Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,19

noted, all wearing the ideologically appropriate wraparound-style sunglasses.

“I’m gonna go talk to these guys,” said Vicino, as he piloted the Lexus suavely into the gas station’s forecourt. “Jin, you wanna look after the diesel?”

He explained to me a little running joke he had with himself when it came to bikers. He’d approach them and ask them very civilly what they would do if he were to just kick over their bikes onto the street. Most recently, he’d aired it with a couple of motorcycle cops back in California. Without fail, he said, the reaction was one of disarmed amusement.

“The one cop was like, ‘You’d hurt your foot is what’d happen.’ ”

Vicino was, among other things, a man who knew how to exercise his whiteness to its fullest extent. He was going to try out his joke as an opening gambit with these bikers here. They were, after all, pretty much right in his target demographic: these guys tended to be self-reliant types, he said, not big fans of government. And despite appearances, a lot of them were doctors, lawyers, professionals, retired folks with money to spend. (My own preconceptions about bikers as a predominantly working-class demographic had been undermined during a brief stop-off at Mount Rushmore the previous day en route from Rapid City. Standing on the viewing platform, gazing across at that absurd and yet somehow moving monument to American grandiosity, I happened to be positioned next to two burly and leather-jacketed bikers, whose conversation about their respective legal secretaries I could not help overhearing.)

He’d been sitting in a café in San Diego last year, he told me, when he’d received an email from a cattle farmer up in South Dakota, informing him about the vast tract of land on his ranch, its former munitions vaults, and how it might be a suitable property for his business to acquire. The plan came to him instantly, he said, the whole idea for xPoint: he was going to pay the rancher the sum of one dollar for the property, offering him a 50 percent cut of all future profits from the vaults, which he was going to sell for thirty-five grand a pop to people willing to fit them out to their own specs, and it was going to be the largest survival community on Earth. It was going to be a much more affordable proposition than his other survival communities: an apocalypse solution for consumers of more modest means. He’d already sold off fifty or so.

“I’m thinking I might put a titty bar in one of the bunkers,” he said at one point. “Like a mud-wrestling lesbian kind of deal.”

This was another running joke he had with himself, a line he used whenever people asked too many questions about his projects. Like the time in Indiana, when the lady at the paint shop had gotten curious about the sheer volume of paint he and his team were buying, about the frequency with which they kept coming back to the shop, and had point-blank asked them what the hell they were building out there.

“I told her we’re building a mud-wrestling titty bar,” he said. “That was the end of that conversation.”

* * *

—

The sound of the door closing was like nothing I had ever heard, an overwhelmingly loud and deep detonation, the obliteration of the possibility of any sound but itself—so all-encompassing and absolute that it became almost a kind of silence. It lingered in the empty interior of the vault for what felt like perhaps three or four minutes, taking full command of the darkness. It was an apocalyptic sound, and I was both unnerved and exhilarated. The darkness, too, was absolute, an annihilation of the very concept of light. As I stood in the reverberating void, it struck me that the fear of darkness was not so much the fear of what might be out there, unseen and moving, but rather the solipsistic and childlike terror of there being in fact nothing out there at all, that a world unseen was a world that had ceased entirely to exist.

If I’m seeming to imply that I was having cool and abstract insights into human psychology there in the black vault, let me state again that my primary emotion was fear. I was, in fact, momentarily deserted by my faculties of reason and began to panic that I might never get out of this place. I was pretty sure that the bolt was on the outside of the door. What