Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  Pops is in a lounge chair across the pool with his peppered beard sparkling in the sun and his shades clipped on and his ball cap pulled low. His white T-shirt is threadbare from being stretched by his gut. His boots are off but his jeans are on. He’s sunning his forearms. Madi Bear is splashing in the pool. She’s maybe ten and already has a little bit of her grandpa’s gut and a little bit of her uncle’s gut and there’s the three of our guts in the sun, bathing in the rays of our Lord of infinite love and scorn with the F-150 parked right by the pool, packed to the brim and the bed stacked to high heaven with all of dead Grandma’s things, all the stuff that had our names stuck on with Post-it notes and plenty of stuff that had no names stuck on because she died and something’s got to be done with it all. We’re hauling our inheritance from her grave in Illinois to our house in Alamogordo, where Momma awaits our arrival, where all the stuff will get unpacked and sit around for a while before getting a new layer of Post-it notes, but we’re in no rush to wallpaper the world with tiny wills. This is the Fourth of July and tonight’s fireworks kick-start the UFO Festival. We sprang for the cheap room with a bed and a cot but we got the parking-lot swimming pool to ourselves. Just me and Pops and Madi Bear and Blind Willie on repeat, and on my lap is a book called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies by Dr. Carl Jung. Me and Madi Bear have resolved to unravel every mystery in the knot of alien existence. Or nonexistence, she would like to point out, even though I’ve assured her many times that aliens do exist even if they are just stories because stories also exist. She’d been to space camp earlier this summer and performed an alien autopsy but the corpse was just full of Twizzlers. She didn’t find that too satisfying so I got us a book. Blind Willie moans and Doc Jung writes, “In the history of religion there are not only sexual unions with gods, they are also eaten and drunk.” Page 35 and everything’s already more knotted than we guessed. Maybe aliens ain’t a story for kids.

  Oh, well, sings Blind Willie.

  The whole town will trickle out to one spot from which to watch the fireworks at 9:15 p.m., but get there early, says our Americas Best Value Inn clerk, because by 8:00 p.m. the trickle becomes a bum-rush. Upon inquiring if, because fireworks happen high in the sky, there might be more than one place from which to watch them, we’re told, No, that’s wrong. There is only one place you can watch them. Turn left at the corner of the Military Institute. Head toward the old airport. Just follow the cars. Already there is a prescription for witnessing lights in the sky that I’m suspicious about. Madi Bear agrees. She says, Let’s just walk until we see them.

  Sand and gravel and we are in SNM again because we are walking in the glass of so many broken bottles too. The sidewalks cracked and crumbled and disappeared a ways back. War zone, says Madi Bear. Firecrackers all around and dogs and the streets littered with mortars of all sizes and kids of all sizes wearing no shirts in the junkyards of houses that should be condemned, adobe going back to dirt and no parents in sight and the kids running off as their fireworks explode on the ground, explode accidentally on the ground as the kids convulse with that kind of maniacal laugh-cry that is the one true trait setting us apart from apes. Ah, Lord. We have the capacity to be amused by our fears, and in this place on this night that’s a beautiful thing. A whole bunch of handguns get shot at the sky. Some tumbleweeds burn. Then the big-ass taxpayer fireworks start and we pause right where we are on the street corner. Pops gets out a Phillies Blunt and leans against a stop sign. We gaze up and watch the explosions from right where we are because, as it turns out, when something is exploding in the sky, you can see it from a whole lot of different places on the ground. Pops gives me a Phillies Blunt too and Madi Bear swipes away some glass and pulls up some dust. Peonies and Palms and Horsetails and Crossettes and Salutes and all those Roman candles: things seen in the sky tonight.

