Bunkers & Fortresses: Examining Places of False Safety

This piece got rejected from a litmag the same week I got really sick, so that seemed a good time to record it and publish it myself.

Cheers,
Nate


Pt. 1: A Sneeze in the Facial Politic AKA The Gut Biome of the Finzi-Continis

I wrote a novella-length collection of vignettes about my late 20s drinking days as a young professional in Denver. In the late '90s there was an incalculable swath of neon and summer balconies and cool restaurants between myself and the horrors of the age, which still felt as distant as the Stalin-era body counts I would roll out over the bartop to titillate other drunks.

In the last vignette ("Rockies v. Marlins 7.10.98") I tried to give the character — who is alcoholic, vain, a dreamer with reflexive contempt for anything not clever and well-dressed — a moment of gratitude for the human and physical infrastructure upon which he stands to dream and mock:

The concourse breaks open into a sort of little village just past right field, full of the promise of pizzas in boxes. A sign that says “Sangria Bitch” jabs at the corner of his eye. Eric looks again: “Sammy’s Burgers.” He stops and watches. They mill up to the bored and edgy staff in the ubiquitous vendor’s red polo, holding the entire city on the tops of their heads with their moment’s distraction in reaching for napkins, for money. Now the thought of it all falling quiet leaves cold pits in Eric’s stomach. Tonight he needs an unfettered expanse of home games to bring it back to life, or another season to dream into, one to make it hum and shuffle again, everybody perpetually distracted with snacks, scores and seats beneath the lights — he needs for there to be Major League Baseball forever.


The Aisle Inviolate. The Display Eternal. The Package Resplendent. The Appetizer Inexhaustible.

These are the sturdy ships that rocked sickeningly in the first waves of COVID. And people couldn't take it. They couldn't handle the idea that the natural state of being is not dawdling in box store aisles and buying throw pillows and gorging at Red Robin.

We all got rocked. But this particular response was telling. Being that "shopping" and "I cannot process the effects of my choices upon others" aren't that compelling as ideological rallying cries, we saw the apoplectic emergence of a new breed of skeptics and rebels who — lives given over without examination in every other respect to the corporate surveillance state — howled for the comforts they knew.

The true national anthem turned out to be a massive howl for a safe space from the center of a globe-spanning set of concentric rings made of violence — drone-launched ordnance flowering in the midst of God-knows-who in AFRICOM's purview, bastards of every description raining down piles of their cut from the post-Afghanistan inventory redirect, vast oceans, two major borders buffered against tumult — and within that, soothing parkways with high medians and ceremonial brick fortresses announcing this or that developer's satrapy, well-patrolled by tac-vested former grunts, and within that, surveilled homes stocked with more weapons, even casual Saturday wear hinting at both athletic and special ops competence.

I am fairly certain my borders were overrun more than once.

In the few weeks in between the wave of Asian epicenter stories and reports of first cases in the U.S. and — this squelched any denial I had about the scope of the thing — the NBA announcing cancellation of the season after Rudy Gobert tested positive. (Again, the gleaming concourse in the sports redoubt closes, the drunken gurgle of collective consumption rudely cut short!)

Sometime in this span, I rode out what felt like the worst flu of my life for three days in a rented basement on one of the whitest lanes of northern Colorado Springs, with the footfalls of the two whitest people on the street overhead. I remember laying nearly motionless for an entire day of it because every centimeter of skin wailed. Even resting and motionless, my sweats and soft long T hurt my skin. It migrated to my chest. I expelled green stuff in hacks for weeks later and my lungs haven't felt the same since.

And later, once the lease in the basement was up and I was on the road, trying to buy a house further south in what was incidentally the hottest real estate market ever recorded in Colorado — that my little Fortress America collapsed again in a 2.5-star hotel where I had paid for two nights, but left after one because there were a steady stream of people who had enough money for a room that night disappearing into the juniper landscaping across the parking lot to party with those who didn't and the blinds were mangled and my window was directly next to a punishing sodium vapor lamp and the traffic, despite this place not even being on a minor artery, circled allll night.

The dread waves of influenza, plague, the titillating millions at which I marveled third martini in hand. This perch dissolved absolutely, and I didn’t even have to take a teargas pellet in the nuts from a pissed-off cop in riot gear to get the message.

You don’t even need time-lapse to watch it collapse. You, too, can become a nameless casualty of the age.

How many layers of protection can you wrap around the atomized, middle-class 21st Century Precious Self?

"Not many," said the wind that drove the fire through Mountain Shadows and the Marshall/Boulder neighborhoods. "But you can add religion and a religious attraction to particular health supplements, if you like."



"Not many," said the toothfish as it gorped up an alluring pellet of plastic. The toothfish will be sold to you as Chilean sea bass at proper markup in an establishment where the staff is well-practiced in shooing homeless out of the lobby. But you still have to look at ‘em on the way back to your car. They can only make this so easy for you.

Not many i can barely hear through my right ear anymore and my sense of smell can pick up on a handful of noxious things with suffocating accuracy but its generally shit across the board and although this is a poor part of the country i have the goodwill of my mostly chill working-class neighbors and People That Don't Belong Here generally do not make the dirt in front of my house crackle under their tires, I can still be "found" I cannot with the envelope of senses given and inadequate countersurveillance skills track the germ that slays me nor the surveillance node that logs me.

