Here on the ledge of the teardrop in the year of our Lord 2012, we have risen above the violence of the winds and risen above the eddies but Lord please let us never rise above the consciousness of the temerity. Existence has always been a foolhardy thing. Look around. Look down. Best to do it out of sheer audaciousness then. No glut for fame or advertising dollars. The record will be broken in two years anyway. Another man in a space suit will rise higher by eight thousand feet, without any capsule at all, just dangling from a balloon by a tether until he’s higher than our daredevil, until he cuts the tether with explosive charges and falls without any fanfare or worldwide Net stream, with hardly anyone noticing at all.
Joe says, Start the cameras, and now our daredevil is ready to say his piece for posterity.
Our daredevil says, The whole world is watching now.
About 14 percent of the world’s population, 530 million people, watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969, when Neil Armstrong uttered his famous space words for posterity. A couple of cricket matches between India and Pakistan have hit nearly 1 billion viewers. In this moment, through the magic of DEISM, 8 million of us are with our daredevil on the ledge. If we include all of us who will watch the Super Bowl spot and all of us who will plug into the FULL POV, maybe 200 million of us will experience this fall, less than 3 percent of the world’s population. So when our daredevil says, The whole world is watching now, he isn’t quite right. But then he says, I wish you could see what I can see. Well, alright. We’ve been here the whole time. We see what you see. We see exactly what’s down there.
Five decades ago, when Joe did his falling, the day had so much cloud cover that from nineteen miles up it looked like he could have been falling to anywhere. In some ways that makes the footage of Joe’s jump more universal than our daredevil’s: Joe could be anywhere, could be anyone falling without flags or corporate logos and with his legs kicking the way any of our legs would kick as we plummeted through thick white blankets of cirrocumulus. But today the skies are clear and below us is a specific place.
Look: at the apex of the curvature of the earth is a white splotch, 275 miles of gypsum dunes. In the midst of that gypsum is a runway where the Space Shuttle Columbia once landed. Almost directly below is Roswell and the airstrip where Joe sits in Ground Control with the mission team and reporters and our daredevil’s mother, who wears a souvenir-type green plastic alien ring on her finger. There are the Sacramento Mountains and the town of Alamogordo, and White Sands National Monument is the brightest spot on the world. Everything that is visible from the ledge of our teardrop is the blackness of space or a place called Southern New Mexico. There’s the Malpais lava flow running along the Jornada del Muerto. And the edge of our view on the north side is almost exactly the 34th parallel, which cuts New Mexico in half.
When our daredevil begins his fall, he will start to spin uncontrollably, and in BDED Corp’s DEISM FULL POV we will spin round and round with our daredevil and see SNM shook up below us, everything swirling around us, the Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns and a little bit of the top of Mexico and round toward the Texas Panhandle, spinning from the Chihuahuan Desert and the gypsum sands where the Space Shuttle Columbia landed in 1983 and around to the Great Plains where the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart and showered down in 2003 with the flames and silkworms and cancer cells and roses and astronaut Laurel Clark with all her questions about sand. We will spin around and around like this until our daredevil fights his arms into the delta position and gains control of his speeding flesh and suit-beast and locks on three splotches of brown heaps: the Mescalero Sands, our landing zone. We will see so much in FULL POV and still it will not be enough to get notions of the infinite.
