Lost Children Archive

When the boy has at last calmed down, his sister walks up to him, and with a little hopefulness and a little hesitancy, asks him if he wants to play with her for a while. She needs him to confirm to her that they still share a world. That they are together in this world, inextricably bound, beyond their two parents and their flaws. The boy turns her away at first, gently but firmly:

Just give me a moment.

Yet in the end, he’s still small, still susceptible to our fragile, private family mythologies. So when his father suggests we delay our departure so that they can all play the Apache game before we leave, the boy is overcome by a deep, primal happiness. He collects feathers, prepares his plastic bow and arrow, dresses his sister up as an Indian princess, taking care to tie a cotton belt around her head, not too tight and not too loose, and then runs around in circles howling like a madchild, wild and unburdened. He fills our life with his breath, with his sudden warmth, with his particular way of exploding into roaring laughter.

ARCHIVE

In the slow float of midmorning light, the children play the Apache game with their father. The cottage is at the crest of a hill in a high valley that undulates down toward the main road, invisible to us. No houses can be seen, just farmland and grassland, sprinkled here and there with wildflowers we do not know the names of. They are white and violet, and I make out a few orange patches. Farther away in the distance, a confederacy of cows grazes, looking quietly conspiratorial.

From what I can make out, sitting on the porch bench, the game consists of nothing more than collecting little sticks from the forest proper, bringing them back, and fixing them into the ground one next to the other. Intermittently, little disputes spice the game: the girl suddenly says she wants to be a cowgirl, not an Indian princess, not any type of princess. My husband tells her this game has no white-eyes. They quarrel. In the end, she agrees hesitantly. She’ll carry on being an Apache, but only if she can be Lozen and if she’s still allowed to wear that cowgirl hat we found in the cottage, instead of the ribbon, which keeps slipping off.

I sit on the porch, half reading my book, looking up at the three of them now and then. They look memorable from where I’m sitting; look like they should be photographed. I almost never take pictures of my own children. They hate being in pictures and always boycott the family’s photographic moments. If they are asked to pose for a portrait, they make sure their disdain is apparent, and fake a wide, cynical smile. If they are allowed to do as they please, they make porcine grimaces, stick out their tongues, contort themselves like Hollywood aliens in midseizure. They rehearse antisocial behaviors in general. Maybe it’s the same with all children. Adults, on the contrary, profess almost religious reverence toward the photographic ritual. They adopt solemn gestures, or calculate a smile; they look toward the horizon with patrician vanity, or into the lens of the camera with the solitary intensity of porn stars. Adults pose for eternity; children for the instant.

I step back into the cottage to look for the Polaroid and the instruction booklet. I’d promised the boy I’d study them, because surely we were doing something wrong if the camera was indeed real yet his pictures still came out all white. I find them both—camera, instructions—in his backpack, among little cars, rubber bands, comics, his shiny red Swiss Army knife. Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings? I once had to look for an ID my sister had forgotten in her drawer and was suddenly wiping away tears with my sleeve as I went through her well-ordered pencils, colored clips, and random Post-it notes addressed to herself—visit Mama this week, talk more slowly, buy flowers and long earrings, walk more often. Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person’s absence. Perhaps it’s just that belongings often outlive their owners, so our minds can easily place those belongings in a future in which their owner is no longer present. We anticipate our loved ones’ future absence through the material presence of all their random stuff.

Back on the porch, I study the instruction booklet for the camera. The children and their father are now gathering rocks, which they place between the sticks fixed in the ground, alternating rock, stick, rock. The camera instructions are complicated. New Polaroid film has to be shielded from the light as soon as the photograph is expelled from the exit slide, the booklet explains. Otherwise, the film burns. The children and their father are taking over Texas, defending it from the American army, handing it over to their Apache fellows, and fencing it off, rock, stick, rock. Color film takes thirty minutes to develop; black-and-white film takes ten. During this time, the picture has to remain horizontal and in total darkness. A single ray of light will leave a trace, an accident. The instructions recommend keeping a developing Polaroid picture inside a special black-box, available from the store. Otherwise, it can be placed between the pages of a book and kept there until all its colors and shades are fully fixed.

