Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  Between the soldier and the children, men and women huddled and squeezed against one another along the gondola murmur and whisper, but the ripples of their words do not reach the children, who are waiting for a cue, waiting for instructions from the man in charge, waiting. Even the older boys in the group are silent and look scared and don’t know what to tell the rest. The man in charge fidgets with his pipe, unengaged, far away somehow. As the soldier approaches the children, his heavy boots polished black over black thumping against the roof of the train car, they understand that he is not going to ask for passports, not for money, not for explanations. The youngest boy maybe doesn’t understand, but he shuts his eyes and wants to suck his thumb again and is about to but instead bends over his crossed legs and bites the strap of his backpack.

  They’d all brought with them a single backpack. The man that would lead them through forests and plains and now through deserts had told their parents before leaving:

  No unnecessary belongings.

  So they had packed mostly only basics. At night, atop the train, they used the backpacks as pillows. By day, they hugged them to their stomachs. Their stomachs were always sick with rocking and angry with hunger. Sometimes, when the train was about to cross near one of the police or military posts that mushroomed silently along the way, they were told to jump off, leaping off the ladder onto the ground, scratched and bruised by stones and branches, always holding on tight to the backpack. They’d walk in a single line amid thornbushes and pebbled dirt, always parallel but far enough from the tracks. They’d walk silently, sometimes whistling alone, sometimes together, their backpacks hanging. The older boys wore them on one shoulder like when walking to school, and the younger children thrust their small bodies forward to balance the heavy weight of toothbrushes, sweaters, toothpaste, Bibles, bags of nuts, bread buns smeared with butter, pocket calendars, spare change, and extra shoes. They walked like this until the man in charge signaled it was time, and then they cut through the bush, walking perpendicular and then parallel to the tracks, and caught up with the slow-moving train again some miles ahead.

  But this time they had received no warning and had slept through a stop at a military post, where the train had boarded soldiers.

  Now, on the roof, the silhouette of the soldier against the pale sky looms directly above them. He stretches an arm and knocks with his fist twice on the skull of the boy who is biting the strap of his backpack. The boy raises his head and opens his eyes, fixing them on the soldier’s good boots as he hands the backpack over to him. Slowly the soldier opens it and pulls out its contents, studying and naming each object before he throws it back over his shoulder. He collects all their backpacks, one by one, meeting no resistance from this group of six. No wails, no cries from any of them, no struggles as he takes the backpacks and reaches into each one, roams with his hand, and flings things high into the air, punctuating their names with question marks as they fly and crash or sometimes feather into the ground below: Toothbrush? Marbles? Sweater? Toothpaste? Bible? Underwear? A broken telephone?

  Before he can move on to the next group of backpacks, the train blows its whistle. He scans the children, and nods at the man in charge. The men exchange glances and a few words and numbers that the children cannot make sense of, then the soldier takes a large folded envelope from inside his jacket and hands it over to the man in charge. The train blares a second whistle, and the soldier, like the rest of the soldiers atop the beast, all performing a similar operation on contiguous train cars, slowly climbs down the side ladder of the train and hops onto the ground, dusting his thighs and shoulders as he strolls back to the post.

  The whistle blows for the third time and the beast jerks once, twice, and then resumes its forward course, all its screws and drawbars shrieking awake again. Some travelers look over the edge of the roof to the ground scattered with personal belongings, the desert sand like an ocean flowing backward after a shipwreck. Others prefer to look farther away into the northern horizon or up into the sky, thinking nothing. The train gains speed upon the tracks, almost lifting a little like a ship setting up mast and sailing forth. From his booth, a lieutenant watches the train disappear into the haze, thinking haze, thinking spray, thinking ships cutting through the waste of seaweed: the heaps, the broken, the beautiful rubbish, all the colors of stuff beaming now under the sun.

  (THE THIRTEENTH ELEGY)

  Under the desert sky, they wait. The train moves in perfect parallel to the long iron wall, forward yet somehow also in circles, and they do not know that the next morning, the train will come to a final halt. Caught in repetition, trapped in the circular rhythm of the train wheels, tucked under the umbrella of the invariable sky, none suspect that it will finally happen the next day: they will arrive somewhere, and get off the train at the first sign of dawn.

  They had heard stories about it for so long. For months or years, they formed pictures of places and imagined all the people they would finally see there again: mothers, fathers, siblings. For so long, their minds had been filled with dust, and ghosts, and questions:

  Will we make it safely across?

  Will we find anyone on the other side?

  What will happen on the way?

  And how will it all end?

  They had walked, and swam, and hidden, and run. They had boarded trains and spent nights sleepless atop gondolas, looking up at the barren, godless sky. The trains, like beasts, drilled and scratched their way across jungles, across cities, across places difficult to name. Then, aboard this last train, they had come to this desert, where the incandescent light bent the sky into a full arch, and time had also bent back on itself. Time, in the desert, was an ongoing present tense.

  They wake.

  They watch.

  They listen.

  They wait.

  And now they see, above them, an airplane flying across the sky. They follow it with fixed gazes but don’t suspect that the plane is full of boys and girls like them, looking down toward them, though none see each other. Inside the plane, a little boy peers out the oval window and plugs his thumb into his mouth. Far below him, a train advances on a railroad track. Sitting next to him is an older boy, his teenage, pimple-scarred cheeks similar to the almost lunar industrial landscapes over which they will fly. The little boy’s thumb, in his mouth, tucked between his tongue and his palate, makes his throat less hungry, his belly less empty with angst. A resilience will start settling in him, thoughts slowing and dissolving, body muscles yielding, respiration layering quietude over fright. The boy’s thumb, plugged, sucked, pumped, swollen, will slip out as he sinks into sleep, erased from his place in his seat, on this plane, erased from the fucked-up country below him, removed. Finally he shuts his eyes, dreams spaceships. The plane will sweep above vast stretches of land, over peopled cities, above the stones and the animals, over meandering rivers and ash-colored ridges, a long powdery white line trailing behind it, scarring the sky.

  (THE FOURTEENTH ELEGY)

  It starts at sunset, when storm clouds are gathering above and in front of them. The beast screeches through the continuous desert, always rocking and shaking on the tracks, threatening to fall apart, derail, suck them into its insides. The man in charge has drunk himself to sleep again, holding to his half-bare chest a plastic bottle of something he got in exchange for one of the boys’ empty backpacks. He is so deep inside his sleep, dreamless or full of dreams, no one knows, that when the younger of the girls shoves a bird feather she collected days earlier deep into his nose, he only grunts, shuffles, and continues to breathe like nothing. She giggles, toothless here and there, and looks up at the sky.

