This latter game was in fact among the reasons why Dylan was so quick to agree to this trip: it had a certain sentimental resonance for him, as the game his company—a provider of networking software for online multiplayer games—was working on when it was acquired by Activision, the game’s developer.
“This is a hugely iconic place in terms of games,” said Dylan.
We were gazing up at the same abandoned Ferris wheel we’d seen several times on the minibus that morning—on the Top Gear segment, the movie trailer, the music videos. This was the city’s most recognizable landmark, its most readily legible symbol of decayed utopia. Our little group wandered around Pripyat’s fairground, taking in the cinematic vista of catastrophe: the Ferris wheel, the becalmed bumper cars overgrown with moss, the swingboats half-decayed by rust.
The park’s grand opening, Vika said, had been scheduled for the International Workers’ Day celebrations on May 1, 1986, a week after the disaster, and had therefore never actually been used. Beside her, Igor held aloft the dosimeter, explaining that the radiation levels were by and large quite safe, but that certain small areas within the fairground were dangerously high: the moss on the bumper cars, for example, was among the most toxic substances in all of Pripyat, having absorbed and retained more radiation than surrounding surfaces. So moss in general was to be avoided, as were all kinds of fungi, for their spongelike assimilation of radioactive material. Wild dogs and cats, too, presented a potential risk, not because of rabies, but because they roamed freely in parts of the Zone that had never been effectively decontaminated, and carried radioactive particles in their fur.
I leaned against the railings of the bumper car enclosure and then, recalling having read a warning somewhere about the perils of sitting on and leaning against things in the Zone, quickly relocated myself away from the rusting metal. I looked at the others, almost all of whom were engaged in taking photographs of the fairground. The only exception was Dylan, who was on the phone, apparently talking someone through the game plan for a current investment round. I was struck for the first time by the disproportionate maleness of the group: out of a dozen or so tourists, only one was female: a young German woman who was at present assisting her prodigiously pierced boyfriend in operating a drone for purposes of aerial cinematography. (Through the course of two days in the Zone, we crossed paths with three or four other tour groups, each of which was itself a heavily male enterprise.)
There seemed to be a general implicit agreement that nobody would appear in anyone else’s shots, due to a mutual interest in the photographic representation of Pripyat as a maximally desolate place, an impression that would inevitably be compromised by the presence of other tourists taking photos in the backgrounds of one’s own. On a whim, I opened up Instagram on my phone—the 3G coverage in the Zone had, against all expectation, been so far uniformly excellent—and entered “Pripyat” into the search box, and then scrolled through a cascading plenitude of aesthetically uniform photos of the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, the swingboats, along with a great many photos employing these as dramatic backgrounds for selfies. A few of these featured goofy expressions and sexy pouts and gang signs and badass sneers, but the majority were appropriately solemn or contemplative in attitude. The message, by and large, seemed to be this: I have been here, and I have felt the melancholy weight of this poisoned place. (#Chernobyl #amazing #melancholy #nucleardisaster)
Pripyat presents the adventurous tourist with a spectacle of abandonment more vivid than anyplace on Earth, a fever-dream of a world gone void. To walk the imposing squares of the planned city, the broad avenues cracked and overgrown with vegetation, is in one sense to wander the ruins of a collapsed utopian project, a vast crumbling monument to an abandoned past. And yet it is also to be thrust forward into an immersive simulation of the future, an image of what will come in our wake. What is most strange about wandering the streets and buildings of this discontinued city is the recognition of the place as an artifact of our own time: it is a vast complex of ruins, like Pompeii or Angkor Wat, but the vision is one of modernity in wretched decay. In wandering the crumbling ruins of the present, you are encountering a world to come. (“Something from the future is peeking out and it’s just too big for our minds,” says one of the interviewees in Chernobyl Prayer, the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the disaster and its aftermath.)
And this is why the images from my time in Pripyat that cling most insistently to my mind are the fragmented shards of technology, the rotted remnants of our own machine age. In what had once been an electronics store, the soles of our sturdy shoes crunched on the shattered glass of screens, and with our smartphones we captured the disquieting sight of heaped and eviscerated old television sets, of tubes and wires extruded from their gutted shells, and of ancient circuit boards greened with algae. (And surely I cannot have been the only one among us to imagine the smartphone I was holding undergoing its own afterlife of decay and dissolution.) In what had once been a music store, we walked among a chaos of decomposing pianos, variously wrecked and capsized, and here and there someone fingered the yellowed keys, and the notes sounded strange and damp and discordant. All of this was weighted with the sad intimation of the world’s inevitable decline, the inbuilt obsolescence of our objects, our culture: the realization that what will survive of us is garbage.
* * *
—
“You ever read any J. G. Ballard?” I asked.
“No,” said Dylan. “Why, is he any good?”
We were standing beside an empty Olympic-size swimming pool, staring over the edge into the deep end, the inclined floor of which was caked with dirt, glittering splinters of glass and paint, a damp mulch of leaves. An illegible graffiti throw-up, bubble-style, extended across the near width of the pool.
“He’s all right,” I said. “A bit repetitive. But an absolute fiend for the symbolism of drained swimming pools, is the reason I ask. This whole place would have been right in his wheelhouse.”
I took a couple of photos with my phone, but realized that whatever images I produced would be identical, or inferior, to dozens of others on Instagram, and consequently stopped bothering. I opened my phone’s browser and found a picture of the pool in happier times—not, surprisingly, from before the accident, but from the mid-1990s, when it was still used by the so-called liquidators, the military and civil personnel who in those years were charged with cleaning the abandoned city of toxic waste. The shimmering blue water in the photo was no more, and the glass panes of the front wall were all gone, and the ceiling tiles, too, leaving exposed the metal grid of the building’s structure. But I was struck by how essentially similar the place was in its state of ruin to what it had been before. Even the clock still hung on the wall at the far end of the pool. It was a large octagonal-faced clock, more or less identical, I realized, to the one that hung on the wall over the pool I regularly swam in near my house—a clock on which you could read both the time of day and, via a large red continuous second hand, the pace of your own laps of the pool. This particular clock, the one I was looking at now, had stopped, whereas the one at the pool I used was, presumably, still counting its seconds. It was another place, Pripyat, another time, and yet entirely recognizable as our own. It was a vast memento mori, a seventeenth-century Vanitas on the scale of a city, a culture.