Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  Back on the porch, I study the instruction booklet for the camera. The children and their father are now gathering rocks, which they place between the sticks fixed in the ground, alternating rock, stick, rock. The camera instructions are complicated. New Polaroid film has to be shielded from the light as soon as the photograph is expelled from the exit slide, the booklet explains. Otherwise, the film burns. The children and their father are taking over Texas, defending it from the American army, handing it over to their Apache fellows, and fencing it off, rock, stick, rock. Color film takes thirty minutes to develop; black-and-white film takes ten. During this time, the picture has to remain horizontal and in total darkness. A single ray of light will leave a trace, an accident. The instructions recommend keeping a developing Polaroid picture inside a special black-box, available from the store. Otherwise, it can be placed between the pages of a book and kept there until all its colors and shades are fully fixed.

  I don’t have a special black-box, of course. But I have a book, Sontag’s journals, which I can leave open by my side and where I can place the Polaroid as soon as it comes out of the camera. I flip the book open to a random page, in preparation: page 142. Before I lay the book back down next to me, I read a little bit, just to make sure the page I found augurs something good. I’ve never been able to resist a superstitious impulse to read a page opened at random, any page, as if it were the day’s horoscope. One of those coincidences so small, yet so extraordinary: the page before me is a strange mirror of the exact moment I am witnessing. The children are playing the Apache game with their father, and Sontag describes this moment with her son: “At 5:00 David cried out—I dashed to the room & we hugged & kissed for an hour. He was a Mexican soldier (& therefore so was I); we changed history so that Mexico got to keep Texas. ‘Daddy’ was an American soldier.”

  I pick up the camera, look around the field through the lens. I finally find the children—focus, refocus, and shoot. As soon as the camera spits out the shot, I take it with my index finger and thumb and tuck it between pages 142 and 143.

  DOCUMENT

  The picture comes out in shades of brown: sepia, ecru, wheat, and sand. Boy and girl, unaware of me, a few feet from the porch, stand next to a fence. He is holding a stick in his right hand, and she points toward a clearing in the woods behind the cottage, perhaps suggesting they look for more sticks. Behind them is a narrow path, and behind that, a row of trees that follow the declination of the hill from the cottage toward the main road. Though I can’t explain exactly why or how, they look as though they’re not really there, like they are being remembered instead of photographed.

  § FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ X 5″)

  “On Soundscaping”

  “On Acoustemology”

  “On Documenting”

  “On Field Recording”

  § SEVEN BOOKS

  Sound and Sentiment, Steven Feld

  The Americans, Robert Frank (introduction by Jack Kerouac)

  Immediate Family, Sally Mann

  Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

  The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

  A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

  In the Field: The Art of Field Recording, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, eds.

  § THREE COMPACT DISCS (BOXED SETS)

  Voices of the Rainforest, Steven Feld

  Lost & Found Sound, The Kitchen Sisters

  Desert Winds, Scott Smallwood

  § FOLDER “ABOUT SOUND MAPS” (NOTES, CLIPPINGS, FACSIMILES)

  “Sound Around You” project, University of Salford, UK

  The Soundscape Newsletter, vols. I–X, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

  “NYSoundmap,” the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology

  “Fonoteca Bahia Blanca,” Argentina

  UNDOCUMENTED

  An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound.

  —DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ

  Hearing is a way of touching at a distance.

  —R. MURRAY SCHAFER

  HISTORIES

  Inside the car, the air is familiar and the smell our own. As we head southwest across the Appalachians, toward North Carolina, the world outside seems more foreign than ever before. My husband keeps his eyes steady on the road, which winds and curves higher into the mountains, and we all listen to the radio. A boy, maybe nine or ten, judging by the sound of his voice, is being interviewed by a reporter in a detention center in Nixon, Texas.

  How did you travel to the United States? the reporter asks.

  His voice calm and composed, the boy replies in Spanish, saying that he came on the Bestia. I translate his response for my husband.

  Like Manuela’s daughters! the boy calls out from the backseat.

  That’s right, I tell him.

  The reporter explains that as many as half a million migrants annually ride on the rooftops of trains, which people call the Bestia, or beast, and says that the boy he’s interviewing today lost his little brother on one of those trains. The news report then switches to the boy again. His voice is no longer calm. Now it’s breaking, hesitating, trembling. The boy says that his little brother fell off the train shortly before it reached the border. As he begins to explain what happened, exactly, I switch off the radio. I feel a dull, deep nausea—a physical reaction to the boy’s story and his voice, but also to the way that news coverage exploits sadness and desperation to give us its representation: tragedy. Our children react violently to the story; they want to hear more but also don’t want to hear more. They won’t stop asking:

  What happened next?

