George watched, wide-eyed, his brain imprinting with the choreographed images of a solitary human leapfrogging in jump cuts from vital adult to old then older man and, finally, to a flare of pure light followed by a face that looked a lot like George’s own, a pudgy-smooth baby’s face, which he’d been shown in a mirror, equally wide-eyed and glowing around the edges in a way that suggested edges—where some things stopped and others began—were not as sharp as they’d appeared before these lights and sounds came flowing into and over him.
“Okay,” Uncle Jack announced, reaching for the remote as he debated ejecting versus cuing up star gate again, “that was interesting,” when he noticed his nephew, still transfixed. So he gave it a shot and started the movie from the beginning, his nephew taking it all in, the ape men, the monolith, the waltzes and measured breathing, up until the scene in which the computer HAL is lobotomized amid scarlet-drenched lights and shadows. And as HAL began singing slowly about Daisy and a bicycle built for two, George turned to his stoned and red-eyed uncle.
“I sad,” he said.
“Well,” his uncle said, “it’s a sad part.”
Indeed, it was, and within some subliminal part of George’s own still-plastic brain, a resolve formed to do something to undo the sadness, whatever that might mean.
“I apologize,” George’s uncle said, returning the child to his sister.
“Why?”
“I think I may have broken it,” he said. “I’ll start the trust fund for therapy tomorrow.”
“Jocko, you’re going to have to explain.”
And so he did. Afterward: “Could you maybe not smoke around him?” George’s mother asked.
Uncle Jack considered this a reasonable request, especially since, well, how was she supposed to know whether he did or not? That’s what Glade was for. And about using a bona fide science-fiction masterpiece as a babysitter? What about that part? That’s when George’s mom went with the mantra of harried single mothers everywhere: “Whatever works, Jocko,” she said, “is fine by me.”
And thus the future became their routine—George’s and Uncle Jack’s—with the latter alluding to the movie when, say, his nephew’s pod bay door was refusing entrance to some forked or spooned veggie. “C’mon,” he’d say, “don’t make me blow the hatch,” while George, his little arms folded, shook his head. Other times the threat was to deactivate the red-and-yellow nightlight purchased for sleepovers, its allusive gaze comforting for the weird little boy destined to become a coder’s coder in a future destined to feel like a rerun.
There was another reason it wasn’t a good idea leaving George with his weed-smoking-and-dealing uncle: George’s real name was Jorge, Uncle Jack was really Tío Juan, and of the three of them, George/Jorge was the only one in the United States legally, seeing as he’d been born there. Not that it was ICE agents who came to Tío Juan’s door one morning while HAL was being lobotomized again; no, that was a joint (snicker) task force including DEA and ATF agents, the latter included because the first two letters of its bureaucratic acronym were major competitors of the illicit substance the soon-to-be apprehended perp was peddling to the detriment of local Angelenos.
“Crap, he’s got a kid,” the guy holding the battering ram said, framed in the splintered frame of the doorway he’d bashed in.
“Is that 2001?” another agent asked.
“You know Kubrick?” Uncle Jack asked.
“Not personally,” the agent said, “but I admire his work.”
“Dude,” Uncle Jack said, offering the agent a brotherhood toke of the joint he’d been planning to Glade over before getting busted by his big sis. In retrospect—Jack would later think—if only . . .
Spinning his uncle around, the agents cuffed Jack right in front of his nephew, forming a mini memory that would seem like déjà vu years later, when George found his own wrists being cinched together.
“What do we do about . . . ?” the battering ram agent asked, pointing at the child while HAL sang plaintively in the background.
“He yours?” the fellow Kubrick admirer asked.
The boy’s uncle shook his head. “Sister’s.”
“Number?”
He gave it.
And that’s when ICE got involved.
George’s mom, Margarita (or Marge, like Marge Simpson, how American was that?), had no idea of the difference between her and George’s immigration status back when she’d become pregnant with him. Before confessing to her parents, her biggest concerns were being unmarried and the fact that her baby’s biological father disappeared upon hearing the news. And so she anticipated a lot of grief for confessing her condition. What she didn’t expect from her parents was a confession of their own, provided with no little sense of relief.
“Finally,” her father had said, “a Garza who won’t have to look over his shoulder.”
“Excuse me?”
So out came the story Margarita had lived through but hadn’t remembered, the one that explained why they all had at-home names and out-there names. And as her parents told it, it explained a lot more, including her visceral reaction to the story of the Christmas nativity, how she always felt tears welling when she heard the words “no room at the inn” and imagined Mary and Joseph trudging through the sand, ratty sandaled, holey clothes flapping as they moved from place to place, denied entry again and again, until they finally took shelter with the animals they were being treated like, mankind as usual ignorant of the miraculous in its midst. She imagined that trek again now—with herself a three-year-old Y between her parents, one of her hands for each, their triptych of footprints unwinding behind them in the sifting, shifting sand—imagined now as the top half on an hourglass that had been running out of time all along with the exception that Marge, a.k.a. Margarita, could finally feel the downward tug of her world funneling away from her.
“What’s going to happen to us?” she’d asked. “What’s going to happen to my baby?” she added, a hand on her belly, where the computer hacker growing inside her had kicked a good one.
“Nothing,” her parents said together, as if they’d practiced. “We’ve been good. We haven’t broken any laws,” her dad continued.
“Except,” her mother interjected, only for her husband to wave it away.
“They need our kind,” her father said. “They’ve needed us ever since the Civil War went the way it did. Cheap labor is always welcome; the rest is BS the politicians run on until they get into office and forget us once again.”
“Your father’s right, mija,” her mother said.
“Just don’t kill people or steal anything. Pay your social security like it’s rent and won’t come back to you. And know that that little bebé in your belly is your safety net.”
“How so?” the child with a child asked, still feathering the globe of her stomach with her fingertips.
“Only a monster would separate a mother from her child,” her own mother said. “And Americans aren’t monsters. Your own child will be an American.” She paused, smiled. “Our grandchild will be one,” she added.