The mountains, the clouds, the sound, the borders, everything feels more soluble. I’m closer to the sky, this immense space, and at the same time, at 1,350 metres above sea level my own spaces, the smallest spaces, blood vessels and nerves and cells, are expanded. Everyone has to breathe more heavily here; the air molecules are bigger. When I breathe more deeply, I think about the world BREATHE, and how close it is to WRAITH, because with that extra force, I inhale something unknown, something extra, perhaps some local Jumano spirits. Outer space includes the sky too, I think: it begins all the way down on the ground.
I wish I’d thought that sentence in Norwegian, but the most common Norwegian word is VERDENSROMMET, meaning world’s space, implying that space itself is part of our world, which doesn’t sound right. I could of course just translate outer space directly; outer’s a Norwegian word, too, but the phrase isn’t in everyday use and I don’t remember it until later. Perhaps intentionally; perhaps I’m trying to get away from my own language. OUTER SPACE couldn’t substitute for WORLD’S SPACE anyway, a word that doesn’t exist in English. In English everything is outside of the earth, and the atmosphere is a separate space. The English language looks past the world as we know it, while the Norwegian language is actually capable of calling outer space WORLD SPACE, forcing the unknown into itself, into its silent letters, into the white. Here in New Mexico, using the Norwegian word feels ridiculous. The sky is too alien, and Mexico is too far away, fenced off behind a tall wall. Both are outer space.
A small sandstone building in the middle of no man’s land is flanked by telescopes and plaques that hint at UFO sightings. In front of the building is a dark blue minibus full of metal scraps and fabric that seems to be parked there more or less permanently. An old striped cat rests in the car’s shadow.
Voices sound through the clear air. A group of girls stand behind the building, looking at the sky through the telescopes. They’re excited, pointing and discussing. Far up there, you can make out a tiny white dot. It moves steadily closer and the girls try to zoom in on it with the telescopes, but like most things that are free and public here in America, the lenses are low-quality, too weak to really magnify anything. Several cars begin to park and people step out to look at the dot.
The Norwegian South has its own history of white dots in the sky, retold as ‘The wonderful heavenly vision above Grimstad centre 15 June 1934.’ From out of a blurred white spot, far out above the fjord, a figure of Christ appeared between two puffs of clouds, first with its arms raised to the sky and then with them stretched out gently, palms facing heaven. According to witnesses he looked like Bertel Thorvaldsen’s famous sculpture, as if even Christ understood that it’s art and not religion that expands human space, the place that opens up imagination and faith.
In the desert by the sandstone buildings, the group of girls and a few families in cowboy hats and I stand in a circle waiting for the white to appear. We’re a band now. We look in the same direction; we talk about other celestial bodies we’ve seen, about what we think it might be. We hold on to the same fence and pass around the binoculars. It turns out to be a border patrol drone, a modern UFO (or Christ), one of the scouts of the establishment in search of modern aliens, a plastic bone in the bone-white American police state’s skeleton, with its little helicopter arms raised from its body and up toward the sky. For a while it circles us, scanning us, then it gradually shrinks into the sky again, as if it, too, is slowly devoured, slowly loses function until it’s a completely ordinary balloon, rising and rising into the atmosphere’s thinner and thinner air. Finally it just blinks in and out of sight, like a mirage, or the reflection of a moving lens. Around it, clear skies in every direction, if only eyes could take them all in, or if only there were other ways to float up there, deeper and deeper into the cerulean body.
From El Paso in southern Texas I drove along the border fence, then north across the state line and into New Mexico, to a town called Las Cruces. After the drone surveillance incident, I move on to Alamogordo, an old military barracks town, and finally to insignificant little Carizzozo with its empty streets and burnt-out gas stations. Carizzozo is right next to Carizzozo Malpaís, a dark belt left by a lava stream from the volcano Little Black Peak, 5,000 years ago. The earth in this belt is completely blackened and barren; it’s like walking across the remains of a burnt-out witch’s bonfire. The local camping site is called Valley of Fires Recreation Area and is on a small island of rusty desert dirt surrounded by black. Most of the buildings are closed for renovation, and when I turn on the camp’s standpipe I hear only the sound of a faint wind in there, like the drain into a tomb.
Not far from the malpaís is more burnt dirt of an entirely different kind: Trinity Site, scene of the first atom bomb test explosion, 16 July 1945, postponed for three days because of bad weather. The Trinity bomb was based on the fission process: atoms, once regarded as indivisible, exploded or were torn apart. Trinity’s power came from splitting atoms in two. It rose through the atmosphere, a glowing, mushroom-shaped erection fantasy, with the aid of Oppenheimer’s technology, the United States’ immense defence budget and the
