El Pastor has quit on his country show tune. I miss it already. His version, specifically, with all the wrong words. Translation is the attempt to erase borders, but the whole history of civilization is the creation of borders, so translation is a Sisyphean mess. That’s why, when something manages to pass through so effortlessly—like the sentiment of bedrock faith in human goodness through the sap of Don Williams and the atonal hollering of El Pastor, like smoke through the bars between me and El Ratón—you just got to shut up, let it echo through your labyrinthine inlets, give your fetal ears a real chance to grow into a worthwhile soul.
As we pack up to head out, I ask El Pastor why they’ve stopped needling, if they can’t easily get needles from Bemis or have Morgan bring them or pick them up when El Pastor or Josué are in El Paso. El Pastor’s eyes get big and he says, Ah, but the miracle has happened! Out of his closet he drags a bag from Express, grinning and loosening the drawstring so I can see inside, see many little boxes covered in Japanese glyphs. El Pastor was late to the chili-dog party because he was retrieving these needles from an old lady in the city who didn’t need them anymore. I don’t know why she has needles but then she gives them to me. Like that. It does seem like a little miracle as I shake the boxes to make sure they’re full. Yes, he says, her son died this morning. El Pastor had gone to visit the woman because her son had been a resident at the asylum, spent a year here after his family got overwhelmed by his violent outbursts and dropped him off. Then came the call that the boy, having returned home several months ago, just this morning hanged himself after smoking PCP. His mother had bought the needles for him because he’d received NADA treatments at the asylum. She thought they might continue to help in his recovery. Only one of the boxes is opened but in it only a single packet of needles remains. He must have tried to get better, must have believed in the needles a little bit, for a little while. I show El Pastor the lonely packet and he says, Go ahead. I put the needles in my shirt pocket. This boy who hanged himself was one of the few who got out of the asylum and made it home and these were the last needles he looked at and decided against. A shame, says El Pastor. But this is how the miracle works. Ah, mysterious, you see? He closes the bag and pats me on the shoulder and pulls me in for a hug.
* * *
As we leave the asylum, there’s Benito, the goatherd, on his bicycle chasing some strays off the road. He had a bipolar episode every January until they put him in charge of the animals. And there’s Memo, with a big staff walking among the goats. Gaspar stands at attention in front of the gates, salutes us away. Art and his crew head north, back across the border, but Morgan and his nephew and me, we go the other direction. We stop and buy Cokes at a little shop where some boys in the back are watching RoboCop. We head toward Palomas, another Mexican border town to the west. We stop off at a lonely highway shrine for Santa Muerte, the saint of death, whose veneration has long been condemned by the Catholic Church and more so lately because of the way the cartels have taken to her. Shrines like this one have risen up all over the war zones, little shacks painted black and purple, covered in murals of a skeleton holding Earth in its hand or a skeleton praying with rosary beads, shacks housing a statue of a black-robed skeleton sitting on a throne of skulls holding a scythe. Morgan wanders into the desert to take a leak and his nephew grabs as a souvenir one of the many candles burned at the shrine. I step up to the grim reaper and look her straight in the skull holes and drop the packet of needles at her feet bones. All hail Santa Muerte of la Frontera. I make this sacred offering, a few grams of steel. Even you must weigh little things. The sun gets big and fiery like it does when it falls and looks to bounce off the distant sandy plain. We drive into Palomas and there in the road at the edge of town is a woman with three small children, the kids running around her and screaming as she playfully herds them down the road. And of course it is not Elisabeth. Of course it is not. Nobody knows what happened to Elisabeth or where she went, and generally when residents leave the asylum and do not return, it means they are gone for good but what if this is Elisabeth, her hair down to her chin, exactly the length it might have grown after her head was shaved last year, reunited with her kids and fixed up totally with her soul fallen into place, the concrete cell and the bugs a distant memory but the ping of the needles still in her ears as she drifts along a road that disappears into the ball of fire landing on the horizon, as she heads not into the sunset, heads not even for the sunset but stops, just now, to sway around it, her dancing just like that, to the perfect pitch of one or two grams of steel, and singing all the words just exactly right:
But I believe in love, I believe in music, I believe in magic, and I believe in you.
NOTES
EPIGRAPH
The definition of acid western is a mash-up of phrases from Pauline Kael’s blistering review of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film El Topo (The New Yorker, November 20, 1971) and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s blissful book-length review Dead Man (BFI Modern Classics, 2000) of Jim Jarmusch’s film of the same name.
