A saguaro splinter! she claims.
I turn around from my seat, lick the tip of my finger, and place it softly on the—most likely imaginary—splinter. The heel of her foot is soft and smooth, and as I hold my finger against it, I remember the feet of that lost boy being cured by the girl in the train yard.
The reply to my email arrives around noon, when we are just a few miles from Roswell, buying coffees and juices at a gas station. The lawyer says she does not know the exact time, though she thinks it will be during the early afternoon, and confirms our deduction: the planes will leave from the Artesia Municipal Airport. I check the map. The airport is only forty miles south of Roswell. If the planes are scheduled to take off in the early afternoon, we will easily get there in time.
TRANSFERALS
As we speed toward the airport near Artesia, I listen for more news on the radio, find nothing. I switch it off and listen to our two children playing in the backseat. Their games have become more vivid, more complex, more convincing. Children have a slow, silent way of transforming the atmosphere around them. They are so much more porous than adults, and their chaotic inner life leaks out of them constantly, turning everything that is real and solid into a ghostly version of itself. Maybe one child, alone, by himself, cannot modify the world the adults around him or her sustain and entertain. But two children are enough—enough to break the normality of that world, tear the veil down, and allow things to glow with their own, different inner light.
I efface myself for a while, and simply let their voices fill the space of the car and the space in my head. They’re participating in a verbal choreography that involves horses, airplanes, and a spacecraft. I know their father is also listening to them, although he’s concentrating on the road, and I wonder if he feels the way I do—if he senses how our rational, linear, organized world dissolves into the chaos of our children’s words. I wonder and want to ask him if he, too, notices how their thoughts are filling our world, inside this car, filling it and blurring all its outlines with the same slow persistency of smoke expanding inside a small room. I don’t know to what degree my husband and I have made our stories theirs; and they, their stories and backseat games, ours. Perhaps we mutually infect each other with our fears, obsessions, and expectations, as easily as we pass around a flu virus.
The boy shoots poisoned arrows at a Border Patrol officer from a big horse, while the girl hides from American bluecoats under some kind of desert thornbush (though she finds mangoes growing on its branches and stops to eat one before she jumps out to attack). After a long battle, the two children sing a song together to resuscitate a fellow child warrior.
Listening to them now, I realize they are the ones who are telling the story of the lost children. They’ve been telling it all along, over and over again in the back of the car, for the past three weeks. But I hadn’t listened to them carefully enough. And I hadn’t recorded them enough. Perhaps my children’s voices were like those bird songs that my husband helped Steven Feld record once, which function as echoes of people who have passed away. Their voices, the only way to listen to voices that are not audible; children’s voices, no longer audible, because those children are no longer here. I realize now, perhaps too late, that my children’s backseat games and reenactments were maybe the only way to really tell the story of the lost children, a story about children who went missing on their journeys north. Perhaps their voices were the only way to record the soundmarks, traces and echoes that lost children left behind.
I think about that persistent question:
Why did you come to the United States?
And why are we here? I wonder.
What are you thinking, Ma? the boy suddenly asks me from behind.
Just thinking that you’re right. It’s “fight-or-flight” and not “firefly” mode.
AIRPLANE
On a strip of gravel, we pull over. To our right is a long wire mesh fence, and on the other side of the fence, there’s a runway where a small airplane stands still, an airstair attached to its only door. It’s not a commercial plane but not a military aircraft either. It indeed looks like a private plane (an American plane, made in America). We step out of the car, into the dense heat, the midday sun beating down on us. The girl is asleep in the backseat, so we leave two doors open to allow air to blow through the car.
There is no one on the runway except a maintenance man, driving a kind of golf cart in loops. I have my recorder with me, and tuck it into my left boot, pressing Record before I do and making sure the mic is sticking out, ready to trap at least the sounds closer to us. We lean against the car while we wait for something to happen—but nothing does. My husband lights a cigarette and smokes it with long, strained puffs. He asks if he can record some sounds, asks if I mind. I tell him to go ahead; that’s why we’re here, after all. I watch the maintenance man, who now steps out of the little cart, picks something up from the pavement—a rock? a penny? a wrapper?—deposits it into a black bag hanging from the back of the golf cart, then steps back into his seat and resumes his route until he eventually disappears into the hangar at the right end of the airstrip.
I ask the boy for his binoculars, to get a closer look at the plane parked on the runway. He fetches them from the backseat, and also fetches his camera and the little red book from my box.
