Simulator

Hannah Hindley

Dry things catch fire more quickly: less water to vaporize before the flames can do their work.

Snake skin coils into papery curls, chars into powder.

The straight ribs of cacti ignite like tiki torches.

Sand fuses into glass.

A burned desert remembers its damage like mud holds pressed tracks. When monsoon season surges in out of the rising summer heat, the evidence might wash clean. Reset, repeat.

A few weeks into the government shutdown, Ryan and I drove west and south of Tucson, through the purple-brown Tohono O’odham Nation and past a town called Why. Along the open stretches, wind wobbled the car and ravens shouted. “Watch for coyotes,” an off-duty ranger told us. As we drove the final length of road, rabbits in our headlights, we weren’t sure if we should look for animal tracks or human ones.

In the morning, the desert sun sliced clean through the cactus bristles and stained the mountains pink. We hiked all day upvalley toward a ridge. Frogs spoke in the wet places where rainwater lingered. Taut old junipers twisted out of rocks, alive with crocodilian quiet. At dusk, we went walking through the organ pipe forest a few miles north of the border wall, which snaked its way across a shoulder of land in the distance. On the far side, lights twinkled in Mexico. The boundary felt abrupt here, where cottontails wisped across fractured dirt, where footprints wandered north and south in the night, where the desert breathed, too shifty for believable borders.

From above, in the simulator, the land is brown: patchworked edges of city, toasted desert crackle, mountains snaggled at the basin’s rim. I gain elevation, and the world below slows down. I float. I can see the airplane boneyard where old Air Force craft have come to roost — where the dry air and alkali soil keep them a little bit alive, so that they might turn on again someday, return to action. To the south, a copper mine’s terraced edges drift underneath us, each forty-foot bench a fingerprint’s fine contour line stamped into the chalky land.

Trey is a gentle teacher. He leans in from outside the simulator cockpit, flipping switches for me, laying his hand atop mine to help roll, lift, steady. He says, “Let’s find you something to shoot.”

That week, Ryan and I continued west, our road paralleling the Gila River and veering north through the Yuma Proving Ground. We passed through border checkpoints: armored uniforms and guns across shoulders and quiet dogs that appeared like mirages out of the flat land before melting behind us. Mountain ranges knuckled up out of the desert, brown and blush and copper. Every now and then a car would pass, coming from the other direction, likely headed to Yuma or maybe onward into Mexico. Animals moved, unseen, in the world that flashed by behind “No Trespassing” signs: Sonoran pronghorn, fringe-toed lizards, bats between the soft rocks of old mines. A desert only looks empty from afar.

We pulled over, snapped pictures of hoodoos, and Ryan took the wheel. We slowed down to pass through another border checkpoint, our white skin as good a passport as any. The road flattened and a red pickup came into sight. As we sped past, I saw two figures standing on top of the cab. A woman held a young boy’s shoulder with one hand and pointed with the other, both of them gazing out to the west. They looked like parade goers, craning for a view, rocking a little as our car buffeted past. I strained to see what they were seeing: wild horses? a roving dust storm?

Then I saw. “Something just exploded!” I shouted, and Ryan swerved and whirled in his seat to catch the slow-growing gray blast.

Outside, beyond the simulator room, spring is arriving. Snowmelt fills Tucson’s dry washes and thorny ocotillo buds green. Globe mallow and poppies cluster along arroyo banks, a thousand veins of orange divulging the desert’s vasculature. Where ephemeral water wanders, color follows.

Indoors, perched in the simulator, I bank left, leaning low across the virtual land, which is seasonless and dry. Everything feels static in the simulator: not just the braided brown strands of empty waterways, but the amaranthine suspension of it all. There’s nothing high-tech about my pilot’s seat. It’s just a cockpit inside a room lit by mirrors and the whirring light of projectors. But with the sky rolling overhead and the ground so quiet and slow underneath, I feel weightless. There’s something almost peaceful about it — like those moments when, as a wilderness first responder, I found myself dealing with sudden trauma in the woods. There’s a certain lift, a buoyant meditative removal from the blood, the breakage. Apply pressure, glide through checklists, think ahead to evacuation. In the cockpit, I feel a similar calm: ease the joystick, grip the trigger, float.

The suns hovers at the same hazy place in the sky. If I stay here, aloft, for hours, would the sun move with me? I ask Trey and he leaves the simulator room, dials a knob, and the sky goes dusky. Lights glitter in little pockets of land. The airstrip blinks on in a distant, twinkly strip. Trey dials another switch and gray clouds materialize. As the plane lifts, tufts of moisture wisp past, the windshield gets fuzzy: time to watch the instruments.

In the simulator room, time, it seems, doesn’t quite pass so much as change. Storms can appear but not grow, evening can fall but not creep, and all the while, we soar in place.

“They’re dropping bombs,” Ryan said, and he pulled onto a gravel shoulder and turned the car to face west. A gray plane cast a shadow over the dashboard, then curved out over the flat land beyond the road. “That’s an A-10 Warthog!” he exclaimed. “Watch, watch — it just pulled up, which means it already shot its missile. Look for the explosion.”