  Suddenly a single, tepid, fat drop falls on the surface of their gondola. Then a few more drops plop down on the roof. The sixth boy, sitting cross-legged, clears the space in front of him and hits the roof of the gondola with his fist. The thump echoes inside the empty space bellow. Another raindrop falls, and another, beating against the metal rooftop. The boy hits the roof again with
the same hand, and then with the other—thud, thud—and again: thud, thud. Drops now fall more eagerly, more rhythmically, on the tin roof. The older girl, squatting on the surface of the roof, looks up at the sky, and then down at the space in front of her frogged legs. She hits the gondola with her fist once, and again, twice. Others follow her, with palms or fists, pounding, knocking, thwacking. One boy uses the bottom of a half-empty water bottle to whack the train roof. Another takes off his shoes and pounds on the roof with them. At first he struggles, but then he manages to find his beat inside the beat of the others, everyone hitting the beast with all their accumulated strength, fear, hatred, vigor, and hope. And once he’s found the beat and stayed on it, he cannot suppress a deep, visceral, almost feral sound, which begins in a howl, travels around the group of children contagiously, and ends in roaring laughter. They beat and laugh and howl like mammals of a freer species. They dip their fingers into the dust turned to sudden streams of mud on the surface of their train car and paint their cheeks with it. Aboard other train cars, some travelers hear the beat and the howls and wonder. The train travels through the curtains of water, across the thirsty desert cracking open a little to receive the unexpected shower.

  When the rain subsides, the children, exhausted, wet, relieved, lie faceup on the gondola, mouths open to catch the last drops. The man in charge still sleeps, wet and oblivious to the rumpus. It’s the oldest of the six children who sits up and starts speaking, saying:

  Warriors had to earn their names.

  He tells them that in the old times, names were given out to children when they got more mature.

  They had to earn them, he says.

  He continues to explain that names were like a gift given to people. The names were not secret, but they also couldn’t be used just like that by anyone outside the family because a name had to be respected, because a name was like the soul of a person but also the destiny of a person. Then, getting up, he slowly and carefully walks to each of them, and into their ears he whispers a warrior name. They feel the train rocking beneath them, hear its wheels slicing the heavy air of the desert. The boy whispers a name and they smile back into the darkness, in acknowledgment of what they are being given. They smile perhaps for the first time in days, receiving his whispered word like a gift. The desert is moonless dark. And slowly they fall asleep, one by one, embracing their new names. The train moves slowly, in perfect parallel to the long wall, moving forward through the desert.

  (THE FIFTEENTH ELEGY)

  Mouths open in the night, they sleep. The train advances slowly along tracks parallel to the wall. From behind the rim of his blue cap, the man in charge counts them—six children in total, seven minus one. Boys, girls: lips chapped, cheeks cracked. They occupy the entire space there, stiff but warm, lined up like new corpses along the metal roof of the train gondola. Beyond, on both sides of the wall, the desert stretches out, identical. Above, the swart sky is still.

  But the great ball of the earth keeps turning, always constant, always spinning, bringing east toward west, west toward east, until it catches up with the moving train, and from the last gondola, the first signs of daybreak are spotted by someone, someone in charge of keeping vigil, and as instructed, that person alerts another, and the alert is passed on, between men and women, from lips to ears, in whispers, mutters, cries, until it reaches the conductor in the engine car, sitting on a rickety stool, worming a finger inside his ear for wax-crust, thinking of beds and women and bowls of soup, and he sighs, twice, deep sighs, finally scoops out the incrustation from his ear and pulls the emergency lever, and one by one in chain reaction the brake pistons shove inside their cylinder cavities, compressing air, and the train sighs loudly, skidding and screeching to a final halt.

  Ten train cars back from the engine car, the man in charge hurries the six children down the side ladder, one by one, and lines them up against the iron wall. Other men in charge of other children and other adults, on different gondolas and boxcars, do the same. Wooden ladders, ropes, improvised props, prayers, and good wishes are passed on, horizontal to the wall. And over the wall—quick, invisible—bodies climb and cross to the other side.

  (THE SIXTEENTH ELEGY)

  Unreal desert. Under the brown fog of a desert dawn, a crowd flows over the iron wall, so many. None thought the trains would bring so many. Bodies flow up the ladder and down onto the desert floor. It all happens too quickly after that.

  The children hear men’s voices calling out instructions in another tongue. They do not understand the words, but they see others lining up along the wall, foreheads pressed against the iron, so they do the same.

  Far away, a dead, sharp sound blasts into the emptiness. Men and women, girls and boys, hear it. It travels from ear to ear, spreading fear in their bones. And then, again, the same sound, now multiplying in a continuous hail. The children stand still, exhale brief, infrequent sighs. Their eyes are fixed on their feet; their femurs locked into the sockets of their heavy hips.

  The man in charge suddenly cries, run, follow me. The children recognize his voice and begin to run. Many others run, too, all in different directions, dispersing, despite the orders yelling them back to a halt, back to the line. They run. Some of those who run soon fall down when bullets pierce their livers, intestines, hamstrings. Their few belongings will outlive their corpses, and will later be found: a Bible, a toothbrush, a letter, a picture.

  The man in charge again yells, run, run and don’t stop running, and now lets them overtake him, ushering the six children on from behind, like a sheepdog, running behind them, yelling, go on, don’t stop! One boy, the fifth, falls down, not dead, not hurt, but too exhausted, lips soft against hard dust. The man in charge shouts, go on, go on, leaving him behind but still guarding the back of the small pack, which runs onward in a closed horde, five children, two girls and three boys, and he continues to run behind them for a few more steps until a small bullet hits his lower back, rips easily through a thin layer of skin, then through thicker muscle, and finally bursts his sacrum bone into tiny pieces.

  Once more he yells, go, go, as he falls to the ground, and the children continue running, as fast as they can for a while, then slower and slower, and finally start walking when behind them no more bullets and no more footsteps follow. They carry on and on, the five of them. In the distance, they see thunderclouds gathering, and they walk in that direction. Toward what now, they do not know. Away from the darkness behind them. North into the heart of light they walk.

