Necessary Explanations
Two materials lay before me when I decided that this book should be written.
My solution is simple. The summer of 2000, hot and muggy, left a mark on our memories - not a solution, not a triumph, but the heavy silence of failure. We, a small team of scientists in Brooklyn, tried to understand a mystery that seemed important but slipped through our fingers. Names, dates, reports - all of it was there, but we found no truth. And now, as rumors and speculation begin to gather around this story, I feel a duty to tell it as it happened. Not for fame or sensation, but for the sake of honesty - to ourselves, to those who were with us, and to those whose lives we tried to understand.
The first material is the diary of Dmitry Sukhov, a Russian engineer whom we summoned from St. Petersburg. He was hired inexpensively, as was the custom in those years when Russia, still recovering from the 1998 crisis, gave away its specialists for modest money. Dmitry came to us shabby, in a strange costume from some St. Petersburg Halloween, with tired eyes and a habit of keeping a pack of Java in his pocket. He was not a hero, he was not a genius. He was a man - stubborn, confused, sometimes drunk, but sincere. His diary is not a scientific work, but a confession. It contains anger, melancholy, attempts to understand why he was here, in this noisy New York, among strangers and strangers’ ideas. He wrote about walks around St. Petersburg, about our arguments, about his faith and doubts. His words are like a mirror in which not only events are reflected, but also ourselves.
I edited his notes. Some pages had to be rewritten: his handwriting, uneven from fatigue or drink, was almost illegible. I removed the lines that were too personal - about his life in a Khrushchev-era apartment, about conversations with his grandmother, about the dreams that tormented him at night. They were not about the case that brought us together. But I kept his voice - sharp, with a Russian accent even on paper, with a habit of comparing our world with the films he had watched, or seeking answers in prayer before a small icon in a motel. His grievances, his hopes, his questions - all of that remained. This diary is not just a chronicle. It is a portrait of a man who sought meaning where we had all failed.
Now about the second component of this book - the official reports of our commission. Their origin is as obscure as their content, and requires a few words.
In early December 2000, when our project was officially closed, Elizabeth Crowe, the head of the committee, handed me a tattered folder. Scrawled on it, in blue ink as if in a hurry, was the project’s title-a word I will leave unexplained for now. Elizabeth handed over the papers, saying that they might “shed light on our failure.” Her voice was tired, her eyes doubtful. I’m still not sure what she meant, and I confess I don’t know if I understand their significance even now.
The reports are a mosaic of police reports, medical records, and our own notes. They come from many places: police department archives, hospital charts, even discharge summaries marked with stamps that hint at government involvement. Some are copies, the ink smeared, others are originals, with pencil marks in someone’s hasty hand. Who collected them? Who handed them to our modest institute in Brooklyn, where we worked on antiquated machines with humming fans and Windows 98 floppies? Perhaps they were an attempt to solve a mystery that seemed important but remained unanswered.
These papers are the opposite of Dmitry’s diary. If his entries are full of life, anger and melancholy, then the reports are cold and impersonal. They contain sparse facts, dates, numbers, medical terms that we tried to understand, but which only multiplied the questions. I did not edit them. They are included in the book as they came to me: with official language, with rare traces of a human hand - an underlined word, a crumpled corner. I only broke them into parts to alternate with Dmitry’s notes, as we read them then - in snatches, in breaks between arguments, coffee from cheap cups and the hum of old EEGs.
Why are these reports here? They are not a clue, but evidence. Evidence of how we, a group of scientists and one Russian engineer in a ridiculous trench coat, tried to make sense of the chaos of data. Perhaps there is a truth hidden in these lines that we did not see. Perhaps someone else will see more in them than we did.
Mark T.
