I have pills on my desk. Four pills. They’re behind a scrim of foil, like Dentyne Ice, at the bottom of a large white envelope.
The envelope is open, but I won’t be taking the pills now. These pills are backup pills, pills for a crisis. I’m not talking about a minor crisis. I’m talking about something major. It would literally take a nuclear disaster to get me to swallow these pills.
I use “literally” literally. The pills are potassium iodide, to be taken in the event of a nuclear event. They will flood my body with iodine, preventing my thyroid from hosing up 131I, a radioactive isotope of iodine that can be dispersed in a nuclear meltdown.
I got the pills for free, from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, which is distributing them today in the areas surrounding the state’s five nuclear power plants. The department’s rap sheet on potassium iodide refers to it by its chemical formula, KI. What is KI? A salt compound. What does KI do? Help protect your thyroid gland. What is KI not? A “magic anti-radiation pill.”
To get the pills, I had to drive out to the Fairview Township Fire Station No. 1, on Lewisberry Road. On the way, I listened to NPR’s “Here & Now”: a story about a soldier’s tintype photos of his tour of Afghanistan, new grand jury indictments in the Boston marathon bombings, a photographer in Detroit who snaps things other than ruin porn.
The destination flag on the GPS approaches. I’m passing an empty field. I pull into an auto shop down the road, where two guys are removing a tire from a Staples truck. One of them, with short blond hair and thick glasses, tells me to drive back through two red lights and look left. Does he mean two green lights? I will drive through red lights. This could be an emergency.
At room temperature, iodine is a metallic solid that will sublime with a little heat into violet gas. The thyroid uses it to synthesize a key hormone, which is why—for people who don’t get enough in their diets—it’s advisable to consume it by way of iodized salt. One of my pills has somewhere between 300 and 700 times the recommended daily serving, which is the reason they’re to be reserved for radiological catastrophe. Conversely, in lieu of the pills, my cylinder of Morton would do no good. To achieve the pills’ prophylactic function, I’d need to swallow a kilogram of salt, and that could kill me.
The foyer of Fire Station No. 1 is sharp with the chemical smell of new paint. Pill distribution is down the hall, in a room with an electronic Bingo scoreboard mounted high on the wall.
There’s a foam-core evacuation-route map propped on a folding chair. I see that my apartment is technically outside the ten-mile radius around Three Mile Island, but that the evacuation arrows proceed up 2nd Street, right past my stoop, and continue over the George Wade bridge out of town. I think about the day when, advised not to evacuate, I will watch my southern neighbors caravan past my window, towards cleaner air.
I have to fill out a form with my name—and my address. Will they refuse me on the grounds that I’m outside the zone? I want those pills. In cases like these, a well-timed diversion is required. A volunteer looks over my sheet.
“Can I take a copy of these?” I ask abruptly, holding up a printout of guidelines I already have at the office.
“Absolutely,” the volunteer says. He puts down my paper, fills an envelope, and forks over the meds. He continues to review my paper. Will he take them back? Am I within the zone after all? No time to find out. I get out of there.
In the parking lot, an elderly couple step out of their car. They approach the building, and the man holds open the door. They’re in their seventies, possibly older—is it a generational dutifulness that brings them, or a pre-smartphone-era impulse to stay prepared? The pills are not likely to help them: a 1999 report by the World Health Organization advised that, for people over 40, the KI doses carry more risks than benefits. But what does that matter? They were born before the Cold War. I wonder about what they’ve seen.
In the car, my pills sit in the passenger seat, in their crisp and illicit sleeve, like photos taken by a private eye. I get stuck in traffic and turn on the radio. The story about the Detroit photographer is still on. They discuss a man who built a fence around his mobile home, for security purposes.
