Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,67
aftermath.
I wanted to go, but not alone. A couple of months after the retreat in Alladale, I called my friend Dylan, who lived in London, and who of all my friends was the one I felt would most likely agree to accompany me to Ukraine on short notice. He was his own boss, for one thing, and he was not short of money, and he was also in the midst of a divorce, amicable but nonetheless complex in its practicalities. It would, I said, be a kind of anti–stag party: his marriage was ending, and I was dragging him to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for a weekend. As soon as I’d made it, I felt some discomfort about this joke, with its laddish overtones, as though I were proposing the trip for the sheer lols, or as an exploit in extreme tourism, or, worse still, some kind of stunt journalism enterprise combining elements of both. I was keen to avoid seeing myself in this way.
“I haven’t told anyone I’m going,” said Dylan over the phone. I was at my hotel at Heathrow.
“Why the secretiveness?” I asked.
“I don’t need the hassle,” he said. “People thinking I’m weird for wanting to go.”
“I know what you mean. There’s an ethical queasiness to the whole thing. I have issues with that myself.”
“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