The Lost Daughter Collective

by Lindsey Drager

  The leading scholar in the field of Wrist Studies cites a single moment in his discovery of the field. When clasping a bracelet on his daughter, he was taken by the fact that it seemed to fall either on her hand or her arm. When he asked his daughter to point to her wrist, the daughter pointed to her head. Wrists, he then concluded, are a social construction perpetrated by our need to categorize the body. Subsequently, his life’s work became stripping the world of the wrist.

  THE ICE SCULPTOR’S MOST successful work will be a series of exhibits in which she hangs hands formed of ice from lines bound to the ceiling. A series of studio lights will be adhered to the ground on the opposite side of the room, and when the lights are administered, the wall will reveal a set of shadow puppets in all shapes. Fruit and books and ladders. Mugs and bathtubs. Aged spoons and empty closets. Agony and flight.

  The shadows are sustained on the wall for a brief period of time, until the light that allows the shadow to form induces melt. The exhibit is titled Suspension of Belief.

  IN THE FIRST VOLUME she published after meeting the Wrist Scholar—the book titled Rooms and Crime—the woman the girl never called mother writes:

  The human voice rises when questions are asked, therein adhering the notion of up with the unknown. This logic— unknown is up, known is down—is further perpetrated by the use of upper and lower case in parsing out the difference between specific and general ideas. That the upper case contains the letters we use to denote the grand theories of life such as Death, Fear, and Love further yokes the notion of up with that which is unknown, for the general and abstract—the intangible and fluid—is capitalized not because these terms harbor more significance, but because they will endure as concepts forever defined and redefined, a salve we apply to the wound of mystery.

  It is in this way that our notion of unknown is bound to and rooted in up. And it is in this way that the harvesting of knowledge implicitly requires the agent to go down.

  THE GIRL IS IN her room working with her three shadow girls, when her father enters at 1 a.m.

  Hello, child, he says, adjusting his tie. Are you well?

  She wants to say No. She wants to say No, I am not, I am very unwell because, you see, my mouth has become an independent organism. But she keeps her lips closed. She nods to him. And then he nods to her.

  As you are entering this last quarter of your fifth year, it is time to introduce a conflict to the plot, her father says. Tonight we’ll hear The Mystery of the Archivist’s Daughter.

  When she is ten, she will participate in her first ice-sculpting exhibition. It will be held at the local cold space, where Ice Sculptors from across the country have come to evaluate amateur work. She will wait for her father all evening, and even as she is receiving the praise of the professionals and getting her ribbon for first place, her father will not be there. Just as the local cold space guardians are telling her to leave, her father will arrive. She will grab his hand in hers and lead him swiftly to the dome, and he will quicken his pace as they navigate the labyrinths of sculptures. But already she will be anticipating the worst. And when they arrive, the worst will be realized, as they meet only a dark blue ribbon in the center of a puddle.

  THE MYSTERY OF THE

  ARCHIVIST’S DAUGHTER

  THE RIDDLE IS THIS: The Archivist’s daughter is neither a Dorothy nor an Alice. The fathers have theories, but the question remains. If not dead or missing, how lost could The Archivist’s daughter be?

  INDEED, HOW LOST COULD The Archivist’s daughter be?, the girl will think as she tries to sleep that evening. She had thought her father’s tales were merely to warn her, but now her curiosity is piqued. This is a riddle, she concludes, and riddles are solved only one way.

  The stories of the Lost Daughter Collective have haunted her since the first time her father introduced her to The Realm of the Real the night before—Or was it the morning of? When in the twilight time between sleep and waking does the day begin?—she turned five. The nights he comes to tell her of the Lost Daughter Collective, she is haunted by the tales of the fathers, but on the nights when he does not come, she imagines what kind of stories the daughters would tell.

  And this is how her shadow girls become lost daughters, each of whom has her own side of the story. And while she knows it is dangerous territory to imagine, she cannot help thinking that while the fathers see their girls as lost, perhaps the girls interpret their leaving differently.

  She has been working on a piece she calls Exit Father, wherein her three shadow girls perform their tales to an audience of fathers in order to teach them how to better take on their role. Just as her father lectures to his students, there is a message to be found in her piece, if he chooses to listen.

  It is the conclusion of Exit Father, the closing moments after the girls have shared their tales, that impresses her most. As a final gesture, the three forms come ever closer until they finally connect, unite, grow into and around each other. And then, in a breathtaking climax, she empties the form, so that it stands not as a compendium of shadow, but as the compendium’s frame.

  This is how she takes the daughters that are lost and makes them found.

  IN HER FINAL PUBLISHED book, The Room with Two Doors, the woman the girl never called mother writes:

  Which is the entrance? Which is the exit? How is it decided which role each serves? And who decides in which direction the current runs? The room with two doors has always a line of people walking through it. This is the case through light and dark hours, through ages of water and through ages of ice.

  The people who walk through the room with two doors do not know that they do so. One of the people is you.

