Now I hear the voices and footsteps of my own children coming from inside the cabin. They’ve woken up, so I stop the recording, put the boy’s pictures back inside the book, and then put both the book and the recorder into my handbag. The boy and girl come out to the porch and ask:
What are you doing out here?
When is breakfast?
What will happen today?
Can we go swimming?
They’ve discovered a brochure in the cabin, which invites guests to visit Medicine Park’s “gem,” a swimming hole called Bath Lake less than a mile from the cabin.
It’s only two dollars each, the boy says, pointing with his finger at the information on the brochure.
And it’s in walking distance, he adds.
For breakfast there’s bread and ham. Then we hang towels around our necks, I hang my handbag on my shoulder, and we all walk down a narrow path to the public swimming hole. We pay our eight dollars, and we stretch our towels out on some rocks. I don’t feel like getting into cold water, so I say that I still have my period, tell them to go ahead without me. The three of them race to the water, and I sit in the sunlight, watching them from a distance, like a ghost of myself.
ERASED
What there was, between Arkansas and Oklahoma, was hours of tape and more hours of things not on tape.
What there was, along highways and across thunderstorms, was my husband, drinking his coffee silently or talking to the children as we drove. Sometimes, my wish for all this to end, and to get as far away from him as possible. Other times, my desire, trailing after him, hoping he might suddenly change his mind, tell me that he’d drive back to New York with us at the end of the summer, or ask me to stay with him and the boy, say he could not let me and the girl go.
What there was, between us, was silence. What there was, was Manuela’s phone call, about her two girls, who were not there with her yet and who knows where they were. Sometimes, when I shut my eyes to sleep, there was a telephone number sewed on the collars of the dresses that Manuela’s girls had worn on their journey north. And once I was asleep, there was a swarm of numbers, impossible to remember.
What there was, between Memphis and Little Rock, was the story of Geronimo, falling from his horse, over and over again.
What there was in Little Rock, Arkansas, was Hrabal leaning out of a hospital window, bread crumbs in his palm, the pigeons scattering as his body falls out and hits the ground.
There was also Frank Stanford, falling into or out of his mind, three dry gunshots.
In Broken Bow there was news of children falling from the sky—a deluge.
What there was in Boswell was frightening.
What there was in Geronimo was a Western.
What there was in Fort Sill were names on tombstones, and names not there anymore, erased, in a photograph.
There was also that book, Elegies for Lost Children, in which a group of children were riding atop a train, their lips chapped, their cheeks cracked.
Everything that was there between Arkansas and Oklahoma was not there: Geronimo, Hrabal, Stanford, names on tombstones, our future, the lost children, the two missing girls.
All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it winds its way around a sun. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.
But finally, there is something. There is this one certainty. It arrives like a blow to my face as we speed along an empty highway into Texas. The story I have to record is not the story of children who arrive, those who finally make it to their destinations and can tell their own story. The story I need to document is not that of the children in immigration courts, as I once thought. The media is doing that already, documenting the crisis as well as possible—some journalists leaning more toward sensationalism, their ratings escalating; others adamant about shaping public opinion, this way or that; and a few others simply committed to questioning and fathoming. I am still not sure how I’ll do it, but the story I need to tell is the one of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost. Perhaps, like my husband, I’m also chasing ghosts and echoes. Except mine are not in history books, and not in cemeteries. Where are they—the lost children? And where are Manuela’s two girls? I don’t know, but this I do know: if I’m going to find anything, anyone, if I’m going to tell their story, I need to start looking somewhere else.
§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ X 5″)
“On Mapping”
“On History”
“On Reenactment”
“On Erasing”
§ EIGHT BOOKS
The North American Indian, Edward S. Curtis
From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886, Edwin R. Sweeney
Lt. Charles Gatewood & His Apache Wars Memoir, Charles Gatewood (Louis Kraft, ed.)
Geronimo: His Own Story. The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior, Geronimo and S. M. Barrett
Mangas Coloradas: Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, Edwin R. Sweeney
A Clash of Cultures, Robert M. Utley
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony
Cochise, Chiricahua Apache Chief, Edwin R. Sweeney
§ ONE BROCHURE
“Desert Adaptations (The Sonoran Desert Species),” National Park Service
§ FOUR MAPS
New Mexico
Arizona
Sonora
Chihuahua
§ ONE TAPE
Hands in Our Names, Karima Walker
§ ONE COMPACT DISC
Echo Canyon, James Newton
§ FOLDER (5 STEREOGRAPHS / COPIES)
Postcard (!) of five men, ankles chained, H. D. Corbett Stationery Co.
