Lost Children Archive

CHECKPOINT

I know I won’t be able to sleep, so when the children are finally tucked into bed, I go outside again, walk down the long corridor to our car, and open the trunk. I stand in front of our portable mess, studying the contents of the trunk as if reading an index, trying to decide which page to go to.

Well stacked on the left side of the trunk are our boxes, five of them, with our archive—though it’s optimistic to call our collected mess an archive—plus the two empty boxes for the children’s future archive. I peek inside Boxes I and II, both my husband’s. Some of the books in them are about documenting or about keeping and consulting archives during any documentary process; others are photography books. In Box II, I find Sally Mann’s Immediate Family. Sitting down on the curbside, I flip through it. I’ve always liked the way she sees children and what she chooses to see as childhood: vomit, bruises, nakedness, wet beds, defiant gazes, confusion, innocence, untamed wildness. I also like the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant. She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.

It comes to me that maybe, by shuffling around in my husband’s boxes like this, once in a while, when he’s not looking, and by trying to listen to all the sounds trapped in his archive, I might find a way into the exact story I need to document, the exact form it needs. I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you’ve finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface.

I search inside my husband’s Box III, which at first glance seems like an all-male compendium of “going a journey,” conquering and colonizing: Heart of Darkness, The Cantos, The Waste Land, Lord of the Flies, On the Road, 2666, the Bible. Among these I find a small white book—the galleys of a novel by Nathalie Léger called Untitled for Barbara Loden. It looks a little out of place there, squeezed and silent, so I take it out and head back to the room.

ARCHIVE

In their beds, they all sound warm and vulnerable, like a pack of sleeping wolves. I can recognize each one by the way they breathe, asleep: my husband next to me, and the two children next to each other in the contiguous double bed. The easiest to make out is the girl, who almost purrs as she sucks arrhythmically at her thumb.

I lie in bed, listening to them. The room is dark, and the light from the parking lot frames the curtains in a whiskey orange. No cars pass on the highway. If I close my eyes, disquieting visions and thoughts churn inside my eye sockets and spill over into my mind. I keep my eyes open and try to imagine the eyes of my sleeping tribe. The boy’s eyes are hazel brown, usually dreamy and soft, but can suddenly ignite with joy or rage and blaze, like the meteoric eyes of souls too large and fierce to go gentle—“gentle into that good night.” The girl’s eyes are black and enormous. Come tears, and a red ring appears instantly around their edges. They are completely transparent in their sudden mood shifts. I think when I was a child, my eyes were like hers. My adult eyes are probably more constant, unyielding, and more ambivalent in their small shifts. My husband’s eyes are gray, slanted, and often troubled. When he drives, he looks into the line of the highway like he’s reading a difficult book, and furrows his brows. He has the same look in his eyes when he’s recording. I don’t know what my husband sees when he studies my eyes; he doesn’t look very often these days.

I turn on my bedside lamp and stay up late, reading the novel by Nathalie Léger, underlining parts of sentences:

“violence, yes, but the acceptable face of violence, the kind of banal cruelty enacted within the family”

“the hum of ordinary life”

“the story of a woman who has lost something important but does not know exactly what”

“a woman on the run or in hiding, concealing her pain and her refusal, putting on an act in order to break free”

I’m reading the same book in bed when the boy wakes up before sunrise the next morning. His sister and father are still asleep. I have hardly slept all night. He makes an effort to seem like he’s been awake for a long time, or like he’d never fallen asleep and we’d been having an intermittent conversation all the while. Wrenching himself up, in a loud, clear voice, he asks what I’m reading.

A French book, I whisper.

What’s it about?

Nothing, really. It’s about a woman who’s looking for something.

Looking for what?

I don’t know yet; she doesn’t know yet.

Are they all like that?

What do you mean?

The French books you read, are they all like that?

Like what?

Like that one, white and small, with no pictures on the cover.

GPS

This morning we’ll drive across the Shenandoah Valley, a place I don’t know but had just seen last night—all partial slivers and borrowed memories—through Sally Mann’s photographs taken in that same valley.

To appease our children, and fill the winding hours as we make our way up the mountain roads, my husband tells stories about the old American southwest. He tells them about the strategies Chief Cochise used to hide from his enemies in the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains, and how, even after he died, he came back to haunt them. People said that, even today, he could be spotted around the Dos Cabezas Peaks. The children listen most attentively when their father tells them about the life of Geronimo. When he speaks about Geronimo, his words perhaps bring time closer to us, containing it inside the car instead of letting it stretch out beyond us like an unattainable goal. He has their full attention, and I listen, too: Geronimo was the last man in the Americas to surrender to the white-eyes. He became a medicine man. He was Mexican by nationality but hated Mexicans, whom Apaches called Nakaiye, “those who come and go.” Mexican soldiers had killed his three children, his mother, and his wife. He never learned English. He acted as an interpreter between Apache and Spanish for Chief Cochise. Geronimo was a sort of Saint Jerome, my husband says.

