The government announced that there’d been an accident at the nuclear power plant just outside the city, after which Oswald Kuzmenko and his pregnant wife, Oksana, fretted around their small apartment for two days, slowly gathering their things, mourning the life they’d had up to then. They were both employed by the plant—Oswald a custodian, Oksana a reactor operator—and they were loyal members of the state. They were starting a family. They lived in a good town. Now that was assumedly over, Oksana declared.

​

Oswald stared blankly at his wife. “You don’t say.”

​

“Don’t snap at me,” Oksana said. “It’s not like I caused the accident. I wasn’t even working two days ago. I was home with you. We played Risk, remember?”

​

“Why are we arguing?” Oswald said. But he was, in a sense, actually quite angry with his wife and in an argumentative mood. He couldn’t stop mulling over the idea that they wouldn’t have been in this predicament had they stayed down south with his brother, instead of moving up north to the plant. The move had been Oksana’s idea, after all. She never liked Oswald’s brother, Marko, a political dissident and an imprudent gambler. Oswald, by proxy, had suffered some minor injuries and Oksana panicked, moving them away. But Oswald had buried all that, until the accident, the waiting, these past two days.

​

After tea, they walked around the apartment again. They’d already packed their money and several changes of clothes in a duffel bag. They were supposedly forbidden from taking any more luggage than that.

​

Oswald sat down in his favorite blue recliner. “I’m going to miss this chair,” he said. It had been in his brother’s house, and in his father’s house before that. It stank, nostalgically, of pickled eggs and cigarettes.

​

“We’ll buy a new chair,” Oksana said. “I don’t know why we took that thing with us in the first place.” She was washing her hands in the kitchen. Ever since the accident, she’d been adamant about washing her hands. Oswald didn’t understand why, but he thought it best to let her have that small, odd habit.

​

“This chair holds many memories,” he said, thinking.

​

Oksana came into the living room, her hands rubbed red. “Lately I feel so dirty all the time, I can’t stand it.” Confusion quivered across her face.

​

Oswald stood from the chair and moved to the window. The city already seemed evacuated, but everyone was just inside, preparing. It had been a strange city to live in, as specifically engineered as a theme park. There were patios with multicolored umbrellas on every block, and lines and lines of rosebushes. There was even a Ferris wheel. It was not a city that had risen from the earth, so to speak, but one that had been placed there, like a fondant cake topper, to house the power plant’s employees and their families. Supposedly the streets were designed, with a geometric carefulness, in a manner that alleviated traffic, although Oswald considered traffic just as bad here as anywhere else. In fact, Oksana had initially been transferred to this particular power plant after one of the other operators had drowned when a horrible car accident sent him flying off a bridge, landing nose first in the river below. It was as if even that tragedy had been mapped into the city’s infrastructure, to doom them, Oswald thought gloomily.

​

“The chair holds no memories, we hold the memories,” Oksana said.

​

“The chair inspires the memories,” Oswald replied, unimpressed.

​

Oksana sighed and took off her clothes. The evening wavered around her. Oswald watched her as she crossed the apartment, slow as a boat, to the bathroom.

​

The next morning, a soldier arrived. He was much skinnier and much younger than Oswald expected him to be. Younger than Oswald, who was himself still young, at least he considered himself young, willful, with a future. The soldier informed the couple that they would be traveling via bus to one of several villages some miles from the city.

​

Oswald shouldered their duffel bag. “When are we coming back?”

​

“I’m not sure,” the solider said.

​

“Well, why are they moving us?”

​

“They don’t tell me anything,” the soldier shrugged.

​

“So why should we listen to you?”

​

Oksana touched his cheek with the back of her bright red hand. Her knuckles, cold as little mountaintops, moved across his skin. “What else are we going to do?”

​

They left their apartment and took the elevator with another family down to the street. The flow of pedestrians pulled them toward the town center where the entire city gathered next to rows of parked military buses. Oswald held Oksana’s hand so as not to lose her, but he couldn’t help but feel angry at her. She was the one who wanted to move here after all. She was the one who got a job at the power plant. If not for her, he’d still be down south, gambling and protesting, which may have left him a little worse for wear (a stab wound just below his collar bone and a broken left arm, respectively), but was better than being herded onto buses. Oswald took his hand away.

