You can see where the publicity is, Joe says.
It will go viral, Will replies.
I don’t care. I just wanted to see if I could do it. It was a guess, really.
You knew you would find it.
Yeah. I knew I would.
Will reaches over the fence and hugs his father. No cameras record this embrace. I feel like a jerk staring at them, but it’s the first sincere moment of an otherwise bogus day.
In a few months, after the documentary premieres, Joe Lewandowski will not be so laconic. He will say, Now, that’s what made me so angry about the movie, then spend three hours laying out his critiques for me. The documentary will make little mention of the curse of the videogame graveyard that Joe battled, how he discovered that city ordinance #666 made it illegal for Atari to dump in Alamogordo, how all the garbage workers and cops and reporters who were at the initial dump in 1983 kept ending up dead, how Joe blew a tire going 80 mph in his Camaro while on the phone to seal the film deal with Xbox, how he had that strange heart attack his doctors still cannot explain. He’ll go so far as to tie the curse to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, noting that one of the local cops who chased scavenger kids such as Ricky Jones away from the dumped E.T.s ended up a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 175 and died when that second plane hit the World Trade Center. The shit goes to shit, Joe will say over and over to me, sometimes as a critique of the documentary, sometimes as remorse about the reach of the curse, sometimes as a too-perfect garbage-contractor catchphrase. Mostly he’ll say it between laughs as the only way to sum up the whole strange experience: Man, the shit goes to shit. But for now, he’s just hugging his son.
The Arch Punks fill a succession of five-gallon buckets with all the games they’re uncovering. E.T., Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command, everything Ricky Jones reported scavenging three decades ago. Guins hops by and says, Very high, my man. Very high right now. Reinhard says they’re finding thousands of games, remarkably well-preserved. Lots of returned E.T.s. with the buyer’s name and address still taped to them, he says. Enough data for decades of Ph.D. dissertations!
Some friends of the crew’s are escorted past the fence and into the Pit. They fine-tune backgrounds for selfies by placing dirty E.T. cartridges carefully in different spots on the trash. The heap of unearthed garbage is now almost entirely junked Atari games and equipment. Many hundreds of cameras, professional and amateur, have focused on that pile of trash today. Here in Alamogordo lies perhaps the most photographed dump in human history but you will learn little about our town or its people by looking at those pictures. Maybe I should have been telling you more about Lewandowski’s decades-long rise to garbage kingpin of town, about the bankruptcies and perseverance and how his pursuit of the E.T.s has now launched him into a second career as de facto town historian. I should have been telling you more about Ricky Jones, how his sandblasting business, Desert Sands Stripping over on Lonesome Dove Lane, isn’t making him rich but has toughened his skin against sand, how he keeps circling the dump on his four-wheeler, appearing and disappearing in the dust devils, scouting the site to scavenge leftover E.T.s again, all these years later, once the cameras are gone. I should have told you more about Ernestine Huckleby, how she died a quadriplegic with mercury still in her brain at the age of thirty, over on Brookdale Drive, maybe with that same old teddy bear still in her arms. All of the sudden I fear that I’ve fucked up, got sucked into the node of the Pit like everything and everyone else and forgot about my own people, that I should jump in the DeLorean with Warshaw and go back and try to fix this story. When I finally get close enough to Warshaw to ask him if he wants to saddle up the DeLorean with me, he says, No thanks. He says, The mistakes make us human.
Eventually the DeepMind AI will play sixty Atari games, learning to outperform humans in more than half of them. But E.T. is not among the Atari games DeepMind’s AI will attempt to play. Maybe the glitch of the Pit in Warshaw’s E.T. is something DeepMind knows would send their AI into a tailspin, a mistake in the code that makes the game unplayable, too craptastic even for a superhuman superintelligence to conquer. Only a regular dumb human could figure out any use for a game like that, not even bothering to play it but just burying the cartridge and later digging it up, like a dog with a bone toy.