FULL POV will not show us that at the core of the Mescalero Sands is shinnery oak. That more than two hundred years ago, before American settlers and cattle, it wouldn’t have been dunes at all but would have still been prairie land, before the grasses were grazed to nothing and mesquite shrubs spread everywhere and started collecting sand. The dune fields we’ll fall toward are a consequence of American progress but FULL POV cannot show us that. FULL POV cannot show us the red-eyed, inch-and-a-half-long insects beneath the sand, cicada nymphs feeding on rootlets for thirteen or seventeen years before their cyclic emergence as swarms of full-grown cicadas dying—literally dying—for just a few weeks out of the sand, in flight. Where are we in the cicada cycle now? Will we fall through a swarm of 10 million bugs rising from the dunes? Or have they just burrowed, every female dropping six hundred eggs that will hatch and dig deeper and suck on roots for another seventeen years until the next man falls from space? They bioturbate, these bugs, burrowing into the dunes, a meter down into the soil that is only a hundred or three hundred years old and another meter down through aeolian sands that are five thousand or six thousand years old. Then they rise up in swarms. Between the cicadas burrowing and rising in swarms and the ants colonizing and the badgers digging after their prey, more than thirty-seven tons of sand per acre per century is brought to the surface from below. So what is on the surface is mostly ancient, sand from the time of humans first learning to churn earth with the invention of the plow. This is where our daredevil’s feet will touch down after he falls from the stratosphere: on sand formed as humans worked through the invention of written language in Sumer, the very beginning, scholars say, of recorded history. This is where we will land: on sand from the very time of creation as pinpointed by the Mayan calendar that runs back 5,126 years and, our worried ones say, runs out in just a few weeks at the end of the year of our Lord 2012. Already some among us are prepping for the end-time with underground shelters and pilgrimages and suicide pacts. So many of us want to escape. Why? Or, what’s the point?
Our daredevil is on the ledge and has something to say. His heart slows. The whole world is watching now. I wish you could see what I can see. Oh, but we can, daredevil. We see what you see and more. Sometimes you have to get up really high to see how small you are. I’m coming home now.
Somewhere, in an interview or a documentary, we have seen Dr. Clark cry about his dead astronaut wife, Laurel. Or maybe it is a manufactured memory but it is here in our minds on the ledge of the teardrop: him pulling his glasses from his face and wiping his eyes, smearing the tears across his cheeks as if he were trying to wipe from the sky over the Great Plains the trails of fiery star stuff as the Space Shuttle Columbia explodes. We all want a chance at egress, an opportunity to escape. We all just want to go home, to find a way to come home again, to perfect an escape technology, sure, but also to have the adventure, ever more temerarious, just to get that feeling of coming home again. And so maybe despite all the absurdity of BDED and DEISM, our daredevil hits upon some words for posterity that are even more sincere than Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind. Our daredevil says, I’m coming home. Then he jumps—we jump in a way that is just a step from the ledge, not a dive at all, just a nudge of the self from the ledge of the teardrop in the stratosphere. The crew calls it a bunny hop or a step-off or maybe it is that original kind of egress—just stepping out, darling—but Joe in Ground Control says, Jumper away! He means the fall has started.
See us hurtling?
There we are. Fallen.
Welcome home.
RAGGEDY, RAGGEDY WABBITMAN
SKINNING JACKRABBITS WITH GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDDADDY AT A WEDDING PARTY
•
In the Year of Our Lord 1899
His name is George Bradley Oliver but all of his friends and family call him GB and Lord knows more than enough of his male progeny will be called GB but he doesn’t yet have any friends in this territory and his progeny still linger back in Texas. He’s got big plans to start a proper business: he’s entertaining the thought of himself as Mister Oliver—the name all big and written in his head like those swirly vines, the way words are always just too fancy for themselves at the top of newspapers and on business signs. He’s fifty-six now and everything has been downhill since he was a
teen shooting from the losing side of a civil war. Nobody asks much these days, but when they do, he stands up straight and says, Company K, Jake Thompson Guards, Nineteenth Mississippi Infantry. Mustered without qualm and first thing in Itawamba and Tishomingo Counties. But even now, through his tremendous collection of whiskers, he says it like a kid playing soldier, like a skittish private, like the froth of someone else’s boiling hate. But he believed the hate and held it dear for many years and that succeeded in nothing but making him destitute. He’s out of the South now and in the West and worrying mostly about his own. He’s got a promise to his wife and five kids back in Cooper, Texas, says he will not cut a hair on his head or shave a hair on his face until he has $500 in the bank for a better life in this New Mexico Territory. But his try at a pool hall in Roswell fizzled out and his try at a sandwich shop in Eddy went belly-up and now the word for what he is getting to look like is bushy. Several years’ worth of bushy. And bushy is exactly how the letters of the name George are written in his head and why he’s got the urge to switch over to the sleek vines of Mister Oliver. But there are not currently a whole lot of people lining up to address him in any way at all except for these children milling around and they’re not addressing him so much as they are pointing and yelling at him and calling him Wabbitman. He’s got a baker’s dozen of them jackrabbits hanging in the tree, dripping blood. Cutting the heads off for draining ain’t necessary unless the suckers are huge. And some in this territory get that way, if you believe the rags. And George does. He has a whole box of scraps from the rags as a kind of motivation to make a business out of these giant pests. But the ones he has now are just alright, sizewise, the throats slit if a bullet didn’t finish the job—heads dangling a tad more than any god intended, the already-long ears stretching earthward, their lateral eyes coming round so just one is looking at you, then the other, then the other again. The kids get a big laugh out of the dangling. Raggedy, raggedy Wabbitman! Ye rabbits so raggedy, Wabbitman!