I held my breath and hoped someone else got picked.


Pt. 2: Bond Villains and the Halfling's Lair


The only thing more repugnant to my prepubescent self than a movie's plot tilting toward finality — to this day, ending credits and the song overlaid produce a sui generis melancholy — was the mechanized imperative to destroy the villain's lair.

I thrilled to the villain lairs. The idea of garrisoned, well-run headquarters hidden under volcanoes, on islands nobody could quite find before, seemed too important a space to just throw into the wood chipper of plot.

Don't blow it up. Just get everybody out so I can live there with my friends. Oh, to live supplied and fortified and act within without being acted upon, forgotten except for the ludic platoon I would select personally.

I don't explore wilderness places, but knowing they are there, something untrammeled, is psychological ballast. And I started to hate Bond. Always smirking his way through shootouts with tenpin private armies and closing all these fantastic spaces. Hated him for finding them. Hated him for blowing them up. I didn't care what they were for.


What were they for? 



I cannot remember what precipitated it: the family going to a few counseling sessions when my Mom remarried and we all lived in Springfield, Missouri. I don't remember more than one session. But at this session, the therapist asked us to each draw a house of some kind.

I still played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back then with a buddy who was a Santa Claus dungeon master. I had a halfling character who he showered with preposterous goodies and wealth for hacking my way through the most remedial adventures. My halfling was hilariously wealthy for a character of such pedestrian feats, and I used downtime, finding a section of one of the manuals that suggested or distinctly outlined the cost of tunneling through stone.

Toward the end of my AD&D career, I think I spent more time planning his hideout than I did going on adventures. He'd done a "sold the company to Oracle"-level cashout. Time to make something swank and impregnable. 

So that's what I drew during the family therapist's exercise: a long tunnel leading to a large underground chamber.

I cannot recall her interpretation of this, if she ever gave one. There couldn't have been more than a session or two.


I draw and redraw this space, still.


Pt. 3: Is the Water Boiling Yet

While the character suicided before the formal narrative picks up and is recalled only in flashback, I keep hearing the lucidity of her proposition. I'm speaking of the mother and wife from McCarthy's The Road.

Her dilemma is yours and mine: What is your dashboard for deciding when the pooch is screwed? Post-apocalyptic novels have a clear-as-day inflection point: a flash in the sky, then everything's ash dead and people start eating each other. I think I have a pretty good response plan laid in for that one — break out the bourbon and watch the skies. My quads are probably all tough and stringy by now anyway. Go ahead, use my skull for a soup bowl, I don’t give a shit, just make it fast.

This slow boil, though. It gets murky: Was it Jonathan Knowles' eliminationist speech at CPAC? The soft coup that put Dubya in the Oval Office? Capture of the public pleasure centers by Facebook while the public square gets shut down, and what can't be shut down gets privatized and choked and thorny with the logic of transaction? Was it when the first boutique bakery for dogs opened?

I get up in the morning just like you out of stupid animal drive and do things that I think will make me feel good and I architect mid- and near-term narratives — imaginable futures in which I am viable.

Was that it? Was it Hiroshima? Flint being poisoned in broad daylight? The weird throb that settles in on my left side after meals? The last of the beauties I threw away?

Always peering out the curtains looking for the Big One and trying to simultaneously count the cuts from the Little Ones in my pockets, my lungs, blind to the bright line.


Pt. 4: Red-Teaming Your Getaway Idea


Quick thought experiment for you: When Peter Thiel evacuates to his underground fortress in New Zealand, do you have a seat on the plane?

Didn't think so.



And I don't want to hear about the 400 lbs. of beans you have in canisters or all your weapons and generators. This will get you through a period of disruption for longer than your comparatively defenseless fellow Americans in the cities, but what you seem to forget is that you're going to go insane because 85% of the stuff that made life worth living will be gone, most notably, the social contract that lets even colossally dangerous pigs like Jeff Bezos stroll down a street in Manhattan with one measly bodyguard.



And as for the bunker itself: Here are the odds. There will be at least four people in Thiel's retinue who would cut his throat and sleep like a baby when they grasp that the game table has been flipped over and nobody's picking up the pieces.

That thing is gonna have ventilation, too. It can crumble from within and without…these pharaohs will be swallowed up by the sands, too. Didn't Bezos put a big, stupid clock in a mountain or something? It's going to make a plum find in a few centuries or so.

Douglass Rushkoff's account of being asked to consult five hedge fund billionaires about the best technology for securing their private bunkers — and for ensuring compliance among the vassals they'll need to serve them there — I consider a bellwether moment in civilization.

I have encountered these kinds of nightmare "What If?" games on the edge of sleep.

Before I became dependent on Ambien, an angel who, among other things, could help me forget I was going to sleep in an unhappy house and later helped me forget I was going to sleep in a strangers' rented basement and later would snap the lights off at any number of possibly dangerous two-star hotels up and down the Denver-to-Albuquerque corridor, I would construct an imaginarium to coax myself to sleep.


