Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  HOMO FABER

  When I first met my husband, while we were working on the New York City soundscape project, I found his ideas about soundscaping intriguing, and his past life recording bird songs and song paths in rain forests fascinating, but I never quite understood the methods he used for sampling sounds in our project: no direct interviews, no preplanned anything, just walking around listening to the cityscape as if waiting for a rare bird to fly past. He, in turn, never understood or came to terms with the sound tradition that I was educated in, a tradition much more journalism-based and narrative-driven. All those radio journalists, he always used to say, unzipping their pants to take out their long shotgun mics and record their story! I disagreed with him, though he was sometimes so convincingly charismatic—especially when he was being nasty—that I often found myself, if not agreeing, at least laughing with him.

  When we were in better spirits, we were able to joke about our differences. We’d say that I was a documentarist and he was a documentarian, which meant that I was more like a chemist and he was more like a librarian. What he never understood about how I saw my work—the work I did before we met and the work I was probably going to go back to now, with the lost children’s story—was that pragmatic storytelling, commitment to truth, and a direct attack on issues was not, as he thought, a mere adherence to a conventional form of radio journalism. I’d come of age as a professional in a very different sound-setting and political climate. The way I learned to record sound was fundamentally about not fucking it up, about getting the facts of the story as right as possible without getting killed because, alas, you got too close to the sources, and without getting the sources killed because, alas, they got too close to you. My apparent lack of greater aesthetic principles was not a blind obedience to funders and funding, as he often said. My work was simply full of patchwork solutions, like those old houses where everything is falling apart and you just have to solve things, urgently, no time for turning questions and their possible answers into aesthetic theories about sound and its reverberations.

  In other words, the ways in which we each listened to and understood the sounds of the world around us were probably irreconcilable. I was a journalist, had always been, even though I had ventured outside my sound-range for a while and was now confused about how to return to my work, about how to reinvent a method and form, and find meaning again in what I did. And he was an acoustemologist and soundscape artist who had devoted his life to sampling echoes, winds, and birds, then found some economic stability working on a big urban project, but was now going back to what he’d always wanted to do. For the past four years, working on the city soundscape project, he had complied with more conventional ways but never really abandoned his ideas about sound; and I had immersed myself in the project, learned from it, and enjoyed not feeling burdened, for a change, by concerns about the immediate political consequences of what I was recording. But I was now gravitating back to the problems and questions that had always haunted me. We were both back to chasing our old ghosts—that, at least, we still shared. And now that we were each venturing out on our own again, and somehow also returning to the places we had each come from, our paths were dividing. It was a deeper chasm than we’d expected.

  HOMO FICTIO

  For now, there’s a bridge connecting us, and it’s the book called The Book with No Pictures, which the girl got in Asheville. It’s a simple story, though it’s metafictional. It’s about reading a book with no pictures, and why that might be better than reading one with pictures. The boy and his father have come back from their recording session, and it’s still raining too hard. We agree it’s not safe to drive in this weather. So we read. We read The Book with No Pictures out loud, over and over again, legs and elbows tangled together on the bed, leaving the door of our motel room wide open because we want to hear the rain and let some of its mood come in, but also because the children laugh so uncontrollably with every page of the book that it seems right to let something of this moment, larger than the sum of us, leave the room and travel.

  EXEGESIS

  Later that afternoon, when the rain has finally turned into a mere drizzle, we get back in the car, heading toward Nashville. Every day, we drive forward, though it sometimes feels like we’re on a treadmill. Inside the car, there is a sort of cyclical current of voices, questions, attitudes, and predictable reactions. Between my husband and me, silence is steadily growing. “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night…” The line comes up again. I pause the recording and look for a music playlist. We each get to pick one song. I choose Odetta’s version of Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” which I think is so much better than the original. My husband picks “Straight to Hell,” in the original version by The Clash. The boy wants The Rolling Stones, and picks “Paint It Black”—and I acknowledge his good taste in music. The girl wants “Highwayman,” by the band The Highwaymen, with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and two others whom we don’t know and always forget to look up. We play the song a couple of times as we drive, unraveling the lyrics as if we were dealing with Baroque poetry. My theory is that it’s a song about fiction, about being able to live many lives through fiction. My husband thinks it’s a song about American history, and American guilt. The boy thinks it’s a song about technological developments in means of transportation: from horseback riding, to schooners, to spaceship navigation. He may be right. The girl doesn’t have a theory yet but is clearly trying to work it out:

  What is a blade?

  It’s the part of the knife that cuts things.

  So the highwayman used his knife?

  Yes.

  To cut people apart?

  Well, perhaps, yes.

  So was he an Indian or a cowboy?

  He was neither.

  Then he was a policeman.

  No.

  Then he was a white-eye.

  Maybe.

