Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  Yes.

  When the boy and my husband walk in with bags and suitcases, we all change into our swimsuits and run down to the guitar pool. We forget the towels, and the sunscreen—but then again, we are the type of family that has never taken a picnic blanket to a picnic, or beach chairs to a beach.

  The girl, so cautious and philosophical in all her daily activities, becomes a wild beast in the water. She is possessed, delirious. Beats on her own head and stomach like one of those post-hippie drummers who’s been on LSD for too many decades. Her laughter thunders in her open mouth, all milk teeth and perfect pink gums. She howls as she jumps into the pool. Wriggles her way to freedom from our nervous clutches. Discovers, underwater, that she does not know how to surface. So we fish her out and hold her tight and say:

  Don’t do that again.

  Be careful.

  You don’t know how to swim yet.

  We don’t know how to embrace her boundless enthusiasm, or her volcanic bursts of vitality. It’s hard for the rest of us, I think, to keep up with the dashing, reckless train of her happiness. Hard, for me at least, to let her be, when I keep on feeling that I have to save her from the world. I’m constantly imagining that she’ll fall, or get burned, or be run over. Or that she’ll drown, right now, in this guitar-shaped swimming pool in Memphis, Tennessee, her face, in my mind, all blue and swollen. A friend of mine calls this “the rescue distance”—the constant equation operating in a parent’s mind, where time and distance are factored in to calculate whether it would be possible to save a child from danger.

  But at some point, like flipping a switch, we all stop calculating grim catastrophes and let go. We tacitly agree to follow her, instead of expecting her to stay back with us, in our safe incapacity for life. We howl, ululate, roar, we plunge and resurface to float on our backs, looking up at the cloudless sky. We open our eyes wide inside the burning chlorine-water; we emulate shitty fountain-statues, spouting water from our mouths. I teach them a choreography for “All Shook Up” that I vaguely remember being taught by a childhood friend: a lot of shoulder shaking and some hip back-and-forth in the “ughs” of the song. And then, when the spell the girl has cast on us finally evaporates, we all sit by the edge of the pool, dangling our feet in the water and catching our breath.

  Later that night, lying in the dark of our motel bedroom, my husband tells the two children an Apache story, about how Apaches learned their war names. We listen to him, silent. His voice rises and whirls around the room, carried across the thick hot air that the ceiling fan stirs—its cheap veneer blades squeaking a bit. We lie faceup, trying to catch a breeze. Except the girl. She lies on her tummy and sucks her thumb, her suck-rhythm in syncopation with the cyclical rattle of paddles bobbling in the ceiling fan. The boy waits for his father to finish the story, and then he says:

  If she were an Apache, her war name would be Loud Thumb.

  Me? the girl asks, unplugging her thumb from her mouth and raising her head in the dark, not convinced but always proud to be talked about.

  Yes, Loud Thumb or Suck Thumb.

  No, no. My war name would be Grace Landmemphis Tennessee. Or Guitar Swimming Pool. Either or.

  Those are not Apache names, right, Pa?

  No, they are not, my husband confirms. Guitar Swimming Pool is not an Apache name.

  Well, then I want to be Grace Landmemphis, she says.

  It’s Graceland, comma, Memphis, you moron, the boy informs her from the heights of his now ten-year-old superiority.

  Fine, then. So I’ll be Memphis. Just Memphis.

  She says this with the authoritative assurance of bureaucrats closing their plastic windows, taking no more requests, no more complaints, and then plugs her thumb back into her mouth. We know this side of her: when she’s made up her stubborn little mind, there’s no way to convince her otherwise, so we defer, respect her resolve, and say no more.

  What about you? I ask the boy.

  Me?

  He would be Swift Feather, his father immediately suggests.

  Yes, that’s right, Swift Feather. And Ma? Who’s she? he asks.

  My husband takes his time to think about it, and finally says:

  She would be Lucky Arrow.

  I like the name, and I smile in acknowledgment, or in gratitude. I smile at him for the first time in days, maybe weeks. But he can’t see me smile because the room is dark and his eyes are probably closed anyway. Then I ask him:

  And you? What would your war name be?

  The girl chimes in, without taking her thumb out of her mouth, lisping, thething, and fumming her words:

  Pa, he’s the Elvis. Or the Jesus Fucking Christ. Either or.

  My husband and I laugh, and the boy reprimands her:

  You’re gonna go to hell if you keep saying that.

  He probably chastises her more because of our praising laughter than because of the content of her statement. She certainly does not know why she should be censured. Then, taking her thumb out of her mouth, she asks:

  Who’s your favorite Apache, Pa? Geronimo?

  No. My favorite is Chief Cochise.

  Then you get to be Papa Cochise, she says, like she’s handing him a gift.

  Papa Cochise, my husband whispers back.