I don’t have a special black-box, of course. But I have a book, Sontag’s journals, which I can leave open by my side and where I can place the Polaroid as soon as it comes out of the camera. I flip the book open to a random page, in preparation: page 142. Before I lay the book back down next to me, I read a little bit, just to make sure the page I found augurs something good. I’ve never been able to resist a superstitious impulse to read a page opened at random, any page, as if it were the day’s horoscope. One of those coincidences so small, yet so extraordinary: the page before me is a strange mirror of the exact moment I am witnessing. The children are playing the Apache game with their father, and Sontag describes this moment with her son: “At 5:00 David cried out—I dashed to the room & we hugged & kissed for an hour. He was a Mexican soldier (& therefore so was I); we changed history so that Mexico got to keep Texas. ‘Daddy’ was an American soldier.”

I pick up the camera, look around the field through the lens. I finally find the children—focus, refocus, and shoot. As soon as the camera spits out the shot, I take it with my index finger and thumb and tuck it between pages 142 and 143.

DOCUMENT

The picture comes out in shades of brown: sepia, ecru, wheat, and sand. Boy and girl, unaware of me, a few feet from the porch, stand next to a fence. He is holding a stick in his right hand, and she points toward a clearing in the woods behind the cottage, perhaps suggesting they look for more sticks. Behind them is a narrow path, and behind that, a row of trees that follow the declination of the hill from the cottage toward the main road. Though I can’t explain exactly why or how, they look as though they’re not really there, like they are being remembered instead of photographed.

BOX II

§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ × 5″)

“On Soundscaping”

“On Acoustemology”

“On Documenting”

“On Field Recording”

§ SEVEN BOOKS

Sound and Sentiment, Steven Feld

The Americans, Robert Frank (introduction by Jack Kerouac)

Immediate Family, Sally Mann

Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

In the Field: The Art of Field Recording, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, eds.

§ THREE COMPACT DISCS (BOXED SETS)

Voices of the Rainforest, Steven Feld

Lost & Found Sound, The Kitchen Sisters

Desert Winds, Scott Smallwood

§ FOLDER “ABOUT SOUND MAPS”

(NOTES, CLIPPINGS, FACSIMILES)

“Sound Around You” project, University of Salford, UK

The Soundscape Newsletter, vols. I–X, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

“NYSoundmap,” the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology

“Fonoteca Bahia Blanca,” Argentina

UNDOCUMENTED

An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound.

—DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ

Hearing is a way of touching at a distance.

—R. MURRAY SCHAFER

HISTORIES

Inside the car, the air is familiar and the smell our own. As we head southwest across the Appalachians, toward North Carolina, the world outside seems more foreign than ever before. My husband keeps his eyes steady on the road, which winds and curves higher into the mountains, and we all listen to the radio. A boy, maybe nine or ten, judging by the sound of his voice, is being interviewed by a reporter in a detention center in Nixon, Texas.

How did you travel to the United States? the reporter asks.

His voice calm and composed, the boy replies in Spanish, saying that he came on the Bestia. I translate his response for my husband.

Like Manuela’s daughters! the boy calls out from the backseat.

That’s right, I tell him.

The reporter explains that as many as half a million migrants annually ride on the rooftops of trains, which people call the Bestia, or beast, and says that the boy he’s interviewing today lost his little brother on one of those trains. The news report then switches to the boy again. His voice is no longer calm. Now it’s breaking, hesitating, trembling. The boy says that his little brother fell off the train shortly before it reached the border. As he begins to explain what happened, exactly, I switch off the radio. I feel a dull, deep nausea—a physical reaction to the boy’s story and his voice, but also to the way that news coverage exploits sadness and desperation to give us its representation: tragedy. Our children react violently to the story; they want to hear more but also don’t want to hear more. They won’t stop asking:

What happened next?

What happened to the little boy?

To distract them, my husband tells them Apache stories, tells them about how the Chiricahua tribe consisted of four different bands, tells them about the smallest band, which was also one of the most powerful, because it was led by a man who was six and a half feet tall, called Mangas Coloradas.

But did an Apache children band exist? the girl interrupts my husband.

What do you mean?

I mean, did they also have a children band? she says.

The boy rephrases her question, translates for her:

I think she means: Were there any bands that were only made up of children?

Their father, his eyes on the road, takes a sip of coffee from a cardboard cup and hands it over to me to put down again in the cup holder before he replies.

