Something Man-Made Is Here

by Kurt Vonnegut, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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1991

In the desert outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, the government of the United States has dug a hole two thousand one hundred and fifty feet down into a bed of salt. It puts things into the hole that will stay poisonous for longer than there has been such a thing as writing.

The law says the place has to be marked, so that nobody digs it up by mistake for ten thousand years.

Ten thousand years ago, the people in what is now New Mexico were hunting animals that do not exist anymore. Nobody had warned them about anything. They had no idea we were coming. We would have been very hard to explain.

So in 1991 the Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, got together two teams of experts. There were anthropologists. There was a linguist. There was an astronomer, the kind who listens for messages from other planets. There was an architect, and there were people who knew how long granite lasts in the rain, and how long steel lasts, and how long anything lasts. They were asked a simple question.

How do you put up a sign that says KEEP OUT for ten thousand years?

They wrote a report. It came out in November of 1993, and it was called Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. You can read it. I have.

Part of what they proposed to say to the future goes like this:

"This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here."

And a little later: "This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."

I think it is one of the saddest and most honest things a government has ever written down. It was not written by poets. It was written by people with slide rules in their past, trying to be clear. That is why it is so sad.

All of that is true.

What comes next is not. I made up a woman, because I needed somebody in New Mexico who had once put up a sign that worked.

1956–1990

Her name was Guadalupe Archuleta, and everybody called her Lupe.

She painted road signs for the state highway department, in the sign shop in Roswell, for thirty-four years. She started when she was twenty-five, because her father knew a man. She retired at fifty-nine, because her back said so.

In those thirty-four years she painted, by her own estimate, which she had worked out once on the back of a calendar, about eleven thousand signs.

STOP. CATTLE GUARD. DIP. FLOOD AREA. DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED. NEXT GAS 63 MILES. LOOSE GRAVEL. SOFT SHOULDER. WATCH FOR ROCKS.

She did not think of herself as a writer. But she had written more words that people actually read and actually did something about than most writers who ever lived. I include myself.

And she had learned three things about signs, which she would tell you if you bought her a coffee.

The first thing was that a sign should be short. Everybody who reads a sign is in a hurry. Nobody ever pulled over to finish a sign.

The second thing was that any sign standing by itself in the desert will get shot.

It was not personal. It was boys. Boys between about fourteen and twenty-two, with a .22 rifle and a pickup truck and a Saturday with nothing in it. A sign out there is the only thing for miles that is flat and bright and has a meaning. So they shoot the meaning.

She once got a sign back to the shop to be replaced that said NEXT GAS 63 MILES. She counted the holes in it, on her lunch break. There were a hundred and forty-one. You could still read the 63. She was proud of that. She had made the numbers good and thick.

The third thing was the one she was least sure how to say.

In thirty-four years, the only signs of hers that never got shot were the ones on roads that nobody had any reason to drive down.

1991

Lupe Archuleta had a nephew named Ernesto who was a pipefitter, and in 1991 he was working at the site outside Carlsbad.

He came to her house for Sunday dinner in March and told her about the experts. He had it from a man who had it from a secretary. There were very smart people from all over, he said, college professors, and they were trying to figure out what to write on top of the hole so that people ten thousand years from now would not dig it up.

"What are they going to write?" said Lupe.

"Nobody knows yet," said Ernesto. "That's what they're figuring out. Some of them want to carve faces. Scared faces. Like that painting, the guy on the bridge holding his head."

"In what language?"

"All of them, I guess. Every one they can think of."

"And the ones they can't think of?"

Ernesto said he did not know. He was a pipefitter. He passed the beans.

1991

That night Lupe sat up at the kitchen table and wrote a letter.

She wrote it in pencil first, on the back of a feed-store calendar, and then she copied it out in ink on good paper she had been saving since nobody remembered when. I am going to give it to you whole, because it is short. She knew how to be short.

To the Experts
Sandia Laboratories
Albuquerque

Dear Sirs and Ladies,

I painted road signs for the State of New Mexico for 34 years. I understand you are making a sign. I would like to tell you some things.

