I.
Bruce Beach was a symbol, a private symbol just for me, right from the start. To be sure, the world was not ending then – this is fifteen years ago – nor is it ending now. And though fascination with doomsday scenarios (the old term) and apocalyptic visions (a bit more modern, though its days are numbered) probably should have been a variable in the equation that Beach used (or uses, for all I know) to mentally calculate the immediacy of Armageddon (even older), the real truth, I think, is that TEOTWAWKI, as folks who talk a lot about the end of the world as we know it refer to it these days, is not really all that immediate, or even possible. Or, put another way, the world as we know it, metaphorically at least, is pretty much always ending, it ends every time something new is brought into the world, and our fascination with apocalypse probably has something to do with fear of change, and, ultimately, latent conservative thought. That is, there comes a time in life when you’d like to stop endlessly learning about the ever-changing world and just live in the one you’ve got, and when the world ignores you and goes on disrupting itself or reinventing itself anyway, it feels like end times (biblically old). Or something like that.
Fifteen years ago, my situation was a little different. I was a writer who had produced a couple of books, and there’s a metaphor there too: Each book a writer writes is a world that is born with its inspiration, and ends, usually calamitously, with its publication. What drew me to Bruce Beach – whom I heard about from my brother, a story I’ll tell shortly – was that I had begun thinking of my career itself as coming to an end. Even though the world wasn’t ending, and isn’t ending, and won’t ever end in any kind of literal way, what people tend to do with dramatic turmoil in their lives, of the romantic or professional or political sorts, is react as though it’s the end of the world, as though they simply can’t live without this lover, this job, this movement. Therapy has a term for this, to catastrophize, and lord knows I’ve been guilty of that. But books rely on it too. Pretty much every story Henry James ever wrote features characters confronted with minor bits of class angst, reacting as though their very souls are on the line. They need salvation, or they think they do, and James’s plots generally hinge on whether or not they get it.
All of which means that when I first heard of Bruce Beach – who was guilty of some catastrophizing of his own, having a couple decades earlier built a giant bomb shelter in Canada out of forty-two buried school buses – I was more or less desperate for a story to tell. I had it in my head that I needed to “break into” big magazine publishing. I hadn’t previously written for big magazines, save once, and I believed this explained why my first two books had not paved the way for the rest of my career. Name recognition, platform building, all that bullshit – but I believed it to such an extent that I had convinced myself that without breaking into magazines the world, my world, would end. That’s why my ears pricked when my brother, Peter, mentioned Ark Two.
II
Peter and I are the classic brotherly case. We were close when we were young, though what this really meant was that I tagged along on Peter’s efforts at self-education in geology, herpetology, and archaeology: we collected rocks, snakes, and Native American artifacts in the canyons around our Southern California neighborhood. Peter was never a good student, but he performed these investigations with a precociousness that I wish someone serious had taken note of back then. He measured, weighed, and photographed all the snakes we caught, and kept a thick logbook of local reptiles that my parents probably still have in a box somewhere. Even earlier he built sieves for our “digs” from two-by-fours and wire mesh: we would climb down into wriggling erosion gullies in the hills; pottery sherds jutted out of the earthen walls. Once, when I was ten and Peter thirteen, something caught his eye as we sifted hard clods of dry desert dirt. He snatched it up and popped it in his mouth to clean it. I caught a glimpse of something white and sharp.
“Is it a shark tooth?”
“No.” He spit it into his palm: a perfect quartz arrowhead the size of a thumbnail.
Academia never really worked for Peter, though in his thirties he would come close to completing a Ph.D. in archaeology. His first go around in college, he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant (they’re still married, my nephew is a fine young man) and dropped out to join the Army, which frankly did a better job of recognizing his potential. He was shuttled into some kind of intelligence MO, and that’s about all I can tell you about what my brother does for a living these days. That turn in life represented a philosophical and ideological and vocational shift, and now, as in a lot of families, we don’t talk much and if we do talk, we argue. Even the moment that is relevant to this story amounts to a miscommunication. I was going on about needing subjects to write about, and Peter knee-jerkedly offered up Ark Two, not quite anticipating, I think, that I would react to potential nuclear holocaust, however implausible, with a kind of haughty bemusement – i.e., as a career advancement opportunity.
