Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  POINT OF VIEW

  By the time I had finished reading, you were asleep and I was a little scared to fall asleep, and I remembered those lines we used to repeat in the car, “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him,” and for the first time I understood exactly what the author had meant when he wrote them.

  I also felt that we were getting closer and closer to the lost children. It was as if while I listened to their story and their plans, they also listened to ours. I decided to read aloud just one more chapter, which was very short, even if you were already asleep.

  (THE EIGHTH ELEGY)

  The boys relieved their bladders together, making a circle around a dead bush near the tracks in the train yard. Before they had come to the train yard, it was a difficult task, and now they had almost forgotten how simple it was. Aboard the trains, in the early mornings, the boys were allowed to relieve their bladders only once. They stood by the edge of the gondola’s rooftop, in pairs or alone. They saw the yellow arch of urine first jetting forward, then spraying sideways, broken into countless little drops. The girls had to climb down the side ladder, jump onto the small platform between cars, and, holding on to bars, squat into the emptiness, spraying or soiling the gravel beneath them. They closed their eyes, trying to not see the moving ground. Sometimes they looked up and saw the man in charge looking down at them, grinning under his blue cap. They looked past him, and sometimes they saw high eagles crossing the bluer sky above, and if the eagles did pass, the girls knew they were being watched over and were safe.

  SYNTAX

  I realized I also had to pee. I used to pee only in toilets, but I had learned to do it in the open, just like the lost boys did from the top of the gondola. And now I think I could only ever pee in the open. I learned to do it one day when we were outside the Apache cemetery. You all got in the car to wait for me and I asked you to look the other way and Ma and Pa did, but you, Memphis, you covered your face with your hands but didn’t really cover your eyes. I knew you were peeking and would look at my butt and think that my tooshie was ugly, and maybe laugh at me, but I couldn’t have cared less because anyway you always used to see my butt when we’d shower together, and you’d even see my penis, which you called yo-yo, so sometimes I call it yo-yo, too, but only in the shower, because it’s the only place I’m not shy about words like that, ’cause there we’re alone together.

  That time in the cemetery, I peed so strong, I was bursting. And it was so much pee coming out of me that I wrote my new initials on the dust: S for Swift and then F for Feather, and then I even underlined them both.

  When I was pulling up my pants, I remembered a joke or a saying Pa had told us where someone says, you can piss on my face, just don’t tell me it’s raining, and I was going to laugh or at least smile, but then I also remembered that Geronimo was buried there beyond the wall because he fell off his horse and died and now was buried in the cemetery for the prisoners of war, and I felt proud to be peeing there on the stupid wall that kept the prisoners of war locked up and removed and disappeared from the map, just like Ma used to say about the lost children, who had traveled alone and then were deported and wiped off the map like aliens. But later, inside the car looking back at the cemetery, I just felt angry because peeing on the wall wouldn’t have mattered to the people who had built the wall around the dead prisoners, and then I was angry for Geronimo and for all the other prisoners of war, whose names no one ever remembered or said out loud.

  And these names I remembered every time I peed out in the open like a wild beast. I remembered their names and imagined they were coming out of me, and I tried to write their initials in the dust, different ones each time, so I wouldn’t ever forget their names and so that the ground would also remember them:

  CC for Chief Cochise

  CL for Chief Loco

  CN for Chief Nana

  S for the priest woman called Saliva

  MC for Mangas Coloradas

  And a big G for Geronimo.

  RHYTHM

  We opened our eyes again when the sun was up, and I heard a motor, which at first I ignored because I thought it was dream noise. But you also noticed it, so we decided to walk toward that sound. We followed it for a little while, down a rocky slope, until we saw a man at the bottom of a road, a man with a white straw hat sitting on his tractor pushing hay into a neat pile. My strategy was clear from the beginning. When we approached him, you had to keep quiet and I was to do the talking and would fake an accent and sound in control of the situation.

  So the first thing I said when we were finally a few steps from him was, hello sir, and can I take a picture of you dear sir, and what’s your name sir, and he looked a little surprised but said the name’s Jim Courten, and sure thing young man, and then after I took the picture, he asked us our names and where we were going and where were our parents this fine morning. When I heard his name was Jim Courten, I almost cried out with joy, because that meant he was the owner of the Jim Courten Ranch I had circled on my Continental Divide Trail map, and so I knew we were on the right path. But I didn’t show any feelings, and I knew we couldn’t seem lost because I wasn’t sure we should trust him yet, so I lied, told him our names were Gaston and Isabelle and repeated the line I had already made in my head before he even asked the question: I said, oh, they’re just at the ranch back there, Ray Ranch, and are busy with stuff ’cause we just moved here. We moved here from Paris ’cause we are French, I said, all in a convincing French accent. He was still looking at us like he was waiting for more words, so I said, French children are very independent, you see, and our folks told us to walk around and explore to keep us busy, you know, and asked us to take pictures to send back to our French relatives, and when he nodded, I said, could you maybe give us a ride to the Big Tank so we can take pictures of it? Also, we said we’d meet our folks there. I’m not sure if he believed us, and I think he was a little drunk because he smelled strong, like gasoline almost, but he was nice and he took us to the water tank, where we waved goodbye, pretending we knew our way and pretending, especially, we were not nearly dying of thirst.

