Pero el desierto nos olvida – Carlos Fuentes
An eclipse occurred at 09:23 PST. Only one person witnessed the event, consumed by darkness as he watched the trunk lid of the Mercedes slam down on him, hands cable-tied, eyes panic-wide, mouth carpet-taped. Now, as a deep, serrated throb set in and the viscous warmth crawled over his scalp, the full extent of the head wound began to declare itself.
The blow had been delivered as he closed the driver’s side door of the Mercedes and turned to identify the source of the fast-approaching footsteps. He registered a disembodied arm, raised aloft, and a metallic cudgel descending precipitously to shatter his cranium at the syndesmosis joint of the left and right parietal bones. Knees buckling, he crumpled to the concrete floor of the parking structure, clutching at the door handle as he fell. His immediate impulse had been to hoist himself straight back up, but the impact had disconnected his primary motor cortex, stranding him like a paralytic drunk trapped in genuflection at midnight mass.
Powerful hands forced him face-down onto the concrete and rolled him onto his back. Once relieved of his uniform, tied and taped, he was hauled upright and tipped into the trunk of the Mercedes. Amid all of this he had noted that the cudgel, discarded on the garage floor, was in fact a brass statuette, approximately 35 centimeters in length. The subject of the statuette was familiar but he was unable immediately to place it.
Doubled up in his airless compartment, skin abrading against the coarse synthetic fiber of the trunk liner, he was wracked with nausea as the pain drummed a razor-sharp tattoo into his skull. For an instant, despite escalating disorientation and confusion, his mental snapshot of the statuette came back into sharp focus. And as his consciousness ebbed away, his final seconds of awareness were occupied with the improbable certainty that he had been bludgeoned with a likeness of a beaming Chuck Yeager, hands pocketed in his trademark Avirex Bomber Jacket, garrison cap angled rakishly.
***
At 09:35 PST, a United Airlines first officer, jacket tight in the shoulders, inside leg riding up a little, maneuvered his rollaboard luggage into an empty elevator on the rooftop level of the long-term parking garage at John Wayne Airport. Concealing the bloodied miniature airman beneath his jacket, he exited on Level 2, straightened his ID lanyard and made his way toward a red Toyota Tercel in the northwest corner of the urine-lit concrete hive.
He lifted the luggage onto the cracked warm leatherette surface of the rear seat, next to a Nike shoebox containing a set of garden secateurs and two more statuettes. Once behind the wheel, he dropped a pair of aviator sunglasses into the center-console organizer and tossed a pilot’s cap onto the passenger seat, under which he secreted the ensanguined figurine of the aeronaut. Crammed into the passenger-side footwell were a portable generator, a welding gun and rods, a protective mask and gloves and a can of gasoline.
The shock of the flooding white-out glare momentarily bleached his retinas as the Toyota nosed its way out of the murky edifice. By the time the oversaturated pigmentation had recalibrated, he was accelerating south, through the palm-glass canyon of Airport Way, up the 55 on-ramp, then merging onto the I-5, which would take him north to Agua Dulce Airpark, location of the vehicle he intended to steal.
The Toyota’s motorik cadence across the transverse expansion joints of the concrete surface suffused his body, calming a heartrate and pulse overstimulated by the violent demands of the parking-garage assignation.
As his heightened emotional state readjusted, an unsatisfactory detail now began to nag. The objective had been to secure a jacket bearing four captain’s stripes, as opposed to a first officer’s three. During the 30-minute window he had allotted himself, crouched behind a Porsche Cayenne SUV, he had surveilled five other candidates, none of whom satisfied his criteria: three Jet Blue junior officers and two Delta flight attendants. The uniform, the crew-tagged bag, the peaked cap, the lanyard, the sunglasses – which others might deem unnecessary – were, in his estimation, aesthetic imperatives germane to the integrity and the execution of the project. These accessories were as important as the welding equipment, and, above all, the Object itself, carefully stowed in the Toyota’s trunk, inside a rectangular chrome-edged 120cm x 70cm flight case.
The flight case had been a fortuitous addition to the project’s inventory, an unexpected find a week earlier, when he had pulled over on Wilshire Boulevard to admire the turquoise terra cotta façade of the Wiltern Theater. He had liberated the case from a log-jam of empty equipment containers standing unattended outside the zig zag moderne edifice during the death-throes of a performance by a superannuated heavy metal act. Before commencing load-out duties, the band’s crew was resting in the bowels of the venue, occupied with pornography as ontologically complex as it was upsetting, and a final helping of amphetamines.