The quick version. Bruce Beach was an American grant writer and self-proclaimed radiation expert who expatriated sometime around 1970. He bounced around Canada with his second wife for a while, then settled in Horning’s Mills, Ontario, a small town ninety kilometers north of Toronto. A short time later the Canadian government launched an ambitious initiative to spur scientific research in the country. Spying opportunity in the program’s porous guidelines, Beach put together a grant application for an elaborate oceanic research venture, and then used the millions of dollars he was awarded to purchase forty-two school buses which he buried under hundreds of tons of concrete on some land near his home. The hive of buses, connected by passages and forming a subterranean community, would house as many as five-hundred people for the duration of whatever nuclear haboob might come rolling along. For obvious reasons, the complex was called Ark Two, and Beach struck a pretty good Noah figure with girth and a beard and a name that seemed like a citation of the nuclear disaster film, On the Beach. Of course, the people of Horning’s Mills grew alarmed when lines of cement trucks started to cause traffic jams in the middle of their tiny town, but the Canadian government didn’t get around to shutting Beach down until the buses were in place, the concrete poured, the blast door installed. It was all there – done.
In the years since, in debt to Canada for $95 million, give or take, Beach had sat in his home in Horning’s Mills, and maybe still does, monitoring the news and making occasional apocalyptic predictions. When I first looked him up, he had a mailing list of around two thousand people who agreed the end might be nigh. Every once in a while Beach would suggest that members of the Ark Two community descend on Horning’s Mills, just in case. If worse came to worst, they’d fight their way to the shelter, break the seal on the blast door, and hibernate through the irradiated season.
III
I learned most of the above a few weeks after that conversation with Peter, when I started creeping around on the Internet. I grew unnerved and excited. Unnerved because I realized that Peter was probably on Beach’s mailing list. That’s why his telling me about it amounted to a miscommunication. For me, TEOTWAWKI sounded just goofy enough to make for a comic but informative reported essay; for Peter, it was probably still pretty goofy, but it was plausible enough that he at least gave it his attention. In other words, he was earnest and I was jaded.
But I was thrilled, too, because Beach’s latest doomsday prediction was coming up in about three weeks. I joined his mailing list too, and I promptly received a warning about some Israeli-Palestinian thing that had flared up: Beach sketched out a scenario in which a break in ongoing peace talks triggered a loose nuke detonation, which in turn lit the tinderbox of a traditional Cold War–style cascade of mutual destruction. Not likely, but it could happen. Beach put out a call for whoever might want to be near the shelter for a few days: come to Horning’s Mills, hang out, prepare for the end.
Now, as I said, I’d had just that one prior experience writing for big magazines. In the years since then, I’d written, or tried to write, a few pitches, which are, if you don’t know, brief approximations of what a writer intends to do and what he or she will conclude as a result of doing it. Pitches are pretty absurd, truth be told, because how can you possibly know what you will conclude before you conduct your investigation? On the other hand, when an editor considers an idea, particularly an idea from a writer they have not previously published, how can they be sure they are making a wise investment of the publication’s resources unless they have some sense of what they are commissioning? Yeah, it’s all pretty clunky, but there’s probably no better way of doing it.
Anyway, even harder than writing a whizbang pitch is getting an editor’s attention long enough to read it. I’ve had many conversations with writer friends about this problem, none of which have helped. But thinking of pitching Beach, I recalled one bit of advice: The way to get an editor’s attention is to send them something that requires immediate action, something they have to pull the trigger on that very moment, or lose it forever.
Which is totally apropos for TEOTWAWKI. So that’s what I did. I fully intended to tell Beach’s story in the context of the history of bomb shelters and apocalyptic thought, but I didn’t talk about any of that in my pitch. Instead, I waited two weeks and then sent a slightly frantic email that described Beach’s bomb shelter and his claim that the world might be ending in a few days. I attached a schematic of the shelter itself, complete with armory and morgue, along with a scan of the front page of the newspaper that Beach intended to distribute when civilization began to climb from the rubble. If the editor wanted me to go, I said, I had to leave right away. It didn’t occur to me until much later that my pitch was a lot like Beach’s warnings, and even his bomb shelter, in that it attempted to transmute doomsday into salvation.
I clicked send. The editor called within the hour. He had just one reservation.
“The shelter is sealed, right?” he said. I could tell from his voice that he was looking at the blueprint. “What does that mean?”
I’d read a news report that local police sometimes used the shelter for training exercises. “A piece of paper across the jamb? I don’t know.”
