinnati Kid,” my brother goes, watching me tote up.

  “I'm the kid with all the answers,” I tell him. You can see him wondering how I meant that and then figuring it's not worth finding out.

  “So here's the article I was talking about,” my father tells him. There's a muffin wrapper stuck to it.

  “Very nice,” my brother goes. He's rearranging the suits in his hand. He's starting to look worse. He doesn't do almost anything but work out, and his arms when he flexes them rip the T-shirt sleeves.

  “I'm out,” I tell him again and fan the cards out between us. I catch him with another big hand.

  He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another. While he does the math I page around some more in the book. There's a drawing of something that looks like a shingle with some antennae. It looks like I'm showing off, beating him while reading a book. But it's somewhere to put my eyes, so I can't bring myself to shut it.

  “You playing cards or reading?” my father wants to know. He can see my brother's face.

  “The library,” my mother says from the other room. “That's the only place anybody in this family goes.”

  “Where're we gonna go? It's a fucking downpour,” my brother tells her.

  She doesn't answer. My father wipes his sponge around the rim of the sink, finishing the cleanup.

  I'm given a dream hand—a run and a half—right off his deal. And the card I need after that is the first one he discards. I think about not saying anything. Then I go ahead. “I'm out again,” I tell him, putting my cards down to show him.

  He pulls his hands back to his lap and sits there. Then he turns the whole table over. At its highest point the whole thing's up over my head. A few minutes after it hits, the neighbor across the street calls to see if everything's all right.

  Later when everything's quiet I'm still in the kitchen. There's a divot in the linoleum where the table edge came down. I'm in the corner with my back to the cabinets. My brother's in his room. My mother's in hers. My father hurt his back wrestling my brother up the stairs. He's got the heating pad on it. One end of the pad's tucked into his belt so it looks like he's plugged into the wall.

  There's tuna in my sock. My throat's still sore. There's not enough self-pity to go around. “Is he your brother or not?” my father's asking me.

  “Yeah,” I tell him.

  “So you wanta help him?” he wants to know.

  “Yeah,” I tell him, tearing up.

  “Well then why don't you help him?” he wants to know.

  Because there's what we want, and what we do, I'd figured out, even then.

  “You want to help him?” he asks me again.

  “Not really,” I tell him, sitting there. Not really, I tell myself, now.

  Hadrian's Wall

  Who hasn't heard by now of that long chain of events, from the invasion by the Emperor Claudius to the revolt of Boudicca and the Iceni in the reign of Nero to the seven campaigning seasons of Agricola, which moved our presence ever northward to where it stands today? From the beginning, information on our campaigns has never ceased being gathered from all parts of the province, so it's easy to see how historians and scribes of the generation before me have extended the subject's horizons.

  In my father's day, before my morning lessons began, I would recite for my tutor the story of the way the son of all deified emperors, the Emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus, on whom the necessity of keeping the empire within its limits had been bestowed by divine command, had scattered the Britons and recovered the province of Britannia and added a frontier between either shore of Ocean for eighty miles. The army of the province built the Wall under the direction of Aulus Platorius Nepos, pro-praetorian legate of Augustus. I would finish our lesson by reminding my tutor that my father had worked on that wall, and my tutor would remind me that I had already reminded him.

  The line chosen for the Wall lay a little to the north of an existing line of forts along the Stanegate, the northernmost road. The Wall was composed of three separate defensive features: the first a ditch to the north, the second a wide, stone curtain wall with turrets, milecastles, and forts strung along its length, and the third a large earthwork to the south. Their construction took three legions five years.

  I have memories of playing in the freshly dug material from the bottom of the ditch. I found worms.

  The ditch is V-shaped with a square-cut ankle-breaker channel at the bottom. Material from the ditch was thrown to the north of it during construction to form a mound that would further expose the attacking enemy. The turrets, milecastles, and forts were built with the Wall serving as their north faces. Double-portal gates placed front and rear at the milecastles and forts provide the only ways through.

  The countryside where we're stationed is naked and windswept. The grass on the long ridges is thin and sere. Sparse rushes accentuate the hollows and give shelter to small gray birds.

  The milecastles are situated at intervals of a mile, and between them, the turrets, each in sight of its neighbor, ensure mutual protection and total surveillance. The forts are separated by the distance that can be marched in half a day.

  Here then is the aggregate strength of the Twentieth Cohort of Tungrians whose commander is Julius Verecundus: 752 men, including 6 centurions, of which 46 have been detached for service as guards with the governor of the province, under the leadership of Ferox, legate of the Ninth Legion. Of which 337 with 2 centurions have been detached for temporary service at Coria. Of which 45 with 1 centurion are in garrison in a milecastle six miles to the west. Of which 31 are unfit for service, comprising 15 sick, 6 wounded, and 10 suffering from inflammation of the eyes. Leaving 293 with 3 centurions present and fit for active service.

  I am Felicius Victor, son of the centurion Annius Equester, and I serve in the Twentieth Cohort as scribe for special services for the administration of the entire legion. All day, every day, I'm sad. Over the heather the wet wind blows continuously. The rain comes pattering out of the sky. My bowels fail me regularly and my barracksmates come and go on the bench of our latrine while I huddle there on the cold stone. In the days before his constant visits, my father signed each of his letters Now in whatever way you wish, fulfill what I expect of you.

  My messmates torment me with pranks. Most recently they sent off four great boxes of papyrus and birch bark for which I'm responsible in two wagonloads of hides bound for Isurium. I would have gone to get them back by now except that I do not care to injure the animals while the roads are bad. My only friend is my own counsel, kept here in this account. I enter what I can at day's end while the others play at Twelve Points or Robber Soldiers. I sit on my clerk's stool scratching and scratching at numbers, while even over the wind the bone-click of dice in the hollow of the dice box clatters and ploc
ks from the barracks. Winners shout their good fortune. Field mice peer in at me before continuing on their way.

  Our unit was raised in Gallia Belgica according to the time-honored logic concerning auxiliaries that local loyalties are less dangerous when the unit's not allowed to serve in its native region. Since spring, sickness and nuisance raids have forced the brigading of different cohorts together in order to keep ourselves at fighting muster.

  Scattered tribes from the north appear on the crests of the low hills opposite us and try to puzzle out our dispositions. The wind whips through what little clothing they wear, mainly what looks like muddy flags between their legs. We call them Brittunculi, or “filthy little Britons.”

  Even with their spies they don't fully grasp how many of the turrets and milecastles go undermanned. Periodically our detachments stream swiftly through the sparsely guarded gates and we misleadingly exhibit strength in numbers.

  The governor of our province has characterized us as shepherds guarding the flock of empire. During punitive raids all males capable of bearing arms are butchered. Women and children are caravanned to the rear as slaves. Those elderly who don't attempt to interfere are beaten and robbed. Occasionally their homes are torched.

  Everyone in our cohort misses our homeland except me. I would have been a goat in a sheep pen there, and here I contribute so little to our martial spirit that my barracks nickname is Porridge. When with some peevishness I asked why, I was dangled over a well until I agreed that Porridge was a superior name.