Lost Children Archive. Valeria Luiselli

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.

      So the wind instruments are the Indians, and the violins are the bad guys? asks the girl.

      My husband confirms this, nodding.

      But what are the bad guys, Pa, really? she asks him, demanding more details to put all this information together in her little head.

      What do you mean?

      I mean are they beasts, or cowboys, or monsters, or bears?

      Republican cowboys and cowgirls, my husband tells her.

      She thinks for a moment as the violins strike a higher pitch, and finally concludes:

      Well, I am a cowgirl sometimes, but I’m not ever a Republic.

      So, Pa—the boy wants to confirm—this song takes place in these same mountains we are driving through right now, yes?

      That’s right, his father says.

      But then, instead of helping the children understand things in more subtle historical detail, he adds a pedantic coda:

      Except it’s not called a song. It’s just called a piece, or in fact a suite.

      And while he explains the exact differences between those three things—song, piece, suite—I stop listening to him and focus on the very cracked screen of my irritating little telephone, where I type in “Copland Appalachian,” and find an official-enough-looking page that contradicts my husband’s whole story, or at least half of it. Yes, this Copland