Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  ARCHIVE

  I wake up early the next morning in the cottage and make my way to the kitchen and living room area. I open the door to the porch, and the sun is rising behind the mountain. For the first time in years, there are slices of our private space that I’d like to record, sounds that I again feel an impulse to document and store. Perhaps it’s just that new things, new circumstances, have an aura of things past. Beginnings get confused with endings. We look at them the way a goat or a skunk might stare stupidly toward a horizon where there’s a sun, not knowing if the yellow star there is rising or setting.

  I want to record these first sounds of our trip together, maybe because they feel like the last sounds of something. But at the same time I don’t, because I don’t want to interfere with my recording; I don’t want to turn this particular moment of our lives together into a document for a future archive. If I could only, simply, underline certain things with my mind, I would: this light coming in through the kitchen window, flooding the entire cottage in a golden warmth as I prepare the coffeemaker; this soft breeze blowing in through the open door and brushing past my legs as I turn on the stove; that sound of footsteps—feet little, bare, and warm—as the girl gets out of bed and approaches me from behind, announcing:

  Mama, I woke up!

  She finds me standing by the stove, waiting for the coffee to be ready. She looks at me, smiles, and rubs her eyes when I say good morning back to her. I don’t know anyone for whom waking up is such good news, such a joyful event. Her eyes are startlingly large, her chest is bare, and her panties are white and puffy, too big around her. Serious and full of decorum, she says:

  I have a question, Mama.

  What is it?

  I want to ask you: Who is this Jesus Fucking Christ?

  I don’t answer, but I hand her a huge glass of milk.

  ORDER

  The boy and his father are still asleep, and the two of us—mother, daughter—find a seat on the couch in the cottage’s small but luminous living room. She sips her milk and opens her sketchbook. After a few failed attempts at drawing something, she asks me to make four squares for her—two at the top, two at the bottom—and instructs me to label them in this order: “Character,” “Setting,” “Problem,” “Solution.” When I finish labeling the four squares and ask what they’re for, she explains that at school, they taught her to tell stories this way. Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long. I remember how one day, when the boy was in second grade and I was helping him with homework, I suddenly realized he probably didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard.

  The girl concentrates on her drawing now, filling in the squares I made for her. I drink my coffee, and open Sontag’s journals again, rereading loose lines and words. Marriage, parting, moral bookkeeping, hollowed out, separation: Did our underlining these words foreshadow it? When did the end of us begin? I cannot say when or why. I’m not sure how. When I told a couple of friends, shortly before the four of us went on this trip, that my marriage was possibly ending, or at least was in a moment of crisis, they asked:

  What happened?

  They wanted a precise date:

  When did you realize, exactly? Before this or after that?

  They wanted a reason:

  Politics? Boredom? Emotional violence?

  They wanted an event:

  Did he cheat? Did you?

  I’d repeat to all of them that no, nothing had happened. Or rather, yes, everything they listed had probably happened, but that wasn’t the problem. Still, they insisted. They wanted reasons, motivations, and especially, they wanted a beginning:

  When, when exactly?

  I remember going to the supermarket one day shortly before we left on this trip. The boy and girl were arguing over the better flavor of some squeezable pureed snack. My husband was complaining about my particular choice of something, maybe milk, maybe detergent, maybe pasta. I remember imagining, for the first time since we had moved in together, how it would be to shop for just the girl and me, in a future where our family was no longer a family of four. I remember my feeling of remorse, almost instant, at having the thought. Then a much deeper feeling—maybe a blow of nostalgia for the future, or maybe the inner vacuum of melancholia, sucking up presentness and spreading absence—as I placed the shampoo the boy had chosen on the conveyer belt, vanilla scented for frequent use.

  But surely it was not that day, in that supermarket, that I understood what was happening to us. Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.

  The girl is finished with her drawing and shows it to me, full of satisfaction. In the first square, she has drawn a shark. In the second, a shark surrounded by other sea animals and algae, the surface of the water above them, the sun at the very top in a distant corner. In the third square, a shark, still in the water, looking distraught and facing a kind of underwater pine tree. In the fourth and last square, a shark biting and possibly eating another big fish, maybe also a shark.