I could hear him thinking on the other end of the line, perhaps feeling the weight of the rest of his day’s decisions. “Okay. Let’s do it. But you have to get inside the shelter. If you don’t get inside the shelter, there’s no piece.”
IV
I was a little dishonest with the editor. By the time I sent the pitch I knew that the Canadian government had welded shut Ark Two’s blast door, and I knew a ton more about the history of bomb shelters and Bruce Beach. I’d been researching non-stop from the moment I learned of his prediction.
I knew things like the fact that digging underground complexes to escape wartime calamity was a practice thousands of years old, and that it didn’t really work. Ask the French about that. I knew that the United States had once built a gargantuan shelter for the President and the Joint Chiefs under the Greenbrier Hotel in Virginia, and that there was another shelter closer to D.C., for the Supreme Court (or maybe it’s the other way around, Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs). There was a bunch of other great factoids, too. 110% of the population of Switzerland can be underground within two hours! A complex under Beijing can accommodate as many as 350,000 people! There are five stories of underground housing beneath Cappadocia, Turkey, built by the Hittites in 2000 BC! I’d culled this material from several books about the history of bomb shelters; but apart from the stray news story, no one had yet written about Ark Two.
I haven’t out and out said it yet, but these weren’t exactly flush times for me. My previous books had been research heavy, advances eaten up by travel and lodging, so I heaved a sigh of relief when the editor agreed to pay my expenses even if the Ark Two blast door proved impenetrable. I contacted Beach with the news that a big magazine wanted me to feature him, and he responded promptly: I was welcome to join them for the vigil, he said, but as to a “story” about him, well, we’d talk about that when I arrived. You bet we would.
In the days before heading off on research trips – and by this point in my career I’d interviewed murderers in maximum security prisons, participated in satanic rituals (also, weirdly, in Canada), and infiltrated Scientology – I’ve always experienced a kind of Indiana Jones–style anticipation of adventure. This begins with packing my satchel: pens, notebook, recording device. And when I depart, even when I’m just on the way to the airport, I note a slight shift in my consciousness: the journey has begun, and suddenly everything I see or hear or touch is invested with the added significance of potentially becoming a detail I’ll use when I turn the experience into a story. I love this feeling; it buoyed me as I departed for Ark Two. And though now, a decade and a half later, emotion itself seems to be the point of all this, back then the irony passed me by: I had sunk so low that it was only by embarking on a trip to attend a global deathwatch that I could feel awake, alive, hopeful.
Beach met me at the airport, a chubby and bearded guy who tended, when standing erect, to lean back on his heels a bit to emphasize a gut of Santa Clausian bonhomie and boddhisatvian tranquility. He wore a cartoonish cap and cartoonish rainbow suspenders, and I learned later that Beach had been active in the early days of computers and had produced several instructional books in which a cartoonish depiction of him acted as a kind of illustrated docent, bounding from page to page, and dialogue bubbling out helpful aphorisms to make sense of the coming revolution. I want to say that when I first met Beach he was holding a Dr. Pepper, because I almost never saw him without one, but I think that’s probably my imagination. Beach knew he was a character – “I got a characteristic laugh. I got a characteristic look, and a characteristic past and personality – you put it all together, I’m a character,” he told me later – but initially he was kind of shy. He didn’t say much on the drive to Horning’s Mills, and I asked only a few gently probing questions, learning en route that both Beach and his wife, Jean, were dedicated Bahá’ís, which, looking back, was the first hint I received that Beach was not your ordinary doomsday survivalist.
Horning’s Mills had once been a mill town, of course, and it was where Jean’s people were from, I think. She had met Beach in Kansas, or maybe it was Chicago. Jean was the picture of an ordinary housewife – Beach was sometimes short with her in a way that made me uncomfortable – but she’d once penned a book that amounted to a semiotic close read of The Book of Revelations, and this, if nothing else, explained why she’d been drawn to Beach in the first place. Their small home in the middle of Horning’s Mills was cramped and crowded with crates of dried lentils, fruit cocktail, Dr. Pepper, Ragu, and creamed corn. There were overstuffed chairs where there wasn’t room for understuffed chairs, and power seemed to be a problem: electrical cords snaked up over door jamb moldings, and insectoid tangles of wires, surge protectors, and prong converters hid under furniture like traumatized cats. There were seeds in Beach’s freezer, and potassium iodine in bulk. All of which meant that the house itself was a bomb shelter.