  GOOD MORNING, MY ONLY child, and happy birthday, her father says at 1 a.m. She has been six for one hour. He stands next to her where she is tucked into the bed, her two hands holding the even cuff of the bed sheets.

  I am in the final edits of the new book, so I cannot stay long, but I did want to congratulate you on adding yet another year to your repertoire. The Wrist Scholar looks at his daughter, who looks up at him with large eyes.

  Your face, he tells her. Your face is growing lean. Your face is becoming the face of a woman, he tells her, and she blinks twice.

  As you are now six, you will notice other things changing, too, he tells her. As the body moves through the years, it grows and sheds accordingly. Do not be surprised if you begin to lose things or discover development in places you might not have anticipated.

  The girl does not feel her face flush or realize she’s opened her mouth. It does not register that she needs to visit the restroom. With the delivery of her father’s words is erased the knowledge that she is in fact corporeal. And when her tiny jaw falls and her lips part, her father squints to see inside her mouth.

  Well, but you’ve already started! The teeth are the first to go. But now I must be telling you things you’ve known for months. It is true what they say: as the daughter develops, she needs the father less. The Wrist Scholar pats the girl on the head twice. Good morning, and happy birthday, my only, he says and walks out the door.

  The girl does not notice that he does not lean in for the touching of her nose to his. The girl does not notice that there is no narrative tonight. The girl notices nothing, because her cognition is obfuscated by the process of knowledge slowly budding in the mind.

  The girl sits letting this knowledge overtake her for some time before the desire to visit the restroom prompts her to leave. And as she lowers her pajama bottoms and climbs the toilet to seek the comfort of release, she finds that she cannot. She cannot void herself, and she cannot cry. She wants to cry for her fifth year and her mother and for the curse of misunderstanding and for keeping quiet and for not knowing the rules of daughterhood.

  Eventually she gives up. The girl exits the restroom and walks quietly to the dining hall. When she enters, it is empty, chairs living sideways on the table, floor shining, the smell of clean. In the door that leads from the dining hall to th
e parking lot, she notices the silhouette of a figure smoking. When she gets closer, the woman turns around and the girl sees it is she who dishes up food three times a day.

  What are you doing awake? the woman says, waving the smoke from her eyes.

  I would like a cup of water, the girl says.

  We’re out of water, the woman tells her. But I can get you something else.

  Here— the woman says, handing her a tall cup full of ice. This ice is enchanted. Put the glass aside and go to sleep. When you wake tomorrow, you’ll have a glass of water, the woman says.

  The girl holds the cup of ice with two hands. She peers into the well of the cup. The woman watches her for a minute while she fixes her hairnet and corrects her apron, shoves her fist into her thick hip. She takes a drag, then squints and leans her head toward the girl. Are you okay?

  The girl nods.

  As soon as the woman turns around, the girl decides she does not believe in enchantment. And so she does not set the cup aside. Instead she studies the ice, watches it contract and condense, watches it crack and shift and fall. And when at last there is only a nub of ice left floating at the top of what is now a glass of water, she decides she is done with shadow and will only deal in melt.

  That night she says goodbye to her shadow girls. They beg her not to end them, but she tells them there is no such thing in history as going back.

  By morning, she has buried her three shadow girls in light and decided that six will be a better year.

  IN HER POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED book Access to the Exit: The Imperceptible Door, the woman the girl never called mother writes:

  The Allegory of the Womb purports a body is only distinct from its surroundings if we cast that body as part of the foreground, not the back. Consider this:

  You may think this is a sphere, but you are looking inside, not out:

  Now you see it is not a sphere, but rather a hole in a wall.

  Just as we think we can tell the foreground from the back, the inside from the out, the mother from the daughter, we think that we tell our stories. But I am here to tell you: our stories tell us.

  HER FINAL EXHIBIT WILL be titled Against Rational Daughterhood. In it, the exhibit floor becomes a mouth and she lines it with giant teeth. But unlike her other projects, this one resists melt. After the teeth maintain their shape for an eerie length of time, and after the viewer is compelled to move closer to the work, the secret is revealed. The teeth are not crafted from ice, but glass.

  IN HER LAST INTERVIEW, when The Writer asks her a question about her father, she will say she does not want to talk about him. When The Writer insists, the Ice Sculptor will respond aggressively and then regret it and ask The Writer not to publish what she said. The Writer will leave the comment out of the publication, but after the Ice Sculptor’s death, The Writer will resurrect her words. Paired with the radical departure from ice featured in her final exhibit, the statement will become the anachronistic last words of the Ice Sculptor. Her proclamation that day and the phrase that resonates in every mind who will come to hear the Ice Sculptor’s story is this:

  My father’s theories suggest possibility is not a branching forth, the opening of a web. My father’s theories suggest possibility is a many-tiered grave in which all of the not is buried.

  When I was young, he took away my arms, but I did not lose my hands; they stay hovering next to where my wrists should be.