  ECHO CANYON

  And south into the heart of light we walked, Memphis, you and me, close together and quiet, like the lost children walked somewhere, too, under the same sun maybe, though I kept feeling all the time that we were walking on the sun’s surface and not under it, and I asked you, don’t you feel like we’re walking on the sun, but you didn’t say anything in return, you weren’t saying anything, nothing at all, which made me worry because it felt like you were disappearing and I was losing you all over again, even though you were right next to me, like a shadow, so I asked you if you were tired just to hear you say something, but you only nodded yes you were tired but said nothing, so I asked you if you were hungry, and you said nothing but nodded yes you felt hungry, which I felt, too, felt hunger ripping me from inside, ripping me apart and eating me from the inside out because I could not feed it anything, though maybe it wasn’t that, maybe it wasn’t hunger, that’s what I suspected sometimes, that it wasn’t hunger, but I didn’t tell you that, I didn’t say so out loud because you wouldn’t understand, I thought maybe it was not hunger but more like a sadness or like an emptiness, or maybe some kind of hopelessness, the kind of hopelessness that seems like it will never get repaired no matter what, because you’re trapped in a circle, and all circles are endless, they go on forever, round and round this round endless desert, always the same, in a loop, and I told you, you know how we used to fold pieces of paper, me and you, when we made origami fortune-tellers, and you said hmmm, so I said this des
ert is just like our origami fortune-tellers, except that in this one, when you open the paper flap in the corner, your fortune is always desert, every single time, desert, desert, desert, same thing, and when you said hmmm again, I realized that what I was saying made no sense, that my brain was just going round and round, empty and full of hot air only, though sometimes when the desert wind came, it cleared my thoughts for a moment, but mostly there was just hot air, dust, rocks, bushes, and light, especially light, so much of it, so much light pouring down from the sky that it was hard to think, hard to see clearly, too, hard to see even the things we knew by name, by heart, names like saguaro, names like mesquite, things like creosote and jojoba bushes, impossible to spot the white heads of teddy bear chollas right in front of our eyes before they clawed out to scratch and prick us, impossible to see the outlines of the organ pipes farther away in the distance until they were right in front of us, everything invisible in that light, almost as invisible as things are by night, so what was it for, all that light, for nothing, because if light had been useful, we wouldn’t have got lost inside of it, so lost inside light that we were sure the world around us was slowly fading, becoming unreal, and for a moment it did disappear completely and all that was there was the sound of our mouths breathing thin air, in and out, and the sound of our feet, on and on, and the heat on our foreheads burning out our last good thoughts, until the wind came again, a little stronger than before, blew on our faces, brushed our foreheads, whirled into our ears, reminded us that the world was still there around us, that there was still a world somewhere, with televisions, and computers, and highways and airports, and people, and parents, the breeze brought back voices, it was full of whispers, it brought voices from far away, so we knew again there were people somewhere, real people in a real world, and the wind blew some more and shook the real branches around us, the real branches rattling like sidewinder snakes, which were also real, so in my head I was able to make a list of real things that existed around us in that desert, the sidewinder snakes, the scorpions, coyotes, spiders, creosotes, teddy bear chollas, jojobas, saguaros, and suddenly you said saguaro, like you’d read my mind, or maybe I’d been saying these words out loud and you heard me and repeated one, said look there, look, a saguaro, and of course there wasn’t a saguaro, but there was a nopal cactus right in front of us, a nopal where six fat prickly pears had sprouted, full of sweetness and water, Mama called them tunas, and they were real, we picked them all, dug our nails into them, peeled their thick skin off in chunks no matter if our fingers were getting pricked by a thousand tiny thorns, they were real, and ate them like we were coyotes, the juice bursting out and trickling down, through our teeth gaps, down round our chins, down along our necks, and disappearing under my dirty torn shirt and your nightgown, I realized now that they were torn and dirty, and only barely covering our chests, but who would care, at least our chests were there, and our lungs were finally breathing better, filling our bodies with better air, our minds with better thoughts, our thoughts with better words, words you finally spoke out loud, said would you, Swift Feather, would you tell me more about the lost children, where are they now, what are they doing, will we see them, and as we walked on, I tried to imagine things to tell you about the lost children so that you could hear them the way I did in my mind and also imagine them, I said yes I’ll tell you more about them, they’re coming to meet us and we’ll meet them over there, look, and then I took out my binoculars from my backpack and said here, hold these tight and look through the lenses, look over there, see, focus, look far away over there, toward those black thunderclouds gathering over the valley, can you see them I asked you, do you see those clouds, yes, you said yes, did you focus, I asked, and you said yes I focused and yes I can see the clouds and I can see the birds, too, flying around the clouds, and you asked me if I thought those birds were the eagles, so I looked through my binoculars and then said yes of course they are, those are the eagles, the same eagles the lost children now see as they walk north into the desert plain, beating muscled wings, threading in and out of black thunderclouds, they see them with their bare eyes, the five of them, as they walk onward, under the sun, keeping close together and silent, in a tight horde, deeper and deeper into the silent heart of light, saying nothing and hearing almost nothing, because nothing can be heard except the monotonous sound of their own footsteps, on and on across these deadlands, never stopping because if they stop, they will die, this they know, this they’ve been told, if someone stops in the deadlands, they never come out, like that boy among them, the fifth, who didn’t make it, and the man in charge, who was gone, and also like the sixth boy, who tripped on a root or a rock or a ditch once they were already out of sight of the men who guarded the wall, he had tripped on a root or a rock, no one saw exactly what, but he fell to the ground, his knees unlocking, his hands meeting the hard ground, so tired, while the rest kept walking as he crawled on fours, one step, two steps, so tired, resisting the hard ground, fighting against the wave of fatigue surging from inside him, three steps, four, but it was no use now, it was too late, he knew he should not stop but did, even though one of the two girls, the older one, had said get up, don’t stop, even though he heard her voice saying get up now, and felt her hand tugging at his shirt from his sleeve, looked up and saw her arm, her shoulder, her neck, her round face that told him no, do not stop, get up right now I’m telling you, she’d pulled him from his sleeve, which stretched until it ripped half an inch or so, and as he wrapped the palm of his hand around her small clenched fist that tugged at his sleeve, he squeezed her hand just a little to let her know that it was too late now, but that it was okay, and that she needed to let go of him and carry on with the others, and he almost smiled at her as he gave her the black hat he was wearing, and she received