They showed me to their son’s room, where I’d sleep. He’d moved out, had a job at Home Depot these days, but he’d left behind a telltale collection of VHS tapes: “The Case of the Missing Messiah,” “CR2 Drill, 1995,” and “Barefoot without Embarrassment: Uncovering the Inside Story on Nail Fungus.” Beach told me they’d had four children total, if you counted waterbabies. Another son, Bahj’i, had died at age seven, in a sledding accident just up the street from where we were sitting. There was a little hill; the boy sledded into the road; a car was coming. Beach mourned for two years.
V
That first afternoon, Beach wanted to take me to a meeting of the World Language Process, a group that was convening to discuss something called ANJeL Tun. Beach’s title within the World Language Process was “International Coordinator,” which was basically a way of saying it was all his show, and the gist of ANJel Tun was that it was a phonetic universal language: angel tongue. I was a bit confused – I was anxious to see Ark Two – but I figured I’d put the story’s pieces together as we went along.
En route, I yanked out a few more details of Beach’s characteristic past. He said he’d worked more than one-hundred-and-fifty jobs before he married Jean. Counted them up one time. Did four years in the Army, but two stripes was all they ever gave him. Always wanted to see a UFO, eventually did. Taught himself to speed read, and got so fast he didn’t even have to check books out of the library, just pulled them down from the shelf, read them, and put them back. Wrote a book of his own about computerized matchmaking. First wife left him somewhere in all that. Circa 1961, he founded the American Shelter Company, just saw the need, though bomb shelters is admittedly a stupid business to get into because you’re banking on the end of the world, so how can you keep a straight face while presenting a five year cash flow plan? Started an association of shelter builders in those days too. Twenty-two of them.
But to be honest, Beach said, as we pulled into the school where he’d managed to reserve a room, or maybe it a community center, he wasn’t all that interested in bomb shelters anymore. Now he was focused on ANJel Tun. The Chinese, he claimed, were interested in making ANJeL Tun the official language of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At this point, I cringed. If I didn’t get inside Ark Two, that was it, the world would end, and I just knew Beach had acetylene torches lying around someplace, to get through the blast door in case worse came to worst. I needed him interested in shelters again.
But I bided my time, and put on a show of recording the meeting of the World Language Process. In attendance was a guy named Mitch, a guy named Israel from Nigeria, a guy named Will, an older woman named Toni, a guy named Peter who was a rich doctor, a guy named Ray, and eventually a guy named Dennis who came in a little late. We watched an ANJel Tun instructional video that Beach had put together. Computerized cartoon characters did the talking, and the video concluded with the animated figures breaking into what is arguably a doomsday song, Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken,” the words scrolling across the bottom in ANJel Tun. Then Beach, occasionally sipping a Dr. Pepper, spoke for a while about the new world order that would emerge after TEOTWAWKI, and though he wasn’t a particularly accomplished speaker, he did, in this surely oft-delivered talk, occasionally brush up against, or sideswipe, eloquence. The group’s basic problem, he said, apart from the Chinese enthusiasm for 2008, which was great, no doubt about it, was that the one world government that would arise after catastrophe would need some kind of organization to implement whatever international auxiliary language, ANJel Tun, or there were a bunch of others too, came to be widely accepted. So here we were, the Board of Directors of the World Language Process, each of us qualified in our own unique way, and it’s a very dear-hearted group, to be sure, and we could take comfort from the fact that the United Nations already had a universal language committee, or maybe they didn’t call it a committee, maybe it was a colloquium, and Beach was a representative to that too, he reminded us, a liaison from some NGO whose name he couldn’t quite recall, and, yeah, the UN’s universal language committee wasn’t, quote unquote, active, but it was there, and, hey, Mitch, do you remember what it was called, because you wrote a letter to them?
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Mitch said.
Anyway, Beach said, there was something there, and with the Chinese showing interest in ANJel Tun for 2008, and following that the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, and then the Olympics again, London 2012, and so on, the World Language Process was looking pretty well positioned. Surely we could agree on that. Well done, meeting adjourned.