***
Approaching the entrance to Agua Dulce Airpark at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains, he could already see the Beechcraft C-45 Expeditor on the southwest edge of the airfield, its chrome fuselage catching the noon sun. The plane’s owner, Ted Hackett, wobbled atop a step-ladder, wiping down the cockpit windscreen, the custom-reinforced seams of his Freedom Sage Nomex flight suit straining under significant structural duress.
He had made Hackett’s acquaintance at a support group for troubled aviation professionals, convened bimonthly in the musty wood-paneled annex of a San Fernando Valley VFW post. Having completed the federally mandated minimum of 40 flight hours for a private pilot’s license, he had recently earned an additional rating for multi-engine planes; the meetings provided a context in which he might ingratiate himself with members of the flying community, in the process gaining access to the aircraft his project required.
To that end, he had endured months of aviation-centered group therapy. The sessions were jointly facilitated by a retired US Air Force psychiatrist and an ex-air traffic controller. The latter had been on duty in Tenerife during the 1977 catastrophe involving two fully loaded 747s and had subsequently reinvented himself as a Catholic priest in Los Angeles.
Emotionally grueling, occasionally disrupted by paroxysms of hysteria and physical violence, the sessions had nevertheless enabled him to cultivate a friendship with Ted Hackett, owner of a suitable small aircraft. Formerly a TWA long-haul captain, Hackett had been hospitalized, and later jailed, after a contingency between Honolulu and Los Angeles in 1988, one that had attained mythical status in aviation circles, coming to occupy modules of training courses and chapters of pilot-education manuals. Inevitably, it had also been the subject of several television documentaries as well as a sanitized small-screen movie starring Tom Sizemore as the disgraced pilot.
Alone behind a locked flight-deck door, in the vise of cocaine-induced psychosis, Hackett had preached a sermon of obscene, distressing aeronautical hallucinations over the passenger address system. This aerial Jonestown homily was terminated by a federal air marshal who, after two hours of failed entreaties to Hackett, took the last-resort decision to discharge his Sig Sauer P229 Compact in the cabin’s pressurized environment and blow the locking system off the cockpit door.
Extricated from the cockpit amid a scrum of crew members and passenger-volunteers, the manic pilot-evangelist was secured in a first-class toilet with an assortment of improvised ligatures. Much later, whilst giving evidence at an FAA investigation, Hackett insisted in mitigation that, for the duration of the episode, although the passengers and crew had spent 120 minutes believing that their deaths were inevitable and imminent, he had always maintained exemplary, textbook technical control of the aircraft, a claim that was supported by extensive analysis of flight-data telemetry.
Hackett’s days as a commercial pilot were over but, after years of treatment, his private pilot’s license had been quietly reinstated and he was free to fly his Beechcraft. To mark the occasion, he had suggested to his new acquaintance from the support group that they make a celebratory sortie to Catalina Island.
***
Ingress to the Agua Dulce Airpark had presented no security challenges, an apathetic, glass-boothed sentinel waving him through the gate at the mention of the disgraced airman’s name. He drove the length of the deserted airstrip, its single runway flanked on the right by a row of pastel-painted corrugated hangars. The Beechcraft stood in front of the final structure. Announcing his arrival with a cheery horn toot, he circled around behind the hangars, pulling up to the perimeter fence, alongside Hackett’s prized Corvette Stingray.
He lifted the flight case from the trunk of the Toyota, then placed the rollaboard luggage, the generator, the welding equipment, the gas canister and the shoebox on top. Donning his cap and sunglasses, he set off, guiding his load carefully across the scorching midday tarmac.
Hackett smiled and raised a hand in salutation. His facial expression quickly turned to puzzlement, however, as a United Airlines first officer materialized through the heat haze, wheeling a quantity of baggage that was surely surplus to the requirements of the planned excursion.
Pocketing his sunglasses, he greeted Hackett effusively, maintaining eye-contact as he rummaged inside the shoebox. Distracted by his friend’s makeover as a commercial airline pilot, Hackett’s confused thought processes were interrupted by a statuette of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which delivered a savage lateral blow to the temporal bone above his left ear, an impact that dislodged a hitherto convincing wig and rendered his legs useless.
Hackett felt only four of the next ten blows before the United Airlines pilot rolled him onto his stomach, straddled him and went to work with a pair of secateurs, excising the ample seat of the Nomex flight suit, like a battlefield medic improvising a life-saving intervention with whatever random tools were at hand.
