Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  But the echoes we heard against the rocks that morning in the mountains were real echoes and nothing like the ones in our old tunnel in the city. That day Mama and Papa had woken us up before sunrise and given us mush, which I hate, and boiled apples, which I like, and we’d taken long walking sticks from a basket outside the house and walked down the path to the creek and slowly back up another mountain, and then halfway down the other side of the second mountain, until we’d found long flat rocks, where we lay for a while and then sat for a while, the sun getting higher and heavier on our hats. I took my camera out of my backpack and told Papa to stand up, which he did, and I took a picture of him with his hat on and smoking the way he smokes when he’s worried, his forehead all crumpled up and his eyes looking somewhere like they’re looking at something ugly, wishing I knew but not knowing what he was thinking or what he was always worried about. Later, I gave him that picture as a present, so I didn’t get to keep it for you to see and keep and I’m sorry for that.

  We sat down again and ate cucumber sandwiches on buttered bread that Ma had packed in her small sack, and she said we were allowed to take our heavy boots off while we ate. For a moment, I was happy knowing we were all like this together. But then, while we were eating, I realized Mama and Papa were not talking to each other, saying nothing, again not talking not at all, not even to say pass me the water bottle or pass another sandwich. When Papa Cochise got moody, you and I would tell him to go have a cigarette, and usually he’d go and have one. He smelled disgusting afterward, but I liked the sound of him blowing out smoke and the way he squinted when he did. Ma said he furrowed his brow like he was squeezing out thoughts from his eyes, and that he did it so often, one day there would be no thoughts left in there.

  Now they were not even looking at each other or nothing while we ate, so I thought hard and decided I should either tell a joke or start talking louder because although I liked some kinds of silence, I hated that sort of silence. But I couldn’t think of any jokes or funny words, or anything loud to say like that, just because. So I took off my hat and put it on my lap. I thought hard what to say and how and when. Then, looking at my hat on my lap, I got an idea. I looked around and made sure no one was watching, and then with one hand I flung the hat up high in the air, and it flew up and then down, falling and then rolling down the side of the mountain, bouncing off rocks, and finally getting caught in a bush. I took a deep breath and made a face and pretended to sound worried when I shouted very loud into the wind, shouted the word hat.

  That’s when it happened. I shouted the word hat, and you all looked at me, and then looked back at the mountain, because we all suddenly heard hat hat hat hat coming back at us from the mountain, my voice bouncing off all the mountain rocks around us, all the rocks repeating hat.

  It was like a spell, a good spell, because all of a sudden, the silence between us was filled with smiles, and I felt the same feeling growing in my stomach that I know we all used to feel each time we were riding our bikes so fast down that steep street downhill toward the tunnel toward the river, and suddenly now Papa shouted the word echo and Ma shouted echo and you shouted echo and all around us the echoes multiplied, echo, echo, echo, and even I shouted echo, and for the first time I heard my own echo coming back, bouncing back to me so loud and clear.

  Papa put his sandwich down and cried, Geronimo! And the echo said onimo, onimo, onimo.

  Mama shouted, you hear me? And the mountain bounced back ear me, ear me.

  So I shouted, I’m Swift Feather! And it came back eather, eather, eather.

  And you looked around kind of confused and said softly:

  But where are they?

  Then we stood up one by one, all of us barefoot on the surface of the long flat rock, and tried different words like Elvis, words like Memphis, like highway, and moon, and boots, hello, father, away, I’m ten, I’m five, I hate mush, mountain, river, fuck you, you, fuck you too, too, tooshie, ooshie, fart, airplanes, binoculars, alien, goodbye, I love you, me too, too. And then I shouted, auuuuu, and we all howled like a pack of wolves and then Pa tried clapping his hands against his mouth, saying, oooooooo, and we all followed him like an ancient family, and then Ma clapped her hands together and the claps came back to us clap clap clap, or maybe more like tap tap tap. And when we’d all run out of things to say and all run out of breath, we sat down again, the three of us except you, who cried one last cry.

  But where are you, are you, are you?

  And then you looked back at us and said, now whispering, I don’t see them, where are they, are they hiding from us? Pa and Ma looked at you looking confused and then back at me like wanting a translation. I understood your question perfectly, so I explained it to them. I was always the one standing between you and them, or between us and them. I said, I think she thinks there’s someone on the other side of the mountain who is answering us. They both nodded and smiled at you and then at me and then even looked at each other still smiling. I explained, Memphis, there’s no one out there, Memphis, it’s just our own voices. Liar, you said. You called me a liar. So I said, I’m not lying, you idiot. And Mama scolded me with her eyes, and told you, it’s just an echo, baby. It’s just an echo, Papa also said. They didn’t know but I knew that that was no good as an explanation for you, so I said, remember, remember the bouncy balls we got from that round machine in the diner where you cried afterward? Yes, you said, I cried because you kept getting all the colorful balls and me, I kept getting only plastic bugs. That’s not the point, Memphis, the point is the balls, the point is, remember how we played with them outside the diner afterward, throwing them against the wall and catching them again? Now you were listening and said, yes, I remember that day. Our voices are like those bouncy balls, even if you can’t see them bouncing now, I said. Our voices bounce off this mountain when we throw our voices at it, and that’s called echo. Liar, you said again. I’m not lying, he’s not lying, it’s true, baby, that is echo, that’s what echo is, he’s not lying, I’m not lying, we all told you.