Two young men, chained
San Carlos Reservation, seven people outside adobe house
Geronimo holding rifle
Geronimo and fellow prisoners on their way to Florida by train, September 10, 1886
REMOVALS
And it is we who travel, they who flee,
We who may choose exile, they who are forced out.
—JAMES FENTON
Away and away the aeroplane shot,
till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration;
a symbol…of man’s soul; of his determination…to get outside his body.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
STORMS
Everyone says they’re empty. Everyone says—vast and flat. Everyone—mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere—indomitable. But no one had ever told us about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes. Forward, until you reach them and dissolve into them. Highway storms erase the illusory division between the landscape and you, the spectator; they thrust your observant eyes into what you observe. Even inside the hermetic space of the car, the wind blows right into your mind, through stunned eye sockets, clouds your judgment. The rain that falls down looks like it falls up. Thunder blasts so hard it reverberates inside your chest like a sudden uncontrollable anxiety. Lightning strikes so close you don’t know if it comes from outside or from inside you, a sudden flash illuminating the world or the nervous mess in your brain, cell circuits igniting in incandescent ephemeral interactions.
PRIVATE LANGUAGES
We pass the storm, but the rain continues as we drive across the northernmost tip of Texas, heading west toward New Mexico. We play a game now. The game is about names, about knowing the exact names of things in the desertlands we are driving toward. My husband has given the children a catalog of plant species, and they have to memorize names of things, things like saguaro, difficult names like creosote, jojoba, mesquite tree, easier names like organ pipe cactus and teddy bear cholla, names of things that can be eaten, prickly pears, nopales, and then names of animals that eat those things, spadefoot toad, sidewinder snake, desert tortoise, coyote, javelina, pack rat.
In the backseat, the boy reads them all aloud, saguaro, creosote, one by one, jojoba, mesquite, and his sister repeats them after him, teddy bear cholla, sometimes giggling when she finds that her tongue, nopales, cannot wrap itself around a word, spadefoot, sidewinder, and sometimes roaring out her frustration. When we stop for coffees and milks, in a diner by the side of the road, their father tests them. He points to the picture of a species, covering the name underneath the image, and the children have to call out the right name, taking turns. The boy has learned almost all the species by heart. Not the girl. No matter what object my husband points at, she invariably, and without hesitation, shouts:
Saguaro!
And the rest of us, sometimes grinning, sometimes losing patience, answer:
No!
Back in the car, she places the tip of her index finger on the window, pointing to nowhere and everywhere, and says:
Saguaro!
She says the word like she’s discovered a new star or planet. But there are no saguaros here, not yet, because this is not the real desert yet, my husband explains. She’s not convinced and continues to count saguaros in the wet empty plains, but softly now, to herself, her sticky index finger dotting the foggy window with prints, and slowly mapping, indeed, the constellation of all her saguaros.
ALIENS
Later that day, in a gas station near Amarillo, Texas, we overhear a conversation between the cashier and a customer. As she rings him up, she tells him that the next day, hundreds of “alien kids” will be put on private planes, funded by a patriotic millionaire, and they’ll be deported, back to Honduras or Mexico or somewhere in “South America.” The planes, full of “alien kids,” will leave from an airport not far from the famous UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico. I’m not sure if when she says the words “alien kids” and “UFO museum,” she’s stressing the irony of it or is completely unaware of it.
With a quick internet search, back in the car, we confirm the rumor. Or if not confirm, I at least find two articles that support it. I turn toward my husband, tell him we need to go to that airport. We have to drive there and be there when the deportation takes place.
We won’t make it on time, he says.
But we will. We are only a few hours away from the first town on the New Mexico–Texas border, a town called Tucumcari, where we can stop to sleep. We can wake up before dawn the next day and drive the two hundred miles or so south to that airport near Roswell.
How will we find the exact airport? he asks.
We just will.
And then what?
Then we’ll see, I say, mimicking a type of answer my husband often gives.
Then we’ll visit the UFO museum! says the boy from the backseat.
Yes, I say, then the UFO museum.
GAMES
My back is sweaty against the cracked black leather of the passenger’s seat, my body stiff from sitting in the same position for so long. In the back of the car, the children play. The boy says they’re both thirsty, lost and walking in the endless desert, says they’re both so thirsty and so hungry it feels like hunger is ripping them apart, eating them from the inside, says that hardship and hopelessness are now overtaking them. I wonder where his mind plucks those words from. From Lord of the Flies, I suppose. In any case, I want to tell him this reenactment game is silly and frivolous because—because what do they know about lost children, about hardship or hopelessness or getting lost in deserts?