There was some milling and chatting and Dr. Pepper sipping and donut eating before people began to depart. I kept to a corner of the room, scribbling something in my notebook about how the group, and Beach in particular, sat square in the middle of the apocalypse narrative’s target audience of morose misfits. Quirky individuals with peculiar skill sets who had run aground attempting to navigate the world’s treacherous archipelago of economics, politics, and social hierarchy. Wasn’t it natural for them to fantasize about the smooth sailing that might follow a cataclysmic reorganization? Initially, I would have said that this was a better description of my brother, whose skills the education system had failed to recognize, than it was of me, but it was probably right around this point in my journey that I began to realize that I’d identified with Beach, just a bit, right from the start. I’d run aground too, or I felt I had. That’s why I was here: an ironic doomsday would save me. One of the men at the meeting, it might have been Ray or Will, I’m not sure which, made a point of approaching me to state unequivocally how happy they were that I’d attended the meeting, because as far as they were concerned getting ANJel Tun into a big magazine, which Beach had told them about, was as important a step forward as the Chinese enthusiasm. Hilarious, I thought. Because of course I was going to make them all look like cranks. But then, even that emotion curdled in my mind. It was jaded vs. earnest, all over again.
On the way back to Horning’s Mills, Beach filled in a couple more gaps for me. After the nuclear war or whatever, he explained, a Universal Language Institute would be built right on top of Ark Two, on the earth and concrete radiation shield, meters thick, that covered over the forty-two school buses. That’s where ANJel Tun would begin, Beach said. In his barn, he had a model of the Universal Language Institute that had cost $240,000 to build. He said this as we rolled along, in the middle of August, in a car with busted air conditioning. I took note of the fact, too, that one of Beach’s side view mirrors was attached with duct tape.
VI
As a point of fact, I was the only member of the Ark Two community to show up in Horning’s Mills to await that particular doomsday. Mostly, for those three days, it was just me and Beach and Jean sitting around in their little house, talking.
Beach monitored international events from an old swiveling desk chair with some exposed foam stuffing. Sometimes twisting back and forth like a tail gunner, sometimes putting up his bare feet and cupping a Dr. Pepper on his belly as though it was chalice, he studied an aging computer monitor that most of the time showed the news feed from Haaretz.com. In the morning there were Israeli civilians slipping into Gaza to protest a pullout. There had been friendly fire casualties. Oil had hit $60 per barrel, but no one knew whether that would eventually seem outrageously high or comically low. Beach heard a rumor (which meant he read a chain email) that U.S. draft boards had been restaffed on the sly and that all U.S. military leave for September had been canceled. In Horning’s Mills, it had rained during the night, which meant that we wouldn’t be going up to the shelter to mow, which had been the plan. The Ark Two community stood at Alert Level 1A.
I walked up to the shelter for the first time by myself. It sat beneath a large open field on the edge of town, alongside a deep gorge. Beach was right, the field needed mowing, which gave the shelter at that moment the look it would have had if the apocalypse had already come and you were a waste-wanderer who stumbled across a hidden refuge. The blast door was built into a hillside, like the door of a hobbit house, a massive cold steel slab, incongruous and uncanny. I yanked the handle; its weld felt solid as rock. I was clinging to hope, but I think it was then that I began to realize that I wasn’t going to get inside Ark Two.
I walked uphill. A couple exhaust vent hoods hid in the high grass, so I knew I was on top of the shelter, and I knew that some parts of the shelter sat deeper than others, so moving uphill meant walking on top of it. Plus I’d studied the schematic, so I knew, roughly, that I was moving over the X-ray Room, the Silent Library, the Command Room, and then turning up toward the Transmitter Room and the Chapel. At the top of the rise, near the edge of the gorge, I found something I didn’t expect: a giant boulder, so out of place as to suggest that it had been moved here. In fact, it had. A plaque was embedded in its side:
Bahj’i Barrett Beach
March 24, 1971
January 2, 1979
“O my son! Verily, God will
bring everything to light...”
Back at the house, Beach explained that the son who had died in the sledding accident was interred beneath the boulder. Bahj’i was in the ground alongside Ark Two.
VII
That afternoon, Beach opened up a bit more about the religious motives behind the shelter. The quote on Bahj’i’s plaque was from the Koran (Luqman 31:16), but, as a Bahá’í, Beach was spiritually ambidextrous, and there were a number of Bible quotations that had spoken to him as well, as God once spoke to Noah: Matthew 24:15-16 (“When, therefore, you see the abomination of desolation...then let those who are in Judea flee into the mountains”); Job 24:8 (“embrace the rock for lack of a shelter”); and Psalm 61:2-3 (“Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For you have been a refuge for me”).