  And softly, slowly, we fall asleep, embracing these new names, the ceiling fan slicing the thick air in the room, thinning it. I fall asleep at the same time as the three of them, maybe for the first time in years, and as I do, I cling to these four certainties: Swift Feather, Papa Cochise, Lucky Arrow, Memphis.

  § FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ X 5″)

  “On Reading”

  “On Listening”

  “On Translating”

  “On Time”

  § NINE BOOKS

  The Cantos, Ezra Pound

  Lord of the Flies, William Golding

  On the Road, Jack Kerouac

  Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

  New Science, Giambattista Vico

  Blood Meridian & All the Pretty Horses & Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy

  2666, Roberto Bolaño

  Untitled for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger

  The New Oxford Annotated Bible, God?

  § FOLDER (MUSICAL SCORES)

  Metamorphosis, Philip Glass

  Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso el Sabio), Jordi Savall

  MISSING

  A borderland is a vague and undetermined place

  created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

  It is in a constant state of transition.

  The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

  —GLORIA ANZALDÚA

  You better hope you never see angels on the rez.

  If you do, they’ll be marching you off to

  Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.

  —NATALIE DIAZ

  SPEED

  Light poles flicker beside us, aluminum and white neon. The sun is rising behind our car, coming up from under the inch of concrete at the far eastern tip of Route 50. As we drive west across Arkansas, chicken fences stretch out endless. Behind the fences are lonely ranches. Lonely people in those ranches, maybe. People reading, sleeping, fucking, crying, watching television. People watching the news or reality shows, or perhaps just watching over their lives—over a sick boy, a dying mother, over a cow in labor, and eggs hatching. I look out through the windshield, and wonder.

  My phone rings as we are driving past a soy field. It’s Manuela, finally calling me back after a long silence. The last time I talked to her was nearly three weeks ago, right before we left the city. She doesn’t have good news
. The judge ruled against the petition for asylum that the lawyer had filed for the girls, and after that, the lawyer dropped the case. She was told that her two daughters would be transferred from the detention center where they had been waiting, in New Mexico, to another detention center, in Arizona, from where they would be deported. But the day they were supposed to be transferred, they disappeared.

  What do you mean, disappeared? I ask.

  The officer who called her to deliver the news, she tells me, said the girls were put on a plane back to Mexico City. But the girls never arrived there. Manuela’s brother had made the trip from Oaxaca to the capital and waited at the airport for eight hours, and the girls never walked out.

  I don’t understand, I say. Where are the girls now?

  She tells me she doesn’t know, says that everyone she has talked to tells her that the girls are probably still in the detention center. Everyone tells her to wait, be patient. But she thinks the girls aren’t in any detention center. She says she’s sure the girls ran away, that maybe someone in the detention center, someone friendly, helped them escape, and that the two of them are possibly on their way to her.

  Why do you think that? I ask, wondering if she is losing her grip.

  Because I know my blood, she says.

  She tells me she’s waiting for someone to call her and tell her something. After all, the girls must still have their dresses with them, so they have her telephone number. I don’t question her further about it, but I ask:

  What are you going to do next?

  Look for them.

  And what can I do to help?

  After a brief silence, she says:

  Nothing now, but if you get to New Mexico or Arizona, you help me look.

  VIGIL

  A few months before the four of us left on this trip, during the period in which I was going to the New York federal immigration court at least once a week, I met a priest, Father Juan Carlos. Having studied at an all-girls Anglican boarding school, I have never been too fond of priests, or nuns, or religion in general. But this priest I immediately liked. I met him outside immigration court one day. I was standing in line, waiting to be let into the building; he was standing to one side of the line, wearing sunglasses even though it was too early in the day to wear sunglasses, and was handing out flyers, smiling at everyone.

  I took a flyer from him, read the information. If you were at risk of being deported, it said, you could visit his church any weekend and sign up for sanctuary assistance. And if you had an undocumented family member who had disappeared, you could contact him 24/7 by calling the emergency telephone number written below. I called the number the next day, saying I didn’t have an emergency but wanted to ask what this flyer was all about. In a priestly way, perhaps, his explanation was more allegorical than practical, but at the end of our conversation, he invited me to join him and a few others during their weekly vigil the following Thursday.

  The vigil was held at 6:00 p.m., outside a building on Varick Street. I arrived a couple of minutes late. Father Juan Carlos was there, with another twelve people. He greeted me, shaking my hand formally, and introduced me to the rest of the group. I asked if I could record the gathering on my sound recorder. He said yes, the others nodded in agreement, and then, ceremoniously but with a candid simplicity uncommon in men accustomed to podiums, he began speaking. He pointed to the sign hanging by the main entrance of the building, which announced Passport Agency, and said that few people knew that the building, which occupied an entire block of the city’s grid, was not actually just a place where you got a passport but also a place where people without passports were being held. It was a detention center, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents locked people away after detaining them on the streets or raiding their homes at night. The daily federal quota for undocumented people, he said, was 34,000, and was steadily growing. That meant that at least 34,000 people had to be occupying a bed each day in any one of the detention centers, a center just like this one, across the country. People were taken away, he continued, locked up in detention buildings for an indefinite amount of time. Some were later deported back to their home countries. Many were pipelined to federal prisons, which profited from them, subjecting them to sixteen-hour workdays for which they earned less than three dollars. And many of them were simply—disappeared.

