Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  Though curious and also desperately hungry, they’d dared not touch it. Others like them, after them, perhaps sensed the same dark something in that strange fruit, because days and then weeks passed and the orange remained there, round, untouched, molding green and showing white rings on the outside, fermenting first sweet and then bitter inside, then gradually blackening, shrinking, shriveling, until it disappeared into the gravel during a long midsummer rainstorm.

  The only yard people who didn’t curse, didn’t trick, didn’t ask for anything in return were three young girls with long obsidian braids who carried buckets of powdered magnesium. For free, the three girls offered to tend to the children’s ravaged feet, the heels and balls pulpy and bursting open like boiled tomatoes. The girls sat beside them and reached their cupped hands into metal buckets. They powdered the children’s soles and insteps, and later used tattered cloths or scraps of towels to wrap ripped skin. They used pumice stones to reduce tough calluses, careful not to rub the skin raw, and massaged contracted calf muscles with their small but firm thumbs. They offered to puncture bellying blisters using a sterilized needle. “See the small flame of this match?” one of them said, and then explained that when the flame touched the needle, the needle got clean. And last, the youngest of the bucket-girls, the one with the best eyes—big black almonds—showed the children a set of contorted metal hangers and a pair of large clippers that she pulled from inside her bucket, and with them offered to relieve the deeper, more desperate pain of ingrown or half-hanging toenails.

  Only one boy, boy six, said yes, yes please. He was not one of the younger ones, nor was he the eldest. He had seen the large clippers offered to him and had remembered the lobsters. He remembered his grandfather walking out of the sea on unsteady twiggy legs, carrying the lobsters inside a net mended twice or thrice with double knots and drops of candle wax. The old man would stand by the shore, his back curved forward to balance the weight of the catch, and call out his name. Always he had run to the shore at his grandfather’s call, offered to carry the net for him. And as they made their way from the hard, wet sands nearer to the shore toward the dry, higher dunes, and then crossed the road and boarded the passenger bus, he would peek now and then into the net. He’d observe that death-nest of lobsters crawling over lobsters, speculating how much will we earn, counting how many did we catch, watching the little beasts opening and closing their pincher claws as if they were all uttering sad thoughts to one another in sign language.

  He had never thought very highly of the lobsters they caught—those slow, dumb, but eager and somewhat sexual sea monsters that they would later sell in the food market for ten coins apiece. Yet now he remembered them and missed their smell of salt and rot, their perfectly articulated small bodies inching pointlessly inside the wobbly, concave net. So when the girl showed him the clippers, he raised his hand and waved, and she came and kneeled in front of him and held the clippers to his toes and looked into his eyes and told him don’t worry, though she was worried, and her hands trembled a little. The boy closed his eyes and thought of his grandfather’s bony brown feet, their swollen veins and yellowing toenails. Then, when the metal instrument pierced first hesitantly, then more firmly into his skin, he wailed and cursed and bit his lower lip. The girl felt the resolve of determination layering over her fear as she pierced the skin, and her hands stopped trembling. She deftly clipped and cut the broken toenail, biting her lower lip, too, in concentration or perhaps with empathy. In his mind, the boy cursed her while she cut and twisted, but in the end, he opened his eyes and wanted to thank her, teary and embarrassed, looking up into her steady black eyes. He did not say anything when she said she was all done, and wished him good luck, and told him to always wear socks, but he smiled.

  He searched for her the next morning, when the children finally boarded the gondola and the train departed, but in the sea of faces in the distancing train yard, he recognized no one.

  TOGETHER ALONE

  As I get into bed and curl around my husband’s sweaty back, I can still hear the echoes of these other children, somewhere. I hear the monotonous sound of thousands of lost footsteps, and a dim chorus of voices, weaving in and out of the sentences, swiftly shifting perspectives in the slow, heavy rhythm of the narrative voice, and as I try to fall asleep, I know that this life is mine, and also, at the same time, irremediably lost.

  What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread, sometimes absentmindedly, other times in a kind of rapture, recording it; and now I am reading parts to the boy. And then there’s also the story of the real lost children, some of whom are about to board a plane. There are many other children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers. There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally, there are my own children, one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are now always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes, riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.

  As my husband feels my body close to his, deep in his sleep, he inches away, so I turn the other way and curl up around my pillow. A kind of future self looks at all this in quiet recognition: what I once had. No self-pity, no desire, just a kind of astonishment. And I fall asleep with the same question the boy asked me earlier:

  What happens if children are left alone?

  BEDS

  The question comes back, more as a presentiment than as a question, early the next morning, as we pack to leave and prepare for the drive ahead of us to the airport near Roswell. I notice a urine stain on the children’s bedsheets before we check out of the inn and jump in the car, but I don’t ask the boy or the girl whose it is.