  FUTURE PRESENT

  As we drive farther west into Tennessee, we pass more and more abandoned gas stations, empty churches, closed motels, stores and factories that have shut down. Looking out the window and through the lens of his camera, the boy asks me again:

  So what does it mean, Ma, to document stuff?

  Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing plus light, light minus thing, photograph after photograph; or when you add sound, plus silence, minus sound, minus silence. What you have, in the end, are all the moments that didn’t form part of the actual experience. A sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, cut out from the moment in which the experience took place. Because experience, plus a document of the experience, is experience minus one. The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents together again, what you have, all over again, is the experience. Or at least a version of the experience that replaces the lived experience, even if what you originally documented were the moments cut out from it.

  What should I focus on? the boy insists.

  I don’t know what to say. I know, as we drive through the long, lonely roads of this country—a landscape that I am seeing for the first time—that what I see is not quite what I see. What I see is what others have already documented: Ilf and Petrov, Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, Stephen Shore—the first road photographers and their pictures of road signs, stretches of vacant land, cars, motels, diners, industrial repetition, all the ruins of early capitalism now engulfed by future ruins of later capitalism. When I see the people of this country, their vitality, their decadence, their loneliness, their desperate togetherness, I see the gaze of Emmet Gowin, Larry Clark, and Nan Goldin.

  I try an answer:

  Documenting just means to collect the present for posterity.

  What do you mean, posterity?

  I mean—for later.

  I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all
can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them. Finally, I tell the boy:

  You just have to find your own way of understanding space, so that the rest of us can feel less lost in time.

  Okay, Ma, he says, but how much longer till we get to our next stop?

  TROPES

  We had planned to stay a few days in Nashville, visiting recording studios, but instead, we drive right through it and sleep in a motel near Jackson. Then, the next morning, we do something entirely predictable, at least for people like us—foreign but not entirely so—which is to play “Graceland” over and over as we cross Memphis into Graceland, trying to figure out where the Mississippi Delta is, exactly, and why it might shine like a national guitar, or if the lyrics even say “national guitar.” The boy thinks it’s “rational” guitar, but I don’t think he has it right. Our entrance, played against the background of the song, has an epic quality, but of the quiet sort. Like a war being lost silently but with resilience.

  The boy notes, first, that we are singing off-key, and second, that the boy mentioned in the song is only a year younger than him, nine years old. Also like him, he says, the boy in the song is the son of his dad’s first marriage. I wonder how that line in the epicenter of the song—the one about how losing love is like a window suddenly open in someone’s heart—would sound to us a few months from now, and if the boy’s father and I would show resilience and integrity, and behave like rational guitars.

  As soon as the song ends, we are thrust back to the world-weary line that always pops up in the speakers: “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 so I turn off the radio and look out the window toward the city, broken, abandoned, but also beautiful.

  NOUNS

  Unhappiness grows slowly. It lingers inside you, silently, surreptitiously. You nourish it, feeding it scraps of yourself every day—it is the dog kept locked away in the back patio that will bite your hand off if you let it. Unhappiness takes time, but eventually it takes over completely. And then happiness—that word—arrives only sometimes, and always like a sudden change of weather. It found us on our tenth day into the trip. I had called a number of motels in Graceland. None picked up, except one. An old lady answered the phone, her voice like a distant fire, crackling its way into my ear:

  Elvis Presley Boulevard Inn, at your service.

  I wondered if I was misunderstanding her when she said:

  Yes, ma’am, plenty room here, and a new ghee-tar pool.

  But we find exactly that: a motel all to ourselves. A motel with a swimming pool in the shape of an electric guitar. A motel in which instead of a bedside Bible, there is an Elvis Presley songbook. A motel with Elvis Presley everything everywhere, from the hand towels in the rooms to the salt and pepper shakers in the breakfast area. The boy and his father stay behind in the parking lot, rearranging the daily puzzle of our luggage, and the girl and I run up to the room to pee. We climb stairs, walk past eerie Elvis wax statues, hundreds of pictures and cartoons, an Elvis piñata, an all-Elvis jukebox, small statuettes, yellowing T-shirts with the King’s face nailed to the walls. By the time we make it to our room, we have understood, she in her own terms, that we are in some sort of temple or mausoleum. She’s understood that this man is or was something important. She looks up at a photograph of a thirty-something-year-old Elvis Presley hanging on the wall between the two double beds in our new room and asks:

  Is that Jesus Fucking Christ, Mama?

  No, it’s Elvis.

  Mama, could you leave Papa and marry Elvis? If you wanted.

  I try not to laugh, but I do. I say I will consider it. But then I tell her:

  I would, except he is dead, my love.

  This poor young man is dead?

  He is.

  Like Johnny Cash is dead?

  Yes.

  Like Janis Joplin is dead?

  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 mo
uth 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.