Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  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 him 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.

  JUKEBOXES & COFFINS

  We finally stopped and had a real breakfast in a diner, which had a jukebox. And it was perfect, except there was an old man in the booth in front who was wearing a tie with a picture of Jesus Christ stuck with nails to the cross, and on top of the tie he was wearing a silver chain with another cross hanging but with no nails and no Christ on it. I was nervous because I thought you might say something about Jesus Fucking Christ, which you had discovered made Pa and Ma laugh every time you said it. But luckily you didn’t say anything about that, I think because the man made you a little scared. I was also a bit scared of him and took a picture of him without even looking into the lens, just resting the camera on our table and calculating the focus. He didn’t even notice when the shutter went who-ching because he was talking nonstop to the waiter and to us and to whoever would listen to him. He ordered pancakes and kept on wanting to talk to Pa and Ma about salvation, and then told the two of us jokes, one after the other, horrible jokes about Indians and Mexican people and Asian people and brown people and black people, and basically all people except people like him. I wondered if he didn’t notice that we were not like him. Maybe he was a little blind. He was actually wearing very thick glasses. Or maybe he did notice and that’s why he was telling us all those ugly jokes. When his breakfast came, he finally shut up. Then he cut a huge square of butter, rubbed it on the pancakes using his fork, and asked us where we all were from. Ma completely lied and said we were French and from Paris.

  Back in the car, you made up your absolute best knock-knock joke ever, which Pa didn’t understand, ’cause it was half in Spanish, but Ma did, and so did I ’cause I also understood Spanish:

  Knock-knock!

  Who’s there?

  Paris!

  Paris who?

  Pa-re-ce que va a llover!

  And Ma and I laughed so hard that you wanted another go, and then you told your second-best joke, which was this:

  What did the knock-knock joke say to the other kind of joke?

  And we all said: What?

  And you said: Knock-knock.

  So we said: Who’s there?

  And you said: Knock-knock!

  So we said: Who’s there?

  And again you said: Knock-knock!

  It took us all a minute, but then we got it, and we all laughed, with real laughs, and you smiled out the window looking all proud of yourself and were about to slip your thumb into your mouth but didn’t this time.

  CHECKPOINT

  That day after breakfast, we drove so long without stopping, I thought I would die. But I was glad to leave that town full of cats and that old man with the cross on his tie, so I didn’t complain, not even once. In the car, Ma read the news on her phone and read something aloud to Pa about the lost children arriving safely back in their country, where people in the airport had given them balloons. And Ma sounded angry about them getting balloons, and I didn’t get why. She used to give us balloons, too. We would walk down the street to the store and we would get a balloon each, a real one filled with helium, and she’d write our names across them with a marker. I’d hold on to the thread of my balloon as we walked back home, and I always played a game, though I don’t know if it even counts as a game, which was that I wasn’t holding on to the balloon but rather the balloon was holding me. Maybe it was just a feeling and not really a game. After a few days, no matter what we did to try to save them, our balloons would start to get smaller and would drift around the house by themselves, just like Mama’s mom, who you don’t remember because you were tiny and she only visited us in New York once, and then she died. But before she died, she also used to drift around the house, from room to room, complaining and sighing and moaning but mostly being silent and kind of getting smaller. The balloons we got would drift lower and lower in that same way as she did, closer to the ground, until one day, they were under a chair or in some corner and our names on them were wrinkled up and small.

  We finally stopped to buy food in a city, because that night and possibly the next night, we would sleep in a house in the Burro Mountains that Ma had found on the internet and had rented. The city where we stopped for shopping was called Silver City, which Pa told you was made of real silver except it had been hidden by coats of paint so that enemies would not come and take parts of the city away. You got obsessed with this, and while we walked around the streets, then into a supermarket, and up and down the aisles, you thought you saw hints of that hidden silver everywhere, including in all the canned beans, and a bottle of Windex, and even a box of Froot Loops, which you called frutilupis, the same thing Ma called them, though I suspected you were only pretending to see hints of hidden silver in the frutilupis because you wanted Ma and Pa to buy them for you, which meant you were sometimes smarter than they thought.

  We drove a little farther after that, and when we arrived in the Burro Mountains, it was still daytime, which was good for a change, because when we arrived to rest or sleep in places it was usually sunset or nighttime, which meant we had to be in bed soon, which made me think Pa and Ma always wanted to spend as little time as possible with us. But this time, we arrived in full daytime. Two very old grown-ups, a lady and a man with cowboy hats, showed us into a small and dusty house, made of clay, I think. Then the man and woman showed us the two bedrooms, and the little bathroom between them, and then the space with the kitchen, living room, and dining table. They walked so slow and explained so much, you and I were getting antsy. They gave Pa and Ma the keys, and told us how things worked and what not to do, and showed us where the trail maps were, and the walking sticks for hikes, and asked us if we needed a
nything else or had questions, and luckily Ma said no, so they finally went away.

  Pa and Ma got to pick their bedroom, and we complained that we had to share a bed in ours while they each got their own bed in their room, but they scolded us, and we didn’t complain more. We were happy to not be in a motel for a change, or in a creepy inn or a bed-and-breakfast. We helped them unpack some things, and then they gave us water and snacks, and opened beers and sat out on the porch with a view of the mountain ridge. You and I explored the inside of the house on our own for a while, but it was small, so there was little to explore. We found two flyswatters behind the refrigerator in the kitchen and took them back outside to the porch, where Ma and Pa were. We offered to kill all the flies so they could relax, said we’d only charge a penny per fly, and they accepted. Hunting flies was harder than we thought, there were so many. We’d kill one fly and ten new flies would appear from nowhere. It was like a vintage video game.

  Pa and Ma said they needed a nap, and went inside, and meanwhile you and I collected rocks and pebbles from around the house, being careful when we picked up rocks in case there was a scorpion, wanting to find a scorpion but also not wanting to find one. We put all the rocks and all the pebbles into a bucket we found next to the trash cans at one side of the house, and we spread them on the table. When we’d finished arranging them all on the table, you looked at everything and said that it was like the turtles in the Sargasso Sea that I’d told you about. I asked you why, ’cause I was not understanding you, and you said because, because look at all the turtles floating there, and you were right, the pebbles looked like turtle shells from above.