  This is the Summer of Snowden. The glow of Charlie Rose on television talking about the big government eyeball and the afterglow of fireworks on our faces as we shuffle around the cheap room at Americas Best Value Inn making excuses for why we shouldn’t be the one on the cot. Pops says, I’m too big. Madi Bear says, I’m too small. I say our paranoia has turned inward. We are no longer scared about what’s out there in the universe but terrified nothing can be kept inside. Google knows our thoughts and hands them over to the NSA. We Are Not Alone is a mantra that now has nothing to do with aliens. Madi Bear says, Whatever, and none of us give up our spot in the bed. Pops turns into a sack of snores before Charlie Rose figures out whether Snowden should die for shining a light in the big government eyeball. I drift off when talk turns to a murder trial and the likelihood that we’ll all kill each other no matter what anyway forever amen. Madi Bear stays awake drawing aliens and having trouble sketching Doc Jung’s version of a UFO: “It is difficult, if not impossible, to form any correct idea of these objects, because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts.” In the morning Madi Bear is still sitting there between me and Pops but looking a little green in the face like she stayed up so late drawing aliens she turned into one. She couldn’t sleep, she says, because between me and Pops she was bombarded all night long by a tremendous volley of farts. She’d tried covering her face with the blanket but the blanket smelled full of old farts and so she’d clung to the wall and turned green in the face. The world is so full of farts. Me and Pops agree to sleep on the floor for the rest of the festival but we also explain to Madi Bear how heat rises. There is no escape.

  The mailbox in front of the civic center is painted up like R2-D2. That’s a permanent situation. Also permanent are the Main Street lights shaped like alien heads and all the business signs with little green men painted on and the McDonald’s that has outdone itself by remodeling the entire restaurant into a flying saucer. Inside the civic center chairs are set up for an audience of hundreds but we are only about thirty-five this morning. The family all wearing the same thick-rimmed glasses that we saw coming out of Starbucks looking like they were just exactly nerdy enough for a UFO festival are in fact here for the festival. The median age is fifty or sixty. And there’s a lady with a butterfly clip in her hair and a guy with a safari hat and a guy in all neon green and there’s a whole slew of crew cuts grown out into comb-overs—everybody has a good reason for being at the festival: Butterfly Clip is a general free-spirited sort and Safari Hat is on a serious quest/hunt and Neon Green wants to role-play with other lovable freaks and then there are the Crew Cuts into Comb-Overs who saw some weird shit during their military service and lately that weird shit’s been running through their minds a lot and they can’t think about much else anymore except trying to understand the weird shit and after many years of obsession and neglecting their high and tights they are here and mad as hell. There’s one baby and it keeps looking at me. I’m here because it was on the way home from a funeral. But really I’m here because a long time ago I lost my religion and lately that’s been feeling sort of lonesome. Don’t tell anybody I told you that. I don’t want people thinking I’m sad, or worse: on the prowl for transcendence. The banner behind the lectern advertises the upcoming Alien Chase and the upcoming Alien Costume Contest for Pets and Humans.

  Stanton Friedman bills himself as the world’s foremost UFOlogist (say you fall a gist). Stan the Man has the cadence of an evangelist with the nasal tone of an academic though neither of those descriptions capture how his ears and eyebrows seem shot into his face at amazingly congruent and sharply elfish angles. His head is huge, which makes it all the more remarkable when his eyes get crazy excited and swallow all his other features. Before we learn anything about the evidence for the existence of UFOs, we learn about the government’s UFO lies. Stan the Man puts the words GOVERNMENT UFO LIES up on the big screen and tickles them with his laser pointer for effect. It made me angry because I don’t like being lied to, he says. In this lecture and the next lecture and most all the lectures on UFOs, the talk will be only tangentially of the existence of extraterrestrial life and mostly
all about the secrets our government keeps.

  Something crashed in the desert near Roswell in July 1947. The local paper put RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH in the headline about the crash and locals talked about it for maybe a week. All manner of unbelievable military shit fell from the skies onto SNM ranches in those days, and most folks were just grateful when it wasn’t an atomic bomb. So the crash was mostly forgotten until Stan the Man put himself on the case, starred in the 1979 documentary UFOs Are Real!, which claimed to blow the whistle about “the Cosmic Watergate.” UFOs Are Real! uncovered government documents about more than one hundred UFO sightings in SNM, and put much emphasis on the 1947 crash in Roswell as the clearest evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. And so, in the eighties, as synthesized music took over the airwaves and Spielberg took over the big screens and personal computers invaded our homes, the Roswell Incident became a worldwide obsession. Roswell officially incorporated the International UFO Museum in 1991 and had a million visitors in its first decade. Under duress in the midnineties our government actually admitted to a cover-up at Roswell, said they’d lied about the wreckage being weather balloons because really they were Project Mogul, a fleet of atomic-bomb-detecting balloons they’d wanted to fly over the Soviet Union—but then they crashed in the desert near Roswell.