  At first, I thought Father Juan Carlos was preaching from a kind of Orwellian dystopic delirium. It took me some time to realize that he wasn’t. It took me some time to notice that the rest of the people there that day, mostly Garifunas from Honduras, were family members of someone who had, in fact, disappeared during an ICE raid. When Father Juan Carlos finished speaking, he said we’d all now walk twice around the building. Everyone started walking in a line, in complete silence. They were all there to claim their disappeared, there to protest silently against a bigger, deeper silence. I followed them, at the end of the line, my recorder raised above my head, recording that silence.

  We walked half a block south, one block west, one block north, one block east, half a block south. And then once more. After the second round, we all stood still on the sidewalk for a few minutes, until the priest instructed us to place the palms of our hands against the wall of the building. I tucked my recorder into my jacket pocket and followed the rest. The concrete felt cold and rough against my hands. Cars whipped past, behind the line of us, along Varick Street. Father Juan Carlos then asked, in a louder, more severe voice than before:

  Who are we missing?

  One by one, the twelve people standing in the line, their hands firmly pressed against the building’s walls, their backs to the busy street, each called out a name:

  Awilda.

  Digana.

  Jessica.

  Barana.

  Sam.

  Lexi.

  As each person in the line called out the name of a missing relative, the rest of us repeated the name out loud. We pronounced each one clear and loud, though it was hard to keep our voices from breaking, hard to keep our bodies from shaking:

  Cem.

  Brandon.

  Amanda.

  Benjamin.

  Gari.

  Waricha.

  ERASED

  Winona, Marianna, Roe, Ulm, Humnoke—I look at the road map, following the names of places we’ll pass today. We’ve been driving for almost two weeks now, and my husband thinks we’ve been moving too slowly, stopping too often and overstaying in towns. I had been enjoying that rhythm, the slow speed on secondary roads across parks, the long stops in diners and motels. But I know he’s right—our time is limited, my time especially, and it’s running out. I should get to the borderlands as quickly as possible, too—to New Mexico or Arizona. So I agree when he suggests we drive more hours and stop less frequently. I think about other families, like us and also unlike us, traveling toward a future impossible to envision, the threats and dangers that it poses. What would we do if one of us simply disappeared? Beyond the immediate horror and fear, what concrete steps would we follow? Whom would we call? Where would we go?

  I look back at our own children, asleep in the backseat. I hear them breathe, and I wonder. I wonder if they would survive in the hands of coyotes, and what would happen to them if they had to cross the desert on their own. Were they to find themselves alone, would our own children survive?

  FALLINGS

  In 1909, Geronimo fell off his horse and died. Of all the things my husband tells the children about him, this fact is the one that both torments and fascinates the children most. Especially the girl. Ever since she heard the story, she brings it back up—now and then, unexpectedly and unprompted, as if it were a casual conversation starter.

  So, Geronimo fell off his horse and died, right?

  Or:

  You know how Geronimo died? He fell off his horse!

 
Or:

  So Geronimo never died, but one day, he died, because he fell off his horse.

  Now, as we speed toward Little Rock, Arkansas, she wakes up and tells us:

  I dreamed of Geronimo’s horse. I was riding it and it was going so fast, I was about to fall off.

  Where are we? the boy asks, also waking up, their strange sleep synchronicity.

  Arkansas.

  What’s in Arkansas?

  I realize I know very little about Arkansas. I know about the poet Frank Stanford, who shot himself through the heart—three times—in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and fell to the ground. The morbid question of course being not why but how three times. I don’t share this story with the family.

  Then there’s the slightly more comic than tragic death of the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who did not die in Arkansas, but who was for some reason beloved by ex-president Bill Clinton, who lived in Little Rock when he served as Arkansas’s governor—so there is that connection. I once saw a photograph of a beer-red, chubby-grinned Bill hanging on the wall of a bar in central Prague. He did not look out of place there, as dignitaries always do in restaurant pictures. He could have been the brother of the owner of the bar, or one of the regulars. Hard to think that the man in that picture, full of bonhomie, was the same man who laid the first brick in the wall dividing Mexico and the United States, and then pretended it never happened. In the photograph, he is shaking hands across the table with Hrabal, whose Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age Clinton might have read and liked. I had read the book during that trip to Prague. I read it in a state of quiet awe, and underlined and memorized strange and simple lines that I still remember:

  “the minute I saw you I could tell you were supersensitive”