The earth would eat us all but until then he would eat potatoes.
He’d had a knife then. He had the knife still. Sometimes when he walked the forest he took out the knife he’d had when he’d had his wife and he carved her name into the trees. He wasn’t afraid to forget it but it was good to read it, to have the letters make the sound in his mind, to hear it spoken. She had been in the world. Her name was in it still. As long as the trees lasted he knew he’d carved enough trunks he wouldn’t ever go too long without her.
What had her voice sounded like?
Seven years since he’d heard her last words. She was the one from Pripyat. This had been her home. He had met her the first time, had taken her away, had brought her back. By then she was sick and he thought he would be sick soon too. But she had died and he had lived.
They had come back together but sometimes he remembered it differently. In his memory he had come back alone because now it was hard for him to imagine doing anything not alone. And what was memory but imagination girded with fading truth.
When he returned to the cave he found the coals of his fire gone cold and empty. If he wanted anything from Pripyat it was matches but there were other ways to start a fire. Dark would fall soon and the cold would increase and as he gathered kindling he knew that what he was making was no home, only a hole, a burrow for a man who knew at last that he was an animal like all the rest.
He had wanted to do the right thing for his wife but she was gone, they were all gone, and he didn’t know if he still believed in right or wrong. He supposed he was no longer a moral creature. The earth was death and the earth radiated with evil and the evil soaked into your bones. He wasn’t born a moral creature but for a time he had been made one by motherland and marriage. A righteous task could make a righteous man but all he had left to do was live or die. The evil burned in the ground and it came up into his skin and his lungs and when it killed him he would go into the ground too, become one with it.
The good man in the bad world. He had believed once but now he knew the world was neither good nor bad. The world was death and against death there was no sufficient goodness. And what did goodness matter if it couldn’t change the world.
He walked among the trees of the forest, gathering what dead wood had fallen since the last snowfall. It hadn’t snowed in days but there was snow on the ground, thick and crusted and long from melting. Everywhere he went there were tracks but not footprints, never footprints again. Only the mark of wild boar and wild deer, of wild dog and wolf. Everywhere the marks of beasts and on the trees the marks of his knife, her name, the name keeping him company, the last company he craved.
He couldn’t remember her voice. He couldn’t call her last face to mind, not the false face she’d worn at the end. He liked seeing her as he’d met her, young, fresh, smiling. Even then full of the radiation killing her but without a hint of its effects. It would take so long for the evil to have its way. Long enough they could believe it never would. Evil got inside her but he couldn’t see it, but it didn’t change who she was. So kind and joyful, an antidote to himself, to who he knew himself to be. He had never known joy before her. When she was alive he’d thought he would never lack it again. But then the birth of their poor daughter. Then the wages of radiation, of dirt, of the pitiless earth.
He would live but he wouldn’t live in joy. There would be no more gladness. He was a thing running its course. Empty as a river. Moral as a river. Until the earth opened up and swallowed it whole, spring and source and the carve of its route.
A man living in the forest. A man who had lost everything he’d ever loved. Somewhere in the distance Pripyat waited outside the future and somewhere beyond that the plant did the same. All the Soviet architecture, Stalinist development plans. Districts of brick masonry, wet-stucco walls. Cities designed to last forever. The glory of empire. Pripyat, the ninth atomograd, the ninth nuclear city. Once fifty thousand Soviets strong and now who was left. A few stragglers, a few returning refugees.
A story of perseverance but against what? The Soviet world had ended. Pripyat endured, the evidence of its failure. What the Soviet world had wrought. Was there anywhere else on earth, the last man wondered, that had ever indicted a nation so fully? Did every other nation contain a city whose failure cast such fear, such wide and lasting doubt?
He dropped the kindling onto the snow, fell to his knees. The old grief was heavy upon him again but he couldn’t stay there long. The cold only killed you if you couldn’t keep moving. When he stood he took his knife from his pocket, placed its blade against the flesh of an unmarked tree. He remembered her name into its bark, carved the crooked memory. In his youth, he might have carved a plus, might have carved an and. He had been so sure then of his name, of who the man so named was, would become. Now he was not so sure. Or else he would not admit who he was. Only the last soul living in this frozen forest. Nameless to any who might see him, any beast or man. Walking, gathering, surviving. Reading everywhere the name of the woman he’d loved. The best thing he’d known between birth and death, between the air and the ground. Her name, of which too much was asked. Because what was a name. Because what was a name, even a name you could see in the skin of every tree, against the colorless evil of the earth, of every inch of dirt.
DETROIT
THE ARENA HAD SPECIAL SEATING for the handicapped and their caretakers, designated entrances. Kelly showed the parking-garage attendant their tickets, then followed the attendant’s directions to push the girl in her wheelchair out onto a street named for one of her heroes. When he said the name and pointed at the sign, her head didn’t move but he thought she might have shifted her eyes. They had lived together for almost a year now and he had spent the first months learning the new range of her expressions, had started to recognize the small differences between a good day and a bad day, slight shifts in her mood and movements.
In the handicapped section he cataloged the previously unimagined configurations of men and women, their varied dependencies, the results of age, disease, awful chance: An old man with an oxygen tank strapped to his walker, linked armed in arm with a woman who must have been his daughter. Another woman in a wheelchair, her limbs distorted, her age impossible to determine through her deformity. A teenager ancient in his seat, his head wobbling, mouth open, full of soft teeth and dumb sound. All of them dressed in the same red jerseys as anyone else, loose over their differences. The other wheelchairs decorated with stiff flags, bumper stickers for the team, the city, other abstracted allegiances.
The game hadn’t started yet. There were twenty-ounce beers available for nine dollars twenty feet away but he didn’t want to take her with him to get one, didn’t know how to ask someone else to watch her. There wasn’t much she needed but he wouldn’t leave her alone. To not leave her was the rule. There was a backpack hung over the back of her chair and it contained most of what she might require. Whenever he remembered he kept one hand on her shoulder, let her know he was there. He talked more now than ever before. She couldn’t talk but she could make some sounds and he applied certain kinds of sense to each. There wasn’t as much hunger in her as before but she was putting on weight, acquiring a sedentary sag to her flesh. They didn’t have sex anymore but one of his tasks was to lift her naked in and out of the tub, to rub soap and sponge over her sore skin. Up close there was still something sexual about her body but sooner or later he stepped back.