  PART II:

  THE REGION OF PERHAPS

  Neverland is more or less an island.

  —Peter

  COME NIGHTS, THE GIRLS would ask, each alone in their separate homes across the contours of the country and the zones that designate time: Tell the story of the ice girl and her father without whisks.

  Risks, their fathers would say, making dinner or folding laundry, doing the dishes or picking up their dolls. Her father without risks, they’d say, and launch the telling of the tale. Once, long ago, there was a man who lived life without risks, they would tell their daughters, and the girls would listen, looking up at their fathers with wide eyes.

  This was when thought was very powerful and there were books. In fact, the ice girl and her father lived in a Language Museum, where people talked together about notions all day. The displays at the Language Museums were called prophecies and those who populated the museum exhibits were called prophessors. One prophessor cared deeply for his thinking. In fact, he enjoyed thinking with others so much that he seldom had time to think with his daughter, and because so many of our methods of growing up are rooted in learning from our parents, she was not told some very important things. And so she was horrified when events began to unfold for which she was unprepared. As a result, she did not speak for an entire year.

  She grew up to carve ice using heat because it reminded her of the way her father treated her. And that, the fathers would say, towering over their daughters, is why fathers and daughters should always be close and transparent.

  The daughters would nod several times and then ask Is dinner ready? or Can I help? or Tuck me in! and the fathers would respond reflexively Yes, No, Sure, with the story still loitering in the back of their heads.

  This was the refrain the men would repeat for their girls before the daughters died or went missing.

  This is the mantra they now repeat together at the meetings of the Fathers of Lost Daughters, or the FOLD:

  Every woman was once a girl,

  and every girl was once a daughter.

  For every woman in the world

  there will always be laughter in slaughter.

  THE FATHERS OF LOST Daughters gather on the top floor of an abandoned umbrella factory in the downtown of a small city. The group is composed of men who meet weekly to mourn. Along with the roomful of fathers, there is always strong coffee and a healthy supply of a tasteless biscuit. A rich store of kerchiefs is hidden in the pockets and palms of the men so as not to invite tears. Despite this, crying often ensues, though the men use their sleeves so as not to dirty the kerchiefs their girls wove for them.

  The men gather regularly to share their narratives or to sit without speaking in a kind of vigil. The group was founded on the theory that when beings gather, grief moves among them, dispersing rather than multiplying, and in this way their mourning is communal.

  Today is the hardest day of the year for the FOLD. They arrive at dawn and will not break their meeting until nightfall. This is done as defense against the devastation that lingers on the borders of the day: the compulsion to join their daughters’ status as lost. They gather to secure their own safety. Today is the day that is called Daughter’s Day.

  The men think of all the things that will not happen to and with their girls: every wound left unkissed, every hand left unheld, every bath the fathers did not nor will ever draw. They travel from all corners of the city, and the paths they take form an obscure constellation that can only be interpreted by a child. The shape of their travel looks something like the thin fingers and palm of a human hand, and they enter the top floor of the umbrella factory at the place where the hand should meet the arm.

  The FOLD consists of the following members: Nero Barber, Silas Butcher, Lars Woodsman, Salvador Smith, Tristram Angler, Octavio Wainwright, Ignatius Miller, and their leader, known only as Peter.

  At night the fathers fall to sleep yearning for youth with tears. In this way, the Fathers of Lost Daughters revert to sons.

  WHEN THE FATHERS RECALL the events that transpired, the stories yoke so that the girls are understood as a single assemblage. This is not a practice overtly instituted, but one that slowly transpired because they did not use their daughters’ names. Eventually the network of daughter-exit was understood less as a long list of lost girls and more as an intricate design before which the men stood in awe. Their stories and their grief, once ambulant and varied, live now in a narrative that hovers and coils around the safe space of the thirty-third floor of the abandoned umbrella factory.

  The ice girl, tell the st
ory of the ice girl, the daughters would ask separately and now, through narrative, together.

  Again? That’s twice this week.

  It is a story that never grows old, the girls would respond, and tug on their father’s hands or shirtsleeves, back pockets or pant legs.

  The ice girl had three maidens that accompanied her always through the form of shadows. They were called Mary, Charlotte, and Virginia. They, too, had fathers who stayed distant. They, too, were artists, but they did not work with ice—they were archivists. They collected the world’s events in their heads and then filtered them through language until art remained. The consumption of this art was called reading.

  Reeding? Like the wood part of an instrument?

  In the sense that there is a kind of reverberation, yes. And in the sense that this all happened on paper, which was made of wood, yes.

  What is paper?

  A thin material like lace, only it could cut you. Eventually it was outlawed because it was too dangerous. It is the tool by which archivists used to make their art.

  How do they make it now?

  They don’t. Archivists are extinct.

  The girls would think on that, the idea of extinction, how it was a kind of end that grows ever greater. Their fathers had told them that extinction is like waiting in a very long line for a ticket that takes you to the back of the line, where you started.