​

“Give me,” Oksana said, groping for him. “I don’t want to lose you.”

​

“Stop it,” Oswald said.

​

“Wow,” Oksana said. She crossed her arms. “Fine.” She pushed her way into the crowd and disappeared. Oswald, refusing to be bested, didn’t bother to call after her.

​

On the bus he ended up sitting next to an old man. “I abandoned my poor cat,” the old man said, shaking his head. “He had cat diabetes. Did you know there was such a thing? But they don’t have cat insulin. What could I’ve done for him anyway?”

​

“Cats are survivors,” Oswald said, but in fact he didn’t know if this was true. He’d never owned a cat before. Everyone in his family had been allergic, including him.

​

“Not this one,” the old man said. He licked his oily gums. His milky eyes were speckled like eggs. “I’d to have to point out his food bowl to him to get him to eat. Otherwise he’d never realize there was anything there. His mind was a rock.”

​

“Do you know what’s happened,” Oswald asked, “why we’re being moved?”

​

“How should I know?” the old man said. He shrugged, burdened. “I’m just an old man. I moved here to live with my son and then my son died and left me here. Didn’t you work at the power plant? If anyone should know between us, it should be you.”

​

“I just cleaned the toilets there,” Oswald said, sulking.

​

The old man said, “Isn’t it strange that, in English, the words unclear and nuclear are made of the same letters? And the Jews think that God can be found in their gobbledygook language. But how can that be? Half our languages are lost to the ruins, like my cat. Our minds, eventually, become ruins too. We tour them, we take pictures, we imagine what happened, but what do we learn?” He coughed wetly into a crooked fist, spit onto the floor of the bus, and turned away from Oswald and toward the window.

Oswald zoned out. The bus kept moving. Occasionally they would hit a muddy divot in the road and the bus would clatter. Silence pressurized the inside of the bus as if it was underwater. Oswald slipped into a dark place in his mind. Oksana was not on this bus. In fact, he wasn’t sure what bus she was on, or if she’d even gotten on a bus. For all he knew, his wife had stranded herself in the city. Well, it had been her idea to move, hadn’t it? Oswald’s thoughts buzzed in his head like the fluorescent lights that had once lit the power plant. The old man had fallen asleep, his head against the dewy window. Outside, the world passed by like one long ocean of mud. Oswald looked behind them. There seemed to be way fewer buses forming their caravan than there’d been parked in the city center. The old man snorted in his sleep.

​

Several hours later they stopped in a small, empty village. It looked like a set in an old black-and-white movie without any of the actors to populate it. Oswald retrieved his duffel bag from a compartment underneath the bus and scanned the faces of people filing off the other buses, searching for Oksana. Perhaps she really had been left behind, Oswald thought—a bit too eagerly, he knew. But then he spotted her idling next to the last bus in line, kicking up dust. A soldier, who also seemed too young to be fit with a rifle, was waiting with her.

​

“Funny seeing you here,” she said when Oswald approached. “You should have been on my bus. There was this couple a few seats in front of me arguing about what they’d brought from home. The wife had filled a cardboard box with porcelain trinkets and crystal dinnerware, and the husband was just furious. He shouted at her in front of everyone and then shattered a crystal fruit bowl on the floor of the bus into a million jagged glittering pieces, give or take. Why won’t you say anything?”

​

“Is there some kind of lesson I’m supposed to take from that?” Oswald said.

​

“It really happened.” She pointed to the soldier. “Ask him.”

​

Oswald glared.

​

“I’m just trying to do my job,” the soldier said.

​

“Where are we?” Oswald demanded. He looked the soldier square in the eye and could see that this one was much too young and hopelessly stupid as well.

​

The soldier lifted his slender arm toward the distance, where a crowd of people had gathered around another group of soldiers. “Please find, in that direction, where you will be sorted into temporary housing,” the soldier recited.