THE LIGHT OF GOD
Highly skilled, highly trained people can only eat: A Predator drone pilot said this in the article “Boredom May Be Worst Foe for Predator Drone Operators,” published November 16, 2012, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The article cites an MIT study that claims remote pilots are likely to make fewer mistakes if they distract themselves with snacks or music because they won’t get bored. Creech Air Force Base, forty-five minutes north of Vegas, is where the military operates most of its Afghanistan drone missions from. Most drone strikes in Pakistan are likely carried out from CIA offices in Langley, Virginia, because we (the United States) are not officially involved in military operations there—but this, like all things covert and drone, is hard to pinpoint. Also hard to pinpoint is which locale makes for more sinister remote killing, a steel cargo container in the Nevada desert or an air-conditioned office building in Virginia.
For most missions nothing happens: Another drone pilot, quoted in “Boredom, Terror, Deadly Mistakes: Secrets of the New Drone War” by Jefferson Morley on April 3, 2012, on Salon.com.
I can’t sleep at night because when the drones are there: From an interview with a man injured in a March 17, 2011, drone strike on Datta Khel in North Waziristan. This interview and others more disturbing, all conducted with Waziris on the ground in Pakistan, are from the report Living Under Drones published through a joint effort by the Stanford Law School and the NYU School of Law in 2012. The report is the most comprehensive evaluation of the effect of drone strikes on civilians in the FATA regions of Pakistan. The report also includes a description of Hellfired bodies, used later in this essay: “dismembered, mutilated, and burned beyond recognition.”
Obama has a “kill list”: Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “The Shadow War: Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, May 29, 2012.
“Among the elements that could combine for a lethal signature”: This is from Andrew Cockburn’s Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, which, when published in 2015, will be the definitive history of America’s drone warfare up to that point. Cockburn establishes that much of our drone warfare results not from its effectiveness as a surgical weapon but from the need to feed a trillion-dollar (too-big-to-fail) defense industry. Most drone-related technology, including the much-vaunted Gorgon Stare, he will characterize as absurdly ineffective and inaccurate, writing that the military has often known this before its deployment in combat but kept it quiet to keep the cash flowing.
“data at rates of 10 to over 1,000 times projected communications”: Operating Next-Generation Remotely Piloted Aircraft for Irregular Warfare, United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, April 2011, 10–11. The Gorgon Stare, while portrayed in this government document as an almost omnipotent surveillance tool, will never actually work (see Kill Chain by Andrew Cockburn).
the USAF Scientific Advisory Board recommends “automated processing”: Ibid., 21.
; “The new technology should be accurate”: Michael Endler, “Baseball Meets Internet of Things: Bye, Bad Umpires?,” InformationWeek.com, April 5, 2013.
When a reporter gets into the Reaper Ground Control Station at Holloman Air Force Base: This exchange occurs at Holloman AFB in the 2012 Al Jazeera documentary Attack of the Drones. An almost identical scene occurs at Holloman in the 2012 ABC Australia documentary Rise of the Machines.
One of the few photos I’ve seen: Photos by Noor Behram, in Spencer Ackerman, “Rare Photographs Show Ground Zero of the Drone War,” Wired, December 12, 2011.
The government reported no civilian casualties for this strike: The Pentagon remained silent about this strike, while Reuters reported only three dead, all combatants. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism used eight sources, including locals and Pakistani officials, to estimate that seventeen to twenty-one people were killed in the strike including nine to thirteen civilians, of whom six were children, including the seven-year-old brother of the children in the photograph. The most accurate public information on all American drone strikes is on the bureau’s website, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war.
light that looks like it’s coming from heaven: From an interview with a former Predator drone pilot conducted by Omer Fast for his film 5,000 Feet Is the Best.
CHILDREN OF THE GADGET
Joseph Masco’s got this idea in his book The Nuclear Borderlands: Masco’s book brilliantly explores the complexities of complacency regarding the Bomb and delves into Northern New Mexico culture in a way this book doesn’t even attempt to. You should definitely read it. But as I prepare this book for publication, I can’t help but feel both Masco and I are behind the times, though this essay is just two years old and Masco’s book is only nine years older than that. Right now, in the summer of 2017, Americans cannot stop talking about nuclear war because we have a president who seems willing to wage it on a whim. Fearmongering is never useful. But part of me hopes that more than a little bit of our anxiety from this political shitshow persists, to keep us from ever becoming complacent again about the monster we have created.
“Exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion”: From the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) Project: Prepared for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects Radiation Studies Branch (2009). That’s the actual thirty-two-word title, which is not a title so much as a list of bureaucracies. It’s an incredibly eye-opening report if you can keep your eyes open through all the bureaucratic obfuscation.
“A few people were probably overexposed”: LAHDRA.
0545 Hours—July 16, 1945 (Fifteen Minutes After the Blast): This section is an edited version of a July 21, 1945, report to General Groves, included in LAHDRA.
The first public tour of the Trinity Site was organized in September of 1945: All quotes about the first public Trinity Site visit are from a September 11, 1945, article from the Associated Press, reported from Alamogordo, that ran in almost every one of the nation’s newspapers, often headlined by variations on words such as Destructive, Death, Devastations, etc., even as the article itself promotes the idea that no danger lingers from atom bombs beyond the blast itself.
