Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  No idea. I suppose they just said they were sorry.

  And then?

  Then they got married, had my sister and me, then eventually got divorced and lived happily ever after.

  RHYTHM & METER

  We’ve finally descended from the Great Smoky Mountains and approach a populated valley. The landscape changes so dramatically, it’s hard to believe we’re still in the same country, on the same planet. In less than an hour, we’ve gone from fog-clad peaks and a vast expanse of countless shades of green—hues nuanced toward blues into grays and purples—to a succession of monochrome parking lots, enormous and mostly empty, surrounding their respective motels, hotels, diners, supermarkets, and drugstores (the ratio of parking space to space for human bodies bewilderingly biased in favor of the former). We make a quick stop for a late lunch in a place called Dolly Parton’s Stampede, and make sure to leave before the start of their afternoon show, which, according to the menu, features music, comedy, pyrotechnics, and live animals.

  Back in the car, the children demand that we play an audiobook. The boy wants to continue listening to Lord of the Flies. “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night…,” says the voice of the man in the car speakers, every time, when I connect my phone to the sound system. I guess it’s because that book is at the top of the playlist, but I can’t figure out why it just starts playing by itself, like some diabolical toy. The children complain from the backseat. I press Stop and tell them to be patient with me as I search for Lord of the Flies.

  The girl says she doesn’t want to listen to that story anymore, says she doesn’t get it, and that when she does get it, it’s too scary anyway. The boy tells her to hush up, and be more mature, and learn to listen to things. He tells her that Lord of the Flies is a classic, and she needs to understand the classics if she wants to understand anything about anything. I want to ask him why he thinks that, but I don’t, not now. I wonder at times if the children are indeed getting any of it, or if they’re even supposed to get it. Perhaps we expose them to too much—too much world. And perhaps we expect too much from them, expect them to understand things that they are maybe not ready to.

  When my husband and I were just beginning to work on the city soundscape project, four years ago, we interviewed a man named Stephen Haff. On the ground floor of a building in Brooklyn, this man had opened up a one-room schoolhouse called Still Waters in a Storm. His students, immigrants or children of immigrants, mostly of Hispanic origin, were between five and seventeen years old, and he taught them Latin, taught them classical music, taught them how to scan poems and understand rhythm and meter. He’d helped them, even his youngest ones, learn parts of Paradise Lost by heart and understand it, and was at that time guiding a group of fifteen children in a collective translation, from Spanish into English, of Don Quixote. In their version, though, Don Quixote was not an old Spanish man but a group of children who had migrated from Latin America to the United States. It takes courage, and a little bit of lunacy, to do things like that. But especially, I thought then and still think now, it takes clarity of mind and humility of heart to understand that children can indeed read Paradise Lost, and learn Latin, and translate Cervantes. During a sampling session for the soundscape, my husband and I recorded one of Stephen Haff’s younger students—a little girl, eight or nine years old—while she argued passionately with the rest over the exact way to translate the words “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness.”

  I suppose that after listening to her, we both decided, even though we never really spoke about it, that we should treat our own children not as lesser recipients to whom we, adults, had to impart our higher knowledge of the world, always in small, sugarcoated doses, but as our intellectual equals. Even if we also needed to be the guardians of our children’s imaginations and protect their right to travel slowly from innocence toward more and more difficult acknowledgments, they were our life partners in conversation, fellow travelers in the storm with whom we strove constantly to find still waters.

  Finally, I find the Lord of the Flies file and press Play, picking up from where we’d stopped last time. Piggy’s glasses are being stepped on, crushed, and without them he’s lost: “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.” As the sun sets and we drive through Knoxville, we decide to sleep in a motel farther away from the city, perhaps midway between Knoxville and Nashville. We’re world-weary, and we don’t want to see too many other people or have to think about how to interact with them.

  CLIMAX

  There is never a climax unless there is sex, or unless there’s a clear narrative arc: beginning, middle, end.

