Aloft

Months ago, that story came across the wires about a six-year-old boy held aloft in a silver balloon, stolen up into the wind, careening across the landscape. You were there, too, caught, like me--leaning close to the computer screen, listening out for the evening news, honing in on that image of that balloon, twisting, bobbing, moving too fast against the bright sky.

For some watching, there was the excitement of the chase. That drama: What would happen next?  For me there was only terror. Even when the child was in the air, I thought, he was already gone. There was no saving him. The reports that came quickly in 10 to 15 minute increments and then slower, stretching across hours, seemed to confirm that the chance of rescue was slim. The balloon flew too high, with the potential to go even higher and drift for days. There were risks to the boy for hypothermia. Officials had no real idea how to arrange a rescue once they put helicopters on the balloon’s trail. Policemen looked sadly into the camera and expressed their doubt and worry. There was little in the way of consolation.

Then the balloon touched down, empty. The boy apparently lost along the way, fallen somewhere down to the ground and--how could you not think?--dead.

But next they found the child, hiding in the attic, and the story switched, almost with denial of what it had been before. Suddenly, he was just a bad boy, hiding from further punishment in the top level of his house. He was here, and alive, hunkered into a cardboard box--simple as that,  it had all been a misunderstanding.

I was frightened to realize how quickly I’d jumped to pronounce this small, hiding boy, who was, indeed, safe in his parent’s house, dead and gone--to have to recognize how comfortable I’ve gotten with the worst case scenario that I don’t even stop anymore to think that there might be an alternative.

How did that happen? How did I become that person?

This way. In the moment, that pitch-black, close your eyes tighter than you ever have because you cannot bear to believe that this is really happening moment, and all the darkest moments afterwards, when I have had to face the loss of a child and when that knowledge has simply been too much. When hope became a country I could no longer visit, I learned to duck down and keep local, fluent in the quieted language and strange customs of grief. When I could not be among people and understand anymore what it means to understand trouble as something outside and beyond. 

Soon enough, the real news turned up, that this was all a hoax concocted by parents searching for limelight and perhaps a better deal on their reality series. We’d been tricked, and it became our job to laugh at ourselves. The “balloon boy” became a national joke, a silly Halloween costume, wisecracks on late-night TV, an item in December’s wasn’t-this-a-wacky-year yearend roundups. In January, we settled back into our daily lives with that story forgotten, one among so many ideas that capture our national interest for moments until we’re onto judging this starlet’s tacky dress or secretly encouraging the rumored divorce of that supercouple.

But not me. I can’t let it go. I am still with that imaginary boy, up in the air, in danger, but also bunkered in the attic, avoiding scrutiny. Seven months after losing L., it feels easier to be suspended and hidden rather than out amongst the world.

It’s not just that the father was back in the news in the past weeks, re-pleading his innocence after claiming guilt. It’s that the essence of that story has stayed with me: as much as I can’t let it go, it will not let go of me--that silver balloon loose and lost in the wind, a small child--a son, no less--carried away and away and away.

It’s the way that that hovering, here but away, keeps reentering the house of my days. On the way out the door to work, I grab a paperback from the stack of recent buys from the thrift store. Once I sneak onto a seat on the Metro in the morning crowd, I open Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan. I’d seen the movie version a few years ago. I remember the gist of the story, a literate thriller where, as in all McEwan books, things go terribly wrong in accidental ways. I remember that there’s an tragedy with a hot-air balloon that starts off a tale of obsession and violence.

But here’s what I’ve forgotten, or didn’t pay ample attention to back then: trapped in the basket of a hot-air balloon is a boy, along with his grandfather. I’m somehow not dissuaded from starting it even though the back cover reminds me clearly that this novel involves tragic accident, and I get caught, against what should be my better judgment, in the opening pages, the rush of plot, the whole wonder of what will happen next coupled, in the same breath, with terror.

Because there it is, again. A balloon, in horrible lift and dodge--a child caught in its relentless push up into places the body does not belong and cannot sustain within. “The child was incapable,” McEwan writes, “and about to be borne away. Two miles to the west were high-voltage power lines. A child alone and needing help. It was my duty to hang on.”

