Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,70

home she had ever known. It was December of last year, and it was cold, and when he saw no smoke coming from the roof of her cottage, Igor called her name—“Rosalia! Rosalia!”—and heard no reply. He found her dead in her cottage. She was eighty-eight years old, the last remaining resident of her village.

* * *

—

Strictly speaking, everything here is tightly controlled. Strictly speaking, visitors are forbidden from entering any of the buildings in the abandoned city of Pripyat—all of which are in variously advanced states of decay and structural peril, many clearly ready to collapse at any moment. Igor and Vika’s employer could in theory lose its license to enter the Zone if its guides were caught taking tourists into buildings. It had been known to happen, said Igor, that guides had had their permits revoked. But the company found itself in something of a double bind in this regard, he explained, on account of the proliferation in recent years of rival outfits offering trips to the Zone. If they didn’t take customers into the buildings—up the stairways to the rooftops, into the former homes and workplaces and schoolrooms of the citizens of Pripyat—some other tour company would, and what people wanted more than anything in visiting Pripyat was to enter the intimate spaces of an abandoned world.

One of the Swedish men who accounted for about a third of the group’s number asked whether any visitors to Pripyat had been seriously injured or killed while exploring the abandoned buildings.

“Not yet,” said Igor, a reply more ominous than he may have intended.

He went on to clarify that the fate of the small but thriving tourism business hung in the balance and depended, by general consensus, on the nationality of the first person to be injured or killed on a tour. If a Ukrainian died while exploring one of the buildings, he said, fine, no problem, business as usual. If a European, then the police would have to immediately clamp down on tour guides bringing people into buildings. But the worst-case scenario was, of course, an American getting killed or seriously injured. That, he said, would mean an immediate cessation of the whole enterprise.

“American gets hurt,” he said, “no more tours in Zone. Finished.”

Tourism to Chernobyl had expanded rapidly over the last decade or so—according to Igor, there were thirty-six thousand visitors in 2016—boosted by popular entertainments using Pripyat as a postapocalyptic verité setting. Films like Chernobyl Diaries and A Good Day to Die Hard, television shows like the History Channel’s Life After People (an entire series devoted to the fetishistic representation of nature’s reclamation of the built environment after the disappearance of the human species) and video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fallout 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

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