The Haunting in the Ruins Read online

their seats, to see if I reacted in any way to all this. I kept my face poker still and stared straight ahead.

  After that came more basic things. Safety protocols: basic care and attention of gloves and overalls and gasmasks. And there was a short talk given by a counselor. Her name was Gloria, another of the Californians. She had a long sallow face framed by two curtains of red-brown hair. Apparently she travelled around a lot, between the blast zones, spending a little time in each before moving on. The way she looked at me made me uncomfortable at times.

  “It’s possible you may come across some disturbing sights,” she had said. “If so do feel free to come talk about it. Don’t be tempted to just bottle it up and soldier on.” Her eyes swept over me just for a second. She did not realize how long I had been doing just that: bottling up, soldiering on.

  My job was to be the collecting of soil, dust, powder and other such residue for radioactivity analysis, at varying distances from Ground Zero. We were looking in particular for Strontium 90 levels in the ground ashes, as well as comparing how various materials such as brick, stone, mortar, and metals might have absorbed different levels of fallout. It was all simple, straightforward undergraduate work.

  A couple of routes into and out of what had been the downtown had been cleared of all the vehicular wreckage that had been melted into slag and sent flying. Most of the larger ones had been cut through with huge chainsaws, and then pushed aside with heavy-duty army bulldozers and left piled up in black heaps by the roadside. Before us there had been numerous other teams working elsewhere in the city, doing research, removing remnants of skeletons, taking them away for what little DNA analysis was possible. A mass grave was being set up somewhere on the outskirts. There was talk of a memorial. I had no interest in it whatsoever. I still could not feel anything at all.

  At first, other than the overturned remnants of cars and other vehicles, there was little wreckage to speak of. Mostly there were broken windows, and lamp posts and telegraph poles leaning away from the epicenter. Then as we got closer we saw how their wires disappeared into melted puddles on the ground which had hardened into uneven discs of copper. Then the houses we passed became blackened on the insides, aluminum window frames having melted and ran down the walls, which were all blackened on one side. Closer in the tarmac on the roads had melted into rivers of molten black, then spread out and hardened into alluvial floodplains of hardened tar, household plastics, and aluminum. Glass had melted also, ran down the sides of buildings before settling itself into unexpected new shapes. What hadn’t been smashed to bits had burned uncontrollably. What hadn’t burned had melted, into a surreal twisted nightmare of molten tarmac, flowing glass and steel reshaped in seconds within a furnace as hot as the sun.

  Then that gradually gave way unidentifiable broken walls sticking up out of the tarmac floodplains like slices of burnt toast. Then it simply became undifferentiated rubble, in which there was nothing intact at all. It was as though a giant had come along with an immense bag full of millions of broken and blackened bricks, and just scattered them everywhere, until the entire landscape was covered in them. Then it all just became ash. Poking up here and there a blackened stump with no way to know what its purpose had ever been. There was one thing the lecture animation seemed to have gotten wrong: there were no sharply defined rubble ring walls, no smooth crater of atomized metal. Nothing was that sharply delineated. One area of devastation gave way gradually to the next, and everything solid that had not burned or melted seemed to have been tossed around randomly.

  And there were the shadows. On some of the walls facing the blast were faint traces of people that had been caught out in the open when it came down. All that was left of them were blackened outlines. Along one wall were a row of shadows all standing in line. Had they been soldiers, standing to attention? There was no way to tell. They seemed to watch in silence as we passed.

  I tried to make myself feel some sort of grief or outrage, but nothing here was even recognizable as the place I had grown up in. It was all a dark parody. The numbness inside me seemed to have spread outwards to envelope everything. I realized I had probably learned to stop feeling anything at all years ago.

  Why even come back here then? What had I hoped to find here, amidst this degradation? I still could not answer. The silence still haunted me. I wanted, just once, to scream my outrage at the world that had allowed this to happen. But the words would never come. They always died in my throat. Some things are beyond words. Beyond even tears.

