Two Ghouls

By William Rivers Pitt

I've spent the last few days walking around my quiet little Boston neighborhood looking at the houses, the cars, the shops, the trees. I look at my wife, my neighbors, my cat. Then I close my eyes, and in that darkness I see it all wiped out, washed away, obliterated, shattered to kindling and utterly gone. I see a moonscape of annihilation, no reference points in sight, nothing familiar. I see the day after the end of everything, and the horror of it comes nowhere close to the reality that is Japan.

There are no words for this. Only the pictures can tell the tale, but you can't photograph radiation, so even that falls short. It is, quite simply, one of the worst events I have seen in my life, and I am half a planet away. Actually being there, buried in rubble or looking for missing loved ones or staring down a nuclear nightmare, is more than my mind can encompass.

And it's not nearly over. The horror of all this is only just beginning. The funeral industry in the stricken northern region is already overwhelmed, and there are still thousands - if not tens of thousands - of bodies waiting to be found. The process of cleaning up the devastation and then rebuilding will be Herculean in scope. Looming over it all is the seemingly inexorable threat posed by six damaged nuclear reactors.

The destruction and suffering involved here is unspeakable...and so, of course, the ghouls descended.

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