​

Oswald grabbed Oksana’s hand, which was still freezing, and led her to where the others from their city, exhumed from the buses and stranded, were improvising a crowd. A group of soldiers shoved through the crowd and held up manila folders. They shouted out first letters of last names, and several lines formed dutifully. Oswald and Oksana lined up behind another family who Oswald recognized from their building. However, the more he looked at them the more they seemed to change before his eyes. These people could have been anyone, Oswald realized, feeling much smaller suddenly.

​

Oksana rubbed her belly. “It’s been so quiet,” she said.

​

“He’s probably sleeping,” Oswald said, feeling rather impatient.

​

“You’re always so certain the baby’s a he,” Oksana muttered.

​

“I don’t even think about it.”

​

“But that’s what I mean. You assume a he. But why can’t you assume a she? What if our child’s a little girl? Will you still love her?”

​

“I assume nothing,” Oswald grumbled. The line moved imperceptibly, but Oswald didn’t step forward. He refused to step forward as eagerly as the rest, inching as close as they could, as quickly as they could, to a future that was entirely uncertain, entirely out of their control. But eventually people were pushing up against his back, crowding him, and he moved with them. The sky was blue and flat above them. Oswald felt as if he was in a strange terrarium, more or less.

​

An hour later they got to the front of the line. Yet another soldier, a bit older than the others but still close in age to Oswald, was sitting behind a makeshift table. Boxes of files were in the mud next to the soldier’s booted feet. “Name,” the soldier groaned.

​

“Kuzmenko,” Oksana offered, stepping forward.

​

The soldier leaned over and unhurriedly fingered the files in the box. He emerged with a file that had Kuzmenko, O. scrawled across the top. They held their breath.

​

“You are in East Block,” the soldier said, handing them a numbered manila folder, then a sheet of paper with a date and time, “and this is your designated appointment with a health specialist.”

​

Oswald surveyed the papers. He wondered which of them the O on the folder represented. “What’s the number mean?” he asked, pointing to the envelope.

​

“That’s your cabin number,” the soldier replied. “Your key is inside.”

​

“What’s going on?” Oswald said. He held up the dated sheet and shook it. “This appointment is in three days. How long are we expected to be here?”

​

“We’re playing this by ear,” the soldier said. “In the meanwhile, get settled. Think of this as a vacation, free from responsibility. You might as well make the best of it.”

​

Oswald stormed off, Oksana followed behind. They went by the signs for east block. Families around them gathered their things, children were crying.

​

“ ‘Make the best of it.’ Easy for him to say,” Oswald muttered.

​

“Oh please,” Oksana sighed.

​

Oswald spit in the mud. Oksana groaned; she considered spitting a vile habit. They walked with some distance between them, Oswald falling behind, shouldering their bag. Eventually, they came upon East Block, a gathering of stumpy makeshift houses that resembled two small cabins stacked on top of one another. Some people were already habituated, draping damp shirts and pants over the windowsills. It was a little city. Mistrust flashed through Oswald’s mind and faded into a dim shadow just as quickly.

​

They walked through East Block, checking the cabin doors for their number, the mud sucking at their shoes. Their cabin was one of the last ones, tucked neatly in a back corner, next to a fence, beyond which were several grassy hills and a dirt road. Their cabin was the bottom one. A woman was out front, shuffling dirt around a raised planter and planting squirrelly, deflated little flowers.

​

“Hello,” Oksana said, waving. “I suppose we’re your neighbors.”

​

The old woman looked up with a blank expression. “I brought these from home,” the old woman said, gesturing to her plants. “My husband’s spirit visited me last night and said, ‘Perdita, you must bring the plants from our home, or else the looters will steal them.’ So here they are.”

​

Oswald gritted his teeth. Their duffel bag, dense with their belongings, was starting to numb his shoulder with its weight.

​

“They’re mostly onions,” Perdita, the old woman, said. “My Ivan loves onions. He’s coming back. He wants me to save him some onions for when he arrives.”

​

Oksana stepped toward the planter and examined the wilty, off-colored plants. “They are very nice onions,” she assured Perdita, patting the old woman on the back.

​

“Well, I think so!” the old woman barked.