There’s not a whole ton of blood in jackrabbits and these have already been dead a few hours, already dragged a few miles. The blood is not a torrential situation but it is pooling in the crooks of the tree’s exposed roots. The tree is only a sapling so the branches bow from the weight of the dangling bodies, bow and sort of bounce. The tree is without leaves because it is January so there is just the gray of the branches and the dirt white of the hides and the pooling red and the death pallor of winter in a desert. But don’t you know if you stand and stare long enough at the night sky, you will see stars twinkling slowly and, even though they are far apart, they seem to breathe the twinkle into one another until the whole sky undulates sluggishly, coming to life as one big glimmering monster? Yessir. George suspects that is the exact sense the fancy folks gazing out the lobby window are getting as they look on at the slow, asynchronous drips of blood from his baker’s dozen of jackrabbits hanging from the bowed branches of a young cottonwood out front of Hotel Alamogordo. He’s performing a kind of advertisement. The blood drips. The tree breathes. Mister Oliver’s jackrabbit business is one of the great wonders of the universe. Y’all better step out and see.
Around Hotel Alamogordo’s front is a wide veranda where men sit in armchairs or lean on posts to smoke their pipes and take the air and gaze past George for fifty miles, admiring in the mountains the snow-covered form of the Sleeping Lady. George is especially conscious of looking busy when he smells the pipes, hears the door open. But mostly the men smoke inside, and all the women in their cerise silk gowns outshining even gay New York, they never stray from their mingling.
The reason for the party is the city.
Alamogordo has been up and running for all of six months since the railroad arrived and now, at the beginning of 1899, the hotel is raised and decorated and staring down a whole new century. “The linen shines with whiteness, the covers are light and warm while the mattresses are soft and the springs first class,” writes one El Paso newspaperman. But George sleeps on the dirt in a tent. Kids go to school a few days a month in a big tent with a white sand floor. There are only a few actual buildings: the lumber mill, train depot, and now the hotel on the wide dirt road they’re calling downtown. A shiny new street sign says NEW YORK AVENUE. Some frame houses are scattered around, little more than shacks. The big distinction in town is between tents with white gypsum floors and tents with just plain brown dirt. The fancier tents and the big public ones, like the school, have got themselves wagonloads of sand from the blindingly white dunes of gypsum west of town and covered their floors with those crystal grains to keep the dust down and to give a sense of Alamogordo as “the chief jewel in the rich crown of southern New Mexico territory,” as the rags keep saying, keep talking it up trying to get the town to boom. For now it is just a dusty collection of tents, and the first of its inhabitants to go insane will no doubt be Mr. Green, the street sprinkler, the man charged with keeping the dirt out of people’s lungs by driving his carriage of spewing barrels around and around and around. Any desert street sprinkler is born to lose. People will hate him because the dust is infinite but the water he’s using to wage the futile fight isn’t. Mr. Green will slit his own throat soon enough, bleed out right into the fledgling community’s main water supply, and for at least a hundred years there’ll be whispers about the town’s haunted waters. Another sip closer to madness, they’ll say.
