Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  “he was a whoreson”

  “a composer…once tore a chandelier out of the ceiling in his grief”

  “a giant of a girl, but beautiful”

  “the world was as deserted as a star”

  More than his books, more than his harsh humor and Decameronian tableaux of human tragicomedy, more than anything, it is the story of Hrabal’s own death that has haunted me, always. He died like this: recovering from bronchitis in a hospital room, while trying to feed the pigeons, he fell out of the window.

  But Hrabal does not live in Arkansas, so I don’t tell the family about him either.

  ITEMS

  In Little Rock, we see cars, malls, big houses—places presumably occupied by people, but we don’t see people, not on the street. At the city limits, there is a Walmart. We see many things there, as is to be expected during a visit to any superstore. Except there really are way too many things, more than normal, a puzzling number of things, some of which I am sure no one has ever seen before or even imagined. For instance, an itemizer. What is an itemizer, really? What does it do? What does it look like? Who might need one? Only this much is clear from the box: it has spring-latch and roller-mounted drawers (with adjustable dividers), has anti-skid strips, and comes with a lock mount, and its units can be stacked. An itemizer “eradicates the need to crawl inside the van every time by placing things at your fingertips.” I would imagine that if you gave an itemizer to someone brilliant and slightly intolerant to stupidity—say, Anne Carson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or Marguerite Yourcenar—they’d write a perfect poem about reindeer walking in the snow.

  In the Walmart, we also discover that Walmart is the place where people are. These I like instantly: an old man and his granddaughter choosing avocados, judging each by its smell. The old man tells the girl they have to be smelled “not in the belly but right in the navel,” and then goes on to do a demonstration of avocado-navel smelling. This one I instantly dislike: a woman in Crocs who walks slowly, dragging her feet, smiles distractedly at people waiting in line, pretending to be lost or a little confused, and then—cuts the line!

  We buy boots. The discounts are incredible. We buy beautiful, cheap, large, cow-family boots. Mine are not cowgirl boots. Mine are imitation-leather punk-lady boots—$15.99—and I put them on immediately, even before I pay, to the indignation of the children, who cannot conceive of usage before payment.

  I feel like an astrolady in them as we walk out of the store, someone leaving footprints on the moon-gravel in a tremendous parking lot, walking across “a world as deserted as a star” as Hrabal would surely have said of this Walmart in particular. The boy says we have to keep the empty shoeboxes in the trunk, in case we need them, or in case he needs them, for later. I wonder if I’ve passed on to him my documentary fever: store, collect, archive, inventory, list, catalog.

  What for? I ask

  For later, he says.

  But I convince him we have enough boxes, reminding him that he already has an empty box he hasn’t even used.

  Why haven’t you used your box yet, by the way? I ask, to distract him and steer the conversation in another direction.

  Because, Ma, it’s for later, he says.

  And he says it with such authority, like a real archivist who knows exactly what he’s doing, that I just keep quiet and smile at him.

  That afternoon, we drive to the western border of Arkansas, to a town called De Queen, just a few miles from the border with Oklahoma, and there we find a decent-enough motel on a street called Joplin Avenue. Our children are thrilled by the idea of it, Joplin. The girl, instead of asking for a story, takes out her copy of The Book with No Pictures and reads theatrically to the family as she flips through the pages: “This is the story of Janis Joplin, the great witch of the night…” She makes me both proud and worried sometimes—five years old and a Joplin fan—but maybe more proud than worried. She and the boy are both exempted from brushing their teeth before going to bed just this one time.

  DICKS, WHISKEY

  The lights in the room are turned off, the children asleep in their bed. My husband and I quarrel on our own bed. A routine exchange: his poisonous adjectives whispered sharply across his pillow to mine, and my silence like a dull shield in his face. One active, the other passive; both of us equally aggressive. In marriage, there are only two kinds of pacts: pacts that one person insists on having and pacts that the other insists on breaking.

  Why is there always a little hum of hate running alongside love? a friend once wrote to me in an email, paraphrasing someone. I don’t remember if she said it was Alice Munro or Lydia Davis. After the fight, he sleeps and I don’t. A slow rage creeps and flowers in my sternum, burning deep but contained, like a fire smoldering in a fireplace. Slowly, a distance stretches between his sleep and my sleeplessness. I remember Charles Baudelaire said something about everyone being like convalescents in a sickroom, always wishing they could swap beds. But which bed, where? The other bed in this room is warm and pleasant with the children’s breathing, but there is no space for me there. I close my eyes and try to thrust myself into thoughts of other places and other beds.

  More and more, my presence here, on this trip with my family, driving toward a future we most probably won’t share, settling into motel bedrooms for the night, feels ghostly, a life witnessed and not lived. I know I’m here, with them, but also I am not. I behave like those visitors who are always packing and repacking, always getting ready to leave the next day but then don’t; or like ancestors in bad magical realist literature, who die but then forget to leave.

