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  Pops and I throw Cracker Jacks at a guy in a pupfish outfit, our mascot: Gordo. Everybody teases Gordo. One kind of pupfish lives on the brink of extinction in our White Sands, bubbling up in springs that trickle through the hardened gypsum, tiny guys that glow iridescent when they mate, blue or purple, gleaming translucent the way any of us might if we found ourselves in the miracle of one puddle in a white-hot desert with a boner and another fish. No one understands why Pupfish is the name of our baseball club—of all the Old West culture, cowboys and outlaws, of all the Native American lore, of all the war machines and aerospace technology, we ride a scrawny, glowing fish to America’s most storied field of play. Last year the Pupfish were banned from Applebee’s for ripping apart the dining room while trading blows with a bunch of airmen who got to giggling about the team’s name. Gordo’s mascot getup is the epitome of semipro: the fins only come to his elbows, so his bare arms and hands and fingers are on display, and his bowed legs are sticking out of the yellow foam fillets from the thigh down and his manface looms in the dark of his gaping fishmouth. Too much of the human visible. The way we dream up a transformation and give it a half-assed go and get ourselves stuck looking silly. A swing and a miss and the beer’s a buck cheaper.

  Wedged in the fence behind home plate is a camcorder and its ponytailed operator, who mostly just stands around puffing cigarettes, but sometimes he flips open the side viewer and ducks down and jabs his smoking fingers at the buttons and smooths his ponytail and studies the video. Redneck nearly instant replay. Five miles west, as the Reaper flies, two airmen sit in recliners in a steel cargo container, far from war but dressed for it with flight suits and headsets, one manning a control stick and a couple of pedals, the other on a scroll ball, both airmen staring at six screens each, GPS and sensor video feed and data and data and data. The ponytail ashes and grins and slaps his screen closed when he knows a call was either right or wrong, but he’s just some guy so it doesn’t matter much. In the major leagues of our national pastime the powers that be are all tore up about the role of replay, about the extent to which they’re charged with making sure every call is right, tore up about bringing already-common video technology to the old sport and whether that will skew its soul. Pops says, Keep the tradition of using your eyeballs. All the talk is of eyeballs. Last week the Boston Red Sox skipper went on a rant about science proving the human eye misses out on the final five feet of a pitch, how hurlers are now so good their pitches cut and split and move all over in that last five feet, how we need cutting-edge technology to get it right. Your lens doesn’t snap that photograph, the skipper says. So if you can’t see it, why are we asking umpires to call it? They can’t see it. They’re humans. We’re asking humans to do a feat a human can’t do.* Our eyeball wasn’t built to track something so imminent—we were meant to flee or fight back, anything but hold still in judgment.

  Tonight the umpire behind home plate is a kid, younger looking than most of the players, mostly swallowed up under his chest pillow, a little lanky like he would have been great on the mound, but he’s signed up for a job of jeers and he doesn’t care. He sings strikes like opera. He flails his fist way out from his body and hollers each one sustained and soprano just in case the foul lines do extend to infinity and somebody deep along the way gives a damn. He’s not worried about second-guessing. He’s confident about his eyeballs, how they rolled from the goop of his brain early in development but never let go, stayed tethered by the optic nerve, started the lifelong turn of light into neural twitches into thought into decisions about holding still and calling strikes—how the complexity of the human eye is the hardest thing for evolution to explain. The fans are tired of trusting it. Most are leaning toward an everything-but-the-strike-zone policy for instant replay in the big leagues. This season they can review home runs, and next season they may add the review of line drives that are hell for an eyeball to judge because they come off the bat like a bullet, like a missile, absolutely no sense of the arc, no chance to predict a path, where it will land or on which side of the line. And then tags and then trapped balls in the outfield and then everything but the strike zone will be decided by rewinding the world a few seconds, by taking another look at the same tiny moment, rewound and replayed again and again, just that one instant until somebody staring at a couple of screens is confident we’ve got all the information to understand it exactly right, that tiny moment, then on to the next.