“secured some good pictures of the cattle”: This from a December 13, 1945, article in the Alamogordo Daily News headlined “Paramount Picture Corporation ‘Shoots’ Bombed Cattle.” The headline is one of those puns newsrooms get off on, but really the sad joke is that the mutated cows, all of them, should have been shot (gunwise) and removed from the food supply.
A 2011 study of the aftermath in Chernobyl: Alexander M. Danzer and Natalia Danzer, The Long-Term Effects of the Chernobyl Catastrophe on Subjective Well-Being and Mental Health, discussion paper series no. 5906, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, 2011.
“These people are sick”: Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Johan Havenaar, in Michael Specter, “A Wasted Land,” The New York Times, March 31, 1996.
0530 Hours—July 16, 1945 (Fourteen Seconds After the Gadget’s Detonation): Compilation of descriptions of the explosion from Manhattan Project members Frank Oppenheimer, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Val Fitch, and Kenneth Bainbridge.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Bowden, Charles. Trinity. University of Texas Press, 2009.
Couffer, Jack. Bat Bomb. University of Texas Press, 1992.
Eckles, Jim. Trinity: The History of an Atomic Bomb National Historic Landmark. Fiddlebike, 2015.
Hersey, John. Hiroshima. Modern Library, 1946.
Price, V. B. The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. UNM Press, 2011.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Wilson, Jane, and Charlotte Serber, eds. Standing By and Making Do: Women of Wartime Los Alamos. Los Alamos Historical Society, 1988.
SO LET ALL THE MARTIANS COME HOME TO ROOST
SNM EXTRATERRESTRIAL READING
I cannot speak to the validity of the claims in these books, but they make for great entertainment for the brain.
Berliner, Don, and Stanton Friedman. Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1994.
Fry, Daniel. The White Sands Incident. Horus House Press, 1992.
Jung, Dr. C. G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Signet and Mentor Books, 1969.
Marden, Kathleen, and Stanton Friedman. Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction. New Page Books, 2007.
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES AT THE GATEWAY TO SPACE
After this story was first published, a Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight in Mojave, California. One of the two test pilots died that day, Halloween 2014. Much debated (mostly in the geeky New Space Race threads of the Net) was whether Galactic’s public response to the crash was in poor taste. Galactic characterized the dead pilot as a hero sacrificed for a noble cause. But Wired wrote, “When various corporate representatives eulogize those two pilots as pioneers who were helping to cross the Final Frontier, that should make you angry. That pilot died not for space but for a luxury service provider.” The situation was further complicated when, nine months after the crash, an investigation concluded that the primary cause was human error—the dead pilot pulled a lever too soon. This conclusion was obviously advantageous for Galactic, a company that already had many millions of passenger dollars invested and could not afford to have celebs such as Gaga and Brangelina asking for refunds on account of faulty/fatal technology. Some saw Galactic’s eagerness to publicize the findings of human error as a kind of second sacrifice of the test pilot and used this story as evidence for Galactic’s poor corporate conduct. I guess you’ll reach your own conclusions about Galactic, but I want to take a moment to tell you the name of that test pilot: Michael Alsbury. He was thirty-nine, had a wife and two kids and a twin sister. In one sense, Alsbury was just doing his job. He was also doing what he loved. His death was a terrible tragedy, no matter what you think of Galactic. I hope Alsbury’s kids get the chance to experience space, to taste a bit of the Overview Effect, to know that their father’s dreams, at least, were never in the employ of any corporation.
BEFORE THE FALL
All of the highly specific data from this fall is available on the BDED website about their stunt. Much of the information in the essay comes from the “Key Facts Summary” and “Scientific Data Review” documents. The site also includes hours and hours of raw footage of the stunt, interviews with crew and stuntman, slick documentary recaps, and endless advertisements for the ED.
A 2010 complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court: BDED Corp briefly paused the production of their stunt in October 2010 as a result of this lawsuit by Daniel Hogan, though BDED maintained they’d done nothing wrong. The suit was settled out of court in July 201
1 and BDED resumed production on their stunt soon after.
“The Anglo-Saxons of Eilmer’s days were beginning to show Christ almost jet-propelled”: This quote and much of the information about Eilmer, including possible inspirations for his feat, come from “Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition” by Lynn White, Jr., Technology and Culture, vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1961): 97–111. White, like many writing about Eilmer, claims he “flew ‘spatio stadii et plus,’ or more than 600 feet.” But that’s likely impossible, given the height of the tower and what we now understand of physics. Eilmer fell.
“bespattered the emperor with his blood”: From the Harvard University Press edition of the Loeb Classical Library translation of The Lives of the Caesars by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Goble, Ronald, and Stephen Hall. “Archaeological Geology of the Mescalero Sands.” Plains Anthropologist 53, no. 207 (2008).
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