  What happened to the little boy?

  To distract them, my husband tells them Apache stories, tells them about how the Chiricahua tribe consisted of four different bands, tells them about the smallest band, which was also one of the most powerful, because it was led by a man who was six and a half feet tall, called Mangas Coloradas.

  But did an Apache children band exist? the girl interrupts my husband.

  What do you mean?

  I mean, did they also have a children band? she says.

  The boy rephrases her question, translates for her:

  I think she means: Were there any bands that were only made up of children?

  Their father, his eyes on the road, takes a sip of coffee from a cardboard cup and hands it over to me to put down again in the cup holder before he replies.

  There was one that he knows of, he tells them, his gray eyes trying to find theirs in the rearview mirror. They were called the Eagle Warriors. It was a band of young Apache children led by an older boy. They were fearsome, they lived in the mountains, they ate birds that had fallen from the sky and were still warm, they had the power to control the weather, they could attract rain or push a storm back. He tells the children that these young warriors lived in a place called Echo Canyon, a place where the echoes are so loud and clear that even if you whisper, your voice comes right back to you, crisp.

  I don’t know if what my husband is telling them is true, but the story resonates with me. I can perfectly imagine the faces of those child warriors as we drive slowly forward across Appalachia. Our children listen to him in silence, looking out the window into the dense forests, possibly also imagining these children warriors. As we turn on a closed curve, the forest clears, and we see a cluster of storm clouds—and intermittent lightning—gathering above the high peaks to the southwest.

  STORIES

  Traveling in the tight space of the car, we realize how little we know our two children, even though of course we know them. We listen to their backseat games. They are strangers, especially when we add them together. Boy and girl, two startlingly dist
inct individuals whom we often just consider a single entity: our children. Their games are random, noisy, uncanny, like a television suffering a high fever.

  But now and then they find a better pace, establish a softer energy between them. They talk more slowly, thoughtfully. Sometimes they pick up the lost thread of their father’s Apache stories, or of the stories about the children stuck at the border, and enact possible outcomes:

  If we are forced to stop hunting wild game, we shall raid their ranches and steal their cows!

  Yeah, let’s steal the white cows, the white, the white-eyes’ cows!

  Be careful with bluecoats and the Border Patrol!

  We realize then that they in fact have been listening, more attentively than we thought, to the stories of Chief Nana, Chief Loco, Chihuahua, Geronimo—the last of the Chiricahuas—as well as to the story we are all following on the news, about the child refugees at the border. But they combine the stories, confuse them. They come up with possible endings and counterfactual histories.

  What if Geronimo had never surrendered to the white-eyes?

  What if he’d won that war?

  The lost children would be the rulers of Apacheria!

  Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

  BEGINNINGS

  The lost children’s stories are troubling our own children. We decide to stop listening to the news, at least when they are awake. We decide to listen, instead, to music. Or, better, to audiobooks.

  “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night…,” says the voice of the man on the car speakers, “he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” I press Stop as soon as it pauses at the end of the sentence. My husband and I agree that Cormac McCarthy, although we both like him, and even if we especially like The Road, seems a little too rough for the children. Also, we agree that whoever is reading for this audiobook version is an actor acting—tries too hard, breathes too loud—instead of a person reading. So I press Stop. Then I scroll down and press Play on another audiobook.

  “I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there,” a mistranslation of the first line of Pedro Páramo—I think Juan Rulfo really writes “because they told me” and not “because I had been told”—that passive voice and that extra layer of pastness blurring the novel’s calculated austerity and temporal ambiguity. I scroll down again, then press Play.

  “I am an invisible man.” It’s a barren, perfect first sentence. But no, not Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, either. What we want is to overlay the stretch of the drive ahead with a voice and a narrative that may glove itself upon the landscape, and not something that will jerk our minds elsewhere while we move across this humid entanglement of creepers upon forests. Next. Play.

  “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” This one I would want to listen to, but I gather no quorum from the two traitors in the backseat. My husband does not want it either, says Carson McCullers’s only achievement was that one novel’s title and only the title: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. He is wrong, and I say so, throwing back my disagreement with a little bit of poison, asking him if he doesn’t think that first line is exactly about the two of us, and if we might not want to listen to the rest of it as if visiting an oracle. He does not laugh or smile. Next book.