There was one that he knows of, he tells them, his gray eyes trying to find theirs in the rearview mirror. They were called the Eagle Warriors. It was a band of young Apache children led by an older boy. They were fearsome, they lived in the mountains, they ate birds that had fallen from the sky and were still warm, they had the power to control the weather, they could attract rain or push a storm back. He tells the children that these young warriors lived in a place called Echo Canyon, a place where the echoes are so loud and clear that even if you whisper, your voice comes right back to you, crisp.

I don’t know if what my husband is telling them is true, but the story resonates with me. I can perfectly imagine the faces of those child warriors as we drive slowly forward across Appalachia. Our children listen to him in silence, looking out the window into the dense forests, possibly also imagining these children warriors. As we turn on a closed curve, the forest clears, and we see a cluster of storm clouds—and intermittent lightning—gathering above the high peaks to the southwest.

STORIES

Traveling in the tight space of the car, we realize how little we know our two children, even though of course we know them. We listen to their backseat games. They are strangers, especially when we add them together. Boy and girl, two startlingly distinct individuals whom we often just consider a single entity: our children. Their games are random, noisy, uncanny, like a television suffering a high fever.

But now and then they find a better pace, establish a softer energy between them. They talk more slowly, thoughtfully. Sometimes they pick up the lost thread of their father’s Apache stories, or of the stories about the children stuck at the border, and enact possible outcomes:

If we are forced to stop hunting wild game, we shall raid their ranches and steal their cows!

Yeah, let’s steal the white cows, the white, the white-eyes’ cows!

Be careful with bluecoats and the Border Patrol!

We realize then that they in fact have been listening, more attentively than we thought, to the stories of Chief Nana, Chief Loco, Chihuahua, Geronimo—the last of the Chiricahuas—as well as to the story we are all following on the news, about the child refugees at the border. But they combine the stories, confuse them. They come up with possible endings and counterfactual histories.

What if Geronimo had never surrendered to the white-eyes?

What if he’d won that war?

The lost children would be the rulers of Apacheria!

Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

BEGINNINGS

The lost children’s stories are troubling our own children. We decide to stop listening to the news, at least when they are awake. We decide to listen, instead, to music. Or, better, to audiobooks.

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night …,” says the voice of the man on the car speakers, “he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” I press Stop as soon as it pauses at the end of the sentence. My husband and I agree that Cormac McCarthy, although we both like him, and even if we especially like The Road, seems a little too rough for the children. Also, we agree that whoever is reading for this audiobook version is an actor acting—tries too hard, breathes too loud—instead of a person reading. So I press Stop. Then I scroll down and press Play on another audiobook.

“I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there,” a mistranslation of the first line of Pedro Páramo—I think Juan Rulfo really writes “because they told me” and not “because I had been told”—that passive voice and that extra layer of pastness blurring the novel’s calculated austerity and temporal ambiguity. I scroll down again, then press Play.

“I am an invisible man.” It’s a barren, perfect first sentence. But no, not Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, either. What we want is to overlay the stretch of the drive ahead with a voice and a narrative that may glove itself upon the landscape, and not something that will jerk our minds elsewhere while we move across this humid entanglement of creepers upon forests. Next. Play.

“In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” This one I would want to listen to, but I gather no quorum from the two traitors in the backseat. My husband does not want it either, says Carson McCullers’s only achievement was that one novel’s title and only the title: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. He is wrong, and I say so, throwing back my disagreement with a little bit of poison, asking him if he doesn’t think that first line is exactly about the two of us, and if we might not want to listen to the rest of it as if visiting an oracle. He does not laugh or smile. Next book.

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” Pause. We discuss this one at greater length. My husband thinks Kerouac’s On the Road would be a perfect choice. Even if the children won’t get the meaning, he says, we can all enjoy the rhythm of it as we drive. I remember reading Kerouac in my early twenties, when I dated a bookseller. He was a Kerouac fan, and gave me all of his books, one by one. I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup. Every time I was about to finish, the bowl would be refilled. Later into my twenties, I reread a few of Kerouac’s books, started getting them, and grew to like some things in his prose: his untidy way of tying sentences together, his way of speeding through the story as if he’s not imagining or remembering it but catching up with it, and his way of ending paragraphs like he’s cheating on a test. But I don’t want to give my husband this victory, so I say:

I would rather listen to evangelical radio than to On the Road.

Why? he asks.

