I initially hadn’t noticed, but my husband had also started to work on a new project. First, it was just a bunch of books about Apache history. They piled on his desk and on his bedside table. I knew he’d always been interested in the subject, and he often told the children stories about Apaches, so it wasn’t strange that he was reading all those books. Then, maps of Apache territory and images of chiefs and warriors started filling the walls around his desk. I began to sense that what had been a lifelong interest was becoming formal research.
What are you working on? I asked him one afternoon.
Just some stories.
About?
Apaches.
Why Apaches? Which ones?
He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they’d been the last Apache leaders—moral, political, military—of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender. It was, of course, a more than compelling reason to undertake any kind of research, but it wasn’t quite the reason I was waiting to hear.
Later, he started referring to that research as a new sound project. He bought some bankers boxes and filled them with stuff: books, index cards full of notes and quotes, cutouts, scraps, and maps, field recordings and sound surveys he found in public libraries and private archives, as well as a series of little brown notebooks where he wrote daily, almost obsessively. I wondered how all of that would eventually be translated into a sound piece. When I asked him about those boxes, and the stuff inside them, as well as about his plans, and how they fit with our plans together—he just said that he didn’t know yet but that he’d soon let me know.
And when he did, a few weeks later, we discussed our next steps. I said I wanted to focus on my project, recording children’s stories and their hearings in the New York immigration court. I also said I was considering applying for a job at a local radio station. He said what I suspected he’d say. What he wanted was to work on his own documentary project, about the Apaches. He had applied for a grant and had gotten it. He also said the material he had to collect for this project was linked to specific locations, but this soundscape was going to be different. He called it an “inventory of echoes,” said it would be about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.
The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger. What I didn’t expect my husband to say was that, in order to be able to work on his new project, he needed time, more time than just a single summer. He also needed silence and solitude. And he needed to relocate more permanently to the southwest of the country.
How permanently? I asked.
Possibly a year or two, or maybe more.
And where in the southwest?
I don’t know yet.
And what about my project, here? I asked.
A meaningful project, was all he said.
ALONE TOGETHER
I suppose my husband and I simply hadn’t prepared for the second part of our togetherness, the part where we just lived the life we’d been making. Without a future professional project together, we begun to drift apart in other ways. I guess we—or perhaps just I—had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed. But can anyone really prepare? Can anyone tackle effects before detecting causes?
A friend had told us during our wedding party, some years earlier, with that oracular aura of some drunk men right before they fade, that marriage was a banquet to which people arrived too late, when everything was already half eaten, everyone already too tired and wanting to leave, but not knowing how to leave, or with whom.
But I, my friends, can tell you how to make it last forever! he said.
Then he closed his eyes, sunk his beard into his breast, and passed out in his chair.
ITEMIZATION
We spent many difficult evenings, after putting the children to bed, discussing the logistics around my husband’s plan to relocate more permanently to the southwest. Many sleepless nights negotiating, fighting, fucking, renegotiating, figuring things out. I spent hours trying to understand or at least come to terms with his project, and many more hours trying to come up with ways to dissuade him from pursuing his plan. Losing temperance one night, I even hurled a lightbulb, a roll of toilet paper, and a series of lame insults at him.
But the days passed, and preparations for the trip began. He searched online and bought things: cooler, sleeping bag, gadgets. I bought maps of the United States. One big one of the whole country, and several others of the southern states we’d probably cross. I studied them late into the night. And as the trip became more and more concrete, I tried to reconcile myself to the idea that I no longer had any other choice but to accept a decision already taken, and then I slowly wrote my own terms into the deal, trying hard not to itemize our life together as if it were now eligible for standard deductions, up for some kind of moral computation of losses, credits, and taxable assets. I tried hard, in other words, not to become someone I would eventually disdain.
I could use these new circumstances, I said to myself, to reinvent myself professionally, to rebuild my life—and other such notions that sound meaningful only in horoscope predictions, or when someone is falling apart and has lost all sense of humor.
More reasonably, regathering my thoughts a little on better days, I convinced myself that our growing apart professionally did not have to imply a deeper break in our relationship. Pursuing our own projects shouldn’t have to conduce to dissolving our world together. We could drive down to the borderlands as soon as the children’s school year finished, and each work on our respective projects. I wasn’t sure how, but I thought I could start researching, slowly build an archive, and extend my focus on the child refugee crisis from the court of immigration in New York, where I had been centering all my attention, to any one of its geographic points in the southern borderlands. It was an obvious development in the research itself, of course. But also, it was a way for our two projects, very different from each other, to be made compatible. At least for now. Compatible enough at this point, in any case, for us to go on a family road trip to the southwest. After that, we’d figure something out.
