Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  During the trip, Ma’s job was mostly to study the map and plan our route for the day, though a few times she also would drive. Pa’s job was to drive, and to record sounds for his inventory. Your job was easy, you had to help Pa make sandwiches or help Ma clean all our boots, or help anyone do whatever. My jobs were harder. For example, I had to make sure the trunk of the car was neat and tidy before we started driving, every time, after any stop. The hardest part was making sure the boxes were in place. There were seven boxes in the trunk. One was yours and was empty, another was mine and was also empty. Then, Pa had four boxes and Ma had one box. I had to make sure they were all in place, together with the rest of our stuff in the trunk. It was like having to solve a puzzle, every time.

  We were not allowed to dig around in the boxes at all, but I earned permission to open one box, Mama’s box, which was labeled Box V. I had earned permission to open Ma’s box, I think, because when I started taking Polaroid pictures with my camera, Ma discovered we had to use a book to store the photographs in while they were developing, otherwise they’d burn and would come out all white, though it’s difficult to explain why this happens. The point is that before I took a picture, I’d be allowed to take a book out of her box, the book that was at the very top, which was the little red book about lost children. I was allowed to use it to store my pictures in, to tuck them between pages. And each time I opened the box to take the book out, I’d shuffle the things inside it around, to get a quick look. In her box there were some books, all with dozens of little Post-its that flagged the special pages. Mama kept those especially far from your reach, I think because when we still lived back home, you were always stealing the Post-its from her books to make drawings and then sticking them on the walls all over the apartment. So she made sure you didn’t even get near her box.

  Inside the box were also some newspaper cutouts, maps, files, and pieces of paper in all different sizes with notes she had written. I’m not sure why, but I was always curious about all the things in that box. I think maybe because it made me feel the way I felt one day when you and I made up a game while we were playing in the park, making little clay figures that we decided to bury under trees so that some scientist in the future could find them and think they were made by members of an ancient tribe. Except, with Ma’s box, I was not the one who had made the clay figures but the scientist who had found them centuries later.

  APACHERIA

  The roads toward Apacheria were long, and we were driving there in a straight line, but it was like we were driving in circles. There was that voice in the car speakers from the audiobook that always came back, saying: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” Sometimes I pretended to be sleeping behind them, too. I tried. Especially when they were fighting. Not you. When they were fighting, you would come up with jokes or sometimes even say, Papa, you go smoke your cigarette now, and Mama, you focus on your map and on your news.

  Sometimes they listened to you. They’d stop fighting, and Ma would play music on shuffle, or else turn on the radio. She always told us to be quiet when news about the lost children came on, and she always got all strange after hearing it. She either got strange and started telling us about that little red book she was reading about lost children, and their crusade, about them walking across deserts or riding trains through empty worlds, all of which we were curious about but could hardly make sense of. It was either that or she got so sad and angry after hearing the radio news that she didn’t want to talk to us anymore, didn’t even want to look at us.

  It made me so angry at her. I wanted to remind her that even though those children were lost, we were not lost, we were there, right there next to her. And it made me wonder, what if we got lost, would she then finally pay attention to us? But I knew that thought was immature, and also I never knew what the words were to tell her I was angry, so I kept quiet and you kept quiet and we all listened either to her stories or just to the silence in the car, which was maybe worse.

  COSMOLOGY & PRONOUNS

  I don’t think you understood any of the news or any of her stories. I think you didn’t even listen. But I listened. I didn’t understand all of it, only parts of it, but whenever the radio voices started talking about the refugee children or Mama started talking about the children’s crusade, I would whisper to you, listen, they’re talking about the lost children again, listen, they’re talking about the Eagle Warriors that Pa told us about, and you would open your eyes and nod and pretend you were understanding everything and agreeing.

  I don’t know if you will remember what Pa told us about the Eagle Warriors. He said the Eagle Warriors were a band of Apache children, all warriors, led by an older boy. He said the boy was about my age. The Eagle Warriors ate birds that they hunted in midflight by throwing rocks at them, all with their bare hands. They were invincible, he told us, and they lived all alone in the mountains without parents and even so were never afraid. And they were also a little bit like small gods, because they had learned the power to control the weather, and could either attract rain or push a thunderstorm back. I think they were called the Eagle Warriors because of this sky power they had, but also because if you ever got to see them from far away, running down a mountain or in the desert plains, they ran so swift and fast they looked like eagles floating rather than people stuck to earth. And sometimes while Pa was telling us all this, we would both be looking out the car window at the empty sky, wishing we could see eagles.

  You asked, one day in the car, if we were going to live in the car forever. Though I knew the answer, I was so relieved to hear Pa say, no, we’re not. He said we would arrive, in the end, soon, at a beautiful house made of big gray stones, where there was a porch and a garden so big we’d get lost in it. And you said, I don’t want to get lost. And I said, don’t be silly, he just means it’s the biggest garden you’ve ever seen. Though later, I kept wondering if it was possible to really get lost in a garden and wished we were back in our old apartment, which was already big enough for the four of us.