  In our story, there had once been a lot of sex, but never a clear narrative. Now if there’s sex, it has to be in motel rooms, where the children are sleeping on the bed next to ours. It feels like singing into a bottle. I don’t want to have sex tonight; he does. I will have my period soon, and I was once told by a witch doctor that couples who have sex right before the woman’s period later act violently toward each other. So I suggest we play a name game instead. He drops a name of someone we know:

  Natalia López.

  Okay, Natalia.

  Do you like her breasts?

  A little.

  Just a little?

  I adore them.

  What are they like?

  Fuller than mine, rounder.

  Her nipples?

  Of a much lighter color than mine.

  What do they smell like?

  Like skin.

  Would you like to touch her now?

  Yes.

  Where?

  Her waist, the little hairs on her coccyx, her inner thighs.

  Have you ever kissed her?

  Yes.

  Where?

  On a sofa.

  But where on her body?

  Face.

  What is her face like?

  Freckled, angled, bony.

  Her eyes?

  Small, fierce, honey brown.

  Her nose?

  Andean.

  Mouth?

  Monica Vitti.

  At the end of the game, he’s maybe angry but also turned on, and I am turned on but turned off from him, thinking of another body.

  He rolls around to his other side, his back to me now, and I switch on the bedside lamp. I peruse my two new Marguerite Duras books while he wriggles around under the sheet in sporadic, silent complaints. In the English version of The Lover, Duras describes her young face as “destroyed.” I wonder if it should rather be “dilapidated,” “devastated,” or even “unmade,” like a bed after sex. He tugs at the sheet. I think the French word Duras uses is “défait,” unmade, though it could also be “détruit.”

  I don’t think it’s true that we really come to know and memorize the faces and bodies we love—even those we sleep with every day, and have sex with almost every day, and sometimes study with wistful chagrin after we’ve fucked them, or them us. I know I once stared into a spread of freckles on Natalia’s left shoulder and thought I knew it, every possible constellation in it. But in truth, I don’t remember if it was the right or left shoulder, or if the freckles were in fact moles, or if by joining the dots together you got a map of Australia, the paw of a cat, or the skeleton of a fish, and in further truth, this lyrical shit only mattered while the person mattered.

  I put down The Lover and look through the annotated screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour. In the prologue, Duras describes an embrace between two lovers as “banal” and “commonplace.” I underline the two words, such rare adjectives for the noun they modify. Then, on page 15, I underline a description of a shot where there are two pairs of bare shoulders and arms, perspiring and covered in a kind of ashy dew. The description specifies that “we get the feeling that this dew, this perspiration, has been deposited by the atomic mushroom as it moves away and evaporates.” Then comes a succe
ssion of images: a hospital hallway, stills of buildings that remain standing in Hiroshima, people walking inside a museum in an exhibition about the bombing, and finally, a group of schoolchildren leaning over a reproduction in scale of the city reduced to ashes. I fall asleep with these images playing circularly in my mind, and probably dream nothing.

  The next morning, I wake up, pee, and notice the small-scale nuclear mushrooms of menstrual drops expanding in slow motion in the bowl of the toilet. So many years of this monthly experience and—still—I gasp at the sight.

  SIMILES

  Years ago, when I was about three months’ pregnant with the girl, I visited my sister in Chicago. We had dinner at a Japanese restaurant with a friend of hers, whose job it was to make space suits. The three of us—my sister, her friend, and I—were each emerging from recent circumstances of heartbreak, and were therefore entirely self-centered, orbiting obstinately around our own pain. We were stuck in the mud of our personal narratives, each of us trying to deliver stories too wound up and knotted in yarns of detail—he called me on Tuesday and then on Thursday; she took three hours to answer my SMS; he forgot his wallet on my bed—to be of interest or make sense to anyone else. Not entirely disconnected from reality, though, we probably soon realized that our empathy toward one another, and therefore the possibility of a real conversation, was impaired by the radical solipsism that amorous disappointment brings. So, after a few general statements exchanged over slurped miso soups—sex after marriage, solitude, unrequited desire, the relentless social pressure to subsume personhood under motherhood—we steered toward our professional lives.

