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 pictures, 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.
When we went back inside the car after the airplane took off with the children, though, Ma didn’t turn the sound system on at all. She and Pa were in their front seats, you and me in the back. She unfolded her crumpled old map, and Pa concentrated on the highway. We were speeding away like we were running from something chasing us. Everyone and everything was silent. It felt like we were all lost. It wasn’t something I saw but something I knew, the way you know some things when you are just waking up but can’t explain them because your mind is full of cloudiness. And this can’t be explained either, but I think one day, you will know what I mean.
When we were finally far enough from that airstrip in Roswell where the lost children got flown away to who knows where, I asked Pa what would happen next. You were still asleep and I was holding on to the back of Papa’s driver’s seat and trying to pull myself closer to it, against the itchy pull of my seat belt. I was waiting for Papa to say something, waiting and waiting like I was still focusing on something through my binoculars, but just waiting for his words. Pa was holding on to the steering wheel with his two hands, squinting at the highway as he
always did. He kept silent, as he almost always did.
I asked Ma what she thought was going to happen to the children in the airplane. She said she didn’t know, but said that if those lost children hadn’t got caught the way they got caught, they would all have spread out across the country, and she was showing the big map from her seat like always, and moving her finger around it like she was drawing with her fingertip. All of them would have found a place to go, she said. And when I asked where to, where would they have gone to, she said she didn’t know where, exactly, didn’t know which dots on the map exactly, but they would have all gone somewhere to live in different houses with different families. Gone to schools? I asked. Yes. And playgrounds? Yes. And parks and all the rest? Yes.
Once upon a time, every morning, we also walked to school with our parents, and they went to work, but they always picked us up later, and sometimes took us to parks in the afternoons, and on weekends we rode our bikes together next to the big gray river, even though you were always sitting in your baby seat and so not really riding, and always fell asleep at some point. That was the time we were together even when we were not, because that was the time we all lived inside the same map. We stopped living in that map when we left on the road trip, and even though inside the car we were sitting so close together all the time, it felt like we were the opposite of being together. Pa would be looking at the highway in front. Ma would be looking at her map, on her lap, and telling us names of places we were going to visit like Little Rock, Boswell, and now Roswell.
I asked Mama questions, and she answered. Where were the children coming from and how had they got here? And she said what I already knew, which was that they had come on a train, and before that they’d walked miles and miles and had walked so much their feet got sick and had to be cured. And they’d survived in the desert, and had had to keep safe from bad people, and had got some help from better ones, and had made it all the way here, to look for their parents and maybe other brothers and sisters that lived here. But instead, they all got caught and put on a plane so they could be removed, she said, disappeared from the map, which is like a metaphor but also not. Because it’s real they got disappeared.
Then I asked Ma why she was so angry, instead of sad, and she didn’t answer right away, but Pa finally said something. He said don’t worry it doesn’t matter anymore now, it’s over. And then she spoke. She said, yes, exactly. She said she was angry exactly because things could just be over like that, finished, and no one cared to even look. I understood her when she said that, because I also had seen the plane disappear with the children, and I had also seen the names on the tombs of the Apache cemetery, and then their names erased in my pictures, and I had also looked out the window when we drove through some places, like Memphis. Not you, Memphis, but Memphis, Tennessee, where I saw a very, very old woman, almost a skeleton, dragging a heap of cardboard along a sidewalk, and also a group of children, no mother or father, sitting on a mattress in an empty lot next to the road.
I thought I should say all that to her, that I did understand what she meant, and I was also angry like her and like Papa, but it was impossible to say, to find the right words, so instead, I reminded them that we were supposed to go see the UFO museum now, they had promised. They just kept quiet like they were not even listening to me, like I was a fly buzzing in the backseat. And when I said again, I think we should go to the UFO museum because look at my sister, look, she needs to be put on a spaceship and returned to space like those children on the airplane because, look, she’s an alien, Ma turned around looking furious and was about to scold me real bad, I think, but then she saw you asleep with your mouth wide open, drooling, your head dangling to one side, looking totally like a Martian, and she smiled a small, difficult smile, and just said okay, maybe you’re right about that.
