Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  LIGHT

  We walked along the train tracks for a while, and I had Ma’s big map under my arm and also now my compass on my palm. We passed a strange corral where men with shotguns dressed old-fashioned were either about to kill each other or acting out a scene. We didn’t stay to watch, but I thought I’d take a picture of them. When I reached into my backpack for the camera, I realized I had forgotten the little red book on the train. I thought I had put it back, but I hadn’t. At least I’d taken out my pictures from inside it; they were all in a mess in my backpack. I still took the picture, but this time I put it inside the folds of Ma’s map, then threw the map in the backpack and zipped it up.

  We walked a little farther and refilled our water bottles in a bathroom in an abandoned gas station, and also peed a few drops in a toilet with a broken seat, and then noticed that there was no roof above us. From there, we left the tracks and went south into the desert plain, following the compass. In the distance, we saw clouds.

  You gave me your hand, and I held it tight. We walked into the unreal desert, like the lost children’s desert, and under their blazing sun, you and me, over the tracks, and into the heart of light, like the lost children, walking alone together, but you and me holding hands, because I was never going to let go of your hand now.

  PART III

  Apacheria

  DUST VALLEYS

  During the hours after our children disappeared, my husband and I sped along back roads and across valleys: Animas, Sulphur Spring, San Simon. The light is blinding in those desert flats. Under the oppressive arch of their pristine skies, straights of land stretch long, their ground cracked and saline. And when the wind speeds across the dry lake beds, it wakes up the dust. Slender columns of sand spiral upward and move across the surface almost choreographically. Locals call them dust devils, but they look more like rags dancing.

  And as we drove past them, every dust rag looked like it could spiral the girl and boy back into existence. But no matter how hard we looked behind the whirling confusion of sand and dust, we found not our children but only more sand and dust.

  I had first realized they were not in their room in the morning, when I’d gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom and, as I often did in our old apartment, where we had separate rooms, I peeked into theirs to check on them. Their bed was empty, but I didn’t think much of it. I assumed they were outside the house we’d rented, were exploring the area, picking up stones and sticks, doing the things they usually do.

  I got back into bed, but I was unable to fall asleep again. I felt a kind of electric vacuum in my chest, and I should have listened to these early signals. But many mornings I had woken up with a similar feeling, and I interpreted those undercurrents of doubt and unease running through me as just a slight variation on an older, deeper anxiety. I read in bed for a while, as I’d taught myself to do from a young age whenever I felt unready to face the world, and I let the morning ripen, until the room was flooded with new light, and the air was thick with the steam of body vapors and the smell of warm sheets.

  In his bed next to mine, my husband shifted and rolled, his breathing becoming shallower until he finally awoke—with a startle, as he always does—wrenching himself out of bed with a sense of urgency and readiness that I’ve never understood or shared. He left the room, and then came back a few minutes later, asking where the children were. I said they were probably outside somewhere.

  But the children were not outside, not anywhere in the perimeter of the cottage.

  We explored the area around the cottage stupidly, clumsily, and still in a kind of disbelief, as if we were looking for a set of keys or a wallet. We looked under bushes, up in trees, under the car, opened the refrigerator more than once, turned the shower on, then off, and then went back outside, farther out into the valley and creek—what is our rescue distance now? I thought—calling out their names, our voices expanding in waves of horror, crashing, breaking, our screams more and more like the calls of apes, guttural, intestinal, visceral, desperate.

  What, where next?

  Next was all lumped together in an alternation of executive decisions and irrational turns. Shoes, keys, car, Twitter, phone calls, sister, Highway 10, breathe, think, Road 338, decide, follow the train tracks, don’t follow the train tracks, take back roads. The exact sequence of events is blurred in my memory. What did they know and what did we know? What did we think the boy would do in this circumstance? Where would he head to, once he realized he and his sister were lost? And the question most dreaded, which kept coming back, paralyzing my entire body:

  If they are lost in the desert, will they survive?

