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 through 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.