Hackett was only partially conscious when a second statuette (of Charles Lindbergh) was extracted from the Nike shoebox and introduced with determined force and expert precision into his rectal cavity, as his body spasmed and convulsed on the scalding tarmac.
***
Mindful of Hackett’s physical comfort with the ambient temperature ascending now to 32 C, he grasped the epaulettes of his friend’s flight suit and, hauling against the dead weight of android obesity, he inched the corpulent aviator across the apron into the airless shade of the hangar.
As they went, the protruding statuette scraped and scored the asphalt with a track of crude Morse petroglyphs; if decoded, these haphazard engravings would surely communicate the thoughts of the dying aeronaut, as the amplitude and frequency of his neural oscillations spiked and terminal lucidity took him from his earliest memories of flight to the recent shock of intimate violence to a final abject terror without remedy.
Inside the hangar, he located a pair of discarded chocks and wedged them under Hackett’s neck and head, leaving him propped up Che-like in the gloom, his visage a petrified rictus of horror.
Dragging the hangar doors shut, he entombed the fallen pilot in corrugated darkness and paused to consider the task ahead. Not once had he questioned the necessity or the value of the project but, over the years, he had certainly experienced moments of doubt regarding the logistics of its execution. In such moments, his thoughts would turn to Sterling Smith, Simon Rodia and, above all, Donald Crowhurst, visionaries whose resolve and tenacity had enabled them to accomplish feats of transcendent creativity. He would take his place in the company of these men.
Having secured the equipment and materials in the Beechcraft’s aft compartment, he took his seat before the carapaced shrine of the instrument binnacle, red and green lights glowing, gauge needles tracing arcs as he conducted the ritual check of the avionics cluster. Wheels-up by 13:00, he climbed out of Agua Dulce, leveling off at 4,000 meters and setting a cruising speed of 240 km/h.
In pristine conditions with perfect visibility, he headed east over Ridgecrest and on into Death Valley, with Telescope Peak rising away to the north. Beneath him, the cocaine-white counterpane of Badwater Basin spread over the valley floor, its inscrutable honeycomb of hexagonoid alkali deposits silently transmitting the secrets of millennia-old geometry into a cerulean sky.
At Death Valley Junction he started to track Highway 373, crossing into Nevada and picking up I-95 north at Amargosa Valley. Within minutes he was over Beatty, approaching his final destination, but for now he continued, eventually bearing westward at Goldpoint, skirting the northern edge of the valley and then, over Deep Springs, pointing the Beechcraft south again.
***
The fuel-level warnings began as he passed over Ridgecrest for the second time that day. This was of no concern. The pre-flight checks had confirmed a supply adequate for the completion of the journey, and he embarked on another circuit of Death Valley. He traced the same desert path as before, in the process initiating his descent in preparation for landing.
By the time Beatty came into view once more, the dial indicated that the fuel was now all but spent and an emergency landing unavoidable.
As the desert floor rose up to greet the Beechcraft in its sputtering final approach, he recalled chapter 17 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airplane Flying Handbook, which addressed this very contingency. It had informed him that the major challenges to a positive outcome in the event of a crash-landing are purely psychological.
The decisive obstacle, he had read, is a pilot’s unwillingness to accept the situation, resulting in mental paralysis and an inability to come to terms with the fact that the plane will soon be on the ground, regardless of their actions. This paralysis will lead a pilot to delay the inevitable, in the process allowing time for a fear of injury or death to take hold, subsequently spiraling into panic. Fear is acceptable, the FAA counseled, panic is not, because a successful emergency, off-airport landing is as much about the pilot’s state of mind as it is about their skill.
The handbook had also cautioned that the successful execution of this maneuver could be compromised by a pilot’s desire to limit loss of or damage to the aircraft for financial reasons, or else by a mistaken belief that damage to the aircraft means damage to its passengers. Ultimately, almost any terrain is “suitable” for a survivable crash-landing if the pilot knows how to use the airplane structure for self-protection and for the protection of passengers.
But he experienced none of these psychological impediments and he had no need of the Federal Aviation Administration’s advice. He had fully intended for the fuel to expire at this juncture, requiring him to terminate the flight with a forced landing alongside I-95, exactly eight kilometers north of Beatty.
This was integral to the accomplishment of the first stage of his project as an aeronautical palimpsest: he had engineered this emergency in order to recreate as faithfully as possible the final moments and aftermath of an earlier flight, to superimpose his own choreographed accident over the traces of an aviation incident that had occurred 50 years ago to the day, in precisely the same remote section of the Mojave, involving exactly the same model of aircraft.