  I cannot stand the guttural sounds of my husband breathing, he so calm in his nasty, guiltless dreams. So I get out of bed, write a note—“Back later”—in case someone wakes up and worries, and then leave the room. My boots walk me out, out from one godless dark to another. The boots provide a weight, a gravity that I’ve lately ceased to feel under my feet. One of the metal buckles slaps the faux leather flank of a boot in a rhythmical slap, walk, heel, toe—fuck, I’m probably making too much noise. I try to ghost my way down the motel corridor, feeling like a teenage junkie. A neon tube flickers above the door to the empty reception. Under my arm I’ve tucked a book, which I may or may not read if I find a bar or an open diner.

  I don’t have to go too far. Just a mile or so down the highway is the Dicks Whiskey Bar, which I have trouble pronouncing properly in my head—is it a possessive noun or just a plural form? The waitresses are dressed in pioneer costumes, and in the restroom, there are barrels for sinks. A cover version of “Harvest Moon” is playing in the background, seemingly on repeat. At the bar, I find a stool and take a seat. I’ve always felt inadequate on barstools because my legs are not long enough for my feet to touch the ground, so a remote bone and muscle memory is triggered: I’m four years old again, dangling my legs from my chair, waiting for a glass of milk and maybe some attention amid the morning rush of a house with a loud older sibling, knowing that even if I yell, no one will listen. Older siblings don’t listen, and the barman never listens. But I shift a little on my stool and discover that my astrolady boot heels latch on perfectly to the bottom rod between the legs of the stool. So I suddenly feel grounded, present, adult enough to be there. I rest my crossed forearms on the zinc bar and order a whiskey.

  Neat, please.

  Two places from me I notice a man, also alone, writing notes in the margins of a newspaper page. His legs are long and thin, and his feet touch the ground. He has well-outlined sideburns, a sad crease across his forehead, a strong chin, wild bushy hair. The kind of man, I tell myself, who would have swept me under his charm when I was younger and less experienced. He’s wearing a weathered white tank shirt and denims. And as I study his brown naked arms, a shoulder dotted with a darker birthmark, a thick vein that pulses in his neck, and a spiral of small hairs behind his ear, I t
ell myself no, this man is not at all interesting. Lined up next to his drink—also whiskey, neat—he has four pens, all the same color (in addition to the one he’s using to underline something in the newspaper article he’s so invested in). I repeat to myself, no, he’s not interesting, he’s just beautiful, and his beauty is of the most vulgar kind: indisputable. And as I sweep my eyes down along his flank toward his hip, I find myself completely incapable of not asking him:

  Can I use one of your pens or do you need all five of them?

  And as he hands one of the pens over to me, he smiles with a childish bashfulness, and looks at me with a gaze that reveals both a fierceness and a fundamental decency—not of manners and mores, but of a deeper, more simple noble type. For a man this beautiful, I realize, that kind of gaze is rare. Handsome men are habituated to attention, and they look at other men or women with the cold self-satisfaction that an actor displays in front of a camera. Not this man.

  We end up talking to each other, at first following all the ready-made prompts and platitudes.

  What brings us here?

  He tells me he’s on his way to a town called Poetry, which I think is probably a lie, a lie that reveals too much sentimentalism. I don’t think a place by that name exists, but I don’t question him about it. In return for his lie, I tell him I’m on my way to Apacheria—the same kind of vague, fictitious answer.

  What do we each do?

  Our answers are evasive, veiled behind an almost overacted mysteriousness that reveals nothing more than insecurity. We try a little harder now. I tell him I do journalism, mostly radio journalism, and I’ve been trying to work on a sound documentary about refugee children, but my plan for now is, once I reach Apacheria, to go look for two lost girls in New Mexico or possibly Arizona. He says he used to be a photographer but now prefers painting, and is going to Poetry, Texas, because he’s been commissioned to paint a series of portraits of the town’s eldest generation.

  Then we talk politics, and he explains the term “gerrymandering” to me, a term I’ve never understood even after years of living in the United States. He draws a series of squiggly lines on a paper napkin, the resulting image of which looks like a dog. I laugh, tell him he’s a terrible explainer, and I still don’t understand the concept, but I fold the gerry-napkin and tuck it into one of my boots.

  Slowly, though not so slowly, our conversation leads us toward darker, maybe truer spaces. He is the opposite of me, in circumstance. He’s unentangled; I’m a knot. There’s my children and his childlessness. His plans for eventual children and my plans for no more. Hard to explain why two complete strangers may suddenly decide to share an unbeautified portrait of their lives. But perhaps also easy to explain, because two people alone in a bar at two in the morning are probably there to try to figure out the exact narrative they need to tell themselves before they go back to wherever they’ll sleep that night. There’s a compatibility in our loneliness, and an absolute incompatibility of our mutual situations, and a cigarette shared outside, and then the sudden compatibility of our lips, and his breath in my cleavage, and the tip of my fingers around his belt, just inside his pants. My heartbeat races in a way I know well but have not felt in many years. The absolute physicality of desire takes over. He suggests we go back to his motel, and I want to.

