This was why, I think, the conference fell apart at the end of that first day. The chaos broke out when the poet Lisa Romini-Malone got up to read the long poem she had composed for the occasion. She was not herself a Parent of 5/17 but, she said, she had close friends among those who’d lost their bright hopes for the future and she felt she could channel some of their pain through the profound act of empathy that was writing.
The parents sat attentive. Ms. Romini-Malone began to read. I think it was at the line: Burning forth in a magnificent fire / Their young and precious hearts that the trouble began. Or it might have been when she said: Planning in secret / The message passed from hand to hand like signal fires. There was a murmuring in the hall that grew until it began to drown out the speaker at the front. Ms. Williams stood up and asked the audience for quiet. A woman called out from the third row: She’s celebrating this, like it is something great that happened! Like it was something beautiful, and after that there was no quieting the room. What the poet said was lost in the angry, undifferentiated roar that came from the until-then polite and contained audience. It was a sound like the ocean rising up in a storm to burst over the land, unreasonable, unreasoning and bottomless: the sound of grief. As if united into one force, the parents rushed toward the podium and toppled it and then kept going, out into the carpeted halls of the hotel, knocking over ficus plants and tables, smashing lamps, tearing the deliberately inoffensive art down from the walls.
I stayed sheltered in a recessed window of the room with some other journalists until the main energy of the riot had made its way out into the corridor and the main lobby downstairs. Then I followed at a distance, watching from the mezzanine balcony and taking notes for the story I would write and file later that evening. Soon, from outside in the street, there came the undulating sound of sirens as the police pulled up in front of the hotel.
As I watched them storm in through the doors and push the mass of rioting parents back with their big, Plexiglas shields, I remembered, suddenly and vividly, the May morning, almost two years earlier, when the telephone woke me with its bleating and it was my sister on the other end screaming how something had happened to her daughter. I remembered how I turned on the television to the news and saw those first, terrible images that everyone knows now so well.
And I remembered how a few months earlier than that, when my sister was concerned that Annabel was spending so much time with her computer instead of with her friends, I told her not to worry. Annabel was just shy like I had been at her age, she would grow out of it, she would be fine, I said. You have a tendency to over-parent just like Mom, I said, feeling pleased with myself for speaking plainly to my older sister, standing up to her. Leave Annabel alone. She’ll be okay.
Then May 17th arrived. All across the world, children executed what they’d organized in secret, never speaking of their plan out loud and communicating only with a network of others whom they knew just as words and images onscreen, by email, on discussion boards, through cell phones, in coded messages and downloaded, encrypted files, so that just before 11 p.m. EST, they left their homes and climbed whatever they could find that was tall enough, carrying those useless homemade parachutes that one of them, no one would ever know who, had designed.
Some climbed water towers; others went onto the roofs of houses or apartment buildings. One boy in Tucson climbed up the inside of the enormous tilted dish of a radio telescope. A girl in San Francisco pulled herself onto the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge. They took their places in the dark. They waited for the hour to arrive. And when it did, they lit the fireworks they’d tied onto their ankles or wrists or stuffed into their backpacks and launched themselves out so that they all blazed up in a single moment and then plummeted burning through the night engulfed by flames before they hit the ground and burned and guttered there like candles laid out in remembrance of something, then forgotten.
Down in the lobby, the police were starting to cuff and take away the rioters, though some were still breaking and dismantling the furnishings. Below me a woman was sitting on the floor, holding her head, looking dazed. A man, perhaps her husband, tried to comfort her. I thought about my niece, how on earth it might have been for her as she fell from the eighth floor of the library in town — to which she had the key because she volunteered there twice a week — how she must have known at some point that the parachute was not going to save her and how entirely alone she must have been. I felt something like a wave of molten lava rising up inside my body and I tried to tamp it down as I had done many times before, keeping a careful hold of myself so that I could report objectively on all that had occurred. But I did not succeed this time, and the great, hot mass welled up out of my chest and came out of my mouth as a sound I’d never heard myself or anyone else make until that moment and before I knew what I was doing, I found that I was running down the wide, carpeted staircase, with my fists swinging out in front of me, still shouting without words and looking, looking, looking for something, anything to smash.
Biographies
1.
Emily Mitchell was born in London in the middle of a garbage collectors’ strike. The strike began when the year had just crawled out from winter and it was still cold and rainy and the garbage collectors were unhappy because exponential growth in the manufacture and use of disposable food containers had added to their workload but there had been no expanded hiring to meet this increased demand. The leader of their union was a charismatic man called Donkey who got his moniker for his very long ears and braying voice as well as for his stubborn nature, although it is worth noting that Donkey, whose real name was Clive, was also a father and husband whose wife and children remember him as very kind, gentle and patient.
All spring the garbage piled up against the walls of the city. Fruit and scraps of meat dampened and drooped; vegetables blackened, frayed, disintegrated. Bristling animals slipped in and out of the mounting piles of plastic bags and bottles, beverage cartons, tin cans, old shoes. Children had to be warned not to play and climb on the heaps of refuse clogging up the streets, but some nevertheless made games of running up their sides and some of them fell into the piles of trash and had to be rescued. In places around town, whole streets were blocked and traffic had to be diverted.
In the end, the government decided to settle with the garbage collectors, but by this time the mountains of trash were so high and so dense from the pressures of the layers above that they could not be moved by the normal means. In some places the city used helicopters to dislodge the mass of compacted matter and hoist it into the air so that it could be flown away. People who were alive at that time remember from that summer the frequent spectacle of fleets of helicopters flying across the sky, each with a misshapen mass attached beneath it on the end of a long cord, silhouetted against the setting sun. As picturesque as these flights were, they had the disadvantage that the masses of garbage would lose their integrity in flight and start to shed, showering the populace below with banana peels and old chocolate-bar wrappers.
By the time Emily Mitchell was born, in the fall of that year, most of the garbage had been cleared away. Some of it had been buried and the land above turned into parks. Some of it had been moved to a secret location. The strike was over and the growling trucks moved again through the blue early streets waking people before dawn.