  You’re so proud and so arrogant sometimes, you still didn’t believe us. You stood upright very serious on the flat rock and straightened out your pink hat and then your T-shirt like you were about to pledge allegiance to a flag. You cleared your throat and cupped your hands around your mouth. You looked into the mountain rocks like you were giving someone an order and took a deep breath. And then, then you finally shouted hard, you shouted, people, shouted, hello, people, shouted, we’re here, up here, here, here, Jesus Fucking Christ, Christ.

  BIRDS

  Back in the house that afternoon, I helped Papa cook. We prepared the grill outside. Papa threw some coal in the grill and lit it, and I went to the kitchen to get the meat from the fridge, buffalo meat, which is my favorite kind. I got to help him by holding the tray with the meat. One by one, he’d fork a piece of meat and carefully put it on the grill. I stood there and was still thinking in my head of echoes, and everything around me reminded me of the echoes we’d heard earlier on the mountain, Pa’s back-and-forth movements, back and forth, the fire whispering inside the grill, some big birds slapping their wings above us, and even your voice back in the kitchen inside the house, where you were helping Ma wrap vegetables in tinfoil, wrapping potatoes, onions, garlic, and also mushrooms, which I hate.

  I asked Papa if the echoes we had heard earlier that day were like the ones in Echo Canyon he’d told us about. He said yes but no. In the Chiricahua Mountains, in Echo Canyon, he said, the echoes were even stronger and more beautiful. The most beautiful echoes you ever heard, he said, and some of them have been bouncing around there for so long that if you listen carefully, you can hear the voices of the long-departed Chiricahua peoples. And of the Eagle Warriors? I asked him. Yes, of the Eagle Warriors, too.

  I wondered for a while how that was possible, and then I asked Ma and Pa to explain echoes to me more clearly, more professionally, as w
e all set the table, a long wooden table outside the house, bringing plates, forks, knives, cups, water, wine, salt, bread. I understood the basics. They said an echo is a delay in sound waves. It’s a sound wave that arrives after the direct sound is produced and reflected on a surface. But that explanation didn’t answer all my questions, so I kept insisting, asking more and more, until I think I got them both a bit annoyed, and Pa said:

  Food’s ready!

  We sat around the wooden table, and Papa wanted to make a toast, so he let me and you try some drops of wine in our cups, although he also poured a lot of water into them, to make the taste softer, he said. He said kids in this country were usually not allowed to taste wine, said their taste buds were completely ruined by puritanism, chicken fingers, ketchup, and peanut butter. But we were now kids in Chiricahua Apache territory, so we were allowed to have a tiny taste of life. He raised his cup, said Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua were all beautiful names, but also names to name a past of injustice, genocide, exodus, war, and blood. He said he wanted us to remember this land as a land of resilience and forgiveness, also as a land where the earth and sky knew no division.

  He didn’t tell us what the real name of the land was, but I suppose it was Apacheria. Then he took a sip from his cup, so we all took a sip from our cups. You spat it all out onto the ground, said you hated it, this waterwine. I said I liked it, though really I didn’t that much.

  TIME

  We finished eating quickly because we were so hungry, but I didn’t want that evening to end, ever, though I knew it would end and so would all our evenings together, as soon as the trip ended. I couldn’t change that, but for tonight, at least, I could try to make the night longer, the way Geronimo had the power to stretch out time during a night of battle.

  QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

  I decided to ask questions, good ones, so that everyone forgot about time. That way I could make time stretch longer.

  First I asked the three of you what you wished for the most right then. You said: Frutilupis! Pa said: I wish for clarity. Ma said: I wish for Manuela to find her two daughters.

  Then I asked Pa and Ma: What were you like when you were our ages and what do you remember? Papa told us a sad story about when he was your age and his dog got run over by a tram and then his grandmother put the dog in a black plastic bag and threw him in the trash. Then he said that when he was my age, things got better for him and he used to be the director of the children’s newspaper in the building where they lived. He was in charge of leading an expedition every Friday after school to the stationery shop, where there was a machine called the Xerox that made copies of whatever they wrote or whatever they drew but without there being computers or anything. One time, because they had not written anything or drawn anything for the newspaper, they just put their hands, then their faces, then their feet on the machine and the machine printed copies of that, and then when no one was looking, one boy pulled down his pants and sat on the machine and made a copy of his butt. You and I laughed so hard that the waterwine I had just taken a sip of came all out through my nostrils and stung.