The two of us walk across the gravel strip, and stand right up against the fence. I adjust the binoculars to my eyes. Their metal rims feel hot. I zero in on the small plane, but there’s nothing to see. As I fiddle with the binoculars’ lenses, I hear the boy next to me preparing his camera. There is a suspended silence as he holds his breath while he tries to bring the plane into focus, then there’s the click of the shutter button, and then the sound of the rollers turning as they slide the photo out. With the binoculars, I scan the area under and around the plane, catch a bird in flight, and follow it until it disappears. I see the sky, clouds gathering in the distance, an occasional tree, steam rising above the tarmac at the far end of the runway. I hear the boy mumble as he concentrates on protecting the photograph from the blazing daylight, tucking it between the pages of the book so it can develop there, and wonder what sounds my husband’s microphone is capturing right now and which ones will be lost. I’m slowly sweeping the runway with the binoculars, left, then right, then up almost vertically toward the unvarying sky, and then down, angling them back closer to me until I see my own two feet blurred against the gravel. I hear the boy walking to the car to put his camera away again, and I hear him as he steps across the gravel back again to the fence, where I’m standing. He asks me for a turn at the binoculars, and I hand them over to him. He fixes the rims of the oculars to his eye sockets, and squints into the lenses the same way his father looks at the highway when he’s driving.
What do you see? I ask.
Just brown hills that are blurry and the sky that is blue, and the plane.
What else? Look harder.
If I look too hard, my eyes burn. And I see those little see-through things that float in the sky, sky-worms.
They’re not worms. Eye doctors call them floaters, but astronomers call them superstrings. Their purpose is to tie up the universe together. But what else besides superstrings?
I don’t know what else.
Come on. So many years of schooling? You can do better.
He pauses, and smiles back at me, acknowledging my teasing, and then maybe trying a little too hard to give me a patronizing glance. He’s still small enough to wear sarcasm and condescension like a suit several sizes too big. He looks back through the binoculars, and suddenly he says:
Look, Mama! Look over there!
I slowly walk my eyes on the tightrope laid out between his steady eyes and the line of small figures now stepping out of the hangar and onto the runway. They are all children. Girls, boys: one behind another, no backpacks, nothing. They march in single file, looking like they’ve surrendered, silent prisoners of some war they didn’t even get to fight. There are
n’t “hundreds,” as we’d heard there would be, but we count fifteen, perhaps twenty. It must be them. The night before, they were bused from a federal law enforcement training facility in Artesia to this small airport on State Road 559. Now they walk toward the plane that will take them back south. If they hadn’t gotten caught, they probably would have gone to live with family, gone to school, playgrounds, parks. But instead, they’ll be removed, relocated, erased, because there’s no place for them in this vast empty country.
I snatch the binoculars back, and focus. Several officers march at their side, as if the children might try to escape now, as if they could. I know they are not there, and that even if they were, I wouldn’t recognize them, but of course I look for Manuela’s daughters, trying to spot any two girls wearing matching dresses.
The boy tugs on my sleeve:
It’s my turn!
Mirages rise from the hot pavement. An officer escorts the last child onto the airstair, a small boy, maybe five or six, sucking his thumb as he climbs into the plane. The officer closes the door after him.
My turn to look, Ma.
Wait, I say.
I turn around to check on the girl inside the car. She’s asleep, thumb in her mouth, too. Inside the airplane, that boy will sit still in his seat, buckled up, and the air will be dry but cool. The boy will make an effort to stay awake while he waits for the departure, the way my daughter does, the way children his age do.
Mama, he might think.
But no one will answer.
Mama! the boy says, tugging on my sleeve again.
What is it? I reply, losing patience.
My binoculars!
Just wait a second, I tell him sternly.
Give them to me!
I finally hand them over again, my hands shaking. He focuses calmly. I look around anxiously, my jaw tense and my breathing getting quicker and shallower. The plane is standing in the same place, but the officers who escorted the children now walk back toward the hangar, looking like a football team after practice, joking around, slapping one another on the back of the head. Some of them spot us, I think, but they couldn’t care less. If anything, it seems like our presence, behind the fence that divides us, encourages them. They turn around to face the plane as its engines are switched on, and clap in unison as it slowly begins to maneuver. From some dark depth I didn’t know was in me, a rage is unleashed—sudden, volcanic, and untamable. I kick the mesh fence with all my strength, scream, kick again, throw my body against it, hurl insults at the officers. They can’t hear me over the plane’s engines. But I continue to scream and kick until I feel my husband’s arms surrounding me from behind, holding me, tight. Not an embrace but a containment.
When I regain control of my body, my husband lets go of me. The boy is focusing on the plane through his binoculars, and the plane is positioning itself on the runway. I don’t know what the boy is thinking and what he’ll eventually tell himself about this, or how he’ll remember the instant I am letting him witness. I have an impulse to cover his eyes, the way I still sometimes do when we watch certain movies together even though he’s older now. But the binoculars have already brought the world too close to him, the world has already projected itself inside him—so what should I protect him from now, and how, and what for? All that’s left for me to do, I think, is to make sure the sounds he records in his mind right now, the sounds that will overlay this instant that will always live inside him, are sounds that will assure him he was not alone that day. I step closer to him, wrapping an arm around his chest, and say:
Tell me what you see, Ground Control.
The spaceship is moving toward the runway, he answers, catching on.
Okay. And what else?
The astronauts are inside the ship now.
Good.
