Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,21

fond of mentioning the so-called Carrington Event, a massive eruption on the surface of the sun that had occurred at the turn of the last century and caused the breakdown of electrical systems across the world. It wasn’t a big deal back then, of course, for the simple reason that we didn’t yet have much in the way of electrical systems, but how much worse would it be now, at a time when the wipeout of the grid would mean the near certain collapse of the complex structures undergirding our world?

“And let me tell you, we’re well overdue one of those things,” he said. “Well overdue.”

A major element of Vicino’s sales pitch was the idea that the government knew some cataclysmic event was in the offing, but was covering it up to avoid mass panic. You could be sure, he insisted, that those who controlled the world were making arrangements to protect themselves, and that they were hiding from us both those arrangements and the cataclysm itself.

He had some strange beliefs, Vicino, beliefs that were supplementary to his basic apocalyptic vision. He believed that the Earth had a tendency to shift abruptly on its axis, causing massive earthquakes and tidal waves. He believed in the existence of a rogue planet the size of Jupiter called Niburu, which was out there just roaming around untethered to any particular solar system, and that it was on a collision course with our own world, and that the government knew about this, too, and was hiding it from us. He believed that everything that happened, from North Korea to Brexit, was orchestrated with the intention of bringing us closer to one world government.

He wasn’t particularly evangelical about these beliefs. He was mostly just putting them out there, it seemed, in the knowledge that apocalyptic unease was basically a volume game. If you didn’t like one terrifying dystopian scenario, he had another that might be more your thing. But conspiracies—secret knowledge, hidden revelations—were a key component of his business model. And I was not surprised to glimpse, in due course, the ancient shifting heft of the ur-conspiracy itself. He had, in other words, some strange but familiar notions about the Jews. It was his earnest contention, for instance, that the Democratic Party was essentially a Jewish institution. It had long been the case, he insisted, that a disproportionate number of the party’s leaders were Jewish. His historical theory was that because there weren’t enough Jews in America to provide them with a constituency sufficient to maintain power, they decided they needed to get the minorities in their corner by promising them handouts.

I sought to clarify that what he was saying was that the Democratic Party was essentially a Jewish conspiracy to gain power through the exploitation of gullible minorities.

“Listen,” he said, suddenly wary. “I’m not even slightly anti-Semitic. I banged a lot of Jewish girls in my day. My wife is Jewish, for Christ’s sake. My son is half Jewish. So I’m not being anti-Semitic at all when I say that they are very clever, the Jews. Whatever is going on with the breeding they have there. Very clever.”

He lifted a great fleshy hand to his graying goatee, massaged it with rhetorical vigor. I took a moment to absorb the physical spectacle of the man. The chunky gold sovereign ring. The beige cargo shorts. The brown leather slip-ons. The pale and weirdly delicate ankles. There was something grimly compelling about all of it. And if my portrayal of him seems to be verging on the mode of caricature, even of outright grotesquerie, it is only because this was how he presented himself to me in fact.

After a further half hour or so of aimless driving, the purpose of which as far as I could see was simply to illustrate the immensity of the property, Vicino brought the Lexus to a stop by another of the vaults. You could see where the prairie winds had blown away some of the topsoil and grass from the top of the structure, revealing an arc of bitumen coating beneath. Ready to get out, I swung open the car door.

The question I needed to ask myself, he said, is which group I wanted to be in when it all went down, when whatever was going to happen happened. When the asteroid landed. When the lights went out. When the economy crashed for good. When the bombs started falling. When the seas began to drown the cities. When