Lost Children Archive

PRONOUNS

It was decided. We would drive to the southeastern tip of Arizona, where he would stay, or rather, where they would stay, for an undetermined amount of time, but where she and I would probably not stay. She and I would go all the way there with them, but we’d probably return to the city at the end of the summer. I would finish the sound documentary about refugee children and would then need to find a job. She would have to go back to school. I couldn’t simply relocate to Arizona, leave everything behind, unless I found a way and a reason to follow my husband in this new venture of his without having to abandon my own plans and projects. Though it wasn’t even clear to me if, beyond this summer road trip together, he indeed wanted to be followed.

I, he, we, they, she: pronouns shifted place constantly in our confused syntax while we negotiated the terms of the relocation. We started speaking more hesitantly about everything, even the trivial things, and also started speaking more softly, like we were tiptoeing with our tongues, careful to the point of paranoia not to slip and fall on the suddenly very unstable grounds of our family space. There is a poem by Anne Carson called “Reticent Sonnet” that doesn’t help solve this at all. It’s about how pronouns are “part of a system that argues with shadow,” though perhaps she means that we—people, and not pronouns—are “part of a system that argues with shadow.” But then again, we is a pronoun, so maybe she means both things at the same time.

In any case, the question of how the final placement of all our pronouns would ultimately rearrange our lives became our center of gravity. It became the dark, silent core around which all our thoughts and questions circulated.

What will we do after we reach Apacheria? the boy would ask repeatedly in the weeks that followed.

Yes, what next? I’d ask my husband later, when we crawled into bed.

Then we’ll see what next, he would say.

Apacheria, of course, does not really exist anymore. But it existed in my husband’s mind and in nineteenth-century history books, and, more and more, it came to exist in the children’s imaginations:

Will there be horses there?

Will there be arrows?

Will we have beds, toys, food, enemies?

When will we leave?

We told them we’d leave on the day after the boy’s tenth birthday.

COSMOLOGIES

During our last days in the city, before we left for Apacheria, our apartment filled with ants. Big black ants in the shape of eights, with a suicidal drive for sugar. If we left a glass of something sweet on a kitchen counter, the following morning we’d find twenty ant corpses floating in it, drowned in their own hedonism. They explored kitchen counters, cabinets, the sink—all normal haunts for ants. But then they moved on to our beds, our drawers, and eventually our elbows and necks. One night I became convinced that if I sat silent long enough, I could hear them marching inside the walls, taking over the apartment’s invisible veins. We tried sealing every crevice in the molding between the walls and floors with tape, but it peeled off after a few hours. The boy came up with the much better idea of using Play-Doh to seal cracks, and for a while it did the trick, but the ants soon found a way in again.

One morning, the girl left a dirty pair of panties on the bathroom floor after her shower, and when I picked them up a few hours later to put them in the laundry basket, I noticed that they were alive with ants. It seemed like a deep violation of some sort, a bad sign. The boy found the phenomenon fascinating; and the girl, hilarious. Over dinner that night, the children reported the incident to their father. I wanted to say that I thought those ominous ants foreshadowed something. But how could I explain that to the family, to anyone, without sounding crazy? So I shared only half my thought:

A catastrophe.

My husband listened to the children’s report, nodding, smiling, and then told them that ants, in Hopi mythology, are considered sacred. Ant-people were gods who saved those in the upperworld from catastrophes by taking them down to the underworld, where they could live in peace and freedom until the danger had passed and they were able to return to the upperworld.

Which catastrophe are the ants here to take us away from? the boy asked him.

I thought it was a good question, involuntarily poisonous, perhaps. My husband cleared his throat but didn’t answer. Then the girl asked:

What’s a catastrophe?

Something very bad, the boy said.

She sat silent for a moment, looking at her plate in deep concentration and pressing the back of her fork against her rice to flatten it down. Then, looking up at us again, very serious, she delivered a strange agglutination of concepts, as if the spirit of some nineteenth-century German hermeneutist had possessed her:

The ants, they come marching in, eat my upperworldpanties, they take us where there’s no catastrophes, just good trophies and tooshiefreedom.

Children’s words, in some ways, are the escape route out of family dramas, taking us to their strangely luminous underworld, safe from our middle-class catastrophes. From that day on, I think, we started allowing our children’s voices to take over our silence. We allowed their imaginations to alchemize all our worry and sadness about the future into some sort of redeeming delirium: tooshiefreedom!

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?

PASSING STRANGERS

There’s a part in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that used to be a kind of ur-text or manifesto for my husband and me when we were still a new couple, still imagining and working out our future together. It begins with the lines:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you, and slept with you …

The poem explained, or so we thought, why we had decided to devote our lives, alone but together, to recording the sounds of strangers. Sampling their voices, their laughter, their breathing, despite the fleetingness of the encounters we had with each of them, or perhaps on account of that very fleetingness, we were offered an intimacy like no other: an entire life lived parallel, in a flash, with that stranger. And recording sound, we thought, as opposed to filming image, gave us access to a deeper, always invisible layer of the human soul, in the same way that a bathymetrist has to take a sounding of a body of water in order to properly map the depth of an ocean or a lake.