We’re almost ready for launch.
Good. What else?
Personnel clearing launch area. Helium and nitrogen pressurization under way. Launch vehicle switching to internal power.
What else? What else?
Wait, Ma, please, I don’t know what else.
Yes, you do. Just look hard and tell me everything. We are all counting on you.
For a moment he looks away from the binoculars, looks at me, then at his father, who is holding up his boom again, and then at his sister, asleep still, and then again into the binoculars. He takes a deep breath before he speaks, his voice firm:
Blast danger area cleared. Range has reported go for launch. Sixty seconds. Launch enable switch set to on position. Thirty seconds. Liquid oxygen fill and drain valve closed now. Ten seconds. Arm launch vehicle ignition system check. Nine, eight, seven. Go for main engine start. And six, five, four. Command main engine start. Three, two, one, lift-off…
Then what? I ask.
That’s it. Lift-off.
What else?
It’s hard to focus now. The ship is up in the sky and going faster, it’s too hard to focus now, I can’t.
We see the plane vanish into the enormous blue—fast and fading, soaring up and away into the now slightly clouded sky. It will soon fly across unpeopled cities, across plains and industrial cancers sprawling endlessly, over rivers and forests. My husband is still holding up his boom, as if there were anything left to record. The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather—more a whimper than a bang.
For a long time, I’ve been worried about what to tell our children, how to give them a story. But now, as I listen to the boy telling the story of this instant, the story of what we are seeing and the story of how we are seeing it, through him, a slow but solid certainty finally settles in me. It’s his version of the story that will outlive us; his version that will remain and be passed down. Not only his version of our story, of who we were as a family, but also his version of others’ stories, like those of the lost children. He’d understood everything much better than I had, than the rest of us had. He’d listened to things, looked at them—really looked, focused, pondered—and little by little, his mind had arranged all the chaos around us into a world.
The only thing that parents can really give their children are little knowledges: this is how you cut your own nails, this is the temperature of a real hug, this is how you untangle knots in your hair, this is how I love you. And what children give their parents, in return, is something less tangible but at the same time larger and more lasting, something like a drive to embrace life fully and understand it, on their behalf, so they can try to explain it to them, pass it down to them “with acceptance and without rancor,” as James Baldwin once wrote, but also with a certain rage and fierceness. Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don’t fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.
The boy is still pointing at the empty sky with his binoculars. So I ask him once again, this time just whispering:
What else do you see, Ground Control?
PART II
Reenactment
DEPORTATIONS
DEPARTURE
Calling Major Tom.
Checking sound. One, two, three.
This is Ground Control. You copy me, Major Tom?
This is the story of us, and of the lost children, from beginning to end, and I’m gonna tell it to you, Memphis.
We were there, and the lost children had disappeared on a plane into the sky. I was looking through my binoculars for them but couldn’t see anything else, and that’s what I told Mama. Just like you won’t see much in the picture I took of the plane before it departed. The important things that happened only happened after I took the picture, while it was developing in the dark, inside a little red book where I stored all my picture
s, inside a box, inside the car where you were sleeping.
And what happened, so you know it and so you can see it the way I do, too, when you look at the picture later one day, was that the lost children walked out of a hangar in a single line, and all of them were very quiet and looking down at their feet the way children look when they have to walk onto a stage and have stage fright, but of course much worse. They were all taken inside the plane, and I fixed my eyes on it with my binoculars tight against my sockets. Ma started swearing at the soldiers, then screaming like I never heard her before, and then just breathing, saying nothing. I focused hard, and had to focus again when the plane started moving slowly on the runway. Then it was harder to follow the plane speeding and angling up, and impossible to find it once it was up in the air, fast and fading. I buried my eyes deeper into the rims of my binoculars as if I was covering my ears except it was my eyes. Until finally I unstuck my eyes from them because there was nothing to see in the sky, no airplane anywhere up in the sky. It had disappeared, with the children. What happened that day is not called a departure or a removal. It’s called deportation. And we documented it.
FAMILY LEXICON
Officially, Pa was a documentarist and Ma was a documentarian, and very few people know the difference. The difference is, just so you know, that a documentarian is like a librarian and a documentarist is like a chemist. But both of them did basically the same thing: they had to find sounds, record them, store them on tape, and then put them together in a way that they told a story.
The stories they told, although they were sound-stories, were not like the audiobooks we listened to in the car. The audiobooks were made-up stories, meant to make time disappear or at least easier to get through. “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night…,” the car speakers said whenever Ma turned on the radio, if her phone was connected to it. I knew the line by heart and said it out loud whenever it sounded inside the car, and you would sometimes slip your thumb out of your mouth and repeat the line out loud with me, and you were so good at imitating. We’d both say the rest of the line even if Ma stopped the recording before it was over: “…he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” Then Ma would press Stop, and look for the audiobook of Lord of the Flies, or turn on the radio, or sometimes play music.
Lost Children Archive: A Novel Page 19
