In Other Words Acid West by Joshua Wheeler

Southern New Mexico is Joshua Wheeler’s home terrain, and Acid West is his phenomenal ode to it. A sadomasochistic shorthand for the region, SNM, is introduced early in Wheeler’s collection of essays on nuclear fallout, video game refuse, “patrionoia” (a mashup of patriotism and paranoia), and other features, past and present, of the landscape. “Most of us SNM-ans feel some pride or gratification in the way our half of the state is robbed or abused or forgotten entirely — like it makes us the better half because we endure the most fiscal pain or Border Patrol harassment or tourism-department shafting or general ignorance about our existence,” he writes. “We are just the bottom. And we like it.”

It’s likely that Wheeler’s seven generations of Southern New Mexican forebears were frequent witnesses to that sense of disinterest in the area’s inhabitants. He writes that an early New Mexican ancestor may have made his living as a jackrabbit hunter around the turn of the 20th century, trying to sell his wares outside the posh new Hotel Alamogordo. Eventually the family owned a large ranch where weather balloons and missiles landed during Wheeler’s grandfather’s generation. The ranch was sold when Wheeler was young, “after the government gobbled it up using eminent domain until the ranch house was surrounded by a missile range.” (Wheeler grew up in Alamogordo and is now an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University.)

A tenuous cohabitation between government and citizenry is explored in “Children of the Gadget,” Wheeler’s essay on the aftermath of the atomic detonation at the Trinity Site in 1945. Although “all the official Army reports claim nobody lives in this area,” plenty of non-nobodies are around to tell of high rates of cancer, cows that changed color after the blast (but were then sent to slaughter and eaten), and the struggle to pay medical bills, without government compensation, for conditions related to radiation exposure. It is stomach-churning to read of phony evacuation plans and one doctor’s admission that people who had been overexposed couldn’t prove it, “so we just assumed we got away with it.” One woman describes how her father, a toddler at the time of the blast, was teased about how much milk he loved to drink. “But now they realize the error of their joking — those irradiated cows,” Wheeler reports; later in life, the man had one cancer after another.

Wheeler chronicles subsequent instances of the uneasy dynamic among technology, government, and people. At a UFO festival in Roswell, he listens to convictions that the 1947 alien incident there entailed a still-undisclosed government cover-up. He writes of drones getting moving-target practice by following cars along Highway 54. His family and another bond over having lost ranches to the White Sands Missile Range. The essays are not conspiratorial, however. Rather, they are carefully researched and reported, with humor providing some levity, or maybe just confirming the absurdity of so much of it all.

Acid West does not form a succinct survey of a boundary-delineated region. The essays sprawl, enveloping religion, philosophy, history, science, and pop culture in a way that complicates things as seemingly simple as human ears. It may seem ridiculous that Wheeler would dub those body parts “labyrinthine fetal voodoo dolls hanging like bats from the head’s flanks.” But in the context of an essay on faith in Ciudad Juárez, that rendering becomes an admirable summation of elements as disparate as French medicine, meditational wandering, acupuncture, and possibly evolution. Descriptions are often free-wheeling. Of a bar in Truth or Consequences, Wheeler writes, “Everything in the saloon is pine and covered in a little bit of sweat from joy and a little bit of sweat from toil and there’s that thick bar air from years of liquor-swelled dreams that don’t quite break but just get stagnant and hang around.”

Complex comparisons are also strikingly wrought: between video games and the Shroud of Turin, or between baseball spectators and drone operators. Footnotes extend across pages. (David Foster Wallace’s influence is salient, but Wheeler’s style is his own.) Conjunctions do some heavy lifting. Even section breaks and tenses become the objects of dexterous play. The collection seems to be a raucous mutiny against the notion that language should be subject to inflexible regulations.

Throughout the essays, there is a struggle for deeper understanding — of an indifferent region, yes, but also of the indifferent forces at play regardless of locale: technology, gravity, mortality. Standing watch over the hyped-up resurrection of video game cartridges from an Alamogordo landfill, he observes, “When you encounter something seemingly meaningless, you can accept the numbness of it or ache for profundity. Whenever possible, I tend toward the ache.” This is Wheeler’s debut collection, and hopefully, the first of many in which that ache for profundity gives readers so much to reflect on. — Grace Parazzoli