Lost Children Archive. Valeria Luiselli

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