it and did, finally, let go of him and she walked on, first trotting a little to catch up with her younger sister, who’d stayed behind too to wait for her, and once she’d caught up, she took her sister’s hand and continued walking more slowly, limping a little, one foot half shod in a tennis shoe, the other unshod, bloated and bloody, the sole of which was the last thing the boy saw before he allowed his eyes to close, his mind to shift inward, his thoughts to call up the image of his grandfather’s bony brown feet, with their swollen veins and yellow toenails, then a bucket full of clenching lobsters, the metal clippers a girl holds to his own feet, relieving him from the pain that bound him to this body, to this life, and then the never-ending train tracks unraveling behind him and fading into hollow light, so much light, until his elbows gave in and bent deep, so tired, and his chest spread on the sand, so tired, and his lips, half parted, touched the sand, so tired, until the fatigue slowly faded from him, a relief, a final whimper, like a tide at last retreating, he could stop resisting, fighting, trying, finally he could just lie there, completely still, in the same spot where one morning, months later, two men who patrol the borderlands will find the bones that were his bones and the rags that were his clothes, each item of his collected in transparent plastic bags by one of the two men who found him, while the other man takes out a pen and a map, and marks a spot on the map with the pen, one more spot among a few other spots on the paper map that will later be handed over, that same afternoon, at 4:00 or 4:30 p.m., to the methodical old lady who was born many years ago in a house near a smoky lake in the Annapurna Valley, was relocated as a teenage girl to this desert, and now sits in front of a computer in a small office, every weekday, sipping iced coffee from a reusable straw while she waits for the monitor to boot up, her eyes fixed on the screen, which first lights into a generic blue, then slowly pixelates into the custom background of the Annapurna range, snow-covered at sunrise and pristine, and finally freckles with file icons, popping and scattering into successive visibility, while the palm of her hand is wrapping itself around the mouse, squeezing it a little and shaking it awake until the cursor arrow appears from a corner of the screen and is dragged across her desktop snow-covered mountain, is swept over baby-blue fi
le icons labeled Animas Valley Deaths, San Simon Valley Deaths, San Pedro Deaths, and finally stops and is double-clicked on Sulphur Springs Valley Deaths, which opens up and spreads out across the screen, covering the lovely snow-covered mountain on her screen, layering dirty brown sand over clear white snow, dirty sand and red death spots over everything, death marks over fucking everything, the lady mutters between her teeth, because the map of that desert valley, the Sulphur Springs Valley, which is exactly the same but also not the same desert valley right outside her small, dark, but well-air-conditioned office, is speckled with hundreds of red dots, all of them added manually, one by one, by her, the lady who is never late for work, and sips from reusable straws in order not to pollute, and sits up straight in front of the computer monitor while she listens on her earphones to an only mildly pornographic but rotundly moralistic lesbian romance novel written by author Lynne Cheney, titled Sisters, not at all oblivious to the fact that the author of the novel is the wife of the ex–vice president Dick Cheney, who, under President George W. Bush, directed “Operation Jump Start,” during which the National Guard was deployed along the border and a twenty-foot cement wall was erected across part of the desert, passing just a few miles from her office, which itself is nothing but a small rectangle walled off from that disgusting desert by just a meager adobe wall and a thin, single-leaf aluminum door, under the crevice of which the hot, relentless wind drags the last notes of all the desert worldsounds disseminated across the barrenlands outside, sounds of twigs snapping, birds crying, rocks shifting, footsteps trudging, people imploring, voices begging for water before fading into silence with a final whimper, then darker sounds, like cadavers diminishing into skeletons, skeletons snapping into bones, bones eroding and disappearing into the sand, and none of this the lady hears, of course, but somehow she senses all of it, as if sound particles were stuck to the sand particles blown by the desert wind into the faux grass of her welcome mat, so that every day before stepping into her office, she has to take her mat and hit it against the external adobe wall of the office, dust it off with three or four hard slaps against the wall, until all those annoying sand particles are blown back into the desert air, back to the streams and currents of the desert air’s unfiltered sounds carried eternally across empty valleys, sounds unregistered, unheard, and finally lost unless by chance they happen to spiral into the small conch-shaped sockets of human ears, such as those of the lost children, who now listen to them and try to name them in their minds but find no words, no meanings to hold on to, and continue to walk, the sound of the slow flow of footsteps thumping beside them, their eyes always fixed on the ground below them and only once in a while directed up toward the horizon, where they see something happening, though they cannot say exactly what, maybe a rainstorm, clouds gathering, far away over there, black thunderclouds gathering over the valley, over there, look, can you see them they ask each other, over there, those birds, maybe eagles, can you see them, and yes one of the boys says, yes says another, yes we see them, and yes I think they are eagles, you and I saw them, Memphis, those eagles, though we could not hear them, because around us we heard too many other sounds, strange sounds, so strange that I didn’t know if they were in my mind or in the air, like the bells of a church, and many birds scattering, like animals moving around us quick but invisible, and maybe the sound of horses approaching, and I wondered if we were hearing the sound of all the dead in the desert, all the bones there, and remembered that time Papa had read us a story about a body some people found in a field and just left there, and that body in that story had got stuck to some part of my brain and kept coming back to me, because stories can do that, they stick in your head, so that when we were walking in the desert, I would keep thinking about that body in a field, and was scared to think maybe we were going to walk over someone’s bones buried under us, but still we just kept on walking, on and on, the heat always getting heavier and the sun on our foreheads stinging us like a thousand yellow bees even though it was a bit lower now and making small shadows around everything, stones, bushes, cacti, and on and on we went, until I tripped on a root or a rock or a ditch and fell, and my hands hit the hard ground and my palms were full of tiny pebbles and dust and maybe thorns, and I felt like just lying there and putting my cheek to the ground and falling asleep, just a short nap, maybe, but you started pulling me by my shirt, tugging at my sleeve, saying stand up right now, I’m giving you an order, Swift Feather, and though you were younger, you suddenly sounded like you had to be obeyed, so I stood up and said yes ma’am, Major Tom Memphis, which made you laugh first, and then you were crying, then laughing again, round and round like in a circle, all our feelings and bodies changing like the wind, and in that instant, we heard the sky roaring, and we looked up and saw the storm clouds gathering in front of us, they were still far away but closer now than before, and then we saw lightning cracking the huge sky like it was an egg, and the eagles, again, which we could now see with our bare eyes, even though they still looked like tiny dots, they