The original crash had taken place during a publicity stunt commissioned by Tom Billy, the syphilitic proprietor of Billy’s, an ailing desert bordello. Billy was convinced that the key to his financial salvation resided in the spectacle of four parachutists in cowboy attire, jumping from a refitted World War II Beechcraft C-45 Expeditor as it circled the establishment. It was the brothel keeper’s firm belief that this aerial performance would catalyze a reversal in the establishment’s plummeting economic fortunes.
These dreams were crushed when catastrophic engine and landing-gear failure forced the pilot to make a crash-landing, his troupe of flying vaqueros still aboard. Clipping power lines, which sheared off the tip of the port-side wing, the plane came to rest, upright and otherwise intact, just off the highway between the brothel’s towering sign and its six-meter roadside-sheriff mascot: a bulging, leering, starred-and-chapped lawman, a cast-aluminum barker of perversions waving his ten-gallon hat in salutation to concupiscent wayfarers.
Within a year Billy’s had serviced its final customer and its diseased owner had absconded to Los Angeles with the unpaid staff wages, which he used to enroll himself in a graduate program in social work at the University of Southern California.
With the engines now dead, the pilot of the Beechcraft executed a textbook emergency landing, maintaining a nose-high attitude and a stalling speed of 45 km/h. As the derelict brothel, its corroded signage and its sandblasted, sun-bleached buckaroo sex-giant raced towards him, he shut down the electrical systems and let the plane glide into the unforgiving desert bed of middle Ordovician Antelope Valley limestone, slewing and skewing to a violent, cacophonous halt alongside the graffitied metallic cadaver of the other Beechcraft.
***
The sun was waning, its intensity yielding, the day taking its last deep breaths of submission to a cool coming of darkness in this desolate landscape. He would not embark on the final stage of the project until the following morning. The initiation of the assemblage could only take place as the sun’s upper limb rose above the horizon. It was imperative that his aubade to Sterling Smith, Simon Rodia and Crowhurst – above all to Crowhurst – should unfold in unison with the golden intimacy of first light and its incremental revelation of the desert’s violent, indifferent majesty.
In preparation for this momentous assignation, he unloaded the Beechcraft, ran a cursory eye over the equipment and set it in position: he arranged the generator, the welding equipment and the flight case at the base of the statue, next to the sheriff’s colossal right boot. Only as he gazed up at the lawman’s intumescence did it occur to him that he had made a fundamental, critical miscalculation. He had assumed that he would be able to carry out the task standing directly in front of the obscene cowboy but the distance between the ground and the work area itself was greater than he had reckoned.
With the idea of improvising a platform on which he could stand and work comfortably, he made his way across to the dilapidated bordello in search of materials. Positioning himself in the entrance, he firmly planted his left foot, keeping the leg perpendicular to the cracked cement surface of the threshold, raised his right foot, flexing the knee to an angle of 20 degrees, and rammed his heel into the flimsy door, just above the lock. The door splintered open and he stepped into a windowless space that had once doubled as the brothel’s reception area and a bar.
The abrupt in-rush of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide did little to dilute the asphyxiating residual odors of pleasure and decay staining the air within a space that had been sealed for decades.
Late-afternoon sunlight flooded this sepulcher of spent desire, illuminating an anarchic reliquary: wrecked furniture, unspeakable, illegal taxidermy, bottles, cans, plates, a prosthetic lower leg, a child’s bicycle, a rolling lawnmower, syringes, a cardboard box full of 8mm erotic films featuring the 70s icons Paul Ilie, Fearghal Kenney and Jonathan Goff, standard fans, soiled undergarments and surgical dressings, sets of dentures, the skeleton of a Great Dane.
In a storage cupboard behind the bar, he located an aluminum stepladder in reasonably good condition. He carried it back to the foot of the statue, standing it next to the rest of the equipment.
The desert night was falling. This darkness neither enveloped nor enclosed him. It did nothing to diminish his sense of space or scale; it seemed only to amplify his awareness of this limitless, timeless environment, heightening an appreciation of his own irrelevance in this landscape.
His thoughts turned once again to Crowhurst, particularly the ill-fated navigator’s final words, as he perhaps entertained similar, albeit more extreme, feelings of diminished significance and atomization, adrift in the Sargasso Sea, prey to its gyre, lost in its sublime magnitude:
Now is revealed the true nature and
purpose and power of the game offence
I am what I am and I
see the nature of my offence
It is finished –
It is finished
– IT IS THE MERCY
It is the end of my
my game the truth
has been revealed and it will
by done as my familly require me
to do it
Although the import of Crowhurst’s accomplishment – admittedly incomplete – was self-evident and indisputable, he was often troubled by the seafarer’s inscrutable, fragmented valedictory dispatches.