  After some hours of driving aimlessly, we headed to the Lordsburg police station, where a policeman took down our information and asked us for a description of the two children.

  Child one. Age: 5. Sex: Female. Eye color: Dark brown. Hair color: Brown.

  Child two. Age: 10. Sex: Male. Eye color: Hazel Brown. Hair color: Brown.

  We stayed in the waiting room of the police station until we were given directions to the nearest motel, where we could rest and wait and continue looking the day after. We took turns lying on the bed, though of course we did not sleep. Where would the boy decide to head once he knew they were lost?

  We spent the next morning and afternoon driving around the Lordsburg area, returning to the police station every few hours. But nothing seemed to be moving in any direction, so during the second night, taking turns lying down on the still-made motel bed, and perhaps sleeping in intervals of ten or twenty minutes, we decided that as soon as the sun rose the next day, while the police continued to search the area, we would drive farther west. We called the police station to tell them, and they took notes, gave us a few instructions.

  The children had been missing for almost forty hours when we climbed into the car again the next morning at sunrise. As a reflex, I opened the glove box to take out the map, but it wasn’t in its place, nor was my recorder. So I got out of the car again, opened the trunk. I thought I’d look in my box for my map. Everything was out of place in the trunk, a mess. I called my husband over, and he came around to the back of the car to join me. My box was open. My map wasn’t there. Instead, at the top of the open box, there was a map, a map the boy had drawn by hand, and stuck on it was a Post-it note, saying: “Went out, will look for lost girls, meet you later at Echo Canyon.”

  We both stood next to the open trunk, looking down at the map and the note stuck on it, both holding on to the sheet of paper like it was a last bastion but also just trying to decipher what it meant. My husband said:

  Echo Canyon.

  What?

  They’re going to Echo Canyon.

  Why? How do you know?

  Because that’s what we’ve been telling them all this time, and that’s what the map shows, and that’s what the note says, that’s why.

  I was not convinced, despite the clarity with which the boy’s message spelled it out for us. I was not entirely reassured, despite my husband’s conviction. I was not relieved, though I should have been. There was, at least, somewhere we could drive toward, even if it may have been a mirage, even if we were following a map drawn by a ten-year-old boy. Immediately, we were back in the car, speeding in the direction of the Chiricahua Mountains.

  Why? Why did they leave? Why had I not seen the signs earlier? Why hadn’t I looked in the trunk sooner? Why were we here? And where were they?

  We sped out of Lordsburg, southbound, parallel to the New Mexico–Arizona border, across the Animas Valley, past a ghost town called Shakespeare, past a town called Portal. Why? I could not stop thinking.

  Why don’t you call the Lordsburg police and tell them we’re on our way to the Chiricahuas? my husband said.

  I called and was told they’d send someone over.

  We drove on in silence along a dirt road until we reached a town called Paradise—a few scattered houses—where the road ended abruptly. There we left the car. I took my phone out an
d searched for a signal, but there was none.

  The sun was still low when we began climbing up the eastern slope of the Chiricahua Mountains, looking for the trail toward Echo Canyon, the slopes and jagged cliffs of the desert multiplying around us like a question impossible to answer.

  HEART OF LIGHT

  (Last Elegies for the Lost Children)

  (THE ELEVENTH ELEGY)

  The desert opens out around them, wide and invariable, as the train advances westward, parallel to the long iron wall. The sun is rising far to the east, behind a mountain range, a grand mass of blue and purple, its contours jagged lines, like hesitant brushstrokes. They are silent, the six children, more silent than usual. Locked up in their terrors, the six.