After 4:00 p.m. the winds hit 60 mph. The water truck has quit, and the sky is dense with dirt and refuse. The dark cloud isn’t quite a plume of poison rising from hog corpses or the shadows of face-melting specters rising out of the Lost Ark, but it’s more than enough to completely obscure the sun. The crew takes shelter. Ricky Jones circles ever closer to the Pit on his four-wheeler. The few die-hard nerds who have stuck around tear down the orange fence and bum-rush the piles of garbage and revel in it. The shit goes to shit. I can’t bring myself to join that particular fray. Instead I wander, making a list of things I spot far from the Pit that are not videogames, the old trash of our town about which no stories will be told, stuff the Arch Punks have deemed nonsensitive cultural material:
cassette tape for a Fisher-Price tape recorder
Care Bear
I ♥ MY KIDS bumper sticker
checkbooks
bottle of charcoal starter
so many beer cans
bottle of conditioner (extra body)
checkered blouse
empty package of birth-control pills
so many unmatched socks
bottle of foot powder
one baby shoe, so worn
The day after the dig the Arch Punks spend hours cataloging more than 1,300 videogames recovered from the 750,000 estimated to be in the landfill.* After meticulously laying out and studying and photographing the games, they’re told to sweep them all into garbage bags, still wet and now exposed to air and likely to rot, until city officials decide what to do with them. Joe Lewandowski will eventually package them individually with a homemade certificate of authenticity and sell them on eBay, netting the town just over $100,000 for the resurrected E.T.s.*
When we meet the next morning for breakfast at the Waffle Shoppe just east of the landfill, the Arch Punks tell me that important artifacts should not be stored in garbage bags, should not be auctioned off on eBay, should not be wrested from the custody of the archaeologists so quickly and mysteriously. Caraher compares it to the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indy expresses his concern about the fate of the Lost Ark, which he has gone through hell to recover, and a government official replies, We have top men working on it right now.
Indy asks, Who?
Top. Men, says The Man.
But the Punks are mostly cheery this morning because the dig has gone viral, with variations on “Found: E.T. Graveyard” in headlines and Twitter feeds around the world. They debate the extent to which their scholarly work was helped or hindered by the film crew. Symbiosis, Reinhard says. Mutual parasitism, Rothaus says. Caraher leans close to me and says, I think the real deal is we were able to work around them.
They express frustration at not getting all of the coordinates of the exploratory auger holes that were drilled in the days leading up to the dig. They also mention that the day before the public arrived, the augers actually pulled up a load of Atari cartridges as the Arch Punks looked on. The reactions of the filmmakers suggested they wished the Punks hadn’t witnessed that real moment of discovery.
It was pretty tense right up until we found the cartridges, one of the documentary’s producers later tells The New Yorker, failing to mention they’d actually found them the day before. But Lewandowski and Ricky Jones had known the games were there. And the producers had presumably confirmed the burial with James Heller, a former Atari employee the crew paraded around the Pit after the games were unearthed. In 1983 Heller was responsible for disposing of the returned and unsold Atari merchandise. He’s the one who sent the games to Alamogordo. There is no mystery whatsoever, Heller said. People made it a mystery.
As we shovel eggs into our mouths, Caraher gets worke
d up. At first he’s just on his high horse about trailblazing a punk methodology for archaeology that accounts for how late capitalism is irrevocably shaping our landscape, and about how our precapitalist, preglobal, preindustrial contexts for archaeology cannot succeed in this new landscape—a high-minded monologue the old Waffle Shoppe doesn’t get too often. We saw in the landfill, Caraher says, a transition from the domestic world, your domestic world, to shit that had been injected by the industrial world. By a corporation named Atari. Traditional archaeology might suggest that Alamogordo manufactured Atari games or maybe just really loved them. Worshipped them. That’s wrong. The truth is something else totally, that old archaeology alone could never explain.
