On Drones
By John Teschner, The Iowa Review (Spring 2013)
I was afraid of ghosts when I was a kid. I lay awake after my parents said goodnight and refused to put my head out of the covers. It was a crude way to manage my fear, but most nights it allowed me to fall asleep after an hour or so. One night, I dreamed that I was still awake and calling out in fear. My father came to the open door, stood there a minute without speaking, then came in. He walked across the room and sat on the edge of the bed. His face was painted like a clown’s. Those were his eyes behind the white paint and red grin, but they met mine with no sign of recognition. We looked at each other like that for a long time. It’s the worst dream I’ve ever had.
Years later, at the Museum of African Art in Washington DC, I encountered the same impassive gaze in an exhibit of masks donated by the estate of Walt Disney. Most had stylized features carved in stained wood. But one was a perfect replica of a human head, right down to the skin attached with nearly imperceptible stitches. Unlike the other masks, it had realistic eyes with corneas and pupils. Only its spiraling horns were inhuman. When I’d seen enough, I strolled a few blocks down the Mall to the National Air and Space Museum, where I could rest my gaze on polished steel and precision rivets.
I wandered through a gallery of World War II aircraft, emerged onto an elevated walkway, and came face-to-face with a Predator drone. It was January 2010; the New York Times had just published the first details of the CIA’s secret drone war in Pakistan, and I wasn’t expecting to encounter a Predator suspended from the ceiling of the Air and Space Museum. It had the simple lines of a balsa-wood glider, and a Hellfire anti-tank missile tucked below each twenty-five-foot wing. Where a cockpit should have been, there was only a smoothly amputated swelling. The longer I looked at the drone, the less it seemed to have in common with the war planes, space capsules, lunar rovers, and high-altitude gondolas around it than with the skin mask in the other museum. Both gave me a feeling of fear and fascination inextricably mingled, the same irresistible urge that had once driven me to read ghost stories in daylight, though I knew I’d pay for it when I was alone in the dark. The feeling was familiar, profound, and impossible to explain: an urgent signal from a source I did not recognize, carrying a message I could not decipher.
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