​

They moved to the cabin door. Oswald retrieved the key from the envelope and breathed deeply before unlocking the door.

​

“What’s wrong with you?” Oksana said. “Give me the key.”

​

“I can do it,” Oswald said, nudging her. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, Oksana quickly stepping in behind him. The inside of the cabin was uncomplicated. There was a bed, a sink, a stove, and a toilet in a small, doorless room. The walls were turquoise, the paint job puckered, shoddily done, the painters obviously in a rush.

​

“Home sweet home, right?” Oksana said. “Right?” Her freezing hand brushed against Oswald’s skin. He placed the duffel bag on the bed and sighed in relief.

​

“You never answer me,” Oksana said. “You’re never listening.”

​

Oswald lay in bed, his arm draped over his eyes. The room pulsed with a strange, stoic energy. It almost felt like a boat on the water, tilting from one side to the other. He could feel himself leaving his body. Maybe he was dying, he wondered, alarmed at first, but finally accepting it, dignified. In his mind he imagined himself settling into a chair in a long parlor slick with marble, holding his hand to his mouth and a dark red cube there resting in his palm, quivering in the brightness of the parlor. He pocketed the fleshy thing before his wife noticed.  His brain dissipated in a misty rivulet, his heartbeat resonated elsewhere, his bowels slackened, as if shedding a layer of skin.

​

He woke fitfully, sitting up, afraid he’d shit himself. Panic seized him. The room he was in was unrecognizable. He was in a dark blue cave, facing the wrong way. A faucet was running somewhere in his mind. But then he realized where he was. It was the same room he’d fallen asleep in, on East Block. He turned and saw his wife, in her underwear, holding her hands under the faucet, trying to drown them. She was crying.

​

“You were asleep for so long,” she was saying to Oswald. He barely recognized her, as downcast and twisted as her face was. “You left me again,” she sputtered.

​

“I’m right here,” Oswald said. He stood from the bed and drifted over to her. There was no way to tell if he was dreaming or not, he realized. Then he felt stupid. His wife had set a trap for him, waking him this way.

​

Oksana let Oswald hold her—she was freezing all the way through now—and then spun around gracelessly, rubbing her abdomen. “I’m worried,” she said.

​

“What’s wrong now?” Oswald said.

​

“The baby,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

​

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Oswald said. He knew he probably seemed not in the least supportive, but sometimes there was no point in obscuring one’s true feelings.

​

“You never listen,” she said. Above them, the old woman, Perdita, who had been clomping around, suddenly became quite still. They held their breath.

​

“You’re just tired,” Oswald whispered.

​

“I want a professional opinion,” Oksana whispered back.

​

They got dressed and stormed out into the gray, humid outdoors. The shantytown around them bristled. Little pockets of people were here and there, gathered in circles, talking about nothing, unwillingly freed from their lives. A pair of soldiers walked by and surveyed the people, disgusted. Oswald stopped them.

​

“We need to see the doctor. My wife is sick,” he explained as calmly as he could.

​

“You got your appointment sheet, right?” one of the soldiers asked.

​

“It’s not for three days,” Oswald said. “This is an emergency.”

​

“Uh, duh,” the soldier said. “Look around you.”

​

“I’m pregnant,” Oksana said. She opened her coat.

​

“Good luck with that,” the soldier muttered. Then he and his companion marched off. Oswald and Oksana were left feeling somewhat embarrassed. The evening shrank away from them and grew darker.

​

They retreated to their cabin. Oswald leaned against the door as he locked it. Oksana sat on the bed. She held out her hands and cried silently and without tears. Then she rushed to the sink to wash her hands again. Oswald unzipped their duffel bag to retrieve their pajamas and its contents practically burst forward.

​

The next morning Oswald ventured out. His wife was still asleep, so he quietly closed the door behind him. There were no phones in the cabins, but there was a phone booth on each block, according to the literature the solider had handed them when they first arrived. Oswald felt conspiratorial and sly. The old woman, Perdita, was at her planter; Oswald tried to sneak past her but she noticed him and waved.

​

“Yoo-hoo!” Perdita called to him. “How has your stay been?”