  For Stan the Man the admission of a government cover-up was only an admission of the government’s ability to carry out a cover-up and so still there are the stories of metal wreckage with unearthly properties of memory and stories of alien bodies pulled from the wreckage and stories of doctors poking and prodding those bodies with different medical devices over the last sixty-six years. Madi Bear says, They’re just full of candy. I tell her not to talk during the lecture because I’m on the brink of an epiphany. Patrionoia: a word I invent that combines patriotism and paranoia. Patrionoia runs rampant in SNM. All the ranchers and illegal immigrants and atomic bomb downwinders and veterans and UFOlogists: all people whose love for America is outstripped only by their distrust of its government. Out in the parking lot is a Chevy Silverado with Stars-and-Stripes truck nuts hanging from a bumper stickered with the phrase LIES IN THE SKIES written in an airplane’s chemtrails. These are otherwise reasonable people, many of them kin to me, who suffer an inability to reconcile the ideology of American exceptionalism they’ve internalized with the anxiety daily seeping up out of their pores. I love these patrionoiacs and I am of their breed more than I’d like to admit, but I understand—I think—that it makes no sense. For instance, so much of the belief in the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrial life relies on the belief that we have a government capable of keeping secrets. Ouroboros is the term for this kind of thing. A snake eating its tail. Doc Jung quotes Voltaire, who quotes Pascal, who quotes Empedocles, who looked up at the sky one night and said, God is a circle whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. I want to stand up and yell, SNOWDEN, to remind all the patrionoiacs that our government is not as competent at covertness as their fear suggests. Pops sits to my left looking like a turtle slowly receding into his shell that is not a shell but the bulge of his gut. He ain’t interested enough to be skeptical. He’s never owned truck nuts.

  Stan the Man says, Somebody who showed up in 1947 would have looked at earthlings and said, “This is a primitive society engaged primarily in tribal warfare.” Whenever Stan the Man describes earthlings as idiots, which he does often, I tune in. Whenever he describes why the aliens came to Southern New Mexico, why SNM was their crashing spot—the advanced radar tests and the V-2 rocket tests and the atom bomb test—I feel some of that warped pride. Laugh-cry. If the aliens were looking for something interesting and nasty about earthlings, they were looking for it in SNM. Doc Jung writes, “We have here a golden opportunity to see how a legend is formed, and how in a difficult and dark time for humanity a miraculous tale grows up of an attempted intervention by extra-terrestrial ‘heavenly’ powers.” Me and Madi Bear slap a high five after I say, We live at the very epicenter of humanity’s dark time. But then she mulls that over and rescinds the high five by punching me in the shoulder. Well now, here’s an absurd proposition, she must be thinking, that extraterrestrials are some kind of heavenly power.

  In a few weeks I’ll give Stan the Man a call to see if there is any news on the UFOlogist front. He’ll repeat almost verbatim the lecture he’s giving now. But also, when I press him, he’ll respond to the question I keep asking—what the fuck is really going on with the alien situation? He’ll breathe into the phone awhile and finally say, What if there was an announcement tomorrow that the queen and the pope said some UFOs are alien spacecraft? Church attendance would go up. Young people would push for a new view of ourselves as earthlings. Right now nationalism is the only game in town. Tribal warfare. I’ve got a great-grandson. I’d like him to grow up in a world where we’re not spending a trillion dollars on the military. Think about it: earthlings.

  Lunchtime and the guy at the table next to us in Peppers Grill & Bar is clearly out of it. He reaches for his full tea or his whole burger but never grabs either. Just reaches. Stops. Reaches for the other. Buries his hands under the table. Pulls out his wallet. Puts it back. Adjusts his white ball cap. His chips and salsa are untouched. Some of his fries are spilled out on the table. He is perpetually about to eat or has forgotten how to eat. Madi Bear says, Stop staring. Pops has the headphones in and decides that Blind Willie sounds constipated. Madi Bear doesn’t know what to think of Stan the Man’s lecture. She says it was like church but she doesn’t know why. She says, Okay, when I suggest the commonality is some guy talking loudly about something she can’t quite believe. When we get back home to Alamogordo, she will deny having had such blasphemous thoughts and Momma will reprimand me for encouraging them. I will apologize. Madi Bear plugs into Blind Willie as she eats her chicken fingers. I want her to believe in something, but then, just as quickly, I want her to question that belief. Uncles only get so many opportunities to impart life lessons so I tell her to keep listening to Blind Willie until she figures out what he’s singing. We linger in Peppers because they’ve got a misting system cooling our faces. Others have come and eaten and gone. Still there’s the man in the white cap with his full tea and whole burger and mess of fries. The gray heels of his socks stick up over the backs of his shoes. He crosses his feet like a little kid. Uncrosses. Stares into the distance at nothing. Madi Bear takes out the headphones and says she doesn’t like Blind Willie because he sounds sad and like he’s been abducted. I will or Oh, life. Oh, love or Ah, Lord. Oh, well. There is no sense in bickering over government lies about UFOs if there are those among us who have actually been abducted by extraterrestrials. In a booth farther back is a man in a pink shirt with a ginormous mustache. His wife wears around her neck and wrists and has dangling from her ears ten pounds of polished turquoise rock. A woman behind me talks incessantly about the scam of refrigerated air. Are we not all sad and abducted? The man in the white cap is still stuck making up his mind.

