Billy Liu

Guilt, Guilt, Guilt

Here’s what it’s like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been. At the medical center where they brought my brothers, I stood banging my head against a corner of a crash cart. When one of the nurses saw me, I said, “There; that’s better. That kills the thoughts before they grow.”

Hullabaloo

I am Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky, chief engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, and my younger brother, Mikhail Vasilyevich, was a senior turbine engineer serving reactor unit No. 4 at the Chernobyl power station, on duty the night of 26 April 1986. Our half-brother Petya and his friend were that same night outside the reactor’s cooling tower on the Pripyat river, fishing, downwind. So you can see that our family was right in the thick of what followed. We were not—how shall we put it?—very lucky that way. But then, like their country, the Prushinskys have always been first to protest that no one should waste any pity on them. Because the Prushinskys have always made their own luck.

To continue Reading: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2979/the-zero-meter-diving-team

—Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X (Knopf, 2004) and two story collections, including most recently Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004). A third story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, will be published by Knopf this September. “The Zero Meter Diving Team” is included in it.