Bombshell (29 page)

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 the 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.

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.

The great avenue canyons of the Manhattan had, at first, retained some trappings of normality. The early stages of the evacuation of the city proceeded reluctantly, achingly slow, despite the imminent danger of radioactive contamination. But the escape routes were already becoming choked. People pressed like fish against the glass of yellow taxicabs, trunks overflowed with crude luggage, while breakdancers spun their angles on improvised sheets of cardboard and food vendors occupied their steel carts as though it were any other day. The department stores, coffeehouses, and restaurants remained open, and thousands of men, women, and children milled inside them, selecting purchases, exiting the revolving doors encumbered and talking without doubt or fear.

They tried to flee from the ghostly terror of contamination. The only trains arriving at Penn Station, or Grand Central, as at Yanov, brought no new passengers, but the empty carriages filled dangerously in retreat. In the panic, men and women fell from the overcrowded platforms, ribs were cracked in the forcing of more bodies into the cars, and the whimpering of suffocations went unheard in those claustrophobic, fearful tubes. People without vehicles began to walk between cars and overtook the grid-locked traffic on the wet streets. Cash listened to the blaring of horns in the dawn, the slow motion riot of impotent machinery. She sat down on the cold cement beneath the Ferris wheel, aware that the evacuation of the city would take several days and nights, and that against that continual stream would be many who would resist the compulsory clearance and the shutdown of the arcades and dormitories of New York. There would be a period of rioting and looting, as people weighed the possibility of accumulating commodities against accumulating radioactive contaminations. Picassos blew in tatters across the bloody steps of the Metropolitan Museum, a private
Guernica
of granite stripped and hollowed by petrol bombs; Rockefeller Plaza choked under obscene graffiti; the evidence of sexual assaults remained on the steps of St. Marks. The radiation was in every twist of the wind down the Hudson. New York had been shadowed by this oblivion, this blade of Damocles for so long, that now the city revolted against itself, against ever having existed. She looked into her backpack and checked the remaining ammunition for her pistol.

The violence began at an improvised bus terminal close to Canal Street and the Bowery, as thousands of residents sought passage across the Manhattan Bridge. The second wave of airdropped pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and television warnings had convinced her that a blockade was to be established from Red Hook, north through Brooklyn, through Williamsburg and Greenpoint, cutting off Roosevelt Island, the Queensboro Bridge, Astoria, and the RFK Bridge, and curving around La Guardia airport to
Locust Point before turning north toward Port Chester. The southeastern perimeter would close the ferry terminals, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and on the western bank, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and everything at least as far north as Peekskill Bay, in the shadow of Indian Point, but upwind for the time being. The tens of thousands of residents trying to cross the tenuous bridges on foot found their passage blocked by stalled traffic and buses, a din of horns and crying, exhaust fumes billowing between the primer paint superstructures. Bus tires were slashed with knives and shot out, and a swell of astounding fury overturned one of the long vehicles before it was set aflame. Molotov cocktails exploded in blue alcohol flames against neon dragons and lurid plastic fascias, mock pagodas and paper lanterns. Electronic storefronts and steaming kitchens were ransacked; broken glass flowed through the Bowery, a river of razors. The subway turnstiles were jammed with women's hair, torn shreds of clothing, and jettisoned luggage. Bodies fell from rusted fire escapes, clawing at laundry wires and the last bedsheets blackening in the smoke from the streets below. Muzzle flashes cut swathes through the panicked crowds, bullets ripped through designer billboards for perfumes, lingerie, and wristwatches, and strafed the luxury cars, splashing families across their upholstery like fish in a barrel, tiny splinters of bone stippling the leather headrests. The wounded fell in screaming tatters from the pocked passenger doors, slipping in the bloody street, trampled in their fur coats on the meaningless crosswalks. The downdraft of rotor blades churned the trash and dispossessed materials, doll parts, paper, scarves as Blackhawks hovered impotently over the carnage. Windows smashed and voices came like sheets of metal from the airborne PA systems as the riots spread over the island.