look like lost mittens in the sky looking for their mate down on earth, you said, and then we saw another strike of lightning, even brighter this time than the first, the lost children see it, too, as they continue marching in the desert, the radiant and repetitive desert, trying to listen for the sound of thunder that should follow lightning but hearing only the monotonous thump of their footsteps in the sand, on and on as they continue forward, and though the path across the desert plains is always straight, they feel that they are somehow descending, especially now that they have left the hot wind behind them and are sinking into an airless heat, into the lowest point of the basin-shaped valley, where they reach an abandoned village at the hour when the sun is low and children would normally come out to play, only there is no one in the village and nothing can be heard, except their own footsteps, echoing against walls stained yellow by the fat, low sun, nothing but old forgotten houses, some of which have walls that are cracked, and broken windows through which they can see empty bedrooms, pieces of broken furniture, some abandoned belongings, the sole of a shoe, a broken bottle, a fork, and one of the boys, the youngest of the bunch, sees a pink cowboy hat and picks it up, he doesn’t care that it’s dirty and worn, and puts it on his head as the four children continue to walk among a scatter of broken adobe blocks overgrown with few weeds, some of which they pull out with their hands and put into their mouths, the sour taste making them spit and gag, and as they do, the youngest girl starts to hear something different, a sound like whispering voices, hears voices all around her whispering words, but where are the mouths that whisper them, and the other boy, younger than her, who now wears the pink hat, hears them, too, though he says nothing and only thinks to himself listen, listen, heart, listen like only the saints have listened before, and in that murmurous silence, both of them, girl and boy, the youngest of the four, hear the deeper echoes of the things that were once there and were no longer, the chiming of church bells, mothers heavy with weeping, grandparents dispensing instructions and scoldings at the breakfast table, blackbirds scattering into high trees in town squares filled with music, the uninterrupted murmur of other children who had died there before them, where one voice says here we will find the doors to paradise because the doors to paradise exist only in the inanimate desert, here on the earth scorched by the sun where nothing else grows, and another says no, we will not find anything here, because the desert is a tomb and nothing else, the desert is a tomb for those who need to cross it, and we will die under this sun, this heat, a murmur says, this is nothing, another answers, wait till we get to the valley of San Simon, they say it feels like it sits at the doors of hell, it’s hot here, the older girl now says, and her voice sounds so loud and clear, so real, as the four children pass the limits of this abandoned village and nothing is left for them to hear, nothing except the sad sound of wind breathing while they continue to walk together in a closed horde, deeper into the valley, above which the sky is filling with clouds, thick clouds gathering swiftly,
with the redeeming promise of change, of water, of shade, far away still but not too far now because there is another flash of lightning, this time followed by the distant rumble of thunder, and the four children look up toward the storm that will come when they reach the very heart of the valley, where the eagles are now flying in strange patterns like writing a sky-message in a foreign alphabet, and for the first time, they hear their whistling and piping, and high-pitched calls, listen, you said, listen, Swift Feather, you said you could hear voices, good voices, maybe like in a playground or a park somewhere nearby, good and real voices, and I tried to listen, but I couldn’t hear anything except for the blood in my heart pumping, and thought heart, listen, heart, shut up and try to listen to the voices and try to follow them, stop and listen, and when we both stopped and went under the shadow of a red rock, I did hear the sound of the wind breathing, and the sound of space shifting, but I heard nothing that sounded like human voices, just hollow, empty sounds, it was so hot, it’s so hot here I said, and aren’t you hot I asked, but you said nothing, answered nothing, so I didn’t know if I had thought a thought or spoken real words, and when we got up again and carried on walking, all I could hear was the sound of your little feet thumping on the ground, the sound of your feet like a sound-shadow next to me, and my own feet, and then, farther away, the sound of other footsteps, moving in front of or behind us, across the desert, identical, it must be hard to be dead, you said, and I asked what do you mean, though I knew what you meant because also I felt like I was dead and thoughts were bouncing off every rock, back to me, only interrupted by threatening thunder now and then, from heavy clouds in front of us, which were getting much closer to us, or us closer to them, and closer also to the eagles, which we could finally hear, their whistling and piping, high-pitched, sounds that the lost children confuse with the sound of laughter and cries, children-laughter and children-cries, like in a playground where many children gather to play, except there is no playground and no playing, and nothing can really be heard on the ground where they walk except for the sound of little footsteps shuffling, their own footsteps walking in the inanimate desert, on sand scorched by the sun, and maybe hundreds or thousands of other lost footsteps, it must be toilsome to be dead, one boy thinks, hard to be dead here, he thinks, and remembers something his mother said to him one day, she said that angels never know if they are alive or not, that angels forget if they live among the living or among the dead, but the four lost children know they are still alive, although they walk among the echoes of other children, past and future, who kneeled, laid down, coiled into a fetal position, fell, got lost, did not know if they were alive or dead inside that vast hungry desert where only the four of them now keep walking in silence, knowing they might also soon be lost, thinking who can we call upon now, no one, knowing they cannot call upon anyone, not men, not angels, not beasts, especially not the beasts who, silent but sly and astute, notice that they are lost, and know that soon they will be meat, see their awkward shuffles upon this desert, on this uninterpreted world where everything is unnamed for them, the birds, the rocks, the bushes and roots, a world completely foreign, which will swallow them into its namelessness, as it swallowed each of the other children, but the four continue to walk, silent, trying to ignore these dark thoughts, until the younger of the two girls suddenly says look, look up there, look at those eagles floating right above us, look, and the other three children look up at the sky and see a thick blanket of rain clouds before them, not too far, and indeed, those strange eagles, flying in a tight flock instead of alone, which is how eagles usually fly, but why, you asked me, Memphis, why are those eagles flying like that, Swift Feather, why this and why that, why, you kept asking such difficult questions as we walked toward the thunderclouds, getting closer and closer to them, why, where, what, you asked, but how, how could I answer all of your questions, Memphis, questions and more questions, how are swamps made, what is the purpose of thorns, why don’t I laugh when I tickle myself, why can’t I laugh anymore at all, why does the air here smell like chicken feathers, and why, look, why are there all these eagles flying together above us now, do you think they are following us, do they want to eat us or are they protecting us, and why, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, Memphis, but