I can’t stop reading, despite the anxiety those pages fill me with. Because with this terrible danger that starts on page one, after a man has died trying to pull the balloon back down to earth out of the troubled air, that it’s not until page thirty-five that the author, almost as afterthought, tells us that the boy survives.

It’s only a book. Just a story. I have to tell myself these things, half shaking to realize how caught I’ve been in the outcome. McEwan, in fact, is doing exactly what he should do to build his plot and capture us into caring about its spinning out into intellectual drama.

I should put the book down, but I don't. It doesn’t help that the couple at the novel’s center are childless, and that the inability to have a child is a deep sadness to the woman, how she “mourn[s] for a phantom child, willed into half-being by frustrated love,” how so many conversations between the couple arrive at, stop, then turn away from the absence of a baby. It doesn’t help that she is smart and capable out in the world but with a central wound few see--that, in fact, he turns her not to usable character but that he gets her right as human. And that he gets other grief right, too--the woman widowed by the inciting accident, for whom conversational exchange becomes so difficult, McEwan recognizing that “suffering the way she was, a social encounter like this must have been like drunk driving--hard to gauge the right conversational speed, easy to overcompensate with reckless steering”

Suddenly, I’m one of those crazy readers speeding and steering and courting danger who sees far too much in a book, taking its lessons far too much to heart. I can’t help that call to duty, to hold on to the rope, to pull that child, against all odds, away from danger, even though the story itself will find him safe and landed, back into the fold of the living. I can’t help but talk about it here, knowing it’s silly--the hoax of the writer. Knowing that the story is long over and that no one else wants to hear about it.  

So this is grief--hating, as this book tells me, as an overtold news story teaches me, as my own life as a grieving mother forces on me, the ruthlessness of gravity.

I am at once in that basket, holding tight to the shivering boy, telling him, lying to him, that it will all be okay; and on the ground, pulling fiercely on the rope in my small weight against the force of the world’s wind, my body raw with hopeless trying; and I am the balloon itself, alternately filling and collapsing with heat and wild air, pulled away from the scramble of people in their lives below. I’m the boy cowering in the attic, fearing more trouble to come down on my head. I’m that boy in Colorado in those moments of implausible belief he was being carried across the wide expanse of open sky, before there’s sureness he’s careening into catastrophe. I’m an invented balloon, silver and gleaming, catching the hard glint of sun in its unapproachable, sure rise, but then, in the next shadow, showing its handmade seams, the way it doesn’t fit together, and like any story people no longer want to hear--its inability to hold the true weight of a life. I am the impending dropping down of loss, coming but not yet arrived.

Because I am still trying for it all not to be true.

Never mind that I’m stalwart in my ability to face the truth. I know it in the deepest of bone and softest recess of my inner brain. All of it I know through its relentless presence: how that empty in my belly afterwards will follow me always. How I held a dead child in my hands, beautiful as he was to me, and could do nothing to make him whole and healthy or bring him into this world in any measure of real living. The reality of my loss is undeniable, and I have learned all the proper names to call it.

But to be drawn back, somehow, to the before, where yes, the danger had already begun, but when and where I still carried my boy with me, safely, away from the danger we’d have to face together. To hover, to be aloft, to be full--to go back to the parts of the story where we are hidden and safe, where we are one, where the relentless push of people and daily life poses no threat. That's an equal want to the weight of the so-called truth, bearing its own imperatives in bones and brain.

I do not write near as much as I should, because it takes that grounding down, looking up at the sky and murmuring, behaving as if the catastrophe is outside myself rather than is my self, and it takes contending with the worry that I just tell the same silly story over and over like an old woman struck with dementia.

Give me, instead, of give me, please, the air, those few moments of beautiful and doomed possibility. Give me, so that I can dwell there, even if only for mere moment, the tiny safe passages in the secret places of the world where I’m accountable to no one but the boy I am still trying, every day, to save.

 

Comments

[Mel]

I was thinking of you today, wondering about you and then a post pops up in Reader. It is amazing how kismet like that happens. No good words, just quiet head nodding. I stumbled this because I think it's such a gorgeous post, an explanation of how we view moments through the languages we speak.

[Tireegal]

This is a beautiful post. I'm so sorry that you have been to the place where the worst case scenario seems inevitable. ThAnks for your writing. sending peaceful thoughts to you.