  I’m the only one pounding the pavement at 6:00 p.m. after the lectures have quit. The Alien Chase isn’t for two days but I figured there’d be others out training. I want to have a good showing at the Alien Chase because it seems like the only proactive part of the festival. This is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and on that battlefield they are reenacting the pivotal bloodshed with thousands upon thousands of men yelping and charging each other with bayonets. If we’re serious about these aliens, we ought to have some kind of preenactment and the Alien Chase is the only thing on the schedule that sounds anything like war games. But tonight it’s just me running through bulldog barks and minivan honks and lowrider rumbles until I’m back at Americas Best Value Inn. Pops is in the parking lot tightening the straps on our tower of inheritance. When we emptied Grandma’s house, he snorted and guffawed every time something got put into his truck instead of the garbage. But once it was all piled in there, he lost sleep trying to get it packed and strapped just right fo
r the thirteen-hundred-mile drive home. A truck driver has never cared for his haul so much. Morning, noon, and night—yanking on those straps and walking around the truck and yanking on the tarp at every rest stop and gas station and sometimes just pulled over on the side of the highway. Both of his parents are dead now. That’s a messy fact of life he probably has no interest in trying to fathom, but tucking the tarp in all the right places and ratcheting the straps just so, that’s a manageable task. Because he is dependable, he will unload the truck as soon as we get home to Momma, but I guess he’d feel more comfortable leaving it all packed up like that, ratcheting the straps every day until he dies and then just leaving me the keys to an F-150 packed beyond the brim and just right with a tarp over it all. Me and Madi Bear watch from the pool as he ratchets the sun down. Venus and Spica beside the moon and the moon itself and streaks of burning pebbles from the Andromedids meteor shower: things seen in the sky tonight.

  Early on the second morning Pops starts shopping the street vendors for an inflatable alien. Booths along two blocks of the main drag sell tamales and turkey legs, attempts at shitty carnival games, rides on tiny donkeys, and books preaching truth about aliens and Jesus. There are more vendors than shoppers. Over half the booths have inflatable aliens in stock but they all have the same three options: small and purple or medium and black or big and green. Pops goes from booth to booth anyway, says he’s looking for the right one. Me and Madi Bear find a side door to the International UFO Museum and sneak in as protest against the exorbitant $20 entrance fee.

  Today we wear our matching Billy the Kid T-shirts, gifts I got us a few years ago to celebrate both her participation in a Billy-the-Kid ballet at the local theater and my ability to sit through the whole performance. The shirts have a large picture of Billy that suggests he is left-handed because his Colt is holstered on that side, but he is not left-handed. The tintype original reversed the image. The shirts also have a lengthy biography of Billy and that’s the reason I bought them instead of any of the other five hundred Billy the Kid shirts you can buy at most gas stations in SNM. How often do you come across a shirt that’s also a biography? “No one really knows how Billy managed to acquire such legendary status,” says the last paragraph of our T-shirts. “As an outlaw he had only a mediocre reputation; as a murderer he was outstretched by many. To this day he is a legend, regarded by some as a savior, by others as a juvenile delinquent.” Why not both? I say. We wore the wrong shirts, says Madi Bear when we see so many other folks sporting the alien legend. Eventually she will become so concerned that we mixed up our legends that she’ll demand we head back to Americas Best Value Inn so she can change. But this feels right to me, like Billy boy might prefer being mixed up with aliens to being mistaken for a delinquent savior, like all legends boil down to the same thing anyway: a nagging sense the story we’re stuck living ain’t the right one.