  The Invaders’ third-base coach sends signals to his batter, a handswipe across the chest and a touch to the bill of his cap and a wipe down the length of each arm followed by banging his fists and doing some wacky twisting of his wrists. A primitive form of communication. The Invader at the plate gets the gist and turns to the batter’s box but pauses before digging in, grabs his crotch, tugs at his belt, taps at his cleats with the bat, bends left, spits, bends right, spits, tugs his helmet down and chokes up and spits again and tugs at the left shoulder of his jersey and grabs his crotch and does the whole thing again just exactly the same before every pitch. A primitive form of religion. The Pupfish catcher gets in his squat and reaches with his ungloved hand under his right thigh and rubs back to his ass, holding still like that for a moment before bringing his hand up under his mask, to blow on his fingers, or lick them. From where I sit he appears to be eating his own shit, a pantomime not exactly gross but provocative—like this might have been a more effective design for us, scrolling the same chunk of fuel through our bodies for an entire lifetime. Why were we designed just so, to such arbitrary specifications, with eyeballs like ours and desire for more than our own shit? And then the crack of the bat. An Invader gets to first on a fielder’s choice. Pops sends me for another round of dogs and beer. I walk in stride with an Invader who has left the field of play, headed to check a phone he’s plugged into the generator behind the food cart.

  The awful great thing about baseball is that it’s boring as hell to watch. I can get lost in pondering all of existence, but I’ve got the crack of the bat to snap me back into the story, ground me in the game, in life for just a moment before I drift again into a lazy anxiety about the universe. Even the players spend most of their time spitting. Pops keeps his dip in his lip as he watches the game. I’ve never seen him spit the stuff out. His gut is a steel vat bubbling with wintergreen Skoal, but he looks calm always and keeps pretty quiet. I say, I’m bored, not because I am bored but because baseball fosters a feeling of boredom so the crack of the bat, when it happens, stings and echoes like an epiphany. You just gotta wait for it. Wait for it. Pops looks at me and says nothing because it is only the bottom of the fourth and the Pupfish are already trying to rally from five runs down.

  Thirty years ago the thirty-third inning of the longest game in baseball history was played two months after the game first began. Those minor leaguers only really played about nine hours over two days, but damn—a baseball game can last nine hours and sometimes it seems even longer. The sport embodies timelessness: no game clock, all the action moving counterclockwise around the diamond, all the cyclical rhythms of its agrarian origins spilling out in the rebirth of spring training and the freeze of the Fall Classic and the hacking away and the whackers and the apple-knockers and the rhubarb and brushback and bush league and rain check and snake jazz, which is the curveball that first got us knocking at apples in the garden, obsessed with knowledge and the idea that we might get things wrong. The game could go on forever and that’s the rub with replay, that it will slow the game down even more, that we will go on forever indulging our information lust, trying to get every call right and never making it to the end unless we bore ourselves to death.

  Crack.

  A Pupfish homers. A Pupfish doubles. A Pupfish gets caught stealing third to end the inning.

  The sun is pretty well set now. Two fans pull out their cowbells. A group of teens down the third-base line have hurried through a bunch of beer and started up the taunts. One girl yells at the Invaders, My balls are bigger than yours! Her taunt
does not get lost in a crowd of taunts or drowned out by a crowd of cheers or chatter, but because almost no one is here, her taunt lingers in the air over what is clearly an only slightly modified Little League baseball field, and her taunt sours in the quiet and stretches over the grass, with the shadow of the meager press box crawling across the infield toward the Sacramento Mountains until the park lights sizzle to life and all darkness is pushed back just enough for the game to keep on boring us until it incites us. Five miles west, as the Reaper flies, the remote pilot and sensor operator are in the steel cargo container dealing with the same problem of doldrums as they fly what military brass call “the unblinking eye.” One of them says, Highly skilled, highly trained people can only eat so many peanut M&M’s or Doritos or whatnot. The other one says, For most missions nothing happens. Your plane orbits in the sky, you watch and you wait … It’s very boring.