ARCHIVE
I pored over reports and articles about child refugees, and tried to gather information on what was happening beyond the New York immigration court, at the border, in detention centers and shelters. I got in touch with lawyers, attended conferences of the New York City Bar Association, had private meetings with nonprofit workers and community organizers. I collected loose notes, scraps, cutouts, quotes copied down on cards, letters, maps, photographs, lists of words, clippings, tape-recorded testimonies. When I started to get lost in the documental labyrinth of my own making, I contacted an old friend, a Columbia University professor specializing in archival studies, who wrote me a long letter and sent me a list of articles and books that might shine some light on my confusion. I read and read, long sleepless nights reading about archive fevers, about rebuilding memory in diasporic narratives, about being lost in “the ashes” of the archive.
Finally, after I’d found some clarity and amassed a reasonable amount of well-filtered material that would help me understand how to document the children’s crisis at the border, I placed everything inside one of the bankers boxes that my husband had not yet filled with his own stuff. I had a few photos, some legal papers, intake questionnaires used
for court screenings, maps of migrant deaths in the southern deserts, and a folder with dozens of “Migrant Mortality Reports” printed from online search engines that locate the missing, which listed bodies found in those deserts, the possible cause of death, and their exact location. At the very top of the box, I placed a few books I’d read and thought could help me think about the whole project from a certain narrative distance: The Gates of Paradise, by Jerzy Andrzejewski; The Children’s Crusade, by Marcel Schwob; Belladonna, by Daša Drndić; Le goût de l’archive, by Arlette Farge; and a little red book I hadn’t yet read, called Elegies for Lost Children, by Ella Camposanto.
When my husband complained about my using one of his boxes, I complained back, said he had four boxes, while I had only one. He pointed out that I was an adult so could not possibly complain about him having more boxes than me. In a way he was right, so I smiled in acknowledgment. But still, I used his box.
Then the boy complained. Why couldn’t he have a box, too? We had no arguments against his demand, so we allowed him one box.
Naturally, the girl then also complained. So we allowed her a box. When we asked them what they wanted to put in their boxes, the boy said he wanted to leave his empty for now:
So I can collect stuff on the way.
Me too, said the girl.
We argued that empty boxes would be a waste of space. But our arguments found good counterarguments, or perhaps we were tired of finding counterarguments in general, so that was that. In total, we had seven boxes. They would travel with us, like an appendix of us, in the trunk of the car we were going to buy. I numbered them carefully with a black marker. Boxes I through IV were my husband’s, Box VI was the girl’s, Box VII was the boy’s. My box was Box V.
APACHERIA
At the start of the summer break, which was only a little more than a month away, we’d drive toward the southwest. In the meantime, during that last month in the city, we still played out our lives as if nothing fundamental were going to change between us. We bought a cheap used car, one of those Volvo wagons, 1996, black, with a huge trunk. We went to two weddings, and both times were told we were a beautiful family. Such handsome children, so different-looking, said an old lady who smelled of talcum powder. We cooked dinner, watched movies, and discussed plans for the trip. Some nights, the four of us studied the big map together, choosing routes we’d take, successfully ignoring the fact that they possibly mapped out the road to our not being together.
But where exactly are we going? the children asked.
We still didn’t know, or hadn’t agreed on anything. I wanted to go to Texas, the state with the largest number of immigration detention centers for children. There were children, thousands of them, locked up in Galveston, Brownsville, Los Fresnos, El Paso, Nixon, Canutillo, Conroe, Harlingen, Houston, and Corpus Christi. My husband wanted the trip to end in Arizona.
Why Arizona? we all asked.
And where in Arizona? I wanted to know.
Finally, one night, my husband spread the big map out on our bed and called the children and me into our room. He swiped the tip of his index finger from New York all the way down to Arizona, and then tapped twice on a point, a tiny dot in the southeastern corner of the state. He said:
Here.
Here what? the boy asked.
Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, he said.
And? the boy asked.
And that is the heart of Apacheria, he answered.
Is that where we’re going? the girl asked.
That’s right, my husband replied.
Why there? the boy asked him.
Because that’s where the last Chiricahua Apaches lived.
So what? the boy retorted.
So nothing, so that’s where we’re going, to Apacheria, where the last free peoples on the entire American continent lived before they had to surrender to the white-eyes.