He pauses to take a phone call, then asks for help deleting a tweet. The documentary crew is pissed that he posted a photo of the Punks cataloging unearthed games. Caraher says he doesn’t care about the takedown request. But censoring information of any kind for any reason clearly violates the punk ethos and fuels another rant from Caraher that is far too long to fully recount here but was forceful enough to prompt Reinhard to shush him and entertaining enough to prompt Rothaus to get out his phone and film it and profane enough to get Weber to nod apologies at the other patrons. The gist of Caraher’s big Waffle Shoppe diatribe is that what has occurred in the dump is standard practice in the developing world. It’s scavenging. But in Alamogordo it wasn’t done for survival and was therefore unbelievably vain. The size and power of the online nerd community and the entertainment industry have enabled the film crew and the Arch Punks to be celebrated for doing this debased thing that our culture would otherwise condemn them for. The sheer speed at which this industrial waste has become celebrated as artifact, he says, as the unauthorized tweet disappears, is evidence that the world has come completely fucking unhinged.
It’s a glitch, I think. Maybe we’ve fucked it up. But then maybe that’s the only thing that will keep the robot overlords from learning to play our game better than us. Somewhere there’s a sweet spot in which our civilization is ruined enough to always remain our own but not so ruined that we can’t still find some joy in it. Maybe sweet spot is the wrong term. Maybe I’m talking about the absurd. Maybe I mean the Pit.
Soon Joe Lewandowski will announce that a few hundred of the Atari cartridges recovered from the landfill have been set aside for museums, including an E.T. that will be displayed among our greatest national treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will head there every year to take a gander at E.T., the cartridge covered in Alamogordo grime, sitting in its bulletproof, climate-controlled case, glowing under soft museum-grade lights, the kind that perfectly illuminate every angle and cast no shadows at all.
KEEP ALAMOGORDO BEAUTIFUL
In the Year of Our Lord 2013
My great novel about the sad future is not going so well. I am stuck at the apocalypse. I don’t know what happens next.
* * *
Grandmommy hobbles around using a broken shovel for a walking stick, wearing one pink house slipper and one floral-patterned house slipper, both dull and tattered and fastened to her feet with a bunch of rubber bands. The skin of her hands and arms and legs is translucent or her blood is darker than ever before, all visible in her veins and capillaries, not rushing anywhere anymore but just sort of tepid, dark and sluggish like the puddles of our Rio Grande. The rubber bands have stopped what little circulation gravity was forcing into her feet. Blood pools above the bands, above the mismatched slippers, dark rings like she’s ankle-deep in our dying river. Grandmommy is ninety or more and pretty well blind and forgets whether she’s wearing slippers. A few weeks back she got lucid and banded them on for good, to outsmart the forgetting, to keep from cutting her feet to hell on all the cockleburs when she’s out preaching to the turtles. She’s got fifty or a hundred of them, nobody knows for sure anymore, mostly box turtles and ornates and a few red-eared sliders, collected over half a century of walking with Granddaddy through the desert of Alamogordo. But Granddaddy’s dead now so she just hobbles around the yard with a broken shovel, orchestrating her fellowship of turtles.