That poem ends with a vow to the passing stranger: “I am to see to it that I do not lose you.” It’s a promise of permanence: this fleeting moment of intimacy shared between you and me, two strangers, will leave a trace, will reverberate forever. And in many ways, I think we kept that promise with some of the strangers we encountered and recorded over the years—their voices and stories always coming back to haunt us. But we never imagined that that poem, and especially that last line, was also a sort of cautionary tale for us. Committed as we were to collecting intimacies with strangers, devoted as we were to listening so attentively to their voices, we never suspected that silence would slowly grow between the two of us. We never imagined that one day, we would somehow have lost each other amid the crowd.

SAMPLES & SILENCE

After all that time sampling and recording, we had an archive full of fragments of strangers’ lives but had close to nothing of our own lives together. Now that we were leaving an entire world behind, a world we had built, there was almost no record, no soundscape of the four of us, changing over time: the radio in the early morning, and the last reverberations of our dreams merging with news of crises, discoveries, epidemics, inclement weather; the coffee grinder, hard beans becoming powder; the stove sparking and bursting into a ring of fire; the gurgling of the coffeemaker; the long showers the boy took and his father’s insistent “Come on, hurry up, we’ll be late”; the paused, almost philosophical conversations between us and the two children on their way to school; the slow, careful steps the boy takes down empty school corridors, cutting class; the metallic screech of subways halting to a stop, and the mostly silent ride on train cars during our daily commutes for field recordings, inside the grid or out into the boroughs; the hum of crowded streets where my husband fished for stray sounds with his boom while I approached strangers with my handheld recorder, and the stream of all their voices, their accents and stories; the strike of a match that lit my husband’s cigarette and the long inward hiss of his first inhalation, pulling in smoke through clenched teeth, then the slow relief of an exhalation; the strange white noise that large groups of children produce in playgrounds—a vortex of hysteria, swarming cries—and the perfectly distinct voices of our two children among them; the eerie silence that settles over parks after dusk; the tousle and crackle of dry leaves heaped in mounds at the park where the girl digs for worms, for treasures, for whatever can be found, which is always nothing, because all there is under them are cigarette butts, fossilized dog turds, and miniature ziplock stash bags, hopefully empty; the friction of our coats against the northern gusts come winter; the effort of our feet pedaling rusty bicycles along the river path come spring; the heavy pant of our chests taking in the toxic vapors of the river’s gray waters, and the silent, shitty vibes of both the overeager joggers and the stray Canada geese that always overstay their migratory sojourns; the cannonade of instructions and reprimands fired by professional cyclists, all of them geared up, male, and middle-aged: “Move over!” and “Look left!”; and in response to that, our voices either softly mumbling, “Sorry sir, sorry sir,” or shouting loud heartfelt insults back at them—always abridged or drowned, alas, by the gushing winds; and finally, all the gaps of sound during our moments spent alone, collecting pieces of the world the way we each know how to gather it best. The sound of everything and everyone that once surrounded us, the noise we contributed, and the silence we leave behind.

FUTURE

And then the boy turned ten. We took him out to a good restaurant, gave him his presents (no toys). I got him a Polaroid camera and several boxes of film, both black-and-white and color. His father got him a kit for the trip: a Swiss Army knife, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, and a small compass. At his request, we also agreed to deviate from the planned itinerary and spend the next day, the first of our trip, at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. He’d done a school project about Calypso, the five-hundred-pound turtle with a missing front flipper that lives there, and had been obsessed with her ever since.

That night, after dinner, my husband packed his suitcase, I packed mine, and we let the boy and the girl pack theirs. Once the children were asleep, I repacked for them. They’d chosen the most unlikely combinations of things. Their suitcases were portable Duchampian disasters: miniature clothes tailored for a family of miniature bears, a broken light saber, a lone Rollerblade wheel, ziplock bags full of tiny plastic everything. I replaced all of it with real pants, real skirts, real underwear, real everything. My husband and I lined up the four suitcases by the door, plus our seven boxes and our recording materials.

When we’d finished, we sat in our living room and shared a cigarette in silence. I had found a young couple to whom to sublet the apartment for the next month at least, and the place already felt more theirs than ours. In my tired mind, all I could think of was the list of all the relocations that had preceded this one: the four of us moving in together four years ago; my husband’s many relocations before that one, as well as my own; the relocations of the hundreds of people and families we had interviewed and recorded for the city soundscape project; those of the refugee children whose story I now was going to try to document; and those of the last Chiricahua Apache peoples, whose ghosts my husband would soon start chasing after. Everyone leaves, if they need to, if they can, or if they have to.