  The house we were going to, Pa said, was between the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains, not far from a place called Skeleton Canyon, in the heart of Apacheria, near where Geronimo and the other twenty-seven members of his band had surrendered. I asked if it was called that because there were real skeletons there, and Pa said maybe yes, and dried his forehead with his hand, and I thought he was going to carry on with the story, but he just got silent and looked into the highway. I think maybe when Geronimo and the other people walked along that canyon, they were also silent all the time, and listening hard and squinting, to make sure that their feet would not step on bones of skeletons of before, and if we ever go to that canyon, you and I will do the same.

  PASSING STRANGERS

  Soon after the beginning of the trip, aside from keeping the trunk neat and tidy, I knew my duty was to keep track of stuff, take pictures of everything important. The first pictures came out white and I got frustrated. Then I studied the manual and I finally learned. Professionals have to do this kind of thing, and it’s called trial and error. But for a while after learning how to do it, I still didn’t know what my pictures had to be of. I wasn’t sure what was important, what wasn’t, and what I should focus on and photograph. For some time, I took many pictures of whatever, with no plan, no anything.

  One day, though, while you were asleep and I was pretending to sleep but actually listening to Ma and Pa arguing about radio, about politics, about work, about their future plans together, and then not together, about us, and them, and everything, I came up with a plan, and this was the plan. I’d become a documentarist and a documentarian. I could be both, for a while, at least on this trip. I could document everything, even the little things, however I could. Because I understood, even though Pa and Ma thought I didn’t, that it was our last trip together as a family.

  I also
knew that you wouldn’t remember this trip, because you’re only five years old, and our pediatrician had told us that children don’t start building memories of things until after they turn six. When I realized that, that I was ten and you were only five, I thought, fuck. But of course I didn’t say so out loud. I just thought, fuck, silently, to myself. I realized that I’d remember everything and you maybe wouldn’t remember anything. I needed to find a way to help you remember, even if it was only through things I documented for you, for the future. And that’s how I became a documentarist and a documentarian at the same time.

  FUTURE

  I turned ten the day before we left home. And though I was already ten, I still felt lost and unsure sometimes and asked how much longer, and where will we stop. And then you’d ask, where are we going exactly, and when will we get all the way to the end? Ma sometimes pulled out her big map, which was way too big to unfold all the way, and with her finger she circled a part of the map, saying, this, this is the end of the trip. Pa would sometimes remind us, though we already knew it, that all of that had once been part of Apacheria. There were the Dragoon Mountains, and the Wilcox dry lake, and then the Chiricahua Mountains, and Ma would read names of places aloud in her low, raspy voice: San Simon, Bowie, Dragoon, Cochise, Apache, Animas, Shakespeare, Skeleton Canyon. When she was done, she’d put the map in front of her, under the slanted windshield, and then she’d put her feet on top of the map. Once I took a picture of them, and the picture was a good one, though in real life her feet looked a little bigger, browner, and more worn out.

  MAPS & BOXES

  SARGASSO SEA

  This whole country, Papa said, is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don’t matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history, he said.

  He spoke like this sometimes, and when he did, he was usually looking out through a window or at some corner. Never at us. When we were still back in our old apartment, for example, and he got mad at us for something we’d done or maybe not done, he would look straight at the bookshelf, not at us, and say words like responsibility, privilege, ethical standards, or social commitments. Now he was talking about this whirlpool of history, and erased lives, and was looking through the windshield at the curvy road ahead as we drove up a narrow mountain pass, where there were no green things growing, no trees, no bushes, nothing alive, only jagged rocks and trunks of trees split in half as if old gods with giant axes had got angry and chopped this part of the world apart.

  What happened here? you even asked, looking out the window, though you didn’t usually notice landscapes.

  Papa said: Genocide, exodus, diaspora, ethnic cleansing, that’s what happened.

  Ma explained that there had probably been a recent forest fire.

  We were in New Mexico, finally in Chiricahua Apache territory. Apache was the wrong word, by the way. It meant “enemy,” and that’s what the Apaches’ enemies called them. The Apaches called themselves Nde, which just meant “the people.” That’s what Pa told us as we drove on and on in that lonely mountain pass, higher and higher, everything around us gray and dead. And they called everyone else Indah, he said, which meant “enemy,” and “stranger,” but also meant “eye.” They called all the white Americans white-eyes, he told us, but we already knew that. Ma asked him why and he said he didn’t know. She asked him if eye and enemy and stranger were all the same word, Indah, then how did he know that the Americans were called white-eyes and not actually white-enemies? Pa thought for a while, stayed silent. And maybe to fill in the silence, Ma told us that Mexicans used to call white Americans hueros, which could either mean “empty” or mean “with no color” (now they still call them güeros). And Mexican Indians, like Ma’s grandmother and her ancestors, used to called white Americans borrados, which meant “erased people.” I listened to her and wondered who were actually more borrados, more erased, the Apaches that Pa was always talking about but that we couldn’t see anywhere, or the Mexicans, or the white-eyes, and what it really meant to be borrado, and who erased who from where.

