Lost Children Archive. Valeria Luiselli

of crises, discoveries, epidemics, inclement weather; the coffee grinder, hard beans becoming powder; the stove sparking and bursting into a ring of fire; the gurgling of the coffeemaker; the long showers the boy took and his father’s insistent “Come on, hurry up, we’ll be late”; the paused, almost philosophical conversations between us and the two children on their way to school; the slow, careful steps the boy takes down empty school corridors, cutting class; the metallic screech of subways halting to a stop, and the mostly silent ride on train cars during our daily commutes for field recordings, inside the grid or out into the boroughs; the hum of crowded streets where my husband fished for stray sounds with his boom while I approached strangers with my handheld recorder, and the stream of all their voices, their accents and stories; the strike of a match that lit my husband’s cigarette and the long inward hiss of his first inhalation, pulling in smoke through clenched teeth, then the slow relief of an exhalation; the strange white noise that large groups of children produce in playgrounds—a vortex of hysteria, swarming cries—and the perfectly distinct voices of our two children among them; the eerie silence that settles over parks after dusk; the tousle and crackle of dry leaves heaped in mounds at the park where the girl digs for worms, for treasures, for whatever can be found, which is always nothing, because all there is under them are cigarette butts, fossilized dog turds, and miniature ziplock stash bags, hopefully empty; the friction of our coats against the northern gusts come winter; the effort of our feet pedaling rusty bicycles along the river path come spring; the heavy pant of our chests taking in the toxic vapors of the river’s gray waters, and the silent, shitty vibes of both the overeager joggers and the stray Canada geese that always overstay their migratory sojourns; the cannonade of instructions and reprimands fired by professional cyclists, all of them geared up, male, and middle-aged: “Move over!” and “Look left!”; and in response to that, our voices either softly mumbling, “Sorry sir, sorry sir,” or shouting loud heartfelt insults back at them—always abridged or drowned, alas, by the gushing winds; and finally, all the gaps of sound during our moments spent alone, collecting pieces of the world the way we each know how to gather it best. The sound of everything and everyone that once surrounded us, the noise we contributed, and the silence we leave behind.

      FUTURE

      And then the boy turned ten. We took him out to a good restaurant, gave him his presents (no toys). I got him a Polaroid camera and several boxes of film, both black-and-white and color. His father got him a kit for the trip: a Swiss Army knife, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, and a small compass. At his request, we also agreed to deviate from the planned itinerary and spend the next day, the first of our trip, at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. He’d done a school project about Calypso, the five-hundred-pound turtle with a missing front flipper that lives there, and had been obsessed with her ever since.

      That night, after dinner, my husband packed his suitcase, I packed mine, and we let the boy and the girl pack theirs. Once the children were asleep, I repacked for them. They’d chosen the most unlikely combinations of things. Their suitcases were portable Duchampian disasters: miniature clothes tailored for a family of miniature bears, a broken light saber, a lone Rollerblade wheel, ziplock bags full of tiny plastic everything. I replaced all of it with real pants, real skirts, real underwear, real everything. My husband and I lined up the four suitcases by the door, plus our seven boxes and our recording materials.

      When we’d finished, we sat in our living room and shared a cigarette in silence. I had found a young couple to whom to sublet the apartment for the next month at least, and the place already felt more theirs than ours. In my tired mind, all I could think of was the list of all the relocations that had preceded this one: the four of us moving in together four years ago; my husband’s many relocations before that one, as well as my own; the relocations of the hundreds of people and families we had interviewed and recorded for the city soundscape project; those of the refugee children whose story I now was going to try to document; and those of the last Chiricahua Apache peoples, whose ghosts my husband would soon start chasing after. Everyone leaves, if they need to, if they can, or if they have to.

      And finally, the next day, after breakfast, we washed the last dishes and left.

BOX I

      § FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ × 5″)

      “On Collecting”

      “On Archiving”

      “On Inventorying”

      “On Cataloguing”

      § TEN BOOKS

      The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić

      Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, Susan Sontag

      As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Notebooks and Journals, 1964–1980, Susan Sontag

      The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje

      Relocated: Twenty Sculptures by Isamu Noguchi from Japan, Isamu Noguchi, Thomas Messer, and Bonnie Rychlak

      Radio Benjamin, Walter Benjamin

      Journal des faux-monnayeurs, André Gide

      A Brief History of Portable Literature, Enrique Vila-Matas

      Perpetual Inventory, Rosalind E. Krauss

       The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

      § FOLDER (FACSIMILE COPIES, CLIPPINGS, SCRAPS)

      The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

      Whale sounds charts (in Schafer)

      Smithsonian Folkways Recordings World of Sound Catalog #1

      “Uncanny Soundscapes: Towards an Inoperative Acoustic Community,” Iain Foreman, Organised Sound 16 (03)

      “Voices from the Past: Compositional Approaches to Using Recorded Speech,” Cathy Lane, Organised Sound 11 (01)

       ROUTES & ROOTS

       Buscar las raíces no es más que una forma subterránea de andarse por las ramas.

       (Searching for roots is nothing but a subterranean way of beating around the bush.)

      —JOSÉ BERGAMÍN

       When you get lost on the road

       You run into the dead.

      —FRANK STANFORD

      SARGASSO SEA

      It’s past noon when we finally get to the Baltimore aquarium. The boy escorts us through the crowds and takes us straight to the main pool, where the giant turtle is. He makes us stand there, observing that sad, beautiful animal paddling cyclically around her waterspace, looking like the soul of a pregnant woman—haunted, inadequate, trapped in time. After a few minutes, the girl notices the missing flipper:

      Where’s her other arm? she asks her brother, horrified.

      These turtles only need one flipper, so they evolved to having only one, and that’s called Darwinism, he states.

      We’re not sure if his answer is a sign of sudden maturity that’s meant to protect his sister from the truth or a mismanagement of evolutionary theory. Probably the latter. We let it pass. The wall text, which all of us except the girl can read, explains that the turtle lost the flipper in the Long Island Sound, where she was rescued eleven years ago.

      Eleven: my age plus one! the boy says, bursting into a flame of enthusiasm, which he normally represses.

      Standing there, watching the enormous turtle, it’s difficult not to think of her as a metaphor for something. But before I can figure out for what, exactly, the boy starts lecturing us. Turtles like Calypso, he explains, are born on the East Coast and immediately swim out into the Atlantic, all alone. They sometimes take up to a decade to return to