Sure enough, moments later, a cloud billowed up from the land. The plane banked and circled, and a second plane swooped in for a turn.

The Warthogs had blunt wing tips and fat bodies and bifurcated tails. “They were my favorites growing up,” Ryan said, as if he were talking about dinosaurs or dolls. More planes arrived, and missile after missile set the desert smoking. From our distance, there was no noise: just plunge and lift and the breathless lag before impact.

Were we watching something violent? Did the pilots consider the fizzle of lizard skin, the singe and dissolution of cactus? Or for them, from up high, was the land a non-place, a quiet practice ground for some future and unspeakable violence abroad? How different did their bombs look from the cockpit seat, whistling outward and away, than they appeared here from groundlevel, looking up?

Ryan sat rapt in the driver’s seat. He reached blindly for the bag of M&Ms we’d picked up at our last gas stop, tossing back handfuls without breaking his gaze. The movie-theatre atmosphere made me feel nauseous. Snacks crunched, planes swooped, plume after plume of soundless silver smoke came rocketing up. The planes looped and dropped until they ran out of ammunition, then drifted off toward the north and out of sight, game over.

“Do you think there are any animals out there?” I asked.

“Not after the first bomb, there aren’t.”

In the simulator, I can choose my target. Green projections against my windshield help show me my lift, my speed, my aim. I center a grounded battleship in a tight green circle and Trey helps my finger compress the trigger. There is a long lag, then smoke and flames appear where I’ve blasted a hole in the side of the ship. It tumbles soundlessly to its side with video game flair, and I bank.

“You’re going fast enough now to fly a loop,” Trey says, and he helps me drag my joystick back and back, until land is above me and clouds are below and I have to look wildly behind my shoulder to see where my target still smokes. “Fuck!” I exclaim, but it’s exhilarating. I like this: the precision of shooting, the giddiness of flight.

“What would it feel like if this were an actual plane,” I ask, “with actual ammunition?” Trey thinks back to his early days flying an A-10. “Honestly, the kinetic energy of the gun really scares me,” he says. “The airplane shakes, vibrates, gun gas goes over the top. It’s a life-changing experience.”

I was shaking as we pulled away, and I took the wheel so I could focus on the road. The quiet sat heavy in the car and heavy, too, on the desert that streamed past outside. I turned down a dirt road and, rattling over ruts from the last rain, steered us toward a pullout for the night.

Ryan worked to set up camp: “A little help here?”

“I can’t,” I snapped.

Looking at Ryan reminded me of how he had looked at the planes. How the little boy behind us on the road had watched the bombs fall. How drivers crane their necks at highway accidents. How loggers who spend long days under the moss and woven green canopy will say unequivocally that they love the forest more than most people, will say there’s nothing more rapturous than toppling a thousand-year-old tree. There is a blend of revulsion and ecstasy in watching that kind of power play out. At the time, I couldn’t foretell how good that power would soon feel in my own grip.

My stomach hurt, and I hurried away from the circle of light around our little camper and farther up the dirt road. The gold of sunset was fading into a purply dusk, and I arrived at the road’s end, where a canyon opened up to an abrupt cliff face. I found a rock and sat and waited for my heart to slow. Some evening bird was singing from inside the canyon’s echoing spaces. A papery bat squeaked in the air above my head. Tears heated my cheeks. I listened for the shuffle of rabbits and instead, out of the surrounding not-emptiness of the desert, heard my own breath.

When a plane crashes in the simulator, nobody gets hurt. The damages undo themselves like an audio cassette on rewind. The system reboots and the runway reappears, hungry for moving wheels and the pressure release of liftoff. Smoke dissipates and the open land — empty and unhurtable — awaits the next concussive blast, which will be its first and thousandth injury. The pilot soars again and it’s a giddy thing: sky and buoyancy and euphoric abstraction.

When a plane crashes in the simulator, there’s no impact. The seat doesn’t shake, bones don’t fling backward from the crushing up-push of land.

When a plane crashes in the simulator, the windshield dips below the known parameters: the land turns from braided channel and dirt-brown patchwork to a glowing computerized gray. We’ve arrived at the underneath, the edge of the known system. The plane glides to a stop in the amniotic emptiness. Undersides of buildings bob overhead like swimming bodies seen from below. They are blocky and featureless; this isn’t meant to be part of the game.

The battleship, overturned, floats suspended above us. In the moments before reset, flames still spout from its blasted side. The red-orange fire — like the lag between swoop and strike, like the darkness of the border wall against the gathering dusk, like the smoking desert, like the red truck glinting in the rearview, make no sound and so, perhaps, they are not real.

 

•••

Hannah Hindley is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. Her work has appeared in journals, newspapers, and anthologies including River Teeth, the Harvard Review, and Terrain.org. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism, the New Conrads prize in maritime fiction, the Bill Waller Award for Nonfiction, and an honorable mention for the AWP Intro Journals Award. She is currently at work on an essay collection that explores the borderland between storytelling and science.