Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  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, farther 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.

  At night, our children’s fear is the shadow that a moving curtain projects onto the wall, the deeper dark in the corner of the room, the sounds of wood expanding and water pipes shifting.

  But it is not that, even. It is much larger than that. It is behind all that. Too far out of their grasp to be faced, let alone dominated. Our children’s fear is a kind of entropy, forever destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium of the adult world.

  Long straight roads, empty and monotonous, led us from Oklahoma through the northern tip of Texas and brought us to a stretch of concrete right off Route 66. The town is Tucumcari, New Mexico, and here we found an inn that had once been a bathhouse. I am not sure if that means it was a bordello. The gas station owner described paradise when we asked him about nearby lodging: simple elegance, rocking chairs, family-friendly. What we found, instead, when we parked the car, was a cemetery of bathtubs and broken chairs on a sloped lawn leading up to a porch with webs of old hammocks hanging over empty flowerpots. We found cats in overwhelming numbers. The inn looked like a bad omen. The children were right to point out that the space was:

  Creepy.

  Dirty.

  Saying:

  Let’s go back home.

  What about ghosts, Ma?

  Why is there a scarecrow lady in the hallway, in a gown, on a rocking chair?

  What are the hats and masks and crosses in the rooms for?

  Motel nights are getting longer and more full of past and future ghosts, full of night fears. We have two adjacent rooms in this inn, and my husband has gone to sleep, early, in ours. As I tuck the children into bed, they ask:

  What’s gonna happen, Mama?

  Nothing will happen, I reassure them.

  But they insist. They cannot sleep. They’re scared.

  Can I chupe my thumb, Mama?

  Can you read us a story, please, before we go to sleep?

  We’ve read The Book with No Pictures too many times, and it doesn’t make us laugh anymore, only the girl. So we pick the illustrated edition of Lord of the Flies. The girl falls asleep almost immediately, sucking at her thumb. The boy listens attentively, his eyes wide and keen, and not at all prepared for the dreamless sleep that dark nights should confer on children. Some lines we read out loud linger in the room like shadows:

  “Maybe there is a beast…maybe it’s only us.”

  “We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”

  “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

  “What I mean is…maybe it’s only us…”

  My husband once told me that when the boy was small, still a baby, right after his biological mother had died, he would wake up almost every night from nightmares, crying inside the rickety crib where he slept. My husband would walk over to the boy, pick him up, and, holding him in his arms, sing him some lines from a poem he liked, by Galway Kinnell:

  When I sleepwalk

  into your room, and pick you up,

  and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me

  hard,

  as if clinging could save us. I think

  you think

  I will never die, I think I exude

  to you the permanence of smoke or stars,

  even as

  my broken arms heal themselves around you.

  The boy clings to my arm now as I try to turn the page of the book. It’s like a bedtime tug-of-war, except that the ropes are invisible, solely emotional. Before I can continue reading, he asks:

  But what if also we were left alone, without you and Papa?

  That would never happen.

  But it happened to Manuela’s two girls, he says. And now they’re lost, right?

  How do you know about that? I ask him, perhaps naively.

  I heard you talking to Pa about it. I wasn’t spying. You always talk about it.

  Well, that won’t happen to you.

  But just suppose.

  Suppose what?

  Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside Lord of the Flies. What would happen then?

  I wonder what my sister, who understands books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She’s so good at explaining books
and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she’d say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children—books like Peter Pan, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that short story by García Márquez, “Light Is Like Water,” and of course Lord of the Flies—are nothing but desperate attempts by adults to come to terms with childhood. That although they seem to be stories about children’s worlds—worlds without adults—they are in fact stories about an adult’s world when there are children in it, about the way that children’s imaginations destabilize our adult sense of reality and force us to question the very grounds of that reality. The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected from other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.

  The boy repeats the question, demanding an explanation of one sort or another:

  So what would happen, Ma?

  I know I have to reply from my vantage point as mother, my role as a voice that serves as a scaffolding to his world, which is still unfinished, still under construction. He doesn’t need to hear about my own fears or philosophical doubts. What he needs is to explore this frightening possibility—alone, no parents—in order to make it less frightening. And I need to help him enact it in his head so that he can maybe find the imaginary solution to his imaginary problem and feel a little more in control of whatever is frightening him.

  Well, that’s a good question, because that’s exactly what this book is about.

  What do you mean? Why? What’s it about?