In Pripyat, there were no riots because the fire at Reactor IV could be seen from all parts of the city, from the pebble-dash high-rise blocks and bleak dormitories to the greenhouses that caught the reflection of disaster in their
panes. The people evacuated with nothing. Twenty-five years later, those to whom death remained as ineffable as the meteorological conditions that carried it along the Hudson River toward them were riven with suspicion, doubt, anger, and fear. Newspaper kiosks were sent crashing through jewelry store windows; knife-wielding children dripped diamonds in matrices of flashlight. What, in comparison, was the proletariat of 1986 to do—ransack the propagandist library, urinate on the screen of the Prometheus Cinema, steal scalpels from the
atomograd
hospital? In moribund conditions, capitalists will not hesitate from tearing one another apart. In 2001, according to authorities and newspaper reports, one looter was arrested for every fifty fatalities at the time of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center; the actual number of looters was, therefore, still larger. What looting took place at Pripyat came primarily in the months and years following the construction of the sarcophagus around the reactor, as squatters and souvenir hunters measured their risks against the inverted glamour of having visited the zone. The dying atoll of Manhattan was enthralled with bitter, resentful pyromania as fires broke out along the mirrored chasm of Wall Street, at Rockefeller Plaza close to the golden statue of Prometheus, where flames climbed the towers from a flashpoint of piled mannequins and televisions. Street gangs set up in the pale hive of the Guggenheim and ran amok along Park Avenue with automatic weapons. Behind her, the plateglass of a clothing store exploded, strafed by machine gun fire. Falling to the ground, she rolled for cover toward the blackened skeleton of a smoldering motorcycle. It was vital that she find some secure location to wait out the storm of violence and the tides of terrorized flesh that threatened to engulf her and drag her from the city as it receded. It was a holocaust where the atomic power of the stars was sewn into every fiber, licking every bone under the peeled back skin, miniscule fragments, filaments of dust, every trace of moisture incubated the incontrovertible diagnosis of death. The dragonhead, the gorgon plumes erupting from Indian Point blew their lethal steam. It claimed its territory: the irradiated teardrop of Manhattan.

Close to a subway station, Cash discovered an open construction site and dropped through the chevron barricade into the hollows beneath the street. From there, she could make her calculations and wait out the worst of the thunderhead from Indian Point, the radiation and the riots. Between the dripping brickwork of the conduit, she pulled out the shard of trinitite from the small leather sack at her throat and regarded it, a faintly glowing green light in the darkness. Just like Marie Curie and her pretty radium phials, she thought. Marie Curie carried her death in her white lab coat pockets. Cash bore the evidence and instruments of her birth and death in the gris-gris bag strung at her neck.

WHEN THE VIOLENCE SUBSIDED SUFFICIENTLY, AFTER WATCHING IT
from the windows of his hotel, Robert Dresner left his room and began to stroll down Lexington Avenue, drawn on a thread of nostalgia. Despite his excitement, he felt strangely nauseous. During the night and early hours of that morning, he had fought his adrenaline and his desire to descend to the streets and to bathe in the mayhem, to exorcize his ferocious hatred on petrified men, women, and children as they tried to escape from New York. But the greater part of him understood that he must preserve that hatred, and the bitch that had brought him to such profound and depthless despair, loathing, and brutality that his only thoughts involved killing her. From this hell where all doubted him, he would emerge, exonerated.

He had taken a large bottle of vodka from the Meridian's second-floor bar. He staggered drunken from the sidewalk, kicking a drained Molotov cocktail that had failed to ignite down the street of exploding steam. He squinted at the Moorish turrets and ornate orb-minarets, blinding clouds
passing in the time-lapse of his intoxication. The doors to the synagogue were open. He moved closer to witness the disarray inside, the graffiti slashing obscenities across the pipe organ, the wrecked seating and broken windows, as though the building had been besieged, barricaded, and overrun. Dresner felt afraid of the echoing hall. He put his vodka bottle to his lips and pivoted on his heels to descend the steps back to the pavement. For a moment, he hesitated at the traffic lights and pedestrian crossing. The city shifted and warped. Then he continued south, toward a pall of tar-black smoke, pulling his cell phone from his jacket pocket, dialing as he neared the column of flame.

Janelle Gresham answered: “Robert? Where the hell have you been?”

His voice was solicitous, an over-enunciated parody of an actor in a fifties car commercial. “Honey, you'll
never
believe what I'm looking at!”

“I don't care. Where are you?”

Ignoring her, Dresner continued: “Honey, do you remember where we were when we first talked about getting married?” His voice distorted as he tried to pin his phone to his shoulder with his cheek so that he could open his trousers with one hand to urinate in the street, holding the vodka in the other.