For the trick to work, the practitioner must have a certain level of bodily fatigue coupled with a sleep aid and a fresh memory of convincing harbor. If a recent passage from a book or movie I'd watched included a harried character grabbing a few hours of rest, the more vivid the peril-and-harbor gestalt sensation became.

But I had to eliminate the game because if I ran the scenario too many times, my imagination would make last-minute counterplays that collapsed it.

Nobody's going to get any sort of rest that way.

So it is with great pride that I offer the wealthy, visionary survivalists of the current age these vital auxiliary services:

• Three-Factor Poisoning: If you can remember the last names of one of your ex-wives plus a six-digit code and your UndefeatableTM voice key while you're still in your VIP PodTM or before your former head of security cups his hand over your mouth and puts a pig-sticker in your lungs, TFP will inject fast-acting mamba derivative via Compliance Collar* into nearest coded vendor.

Optional Code: Fourth-Factor poisons all vendors and team members (except you) simultaneously.

*Bonus Subscription Feature

• Failsafe: Ron. Ron is a pudgy dude who has a John Galt sticker on his 2001 Altima, loves his blue-and-white uniform, and monitors your bunker exclusively. Ron parks on The Switch. Like you, Ron has become appalled at the state of things and the temerity of the chef or bodyguard who has realized after month six underground that they, could, in fact, cut your throat and sleep like babies. Ron feels as violated by this as you do — he'll hit The Switch with a single confirmation from your doomsday pinky ring deal.

The Switch overrides all previous digital measures and countermeasures, AI or otherwise. Ron will arrive at your bunker via armored SUV and spirit you away to an intermediary secure location so you can plan your next move, have access to high-def, bombproof videoconferencing and a variety of guaranteed plastic-free high-energy snacks.

Except Ron is going to lose comms with the fallback bunker en route. The SUV will take small-arms fire and the suspension will already be compromised owing to heavy off-road jinking necessitated by the higher-than-expected density of ad hoc barricading of surface lanes. Are you all aflutter? Don't worry. Ron has dreamt of this for decades. He has some definite ideas for how things should work going forward. You still have weapons, three liters of Fiji and some kelp jerky.


God, I hope you like Ron.

Pt. 5: Itchy Patch

It took months to get the plumber here. He had been preceded over the months by a procession of ineffectual visitors — some were septic pros who started the clock before diagnosing the problem, others were well-meaning barflies who had oversold their talents — but I finally got a walkthrough from a dude with a real van and a quarter mil of equipment on hand in his working van.

I feel part of the world re-forming under me as our conversation reveals points of resonance with previous hunches and something resembling a good read on the problem.

I ushered him through the insulated flaps separating my kitchen and living room so he wouldn't have to stand in the cold while I wrote him a modest check for his consultation. I showed off the exposed flooring in the living room. I don't have many skills, but I did have the sense to invest in protective gear and a few crappy tools and rip out many square feet of filthy shag carpeting.

"Wow, that's original pine flooring, huh?"

Except this side room had real hardwood. And, as I invited him to peek into my bedroom, have you ever seen flooring with a pattern like that? Had to be the 1970s, right?

"Guarantee you it's made out of asbestos," he said.

Does that have anything to do with the itchy patch that erupted on my left forearm last fall? It's still itching. Sometimes it throbs. I want to get it checked out, but I'm uninsured. Plus I'm a grand plus in the hole from the emergency room visit from those dogs down the road that attacked me during a stroll. The basement here flooded from a once-in-a-decade gully washer and I hand pumped it myself and sprayed it down with a bleach solution, but it's a big, old basement and who knows what's wafting through my ratty nose and into my lungs at night?

I saw one of those clickbait personal finance headlines about the kind of money you need just for healthcare as you age, like are you fucking kidding me, the sturdiest defense I can erect is selling something off for a few thousand dollars, which erects a palisade around a few months where I can rest when I am tired, eat when I am hungry, and only work on that which feels nourishing and necessary. Or sometimes just pouring a first stout at my folding table at 3 p.m. because I can. I experienced suicidal ideation at my last remote job, not because I wanted to die, but because the hassle:output ratio was so out of wack. I'd look through the swinging barn-style doors of my garage and would daydream about throwing a sturdy rope over the rafters, not because I didn't want to live, but having a bit of agency in knowing I didn't have to live like this.

Whence harbor?

As curtains of flame rise over every forest in the west and campfire smells spike my cortisol production from hundreds of miles away, I have finally realized the art of doing what a boss would call "nothing."

That barrier is thinning: I've cashed out the obvious assets. I'm fortunate to have some equity in this old house, but this house is the last chip in my pocket. I burned a layer of money to be a layer of brain that could rest and play, stuck atop a body no longer insulated by money. Existential memos could arrive from the downstairs departments any day, the dullards in the execution layer finally forcing the CEO out of the office, making themselves known. The little stack I have, barring forces majeures, feels like a small fortune — but next to nothing in the economy of healthcare for profit. It wouldn't buy me one day of being stabbed or wrecking my car or getting bone cancer.

I quake like a rodent over its late-winter stores.