no, the eagles won’t eat us, no way, I said, they’re taking care of us, don’t you remember the Eagle Warriors Pa always told us about, I asked, and you said yes, you remembered, and then said let’s follow them, let’s pretend the eagles are kites and we have to follow them like when we follow a kite, which was a brilliant idea, so we did just that, we started following them, clutching invisible holders, attached to invisible strings, and walked for a while like that, looking mostly up toward the sky, our eyes on the eaglekites, taking slow steps forward, until suddenly, very suddenly, an abandoned train car was in front of us, some fifty yards from us, and we noticed the eagles stop moving forward and start just circling above the empty space where the train car lay, how it had got there we had no idea, but we stopped our march and stared at it, I took a picture of it, and we stared some more, and then we looked up at the thick clouds getting ready to burst into rain, and at the eagles above us, which were now flying in a perfect circle over the train car, under those clouds, and the four lost children see them, too, circling low in the sky, under the rain clouds, and decide to walk straight toward them, straight ahead, walking much more swiftly now that the sun is sinking in the sky, walking until they spot an abandoned gondola, still small but clear in the distance, and walk straight to it, stopping right under its shadow, their four backs against the rusted metal side, not daring yet to go inside it though the sliding doors are wide open, because whenever they hold their ears to the warm metal wall of the gondola, they hear something shuffling about inside, a person or a large animal, maybe, and decide they will not risk it, unless they have no other choice later, no other place where they can take refuge from the imminent storm, because the threatening, heavy rain clouds are now right above them, and it is almost sunset, it was almost sunset and the heavy rain clouds were right above us, and we were tired, and also there was fear coming at us, Memphis, like during all the other sunsets, so we walked slowly toward the train car, wondering was it empty and was it safe and hoping maybe we would find old food in there, stored in boxes, because I knew those train cars all transported boxes of food from one edge of the country to the other edge of the country, and then you stopped a few steps from the train car and said I had to go and look inside before you would take another step, so I did, I walked slowly and my feet were making more noise than ever against the thorny, pebbly ground, toward the train car, which was large and had been painted red, but the paint had peeled off in parts and there was rust underneath, and the sliding doors were wide open on both sides so that when I stood in front of the train car, it looked like a window I was looking through from our side of the desert to the other side, which was exactly the same as ours except for the higher mountains on that other side at the end of the stretch of desert, and the sun was setting behind us on the flat horizon, and in front of us, through the train car doors, were the high Chiricahua Mountains, and I picked a rock up from the ground and held it tight in my hand, noticed that my palm was sweating, but I took three more steps, small steps, and swung my arm back and then slowly forward, and let go of the rock so it would rainbow across the air and fall into the train car, slow and soft, like I was throwing a ball for someone your age to catch, and the rock hit the metal surface of the train car floor, thumped, echoed once, then was followed by a flutter that got louder and then louder so I knew it wasn’t an echo but a real sound, and then we saw it, enormous, its huge wings spread out, its curved beak and small feathered head, it paddled in the air, out of the train car into the sky until it was a smaller object up there, and joined the circle of eagles hovering above us, and we were looking up at them like we were hypnotized by their circles when a rock came suddenly flying back at us, a rock the older girl has just thrown from behind the rusted
wall of the gondola and through its open doors, a real rock that the boy and his sister would have mistaken for an echo, confused as they were about cause and effect as the normal link between events, were it not for the fact that the rock thrown back at them hits the boy on his shoulder, so very real, concrete, and painful that his nerves wake up, alert, and his voice breaks out into an angry hey, ouch, hey, who’s there, who’s there I said, who’s there, he says, and hearing the sound of his voice, the four children look at one another in relief, because it is a real voice, finally, clearly not a lost desert echo, not a sound-mirage like the ones that had been following them all along, so they smile at one another, and first the older girl and then the younger one, and then the two boys, peek their faces around one side of the open door of the gondola, four round faces were looking right at us from the other side of the old train car, so real I didn’t believe they were real, thought can this be or am I imagining things, because the desert fools you, and we both knew that by now, and I still couldn’t believe they were real, even though the four of them were standing right there in front of us, two girls with long braids, the older one wearing a nice black hat, and then two boys, one of them wearing a pink hat, none of them seemed real until you opened your mouth, Memphis, you said Geronimoooo from just a step behind me, and then we heard the four faces say Geronimoooo back to us, Geronimoooo, the two children say to the four of them from the other side of the abandoned gondola, a boy and a girl, and it takes them all some seconds to realize that they are all real, them and us, us and them, but when they do, they all, the four, the two, the six in total, step into the empty, abandoned gondola while slowly, outside, the sound of gathering thunder becomes more constant, reverberating like an angry tide at sea, and bolts of lightning, all around them, start pounding down on the dry sand, sending sand grains into upward-spiraling whirls that remind the six children of the dead, the many dead, ghosts jumping out from the desert floor to haunt them, torment them, and the sky was getting darker, I noticed, night was coming, why don’t we make a fire, I said to the five of you, una fogata, I said, and we all agreed it was the right thing to do, so we quickly gathered sticks and twigs and pieces of dry cacti from around the train car, and though they were all too wet already, we started to make a pile with them in the center of the train car, they make a pile right in the middle of the gondola while the older girl walks over to the big nest that the eagle had made in the corner of the train car, on top of two parallel wooden planks, and carefully plucks some dry twigs and grass from it, handing them to the other children, who are still sorting twigs and cacti pieces for the fire, saying things to one another like here, take this, and be careful, this one has thorns, and this twig is longer and better, until they all see the older girl step up on a wooden barrel, she looks into the eagle’s nest, scoops something up from inside it, and then looks back at the rest of the children like saying, here, here it is, with a big smile, and in her hand she is holding an egg, still warm, she holds it high above her head like a trophy and then carefully hands it to her sister, who passes it on to the new girl, who gives it to one of the boys, who then passes it to the other boy, the one who is wearing the pink hat, they pass the egg from hand to hand like in a ceremony, feeling that almost-alive thing palpitating in their hands, and then the girl scoops up another egg and another, three eggs in total, which three of the children, the two younger girls and one of the boys, hold in their cupped palms, and at the very end the older girl scoops up the entire