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 a golden light. I drove around for a while, trying to find somewhere to eat that wasn’t Pizza Hut. Main Street was entirely deserted but for the solitary and oblivious figure of a young man, standing in an empty parking space by the river, across the street from an elegantly dilapidated old movie house. He had on a backward baseball cap and a black vest, and he had lank blond hair down to his shoulders. He was extremely pale and a little pudgy, and his eyes were closed, and his legs were spread in a power stance of heavy-metal defiance. He was shredding an intangible guitar, working his fingers up and down the frets in a blur of agile certitude, thrashing his head in righteous assent with whatever music was playing on his headphones.
I slowed down as I passed him, staring openly through the side window at this spectacle of pure face-melting abandon. There was something both frightening and life affirming about the performance, which was hardly a performance at all, in that it was presumably delivered entirely for the performer’s own personal gratification. I drove on and pulled into a parking spot a little way up the street, and sat there awhile, trying to make sense of what I’d just seen, to fit it into some framework of meaning or significance. I walked back up toward him then, on the opposite side of the street, and when he came back into view I could see that he had abandoned the guitar and had moved on to vocals.
I leaned against the window of a closed military surplus store and took stock of him for a while. He would stand bent as if in prayer over an invisible microphone, mouthing along silently and with shocking intensity to an unheard music, and then abandon himself to an improvised dance, a furious rhythmical stamping that made me think of Rumpelstiltskin. There was real violence to it, real chaos and fury. A car rounded the corner and passed him by, and neither of its occupants, a man and woman in middle age, seemed to pay him any heed at all. Perhaps they knew him, I thought, and were familiar with these desperate displays of pure energy, of wild and illegible life. And if so, I thought, they had surely long relinquished the need for it to mean or symbolize anything.
4
BOLT-HOLE
Within about an hour of arriving in Auckland, I was as close to catatonic from fatigue as made no difference, and staring into the maw of a volcano. I was standing next to an art critic named Anthony Byrt. He’d picked me up from the airport and, in a gesture I would come to understand as quintessentially Kiwi, dragged me directly up the side of a volcano. This particular volcano, Mount Eden, was a fairly domesticated specimen, around which was spread one of the more affluent suburbs of Auckland.
I was a little out of breath from the climb and, having just emerged in the southern hemisphere from a Dublin November, sweating liberally in the relative heat of the early summer morning. I was also experiencing near-psychotropic levels of jet lag. I must have looked a bit off, because Anthony offered a cheerful apology for playing the volcano card so early in the proceedings.
“I probably should have eased you into it, mate,” he chuckled. “But I thought it’d be good to get a view of the city before breakfast.”
Anthony was in his late thirties, neatly bearded with a shaven head. His manner was fluently loquacious and at the same time politely diffident.
The view of Auckland and its surrounding islands was indeed ravishing—though, in retrospect, it was no more ravishing than any of the countless other views I would wind up getting ravished by over the next ten days. That, famously, is the whole point of New Zealand: if you don’t like getting ravished by views, you have no business in the place. To travel there is to give implicit consent to being hustled left, right and center into states of aesthetic rapture.
“I’ve been in the country mere minutes,” I said, “and I’ve already got a perfect visual metaphor for the fragility of civilization in the bag.” I was referring here to the pleasingly surreal spectacle of a volcanic crater overlaid with a surface of neatly manicured grass.
New Zealand, Anthony pointed out, was positioned right on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe curve of geological fault lines stretching upward from the western flank of the Americas, back down along the eastern coasts of Russia and Japan and on into the South Pacific. It was volcano country.
It seemed odd, I said, given all this seismic activity, that superrich Silicon Valley technologists were supposedly apocalypse-proofing themselves by buying up land down here.
“Yeah,” said Anthony, “but some of them are buying farms and sheep stations pretty far inland. Tsunamis aren’t going to be a big issue there. And what they’re after is space, and clean water. Two things we’ve got a lot of down here.”
It was precisely this phenomenon—of tech billionaires buying up property in New Zealand in anticipation of civilizational collapse—that constituted our shared apocalyptic obsession. This was the reason I had come down here, to find out about these apocalyptic retreats, and to see what New Zealanders thought of this perception of their country.
In any discussion of our anxious historical moment, its apprehensions of decay and collapse, New Zealand was never very far from being invoked. It was the ark of nation-states, an island haven amid a rising tide of apocalyptic unease: a wealthy, politically stable country unlikely to be seriously affected by climate change, a place of lavish natural beauty with vast stretches of unpopulated land, clean air, fresh water. For those who could afford it, New Zealand offered at the level of an entire country the sort of reassurance promised by Vicino’s bunkers.