And the new crown jewel of SNM has other nicks, too. The school tent doubles as the Justice Court. When the gamblers and brawlers and drunks are brought to the tent, the students are ushered out. Their education amounts to fleeing when sinners show up, learning to pray for more and more sinners so as to avoid any education at all. These are the little monsters yelling, Wabbitman. Maybe George is one of those they’ve prayed for.
There are plenty of places to gamble but only one place to drink: the Club House Saloon. This will not be a whiskey town, says the founder. But prohibition didn’t work so well for his last town—all the whorehouses and saloons posted up a mile away and started their own town and that’s the one where everybody stayed. That’s where George made and lost a few small fortunes playing cards. So far he has managed to refrain from sitting down at any poker game in this new town. But way back in the corners of his brain he knows he could do better—win the whole $500 for his family—in a town where card games ain’t only at the saloon. Gambling’s less of a gamble when you ain’t swimming in gin. It’s a science, even. George has done the math. Three years and fifteen thousand jackrabbits. Or one good string of cards. Such a strange little town, Alamogordo. The word itself is a jawbreaker for some, who roll it around in their mouths as though it were a red-hot potato: a lumber town in the middle of the desert, a railroad town lacking water, all these white sand floors and sober poker players.
The railroad offices and mill and most of the shops will be gone by 1907 and the population will drop from a bustling four thousand and rising in that year to a sad twelve hundred lingerers and will grow ever more ghostly until the next big gadget comes along and starts a new industry—not a thing to move people, this time, but a thing to blow them up, burn them, poison their blood. George will not work for the railroad, will not work at the mill. The Olivers will employ themselves in this new territory. He’s decided that will be the goddamned truth of the matter. He bites into the leg of a strung-up rabbit, makes a space between the meat and the skin and digs his finger in.
They’re hares, really, but what does that matter? Better to know what’s useful: breeding season is April to August and by now the little suckers are everywhere. Hares ain’t hiders. They run. Well, first they do a whole lot of sitting, grass or fiddleneck in the mouth and chewing, eyes darting exactly opposite directions. At the crack of the gun they leap straight up, then manage to go three different directions on their way down, hitting the earth hardly at all before disappearing beyond a zigzag of dust. The local rags call this “elusive” and put “Elusive” in the headline and reprint the myth on the front page when news of
rustling or manslaughter is slow:
Deming Headlight (Deming, NM), 12 APR 1898
The jackrabbit is awkward, appears to be lame in every joint, holds up one foot as though it pained him and altogether creates the belief that he is a dilapidated wreck of an ungainly animate thing. The settler is surprised that he cannot grab him. The settler’s dog also is confident that he can quickly make an end of the rabbit. He bristles, runs leisurely toward the rabbit, doubles his speed, doubles it again, triples that, quadruples the whole, when, lo, the rabbit disappears. There is some flying grass, a vanishing streak of light, a twinkling of two prodded feet extended forward, and he is gone. The dog sits on his haunches and concludes that it was a dream and that he did not see a rabbit at all.
They might be a dream sure enough if there weren’t so goddamn many of them, a thousand appearing for every one that dissolves. Anybody with enough shots or a scattergun could fill a tree, though most just do it for the shooting, never collecting anything of the kill but the scream.
That scream: “No way to account for such an ungodly squelch,” say the rags.
George has it stuck in his ears, high-pitched but coarser and louder than the cottontail’s, almost the wails of a newborn human if that baby were suckled on peyote and its head were a tiny kettle boiling over, psychotic steam screeching out the spout of its little mouth. When a pest-control brigade gets raised, if you listen past the boom of guns, you will hear so many screams, the kettle yell, the earth sprung with leaks and the ancient angry ghosts spewing out. They’re just little rabbits though. Nothing nightmarish in how they tend to mate up and stay in pairs. Four ears straight up out of the reed grass. When you get one, there’s another nearby, not yet ready to run. Don’t you know that “Two birds, one stone” is a warning about love? But maybe them rabbits know nothing of love. Maybe somebody ought to tell them so they don’t die twice as fast. Maybe, for all their ears, they wouldn’t listen.
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