Bombshell (33 page)

Fading cartoons of Marx and Lenin on yellow wallpaper, military exercises in dead notebooks. Overgrown lots with red machines, torn conveyor belts beneath pylons. The winter sun floods Futurist stained glass, smashed panes of bright workers, snow gathering in the yellow public phone booth close to the hospital steps, fallen cartographies of building plaster. There are the empty livestock pens, the yellow corrugated metal, ice on the occluded railway tracks, a tractor tire in the red berries; stopped clocks on the high-rise
towers. Gas masks collapse like octopus sacs rolled in fields of pale powder and ghostly stairways. Frozen particles blow through the bleached news kiosks of the Union Press. The walls of the bus station peel in the manner of sardine cans. Broken glass and ash occupy the cavities of the ticket booths. I see the X-ray machine and the glass bricks of the hospital corridors. The place of my birth.

CASH LAY BACK INSIDE HER GENTLY ROCKING GONDOLA, ARRANGING
the thermal foil sheets that she had taken from the sports store, along with the javelin. It reminded her of the foil she had worn in the desert for her first attack. She thought of Valerie Solanas, expiring between the interrogating voices in the flophouse of her skull, sometime in the transit from this date to the next. She remembered the nights when the poster of Valerie over her bed would curl down and their lips would meet. High in the crucible of the gondola, below the red sun, a chill found her. The exertions of killing had opened her wound. Bright red blood showed through her bandages. She pulled on the black polar jacket that she had stuffed inside her bag. Around her, as luminous fallout dripped from the aurora that shivered between the buildings, Central Park would conform to the red Wormwood Forest of Pripyat. She took out the antique Walkman Janelle Gresham had given her. Untangling the headphone cable and inserting one of her cassette mixes, she waited for the long day to pass into the night of her birth, and her death, twenty-five years later, April 26, 2011.

Trembling, Varyushka Cash pressed the play button.

Listen, the Snow Is Falling . . .