  In response to my question, my sister’s friend said she had just started a small company that was now providing NASA with some of the best space suits in the industry. I was immediately curious, inquired further. She had gained a reputation as a seamstress and welder making removable wolf masks for Cirque du Soleil some years back, so someone connected to NASA had reached out and asked her to design a complicated mechanism for a removable space glove. I listened to these details, in disbelief at first, thinking she was maybe constructing some kind of elaborate and strangely sarcastic metaphor from the debris of our earlier attempt at conversation. But as she continued to speak, I realized she was really just talking about very concrete things, simply describing her craft to us. My sister distributed three small ceramic dishes, and I poured soy sauce into each of them. With the years, her friend’s skills had become more refined, and she had gone from sleeves, to helmets, to entire suits. Now she was working on a TMG for female astronauts.

  TMG? I asked.

  A thermal micrometeoroid garment designed especially for women, she said, and dipped a California roll in soy sauce. For the last month, she’d been trying to figure out how to factor in menstruation.

  So the question is—where do you put all that blood?

  Her question was of course rhetorical. She knew what she was talking about, understood the needs of people floating in space, including women, as well as the constraints and possibilities of her materials. She went on to explain—and now she was talking to us like we were potential investors sitting around an oval conference table—that it was always better not to fight nature, said it was always preferable to join them if you couldn’t beat them, as the saying went. So the thermal micrometeoroid garment included, she said, an undergarment that absorbed menstrual fluids seamlessly, but also beautifully, into the suit. Once expelled, these fluids would then slowly disperse in an arrangement similar to the one on tie-dyed T-shirts, changing colors and creating unique patterns as the astronaut’s menstrual moon evolved from the shedding of the uterus’s lining into the maturing of a new egg. I looked at her in awe, and probably muttered something to express my admiration. When she finished explaining the project, she smiled wide, and I smiled back, and with the tip of her chopstick, she signaled that I had something stuck between my two front teeth.

  REVERBERATIONS

  So what’s the plan, Papa? asks the boy.

  It’s early in the morning, before sunrise, and though it’s raining, they are getting ready to go out to record some samples around the motel. His father tells him that the plan is simply to work on the inventory of echoes.

  I’m still not sure what he means, exactly, by an “inventory.” I suppose he means he’ll be picking up passing sounds and voices that may eventually, during montage, suggest a story. Or perhaps he will never organize them into a story. He’ll simply walk around places and among people, asking questions now and then, maybe asking nothing, raising his boom to pick up whatever comes his way. Maybe everything will remain unnarrated, a collage of environments and voices telling the story on their own, instead of a single voice forcing it all together into a clean narrative sequence.

  But what are we going to actually do? the boy asks his father as they put on their shoes.

  Collect sounds that are usually not noticed.

  But what kinds of sounds?

  Maybe the rain falling on this tin roof, some birds if we can, or maybe just insects buzzing.

  How do you tape an insect buzzing?

  You just do.

  He tells the boy they’ll be using a stereo mic on the boom, while trying to get as close as possible to sources. He wants all the sounds to be raw, subtle suggestions in a constant, homogeneous background. But that has to be done after, he tells him, during the mixing, when you can actually level the sounds. Before that, he tells the boy, when you’re still recording those kinds of sounds, you want to get as close to the source as possible.

  So we get close to insects and record? That’s it?

  Kind of, yes.

  Lying in bed, awake but with my eyes closed, I listen to them speak as they prepare to go out. I wonder how everything my husband is saying to the boy might apply to documenting sounds and voices for my own sound piece. I’m not sure that I’d ever be able to—or should—get as close to my sources as possible. Although a valuable archive of the lost children would need to be composed, fundamentally, of a series of testimonies or oral histories that register their own voices telling their stories, it doesn’t seem right to turn those children, their lives, into material for media consumption. Why? What for? So that others can listen to them and feel—pity? Feel—rage? And then do what? No one decides to not go to work and start a hunger strike after listening to the radio in the morning. Everyone continues with their normal lives, no matter the severity of the news they hear, unless the severity concerns weather.