  Then it was Mama’s turn, and she remembered that when she was five years old like you, she was in a living room in a house with her mother and her mother’s friend, and there was a huge fish tank with many fish that she was looking at. At some point, she turned around and her mother was not there, only her mother’s friend, so she asked her, where is my mother? and the friend said, she’s in there, look, she became a fish. And at first Mama was really excited and trying to make out which of the fishes was her mother, but then she started getting scared, thinking, will my mother come back and ever stop being a fish? And so much time passed that she started crying for her mother to come back, and I think that while she was telling this story, she almost started crying again, and I didn’t want that, so I asked her what about when she was my age, what was her favorite game when she was ten.

  She thought for a moment, and then she said her favorite thing when she was ten was breaking into and exploring houses that were abandoned because the neighborhood where she lived was full of abandoned houses. And she said nothing else, though you were curious to know more about those abandoned houses. For example, were there ghosts in them and did Ma ever get caught by anyone like the police or her parents? But instead of telling us more, she asked us, what about you two, how do you think you will be when you are our age and grown up?

  You raised your hand to speak and so got to speak first. You said, I think I will know how to read and write. And then you said you would have either a boyfriend or a girlfriend but that you’d never marry anyone so you didn’t have to tongue kiss, which I thought was smart. Then because you didn’t say anything else, I got to speak. I said I would travel a lot, and have many children, and would cook buffalo meat for them every day. For a job, I’d be an astronaut. And as a hobby, I would document things. I said I would be a documentarianist, and I said the word so quick that I think maybe Pa heard documentarist and Ma heard documentarian, and no one minded.

  CREDIBLE FEARS

  That night, when everyone was asleep and I couldn’t sleep, I snuck out of our bedroom, took the car keys from the top of the refrigerator, and went outside. I crossed the porch, walked slowly to the car, opened the trunk, and looked around in the dark for Ma’s box. I wanted to read what happened next in the lost children’s story, in the red book, but this time I wanted to read out loud and record some more, like I’d done with Ma the day before. I didn’t want to make a racket looking for the recorder in the box, so I just took the entire box with me. I was about to go back inside the house when I remembered that Ma kept her recorder in the glove compartment most of the time, and not in the box. So I walked back to the car, opened the passenger door, put the box down on the seat, and looked in the compartment. It was there. Ma’s big road map was also there. I took both things, the road map and the recorder, opened the box’s lid just enough to sneak them inside it silently, then tiptoed back to the house, and across the house into our bedroom carrying everything. You were fast asleep and snoring like an old man, Memphis, and occupying most of the space. I put the box on the floor for a moment, pushed you to your side, being extra gentle, and switched on only the little bedside lamp so I wouldn’t wake you up. You stopped snoring, turned around, belly facing the ceiling. Then your mouth opened a little and you started snoring again. I climbed into my side of the bed and sat there, with Ma’s box in front of me.

  Very carefully, I opened it. I took out the road map, the recorder, and the red book with my pictures inside its pages, and put all three things on the bedside table, under the lamp. I was about to close the box again and get ready to read when something came over me, which I cannot explain. I felt like I needed to see what else was in that box, look at all the things that I knew were always under the little red book, things I wasn’t allowed to look at so never did. But no one was watching me now. I could shuffle the things in the box around all I wanted. As long as I put everything back in its place after, Ma would never even notice.

  One by one, I started taking things out of the box, slowly, making sure I put everything in order on the bed, so I could put it back later exactly the same way. The first thing I took from the top of the box I put on the left-foot corner of the bed, which was my corner, the second thing next to it, then the third, fourth.

  It was more stuff than I thought. There were a lot of cutouts and notes, and photographs and a few tapes. There were folders, birth certificates and other official things, maps, and some books. I put each thing on the bed, one next to the other. At some point, I had to get out of bed and walk around the edges, so I could reach everything better. By the time I took out the last thing, I’d taken up most of the space in the bed, and even though I didn’t want to put anything on top of you in case you moved between the sheets and messed everything up, I ended up having to put some maps and some books on top of you.

&
nbsp; I spent a while looking at all of Mama’s stuff, all laid out, walking around the bed, back and forth, until my head was spinning with feelings. Finally, I took a folder labeled “Migrant Mortality Reports” and opened it. It was full of loose pieces of paper with information, and I looked through them, I tried to understand what they were saying but couldn’t, there were many numbers and abbreviations, and it was so frustrating to not understand. I decided to focus on the maps, because at least I knew I was good at reading maps. I took one that was right on top of your knees, or maybe your thighs, I couldn’t tell, ’cause of the sheet. The map was strange. It showed a space, like any map, but in that space there were hundreds of little red dots, which weren’t cities because some of them overlapped with others. When I looked at the map key, I realized the red dots stood for people who had died there, in that exact spot, and I wanted to vomit, or cry, and wake Ma and Pa up and ask them, but of course I didn’t. I just breathed deep. I remembered Ma and Pa making five-hundred-piece puzzles walking around the dining table in our old apartment, how they looked serious, worried, but at the same time in control, and that’s how I decided I should stand in front of all that stuff lying on our bed.