  The 29th Attack Squadron is in Alamogordo training so they can avoid what the Air Force calls the two biggest causes of civilian casualties from drone strikes: lack of positive identification and lack of tactical patience. Out in the White Sands just on the edge of town, you can visit the sites where they filmed Jarhead and Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Men Who Stare at Goats because this place, they say, is so much like that place: the Middle East. The studio execs grin and call our land NewMexistan. If you look, they say, at each desert just so, through a camera, on a screen: they’re practically the same.*

  I lean back on the bleachers and sigh to the heavens, but I don’t see much between me and the stars, though I know a handful of Reapers hover above us, their remote pilots getting a feel for their screens and how a desert looks on them and getting a feel for the feel of being bored until they get the itch to strike. Or until a Reaper hits the ground. Reapers crash at twice the rate of manned aircraft. If a Reaper crash-landed on the diamond right now, in the bottom of the sixth, skidding from one foul territory to the other, and stopped on the infield grass between the mound and home plate, the wings would span the distance from the laces of the ball leaving the hand of the Pupfish pitcher at the top of his hurl, over the dirt of his mound and over the perfectly manicured grass to the dirt around home, over the Invader’s choked hands and the barrel of his bat exploding toward the crescendo of his swing—a whiff—and the tip of the Reaper’s wing would extend just over the thud in the catcher’s mitt to stop exactly at the hand of the umpire as he unballs his fist and stands up straight after calling the strike, sustained and soprano just in case the foul lines chalk on to infinity and somebody deep along the way gives a damn. But Reapers don’t need to land so often. They were built to stay aloft all day and night or maybe just fourteen hours if they’re heavy with a payload of Hellfire missiles. They’re small for a plane and they fly high and are relatively quiet, but oddly, they are conspicuous in the skies over Waziristan, like we want everyone on the ground to know we are there, like Reapers evolved for surveillance and then for killing but also there’s the advantageous mutation of terror. Villagers all over North and South Waziristan tell stories of the maddening sound: I can’t sleep at night because when the drones are there … I hear them making that sound, that noise. The drones are all over my brain, I can’t sleep. When I hear the drones making that drone sound, I just turn on the light and sit there looking at the light.

  Not two months after the destruction of the World Trade Center an F-117A Nighthawk, the pinnacle of our stealth-aircraft engineering, flew over Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix to launch Game 7 of the 2001 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks. The plane flew low and loud just as Jesse McGuire trilled out the last notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on his trumpet. The crowd went wild, and Jesse blew out the very bottom of his lungs and got to fist pumping and jumping and pumping his trumpet at the sky while the whole stadium shook from the boom of the flyover and the boom of fifty thousand fans giving up the last of their lungs too, even before the first pitch, because no matter who won the game, it was great to be alive and American. The Nighthawk was the plane I grew up with, black and sharp with so many slick facets, like an Apache arrowhead commandeered by Darth Vader. We used to get our school pictures taken standing in front of the thing. The pilots were heroes around town. Now the Nighthawks are all retired to graveyards and the U.S. arsenal swells to nearly seven hundred Predators and Reapers, but I don’t guess we will ever get a triumphant drone flyover to commence a ball game, the small plane hovering slowly, just barely visible above the stadium, all the fans holding their breath to hear the slight, steady buzz of the propeller, like the motor of a distant neighbor’s lawn mower as he rides over the same patch of grass all of Saturday afternoon, just to get out and see what’s going on. But I know right now at this ball game, Reapers do hover over us—there is no better place to train for boredom, to overcome lack of tactical patience.