​

“Fine,” Oswald said instantly. His thoughts were formless, like ink in water.

​

“Do you suppose they’ll be feeding us?” Perdita asked.

​

“I’m not sure,” Oswald said, quietly stunned. He hadn’t even thought about eating, only about how doomed they all were.

​

“Well, my onions are coming in, just in case.” Perdita licked her teeth.

​

“I’m sure Ivan would be very pleased,” Oswald said.

​

“Oh, what does he know anyway,” Perdita yelled.

​

The phone booth demanded a good long walk through the mud and a line had already formed by the time Oswald arrived. There was nothing worse than waiting for people to end their conversations, even back home. But now there was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Waiting for the phone was a meaningful pursuit. This thought made Oswald sick. But he was trapped in his own head, he couldn’t escape himself. Then a large sensation went through him. He opened his hand and spit a small red cube into it, the same as from his dream. Waiting a moment for anything further, he pocketed the cube and decided to leave it out of his mind for the moment.

​

Inside the phone booth the floor was thick with mud. Oswald dialed Marko’s number. The dial tone was a strange, computerized version of the Worker’s Marseillaise.

​

“Who is this?” Marko answered. “How did you get this number?”

​

“Marko, it’s me,” Oswald said.

​

“Oh. Yeah, I heard about what happened. I was wondering.” Marko sounded drunk and out of breath, as usual. There were storms of activity surrounding him at all times and Marko only occasionally seemed in control. This was Marko’s charm, however, ever since they were children, and Oswald couldn’t help but feel mundane in comparison. He, with his pregnant wife and his normal job, was quaint with envy.

​

“I don’t know where we are,” Oswald blurted.

​

“I knew this would happen. She was the one that wanted to move there in the first place, right? You know she never liked me. She always thought I was a bad influence.”

​

“You were a bad influence,” Oswald admitted.

​

“I’m not the one who’s gotten you whisked into quarantine,” Marko shouted. The party behind him subsided into a faint buzz. “I thought you were leaving her.”

​

“She’s pregnant,” Oswald said, a bit loudly. He glanced behind him. A long line of sad looking men were all watching him, entirely disinterested.

​

“Stop making excuses,” Marko said. “You’ve changed, brother. You used to stand right next to me at demonstrations. And now look at what's happened. How can I go on like this, watching you follow around a party hack?”

​

“She’s my wife,” Oswald said. “I love her.”

​

“And me?” Marko said. “I’m your brother, after all. Do you love me?”

​

“Will you help us?”

​

“Yeah, sure. Let me just get my map of secret hidden state-sponsored pogroms. That was sarcasm, brother. What the hell do you expect me to do for you now?”

​

Oksana was reclining on the bed, spooning some substance from an unlabeled can, when Oswald returned to the cabin. “I know,” she said. “But I was starving.” The rest of the cans were piled unceremoniously next to the doorless wash closet.

​

“What are you eating?” Oswald asked.

​

Not very seriously, Oksana studied the can. She shrugged. “Beans, I guess. I think there are also beets, and spinach? You can look.” Bean juice glittered around her lips.

​

“I’m not very hungry,” Oswald said.

​

They spent the rest of the day inside. They barely spoke. There was nothing to talk about. Every so often Oksana would get up to wash her hands. Through the window, the hills beyond their camp seemed to sway in the blank sunlight. Oswald drifted in and out of sleep all day. He woke in the night to sounds outside and saw several soldiers standing over the old woman’s planter in the dark, ripping with little effort the onions from the dirt and dropping them into plastic bags. What could he do about it? Later that night, back in bed, Oswald could hear the old woman, outside, yelling angrily, “We were supposed to share these, Ivan, you pig.” He bit his lip.

​

Early the next morning, Oswald and Oksana walked to the cabin that housed the doctor’s office. They arrived very much ahead of schedule and waited for an hour in the small, poorly lit lobby for the doctor to call them in. The doctor was tall and thin with very dark hair. The way he smoked his cigarette he could have been in the movies.