We assembled a few more pieces of Beach’s story, as well. In 1981, or thereabout (Beach counted it as a virtue that he was not time-oriented in traditional ways), he’d begun placing ads for a survival community. He wanted to hear back from one hundred people before calling a meeting. One thousand responded. Of those, sixty agreed to actually show up, and in early 1982 they debated four shelter proposals: there was a ski lodge for sale; an old rock quarry was available; somebody knew of a secret location back in the woods; and, finally, Ark Two.
For this next phase of Beach’s life, I make no claim to accuracy, if only because Beach himself didn’t.
Here’s the verifiable part. The Canadian government had for a long time offered tax incentives for research, but in 1983 a particularly generous option became available. The Scientific Research Tax Credit (SRTC) permitted companies to enter into research contracts on behalf of outside investors who could take a 50% tax credit on their investment, with no requirement that they demonstrate that their savings were actually being invested. Beach wasn’t the only one to pull a Music Man move on the measure. Between 1983 and 1985, when the SRTC was abolished, $1.6 billion slipped through a gaping tax loophole.
Here’s where it gets iffy. Sometime during his early days in Canada, Beach was introduced to a brilliant man named Alfred Stein, who might have been an engineer, plasma or electronic, or maybe he was just some kind of physicist, but what it boiled down to was that Alfred knew more about anything than anyone. Name a subject. Institutional economics? Alfred knew Veblen backward and forward. Feta cheese? Alfred could rattle off the five principle kinds of feta cheese and where they were produced. Alfred reached out to Beach because Beach had the grant writing skills, and now there was the SRTC, and Alfred decided that what they should do is propose some kind of artificial intelligence research company, with Beach as its president. Beach wrote a successful proposal, but Alfred’s investors picked some IBM guy to be president instead, bum deal, and as a consolation Beach came away with ten thousand in cash so he could write a proposal for an idea all his own.
At this point, Beach already had a shelter in Horning’s Mills. There were four school buses in the ground, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember how he’d paid for that. The next scheme would fund expansion. He first came up with a thing about eliminating dioxins from the environment by mixing them with oil and then burning it, which was perfect because what you needed for the SRTC was big expensive machinery that you could get dirt cheap, and Canada had a bunch of abandoned billion-dollar refineries that you could acquire for around $100 million each. Unfortunately, some environmental people caught wind of the plan, and they set out to force Beach to prove that he wasn’t just pumping dioxins into the atmosphere. Beach’s system was elegant and it worked, he said, but it wasn’t worth the effort. He dumped the refineries plan.
Next he talked to a University of Waterloo professor, who pointed out that ships cost a lot of money. Sure did. An oceanic research ship was another great idea, because what Beach could propose was his robotics thing. He’d later claim that he once owned one-third of the company whose robots retrieved Challenger debris from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But here’s the thing: robotics wasn’t the real plan. That’s just what he proposed. What he really planned to do was put together a bunch of psychologists to investigate the possibilities of remote sensing in people. You know, like bees knowing where pollen is from really far away, or salmon and turtles knowing how to swim to far-off breeding grounds, and Beach had done some work on bacteria, and he knew how to do electropherograms, and...but you know, it’s all pretty complicated, actually, and darn near impossible to explain to a lay person. Anyway, he got the grant for the robots and used the money to buy the ship, Canada’s Tomorrow, and they recruited all these cadets, and there were snazzy uniforms and a magazine for a while, and the ship had classrooms, computer rooms, a TV studio, a moonpool for drilling and diving, and a 16,000-galloon swimming pool for recreation. There was some bad press at this point. Some people were concerned that Beach was brainwashing Canada’s youth. That didn’t stop him. The ship went off on its venture, the real purpose of which – and here’s the crux – was treasure hunting. That’s what they would do. They would use the SRTC money on the ship, and the ship would identify which of the cadets could remotely sense, and then the cadets would find the treasure, and then the treasure would pay for the Universal Language Institute that would rise on top of Ark Two after the war. In the end, it was all connected – it was all one story.
We were sitting in Beach’s living room. It was early evening now, but you couldn’t see outside because of the heavy drapes and the stacks of boxes that blocked the windows. Beach had been talking for a long time; now he fell silent. I flipped through my notes, trying to verify that it was, in fact, all one story. Or that it made sense.
“So,” I said, “Bahj’i dies in 1979.”