  I wet my bed until I was twelve. And I wet it, especially, between the ages of ten and twelve. When I turned ten years old, exactly the boy’s age, my mother left us—my father, my sister, and me—to join a guerrilla movement in southern Mexico. The three of us moved to Nigeria for my father’s work. For many years after that day, I hated politics, and anything to do with politics, because politics had taken my mother away. For years, I was angry with her, incapable of understanding why politics and other people and their movements were more important to her than us, her family. A couple of years later, right after my twelfth birthday, I saw her again. As a birthday present, or maybe just as a general reunification present, she got my sister and me plane tickets to travel to Greece with her, which I guess was kind of halfway between Mexico and Lagos. Our father helped us pack our bags and drove us to the airport: our mother would be waiting for us in the Athens airport. On our first day in Athens, she told us she wanted to take us to the Apollo Temple at the Oracle of Delphi. So we jumped on a local bus. As we found our seats, complaining about the lack of leg space and the heat, she told us that in Greek, the word for being taken somewhere by a bus was μεταφέρω, or metaphor, so we should feel lucky about being metaphored to our next destination. My sister was more satisfied than I was with the explanation that we had been given.

  We traveled many hours toward the oracle. All the while, on the way there, our mother spoke to us about the strength and power of the Pythonesses, the priestesses of the temple, who in ancient times served as the vehicles of the oracle by allowing themselves to be filled with ενθουσιασμός, or enthusiasm. I remember the definition my mother gave of the term, breaking it down into its parts. Making a kind of cutting gesture with her hands, one palm as board and the other as knife, she said: “En, theos, seismos,” which means something like “in, god, earthquake.” I think I still remember it because I didn’t know, till that day, that words could be cut up into parts like that to be understood better. Then she explained that enthusiasm was a kind of inner earthquake produced by allowing oneself to be possessed by something larger and more powerful, like a god or goddess.

 
; As we rode on toward the oracle, my mother spoke to us about her decision, some years earlier, to leave us, her family, and join a political movement. My sister asked her difficult, sometimes aggressive questions. Although she loved my father, my mother explained, she had been following him around all her life, always putting her own projects aside. And after years of doing that, she had finally felt an inner “earthquake,” something that stirred her deeply and maybe even shattered a part of her, and had decided to go out and find a way to fix all the brokenness. Perhaps not fix it, but at least understand it. The bus wound up and down the mountain road toward Delphi, and my mother tried to answer our questions as best she could. I asked her about where she had slept all that time she had been gone, what she had eaten, if she’d felt afraid, and if so, afraid of what. I wanted to ask her if she’d had lovers and boyfriends, but I didn’t. I listened to her speak, looking up at her face and studying the many lines of her worried forehead, her straight nose and her big ears, from which hung long earrings, dangling back and forth with the rocking movements of the bus. At times, as the bus climbed on, I closed my eyes and rested my cheek against her bare arm, smelling it, trying to take in all the old scents of her skin.

  When we finally got to Delphi and got off the bus, the access to the temple and oracle was already closed. We had arrived too late. That often happened if you traveled with my mother: you arrived too late. She suggested we break in, climb over the fence and see the oracle anyway. My sister and I obeyed, trying to pretend that we enjoyed this kind of adventure. We all climbed over the fence, and started walking through a forest. We didn’t get too far. Soon, we started hearing a terrifying dog-bark, and then more barks, all getting closer to us, from multiple dogs, surely a large pack, savage. So we ran back to the fence, climbed back out, and waited on the side of the road for the night bus that would take us back to Athens. Behind us, on the other side of the fence, five or six mean-looking dogs barked at us still.

  That encounter with our mother, although it was a failed adventure, planted a seed in me that would later, as I grew older, flower into a deeper understanding of things. Of things both personal and political and how the two got confused; and about my mother in particular and about women more generally. Or perhaps the right word is not understanding, which has a passive connotation. Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness. I hope my children, too, will forgive me, forgive us, one day, for the choices we make.

  TRIANGLES

  On the radio, we listen to a longer report on child refugees. We had decided not to listen to any more news about this, not when our children were awake. But the recent developments, and in particular the story about the children to be deported near Roswell, now thrust me back into the urgency of the world outside our car.

  They are interviewing an immigration lawyer, who is trying to make a case to defend the children who will be sent back to Tegucigalpa later that day. I listen for any hint, any bit of information on exactly when and where the deportation will take place.

  They don’t give any details, but I use the back of a receipt to take down the lawyer’s name, a name they’ve repeated a few times already. Then I search for her on the internet while she explains that if the children are Mexican, they are immediately removed, deported back. But if they are Central American, she says, immigration law has it that they have a right to a hearing. So this deportation is illegal, she concludes. I find the lawyer’s name and email address on a page of a small nonprofit organization based in Texas, and I email her. Polite introduction, a few sentences about why I’m contacting her, and my only urgent question:

  Do you know where the children will be deported from?