  The boy and his father finally step out of the room, into the rain that is now pouring down, and close the door. I turn around on the bed, trying to fall asleep again. I turn, and turn again, and cover my head with the pillow my husband left spare, still warm and a little sweaty. I try to talk myself back into sleep, to talk myself out of the feeling that a chasm is opening up underneath me, or maybe inside of me, swallowing me. How do you fill the emotional voids that appear when there are sudden, unexpected shifts? Which reasons, which narratives, will be the ones that save you from falling, from wanting to not fall? I turn around again, wishing myself back into sleep. I cover my head tighter with the pillow, reach deeper into my mind, looking for reasons, making lists of things, making plans, looking for answers, solutions, wishing for darkness, silence, emptiness, wishing.

  INVENTORY

  The morning matures, bright and full of day-sounds. The girl is still asleep, but I cannot fall back into sleep. Outside the window of the motel room, behind the blanket of clouds that hover close above this small portion of the world, the sun climbs its regular path, stirring up steam and humidity but failing to illuminate space, clarify thought, and incite bodies to spring into wakeful action. Once more, I turn heavily onto my side. On his side of the bed, my husband has left one of the books from his boxes, The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer. I pick it up, lie flat, and hold the book above my sleepy face, flipping it open. From between the pages, a small note slips out and feathers down onto my chest. It’s a note addressed to
my husband, undated:

  I love the idea of an “inventory of echoes”—it so beautifully resounds the Bosavi dual power of forest agency, being at once acoustemic diagnostic of the h/wealth of a living world, and the “gone reflections/reverberations” of those who have “become” its birds by achieving death. See you soon, I hope.

  Yours, Steven Feld

  I remember this name, Steven Feld. My husband learned to record and think about sound with a bunch of ethnomusicologists, linguists, and ornithologists, sampling sounds in rain forests and deserts. As a student, he read and listened to the work of Steven Feld, an acoustemologist who, like Murray Schafer, thought that the sounds people make, in music or in language, were always echoes of the landscape that surrounded them, and spent a lifetime sampling examples of that deep and invisible connection. In Papua New Guinea, Feld had first recorded funerary weeping and ceremonial songs of the Bosavi people in the late 1970s, and he later understood that the songs and weeping he had been sampling were actually vocalized maps of the surrounding landscapes, sung from the shifting, sweeping viewpoint of birds that flew over those spaces, so he started recording birds. After listening to them for some years, he realized that the Bosavi understood birds as echoes or “gone reverberations”—as absence turned into a presence; and, at the same time, as a presence that made an absence audible. The Bosavi emulated bird sounds during funeral rites because birds were the only materialization in the world that reflected absence. Bird sounds were, according to the Bosavi, and in Feld’s words, “the voice of memory and the resonance of ancestry.”

  Feld’s ideas had formed my husband’s worldview—or rather, his world-ear—and he had eventually sought him out, following him to Papua New Guinea, where he helped him record bird songs and song paths along the rain forests, trying to map the soundscape of the dead through their reverberations in birdsong. My husband trailed behind Feld carrying a bag full of recording instruments. They would walk for hours, until Feld decided to stop, enclose his ears in his headphones, turn on the recorder, and start pointing a parabolic microphone into the trees. There were always local children following them around, curious, perhaps, about all the gadgets and cables these men needed in order to listen to the sounds of the forest. The kids would laugh hysterically as Feld pointed his microphone aimlessly up, down, around. My husband would be standing behind him, also listening for sounds under his headphones, shadowing Feld’s movements. Sometimes a child would pull Feld’s arm and help him point in the right direction. Everyone stood still, under the shadow of an enormous tree, waiting. And all of a sudden, the invisible presence of myriad birds would flood their ear-space, bringing into existence an entire layer of the world, previously ignored.