nest into her bare arms, carries it, stepping down from the barrel, a nest made of intertwined sticks perfectly knitted together, which she deposits in the middle of the empty gondola next to the little pile of twigs that the children had managed to gather, and they all stare into it, not knowing exactly what to do next, until the new boy takes out a matchbox from his backpack, strikes a match, and throws it into the nest, where it dies, then strikes a second match, but nothing, and only at the third try, when he huddles over the nest and holds the lit match to a twig, does he manage to light the dry edge of one, the rest of the children looking at it attentively like they are wishing the flame to spread, and it finally does, it spreads to the rest of the twig, which transports the flame to a thicker stick, and then another, until the entire nest is ablaze, and when there is a proper fire burning before them, the two girls and the boy who are holding on to the eggs let them roll out of their hands back into their burning nest, the flames licking them, scorching them, boiling them, the eggs cook in the fire until, some minutes later, using a long enough stick that she finds on the floor, the older girl rolls them out onto the surface of the train car, just outside the circle of fire, and orders the rest of the children to blow on the shell-surface of the three large eggs, and they do, until they are able to crack them open, peel off the shell, and bite into them with their hungry teeth, taking turns, first the youngest girl, then the boy with the pink hat, then the new girl, then the other boys, and at the end the older girl, who is probably the same age as the new boy, she was my age but was more of a leader than I was, with her big black hat, and while I bit into my part of the soft egg and chewed on the rubbery outside and then into the powdery inside, I kept on remembering the eyes of the big eaglemother that had looked me straight in the face before it flew away out the open door of the train car right after I’d thrown the rock inside, and suddenly you screamed, Memphis, and we all looked at you, and you spit something into your hand, and then pinched it with your other hand’s fingers, and you showed us a tooth, you’d finally lost your second tooth, and you gave it to me to keep, for later, and after we finished eating, I said why don’t we all tell stories before we go to sleep, and we did, we made an effort to stay awake, and for a while, we filled the space of the train car with stories that sometimes became wild laughing like the thunder rolling and rumbling outside, but we were all tired, getting cold, and the storm was strong still, rain falling almost inside the wagon through the open doors and leaks in the rusty roof, and we ran out of things to tell and to laugh at so we all slowly went silent, and cuddling into my lap, you tugged at my sleeve and looked into my eyes like saying something and then you did say something, softly like it was a secret, said Swift Feather, and I said what, and you said promise you will take me to Echo Canyon tomorrow, and I said yes, Memphis, I promise, and again you said Swift Feather, what is it, Memphis, nothing, Swift Feather, I like being with you and want to always be with you, okay, so I said yes, okay, and the other two girls were still awake, too, but the boys were asleep, I think, because they had gone silent and were breathing slowly, and the older girl asked you and me if we wanted to hear a last story, and yes, yes, yes, we all said, yes, please, so she said I’ll tell you a story, but after I tell it, you three have to close your eyes and at least try to fall asleep, and we all said okay, so she told this story, said only this, and when they woke up, the eagle was still there, and that was the end of the story and you didn’t fall asleep, I think, but you pretended to and so did the youngest girl until you both did finally fall asleep, but I didn’t and neither did the oldest girl, we stayed awake while we poked the fire, which was dying, and she asked me why we were there, you and I, so I told her we’d run away, and when I told her why, she said that was such a stupid thing to do, why would I decide to run away if we didn’t really need to run from anything, and she was right, I knew, but I was too ashamed to tell her that I knew she was right so instead, I told her that aside from running away, we were also looking for two girls who’d got lost, two girls who were the daughters of one of our mother’s friends, lost where she asked, lost in this desert I said, do you know them, she asked, the two girls you’re looking for, no I said, so how are you going to find them, I don’t know, but maybe I will I said, but if you do find them, how will you know it is them if you don’t even know their faces, so I told her that I knew the girls were sisters, knew they were going to be wearing matching dresses, and knew that their grandmother had sewn their mother’s telephone number on the collars of their dresses, that’s so
stupid she said again and laughed with a laugh that wasn’t mean at all, more like a mother laughing at her children, what are you laughing at I asked her, and she told me that many children who had to cross this desert had telephone numbers sewn by grandmothers or aunts or cousins on their collars or inside their pockets, she said that the youngest boy who was there, sleeping next to you, had a phone number stitched on his collar, that even she and her sister had numbers on their collars, and she took off her black hat, leaned over toward me a little from across the ashes, and tried to show me the underside of the collar of her shirt, see she said, yes I see I said, though I didn’t see much, just felt all my blood rushing to my cheeks and forehead, luckily the night was dark, everything was dark except for some ashes still orange in the place where we’d made the fire, well, goodnight she said and good luck, yes good luck I said and goodnight, and the night is perhaps not good but is silent, the six children curled into sleeping positions around the dying fire, feet touching head touching feet, most of them maybe dreaming, except the eldest boy and eldest girl, who are still slowly sliding into sleep when they hear it clearly behind the last crackle of twigs, the distant cries of a lone eagle, calling for her eggs, and the boy cries and cries, like he has never cried before, perhaps, and whispers I’m sorry, eagle, I’m sorry, we were so hungry, and the girl doesn’t cry or say she’s sorry but thinks thank you, eagle, until the two finally fall asleep like the others, and the boy dreams he is the young Indian warrior girl called Lozen, who, one day when she’d just turned ten, climbed up one of the sacred mountains in Apacheria and stayed there alone for four days, until, after the fourth day, before she went back down to rejoin her people, the mountain gave her a power, which was that from then onward, by looking at which veins had turned dark blue after she walked around in a circle lifting her hands up, she would know where the enemy was and be able to steer her people away from danger, and in his dream he was she, and she was leading her people away from a band of what could have been soldiers or paramilitaries dressed in nineteenth-century traditional bluecoats but holding wild guns, and huddling them all into an abandoned train car, where he starts hearing, with the repetitive obsessiveness of nightmares, a line delivered histrionically, when he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, over and over again, the same sentence never completed, when he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, until the boy opens his eyes suddenly, wrenches himself up, and reaches out to touch his sister sleeping beside him, feeling a deep relief at confirming that she is there, next to him, there you were, Memphis, your curls all damp, I remembered Mama used to smell your head like she was smelling a bunch of flowers and I never knew why but now I knew why, I bent down to smell you and you smelled like