  I want to, but I know better. With men like this one, I know I’d play the role of lonely hunter; and they, the role of inaccessible prey. And I’m both too old and too young to pursue things that walk away from me.

  So there is one last whiskey and then some scribbles—geographic advice and telephone numbers—that we jot down on our respective napkins. His, probably lost the morning after, in the routine emptying out of pockets for the sake of carrying less weight; mine kept in one of my boots, as a kind of reminder of a road not taken.

  GUNS & POETRY

  The next morning, in a gas station outside Broken Bow, we buy coffees, milks, cookies, and a local newspaper called The Daily Gazette. There’s an article titled “Kids, a Biblical Plague” about the children’s crisis at the border, which I read through, baffled by its Manichean representation of the world: patriots versus illegal aliens. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that a worldview like that has a place outside of superhero comic strips. I read some sentences out loud to the family:

  “Tens of thousands of children streaming from chaotic Central American nations to the U.S.”

  “…this 60,000 to 90,000 illegal alien children mass that has come to America…”

  “These children carry with them viruses that we are not familiar with in the United States.”

  I think of Manuela’s girls, and it’s hard not to be overcome by rage. But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but a little bit frightened. None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.

  There’s only one place to eat at this time in Boswell, Oklahoma, and it’s called the Dixie Café. The boy is the first to jump out of the car, getting his camera ready. I remind him to take the little red book from the top of my box, as well as the big road map, which I left there last night, because the glove box was too full. He runs to the back of the car, fetches everything, and waits for us outside the café, the map and book tucked under his arm and his camera ready in his hand. He takes a picture as the rest of us take our time, climbing out sluggishly, putting on our new Walmart boots.

  The only other patrons in the Dixie Café are a woman with a face and arms the texture of boiled chicken, and a toddler in a high chair to whom she’s feeding fries. We order four hamburgers and four pink lemonades, and spread our map out on the table while we wait for the food. We follow yellow and red highway lines with the tips of our index fingers, like a troupe of gypsies reading an enormous open palm. We look into our past and future: a departure, a change, long life, short life, hard circumstances beyond, here you will head south, here you will encounter doubt and uncertainty, a crossroads ahead.

  Only this we know: in order to reach New Mexico and, eventually, Arizona, we can either drive west across Oklahoma or southwest across Texas.

  Was Oklahoma also once part of Mexico, Ma? the boy asks.

  No, not Oklahoma, I answer.

  Arkansas?

  No.

  And Arizona?

  Yes, I say, Arizona was Mexico.

  So what happened? the boy wants to know.

  The United States stole it, says my husband.

  I nuance his answer. I tell the boy that Mexico kind of sold it, but only after losing the war in 1848. I tell him it was a two-year war, which Americans call the Mexican-American War and Mexicans call, perhaps more accurately, the American Intervention.

  So will there be many Mexicans in Arizona? the girl now asks.

  No, the boy tells her.

  Why?

  They shoot them, her brother says.

  With bows and arrows?

  Guns, he says. And as he says this, he mimics a sniper, shoots the plastic containers of ketchup and then mayonnaise, and is about to squirt some ketchup on Arizona when his father snatches the bottle from him.

  We go back to studying the map. My husband wants to spend a couple of days in Oklahoma, where the Apache cemetery is. He says that stop is one of the central reasons for this trip. It’s incompatible
with his wish, but I want to go through Texas. From where I’m sitting, leaning into the table, the state spreads magnanimous under my eyes. I follow the line of a highway with the tip of my index finger. I pass places like Hope, Pleasant, Commerce, de-route toward Merit, south to Fate, and then to Poetry, Texas, which, to my amazement, does indeed exist. The girl says she wants to go back to Memphis. The boy says he doesn’t care, he just wants his food to come now.

  The drinks arrive, and we sip in silence, listening to the woman at the other table. She is talking loud and slow to, or maybe at, her toddler about price discounts in the local supermarket while she hands him long fries dipped first in ketchup, then in mayonnaise. The toddler replies with inhuman burbles and shrieks. Bananas, ninety-nine cents a pound. The toddler shrieks. And milk, a carton of milk for seventy-five cents. He gurgles. Then she looks at us, sighs, and tells him that them fore’ns are more and more common these days, and that’s okay, it’s okay with her as long as they’re not troublemakers. She hands him a fry with so much mayo-ketchup on the tip that it bends over sadly, like a dysfunction.

  All of us turn around at the same time when another family—father, mother, baby in stroller—walks into the diner. They are of a more discreet type, except for the baby, who is rather big. Maybe even uncannily colossal. It seems difficult to say that someone that size is a baby. But judging by its lumpy features, its almost hairless head, its pixelated movements, it is, by all means, a baby. The toddler, holding a fry up in the air, full of enthusiasm, shouts out from his high chair:

  Baby!

  No, no, that ain’t no baby—the mother tells him, wagging no-no with another French fry.

  Baby! the toddler insists.

  No-no, that ain’t no baby, m’boy, no-no-no. That thing’s huge. Scary huge. Like them tomatoes we saw over at the supermarket. Not God’s tomatoes.