1. Keep it short. Nobody pulls over.

2. Somebody will shoot it. I do not know what they will have in 10,000 years instead of a .22, but they will have something, and they will be about 17, and they will be bored.

3. Whatever you put up out there, it will be the only interesting thing for miles. That is the problem. Then they will want to know what is under it. That is how people are.

4. The signs of mine that never got shot were on roads that went nowhere. Nobody went there. That is my advice. Make it a place nobody wants to go. Do not make it pretty. Do not make it scary either. Scary is a kind of interesting. Make it dull.

I hope this is some help.

Yours truly,
Guadalupe Archuleta (Mrs.)
Carlsbad

P.S. Make the letters good and thick.

She addressed the envelope to The Experts, and she put a stamp on it, and she mailed it in the morning on her way to Mass.

1991

The letter got there. I have decided that it got there. I am the one making her up, and I will not have it lost in the mail.

It was opened by a young woman in an office whose job was opening letters about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, of which there were a great many. Most of them were angry, and some were frightened, and some were from people who wanted to tell the government that Jesus was coming back, so that none of this would matter.

The young woman read Lupe's letter twice. She liked the part about the .22.

Then she put it in a folder marked PUBLIC CORRESPONDENCE, and she sent Lupe a form letter, signed by a machine, thanking her for her interest in the safe disposal of the nation's defense-generated transuranic waste.

Lupe stuck the form letter to her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a chile pepper. It stayed there for six years.

1997

In the spring of 1997 she made Ernesto drive her out to look at the place.

She was sixty-six. She had never asked to see anything before in her life. She had been to Juárez twice and to Denver once, for a cousin's wedding, and that was the extent of her travels, and she had not cared for Denver. But she wanted to see this.

It was about a forty-minute drive east from Carlsbad. Ernesto took the pickup. She brought a thermos of coffee and two burritos wrapped in foil, the way she had for thirty-four years of driving out to see whether a sign was standing where it was supposed to stand.

There was not much to see. There were some buildings, and a headframe, and a tall fence, and a great deal of flat country around it in every direction, the color of a paper bag, with creosote bushes on it. The wind was blowing. The wind is always blowing out there. Nobody ever painted a sign that said so, because it would have been a waste of paint.

There was a sign by the gate, saying what the place was and that you could not come in.

Lupe got out of the pickup and walked right up to it, as close as the guard would let her, and looked at it for a long time, the way a dentist looks at a tooth.

It did not have a single hole in it.

"Well?" said Ernesto.

"That's cheating," said Lupe. "They've got a man with a gun standing next to it."

She got back in the truck. They ate the burritos with the engine running, for the air conditioning, looking at the fence.

"In ten thousand years," Lupe said, "there's not going to be any man with a gun."

"No," said Ernesto. "I guess not."

"Then it's just going to be the sign," Lupe said. "By itself. Out here." She shook her head. "Poor thing."

When she got home she took the form letter off the refrigerator. There was grease on it by then, from six years of frying. She read it one more time and threw it out, and she put a picture of Ernesto's twins up in its place, under the chile pepper.

1993

I should be fair to the experts. They were not fools. They had thought of nearly everything Lupe thought of, and a great many things she did not.

They knew about tomb robbers. They wrote, in their report, about the guardian figures that people long ago set up at burial places to frighten intruders away. Those warnings had not worked. The robbers came anyway. Some of those guardian figures are in museums now, frightening nobody, with little cards beside them.

The reason the warnings did not work, the experts said, was that the robbers knew there was something valuable inside.

So the experts wrote: Nothing valued is here.

They also decided that every marker, before it said anything else, had to say one thing first. It was the simplest message they had. It went: Something man-made is here.

Lupe would have liked that line. It was short. It was true. It said: this is a road that goes nowhere. She never saw it. The report was not the kind of thing that came to Carlsbad on the bookmobile.

But the experts also wanted the place to be enormous, and strange, and unforgettable, so that it could not be mistaken for an accident of nature. One team drew pictures of a field of giant stone thorns, sticking up out of the ground at every angle, so that nobody could build a house there or grow a crop. They called it a Landscape of Thorns. Another idea was faces, carved in stone, like the man in the Munch painting, holding his head and screaming.