What’s a white-eye? the girl asked, possibly imagining a terrifying something.
That’s just what the Chiricahuas called the white Europeans and white Americans: white-eyes.
Why? she wanted to know, and I was also curious, but the boy snatched back the reins of the conversation, steering it his way.
But why Apaches, Pa?
Because.
Because what?
Because they were the last of something.
PRONOUNS
It was decided. We would drive to the southeastern tip of Arizona, where he would stay, or rather, where they would stay, for an undetermined amount of time, but where she and I would probably not stay. She and I would go all the way there with them, but we’d probably return to the city at the end of the summer. I would finish the sound documentary about refugee children and would then need to find a job. She would have to go back to school. I couldn’t simply relocate to Arizona, leave everything behind, unless I found a way and a reason to follow my husband in this new venture of his without having to abandon my own plans and projects. Though it wasn’t even clear to me if, beyond this summer road trip together, he indeed wanted to be followed.
I, he, we, they, she: pronouns shifted place constantly in our confused syntax while we negotiated the terms of the relocation. We started speaking more hesitantly about everything, even the trivial things, and also started speaking more softly, like we were tiptoeing with our tongues, careful to the point of paranoia not to slip and fall on the suddenly very unstable grounds of our family space. There is a poem by Anne Carson called “Reticent Sonnet” that doesn’t help solve this at all. It’s about how pronouns are “part of a system that argues with shadow,” though perhaps she means that we—people, and not pronouns—are “part of a system that argues with shadow.” But then again, we is a pronoun, so maybe she means both things at the same time.
In any case, the question of how the final placement of all our pronouns would ultimately rearrange our lives became our center of gravity. It became the dark, silent core around which all our thoughts and questions circulated.
What will we do after we reach Apacheria? the boy would ask repeatedly in the weeks that followed.
Yes, what next? I’d ask my husband later, when we crawled into bed.
Then we’ll see what next, he would say.
Apacheria, of course, does not really exist anymore. But it existed in my husband’s mind and in nineteenth-century history books, and, more and more, it came to exist in the children’s imaginations:
Will there be horses there?
Will there be arrows?
Will we have beds, toys, food, enemies?
When will we leave?
We told them we’d leave on the day after the boy’s tenth birthday.
COSMOLOGIES
During our last days in the city, before we left for Apacheria, our apartment filled with ants. Big black ants in the shape of eights, with a suicidal drive for sugar. If we left a glass of something sweet on a kitchen counter, the following morning we’d find twenty ant corpses floating in it, drowned in their own hedonism. They explored kitchen counters, cabinets, the sink—all normal haunts for ants. But then they moved on to our beds, our drawers, and eventually our elbows and necks. One night I became convinced that if I sat silent long enough, I could hear them marching inside the walls, taking over the apartment’s invisible veins. We tried sealing every crevice in the molding between the walls and floors with tape, but it peeled off after a few hours. The boy came up with the much better idea of using Play-Doh to seal cracks, and for a while it did the trick, but the ants soon found a way in again.
One morning, the girl left a dirty pair of panties on the bathroom floor after her shower, and when I picked them up a few hours later to put them in the laundry basket, I noticed that they were alive with ants. It seemed like a deep violation of some sort, a bad sign. The boy found the phenomenon fascinating; and t
he girl, hilarious. Over dinner that night, the children reported the incident to their father. I wanted to say that I thought those ominous ants foreshadowed something. But how could I explain that to the family, to anyone, without sounding crazy? So I shared only half my thought:
A catastrophe.
My husband listened to the children’s report, nodding, smiling, and then told them that ants, in Hopi mythology, are considered sacred. Ant-people were gods who saved those in the upperworld from catastrophes by taking them down to the underworld, where they could live in peace and freedom until the danger had passed and they were able to return to the upperworld.
Which catastrophe are the ants here to take us away from? the boy asked him.
I thought it was a good question, involuntarily poisonous, perhaps. My husband cleared his throat but didn’t answer. Then the girl asked:
What’s a catastrophe?
Something very bad, the boy said.
She sat silent for a moment, looking at her plate in deep concentration and pressing the back of her fork against her rice to flatten it down. Then, looking up at us again, very serious, she delivered a strange agglutination of concepts, as if the spirit of some nineteenth-century German hermeneutist had possessed her:
The ants, they come marching in, eat my upperworldpanties, they take us where there’s no catastrophes, just good trophies and tooshiefreedom.
Lost Children Archive Page 3