Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,24

the Lexus. Outside the corrugated iron shipping container was an unmanned red jeep with decals on its doors advertising a local Fox News station, and I inferred that Vicino had gone tooling around the prairies with a TV reporter, perhaps adjusting his sales pitch to the particular anxieties of a South Dakota conservative cable news–viewing demographic. I parked beside the jeep and set out to wander the site, but then quickly realized it was far too vast to even begin to explore on foot and returned to the car. I drove for forty minutes or so, stopping now and then to unlock a cattle gate, and once or twice to get out and observe the delirious spectacle of the endless grass-covered vaults, the hexagonal fronts—an architecture less proportionate to the physical than to the psychic dimensions of human beings. I clambered up onto the top of one of these, to survey the immensity from a higher vantage. Yesterday, Jin and I had stood on top of another of these structures, and my growing apprehension of a military-industrial sublime had been casually undermined by Jin’s solemnly informing me that he’d recently taken a shit on the roof of one such vault, although “probably not this one.”

I sat down now on the sparse grass of the roof and looked out across the infinity of green, surreally ruptured by the vaults. The thought occurred to me that it was here, in what was then the southern part of the Dakota Territory, that Laura Ingalls Wilder spent much of her childhood, and where she set several of her Little House novels. This was not just a prairie I was looking out over, therefore, but the prairie: the fertile source of America’s dream of itself as a nation of entrepreneurial pioneers, settlers of a wild land. I was looking out over a country born in savagery and genocide, built on the ruins of a conquered native civilization, and the bunkers seemed to me like the return of a repressed apocalypse. It was as though the land itself had extruded them as an immune response to some ancient antigen. It was so quiet here I could hear the soft buzzing of electricity in the power lines above me, the brittle snap and hum of technological civilization itself. I thought about America’s twin obsessions with a frontier past and an apocalyptic future, and of how these were ominously fused like the Janus-faced calf at the Pioneer Museum. What was Vicino offering in this place, after all, other than a return to the life of the old frontier, a new beginning in the wake of the end, one that retained as many consumer-facing luxuries as possible?

I saw a plume of dust drifting on the horizon, heralding the approach of Vicino’s Lexus. By the time I reached the shipping container, a young woman in a yellow cocktail dress was holding a microphone and delivering a monologue to a camera she’d set up beside an empty barn.

“If and when the end comes,” she intoned, “will you be ready?”

I sidled up to Vicino, who nodded at me and asked by way of openers what number out of ten I’d assign to the reporter in terms of sexual desirability. I told him I wouldn’t really want to say, and he shrugged and said that he personally felt she’d suffice in an apocalyptic lockdown scenario, the implication being that she would by no means otherwise be to his taste.

I wondered whether this was a deliberate provocation on his part, one of the running jokes he had going with himself, and imagined him bragging later about how he’d outraged the delicate sensibilities of this lefty European writer by continually asking him to judge the physical attractiveness of various women on a numerical rating scale.

Driving east across the prairies, I wondered what it might mean to think of Vicino as, if not a savior as such, then a man who happened to be in a position to offer salvation. The idea used to be that God would spare the righteous while the ungodly perished. These matters now were in the hands of the market. If you could afford the outlay, and if you had the foresight to get in on the ground floor, you were in with a chance to be among the saved. That was business: the first and the last, the alpha and omega.

When I got to Hot Springs it was evening, and the sun was flooding the western sky with