warm dust and pretzel, salty but also sweet at the same time, and so I kissed your curls and when I did, you said some words like eagle and moon, or maybe eaglemoon, and then you were sucking your thumb again, and seemed far away, while I looked around in the dark, still no sunrise, and knew in my heart though not my head that the Eagle Warriors had been there with us all this time, the storm had almost died out and we were safe thanks to them, I knew, they had been protecting us from everything, so I curled up again on my side, listening to the other four children breathe, asleep, and to you, sucking your thumb, and imagined the sounds you made were the thumps of footsteps, dozens, the Eagle Warriors, marching around us, your thumb sucked, thump, and the flutter of eagle-wings, and thoughts like eaglemoon, thunder-lightning swelling in the sky, until I finally shut my eyes again, thought about eagles, fell asleep into eagledreams, and dreamed nothing, slept deep, finally, so deep that when I woke up, it was bright out, and I was alone in the abandoned train wagon, so I rushed to my feet in a panic, and leaned out the wide-open doors of the wagon, and noticed the sun was above the mountain already, and you were there, I saw you, was so relieved, you were sitting on the ground some steps from the wagon, patting mud, I’m making mud pies for breakfast you said, and look I have a bow and arrow so we can hunt something, too, you said, and lifted up a plastic bow and arrow from the ground by your side, where did you get that and where are the other four children I asked, and you said they had left, they’d left right before sunrise, and you said you’d got the bow and arrow in a trade, told me you’d traded some stuff from my backpack with the older girl, and in return she gave you the bow and arrow, what, I asked you, what are you talking about, I repeated, looking around the wagon for my backpack and then shuffling things inside around it to see what was missing, Ma’s big map was missing, the compass was missing, the flashlight, the binoculars, the matches, and even the Swiss Army knife were missing, so I jumped off the wagon with my light backpack around one shoulder, walked over to you, stood right above you, why did you do that I screamed, because we’re going to meet Ma and Pa today so we don’t need that stuff anymore Swift greedy Feather, you said, talking so calmly, and I was so angry at you, Memphis, furious, how do you know we will meet them today I asked you, and you said you knew because Pa had told you that the end of the trip was when you lost your second tooth, and though that was silly and made no sense, it made me feel some hope, maybe we would find them today, but I was still furious, you’d given away my stuff, at least you didn’t give away my camera and my pictures I said, then you turned your head up to look at me and said well I also traded my book with no pictures and my backpack, oh yeah for what, I asked you, for hats you said, one for me and one for you, and you pointed your finger to two hats on the ground a few feet from you, a pink one and a black one, the pink one is yours and the black one is mine you said, so I breathed deep trying to not get more and more angry, and sat down on the ground next to you, thought you were probably right, or at least hoped you were right, we didn’t need that stuff anymore if we were going to find Ma and Pa soon, or be found by them, sometime soon, I could see the Chiricahua Mountains close by in the east and now that the morning had come they looked smaller and closer and less difficult to climb than what they’d seemed the day before under the storm, it would probably take us just a few hours to get to the highest point, where Echo Canyon was, I was squinting my eyes trying to make out which the highest peak was, following the jagged line of the mountains, wishing I still had my binoculars, when you said want some mud pie for breakfast or what, so I smiled at you and said yes, please, just one slice, and reached over to grab the hats that you’d traded our stuff for, handed you the pink one, and no you said, the black one is mine, so we tried them both on, back and forth, and true the pink one felt good on my head, and yours tilted weirdly to the front, almost covering your eyes, but it looked good, and you looked serious as you cut the mud pie into big slices, which then we pretend-ate with sticks, where were the four children heading to exactly I wondered while I pretend-chewed, would they make it, would the map be useful, I hoped it would, if they walked in a straight line, they would be able to make it to the train tracks before sunset, I’m sure they will, I kept saying to myself while you and I got ready to go and as we started walking toward the mountains ahead, I’m sure they’ll make it to the tracks soon, we were also moving easier and faster than I thought because the sun was still low, the air wasn’t hot yet, and we had eaten and rested, so we weren’t getting tired and thirsty like the day before, so soon we had reached the slope of the mountains and started climbing up a steep trail, past the tall stone columns of the Chiricahuas that looked like totems or skyscrapers, and higher up, toward the highest peaks, and up and up we went, walked on and on, till we reached the high valley, red and yellow in the sun, a high valley that Pa had described to us once but that was even more beautiful than he had said, and we reached the highest point there was to reach, from where we could see the rest of the valley, and there we found a small shallow grotto and decided to rest there for a while, because we knew we were on the right path, because Pa had also described these kinds of grottos to us, small and not dangerous, no bears or animals there because they were not deep enough for big animals to hide in, and after we’d
rested a little, because we had the hats and we also had the bow and arrow, we decided to play the Apache game we used to play with Pa, so I hid behind a rock in the grotto, and you hid somewhere else there, too, and you would look for me, and I would look for you, and whoever spotted the other first would shout Geronimo, and that person would win, those were the rules, and I was still hiding when you came around slyly from behind me and shouted Geronimo, so proud of winning, shouted so loud that your voice quickly traveled and then came back to us, clear and strong, eronimo, onimo, onimo, so I shouted Geronimo again, to test the echo, and we heard it bouncing back even stronger and longer, Geronimo, eronimo, onimo, onimo, and we both got so crazy with relief or joy or both, because this was it, this was the heart of Echo Canyon, we’d found it, and we were suddenly so restless with good restlessness that next we shouted our names at the same time so what came back was something muddled like etherphis, etherphis, phis, shhhh, shush, I said, and I made a sign with my index finger on my lips so you’d keep quiet a second because it was my turn now, why you said, because I’m older I answered, and I was just pulling in air so I could shout out my name, Swift Feather, when suddenly, before I was able to say my name, we both heard something else, loud and clear and familiar, coming from far away but straight at us, and then bouncing off every rock in the valley, ochise, cochise, ochise, and then, right after that, we heard arrow, arrow, row, and it was hard to pull the next word out from my stomach because it was suddenly full of thunder-feelings, my stomach, and full of lightning, my head, full of joy, they had found us, finally, and I felt I would be unable to even say anything, but I did, I pulled in air and shouted Swift Feather, and we heard it bouncing back, feather, eather, and we heard them saying we’re coming, oming, oming, and probably something like stay where you are, are, are, and you stood there and it took you a moment, but you also breathed in all the air around you, your belly ballooning out, and called it out, your beautiful name, and it came back mighty and powerful all around us, Memphis.