James Siegel - Deceit

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.

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?”