  Prompted by the interviewer, she continues to explain that once they reach the border, the children know their best bet is to be caught by Border Patrol officers. Crossing the desert beyond that border, alone, is too dangerous. But some of them do. My mind drifts to the lost children in the little red book, all walking alone, lost now and forgotten in history. The interviewer explains that the children also know that if they do not surrender themselves to the law, their fate will be to remain undocumented, like most of their parents or adult relatives already in the United States. The children who will be deported today have been in a detention facility near Artesia, New Mexico.

  I look for airports in or near Artesia, and find one, and note down the location. Artesia is not far from Roswell, I tell my husband, so that must be it. If the lawyer doesn’t reply to this email, our best bet will be to drive to that airport. We’ll just have to trust, and perhaps we’ll get lucky.

  SALIVA

  As we drive forward, my husband tells the children a long, winding story that perturbs me and fascinates them, about a woman called Saliva. She was a medicine woman, a friend of Geronimo’s, who cured people by spitting on them. Saliva, he said, removed their bad luck, illness, and melancholy with her powerful, salty drops of spit.

  SHUFFLE

  I don’t know, when the boy suggests a poll as we take a left on Route 285, south out of Roswell, if my favorite song on this trip is Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” which the boy knows by heart and loves, or Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” which the girl always wants to listen to again and again, or a song quite outside my generational listening habits, called “People II: The Reckoning,” by a band from Phoenix called Andrew Jackson Jihad—a name we hope is somehow ironic, though we’re not sure in which way it could or should be ironic.

  We haven’t discussed the lyrics of the songs in detail yet, the way the four of us usually do, but I think they’re songs about us four, and about everyone else in this big country who doesn’t own a gun, cannot vote, and doesn’t fear God—or who at least fears God less than he or she fears other people.

  I like a line in Anderson’s song, about the airplanes coming—“They’re American planes, made in America,” she says in a robotic voice. The planes always getting closer, always hovering in our consciousness, always haunting people who have to grow up to fear America.

  In Lamar’s song, I like catching up to the line “Our pride was low, lookin’ at the world like, ‘Where do we go?’ ”

  I always sing it loud, looking out the window of the car. The boy, from the backseat, sings the rest of the stanza even louder.

  And finally, I like a line in “People II” that I maybe don’t fully understand, about being in “firefly mode.” Now we listen to the song, and I ask the children what they make of it:

  What do you think “firefly mode” means?

  It means on and off, on and off, says the girl.

  She’s right, I think. It’s a song about switching oneself on and off from one’s own life.

  For the next twenty minutes or so, we’re all silent inside the car, listening to the songs that shuffle and play, looking out our windows at a landscape scarred by decades or maybe centuries of systematic agricultural aggression: fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides, where meager fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields corseted into a circumscription of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and fields turned into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and enormous windmills. We’re driving across a strip of land dotted with cylinders when the “firefly mode” song comes up again. The boy suddenly clears his throat, and says he needs to say something:

  I’m sorry to break it to you, but the lyrics in that song you keep playing and singing say “fight-or-flight mode” and not “firefly mode.”

  He sounds like a teenager, talking to us like this, and I’m not ready to accept his correction, though I know he’s probably right. Even though he’s still a child, he’s so much more culturally attuned to this country, and to the times. I dismiss his opini
on, unfairly asking him for proof—which he of course cannot give, because I won’t lend him my phone to search for lyrics right now. But from this moment on, as the song is played on repeat on our car speakers, he makes a point of singing that part of the chorus especially loud: “fight-or-flight mode.” His sister and father, I notice, pause in silence and don’t sing that part of the song, at least in the next few rounds. I, in turn, make a point of singing the words “firefly mode” especially loud and clear. The boy and I have always met as equals on this sort of battlefield, notwithstanding our age gap. Maybe it’s because our temperaments are so alike, even though we do not share blood-bonds. Both of us will defend our stances to the end, no matter how senseless they eventually reveal themselves to be.

  He shouts:

  Fight-or-flight mode!

  Just as I sing at the top of my voice:

  Firefly mode!

  Inside the car, I’ve grown accustomed to our smell, to the intermittent silence between us, to instant coffee. But never to the road signs planted like omens along the road: Adultery Is a Sin; Sponsor a Highway; Gun Show This Weekend! Never habituated, either, to seeing the cemeteries of plastic toys abandoned on front lawns on reservations, or the melancholy adults waiting in line, like children, to refill their large plastic cups with bright-colored sodas in gas station shops, or those resilient water towers in small towns, which remind me of the equipment we used in school during science lab classes. All of that leaves me in firefly mode.

  FEET

  Mama! the girl calls out from the backseat.

  She says she has a splinter in her foot. She cries and cries and cries, as if she’d lost a limb or broken something.