Whenever the boy starts pretending, in the backseat, that he and his sister have left us, run away, and that they’re also lost children now, traveling alone through a desert, without adults, I want to stop him short. I want to tell them to stop playing this game. Tell them that their game is irresponsible and even dangerous. But I find no strong arguments, no solid reasons to build a dike around their imagination. Maybe any understanding, especially historical understanding, requires some kind of reenactment of the past, in its small, outward-branching, and often terrifying possibilities. He continues, and I let him continue. He tells his sister that they’re walking under the blazing sun, and she picks up his image, says:
We’re walking in the desert and it’s like we’re walking on the sun and not under it.
And soon we will die of thirst and hunger, he says.
Yes, she replies, and the beasts will eat us up unless we get to Echo Canyon soon!
GRAVITY
Almost every day, we drive, and drive some more, listening to and sometimes recording sounds stretched out across this vast territory, sounds intersecting with us, stories overlaid on a landscape that uncoils, the landscape always flatter, drier. We’ve been driving for more than three weeks now, though at times it seems like it was just a few days ago that we left our apartment; and at other times, like right now, it seems like we left a lifetime ago, the four of us already very different from the persons we were before we began this trip.
The boy speaks up from the backseat. He asks me to play the David Bowie song about astronauts. I ask him what song, which album, but he doesn’t know. He says it’s that song about two astronauts talking to each other as one of them is being launched into space. I look for possible songs on my phone, find “Space Oddity,” press Play.
Yes, that’s it! he says, and asks for more volume.
So I play it loud, as I look out the car window into the impossibly vast skies over Texas. Ground Control speaks to Major Tom, who is about to be launched into space. I imagine other lives—different, but maybe not that different from mine. Some people, when they sense that their lives have reached a stalemate, dynamite everything and start over. I admire those people: women who leave men, men who leave women, people who are able to detect the moment when the life they once chose to live has come to an end, despite possible future plans, despite the children they may have, despite next Christmas, the mortgage agreement they signed, the summer vacation and all the reservations made, the friends and colleagues whom they will have to explain things to. I’ve never been good at it—acknowledging an ending, leaving when I must. “Space Oddity” is blasting from the car’s old speakers, which crackle a bit, a chimney around which we gather. Bowie’s voice jumps back and forth between Ground Control and Major Tom—between the one who stayed behind and the one who left.
More louder! the girl shouts, loving the spell this song casts.
Play it again! the boy says after the song finishes.
We play “Space Oddity” more times than I ever imagined I could listen to a song. When they ask for one more round, after the fifth or sixth, I turn back to look at the children scoldingly from my seat, ready to tell them I can no longer take it, can no longer put up with one more replay of the same song. But before I can say anything, I notice that the boy is putting imaginary astronaut helmets on himself and the girl, and then lip-synching into an invisible walkie-talkie:
Copy, copy, Ground Control to Major Tom!
I smile at them both, but they don’t smile back. They’re too focused on holding fast to imaginary steering wheels, ready to be launched in a capsule into space, ejected from the back of the car, maybe, into the wide-open country now stretching out behind and beyond us as we drive deeper into someplace. I know that I’ve begun to drift outward, from the nucleus of them, fart
her away from the center of gravity that once held my everyday life in orbit. I’m sitting in this tin can, falling away from my daughter and son, and they are my Ground Control, falling away from me, the three of us being pulled apart by gravity. I’m not quite sure anymore who my husband is in the picture. He is silent, remote, persistent in his task behind the wheel. The sun has set, the light is blue gray, and he focuses on the road ahead as if underlining a long sentence in a difficult book. If I ask him what he’s thinking, he usually says:
Nothing.
I ask him now what he’s thinking and wait for an answer, studying his lips. They’re dry, and chapped, and could be kissed. He thinks a little, wets his lips with the tip of his tongue:
Nothing, he says.
SHADOW LINE
Fear—in daytime, under the sun—is something concrete, and it belongs to the adults: speeding on the highway, white policemen, possible accidents, teenagers with guns, cancer, heart attacks, religious fanatics, insects large and medium.
At night, fear belongs to children. It’s more difficult to understand its source, harder to give it a name. Night fear, in children, is a small shift of quality and mode in things, like when a cloud suddenly passes in front of the sun, and the colors dim to a lesser version of themselves.
Lost Children Archive Page 16