  Some sit on the edge of the train gondola, facing the east, dangling their legs, spitting out saliva balls just to see whose gets farther, but mostly gazing down at the ground that sweeps beneath them, white, brown, speckled with thornbushes, rubbish, strange rocks. Some sit cross-legged, facing the front of the train, more alone than the others, letting the wind brush their cheeks and tangle their hair. And a couple more, the two littlest, remain lying down on their sides, their cheeks against the roof of the train gondola. With their eyes, they follow the monotonous line of the horizon, their minds threading thoughts and images into a long meaningless sentence. The desert is an enormous, motionless hourglass: sand passing by in time detained.

  Then, the sixth boy, who is now the eldest of the group, reaches into his jacket pocket and feels the cold, concise edges of a mobile telephone. He had found the phone tucked under a track in the last yard while he was practicing train jumping with the others and had hid it. He had also found a good black hat and was now wearing it. The man in charge had not objected to his wearing the hat he’d found, but the boy knew he’d confiscate the telephone if he caught him with it, even though it was broken and could not be used.

  He makes sure the man in charge is still sleeping, and he is. The man in charge is as if in a coma, far away, breathing deeply, huddled under a tarp. So the boy takes out the telephone. Its glass is smashed like a window hit by a bird or a bullet, and the battery is dead, but still he shows the object to the rest of the children as if he were showing them a treasure found after a shipwreck. They all respond with gestures, silent but acknowledging.

  Then he suggests a game, tells all of them to watch him and listen carefully. First he hands the dead phone to one of the girls, the older one, and says: “Here, call someone, call anyone.” It takes her a moment to understand what he’s suggesting. But when he repeats his words, she smiles, and nods, and looks around at all of them, one by one, her tired eyes suddenly looking enormous and ablaze. She stares back down at the phone in her hand, takes the collar of her shirt and stretches it outward, looking at something stitched in its inner folding. She pretends to dial a long number, and then holds the phone up tight to her ear.

  Yes? Hello? We’re on our way, Mama, don’t worry. We’ll be there soon. Yes, everything’s okay.

  The others observe, each understanding the rules of this new game at their own pace. The older girl quickly passes the telephone to her little sister and prompts her with a whisper to follow the game. The little one does. She dials a number—only three digits—noticing the embarrassing sand and soot deep under the nail of her index finger, knowing her grandmother would have scolded her if she saw her nails. She holds the phone up to her ear.

  What did you have for dinner?

  Others wait for her to say more, but this is the only sentence she delivers. The boy sitting next to her, one of the older ones, boy number five, takes the phone from her and also dials, but he places it to his mouth as if it were a walkie-talkie.

  Hello? Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello?

  Self-consciously, he looks around him, holds the phone to his mouth, and burps into it. Then he laughs with the awkward, uneven waves of puberty. Some of the others laugh with him, and he passes the phone down.

  Another boy, boy four, receives the phone now. It trembles in his hand, and he does nothing with it. He passes it to the next boy, the third boy, who pretends it is a bar of soap and cleans his body with it, silent.

  Some children laugh, some force themselves into laughter. Next to him, the youngest of the children, boy three, smiles, shyly, under his sucked thumb. He slowly unplugs his thumb from his mouth. It’s his turn to take the phone, and he does. He looks at it, cradled in the cup of his hands, and then looks up at the rest of the group. He knows by the eyes of the others, by the eyes they look at him with, that he has to say something, that he cannot just keep quiet like he always keeps quiet. So he takes a deep breath and, looking at the phone still cradled in his palms, starts whispering into it. He speaks for the first time, and speaks more than he’s ever done before:

  Mama, I haven’t been sucking my thumb at all, Mama, you’d be so proud, and proud to know we’ve rode on the back of many beasts for many days and weeks now, I’m not sure how long, but I’ve become a man, and a lot of time has passed, but I still can remember the stones you used to throw into the green lake, when we were there, some of them dark, some of them flat, others small and shiny, and I have one of the stones, the one I didn’t throw, in my pocket, and my train brothers and sisters are good people, Mama, and all of them are brave, and strong, and have all different faces, there’s a boy who’s always angry, he talks in a strange language in his sleep, and when he’s awake, he talks in our language but is still angry, and there’s another boy who’s almost always serious though sometimes does funny things, but when he is serious, he says we are ready for the desert, Mama, and I know he’s right, and there are two girls who are sisters and look almost the same, except one is bigger and the other is smaller, and the smaller one is missing some teeth, like I will soon, because I can feel one or two moving already in my mouth, the two girls never get scared, though, not even the smaller one, they are both gentle and brave, they never cry, and wear shirts that they keep clean no matter what, and on the collars of the shirts their grandmother sewed the telephone number of their mother, who’s waiting for them on the other side of the desert, they showed the numbers to me once and they looked just like the number you’d also sewn on my shirt so I can call my aunt when I cross to the other side of the desert, I promise I’ll be strong when we have to climb over the wall with the rest, and won’t be scared of jumping, won’t be afraid of any beasts either and won’t ask to stop for a rest or something to eat once we cross, I promise I will cross the desert and get all the way to the big city, and across the bridge in a beautiful new car, across the bridge to where there’ll be buildings made of glass rising up to meet me, which is what the seventh boy told me, because there used to be seven of us, and the seventh was the oldest boy, he was the only one who was not afraid of the man in charge, and kept us safe from him, the man in charge looked like he was a little scared when the boy was watching him, with his big dog eyes, always watching over us with dog eyes, still now he is, I know, although he’s gone now, not on the train with us anymore.

  He suddenly stops talking and plugs a thumb back into his mouth, the phone resting now in only one of his hands. The sixth boy takes his phone again, knows he has no words left to say.

  After a few moments, he tells the rest of the children that the phone is also a camera, and now they all have to huddle together for a portrait, and they do. They come together, but very carefully, without standing up. The train rocks constantly and sometimes jerks a little, and they have learned to listen to its movements with their entire bodies. They know when they can stand up and when they need to move across its surface without standing. Finally huddled together, some tilt their heads to one side or the other, some make peace signs or horn signs, smile or stick out their tongues, contort in grimaces. The boy says:

  When I count to three, we all say our names.

  He pretends to focus.

  They stare straight into the telephone’s eye with a strange, powerful gaze. Behind them, the sun
is rising higher in the sky. The five of them look serious, mighty. The boy adjusts his black hat, then counts to three, and on three, they all shout out their names, including him:

  Marcela!

  Camila!

  Janos!

  Darío!

  Nicanor!

  Manu!

  (THE TWELFTH ELEGY)

  A ruffle of murmurs hovers in the sullen air and the train stands still on the tracks. Sitting up, the now eldest boy, boy six, looks around and notices that the man in charge is now awake, sitting cross-legged and looking not at him, not at the rest of the children, but into his empty smoking pipe.

  The boy scans the other travelers, grown-ups most of them, in groups of threes and fives or sixes, all huddled tightly together, maybe more tightly than usual. The sky is pale blue, and the sun is milky behind the screen of haze on the horizon. The older girl, sitting cross-legged, looks up toward the sky, braiding her hair. And the youngest one, boy three, lying sideways, sucks his thumb again, his right cheek and ear resting on the leprous surface of the train car. All around them, barrenlands stretch shadowless.

  The six children notice a man climbing up a side ladder and standing tall near the edge of their gondola. He does not look like a priest. Perhaps he is a soldier. He is bending over a group of men and women. They see a woman grapple with the possible soldier for her sack. They hear her dull, dry wail when the soldier snatches the sack away from her and flings something overboard. She lets out a second cry. Her voice rises from her chest, up her esophagus, like the cry of a caged animal. The children hear it and they all sit up now, alert. An electric discharge travels from some vague nerve inside the muscles of their hearts, which pump a message into their chests and down their spines, and as fear settles in the bowls of their bellies, their limbs tremble slightly. They confirm the man is, indeed, a soldier. In a nearby branch, a trio of vultures stands guard or perhaps simply sleeps.