Why Saint Jerome? I ask.

He adjusts his hat and begins to explain something, in professorial detail, about Saint Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin, until I lose interest, the children fall asleep, and we both fall silent, or perhaps fall into a kind of noise, distracted by sudden demands of the route: highways merging, speed checks, roadwork ahead, dangerous curves, a tollbooth—look for spare change and pass the coffee.

We follow a map. Against everyone’s recommendations, we decided not to use a GPS. I have a dear friend whose father worked unhappily in a big company until he was seventy years old and had saved enough money to start his own business, following his one true passion. He opened a publishing house, called The New Frontier, which made thousands of gorgeous little nautical maps, tailored carefully and lovingly for the ships that sailed the Mediterranean. But six months after he opened his company, the GPS was invented. And that was it: an entire life gone. When my friend told me this story, I vowed never to use a GPS. So, of course, we get lost often, especially when we’re trying to leave a town. We realize now that for the past hour or so, we’ve been driving in circles and are back in Front Royal.

STOP

On a road called Happy Creek, we get pulled over by a police car. My husband turns off the engine, takes off his hat, and rolls down his window, smiling at the policewoman. She asks for his license, registration, and proof of insurance. I frown and mumble in my seat, incapable of restraining the visceral, immature way my body responds to any form of reprimand from an authority figure. Like a teenager washing dishes, I reach heavily and wearily into the glove box and collect all the documents the policewoman requests. I slap them into my husband’s hands. He, in turn, offers them to her ceremoniously, as if he were giving her hot tea in a porcelain cup. She explains that we’ve been pulled over because we failed to stop fully at the sign, and she points to it—that bright red octagonal object over there, which clearly pins the intersection between Happy Creek Road and Dismal Hollow Road and signals a very simple instruction: Stop. Only then do I notice this other street, Dismal Hollow Road, its name written in black capital letters on the white aluminum signpost, the name a more accurate label for the place it designates. My husband nods, and nods again, and says, sorry, and again, sorry. The policewoman returns our documents, convinced now we are not dangerous, but before she lets us go, she asks a final question:

And how old are these lovely children, may God bless them?

Nine and five, my husband says.

Ten! the boy corrects him from the backseat.

Sorry sorry sorry, yes, they’re ten and five.

I know the girl wants to say something, too, to intervene somehow; I sense it even though I’m not looking at her. She probably wants to explain that soon she will be six instead of five. But she doesn’t even open her mouth. Like my husband, and unlike me, she has a deep, instinctive fear of authority figures, a fear that expresses itself in both of them as earnest respectfulness, even submissiveness. In me, this instinct comes out as a sort of defiant defensive unwillingness to admit to an error. My husband knows this, and he makes sure I never talk in situations where we have to negotiate ourselves out of something.

Sir—the policewoman says now—in Virginia, we care for our children. Any child under the age of seven has to ride in a proper booster seat. For the child’s safety, may God bless her.

Seven, ma’am? Not five?

Seven, sir.

Sorry, officer, so sorry. I—we—had no idea. Where can we buy a booster seat around here?

Contrary to my expectations, instead of claiming her right to rhetorical usufruct of his admitted wrongs, instead of using his defeat as a trampoline from which to spring her own power into a concrete infliction of punishment, she suddenly parts her lips, layered in bright pink lipstick, and offers a smile. A beautiful smile, in fact—shy but also generous. She gives us directions to a shop, very precise directions, and then, modulating her tone, offers us advice on which exact booster seat to buy: the best ones are the ones without the back part, and we must look for the ones with metal buckles, not plastic. In the end, though, I convince my husband to not stop to buy the booster seat. In exchange, I agree to use the Google Maps GPS, just this once, so we can get out of the maze of this town and back onto a road.

MAP

We drive onward, southwest-bound, and listen to the news on the radio, news about all the children traveling north. They travel, alone, on trains and on foot. They travel without their fathers, without their mothers, without suitcases, without passports. Always without maps. They have to cross national borders, rivers, deserts, horrors. And those who finally arrive are placed in limbo, are told to wait.

Have you heard from Manuela and her two girls, by the way? my husband asks me.

I tell him no, I haven’t. Last time I heard from her, right before we left New York, her girls were still at the detention center in New Mexico, waiting either for legal permission to be sent to their mother or for a final deportation order. I’ve tried to call her a couple of times, but she doesn’t pick up. I imagine she’s still waiting to hear what will happen to her daughters, hoping they will be granted refugee status.

