This Place is a Message — by Isabelle Robinson
Artwork by James Keul
THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE…AND PART OF A SYSTEM OF MESSAGES…PAY ATTENTION TO IT!
Following the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report on methods of indicating nuclear waste sites.
At the behest of the U.S. government, experts of the arts, sciences, and humanities gathered to warn the people of the distant future about contemporary mistakes—people who, due to aforementioned mistakes, may or may not ever exist.
SENDING THIS MESSAGE WAS IMPORTANT TO US. WE CONSIDERED OURSELVES TO BE A POWERFUL CULTURE.
And because we cannot know the languages these hypothetical people would speak, it was decided that the message must be intelligible in the absence of the written word.
But how does one convey something so essential in the absence of words?
THIS PLACE IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR…NO HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEED IS COMMEMORATED HERE…NOTHING VALUED IS HERE.
In my family, the Yiddish language—the language my great-grandmother spoke in Buryakovka, the village where she was born—has been lost to memory.
In America, she was Betty. But then, she was Beile, just like the village was and is Burakówka, Buriakiwka, or Buryakovka, depending on who you ask, on your place in time.
WHAT IS HERE WAS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US. THIS MESSAGE IS A WARNING ABOUT DANGER.
The name, like the land itself, has not been unchanged by the violence of history.
THE DANGER IS IN A PARTICULAR LOCATION…IT INCREASES TOWARDS A CENTER…THE CENTER OF DANGER IS HERE…OF A PARTICULAR SIZE AND SHAPE, AND BELOW US.
12 kilometers away howls the abandoned city of Pripyat.
THE DANGER IS STILL PRESENT, IN YOUR TIME, AS IT WAS IN OURS.
Today, the same village is barren but for rusting machinery. A dumping ground, not for the waste itself, but for the machines that excavated it—poisoned through proximity, through touch.
Radiation touches a tank, touches the grass, touches the seeds, touches the birds, touches the dirt where a house once stood, where candles were lit and a language I don’t speak was spoken. Where a girl named Beile slept in her crib.
THE DANGER IS TO THE BODY, AND IT CAN KILL.
I’ve touched a ring that belonged to Betty, that now belongs to my mother. I’ve touched something that her hand once touched. Am I changed? Does the soul last like radiation does?
THE FORM OF THE DANGER IS AN EMANATION OF ENERGY.
Lacking words, architects proposed black dye and rubble. They designed spikes that erupt from the ground, the spines of long-buried leviathans.
THE DANGER IS UNLEASHED ONLY IF YOU SUBSTANTIALLY DISTURB THIS PLACE PHYSICALLY. THIS PLACE IS BEST SHUNNED AND LEFT UNINHABITED.
This place is a message, is a warning, is to be made an example of.
Spikes: Don’t touch.
Rubble: This is broken.
Basalt: Nothing grows.
We lived here, we had children, we were pogromed, we were evacuated. We don’t want you to share our fate. We love you. We loved our children. Listen.
Isabelle Robinson is a writer from Parkland, Florida. Her literary and academic writing has appeared in the Paper Shell Review, the New York Times, Echoes, and the Swamp Ape Review. She is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Oregon State University. When she isn’t caught in perpetual Oregonian rain, she enjoys FaceTiming her cat.