  “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” Pause. We discuss this one at greater length. My husband thinks Kerouac’s On the Road would be a perfect choice. Even if the children won’t get the meaning, he says, we can all enjoy the rhythm of it as we drive. I remember reading Kerouac in my early twenties, when I dated a bookseller. He was a Kerouac fan, and gave me all of his books, one by one. I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup. Every time I was about to finish, the bowl would be refilled. Later into my twenties, I reread a few of Kerouac’s books, started getting them, and grew to like some things in his prose: his untidy way of tying sentences together, his way of speeding through the story as if he’s not imagining or remembering it but catching up with it, and his way of ending paragraphs like he’s cheating on a test. But I don’t want to give my husband this victory, so I say:

  I would rather listen to evangelical radio than to On the Road.

  Why? he asks.

  It’s a good question, so I look for a good reason. My sister, who teaches literature in Chicago, always says that Kerouac is like an enormous penis, pissing all over the USA. She thinks that his syntax reads like he’s marking his territory, claiming inches by slamming verbs into sentences, filling up all silences. I love that argument, though I don’t know if I quite understand it, or if it’s even an argument. So I don’t put it forward. We’re approaching a tollbooth, and I dig around for spare change. We halt, pay a machine—not a person—and drive on. Kerouac’s America is nothing like this America, so bony, desolate, and factual. I use the distraction to move beyond our Kerouac discussion, a dead-end street, no doubt. And as we gain speed again, I scroll down and press Play on the next audiobook.

  “The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.” After listening to its opening sentence, we all agree: this is it, this is what we’ll listen to, Lord of the Flies, read by William Golding himself. We know it’s no fairy tale, no sugarcoated portrait of childhood, but it’s—at least—fiction. Not a fiction that will separate us and the children from reality, but one that might help us, eventually, explain some of it to them.

  We listen to the reading for a few hours, and probably take some wrong turns, and get lost for a while, and so we listen to the reading some more, until we cannot listen anymore, cannot drive anymore, cannot sit anymore. We find a motel in a town called Damascus, near the Virginia–Tennessee border. I have no idea why it’s called that, but as we pull into the parking lot, and I read a sign that says Free Wi-Fi & Cable TV, it’s clear to me that some appropriations of names are more unsettling than others.

  Outside the motel room, while the rest prepare for bed, I roll myself a cigarette and try to call Manuela. She doesn’t pick up, but I leave a message, asking how things are moving forward with the case, saying please call me when you have some time.

  NARRATIVE ARC

  The girl asks the waitress for crayons and paper while we wait for our breakfasts in a diner booth the next morning, and then asks me if I can draw four squares for her, and label them the same way I did in the cottage the other day. I’ll do it, I say, but only if she’s willing to let me make the game a little more challenging for her.

  How? she asks, skeptical.

  I’ll draw eight squares instead of four, I say, and you figure out what to do with the rest.

  She’s not convinced, grumbles, crosses her arms and digs her elbows into the table. But when her brother says he wants to try it out, she says:

  Okay, fine, fine, fine: eight squares.

  My husband reads a newspaper, and the children concentrate on their drawings, piecing together a more difficult plot, working out how to arrange and rearrange information in an eightfold space.

  When I sat through courtroom hearings in the New York City Immigration Court, listening to and recording children’s testimonies, my recorder on my lap, hidden under a sweater, I felt that I knew exactly what I was doing, and why I was doing it. When I hovered in hallways, offices, or waiting rooms, the recorder in my hand, talking to immigration lawyers, priests, police officers, people in general, sampling the sounds of that raw legal reality, I trusted th
at I would eventually come to understand how to arrange all the pieces of what I was recording and tell a meaningful story. But as soon as I pressed Stop on my recording device, put all my stuff into my bag, and went back home, all the momentum and certainty I had had slowly dissolved. And when I re-listened to the material, thinking of ways to put it together in a narrative sequence, I was flooded by doubts and problems, paralyzed by hesitance and constant concerns.

  The food finally arrives, but the children aren’t interested. They are too caught up in working out how to finish their last few squares. I observe them with pride, and maybe a little envy, a childish feeling, wishing I also had a crayon and was participating in the eight-square story game. I wonder how I’d distribute all the concerns I have.

  Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward. Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonized by Western-Saxon-white categories, what’s the correct use of personal pronouns, go light on the adjectives, and oh, who gives a fuck how very whimsical phrasal verbs are?