We were around a hundred miles from the Zone, and already my
thoughts had turned toward death. This had nothing to do with radi-
ation and everything to do with road safety. I was in a minibus, on
a highway between Kyiv and the 1,160-square-mile Exclusion Zone
around the Chernobyl power plant. The minibus was being driven at
an alarming speed and in such a way that caused me to question the
safety standards of the tour company I’d entrusted myself to for the
next two days. It had become clear that our driver and tour guide,
a man in his early 40s 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 confl ict with it. He was holding a clipboard and
spreadsheet on top of the steering wheel with his left hand (that 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 roughly two-hour journey from Kyiv 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
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 road, 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 appeared to be reading the Wikipedia article for ‘‘nuclear reac-
tor’’ on her iPhone. I considered suggesting to Igor that Vika might
be in a position to take on the spreadsheet 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. I craned
around in an eff ort to make subtly appalled eye contact with my
friend Dylan, who was sitting a few rows back alongside a couple
of guys in their 20s — an Australian and a Canadian who, we later
learned, were traveling around the continent together 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 fl urry of incoming
emails. Some long-fugitive deal, I understood, was now on the verge
of lucrative fruition.
Of all my friends, I knew that Dylan was most likely to accept at
short notice my request for accompaniment on a trip to the Chernobyl
Exclusion Zone. He was his own boss, for one thing, and he was not
short of money (tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist). 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 two days. As soon as I made it, I felt some discomfort about this
joke, with its laddish overtones, as though I were proposing the trip
for the laughs 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.
‘‘Lunch,’’ Igor said, pointing out the side window of the bus. I
followed the upward angle of his index fi nger and saw a series oftelephone poles, each of which had a stork nesting atop it. ‘‘Lunch,’’
he reiterated, this time to a vague ripple of courteous laughter.
About 40 minutes north of Kyiv, a screen fl ickered to life in front
of us and began to play a documentary about the Chernobyl disaster.
We watched in silence as our minibus progressed from the margins
of the city to the countryside. The video was intended as a primer,
so that by the time we got to the site of one of the worst nuclear
accidents in history, everyone would be up to speed on the basic
facts: how in the early hours of April 26, 1986, a safety test simulat-
ing the eff ects of a power failure ended in an uncontrolled nuclear
reaction; how this caused an inferno in the reactor core that burned
for at least nine days; how in the aftermath the Soviet government
created a 19-mile-radius exclusion zone around the power plant; how
they evacuated about 130,000 people, more than 40,000 of them resi-
dents of Pripyat, a ‘‘city of the future’’ built for workers at the nearby
plant; how the vast endeavor of decontamination necessitated the
bulldozing of entire towns, the felling of entire forests, the burying
of them deep in the poisoned earth.
As the documentary played on the screen, Igor demonstrated his
familiarity with it by reciting lines along with the fi lm. At one point,
Mikhail Gorbachev materialized to deliver a monologue on the ter-
rifying time scale of the accident’s aftereff ects. His data entry tasks
now complete, Igor spoke along in unison with Gorbachev — ‘‘How
many years is this going to go on? Eight hundred years?’’ — before
himself proclaiming, ‘‘Yes! Until the second Jesus is born!’’
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 arguably the worst ecological catastrophe
in history, a source of fathomless human suff ering in our own lifetimes.
And yet some measure of levity seemed to be required of us.
After the documentary, the minibus’s onboard infotainment pro-
gramming moved on to an episode of the BBC motoring show ‘‘Top
Gear,’’ in which three chortling idiots drove around the Exclusion
Zone in hatchbacks, gazing at clicking Geiger counters while omi-
nous 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 outfi t — lip-syncing 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 cir-
cumstances of the accident, the staggering magnitude of the cleanup
operation, the inconceivable time scale of the aftereff ects 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 anti-tourism, as
a deep source of dramatic, and at the same time entirely generic,
apocalyptic imagery.
I was being confronted, I realized, with an exaggerated manifes-
tation of my own disquiet about making this trip in the fi rst place;
these unseemly, even pornographic, depictions of the Zone were on
a continuum with my own reasons for making this trip. My anxieties
about the future — the likely disastrous eff ects of climate change, our
vulnerability to all manner of unthinkable catastrophes — had for
some time been channeled into an obsession with the idea of ‘‘the
apocalypse,’’ with the various ways people envisioned, and prepared
for, civilizational collapse.
I was on a kind of perverse pilgrimage: I wanted to see what the end
of the world looked like. I wanted to haunt its ruins and be haunted by36
Photographs by Mark Neville for The New York TimesTh is article is adapted from the book ‘‘Notes From an Apocalypse,’’ to
be published by Doubleday in April.
Opening page: Icon illustration by Francesco Muzzi/Story TKP. The Voyages Issue