Do you know where the children will be deported from?
Prompted by the interviewer, she continues to explain that once they reach the border, the children know their best bet is to be caught by Border Patrol officers. Crossing the desert beyond that border, alone, is too dangerous. But some of them do. My mind drifts to the lost children in the little red book, all walking alone, lost now and forgotten in history. The interviewer explains that the children also know that if they do not surrender themselves to the law, their fate will be to remain undocumented, like most of their parents or adult relatives already in the United States. The children who will be deported today have been in a detention facility near Artesia, New Mexico.
I look for airports in or near Artesia, and find one, and note down the location. Artesia is not far from Roswell, I tell my husband, so that must be it. If the lawyer doesn’t reply to this email, our best bet will be to drive to that airport. We’ll just have to trust, and perhaps we’ll get lucky.
SALIVA
As we drive forward, my husband tells the children a long, winding story that perturbs me and fascinates them, about a woman called Saliva. She was a medicine woman, a friend of Geronimo’s, who cured people by spitting on them. Saliva, he said, removed their bad luck, illness, and melancholy with her powerful, salty drops of spit.
SHUFFLE
I don’t know, when the boy suggests a poll as we take a left on Route 285, south out of Roswell, if my favorite song on this trip is Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” which the boy knows by heart and loves, or Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” which the girl always wants to listen to again and again, or a song quite outside my generational listening habits, called “People II: The Reckoning,” by a band from Phoenix called Andrew Jackson Jihad—a name we hope is somehow ironic, though we’re not sure in which way it could or should be ironic.
We haven’t discussed the lyrics of the songs in detail yet, the way the four of us usually do, but I think they’re songs about us four, and about everyone else in this big country who doesn’t own a gun, cannot vote, and doesn’t fear God—or who at least fears God less than he or she fears other people.
I like a line in Anderson’s song, about the airplanes coming—“They’re American planes, made in America,” she says in a robotic voice. The planes always getting closer, always hovering in our consciousness, always haunting people who have to grow up to fear America.
In Lamar’s song, I like catching up to the line “Our pride was low, lookin’ at the world like, ‘Where do we go?’ ”
I always sing it loud, looking out the window of the car. The boy, from the backseat, sings the rest of the stanza even louder.
And finally, I like a line in “People II” that I maybe don’t fully understand, about being in “firefly mode.” Now we listen to the song, and I ask the children what they make of it:
What do you think “firefly mode” means?
It means on and off, on and off, says the girl.
She’s right, I think. It’s a song about switching oneself on and off from one’s own life.
For the next twenty minutes or so, we’re all silent inside the car, listening to the songs that shuffle and play, looking out our windows at a landscape scarred by decades or maybe centuries of systematic agricultural aggression: fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides, where meager fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields corseted into a circumscription of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and fields turned into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and enormous windmills. We’re driving across a strip of land dotted with cylinders when the “firefly mode” song comes up again. The boy suddenly clears his throat, and says he needs to say something:
I’m sorry to break it to you, but the lyrics in that song you keep playing and singing say “fight-or-flight mode” and not “firefly mode.”
He sounds like a teenager, talking to us like this, and I’m not ready to accept his correction, though I know he’s probably right. Even though he’s still a child, he’s so much more culturally attuned to this country, and to the times. I dismiss his opinion, unfairly asking him for proof—which he of course cannot give, because I won’t lend him my phone to search for lyrics right now. But from this moment on, as the song is played on repeat on our car speakers, he makes a point of singing that part of the chorus especially loud: “fight-or-flight mode.” His sister and father, I notice, pause in silence and don’t sing that part of the song, at least in the next few rounds. I, in turn, make a point of singing the words “firefly mode” especially loud and clear. The boy and I have always met as equals on this sort of battlefield, notwithstanding our age gap. Maybe it’s because our temperaments are so alike, even though we do not share blood-bonds. Both of us will defend our stances to the end, no matter how senseless they eventually reveal themselves to be.
He shouts:
Fight-or-flight mode!
Just as I sing at the top of my voice:
Firefly mode!
Inside the car, I’ve grown accustomed to our smell, to the intermittent silence between us, to instant coffee. But never to the road signs planted like omens along the road: Adultery Is a Sin; Sponsor a Highway; Gun Show This Weekend! Never habituated, either, to seeing the cemeteries of plastic toys abandoned on front lawns on reservations, or the melancholy adults waiting in line, like children, to refill their large plastic cups with bright-colored sodas in gas station shops, or those resilient water towers in small towns, which remind me of the equipment we used in school during science lab classes. All of that leaves me in firefly mode.
FEET
Mama! the girl calls out from the backseat.
She says she has a splinter in her foot. She cries and cries and cries, as if she’d lost a limb or broken something.
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 aren’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:
Lost Children Archive Page 19