  The Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey, was the first place the game of baseball ever bored anyone, in this month of June, 166b years ago.* In Greek mythology the Elysian fields are a paradise where gods send heroes of war after making them immortal. No one will ever die piloting a Reaper. I wonder if eternal paradise is something we can manifest and if it will ever bore us. “The lack of tactical patience is not a problem that can be solved technologically,” says an official Air Force report on diminishing civilian casualties from drone strikes. “That is a matter of training American soldiers to live in a surreal moral universe.”†

  Crack.

  A Pupfish fights off the inside heat and then takes a ball and stumbles back to avoid losing his head when the pitcher hurls some chin music. The aggression begins when the Invader pitcher launches a fastball toward the lone Pupfish at bat, or the aggression begins before that when the Pupfish steps to the plate and waves a stick, or the aggression is sparked by the catcher crouching behind the batter, adopting his perspective, sending covert signals to his pitcher asking for a strike or some dangerous chin music. “Is it so clear who is the defense, who is the offense?”* Obama has a “kill list” and a stack of “terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls … macabre ‘baseball cards.’” But most Hellfire missiles get loosed in Pakistan not because we know a guy’s biography or even his name, but because we’ve observed his “pattern of life” in the desert of Waziristan, extrapolated the imminence of his threat to us by putting the eye of a Reaper on him from five thousand or twenty thousand or sixty thousand feet above, watching like a kid learning mad science, holding a magnifying glass between the sun and an ant. Signature strikes, they’re called, and only the powers that be know what that signature is, what confluence of data streaming into our screens from our drones halfway around the world adds up to a “positive identification” of a “pattern of life” that deserves to be snuffed out.† “Among the elements that could combine for a lethal signature,” writes Andrew Cockburn, “was a man’s mode of urinating. Someone informed the targeters that while Pashtun men urinate standing up, Arab men squat.” This was “duly incorporated in the targeting algorithms.” And all those Invaders gathering at the mound, the infielders and the catcher and the skipper out there to check on his pitcher, huddling up in the dirt and jawing for a bit—a Reaper on high is bound to notice such an assembly, and the remote operators staring at their screens, running low on Doritos after twelve hours in a steel cargo container, are bound to find a pattern in it. The Invaders pitcher gives up the cowhide and heads for the dugout, done for the night. The rest of them linger around as the reliever arrives. The catcher returns to his squat. I can almost see it as ruins—the baseball there, unstitched and steaming. The mound is a crater. Flesh sizzles on the rim.

  Nobody can say for sure how many civilian casualties have resulted from American drone strikes in Pakistan, and that is maybe because the drones move on, the stream of data moves on to suck at another target, drones in the air twenty-four hours a day gathering data and data and data, enough data to make the exact right decision about wh
ose life has the scariest pattern when watched from twenty thousand feet, but then the gathering of data about that target stops because the target is totally “dismembered, mutilated, and burned beyond recognition” by Hellfire missiles. We cannot prove the innocence of someone we never bothered to identify and cannot now recognize.

  The Invaders strike out the side in the bottom of the sixth and now the seventh-inning stretch is in full swing. Some lady hollers a drunken rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” There are prizes. The announcer throws one T-shirt from the press box but the fans want more, so he grabs a half-gone box of Daylight Donuts and hurls them down one at a time. Folks on the bleachers get ferocious about the donuts even though they are stale. Everyone in town knows Daylight Donuts closes at noon. One lady climbs to the top bleacher, snags an airborne donut with each hand, then returns to her seat and munches. She’s German, at the game with her kid and probably in town with the German Air Force, which also trains at Holloman. She feels better now, with the donuts, and even though the game is nearly over, she turns to me and asks what all the numbers on the scoreboard mean. I say, Runs, hits, and errors. She says, Errors? I say, Yeah, when somebody makes a mistake, an error. Tonight there are only two errors, both committed by the Invaders. She says, Why would they put “errors” on the scoreboard?—but says it mostly to herself and gets lost again in the donuts.