“Yeah.”
“And you mourned him for two years, you said.”
“Right.”
“Then, in 1981 – or thereabout – you begin putting together the Ark Two community. Is there a connection there?”
Beach blinked. “You know, I never thought of that.”
VIII
The following morning brought news of six U.S. soldiers having been killed in Iraq. No mention of civilian casualties. The Israeli army was forcibly evicting Israelis who had formed human chains to protect Gaza settlements. A few hardliners had taken up assault rifles. On the bright side, Indonesia and the Aceh rebels had signed a cease fire agreement, which was perhaps a sign that a better society, or at least peace, can in fact follow epic disasters – the Indian Ocean tsunami had struck eight months earlier. Beach spent an hour poring over the news feeds and revised his prediction: the global tipping point might not come for a couple months yet. Maybe October.
We drove to visit Beach’s friend, Fred, a local Ark Two community member and a peak oil conspiracist. Beach and Fred had some things to discuss, and then we’d all head up to the shelter together.
Fred was a mechanic with a shop full of tools, and, I hoped, welding equipment. But Beach had already pooh-poohed my appeals to breach the blast door. There were the Mounties to consider, he said. Of course he had acetylene torches ready to go, he admitted, but if we used them now, and the authorities caught us – goodbye torches. Anyway there wasn’t much to see in Ark Two. A lot of water, a bunch of snakes.
Tell that to my editor, I thought.
Beach and Fred engaged in a spirited exchange about preparedness, and whether they should eventually park the Ark Two semis on the near side of the gorge, where they could be seen from the road, or on the far side, which was less than ideal but at least they’d be hidden. They decided on the latter course. Also, they resolved to eventually install a backup pump for the septic system, which seemed only prudent. Pressing business complete, Fred offered up a long description of the theory of peak oil, global production tending to follow a bell curve, the curve having been passed a couple decades back. The end would come not by bombs, he said, but by the bleak fact of human nature when cars stopped running. Beach claimed Fred had hordes of supplies stored for that day, buses full of stuff.
“He’s got buses,” Fred chuckled, “and I’ve got buses.”
I wrote that line down in my notebook, but despondently so. I was grieving over the fact that there wasn’t going to be a piece. The only thing left to do was wait for the end.
At the shelter we trekked overtop Ark Two, three men wandering an unremarkable overgrown field. Up toward Bahj’i’s monument, Beach told the story of the “miracle of the well.” Originally, they’d installed a water ram to pump in potable water, but the problem was that the ram had to be situated outside the shelter. It could be tampered with. Long after the last of the concrete had been poured, they’d continued working on Ark Two, and Beach eventually decided to blast a well hole down to the water table. Took forever. The first miracle was even finding a guy with explosives experience, and for a while there Jean was ferrying dynamite down from some town up north, you’d have to ask her where exactly. They once blew out a wall and two sinks by mistake. Neighbors complained because the explosions panicked their chickens; they stopped laying, and that just might be one of the seven signs. The well was finally finished only in 2000, just five years back, and since then the one-horse pumps had been installed, and they could bring up fifteen gallons of water per minute, fill the settling tank in half an hour. They were ready to go.
We wandered around a bit more, then dropped Fred off at his shop.
Back at home, out of journalistic habit, I pressed Beach a bit more about the Bahj’i connection. Didn’t there have to be one? Beach didn’t want to talk about it, perhaps because I’d dredged up bad memories, or perhaps because there was no reason to open up to a reporter he’d be driving back to Toronto in the morning. Beach did, however, launch into a talk about how we’re at the end of a terribly destructive period of history, so it wasn’t a great time to be having children anyway. Which was kind of related, he said, to why he wasn’t sold on me writing a story about him. No one knew the true realities and facts of the world, he said, and yet stories, true stories, claimed to be built on facts. I had a hard time listening to this. Not because I disagreed – I didn’t, really – but because I was becoming more and more depressed as he talked. Beach went on for a while about how facts need a thesis, which they do, and then he somehow pirouetted into something about Bahá’í: you don’t recruit Bahá’ís, you find them. Now I’d lost his thread completely. The problem, he said, the real problem that vexed everything, and the problem that, incidentally, explained why the world couldn’t, and wouldn’t, go on as we knew it, was that...and I have no idea what he said next. I had stopped listening completely. I had phased into a self-indulgent wallow. Beach kept talking, and I was looking right at him, but my mind had astral journeyed off to some kind of emotional purgatory, and yet I remained stuck in my body in Horning’s Mills, resembling a little too closely for comfort the blank-faced brain munchers that populate the latest iterations of the story of the global meltdown. I watched Beach talking, but I barely saw him, and for a moment it began to seem as though my personal doomsday would come in the form of spontaneous disintegration. I felt insubstantial and thin, and thinning further, moment by moment. I would melt or dissolve, whisk out of existence. This, perhaps, is the true fear that drives apocalyptic thought: that who we are, and what we’ve made, will simply vanish. We’ll leave no trace, no words, not even a grave. I steeled my resolve, readied myself for whatever dimension waited. But then Beach said something that jarred me out of that dreary reverie, something that snapped me awake like an electric shock and concluded his speech such that he fell silent in its aftermath. What he said rang so true, so quickly, that all at once it seemed like the entire purpose of my journey to Horning’s Mills.