FAMILY PLOT
Before we left on this trip, if I try hard to remember, Pa and Ma used to laugh a lot. When we moved into our apartment together, even though we didn’t know one another well, we all laughed a lot together. While you and I were at school, Pa and Ma would be working on some long recording about people talking all the different languages that existed in the city. Sometimes they’d play samples of the recording at home and you, Memphis, you would stop doing whatever you were doing, and you’d stand in the middle of the living room near the speakers. You’d get serious, clear your throat, and start imitating the recorded voices talking in strange languages, making no sense at all but also sounding very similar to those voices. You were good at imitating, even when you were tiny. Both Ma and Pa would be standing around the corner in the kitchen, listening to you, and though they tried to hold it, and even held their hands to their mouths, they’d always start laughing at the end. If you caught them, if you heard them laughing, you always got angry, because you thought they were making fun of you.
When you finally woke up inside the car, and of course asked if we were already at the UFO museum, I told you we’d gone there but it was closed for the summer, but that we were driving to someplace even better, which was the place where Papa’s Apaches had actually lived, which was true, even though it took you some time to get used to the new plan, and you sulked for a while.
Ma was looking at her big map and asked if we wanted to stop in the next town, called La Luz, or if we wanted to drive all the way to a town farther away, called Truth or Consequences. You and I voted two against two to drive only to the next town, La Luz. So it was decided: we would drive to Truth or Consequences. When I complained, Pa said those were the rules and that was called democracy.
INVENTORY
I had a Swiss Army knife, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, a small compass, and a Polaroid camera. Pa had a boom pole and mic, which recorded everything, and Ma had a small hand recorder, which recorded only some things, mostly the ones that were close up. They had zeppelins and blimps, and I don’t know what those were for, exactly. Whenever we stopped in motels, Pa sat for hours on the floor, unknotting cables and waiting for the batteries of his little recorder to recharge. Then he’d make some notes in a small notebook he always carried in his pocket, put his big headphones around his head, and walk outside to the parking lot holding up his pole. Sometimes, if he let me, I would follow him and help him carry things. You’d stay inside with Mama, and I don’t know what you’d be doing. Maybe she’d be untangling your hair, which was always tangled, just like Pa unknotted cables. I’d be outside with Papa, both of us busy recording stuff. Though really most of the time the only sounds we recorded were the cars that were passing and the wind that was blowing, so I never knew what he’d be able to make with all those sounds. Once I came up with a kind of joke and asked him if he was recording the sounds of boredom, and I was sure he was going to laugh, but he didn’t.
COVALENCE
You knocked on the window and said:
Knock-knock!
Who’s there? we all answered at the same time.
Cold.
Cold who?
Cold Arms!
You told the worst knock-knock jokes in the universe, they made no sense, but still Pa and Ma pretended they were funny, and fake-laughed.
Mama fake-laughed like ha-ha.
Papa’s was more like he-he.
I fake-laughed all silent, just patting my hand on my tummy in slow motion, like in a muted cartoon.
And you, you hadn’t learned how to fake-laugh yet.
Even though you couldn’t tell jokes properly, and even though you were such a bad reader, like you skipped letters and confused b and d, and also didn’t know how to write properly, you were sometimes really smart. One time, you and I both caught a cold, so Ma gave us some flu medicine, which made us feel even more sick. And when she asked us later how are you two feeling now, I could only come up with the word worse, but you thought about it more carefully and then said, I feel haunted.
FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS
The motel we found was not as bad as the ones we’d seen before. We settled in, and Papa went out, said he was going to interview a man who was a real blood descendant of Geronimo’s, said he’d be back late. Mama lay on her bed, concentrated on reading her book, the same small red book where I stored my pictures, and was paying no attention to us, which I kind of expected but still made me frustrated. That little red book was called Elegies for Lost Children, and when I asked her to read out loud to us so we could fall asleep, like she sometimes would, she said, okay fine, just one chapter.
She climbed out of her bed and into ours, in the middle, and we huddled next to her, each of us under one of her arms like she was some kind of eagle. You said, we are the bread and Ma is the butter. I smelled her skin, right at the bend between the forearm and the upper arm, and it smelled like wood and like cereal, and maybe a little like butter. She opened the book, being very careful because there were pictures I’d taken stuck between some of the pages like bookmarks, and she didn’t want them to fall out. Then she began reading to us with her sandy voice.
Lost Children Archive Page 20