Grandmommy says science fiction is hogwash, says it to me and the turtles, says I shouldn’t waste time on a great novel about the sad future. Write the complete history of our Christian family, she says. She doesn’t laugh when I ask if I should start all the way back at the dusk of our apehood. She says start with Alamogordo. Start with how her granddaddy convinced her grandmommy to move to Alamogordo by saying there was not so much whiskey, not so many whores, not so much killing as the newspapers made it seem. How even before that her granddaddy’s daddy was at the very birth of the town skinning jackrabbits with his bare hands. How her own daddy built the White Sands Ranch and lost the White Sands Ranch to a nuclear bomb and its progeny of Cold War missiles. How she pulled the strings for every election in the county for the last four decades. How our blood has been the blood of Alamogordo for as long as Alamogordo has existed. I keep telling her I’ll get around to it someday. When we circle back to the same story about her daddy and the drunk undertaker for the third time, I get up to leave. She tries to give me money. A little something, she says, so you’ll write me a decent eulogy. Just like what you did for your granddaddy. I don’t want her money. I’d only waste it at the bar, trying to drink myself into the future. But I think you might live forever, I say, because I love her and because she’s resilient as hell and because her friends the box turtles routinely live beyond a century and because I do not want to do another eulogy. I didn’t get the last one right at all. She touches my face and swears she’s ready to die. She tells me again how much she misses Granddaddy. She can’t see it anymore but leaning against the far wall of the yard is a thirty-foot-tall VHF antenna that she’s accused me, in less lucid moments, of using to kill Granddaddy. To keep from stirring her up, I take the money. I kiss her head. I bend down and readjust one of her rubber bands before heading out. She rattles a spoon in a can of dog food and the turtles hustle at a breakneck crawl. They claw over one another and stretch their snappers out of their shells, scaly necks all straining just as skyward as they can go, clamoring around and gaping as she slings the Alpo. The moist protein stuff slops onto the ground by her slippers and slops onto nearby cacti and slops onto the horde of dusty shells. Sloppy slop slop goes the whole goddamn world.
* * *
The three steps for embalming a corpse: sanitation, preservation, presentation. These steps are the same for a eulogy: scrub the life of its sinful parts, write down the decent stuff that’s left, say it without falling apart. But it all feels a bit unnatural, doesn’t it? The corpse in the casket is clearly dead but looking worse than that, all waxy with formaldehyde and like it never lived at all. Then somebody stands over the corpse giving a speech that’s all waxy too. In my great novel about the sad future the bodies will not be embalmed. They will lie in the desert, bubbling and rotting, and each corpse will blossom with a whole new kind of life, the slow waltz of decay—a kind of hope that’s lost with sanitation and preservation and presentation. If there’s ever a eulogy in my great novel about the sad future, it must live in this way: with more than a few swear words and some of it made up right there on the spot and most of it, especially toward the end, barely comprehensible in the way a body is totally unrecognizable after a few days in the sun. I guess it’s not that you shouldn’t say nice things when somebody dies, just that pumping a body so full of formaldehyde inhibits the circle of life. Such meticulous preservation is at odds with carrying on. Granddaddy used to tell me that carrying on with booze will pickle you from the inside. That’s not exactly science but I always laughed because pickle is a funny word and because just think of a tiny green man floating inside a jar of vinegar and surely it makes sense that preservation would have some sour side effects. In my great novel about the sad future all attempts to overcome time will be slapstick. The bodies will not be embalmed and they will all end up sour with beautiful decay.
* * *
Joe is up against the wall and grinning and getting choked by D Rock. Then Joe goes limp and D Rock lets go of his neck and Joe slides down the wall but then he ricochets back up but then he slumps and seizes and finally wilts to fetal. We laugh and laugh and laugh. After half a minute Joe comes back to life with resurrection stupor in his eyes but that cloud scatters after a few hard blinks and he laughs too. Then B Rizzle gets choked by Joe and D Rock gets choked by me and I get choked by B Rizzle. Ten deep breaths and my back against the wall and my eyes bulging as B Rizzle’s hands push hard on either side of my throat until my blood-parched brain shorts out and I go limp and travel through time to do all the different stupid things I’ll do in my life and then I’m gasping to consciousness on the floor of my bedroom and all the boys are laughing. Momma is at the hospital, getting her broken blood fixed again. We’re twelve, maybe, unsupervised and learning to get fucked-up. Choking each other out. The high of going to and coming back from nothingness. Resurrection stupor. Also the whir of the VHS camcorder, hulking and purring on B Rizzle’s shoulder. We stole the camera but this is the only thing we can think to record. There’s no internet in our lives yet, no knee-jerk social media, so these recordings are more like prayers than boasts and that’s why we’ll never watch them. We’ll never know what happened to them. They’re gone. But I don’t need to watch them because these days I can just drink and get fucked-up and time travel to any point in my life when I’m doing something stupid and that pretty much covers all of it up until now.
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