  When he was gone and the motor sounded like the memory of something far away, you and I looked each other in the eyes and knew exactly what the other was thinking, which was, water, and we ran for the water, and we got down on our bellies by the shore of the running river and first tried to cup our hands, but it was no use, so we made an O with our mouths like we were insects and drank the gushing gray water directly from the river as if our lips were straws. I could see your little teeth and your tongue coming out and disappearing back in as you sucked in the water.

  CLIMAX

  According to the Continental Divide Trail map, we were only ten miles from the next town, which was Lordsburg, where there was a train station that I hoped would have trains that went west toward the Chiricahuas and Echo Canyon. I tried to explain this to you, excited and proud of how well I was following the map, but you weren’t really interested. Later, sitting by the shore, still hungry but not thirsty at least, I was trying to figure things out, and I took things out of my backpack, like some matches and my book and my compass and my binoculars and also some of my pictures, which were all in a mess inside the backpack, and put everything on the mud all lined up next to one another. There was the picture I’d just taken, of the rancher on his tractor. You said the rancher looked like Johnny Cash, which I thought was really elevated for your age, and I told you, you’re so smart.

  It was an okay picture, except the rancher looked like he was fading under a bright fountain of light that I didn’t remember had been there at all when I took it. And then I remembered also that I’d taken some pictures of Pa where he looked like he was disappearing, under too much light. So I scratched through my stuff to find those pictures, and I did. One of them was of one day when we drove on many roads and cr
ossed Texas and Papa stopped the car in the middle of the highway, which was empty anyway, and we both got out and I took a picture of him next to a sign that said Paris, Texas, and then we got back in the car. And the other one was of one day when we went to the town called Geronimo on our way to the Apache cemetery and Papa parked the car again next to the sign that said Geronimo City Limits and I took a picture.

  Now, lying there on the mud by the shore of the tank, you and I, I realized these three pictures looked so much like one another, like pieces of a puzzle I had to put together, and I was looking at them, concentrating hard, when you suddenly came up with the clue, which was good and smart but also terrifying. You said: Look, everyone in these pictures is disappearing.

  SIMILES

  It was late afternoon when we finally reached Lordsburg, and we’d been walking for so long though I’d thought we had been so near, and we were thirsty again because there had been no other water tanks on that part of the way, just two old windmills, which were abandoned, and also closed or abandoned shops like Mom and Pop’s Pyroshop, and a huge billboard-like sign that just said Food, which I took a picture of, and later the cemetery, and when we had finally left the Continental Divide Trail, there was an abandoned motel called End of Trail Motel, which I also took a picture of. When we reached the big highway that would take us straight to Lordsburg Station, there were also strange road signs saying things like Caution: Dust Storms May Exist and another one saying Zero Visibility Possible, which I knew meant something about bad weather conditions, but I smiled to myself thinking it was like a good-luck sign for us because we’d have to be invisible now that we were going to enter a town full of strangers.

  The Lordsburg train station looked more like a train yard than a station. There were a few old train cars parked there but no real station with people coming and going with suitcases and other things you normally see in stations. It looked like a place where everyone had died or simply vanished, because you could feel people and almost smell their breath around you, but there was no one to be seen. We walked along the tracks for a little while, heading west, I think, because we had the sun in our faces, though it didn’t bother us because it was already low in the sky. We walked along the tracks until we had to step around a parked train, and as we walked around it, we spotted an open diner, and the diner was called the Maverick Room. We stood looking at it for a long time, with our backs against the parked train, wondering if we should walk over and go in. It was just some steps from the tracks, right after a strip of gravel. I was scared to go into the diner, but I didn’t say it. You really wanted to go in, because you were thirsty. I was, too, but I didn’t say that either.

  To distract you, I said, hey, I’ll let you take a picture of the train, and you can hold the camera all by yourself. Of course you agreed immediately. We took a few steps away from the train, stood midway between the train car and the Maverick Room. I took out the camera and Ma’s red book from my backpack, the way I always prepared before a picture. Then I let you hold the camera, and you looked through the eyepiece, and just as I was telling you to be patient and make sure you’d focused well, you pressed the shutter, and the picture slid out. I caught it just in time, quickly put it inside Mama’s red book to develop, and threw the camera and the book back in my backpack.

  You asked, what’s the plan now, Swift Feather?, so I told you that the plan was to wait for the picture to develop. Then, again, you said you badly needed water, which I knew, because your lips were all chapped. And I could tell you were close to throwing a tantrum, so I said, okay, okay, we’ll go into the diner. And what’s the plan after that? you asked. I told you the plan was to jump back on that train car after we got something to drink at the diner. I said we’d sleep on the roof of that train, and that the train would probably depart the next morning, heading west, which was the direction to Echo Canyon. I didn’t know what I was talking about, of course, I was just making everything up, but you believed me because you trusted me, and this always made me feel guilty.

