In a café on Main Street, I sipped a coffee and scribbled in my notebook, before being driven away by a loose but resilient alliance of flies, who took turns in alighting on my forearms as I wrote. I walked the bank of the river, giving a wide berth at one point to a yellow-striped snake as it hustled its way across the path and up a grassy slope, and then I followed on a whim a sign for the Fall River Pioneer Museum.
I was as it happened the museum’s only visitor, and I found myself unnerved by the silence of the building, and even more so by the chipped and peeling mannequins stationed about the place, dressed in nineteenth-century apparel: long silk gloves, black gauze veils and bonnets. At the summit of the house, in a large, creaking room devoted to agriculture, I encountered an exhibit that caused my heart to momentarily falter: a pair of rampant Friesian calves, taxidermied in a freakish embrace, the hooves of their forelegs resting on each other’s shoulders. According to the laminated card in front of them, they had been born “joined at the brisket.” The sense of indeterminate augury I had felt since entering the museum rose to consciousness now in the presence of these unreal animals. In the Middle Ages, I remembered, conjoined births were an omen of ill times, and during periods of widespread struggle and turmoil their appearance was seen as an outright portent of apocalypse.
On my way out the door, the gnarled old man at the desk remarked that I’d gone through the museum pretty quick. I could have been picking him up wrong, but he seemed a little put out.
“Be sure to check out the iron lung in the garage out back,” he said, in a manner both rote and wistful, and I assured him that I would, but I did not.
As I walked down the hill, my phone vibrated in my pocket. Vicino was out at the site and was ready when I was.
* * *
—
About ten minutes after turning off Route 18 onto the cracked interior roads of the ranch, I passed what was once the town of Fort Igloo, home to the hundreds of workers who moved there to take up jobs at the Black Hills Ordnance Depot, built in 1942 to service the army’s increased wartime need for munitions testing and storage. Schools, a hospital, shops, houses, a church, a small theater: all abandoned now to the oblivious cows. Only once the hollow carapace of Fort Igloo began to recede in the rearview mirror did the landscape reveal the true depth of its uncanniness, because it was then that I saw the vaults. I noticed at first only three or four of these things: low, grass-covered protuberances, spaced a few hundred feet apart, their hexagonal concrete frontage jutting from the earth. The deeper into the ranch I drove, the more of these structures emerged from the landscape, until I realized that they were everywhere, hundreds of them, as far as I could see in every direction. It was an ethereal sight, both alien and ancient, like the remnants of a vast religious colony, a place built for the veneration of derelict gods.
I stopped the car and got out, took a couple of pictures with my phone. But the structures barely registered in the images, which reduced the scandalous vastness of the landscape to the level of the banal. The immense horizontality, the otherworldliness, could be properly viewed only with the naked eye.
I drove another couple of miles and came across a large, empty barn, beside which was a dark brown shipping container the size of a small house. On one side was a banner that read “xPoint: The Point in Time When Only the Prepared Will Survive.” Parked next to it was the silver Lexus SUV I’d been told to look out for.
I walked up the steps into the shipping crate, and into a kitchenette. From a room in the back, a gigantic man in his early sixties emerged and ambled toward me, and immediately embroiled me in a painfully vigorous handshake. Robert Vicino was six feet eight inches and, according to his own most recent computations, 310 pounds. (“By no means a porker,” he said, patting the expansive dome of his abdomen. “Just a big guy.”) The crimson bulb of a nose, the pockmarked face, the neat gray goatee: before he even began to speak—which he quickly did, and never let up—he presented himself to me as a distinctly Mephistophelian figure.
Before long, we were in the Lexus, getting ready to head to the nearest town to get diesel for the generator. His seat leaned backward at an absurdly steep angle, Vicino removed a large wooden-backed hairbrush from a side compartment and began to groom, with firm and precisely rhythmical sweeps, first his beard and then his hair.
“This is a great car,” he announced. “You guys got Lexuses in the UK?”
“We have them in Ireland, anyway,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d intended. “Not me personally, but people have them.”
“Best car I’ve ever owned. And I’ve owned Mercedes. I’ve owned Rolls-Royce.”
Sitting in the back was Jin Zhengii, a twenty-three-year-old recent engineering graduate whom Vicino had hired as his intern. Jin didn’t say much—partly on account of being Chinese and not having particularly good English, but mostly, I guessed, on account of just being the kind of person who didn’t say much.
“I tell him, Jin, I’m like your American dad,” said Vicino. “Right, Jin? He’s a great kid. Great kid.”
They’d eaten at a Chinese restaurant in Rapid City the previous night, and Vicino had gone out of his way to fix him up with their waitress.
“I figured she was at least an eight or a nine,” he said. “Jin was like, in China this girl is a three, tops. Right, Jin?”
In the back seat, Jin made a display of indifference—a roll of the shoulders, a tilt of the head—confirming the girl’s low rating in a Chinese context. Robert told him to get her Facebook up on his phone, then took the phone from him and started swiping through photos of her, presenting them for my approval.
“I mean come on, look at this,” he said, showing me another photo. “A three? Does she look like a three to you?”
As we drove, I gazed out the window at Fort Igloo, or the ruins thereof, and I was struck by the sense that I was apprehending at once both the past and the future. Vicino mentioned as we passed that the place had been home to hundreds of families. The news anchor Tom Brokaw, he said, had grown up here after the war, a fact he seemed to take a proprietorial pleasure in presenting to me for inspection. A concrete staircase with metal banisters stood in the middle of a field, utterly alone, no trace remaining of the building that once presumably provided it with a context.
We reached the dismal little town of Edgemont, which had foundered badly in the years since the ordnance facility had closed. The streets were long and narrow and seemed entirely desolate of human life. There was a Laundromat, a low corrugated iron structure, called Loads of Fun Laundry. Outside a gas station, a cluster of bikers were standing around beside their Harleys, variously bedecked in patriotic insignia. They were, I 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?”