Lost Children Archive. Valeria Luiselli

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