Swarm

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Into the belly of the beast, I thought.

The airplane looming above us in the red light of the setting sun had a bulbous body like a whale, with high and oddly twisted wings. A truck could have driven up its rear ramp and into its cavernous hold. It occurred to me that twenty-five years ago, when I was a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, I had watched the space shuttle land on the very runway that stretched into the formless desert beyond the plane.

Edwards Air Force Base around us was the size of a small town, but the empty wasteland that surrounded it made it seem fragile and impermanent, as if a divine wind might at any moment rise and sweep everything manmade into the endless annihilation of the desert. I had never been on any military base before and everything seemed strange and surreal. I felt both exhausted and wired, like I was being kept awake by amphetamines. It was hard to believe that this was actually happening, that I was really in this bustling martial hive, waiting to board the airplane that would take me to fearsome Colombia.

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