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.
Dylan zipped his tracksuit top up swiftly and decisively—a gesture that subtly conveyed that he was just about ready to stop contemplating the apocalyptic resonances of the empty swimming pool and move on to the next thing.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a lot to take in.”
* * *
—
We were in the dank foyer of a high-rise apartment building. One of the Swedes, a guy in his late thirties who worked as a school bus driver and seemed notably less enthusiastic about this jaunt than his friends, was standing by a stairwell gazing down at a pile of broken ceiling tiles. His expression was one of mild and obscurely humorous alarm.
“Asbestos,” he said. “This whole place is absolutely full of asbestos. All these buildings.”
I wasn’t all that sure what the deal was with asbestos. I knew only that it was not good. I said, “That stuff is highly flammable, right?”
“No,” said the bus driver. “The exact opposite, in fact. It’s a flame retardant material. But if you breathe in the dust from it, there are all these little microscopic fibers that get embedded in your lungs and you can never get rid of them, and you die horribly of lung cancer.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I knew it was something.”
Dylan stepped back from the pile of broken tiles and politely petitioned the attention of Igor.
“Should we be worried about asbestos at all, Igor?”
“If you don’t breathe it, no problem,” said Igor, with a shrug of aggressive intricacy and duration.
“Okay, but are you concerned about maybe breathing it without necessarily meaning to?”
“Me? No. Many Europeans and Americans, yes, they are concerned. They are more concerned about asbestos than radiation.” At this apparent absurdity Igor chuckled and shook his head.
“But not you,” said Dylan.
“Not me,” said Igor, and set off up a stairway that looked in its own right to be a grave hazard to public health. Dylan gazed at him as he went, and shook his head in quiet dismay.
“It’ll be fine,” I said, with no conviction whatsoever.
* * *
—
Outside in the street, a small wild dog approached us with disarming deference. Vika opened up her handbag and removed a squat pinkish tube, a snack from the lower reaches of the pork-product market, and presented it to the dog, who received it with patience and good grace.
There was a dark flash of movement on the periphery of my field of vision, a rustle of dry leaves. I turned and saw the business end of a muscular black snake as it emerged from beneath a rusted slide and plunged headlong for the undergrowth.
“Viper,” said Igor, nodding in the direction of the fugitive snake. He pronounced it “wiper.”
We were standing at the entrance to one of Pripyat’s many