And finally, the next day, after breakfast, we washed the last dishes and left.

BOX I

§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ × 5″)

“On Collecting”

“On Archiving”

“On Inventorying”

“On Cataloguing”

§ TEN BOOKS

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, Susan Sontag

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Notebooks and Journals, 1964–1980, Susan Sontag

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje

Relocated: Twenty Sculptures by Isamu Noguchi from Japan, Isamu Noguchi, Thomas Messer, and Bonnie Rychlak

Radio Benjamin, Walter Benjamin

Journal des faux-monnayeurs, André Gide

A Brief History of Portable Literature, Enrique Vila-Matas

Perpetual Inventory, Rosalind E. Krauss

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

§ FOLDER (FACSIMILE COPIES, CLIPPINGS, SCRAPS)

The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

Whale sounds charts (in Schafer)

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings World of Sound Catalog #1

“Uncanny Soundscapes: Towards an Inoperative Acoustic Community,” Iain Foreman, Organised Sound 16 (03)

“Voices from the Past: Compositional Approaches to Using Recorded Speech,” Cathy Lane, Organised Sound 11 (01)

ROUTES & ROOTS

Buscar las raíces no es más que una forma subterránea de andarse por las ramas.

(Searching for roots is nothing but a subterranean way of beating around the bush.)

—JOSÉ BERGAMÍN

When you get lost on the road

You run into the dead.

—FRANK STANFORD

SARGASSO SEA

It’s past noon when we finally get to the Baltimore aquarium. The boy escorts us through the crowds and takes us straight to the main pool, where the giant turtle is. He makes us stand there, observing that sad, beautiful animal paddling cyclically around her waterspace, looking like the soul of a pregnant woman—haunted, inadequate, trapped in time. After a few minutes, the girl notices the missing flipper:

Where’s her other arm? she asks her brother, horrified.

These turtles only need one flipper, so they evolved to having only one, and that’s called Darwinism, he states.

We’re not sure if his answer is a sign of sudden maturity that’s meant to protect his sister from the truth or a mismanagement of evolutionary theory. Probably the latter. We let it pass. The wall text, which all of us except the girl can read, explains that the turtle lost the flipper in the Long Island Sound, where she was rescued eleven years ago.

Eleven: my age plus one! the boy says, bursting into a flame of enthusiasm, which he normally represses.

Standing there, watching the enormous turtle, it’s difficult not to think of her as a metaphor for something. But before I can figure out for what, exactly, the boy starts lecturing us. Turtles like Calypso, he explains, are born on the East Coast and immediately swim out into the Atlantic, all alone. They sometimes take up to a decade to return to coastal waters. The hatchlings start their journey in the east and are then carried by the warm currents of the Gulf Stream into the deep. They eventually reach the Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.

I’ve heard that word before, Sargasso, and never knew what it meant. There’s a line of an Ezra Pound poem I’ve never quite understood or remembered the title of: “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.” It leaps back to me now, while the boy continues to talk about this turtle and her journey in the North Atlantic seas. Was Pound thinking barren? Was he thinking waste? Or is the image one of ships cutting through centuries of rubbish? Or is it just about human minds trapped in futile cycles of thought, unable to ever free themselves from destructive patterns?

Before we leave the aquarium, the boy wants to take his first Polaroid picture. He makes his father and me stand in front of the main pool, our backs to the turtle. He holds his new camera steady. The girl stands next to him—she, holding an invisible camera—and as we freeze, upright, and smile awkwardly for them, they both look at us as if we were their children and they the parents:

Say cheese.

So we grin and say:

Cheese.

Cheese.

But the boy’s picture comes out entirely creamy white, as if he’d documented our future instead of the present. Or maybe his picture is a document not of our physical bodies but of our minds, wandering, oaring, lost in the almost motionless gyre—asking why, thinking where, saying what next?

MAPS

If we mapped our lives back in the city, if we drew a map of the daily circuits and routines the four of us left behind, it would look nothing like the route map we will now follow across this vast country. Our daily lives back in the city traced lines that branched outward—school, work, errands, appointments, meetings, bookstore, corner deli, notary public, doctor’s office—but always those lines circled around, brought back and reunited in a single point at the end of day. That point was the apartment where we had lived together for four years. It was a small but luminous space where we had become a family. It was the center of gravity we had now, suddenly, lost.