  MAPS

  Ma’s eyes were usually fixed on her big map, and Pa looked ahead toward the road. He said, look there, those strange mountains we’re getting closer to are where some of the last Chiricahua Apaches used to hide, during the very hot summer months, because otherwise they’d die from heat exposure in the desert plains to the southwest. Or, if the heat and sickness and thirst didn’t kill them, then the white-eyes always did. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if Pa was telling stories or if he was telling histories. But then, driving on that curvy road in the mountain, suddenly he took off his hat and threw it in the backseat without even looking where it would land, which made me think he was telling us real histories and not stories. His hat landed almost in my lap and I reached out to touch it with the tip of my fingers, but I didn’t dare put it on my head.

  He told us about how the different Apache bands, like Mangas Coloradas and his son Mangus and Geronimo, who were all part of the Mimbreño Apache band, were fighting against the cruelest white-eyes and the worst come-and-goes, which is what they called the Mexicans. They joined up with Victorio and Nana and Lozen, who were part of the Ojo Caliente band and were fighting more with the Mexican army, and then also joined with another one of our favorite Apaches, Chief Cochise, who was invincible. The three bands became the Chiricahuas, and were all lead by Cochise. This all sounds confusing, and it is, it’s complicated, but if you hear it carefully and maybe draw a map, you might understand it.

  ACOUSTEMOLOGY

  When Pa stopped talking, I finally put on his hat, and whispered to you like I was some old Indian-cowboy, said, hey you, hey Memphis, imagine we had got lost here in these mountains. And you said, just you and me alone? And I answered, yes, just you and me alone, do you think we’d join the Apaches and fight against the white-eyes? But Mama heard me, and before you could answer me, she turned around from her seat and asked me to promise that if we ever got lost, I would know how to find them again. So I said, of course, Ma, yes. She asked me if I knew her and Papa’s phone numbers by heart, and I said, yes, 555-836-6314 and 555-734-3258. And if you were out in the open country or desert and there was no one to ask for a telephone? she asked. I said we’d look for her and Papa in the heart of the Chiricahua Mountains, in that place where echoes are so clear that even if you whisper, your voice comes back the same way your face looks back at you when you stand in front of a perfectly smooth, clean mirror. Papa interrupted, saying, you mean Echo Canyon? And I was so glad he was listening to me and was helping me out with Ma’s difficult questions that always felt like tests. Yes, I said, exactly, if we got lost, we would look for you in Echo Canyon. Wrong answer, Ma said, as if it really was a test. If you get lost out in the open, you have to look for a road, the larger the better, and wait for someone to pass, okay? And both of us said, yes Ma, okay, okay. But then I whispered to you, and she didn’t hear me, I said, but first we would go to Echo Canyon, right? And you nodded, and then whispered back, but only if I get to be Lozen for the rest of the game.

  PRESENTIMENT

  For a while after Ma’s test, I kept on thinking, would we really be able to find our way alone to that Echo Canyon? I thought if only, if only we had a dog, there would be no risk of getting lost. Or less risk, at least. Papa once told us a story, a real one that had even been on the radio and in the newspapers, about a little girl who was only three or four years old and lived in Siberia and left her house one day with her dog, looking for her father in the forest. Her father was a fireman, and he had left earlier that day, because there were wildfires spreading. The girl and her dog disappeared into the forest, but instead of finding him, they got lost. They were lost for days, and rescue teams were looking all over.

  On the ninth day after they had gone missing, the dog returned to the house, on his own, without the girl. At first everyone was worried and even angry when they saw h
im come back, wagging his tail and barking. They thought he had abandoned the girl, maybe dead, and had come back selfishly for food. And they knew that if she was still alive, she was not going to survive without him now. But a few hours later, inside the house, the dog started barking at the front door, would not stop barking. When they let him out, thinking maybe he needed to poop, he ran from the door of the house to the first row of trees in the forest, and then back to the house, over and over. Finally, someone understood that he was trying to say something, not just barking and running like a crazy beast, so the girl’s parents and also a rescue team started following him.

  The dog took them into the forest, and they walked for many hours, across streams and up and down hills, and then, on the morning of the eleventh day after they had got lost, they found her. She was huddled up under tall grass, which is called tundra or taiga, or maybe just grass, and the dog had showed them the way to her. She had survived thanks to her dog because he kept her safe and warm at night, and they ate berries and drank water from the rivers, and were not eaten by wolves or by bears, which was lucky for them because there are thousands of bears and wolves in Siberia. And now he had shown the adults all the way to where he had left her. I felt like crying every time I thought of this story. I didn’t cry, but I kept on thinking what it would feel like to wake up one morning after so many days alone with my dog, but suddenly even more alone, my dog gone.

  You were drawing something on the window with saliva, a new disgusting habit since Pa told us about the witch-doctor woman called Saliva who was Geronimo’s friend and cured people by spitting on them. What would you do if we lived in a village next to a forest and we had a dog, and we went into the forest one day and suddenly got lost there with our dog only? I asked you. And all you said was, I would stand next to you and make sure the dog didn’t lick me.