​

The doctor led them through some narrow hallways to an examination room. They explained to him Oksana’s newfound emptiness. The doctor had her hold some sort of sensor with a blue tube to her belly and studied the attached monitor severely. There was a strange way doctors carried themselves, Oswald thought. They rarely had good news, and when they did, it was only because something else had already gone wrong.

​

After a while, the doctor grabbed the sensor from Oksana and looked at the couple with a great deal of pity. “Your child is there,” he said. “But . . . this is hard to explain. I’m not sure I even understand it myself, to be honest. That’s to be expected, given the conditions, the circumstances, but still, it . . . well, we have never experienced this sort of cataclysm before, so the side effects may be very peculiar, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. That being said, this could also have nothing to do with the recent nuclear meltdown and the radiation. In fact, it’s as likely that the radiation has done this as it is unlikely. It’s just impossible for us to know. What I can tell you are the observable facts. And the fact is that your child is spectral in nature.”

​

“Spectral,” Oksana said. “What does that mean?” She looked at Oswald, but he shrugged. The baby had never felt real, exactly, and now it felt even less so.

​

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “At this point, we’re all learning together. We’ll have to set up another appointment to run more tests.”

​

“We are not waiting another three days,” Oksana stated.

​

The doctor sighed. “When are you due?” he asked Oksana.

​

“Several months.” She rolled her eyes. “Why? Are you booked through the holidays? What’s going to happen when the baby arrives? Is my uterus going to be like the Ark of the Covenant? Is my spectral child going to melt everyone’s face off?”

​

“We can only know that when it actually happens. There is only so much that I, a human being, can know, given recent circumstances. Truth is,” the doctor said, shrugging, “I am not an expert in this kind of thing. I was told to come here, so I came. In my real occupation I am a heart surgeon. I don’t know why they chose me.”

​

“What do you know?” Oksana sneered.

​

“What do you know, Mrs. Kuzmenko?” the doctor retorted, undeterred. Oksana crossed her arms. Oswald felt a perverse gratitude toward the doctor right then.

​

They walked back to the cabin, through the mud. Oswald wondered if they should have been discussing the baby, but he had no idea what he was supposed to say, or what there even was to discuss. Then he remembered something, or thought he had, and reached into his pocket. It was empty. But what had he expected to find?

​

“I’ve always done what I thought was best for us,” Oksana said.

​

“O.K.,” Oswald said.

​

The front door to their cabin was open when they got there. “Hello?” Oksana said, nudging Oswald forward. They went inside and discovered an intruder in the back, near the cans: a small, full-bellied child with their food. Or he was a man. They couldn’t tell at first. His skin was bright red, almost glowing. His arms and legs were that of an adult, but his hands, his feet, and his head, comparatively, were very small.

​

The strange child was rummaging through their cans. Several empties were strewn across the floor. He was digging into a can with his small hand and smearing its contents, a mutely colored substance, across his mouth.

​

Oksana stepped closer to the disgusting child. “Is that . . . ? Who’s there?”

​

The strange child glanced up from its cans and squealed. Oksana stumbled back and Oswald covered his ears, the squeal penetrating the air.

​

A woman appeared at their door. “Oh, my baby,” she said. Her cheeks were sooty and her eyes were pale, pale red. She ran to the strange child and scooped him up. “Thank you,” she said, shaking their hands. “We’d thought we lost him.” Then they disappeared.

​

Oswald and Oksana stood by the window, unmoving. Cloudy shadows drifted across their blue floor, one by one, as if filing out of a theater.

“I thought that was our child,” Oksana said quietly. “Jesus. . . . I thought that our child had somehow arrived. What’s wrong with me? I had a good job, a real job, not a week earlier. I went to school. I have two degrees.” Her fists shook.

​

Out the window, beyond the tall fence that surrounded their makeshift town, Oswald noticed a small brown truck puttering along the hills. The old rusted-out truck struggled to make it to the top of the hill. Oswald held his breath until finally the truck’s momentum carried it over and down the other side.

​

“I miss my car,” Oswald said to his wife. There were other things he missed, like the chair, and whatever else. What else was there?

​

“Technically I owned the car,” Oksana said, her voice so far away, so still, he wondered if she’d actually said anything at all.

 

END