Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,68
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?
The minibus slowed as we approached the checkpoint marking the outer perimeter