the waters were made bitter. When the EMP hit. When for whatever reason, in whatever way, the whole setup went tits irrevocably up, as it unquestionably would. Did I want to be out there trying to get in? Because if I thought I was going to be able to get past the armed guards Vivos would have stationed at all the property’s perimeters, good luck to me. I was going to be out there, and you know who was going to be out there with me? A whole lot of other people, and not a lot of food. And it was a known fact, historically, that after twenty-one days without food, people will resort to cannibalism. Here he appealed to the precedent of the Donner Party. In his telling, it seemed to me to be both origin myth and prophecy, a story about a country founded in savagery and destined to devour itself.
“There’s going to be gangs roaming,” he said. “Cannibals in great numbers. Raping. Pillaging. The have-nots coming after the haves for everything they’ve got. And my question to you is, do you want your daughters to live through that?”
I did not at that time have any daughters, but I felt it would have been somehow pedantic to point that out, because I understood that on some level he wasn’t even talking to me. Like the DIY preppers for whom he professed to have little time, he was speaking of, and to, a conjured phantasm of idealized masculinity—the man who provides, the man who protects, and whom only the breakdown of the state, the collapse of civilization itself, could bring to its truest apotheosis. He was speaking of a man for whom society as a whole had on some level always been a hoard of marauding cannibals baying for the good white Christian flesh of his daughters. The apocalypse, in this sense, was an unveiling of how things really were in this life: of what people were, of what society was, and of how a man stood in relation to it all. Apocalypse, after all, means only this: a revelation, an uncovering of the truth.
It seemed to me that this scenario Vicino had outlined, the haves battening down the hatches against the have-nots, was in some basic sense how the world essentially was, only more so. And though I was not certain about much, I was certain that I didn’t want to be one of the haves in a world like that. I knew there was some real hypocrisy in this: if this was already the arrangement of the world, after all, I was nothing if not a have. How could I be so sure that in the wake of some cataclysmic event, I would not be—would not, in fact, have to be—even more heedless of the suffering of others than I already was. Every single day in Dublin I practically stepped over the literal human bodies of the poor, the addicted, the destitute. I complained about the government that did nothing for these people, that had no intention of addressing the systemic injustices that necessitated their suffering, but I myself did essentially nothing to help them, aside from the occasional tossed coin, offered as much to alleviate my own guilt as to ease the suffering of the recipient. But in the end, it was absolutely true that I felt nothing but horror for the product Vicino was trying to sell me, or sell through me. A civilization that could accommodate a business like Vivos was a civilization that had in some sense already collapsed.
* * *
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During the Cold War years, the fallout bunker was buried deep in the American mind. At a public and private level, in the interlocking languages of politics and pop culture, the prospect of total nuclear annihilation embedded itself in the discourse, as an ever-present possibility, even an outright likelihood. A few weeks after the destruction of Hiroshima, Bertrand Russell spoke of the probability, in the coming years, of the absolute obliteration of humanity and its works. “One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.,” he wrote, “which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to be built afresh—a process taking (say) 500 years.” Twenty-four years later, in an interview with Playboy, he had not encountered much in the way of cause for increased optimism: “I still feel that the