  I thought: The plan for now is, we will go inside and we will ask for water sitting at the long counter and pretend that our parents are coming any minute, and after drinking the water, we will run away. It won’t count as stealing because glasses of water are free anyway. But I won’t tell Memphis this part, I thought. I won’t tell her we will have to run away after drinking the water, because I know it will scare her and she doesn’t need to be scared.

  REVERBERATIONS

  The sun was low in the sky when we walked into the diner. As soon as we walked in, I knew we shouldn’t stay too long in there or we’d start looking suspicious, like we were alone, no parents. We sat at the long counter on high stools with bouncy foam. Everything around us was shiny, the napkin holders, the big loud coffeemakers that smell so acid, the spoons and forks, even the face of the waitress was shiny. You, Memphis, asked the waitress for crayons and paper, which you got, and I asked for two waters and said we’d wait for our mom and dad to come to order real things. The waitress smiled and said, sure thing, young man. The only other person, aside from us and the waitress, was an old man with a round pink face. He was standing a few feet from us, dressed in blue. He was drinking a tall glass of beer, and was eating chicken wings and sucking the stuck meat from between his long teeth. I could see you wanted some chicken, too, ’cause your eyes got all tear-swollen and mad like birds fighting for space on branches.

  But we weren’t going to risk it. I said, focus on your picture, and so you drew a girl figure and wrote Sir Fus in Love, and then said it said Sara Falls in Love. I didn’t want to correct your spelling because it really didn’t matter that much, because who was going to see the drawing except us anyway?

  The man went to the bathroom and left his dish full of chicken wings right there. The waitress was in the kitchen, and when I was sure no one was watching, I reached over and snatched two chicken wings from his plate and handed you one, which first you held tight in your hand, and then, when you saw I was quickly eating mine, you did the same. And when we’d eaten the last bit of meat on them, we threw the bones under the counter.

  Then the waters came, with a lot of ice. I took sugar packets and emptied them into our waters and then I put a bunch of them in my pocket, for later. And the waters were so good and sweet, we drank them so quickly, so quickly that I was all of a sudden ashamed to leave. My legs felt heavy and embarrassed, for the waters and also for the evidence of the chicken-wing bones under the counter. We sat there in silence for a while, and I helped you with your drawing and made a heart around Sara Falls in Love, and we both made shooting stars around her and some planets. But even when I was concentrating on coloring in the planets, I knew in my mind I couldn’t pretend for much longer to still be waiting for our parents to come in.

  I was about to not know what to do next and mess everything up when something happened that was lucky for us. I think you brought us the luck. Mama always said you had a good star above you. The man next to us with the round pink face and long teeth stood up and went to the jukebox in the corner. I think he was drunk because he took a long time messing around with it, pressing buttons, and his body moved a bit from side to side.

  Finally, a song came up—and this was the lucky part for us. It was one of our very own songs, yours and mine, one of the songs we knew by heart and had been singing in the car with our parents before we got lost or they got lost or everyone got lost. The song was called “Space Oddity,” about an astronaut who leaves his capsule and drifts far away from Earth. I knew we both knew the song, so I started up a game for you to follow right there. I looked at you and said, listen, you’re Major Tom and I’m Ground Control. Then slowly I put imaginary helmets on both of us, and both of us were holding pretend space walkie-talkies. Ground Control to Major Tom, I said into the walkie-talkie.

  You smiled so wide, I knew you understood my game immediately because also you usually do. The rest of the instr
uctions came from the song, but I was lip-singing them, looking straight at you so you wouldn’t get distracted by something else, because you’re always distracted by tiny things and details.

  Take your protein pills, I said. Put your helmet on, said the song, and then ten, nine, eight, commence the countdown, turn the engines on. You were listening to me, I knew. Check ignition, said me and the song. And as the countdown for space launch went down, seven, six, I slid off the stool and started walking backward toward the door still looking at you and lip-singing really clear. Five, four, and then you also slid off the stool holding the picture you’d drawn with Sara falls in love, three, two, and then came one, and right on one, we were both on the ground and you started following me, walking slowly on tiptoes and opening your eyes like when you’re looking at me underwater. You could be so funny sometimes in your face. You were moonwalking, but forward, and smiling so wide.

  No one in the diner noticed us, not the pink man, not the waitress, who were talking up close to each other, almost touching noses across the bar. We had already reached the swinging doors, exactly when the song gets louder, this is Ground Control the astronaut shouts into the microphone in the song. And I knew we’d made it when I held the door open for you and suddenly we were stepping through it and were both outside, safe and free outside, not having been caught by the waitress, or the man who was eating those chicken wings, or anyone.

  We were invisible, like two astronauts up in space, floating toward the moon. And outside, the sun was setting, the sky pink and orange, and the freight trains parked on the tracks were bright and beautiful, and I ran for it so fast across the gravel and around the train in front of the Maverick Room, and beyond the train tracks, and laughing so hard my bladder almost exploded from all the icy water we’d drank. And I ran more, crossed the big road and then ran along smaller streets until I reached the desert shrub, where there were no more houses or streets or anything, just shrubs and sometimes tall grass. I kept on running ’cause I could still hear the song, but only in my head, so I sang it in pieces out loud as we ran, like I’m floating, and like the stars seem different, and also my spaceship knows which way to go.