“Ethical queasiness? No, I’m talking about radiation. It can’t be safe.”
“Well,” I said, “safe might not be the word exactly. But I’ve done a fair bit of reading about it, and apparently as long as you stay in the designated areas and don’t wander into hot spots or whatever, you get exposed to less radiation from a day in the Exclusion Zone than you would from a transatlantic flight.”
“I don’t know that I necessarily buy that,” he said. “What is the source of this factoid?”
“Can’t remember.”
“Is it the company in Kiev that we’re paying to bring us to the Zone?”
“Possibly that is the source of the factoid,” I admitted.
“Right,” he said. “Excellent.”
I realized that I had missed these kinds of exchanges, missed being subjected to Dylan’s swift and decisive irony. I’d seen a lot less of him since he’d moved to London four or five years ago and gotten married. Ours was a friendship that made little sense on paper—I was a socialist; he’d been a wealthy entrepreneur since we were in our twenties, having cofounded a tech startup while we were college roommates and sold it to a massive American video games company—and yet it had abided where so many others had fallen into disrepair, or collapsed entirely.
Two days later, not far outside of Kiev, my own trust in the tour company as a guarantor of our safety was badly undermined: it had become clear that our minibus driver and guide, a man in his early forties named Igor, was engaged in a suite of tasks that were not merely beyond the normal remit of minibus driving, but in fact in direct conflict with it. He was holding a clipboard and spreadsheet on top of the steering wheel with his left hand (which he was also using to steer), while in his other hand he held a smartphone, into which he was diligently transferring data from the spreadsheet. The two-hour journey from Kiev to the Zone was, clearly, a period of downtime of which he intended to take advantage in order to get some work squared away before the proper commencement of the tour. As such, he appeared to be distributing his attention in a roughly tripartite pattern—clipboard, road, phone; clipboard, road, phone—looking up from his work every few seconds in order to satisfy himself that things were basically in order on the motorway, before returning his attention to the clipboard.
I happened to be sitting up front with Igor, and with his young colleague Vika, who was training to become a fully accredited guide. Vika was reading on her iPhone a Wikipedia article about nuclear reactors. I considered suggesting to Igor that Vika might be in a position to take on the admin work, which would allow him to commit himself in earnest to the task of driving, but I held my counsel for fear that such a suggestion might seem rude, or even outright sexist. (I can only conclude from this that I would literally rather risk death than risk appearing rude or outright sexist.) I craned around in an effort to make subtly appalled eye contact with Dylan, who was sitting a few rows back alongside a couple of guys in their twenties—an Australian and a Canadian who were traveling around the continent together, apparently impelled by a desire to have sex with a woman from every European nation—but he didn’t look up, preoccupied as he was with a flurry of incoming emails. Some long-fugitive deal, I understood, was now on the verge of lucrative fruition.
“Lunch,” said Igor, pointing out the side window of the bus. I followed the upward angle of his index finger and saw a series of telephone poles, each of which had a stork nesting atop it. “Lunch,” he reiterated, this time to a vague ripple of courteous laughter.
About forty minutes north of Kiev, Igor stuck a USB stick into a console on the dashboard. A screen flickered to life in front of us and began to play a television documentary about the Chernobyl accident. We watched in silence as we progressed from the margins of the city to the countryside. Every so often, Igor demonstrated his familiarity with the documentary by reciting lines of dialogue along with the film. At one point, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on-screen to deliver a monologue on the terrifying timescale of the accident’s aftereffects. His data entry tasks now complete, Igor spoke along in unison with Gorbachev. “How many years will this continue to go on?” he intoned. “Eight hundred years! Yes! Until the second Jesus is born!”
Vika laughed, turning toward me, and I chuckled as though I, too, found this amusing, though I did not.
I was unsure what to make of the tone of all this. Igor and Vika’s inscrutable jocularity sat oddly with the task they were charged with: to guide us around the site of the worst ecological catastrophe in history, a source of fathomless human suffering in our own lifetimes. And yet some measure of levity seemed to be required of us.
“Any vegetarians?” Igor had asked as we had climbed aboard the minibus at Independence Square. “If you are vegetarian, we prepare special meal of Chernobyl mushrooms.” This had received a muted response, and so Igor clarified that he was joking—a task he would have to repeat many times over the next two days.
After the documentary, the minibus’s on-board infotainment programming moved on to an episode of the BBC motoring show Top Gear, in which three chortling idiots drove around the Exclusion Zone in family sedans, gazing at clicking dosimeters while ominous electronica played on the soundtrack. There were then some low-budget music videos, all of which featured more or less similar scenes of dour young men—a touchingly earnest British rapper, some kind of American Christian metal outfit—lip-synching against the ruined spectacle of Pripyat.
I wondered what, if anything, the tour company’s intention might have been in showing us all this content. Screening the documentary made sense, in that it was straightforwardly informative—the circumstances of the accident, the staggering magnitude of the cleanup operation, the inconceivable timescale of the aftereffects, and so on. But the Top Gear scenes and the music videos were much more unsettling to watch, because they laid bare the ease with which the Zone, and in particular the evacuated city of Pripyat, could be used, in fact exploited, as the setting for a kind of perverse adventurism, as a deep source of dramatic, and at the same time entirely generic, apocalyptic imagery.
My feelings on all this were already transitioning from discomfort to outright disdain, when the screen began showing a trailer for something called Chernobyl Diaries, a horror flick about a bunch of American twentysomethings who are traveling around Europe when one of them starts pressing the case—“You guys ever heard of Chernobyl? You heard of extreme tourism?”—for a day trip to Pripyat, where they are duly menaced, and lavishly murdered, by some apparently supernatural manifestation of the nuclear disaster.
I was being confronted, I realized, with a cartoonish avatar of my own disquiet about making this trip in the first place; these artifacts of apocalyptiana were on a continuum with the project I myself was undertaking. Was I any less ethically compromised because I had come in search of poetic imagery, or of sociocultural insight? Did the literary form of my intentions make the content any less exploitative? And did my determination to directly confront, on the page, exactly these questions make me, in the end, not less but more ethically culpable, in the sense that I was exploiting my own self-consciousness about exploitation for literary ends?