  So what’s the story? I ask.

  You tell it, Mama, you guess.

  Well, first there is a shark; second, he’s in the sea, where he lives; third, the problem is there’s only trees to eat, and he’s not a vegetarian because he’s a shark; and fourth, finally, he finds food and eats it up.

  No, Mama. All wrong. Sharks don’t eat sharks.

  Okay. So what’s the story? I ask her.

  The story is, character: a shark. Setting: the ocean. Problem: the shark is feeling sad and confused because another shark bit him, so he goes to his thinking-tree. Solution: he finally figures it out.

  Figures what out? I ask her.

  That he just has to bite the other shark back for biting him!

  CHAOS

  The boy and his father finally wake up, and over breakfast, we discuss plans. My husband and I decide we need to get going again. The children complain, say they want to stay longer. This isn’t a normal vacation, we remind them; even if we can stop and enjoy things once in a while, the two of us have to work. I have to start recording material about the crisis at the southern border. From what I can gather by listening to the radio and fishing for news online whenever I can, the situation is becoming graver by the day. The administration, backed by the courts, has just announced the creation of a priority docket for undocumented minors, which means that the children who are arriving at the border will get priority in being deported. Federal immigration courts will process their cases before any others, and if they don’t find a lawyer to defend them within the impossibly narrow span of twenty-one days, they will have no chance, and will receive a final removal order from a judge.

  I don’t say all that to our children, of course. But I do tell the boy that what I’m working on is time sensitive, and I need to get to the southern border as quickly as possible. My husband says he wants to get to Oklahoma—where we will visit an Apache cemetery—as soon as possible. Sounding like a 1950s suburban housewife, the boy tells us that we’re always “putting work before family.” When he’s older, I tell him, he’ll understand that the two things are inseparable. He rolls his eyes, tells me I’m predictable and self-involved—two adjectives I’ve never heard him use before. I reprimand him, tell him he and his sister have to do the breakfast dishes.

  Do you remember when we had other parents? he asks her as they start with the dishes and we start packing up.

  What do you mean? she answers, confused, passing him the liquid soap.

  We had parents, once upon a time, better than these ones that we have now.

  I listen, wonder, and worry. I want to tell him that I love him, uncondi
tionally, that he does not have to demonstrate anything to me, that I’m his mother and want him near me, always, that I also need him. I should tell him all that, but instead, when he gets like this, I grow distant, circumspect, and maybe even unbiologically cold. It exasperates me not to understand how to ease his anger. I usually externalize my messy emotions, scolding him for little things: put on your shoes, brush your hair, pick up that bag. Most of the time, his father also turns his own exasperation inward, but he doesn’t scold him, doesn’t say or do anything. He just becomes passive—a sad spectator of our family life, like he’s watching a silent movie in an empty theater.

  Outside the cottage, as we make final preparations to leave, we ask the boy to help reorganize the things in the trunk, and he throws a bigger tantrum. He screams horrible things, wishing he belonged to a different world, a better family. I think he thinks we are here, in this world, to thrust him toward unhappiness: eat this fried egg you hate the texture of; let’s go, hurry up; learn to ride this bicycle that you fear; wear these pants that we bought just for you even though you don’t like them—they were expensive, so be grateful; play with that boy in the park who offers you his ephemeral friendship and his ball; be normal, be happy, be a child.

  He screams louder and louder, wishing us gone, wishing us dead, kicking the car’s tires, tossing rocks and gravel into the air. When he spins off into a spiral of rage like this, his voice sounds distant to me, remote, foreign, as if I were listening to it on an old analog recorder, through metal wires and across static, or as if I were a line operator listening to him in a faraway country. I recognize the familiar ring of his tone somewhere in the background, but I cannot tell whether he is reaching out to us in a desire to make contact, yearning for our love and undivided attention, or if he is somehow telling us to stay away, to fuck off from his ten years of life in this world and let him grow out of our little circle of familial ties. I listen, wonder, and worry.

