thinking that he’d changed, that way, in the course of the year: he’d been so openly affectionate with his mother back in September. But maybe it was discomfiting to be her kid, in this big white studio, in front of everyone, even embarrassing; maybe he felt funny, too, to see me and his mom both here together, and to think that this was our shared space. I don’t know.
Sirena explained that the children were free to treat all of Wonderland as a stage, almost as if they were in a play. “I know you’ve read about Alice,” she said, “and I want you to pretend that you’ve gone down the rabbit hole too. Here you are, in this weird place, and anything can happen.” She pointed to the two cameras we’d set up weeks before, high up at either end of the Astroturf lawn. “In Alice’s Wonderland, she never knows if someone is watching her. Maybe the camera’s on, but maybe it’s not, so don’t even think about it. Think of this as an adventure, and a game. You can play in groups, or you can play alone. You can make this space what you want it to be.”
We’d hung the mirror shards on their strings from the ceiling to create glittering partitions in the space, and we’d laid out the Alice-dress sky along the ground in a swirling river of fabric that meandered the length of the room. We’d sown whole clusters of aspirin flowers, and some soap tulips, and had scattered around candies and jelly beans for the kids to find. We’d dragged her poufs onto the Astroturf lawn and draped them with burlap, so they looked like boulders. In far corners, we’d hung up several pairs of little red lights, for Jabberwock eyes, and when they flashed, an MP3 player let out roaring noises—quite scary ones, in fact.
All the children wanted to play in Wonderland. Inevitably, making masks seemed like a consolation prize. But we divided them into two groups and told them they had forty-five minutes for their first activity. Then we’d have a break for juice and cookies, and then we’d switch. The bus would be waiting outside for us at two p.m.
Reza and Noah and Aristide were all in my group first, along with three other boys and a gaggle of girls. Even though they were disappointed to have to wait for Wonderland, they were psyched by the idea that they could make masks and then play with them. I pointed out that the masks would need to dry, which made the boys feel they had to work fast. I helped all the kids shape their mask forms out of coat hanger wire: we measured their heads, and then bent the wire into noses and cheeks. Then, with relatively little acting out, the kids laid on the layers of gluey newsprint, molding the flesh devotedly around and around and around their metal bones.
Noah’s Jabberwocky came out looking like a cross between a bull and a horse, its long snout punctuated by gaping nostrils. Aristide made the Cheshire Cat, or said he had, although he hadn’t given it any ears, only an enormous smiling mouth, which was good enough. Reza chose the dormouse, a minor character, capably executed. Its nose was pointy, and he gave his mask prominent ears, but he was particularly proud of its whiskers, six dangling bits of string glued onto the end of its nose like a straggly mustache. The boys finished before the others in the group, and asked if they might cross over early into Wonderland.
They’d been so good, and it was almost time anyway, so I let them. I should have asked Sirena if it was okay with her; I hadn’t realized how involved she was with her cameras, up on ladders to adjust them so they’d track specific kids; and how little involved she was with keeping watch.
It all happened so fast. I was helping Sophia with her walrus mask—a bigger task than either of us was really fit for—when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the boys’ play was turning rough. At first I didn’t do anything, because I figured Sirena was on top of it; but then I stepped down toward the middle of the L, and realized that her back was turned and she was focused on filming Ebullience and Chastity wrapping themselves up in the Alice fabric and twirling around. Meanwhile, behind her, Reza and Noah were scuffling, and