What does “refugee” mean, Mama? the girl asks from the backseat.

I look for possible answers to give her. I suppose that someone who is fleeing is still not a refugee. A refugee is someone who has already arrived somewhere, in a foreign land, but must wait for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived. Refugees wait in detention centers, shelters, or camps; in federal custody and under the gaze of armed officials. They wait in long lines for lunch, for a bed to sleep in, wait with their hands raised to ask if they can use the bathroom. They wait to be let out, wait for a telephone call, for someone to claim or pick them up. And then there are refugees who are lucky enough to be finally reunited with their families, living in a new home. But even those still wait. They wait for the court’s notice to appear, for a court ruling, for either deportation or asylum, wait to know where they will end up living and under what conditions. They wait for a school to admit them, for a job opening, for a doctor to see them. They wait for visas, documents, permission. They wait for a cue, for instructions, and then wait some more. They wait for their dignity to be restored.

What does it mean to be a refugee? I suppose I could tell the girl:

A child refugee is someone who waits.

But instead, I tell her that a refugee is someone who has to find a new home. Then, to soften the conversation, distract her from all this, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle. Immediately, like a current sweeping over us, everything is shuffled back into a more lighthearted reality, or at least a more manageable unreality:

Who is singing this fa fa fa fa fa song? the girl asks.

Talking Heads.

Did these heads have any hair?

Yes, of course.

Long or short?

Short.

We’re almost out of gas. We need to find a detour, find a town, my husband says, anywhere that we might find a gas station. I take the map out of the glove box and study it.

CREDIBLE FEAR

When undocumented children arrive at the border, they are subjected to an interrogation conducted by a Border Patrol officer. It’s called the credible fear interview, and its purpose is to determine whether the child has good enough reasons to seek asylum in the country. It always includes more or less the same questions:

Why did you come to the United States?

On what date did you leave your country?

Why did you leave your country?

Did anyone threaten to kill you?

Are you afraid to return to your country? Why?

I think about all those children, undocumented, who cross Mexico in the hands of a coyote, riding atop train cars, trying to not fall off, to not fall into the hands of immigration authorities, or into the hands of drug lords who would enslave them in poppy fields, if they don’t kill them. If they make it all the way to the US border, they try to turn themselves in, but if they don’t find a Border Patrol officer, the children walk into the desert. If they do find an officer or are found by one, they are put in detention and held to an interrogation, asked:

Why did you come to the United States?

Be careful! I shout, looking up from the map toward the road. My husband jerks the steering wheel. The car swerves a little, but he regains control.

Just focus on the map and I’ll focus on the road, my husband says, and swipes the back of his hand across his forehead.

Okay, I answer, but you were about to hit that rock, or raccoon, or whatever that was.

Jesus, he says.

Jesus what?

Jesus Fucking Christ, he says.

What?

Just get us to a gas station.

Unplugging her thumb from her mouth, the girl grunts, puffs, and tells us to quit it, punctuating our amorphous, flaky, ungrammatical yapping with the resolve of her suddenly civilized annoyance. Without losing her poise, she sighs a deep, weary period right into our stream of words, clearing her throat. We stop talking. Then, when she knows she has our full, silent, contrite attention, she footnotes a piece of final advice to round up her intervention. She sometimes speaks to us—though she’s still only five years old, not even six yet, and still sucks her thumb and occasionally wets her bed—with the same forgiving air psychiatrists exude when they hand out prescriptions to their weak-minded patients:

Now, Papa. I think it’s time you smoked another one of your little sticks. And you, Mama, you just need to focus on your map and on your radio. Okay? Both of you just have to look at the bigger picture now.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

No one looks at the bigger map, historical and geographical, of a refugee population’s migration routes. Most people think of refugees and migrants as a foreign problem. Few conceive of migration simply as a national reality. Searching online about the children’s crisis, I find a New York Times article from a couple of years back, titled “Children at the Border.” It’s an article set up as a Q&A, except the author both asks the questions and replies to them, so perhaps it’s not quite a Q&A. To a question about where the children are from, the author answers that three-quarters of them are from “mostly poor and violent towns” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. I think of the words “mostly poor and violent towns” and the possible implications of that schematic way of mapping the origins of children who migrate to the United States. These children are utterly foreign to us, they seem to imply. They come from a barbaric reality. These children are also, most probably, not white. Then, after posing the question of why the children are not deported immediately, the reader is told: “Under an anti-trafficking statute adopted with bipartisan support … minors from Central America cannot be deported immediately and must be given a court hearing before they are deported. A United States policy allows Mexican minors caught crossing the border to be sent back quickly.” That word “allows” in the final sentence. It’s as if, in answer to the question “Why are the children not deported immediately?” the author of the article tried to offer relief, saying something like, don’t worry, at least we’re not keeping the Mexican children, because luckily there’s a policy that “allows” us to send them back quickly. Like Manuela’s girls, who would have been deported immediately, except some officer had been kind enough to let them pass. But how many children are sent back without even being given a chance to voice their credible or incredible fears?