Did these dispatches ultimately signal self-doubt and capitulation, a recognition on Crowhurst’s part that he had failed? He could only wonder at what else this nautical artistic genius might have achieved. Now more than ever, alone in this place, he felt kinship with the vanished mariner. He had no doubt that his project would, in spirit at least, go some way to completing what Crowhurst had been unable to bring to fruition.
He climbed aboard the airborne daredevils’ wrecked Beechcraft, alongside the corpse of his own flying machine, and stretched out on the cabin floor, using his jacket as a makeshift pillow. Except for some wiring deemed worthless by desert reavers and scavengers, the interior had been picked to its metallic bones, now nothing more than a stark alloy cylinder, its perforated aluminum strips and struts calling to mind a child’s rudimentary Meccano project. The flight deck had been similarly visited, its instrument panel now a spartan peacock’s train of empty circular binnacles, dark orbital cavities staring back vacantly into the cockpit.
In the gutted body of the aircraft, impervious to the desert chill, he slept deeply. He dreamed of nothing.
***
He set to work at sunrise. Releasing the latches, he opened the flight case and considered its contents: in disassembled, modular form, the Object itself.
The Object comprised six lightweight cylindrical aluminum sleeves, each measuring 25cm in length, with a diameter of 25cm. He had mounted four clasps on each end of four of these metal cuffs, enabling him to link them together into an extended tubular structure. Two sleeves had clasps attached only to one end. With the clasps in an open position, the Object would have some flexibility, making it possible to maneuver; once the clasps were closed and fastened and the sleeve-ends welded together, the entire object would acquire rigidity adequate to sustain a horizontal attitude.
He lifted the cuffs from the flight case and arranged them in a line on the desert floor. He connected the welding gun to the generator, poured gasoline into the tank and started it up. Having pulled on his mask and gloves, he chose a section of sleeving with one set of clasps, looped the generator cable over his shoulder and mounted the stepladder, the welding gun tucked into a jacket pocket.
Atop the ladder, he positioned the claspless end of the sleeve over the area of the cast-aluminum statue to which it would be secured. It fitted perfectly, flush with the cowboy-Gargantua’s groinal area, its distension and engorgement thrown into unsavory relief by the framing of his chaps. He quickly welded the cuff into place and then repeated the process with the remaining five sleeves.
Once the entire cylindrical structure had been assembled and secured, he climbed down to retrieve a final item from the flight case: another alloy module, albeit in domed form, it suggested an especially flamboyant Victorian fireman’s helmet. Holding it in place over the open end of the final cuff, he found there was ample space to weld the entire circumference of the contact area between the two components.
The work complete, he descended from his perch, casting aside his tools. He gazed up in reverential contemplation of the obscene six-meter sheriff, now proudly bearing his outlandish, impossible appendage. Crowned with its alarming hemispherical extremity, the Object extended one-and-a-half-meters, anchored at a 90-degree angle to the grotesque lawman’s upthrust groin. Drawing on considerable autodidact research into aircraft-wing design, his projections regarding the Object’s structural integrity and its capacity to self-support had been accurate: he noted with particular satisfaction that the morning desert breeze exacted slight tremors from the Object, the tubular tumescence displaying tolerance for a degree of flux and oscillation precisely consistent with his calculations.
But beyond this mere technical satisfaction, he now experienced a profound, preternatural sense of accomplishment: with the offering he had graciously bestowed upon this vast disinterested landscape, he felt that he had endowed himself with some greater presence, a greater materiality.
Later, he would set off on foot, northwards along the side of I-95, bound for Goldfield. From there he would make his way east to Cisco, Utah. In that place, it was his intention to recreate the final automotive contingency of Kowalski, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the demi-god, the super-driver of the golden west.
— Wilson Neate has published two books, Pink Flag (Bloomsbury) and Read & Burn (Jawbone), and contributed chapters to the books Vagabond Holes (Fremantle Press) and A Life of Reilly (Burning Shed), as well as liner-note essays to album releases. His interviews, profiles and reviews covering literature, music and film have appeared in various magazines, including Publishers Weekly (Críticas), The Quietus, Blurt, Amplifier and Pop Culture Press. He has fiction in Faultine Journal of Arts and Letters and forthcoming in The Brussels Review. He lives in San Francisco.