“You see,” Beach said, “I’m not really a doomsday guy – I’m a utopian.”
IX
I next wrote a book about modern utopias and the history of utopian thought. As research, I stayed for three weeks at the world’s oldest intentional community; I toured the worksite of a master-planned metropolis rising in Asia; and I sailed on the first cruise ship to sell condominiums as private property. My world wasn’t ending after all. I hadn’t needed the big magazine; I’d needed Beach.
My last morning in Horning’s Mills, I walked out to the shelter one more time, alone. The town was quiet, roads deserted. Peak oil might have struck, minds just beginning to buckle. Some roosters crowed nearby. Overhead a vulture made a speculative pass for random kills. At the shelter I gave the blast door a final examination, and realized now that someone even more desperate than me had once fired a bullet at the lock. It had remained solid.
I tried to compose a speech to my editor about why there was still a good piece in all this. But what he wanted was fact. The fact of snakes slithering through trained flashlight beams. The fact of graffiti drawn by Canadian thugs who had trespassed inside, to get high and fuck. Or, better, a fact Beach gave me. He and Jean had stayed just one night in the shelter, years back, when family arrived in Horning’s Mills and they were short beds. It wasn’t comfortable in the shelter, it wasn’t comfortable at all, and performing an inspection they discovered that the dentist’s chair in the X-Ray Room had had some latent biology in it when it was installed. Now it was crawling with fungus, like one of those clay animal figurines that are really a pot for some kind of furry sprout. The post-apocalyptic dentist’s chair. That’s what my editor wanted: fact that illustrated that Ark Two was ill conceived, poorly executed. I couldn’t give him that fact first hand.
There was a smaller autonomous shelter just a few steps from the blast door: the Morgue. The idea was that if someone died, the community would exit the shelter briefly to inter the corpse. Radiation, Beach explained, was like getting a sunburn on your internal organs; it was okay as long as you were not exposed for long, and gave yourself time to heal. But why did dead bodies, I’d wondered, awaiting the more formal ceremony that would be performed when the world itself healed from too long exposure, need all those layers of concrete and dirt? Why not just leave them in the Morgue for good and call it a tomb? The only thing that differentiated the Morgue from a mausoleum was that it also held two backup fuel tanks. It had been strategically placed a little uphill from the shelter so that if the community needed to top off, gravity would do the trick.
I’d only glanced at the Morgue door previously – now I noticed it was imperfectly chained shut. It stood slightly ajar. I approached and yanked it open a few inches, and retrieved a small flashlight from my satchel. Inside, all I could make out was the cement floor, a candy bar wrapper, and a crumpled Dr. Pepper can.
X
I walked back into Horning’s Mills. There was only one hill good enough for sledding on the road between Beach’s house and the shelter. I climbed to the top and sat down. It was a brilliant August morning, yet I hadn’t seen a soul, no parted curtain, no bent Venetian blind. The world came to a standstill. I’d thought that Beach’s story was high stakes, but really it was just a Jamesian tale of perceived threat and promised salvation, orbiting a premature death. At that moment, Beach and Jean were likely sitting in their chairs, sipping porridge and bickering over how to get the shelter field mown. They had boxes of food, the Internet for a window. They didn’t need me sitting out here, where there was only tragedy. They were patient and waiting for the end.
J.C. Hallman is the author of a book of stories, and six books of nonfiction, including SAY ANARCHA. He is the recipient of fellowships in fiction and nonfiction from the McKnight and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.