He is taking us, basically, downwind. Not that the clinic was downwind of the testing in the years of frequent detonations. The clinic was probably not even here at the time. No, it is the people who were downwind, the villagers who are patients now, and their children and grandchildren, and Viktor takes us inside and we're not in a museum this time.
Viktor has been here four times, he says. He says this in a way that's hard to read. Every time he has gone to the Polygon he has also come here. This is a man who is trying to merchandise nuclear explosions- using safer methods, no doubt-and he comes here to challenge himself perhaps, to prove to himself he is not blind to the consequences. It is the victims who are blind. It is the boy with skin where his eyes ought to be, a bolus of spongy flesh, oddly like a mushroom cap, springing from each brow. It is the bald-headed children standing along a wall in their underwear, waiting to be examined. It is the man with the growth beneath his chin, a thing with a life of its own, embryonic and pulsing. It is the dwarf girl who wears a T-shirt advertising a Gay and Lesbian Festival in Hamburg, Germany, bottom edge dragging on the floor. It is the cheerful cretin who walks the halls with his arms folded. It is the woman with features intact but only half a face somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above her shoulders like the crescent moon.
She is wearing a T-shirt like the dwarf's and Viktor says this is the result of an importing ploy gone awry. A local businessman bought ten thousand T-shirts without knowing they were leftovers from a gay celebration in Europe. Very crazy thing, Viktor says, bringing these shirts into a place where Islam is stronger every day.
But this is part of the same surreal, isn't it, that started on the forty-second floor of that Moscow tower.
The clinic has disfigurations, leukemias, thyroid cancers, immune systems that do not function. The doctors know Viktor and let us wander here and there. He talks to patients and nurses. He says there are unknown diseases here. And words that are also unknown, or used to be. For many years the word radiation was banned. You could not say this word in the hospitals around the test site. Doctors said this word only at home, to their wives or husbands or friends, and maybe not even there. And the villagers did not say this word because they didn't know it existed.
Some of the rooms have rugs on the walls. Old men wear skullcaps, sitting motionless in shabby halls.
We stand in the cafeteria doorway watching a group of young people eat lunch. Their hair, nails and teeth have fallen out and they are here to be studied. I look around for Brian.
'Sickness everywhere around. And I tell you something,' Viktor says. 'They are blaming us. They are saying this is calculation. The Kazakhs believe this.'
'Blaming who?'
'The Russians. They are saying we tried to murder the whole population. Red Army did not always evacuate villages before a test. People see the flash and then a great cloud climbing the sky. They don't know what this is. Red Army exploded hydrogen bomb, very big yield, you know, and they left behind a hundred villagers to see what effect on people.'
'Do you believe this?'
'I believe everything.'
'Do you believe it was intentional?'
'Believe everything. Everything is true. Every time they did a test, hundreds of towns and villages exposed to radiation. Ministry of Health says, Okay we raise limit again. When limit is passed, Okay we raise again.'
Viktor is talking mostly to himself, I gather. But he is also talking to me. These faces and bodies have enormous power. I begin to feel something drain out of me. Some old opposition, a capacity to resist. I look around for Brian. But Brian does not want to see toothless people eating lunch. He is outside somewhere.
We walk the halls, Viktor and I.
He says, 'Once they imagine the bomb, write down equations, they see it's possible to build, they build, they test in the American desert, they drop on the Japanese, but once they imagine in the beginning, it makes everything true,' he says. 'Nothing you can believe is not coming true.'
I begin to see him as a very improbable man, lean and dark with the gray dyed out of his hair and a seeming need to look half gangsterish in that long slick coat. At a glance he belongs to these wild privatized times, to the marathon of danced-out plots. The get-rich-quick plot. The plot of members-only and crush-the-weak. Raw capital spewing out. The extortion-and-murder plot. But there are ironies and hesitations in Viktor's address to the moment. Too many years of slowly growing skepticism. He is in a fix, I think.
He says, 'An interesting thing. There is a woman in Ukraine who says she is second Christ. She is going to be crucified by followers and then rise from the dead. Very serious person. Fifteen thousand followers. You can believe this? Educated people, look very normal. I don't know After communism, this?'
'After Chernobyl maybe.'
'I don't know,' he says.
He didn't know and neither did I. We walked out into a patchy courtyard that opened at the far end onto the great wide plain running treeless to the mountains. Children played a game in the dirt, six boys and girls with missing arms, left arms in every case, knotted below the elbow. The eyeless boy was also here, squatted on his haunches, facing the players as if in careful observation of their efforts. Copper-skinned, wearing clothes that were probably Chinese-made, a hole above the welt in each shoe, his big toes poking, a fourteen-year-old, according to Viktor, who looked to be nine or ten, but unretarded, his head slightly oversized, face and forehead marked by tumors, and the spongy caps over the place where his eyes should have been.
The kids are playing follow the leader. A boy falls down, gets up. They all fall down, get up.
Something about the juxtaposition deepened the moment, faces against the landscape, the enormous openness, the breadth of sheepland and divided sky that contains everything outside us, unbearably. I watched the boy in his bundled squat, arms folded above his knees. All the banned words, the secrets kept in whitewashed vaults, the half-forgotten plots-they're all out here now, seeping invisibly into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of the bone.
He crouched under the great split sky, ears set low and his head sloped. The sky was divided, split diagonally, a flat blue, a soft slatey blue, like the head of a crested jay, and a yellow that wasn't even yellow, an enormous heartbreak yellow sweeping to the east, a smoky goldshot stain, and the kids with the knotted arms fell down in a row.
Most of our longings go unfulfilled. This is the word's wistful implication-a desire for something lost or fled or otherwise out of reach.
In Phoenix now, with the years blowing by, I take a drive sometimes out past the regimented typeface on the map and down through the streets named for Indian tribes and past the roofing supply and sandblasting and the condom outlet, painted now in ice-cream flavors, and finally I see the impressive open-steel truss of the waste facility down off Lower Buckeye Road, with grackles sparking across the landfill and the planes in a long line coming out of the hazy mountains to drop into approach patterns.
Marian and I are closer now, more intimate than we've ever been. The serrate edges have dulled away. We go to Tucson to see our daughter and granddaughter. We redecorate our house, building new bookshelves all the time, buying new carpets to set on top of the old ones, and we walk along the drainage canal in the twilight and tell each other stories of the past.
In the bronze tower I stand by the window and look at the hills and ridges and it's a hundred and ten degrees out on the street and I always wear a suit even if I'm only here to check the mail and I listen to the microtonal hum of the systems and feel a quiet kind of power because IVe done it and come out okay, done it and won, gone in weak and come out strong, and I do my imitation gangster for the elevator guy.
We separate our household waste according to the guidelines. We rinse out the used cans and empty bottles and put them in their respective bins. We do tin versus aluminum. We use a paper bag for the paper bags, pressing the smaller bags flat and fitting them into the large bag that we've set aside for the purpose. We bundle the newspapers but do not tie them in twine.
The long ghosts are walking the halls. When my mother died I felt expanded, slowly, durably over time. I felt suffused with her truth, spread through, as with water, color or light. I thought she'd entered the deepest place I could provide, the animating entity, the thing, if anything, that will survive my own last breath, and she makes me larger, she amplifies my sense of what it is to be human. She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully It is only a statement of the power of what comes after.
