son’s bedroom, imagining his soft toys matted and splayed to the
elements, the bare frame of his bed collapsed in a moldering heap,
the fl oorboards stripped and rotted. I would walk out our front door
and imagine our street deserted, the empty window frames of the
houses and shops, trees sprouting through the cracked sidewalks,
the road itself overgrown with grass.
Now I fi nd myself wanting not to think about abandoned streets
and shuttered schools and empty playgrounds any more than I have
to, which is all the time. One recent evening, a few days into pan-
demic-mandated social distancing, I went out for a walk around my
neighborhood — a densely populated community in Dublin’s inner
city — and it was sadder and more uncanny than I was prepared for.
It was not the Zone, but neither was it the world I knew. I thought
of a line from ‘‘Chernobyl Prayer’’ that haunted me for a time after
I read it but had not occurred to me since: ‘‘Something from the
future is peeking out and it’s just too big for our minds.’’ I walked
for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hardly encountered another soul.t the heart of the Zone is Reactor No. 4. You don’t see it. Not now
that it is enclosed in the immense dome known as the New Safe
Confi nement. This, they say, is the largest movable object on the
planet: roughly 360 feet tall at its apex and 840 feet wide. The dome
was the result of a vast engineering project involving 27 countries.
The construction had been completed on-site, and in November
2016 the fi nished dome was slid into position on rails, over the orig-
inal shelter, which it now entirely contained. That original shelter,
known variously as the Sarcophagus and the Shelter Object, had
been hastily constructed over the ruins of the reactor building in
the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
The group stood looking at the dome taking photos of the plant
for later Instagram sharing, as Igor talked us dryly through the stats.
‘‘Sarcophagus is an interesting word to have gone with,’’ Dylan
said, trousering his phone.
‘‘It really is,’’ I said. ‘‘They have not shied away from the sinister.’’
Zone. Shelter Object. Sarcophagus. There was an archetypal
charge to these terms, a resonance of the uncanny on the surfac-
es of the words themselves. Sarcophagus, from the Greek, sark
meaning fl esh; phagus meaning to eat.
A couple of hundred yards from us was an accretion of fi ssile
material that had melted through the concrete fl oor of the reac-
tor building to the basement beneath, cooled and hardened into
a monstrous mass they called the Elephant’s Foot. This was the
holy of holies, possibly the most toxic object on the planet. This
was the center of the Zone. To be in its presence even briefl y
was extremely dangerous. An hour of close proximity would be
lethal. Concealed though it was,
its unseen presence emanated a
shimmer of the numinous. It was
the nightmare consequence of
technology itself, the invention
of the shipwreck.
In the closing stretch of the
Bible, in Revelation, appear these
lines: ‘‘And the third angel sound-
ed, and there fell a great star from
heaven, burning as it were a lamp,
and it fell upon the third part of
the rivers, and upon the fountainsof waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the
third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died
of the waters, because they were made bitter.’’ Wormwood is a
shrub that appears several times in the Bible, invoked in Revelation
as a sort of curse, perhaps the wrath of a vengeful God. In fact,
Chernobyl is named for the plant, which grows in lavish abundance
in the region. This matter of linguistic curiosity is frequently raised
in commentaries on the accident and its apocalyptic resonances.
Laborers in construction hats ambled in and out of the plant.
It was lunchtime. The cleanup was ongoing. This was a place of
work, an ordinary place. But it was a kind of holy place too, a place
where all of time had collapsed into a single physical point. The
Elephant’s Foot would be here always. It would remain here after
the death of everything else, an eternal monument to our civiliza-
tion. After the collapse of every other structure, after every good
and beautiful thing had been lost and forgotten, its silent malice
would still be throbbing in the ground like a cancer, spreading its
bitterness through the risen waters.efore returning to Kyiv, we made a fi nal stop at the Reactor No. 5
cooling tower, a lofty abyss of concrete that was nearing comple-
tion at the time of the accident and had lain abandoned ever since,
both construction site and ruin. We walked through tall grass and
across a long footbridge whose wooden slats had rotted away so
completely in places that we had to cling to railings and tiptoe
along rusted metal sidings.
Once inside, we wandered the interior, mutely assimilating the
immensity of the structure. The tower ascended some 500 feet
into the air, to a vast opening that encircled the sky. Someone in
the group selected a rock from the ground and pitched it with
impressive accuracy and force at a large iron pipe that ran across
the tower’s interior, and the clang reverberated in what seemed an
endless self-perpetuating loop. Somewhere up in the lofty reaches
a crow delivered itself of a cracked screech, and this sound echoed
lengthily in its turn.
The more adventurous of us clambered up the iron beams of
the scaff olding in search of more lofty positions from which to
photograph the scene. I was not among them. I sought the lower
ground, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, having forgotten for a
moment the obvious danger of doing so. I looked up. Hundreds of
feet overhead, two birds were gliding in opposing spirals around
the inner circumference of the tower, kestrels I thought, drifting
upward on unseen currents toward the vast disk of sky, impossibly
deep and blue. I sat there watching them a long time, circling and
circling inside the great cone of the tower. I laughed, thinking of
the Yeatsian resonances of the scene, the millenarian mysticism:
the tower, the falcons, the widening gyres. But there was in truth
nothing apocalyptic about what I was seeing, no blood-dimmed
tide. It was an aftermath, a calm restored.
These birds, I thought, could have known nothing about this
place. The Zone did not exist for them. Or rather, they knew it
intimately and absolutely, but their understanding had nothing in
common with ours. This cooling tower, unthinkable monument
that it was to the subjugation of nature, was not distinguished from
the trees, the mountains, the other lonely structures on the land.
There was no division between human and nonhuman for these
spiraling ghosts of the sky. There was only nature. Only the world
remained and the things that were in it.43
But there was in
truth nothingapocalyptic about what
I was seeing, no
blood-dimmed tide.
It was an aftermath,
a calm restored.A
BP. The New York Times Magazine“
“