I have looked at the drawings. They are very frightening. They are also the most interesting thing I have seen in a long while, and I have been around.

Lupe would have said: There. Now somebody is going to want to see it.

12,026

There is a boy.

I am not going to give him a name. I do not know what names will sound like then, and anything I guessed would be wrong in a way that would embarrass us both.

He is about eleven. He is herding goats on a hot afternoon across a flat country of salt scrub and caliche, which is what the country is now and what it is going to be then. Deserts do not change much in ten thousand years. Neither do goats.

The markers are mostly gone.

It is not that anybody attacked them. It is that they were very good stone, cut very square, sitting out in a country where good square stone is hard to come by. For about four thousand years, people came with carts and took them away a piece at a time, to build sheep pens and walls and a sort of temple, and the foundations of a town that is not there anymore either. A great deal of the warning about the danger of this place is now holding up the danger of somebody's roof falling in, somewhere else.

I expect the experts thought of that too. They just could not do anything about it. Nobody can.

What is left, where the boy's goats are, is one big block, tipped over on its side, about half of it under the dirt.

On the part that is not under the dirt there is a face.

7,340

Here is why that block is still there, when so many others are holding up walls somewhere.

About forty-seven hundred years before the boy, a man came with an ox cart and his two sons, to get stone. He had a pry bar made of bronze, and a great deal of patience, and a wife who wanted a proper wall around the yard.

He and his sons had broken up and carted away three of the plain blocks already that summer. They were wonderful blocks. They were cut so square that they fit together with hardly a gap. There were marks on some of them, in rows, but that did not matter. You turned the marks to the inside of the wall.

Then they dug the dirt away from the side of the fourth block, and there was the face.

The younger son jumped back and fell over. The older son laughed at him. Then the older son looked at the face for a while himself, and stopped laughing.

"We could turn it to the inside," said the older son.

"It would still be in there," said the man. "Looking."

He thought about his wife, sitting in the yard in the evening with her back against that wall, and that face on the other side of the stones, screaming into the dark behind her head, for the rest of her life.

"Leave it," he said.

So they left it, and they went home with an ox cart full of plain stone, and his wife got her wall, and she liked it very much.

The warning worked on that man, in other words. It worked for the wrong reason, and he never knew what it was warning him about. That is how most warnings work, when they work at all. I have been warned about a great many things in my time, and that is how they worked on me.

12,026

It is a man's face, or a person's, anyway. It is holding its head in its hands. Its mouth is open as wide as it will go. Its eyes are two holes.

It has been rained on for nearly ten thousand years, and sandblasted by nearly ten thousand springs of wind, so it is not as sharp as it was. It has a soft, puzzled look now, like a man who has been screaming for so long that he has forgotten what about.

Next to it, there are some marks in rows. They are writing, in several languages, all of them dead. The boy does not know they are writing. He thinks they are a pattern, like the pattern his aunt weaves into the edges of blankets.

There is a hole in the face's left cheek, perfectly round, about the size of a lentil.

I do not know what made it. Neither does the boy. I have my suspicions.

12,026

The boy looks at the face for a while.

Then he puts his own hands on his own head, and opens his mouth as wide as it will go, and makes the face right back at it.

This is very funny to him. He does it again. He does it at the goats, and the goats are not impressed, and that is funny too.

Then he picks up a rock and throws it at the face, because he is eleven and it is there.

It hits the stone forehead. It makes a sound like tock.

That is the last message ever exchanged between our civilization and that one.

Something man-made is here. The boy knows that much. Anybody would.

12,026

He would like to stay. But there is nothing for the goats to eat. The ground around the block is poor, poorer than anywhere else in a poor country, white with salt, and the scrub is thin and bitter. The goats have been drifting away from it ever since they got there. Goats know a road that goes nowhere when they see one.

So he whistles them in, and they come, more or less, and he walks them home the long way around, toward the smoke of his mother's fire, with the sun going down behind him the color of a STOP sign.

His mother asks him where he has been all afternoon.

"Nowhere," he says.

She gives him his supper.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Curtō Vonnegutō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Kurt Vonnegut, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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