No one thinks of the children arriving here now as refugees of a hemispheric war that extends, at least, from these very mountains, down across the country into the southern US and northern Mexican deserts, sweeping across the Mexican sierras, forests, and southern rain forests into Guatemala, into El Salvador, and all the way to the Celaque Mountains in Honduras. No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?

NO U-TURN

Why can’t we just go back home? asks the boy.

He is fidgeting with his Polaroid in the backseat, learning how to handle it, reading the instructions, grunting.

There’s nothing to take pictures of anyway, he complains. Everything we pass is old and ugly and looks haunted.

Is that true? Is everything haunted? asks the girl.

No baby, I say, nothing is haunted.

Though perhaps, in a way, it is. The deeper we drive into this land, the more I feel like I’m looking at remains and ruins. As we pass an abandoned dairy farm, the boy says:

Imagine the first person who ever milked a cow. What a strange person.

Zoophilia, I think, but I don’t say it. I don’t know what my husband thinks, but he doesn’t say anything either. The girl suggests that maybe that first cow milker thought that if he pulled hard enough—down there—the bell around the cow’s neck would ding-dong.

Chime, the boy corrects her.

And then suddenly milk came out, she concludes, ignoring her brother.

Adjusting the mirror, I see her: an ample smile, at once serene and mischievous. A slightly more reasonable explanation comes to me:

Maybe it was a human mother who had no milk to give her baby, so she decided to take it from the cow.

But the children are not convinced:

A mother with no milk?

That’s crazy, Mama.

That’s preposterous, Ma, please.

PEAKS & POINTS

As a teenager, I had a friend who would always look for a high spot whenever she had to make a decision or understand a difficult problem. A rooftop, a bridge, a mountain if available, a bunk bed, any kind of height. Her theory was that it was impossible to make a good decision or come to any relevant conclusion if you weren’t experiencing the vertiginous clarity that heights impose on you. Perhaps.

As we climb the mountain roads of the Appalachians, I can think more clearly, for the first time, about what has been happening to us as a family—to us as a couple, really—over the last months. I suppose that, over time, my husband started feeling that all our obligations as a couple and as a family—rent, bills, medical insurance—had forced him to take a more conventional path, farther and farther away from the kind of work he wanted to devote his life to. And that, some years later, it finally became clear to him that the life we’d made together was at odds with what he wanted. For months, trying to understand what was happening to us, I felt angry, blamed him, thought he was acting on whimsy—for novelty, for change, for other women, for whatever. But now, traveling together, physically closer than ever before but far from the scaffolding that had sustained the daily work in progress of our familial world and distanced from the project that had once brought us together, I realize I had been accumulating similar feelings. I needed to admit my share: although I hadn’t lit the match that started this fire, for months I had been leaving a trail of dry debris that was now fueling it.

The speed limit on the roads across the Appalachians is 25 miles per hour, which irritates my husband but which I find ideal. Even at this speed, though, it took me a few hours to notice that the trees along the mountain path are covered in kudzu. We had passed acres of woodland blanketed in it on our way up toward this high valley, but only now do we see it clearly. My husband explains to the children that kudzu was brought over from Japan in the nineteenth century, and that farmers were paid by the hour to plant it on harvested soil, in order to control erosion. They went overboard, though, and eventually the kudzu spread across the fields, crept up the mountains, and climbed up all the trees. It blocks the sunlight and sucks out all the water from them. The trees have no defense mechanism. From the higher parts of the mountain road, the sight is terrifying: like cancerous marks, patches of yellowing treetops freckle the forests of Virginia.

All those trees will die, asphyxiated, sucked dry by this bloody rootless creeper, my husband tells us, slowing down as we hit a curve.

But so will you, Pa, and all of us, and everyone else, the boy says.

Well, yes, his father admits, and grins. But that’s not the point.

Instructively, the girl then informs us:

The point is, the point is, the point is always pointy.

VALLEYS

We wind up and down the narrow, sinuous road, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and head west into a narrow valley cradled between two arms of the range, once more looking for a gas station. When we start to lose signal again, I turn off the radio, and the boy asks his father for stories, stories of the past in general. The girl interrupts now and then, asks him very concrete questions.