  The tantrum continues, and his father finally loses patience. He walks over to him, grabs him firmly by the shoulders, and shouts. The boy wriggles out of his clutch and kicks his father in the ankles and knees—not kicks intended to harm or hurt, but kicks nonetheless. In response, his father takes off his hat, and with it, smacks him twice, maybe three times, on the butt. Not a painful punishment, but a humiliating one, for a ten-year-old: a hat-spanking. What follows is expected but also disarming: tears, sniffing, deep breaths, and stuttered words like okay, sorry, fine.

  When the boy has at last calmed down, his sister walks up to him, and with a little hopefulness and a little hesitancy, asks him if he wants to play with her for a while. She needs him to confirm to her that they still share a world. That they are together in this world, inextricably bound, beyond their two parents and their flaws. The boy turns her away at first, gently but firmly:

  Just give me a moment.

  Yet in the end, he’s still small, still susceptible to our fragile, private family mythologies. So when his father suggests we delay our departure so that they can all play the Apache game before we leave, the boy is overcome by a deep, primal happiness. He collects feathers, prepares his plastic bow and arrow, dresses his sister up as an Indian princess, taking care to tie a cotton belt around her head, not too tight and not too loose, and then runs around in circles howling like a madchild, wild and unburdened. He fills our life with his breath, with his sudden warmth, with his particular way of exploding into roaring laughter.

  ARCHIVE

  In the slow float of midmorning light, the children play the Apache game with their father. The cottage is at the crest of a hill in a high valley that undulates down toward the main road, invisible to us. No houses can be seen, just farmland and grassland, sprinkled here and there with wildflowers we do not know the names of. They are white and violet, and I make out a few orange patches. Farther away in the distance, a confederacy of cows grazes, looking quietly conspiratorial.

  From what I can make out, sitting on the porch bench, the game consists of nothing more than collecting little sticks from the forest proper, bringing them back, and fixing them into the ground one next to the other. Intermittently, little disputes spice the game: the girl suddenly says she wants to be a cowgirl, not an Indian princess, not any type of princess. My husband tells her this game has no white-eyes. They quarrel. In the end, she agrees hesitantly. She’ll carry on being an Apache, but only if she can be Lozen and if she’s still allowed to wear that cowgirl hat we found in the cottage, instead of the ribbon, which keeps slipping off.

  I sit on the porch, half reading my book, looking up at the three of them now and then. They look memorable from where I’m sitting; look like they should be photographed. I almost never take pictures of my own children. They hate being in pictures and always boycott the family’s photographic moments. If they are asked to pose for a portrait, they make sure their disdain is apparent, and fake a wide, cynical smile. If they are allowed to do as they please, they make porcine grimaces, stick out their tongues, contort themselves like Hollywood aliens in midseizure. They rehearse antisocial behaviors in general. Maybe it’s the same with all children. Adults, on the contrary, profess almost religious reverence toward the photographic ritual. They adopt solemn gestures, or calculate a smile; they look toward the horizon with patrician vanity, or into the lens of the camera with the solitary intensity of porn stars. Adults pose for eternity; children for the instant.

  I step back into the cottage to look for the Polaroid and the instruction booklet. I’d promised the boy I’d study them, because surely we were doing something wrong if the camera was indeed real yet his pictures still came out all white. I find them both—camera, instructions—in his backpack, among little cars, rubber bands, comics, his shiny red Swiss Army knife. Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings? I once had to look for an ID my sister had forgotten in her drawer and was suddenly wiping away tears with my sleeve as I went through her well-ordered pencils, colored clips, and random Post-it notes addressed to herself—visit Mama this week, talk more slowly, buy flowers and long earrings, walk more often. Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person’s absence. Perhaps it’s just that belongings often outlive their owners, so our minds can easily place those belongings in a future in which their owner is no longer present. We anticipate our loved ones’ future absence through the material presence of all their random stuff.

  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.