Inside the car, although we all sit at arm’s length from one another, we are four unconnected dots—each in our seat, with our private thoughts, each dealing silently with our varying moods and unspoken fears. Sunk in the passenger seat, I study the map with the tip of a pencil. Highways and roads vein the enormous piece of paper, folded several times (it’s a map of the entire country, too big to be fully unfolded inside the car). I follow long lines, red or yellow or black, to beautiful names like Memphis, to names unseemly—Truth or Consequences, Shakespeare—to old names now resignified by new mythologies: Arizona, Apache, Cochise Stronghold. And when I glance up from my map, I see the long, straight line of the highway thrusting us forward into an uncertain future.

ACOUSTEMOLOGY

Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid upon it. For us, as a family, the sound of the radio has always charted the threefold transition from sleep, where we were each alone, to our tight togetherness in the early morning, to the wide world outside our home. We know the sound of the radio better than anything. It was the first thing we heard every morning in our apartment in New York, when my husband got out of bed and turned it on. We all heard the sound of it, bouncing off somewhere deep in our pillows and in our minds, and walked slowly from our beds into the kitchen. The morning then filled with opinions, urgency, facts, the smell of coffee beans, and we were all sitting at the table, saying:

Pass the milk.

Here’s the salt.

Thank you.

Did you hear what they just said?

Terrible news.

Now, inside the car, when we drive through more populated areas, we scan for a radio signal and tune in. Whenever I can find news about the situation at the border, I raise the volume and we all listen: hundreds of children arriving alone, every day, thousands every week. The broadcasters are calling it an immigration crisis. A mass influx of children, they call it, a sudden surge. They are undocumented, they are illegals, they are aliens, some say. They are refugees, legally entitled to protection, others argue. This law says that they should be protected; this other amendment says that they should not. Congress is divided, public opinion is divided, the press is thriving on a surplus of controversy, nonprofits are working overtime. Everyone has an opinion on the issue; no one agrees on anything.

PRESENTIMENT, THAT LONG SHADOW

We agree to drive only until dusk that day, and the days that will follow. Never more than that. The children become difficult as soon as the light wanes. They sense the end of daytime, and the presentiment of longer shadows falling on the world shifts their mood, eclipses their softer daylight personalities. The boy, usually so mild in temperament, becomes mercurial and irritable; the girl, always full of enthusiasm and vitality, becomes demanding and a little melancholic.

JUKEBOXES & COFFINS

The town is called Front Royal, in Virginia. The sun is setting, and white supremacist something is playing full blast in the gas station where we stop to fill the tank. The cashier crosses herself quickly and quietly, avoiding eye contact, when our total comes to $66.60. We had planned to find a restaurant or a diner, but after this, back in the car, we decide we’d rather pass—unnoticed. Less than a mile from the gas station, we find a Motel 6 and pull into the parking lot. Checkout is prepaid, there’s coffee in the reception area twenty-four hours a day, and a long, clinical corridor leads to our room. We fetch a few basics from the trunk of the car. When we open the door, we find a room flooded with the kind of light that makes even soulless spaces like this one feel like a lovely childhood memory: flower-stamped bedsheets tucked tight under the mattress, dust particles suspended in a beam of sunlight that comes in through slightly parted green velvet curtains.

The children occupy the space immediately, jump between the two beds, turn the television on, turn it off, drink water from the tap. For dinner, sitting on the edges of our beds, we eat dry cereal from the box, and it tastes good. When we’re done, the children want to take a bath, so I fill the tub halfway for them, and then step outside the room to join my husband, our door left ajar in case one of the kids calls us in. They always need help with all the little bathroom routines. At least as far as it concerns bathroom habits, parenthood seems at times like teaching an extinct, complicated religion. There are more rituals than rationales behind them, more faith than reasons: unscrew the lid off the toothpaste tube like this, squeeze it like that; unroll only this amount of toilet paper, then either fold it this way or scrunch it up like this to wipe; squirt the shampoo into your hand first, not directly on your head; pull the plug to let the water drain only once you’re outside the bathtub.

My husband has taken out his recording gear, and is sitting by the door of our room, holding up his boom. I sit next to him quietly, not wanting my presence to modify whatever he’s trying to sample. We sit there, cross-legged on the cement floor, resting our backs against the wall. We open beer cans and roll cigarettes. In the room next door, a dog barks relentlessly. From another room, three or four doors down, a man and his teenage daughter appear. He is slow and large; she is toothpick-legged, dressed only in a swimsuit and an unzipped jacket. They walk to a pickup parked in front of their door and step up. When the motor roars, the dog stops barking, then resumes more anxiously. I sip my beer, following the pickup as it drives away. The image of those two strangers—father, daughter, no mother—getting into a pickup and driving together to a possible swimming pool for night practice in some town nearby reminds me of something Jack Kerouac said about Americans: After seeing them, “you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” Though maybe Kerouac had said it of Robert Frank’s pictures in his book The Americans, and not of Americans in general. My husband records a few more minutes of the dog barking, until, summoned by the children—in urgent need of help with the toothpaste and towels—we step back inside.