  Presently we reached Ground Zero, where we were to begin working. The missile had exploded over the town square, the spiritual as well as geographical center. In the summer it had played host to street performers. Bands had played. I found as I got out of the truck that I could not now form a coherent mental image of any of it. It was as though my distant memories were slowly being erased. Only to be replaced by this.

  Was that why I had returned, to blank out the last of it? I began to offload the boxes of equipment, my mind increasingly numb. Even thought seemed like an effort. But I was here now. I had to go through with it. I could not walk away. I’m sure that if I had gone to the counselor and pleaded emotional distress she would have understood. But I knew I wouldn’t.

  It was not considered safe to enter any tower block remains, or even get too close, as it was thought there could be a danger of sudden collapse. This had actually happened already, when the transporter drove between two buildings and one of them just fell inwards, imploding in a shower of bricks and dust.

  Little clouds of ash kicked up wherever we walked. We were like some weird parody of explorers on the moon, in our face masks and heavy boots. Even the truck with its big heavy tires looked more suited to a lunar landscape.

  For the rest of that day I simply carried out the job unthinkingly, mechanically. I went through the motions of setting up the elementary atmospheric samplers without thinking about it. They were solid nuclear CR-39 polymeric track detectors, the cheapest available. They came in these big sheets of plastic out of which hundreds could be cut and laid at various points. For the Ground Zero zone the detectors would be formed of cellulose nitrate and acetates, for greater particulate detail. In particular we needed to determine how bomb-derived Cs 137 would interact with natural particles on the surface, most of which would be contained within the top two millimeters.

  It all should have been done years ago, but in the chaos immediately after the war there was no time for such things. And now science and civilization were slowly returning, coming back to re-establish their foothold on the world. But it was science and technology that had helped bring us to this state. And now here it was back again, trying to make amends. But it seemed it could only do so through sample taking and measurements. This, I imagined, was the closest thing to an apology from science that the Earth was likely to get.

  As night fell we were driven back inside the main camp. As we changed out of our suits I noticed several of the others looking at me, in a sort of half expectant way. What did they expect? For me to just break down in front of them? To have hysterics? I said nothing, only glared back resentfully at them. They looked away in embarrassment. Then I softened and realized they were probably only concerned.

  “Do you, uh, maybe want to talk about it?” said Sarah.

  I shook my head. “This isn’t the place I remember,’ I tried to explain. “There isn’t.... there’s nothing here anymore. I can’t even recognize it.”

  “Maybe,” said Sven slowly, “that is a good thing.”

  “It’s awful what happened,” said Sarah quietly.

  “Some good will come of it,” said Sven, nodding his head emphatically. “This will make future wars harder to wage. Even now they talk of a ban on all such weapons. Make them all illegal.”

  “Oh, sure!” said Sarah dismissively. “The war to end all wars, I seem to have heard that one before. Funny how that never seems comes about.”

  “But it does,” said Sven. ‘The First World War prod
uced the League of Nations. The second, the UN. Now there is talk of a universal ban on stockpiles. You see, each war makes people try harder for peace.”

  “Is that what it takes to bring us to our senses? We have to clobber everything into the ground before we can even start talking?”

  “Well, no but-”

  I left them to it and went to my quarters. Such a typical American, I thought petulantly. Always they would come in with the talk therapy, always looking to find some compromise with their selves. How could she hope to understand any of this, in her comfortable California existence? How could any of them?

  We Russians did not make such compromises. We could not afford to.

  And yet, it was this very inability to compromise that had brought us to this state. I stopped at the clear plastic strip in the canvass which passed for a window, and squinted at the desolation that lay outside. I could sneer inwardly at them, yet they had not destroyed their world. I did not feel like trying to understand. I was not yet ready for such a compromise with the Self. I just buried myself in my work and stopped thinking about anything at all. I kept my head down and went on working blindly, amidst the skeletal ruins.

  It was on the next day after that