It’s a good question, so I look for a good reason. My sister, who teaches literature in Chicago, always says that Kerouac is like an enormous penis, pissing all over the USA. She thinks that his syntax reads like he’s marking his territory, claiming inches by slamming verbs into sentences, filling up all silences. I love that argument, though I don’t know if I quite understand it, or if it’s even an argument. So I don’t put it forward. We’re approaching a tollbooth, and I dig around for spare change. We halt, pay a machine—not a person—and drive on. Kerouac’s America is nothing like this America, so bony, desolate, and factual. I use the distraction to move beyond our Kerouac discussion, a dead-end street, no doubt. And as we gain speed again, I scroll down and press Play on the next audiobook.

“The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.” After listening to its opening sentence, we all agree: this is it, this is what we’ll listen to, Lord of the Flies, read by William Golding himself. We know it’s no fairy tale, no sugarcoated portrait of childhood, but it’s—at least—fiction. Not a fiction that will separate us and the children from reality, but one that might help us, eventually, explain some of it to them.

We listen to the reading for a few hours, and probably take some wrong turns, and get lost for a while, and so we listen to the reading some more, until we cannot listen anymore, cannot drive anymore, cannot sit anymore. We find a motel in a town called Damascus, near the Virginia–Tennessee border. I have no idea why it’s called that, but as we pull into the parking lot, and I read a sign that says Free Wi-Fi & Cable TV, it’s clear to me that some appropriations of names are more unsettling than others.

Outside the motel room, while the rest prepare for bed, I roll myself a cigarette and try to call Manuela. She doesn’t pick up, but I leave a message, asking how things are moving forward with the case, saying please call me when you have some time.

NARRATIVE ARC

The girl asks the waitress for crayons and paper while we wait for our breakfasts in a diner booth the next morning, and then asks me if I can draw four squares for her, and label them the same way I did in the cottage the other day. I’ll do it, I say, but only if she’s willing to let me make the game a little more challenging for her.

How? she asks, skeptical.

I’ll draw eight squares instead of four, I say, and you figure out what to do with the rest.

She’s not convinced, grumbles, crosses her arms and digs her elbows into the table. But when her brother says he wants to try it out, she says:

Okay, fine, fine, fine: eight squares.

My husband reads a newspaper, and the children concentrate on their drawings, piecing together a more difficult plot, working out how to arrange and rearrange information in an eightfold space.

When I sat through courtroom hearings in the New York City Immigration Court, listening to and recording children’s testimonies, my recorder on my lap, hidden under a sweater, I felt that I knew exactly what I was doing, and why I was doing it. When I hovered in hallways, offices, or waiting rooms, the recorder in my hand, talking to immigration lawyers, priests, police officers, people in general, sampling the sounds of that raw legal reality, I trusted that I would eventually come to understand how to arrange all the pieces of what I was recording and tell a meaningful story. But as soon as I pressed Stop on my recording device, put all my stuff into my bag, and went back home, all the momentum and certainty I had had slowly dissolved. And when I re-listened to the material, thinking of ways to put it together in a narrative sequence, I was flooded by doubts and problems, paralyzed by hesitance and constant concerns.

The food finally arrives, but the children aren’t interested. They are too caught up in working out how to finish their last few squares. I observe them with pride, and maybe a little envy, a childish feeling, wishing I also had a crayon and was participating in the eight-square story game. I wonder how I’d distribute all the concerns I have.

Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward. Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonized by Western-Saxon-white categories, what’s the correct use of personal pronouns, go light on the adjectives, and oh, who gives a fuck how very whimsical phrasal verbs are?

COPULA & COPULATION

My husband wants us to listen to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring while we drive up and down this meandering road through the Cherokee National Forest, toward Asheville, North Carolina. It will be instructive, he says. So I roll down the window, breathe in the thin mountain air, and agree to search for the piece on my phone. When I finally catch some signal, I find a 1945 recording—apparently the original—and press Play.

For miles, as we make our way up to the very cusp of the mountain range and across the skyline drive, we hear Appalachian Spring over and over, and then once more. Making me pause, play, and pause again, my husband explains each element of the piece to the children: the tempo, the tonal links between movements, the overall structure of the composition. He tells them it’s a programmatic piece, and says it’s about white-eyes marrying, reproducing, conquering new land, and then driving Indians out of that land. He explains what a programmatic composition is, how it tells a story, how each section of instruments in the orchestra—woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion—represents a specific character, and how the instruments interact just like people talking, falling in love, fighting, and making up again.