a lapwing, the tinny whine of a passing mosquito, the endless whispered self-assertions of the river—when out of nowhere the world was murdered, obliterated by a great rupture in the sky. It was the loudest sound I had ever encountered, though I felt it more than heard it: an actual physical force, a violence from the heavens. I opened my eyes, and coming low over the river—three hundred feet, two hundred, a hundred—was a jet shrieking toward me at atrocious speed, and in my mind was the possibility of only one outcome, which was immediate and absolute annihilation. I saw the solitary figure of the pilot in the cockpit, the blank visor of the helmet, and I knew that I’d been seen, and I heard myself howl more in exhilaration than in terror, and then the monstrous visitation was gone, swooping skyward from the water, up and out of the valley and away, leaving only the throbbing echo of the wound it had inflicted on the air. I had dreamt this scene many times, I realized, or something like it, the screaming descent of a plane into a city or a canyon or a body of water, but in those dreams the jet was always a commercial liner, and I was always inside it, frozen in terror, alone, watching the ground rise up to meet me, the vast actuality of onrushing death. I was on my feet now, looking at the sky, and I felt as though I had been on the outside of my own recurring dream, and I was laughing uncontrollably, and my hands were trembling, and I felt utterly alive, and almost physically overcome by an elation of gratitude, though I had no earthly sense of whom or what I might be grateful to.
The irony took some time to settle in, but when it did it settled in deep, and I could think of nothing else. Here I was, the farthest into the wilderness I had ever been, in pursuit of some half-conceived notion of the sublime, of an encounter with the stillness of nature, only to be confronted with the apocalyptic force of the machinery of war. It felt like a mysterious and at the same time almost laughably overdetermined epiphany, a sudden obliteration of one kind of truth by another. (Attempting to follow in the footsteps of Emerson, I had come face-to-face with Pynchon.) I had encountered the sublime after all, but in a form entirely other than what I’d hoped for: this was the military-industrial sublime, the divine violence of technology.
This machine that had flown over my head, close enough that it had tousled my hair like a fond uncle, was, I later learned, a Typhoon bomber from the nearby base of Lossiemouth on the North Sea coast, from where, at that time, the RAF flew jets out to Cyprus for bombing missions in Syria. It was strange, surreally instructive, to have my little retreat disrupted in this way. I had formed a sacred circle of stones around myself, to make a place of stillness and contemplation and communion with nature, and what had been revealed to me was politics in its rawest form. This wilderness reserve, this place ostensibly dedicated to the undoing of human damage, was also a training arena for war. There is no place where you are outside of power.
In that moment the idea of the apocalypse came into sudden and violent focus. It was already the end of the world for the people that fighter jet was likely headed toward. They were experiencing all the things by which I, in my remote and abstract fashion, was preoccupied: the fragility of political orders, the collapse of civilization. Five million of them, fleeing the terror and chaos of their ruined country, meeting the cruel machinery of Europe and its borders. It was always the end of the world for someone, somewhere.
7
THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF THE FUTURE
Because I wanted to know what the end of the world might look like, I wanted to go to the Zone. I wanted to haunt its ruins, and be haunted by them. I wanted to see what could not otherwise be seen, to inspect the remains of the human era. The Zone presented this prospect in a manner more clear and stark than any other place I was aware of. It seemed to me that to travel there would be to see the end of the world from the vantage point of its