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-kn
ock!
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
We finally got to the town called Truth or Consequences, which I thought was a stupid name. Ma found it charming and Pa found it brilliant, and I think that’s the only reason we stopped there. The motels we were driving past were so abandoned that even you noticed it and said to the rest of us, look, there are motels for trees in this town. And no one understood what you meant, only I did. You said they were motels for trees because there was no one who stayed there and only branches and leaves could be seen through all the broken windows and broken doors of those motels, so those trees looked like guests there, waving their branches at us driving by.
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.
(THE FIFTH ELEGY)
Long vines hung from low branches, brushed their cheeks and shoulders. Sitting or lying down, aboard the leprous roof of a gondola, they crossed acres of tropical jungle, where they had to be vigilant of men, but wary also of plants and beasts. Even the train crawled more slowly than usual here, as if it too were cautious not to stir the undergrowth awake. Mosquitoes covered the seven of them in pink welts that later turned bruise-purple, later brown, and then vanished but left behind all their dengue poison.
The jungle was lightless and full of hidden horrors. It choked them with the longing to escape but offered them no foreseeable relief. Their heads filled with heavy air and fever. The colors of the jungle, its fetid vapors, ignited their open eyes with wild visions. Nightmares flowered in all their dreams, filled them with humid tongues and yellow teeth, and the big, dry hands of older men. One night, sleepless and shivering despite the heat, their bones rattling, they’d all seen it, the fleeting silhouette of a body hanging from a rope strung to a branch. The man in charge told them the hanging man was a man no longer, said they shouldn’t be concerned for him, shouldn’t pray for him either, for he was nothing now but meat for the insects and bones for the beasts. The man told the children that if they made any mistake, any false move, they would also be no more than meat and bones, corpses, severed heads. Then he did a head count. He shouted: “Lieutenant, a head count! Count all your corpses!” And he replied to himself: “Yes, sir!” and started counting, slapping each child across the head as he called out a number: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
* * *
—
Here Ma quit reading and said maybe she should read something different to us. But you had already fallen asleep, and so I said, no, Ma, come on, look, she’s asleep. And I’m old enough. Even comic books are more violent than this. So she cleared her throat and continued:
* * *
—
As they rode across the jungle on top of the train car, the seven, trying to sleep but also fearing to fall asleep, they heard stories and rumors. “Was full of thugs and murderers,” people said. “Everyone will have his heart out, set on a pike spike,” a woman atop a boxcar said. “One man had both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,” they said. And they also said, “Here stripped, here made to stand.” The words traveled across the train roof faster than the train itself, and reached the seven children, who tried to not listen but were unable. The words were like those mosquitoes, injected thoughts into their heads, filling them, creeping up everywhere inside them.
One boy, boy number six, the boy whose feet had been cured by the bucket-girl, coiled into a fetal position every night, to wait for sleep. He tried to remember his grandfather, but the old man was not anywhere in his mind, and neither were his lobsters. Everything was becoming erased. He’d coil and then unwind to lie faceup toward the sky, shuffling and shifting and looking for sleep. Then he tried to remember the girl’s soft hands fixing his feet with her clippers, tried to summon her black eyes, and wished them there with him, her eyes and bare hands, inching around his body and into darker crevices. But hard as he tried, his mind forced him back to the larger metallic pincers of the beast now crawling rhythmically along the train tracks.
The children dared not shut their eyes too long at night, and when they did, they were not able to dream of what lay ahead. Nothing beyond the jungle was imaginable while they were inside its grip. Except one night, when the eldest of the boys, number seven, offered to tell them a story.
You want to hear a story? he asked.
Yes, said some of the younger ones, yes please. The older ones said nothing, but also wanted to hear it.
I’ll tell you a story, but after I tell it, you all have to shut your eyes and think about it, about what it really means, and not think about the train or the man in charge or the jungle or nothing.
Okay, said one. Fine, said another. Okay, yes, they said.
Promise?
They all promised. Everyone agreed.
Tell it, they said. Tell it.
Okay, the story is this: “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
That’s no story, said one of the older boys.
Shhh, said one of the girls. We promised. We said we’d just keep quiet and think about the story.
Can you tell it again? asked boy number three, his eyelids heavy, puffy.
Okay, just once more, and then you’re quiet and go to sleep.
And as boy three listened, trying to fall asleep, he gazed up at the sky through the dark leaves, the constant black-deep above him, and wondered, do gods float up there, and which gods do we worship where? He looked long and hard for them up there, but there were none.
MOTHER TONGUES
I asked Mama for just one more chapter. She said no, she had said only one, and that was that. She went back to her bed and turned off the lights. I forced myself to stay awake, pretending to sleep, and when I was sure she was finally asleep, I switched on the bedside lamp, took the book, and opened it.
The picture I had taken earlier that day, of the airplane standing there, slipped out from the pages of the book. I looked at it, hard, like I was waiting for the children to appear in it, but of course they didn’t. There’s nothing in the pict
ure, if you look at it, except that stupid plane, which makes me so frustrated. But as I tucked the picture back in between some pages toward the end of the book, I realized something important, which is this: that everything that happened after I took the picture was also inside it, even though no one could see it, except me when I looked at it, and maybe also you, in the future, when you look at it, even if you didn’t even see the original moment with your own eyes.
Finally, being more careful this time and holding the sides of the book tighter so that the other pictures wouldn’t fall out, I opened it to the beginning. I read the first lines of the story, which I’d heard Mama read out loud once but which were harder to understand if I read them myself:
(THE FIRST ELEGY)
Mouths open to the sky, they sleep. Boys, girls: lips chapped, cheeks cracked, for the wind whips day and night. They occupy the entire space there, stiff but warm, lined up like new corpses along the metal roof of the train gondola. From behind the rim of his blue cap, the man in charge counts them—six children; seven minus one. The train advances slowly along tracks parallel to an iron wall. Beyond, on both sides of the wall, the desert stretches out, identical. Above, the swart night is still.
TIME & TEETH
I read those lines over and over, and tried to memorize them, until I thought I understood them. I was a level Z reader. You were not even level A because you confused the letters b and d, and also the letters g and p, and when I showed you a book and asked you what do you see here on this page? you said, I don’t know, and when I said what do you at least imagine? you said that you pictured all the little letters jumping and splashing like all the kids in our neighborhood when they finally opened the swimming pool and let us swim there. I read the first page of Ma’s red book over and over, until I heard Pa’s footsteps coming back from the street, stopping outside the room, and then the door handle turning, so I threw the book on the floor and pretended to be sleeping, opening my mouth a little.
Lost Children Archive: A Novel Page 20