Lost Children Archive

What about Apache girls? Did they exist?

What do you mean? he says.

You only talk about Apache men, and sometimes Apache boys, so were there any girls?

He thinks for a moment, and finally says:

Of course. There’s Lozen.

He tells her that Lozen was the best Apache girl, the bravest. Her name meant “dexterous horse thief.” She grew up during a tough time for the Apaches, after the Mexican government had placed a bounty on Apache scalps, and paid large sums for their long black hair. They never got Lozen’s, though; she was too quick and too smart.

Did she have long or short hair?

She wore her hair in two long braids. She was known to be a clairvoyant, who knew when danger was upon her people and always steered them out of trouble. She was also a warrior, and a healer. And when she got older, she became a midwife.

What’s a midwife? the girl asks.

Someone who delivers babies, says my husband.

Like the postwoman?

Yes, he says, like the postwoman.

FOOTPRINTS

In the first town we pass through, deep into Virginia, we see more churches than people, and more signs for places than places themselves. Everything looks like it’s been hollowed out and gutted from the inside out, and what remains are only the words: names of things pointing toward a vacuum. We’re driving through a country made up only of signs. One such sign announces a family-owned restaurant and promises hospitality; behind it, nothing but a dilapidated iron structure beams beautiful in the sunlight.

After miles of passing abandoned gas stations, bushes sprouting through every crack in the cement, we come to one that seems only partly abandoned. We park next to the single operational fuel dispenser and step out of the car to stretch our legs. The girl stays inside, seeing her chance to sit behind the wheel while my husband fills the tank. The boy and I fiddle with his new camera outside.

What am I supposed to do? he asks.

I tell him—trying to translate between a language I know well and a language I know little about—that he just needs to think of photographing as if he were recording the sound of an echo. But in truth, it’s difficult to draw parallels between sonography and photography. A camera can capture an entire portion of a landscape in a single impression; but a microphone, even a parabolic one, can sample only fragments and details.

What I mean, Ma, is what button do I press and when?

I show him the eyepiece, lens, focus, and shutter, and as he looks around the space through the eyepiece, I suggest:

Maybe you could take a picture of that tree growing out through the cement.

Why would I do that?

I don’t know why—just to document it, I guess.

That doesn’t even mean anything, Ma, document it.

He’s right. What does it mean to document something, an object, our lives, a story? I suppose that documenting things—through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound recording device—is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world. I suggest we take a picture of our car, just to try out the camera again and see why the pictures are coming out all hazy white. The boy holds the camera in his hands like a soccer ball about to be kicked by an amateur goalkeeper, peeks into the eyepiece, and shoots.

Did you focus?

I think so.

Was the image clear?

Kind of, yes.

It’s no use; the Polaroid comes out blue and then slowly turns creamy white. He claims the camera is broken, has a factory error, is probably just a toy camera, not a real camera. I assure him it’s not a toy, and suggest a theory:

Perhaps they’re coming out white not because the camera is broken or just a toy camera but because what you’re photographing is not actually there. If there’s no thing, there’s no echo that can bounce off it. Like ghosts, I tell him, who don’t appear in photos, or vampires, who don’t appear in mirrors, because they’re not actually there.

He’s not impressed, not amused, doesn’t find my echo-thing theory convincing, or even funny. He shoves the camera into my belly and jumps back into his seat.

Back in the car, the discussion about the problem with the pictures continues for a little longer, the boy insisting I’ve given him a broken camera, useless. The boy’s father tries to chime in, mediating. He tells the boy about Man Ray’s “rayographs,” and the strange method with which Ray composed them, without a camera, placing little objects like scissors, thumbtacks, screws, or compasses directly on top of photosensitive paper and then exposing them to light. He tells him how the images Ray created with this method were always like the ghostly traces of objects no longer there, like visual echoes, or like footprints left in the mud by someone who’d passed by long ago.

NOISE

In the late hour, we reach a village perched high in the Appalachians. We decide to stop. The children have started to behave like nasty medieval monks in the car—playing disquieting verbal games in the backseat, games that involve burying each other alive, killing cats, burning towns. Listening to them makes me think that the theory of reincarnation is accurate: the boy must have hunted witches in Salem in the 1600s; the girl must have been a fascist soldier in Mussolini’s Italy. History is playing out in them, repeating itself in microscales.

Outside the only grocery store in the village, a sign announces: Cottage Rentals. Ask Inside. We rent a cottage, small but comfortable, removed from the main road. That night, in bed, the boy has an anxiety attack. He doesn’t call it that, but he says he can’t breathe properly, says his eyes won’t stay shut, says he can’t think in a straight line. He calls me to his side:

Do you really think that some things aren’t there? he asks. That we see them but they’re not actually there?

What do you mean?

You said so earlier.

What did I say?

You said what if I see you and this room and everything else but nothing is really here, so it can’t make echoes, so it can’t be photographed.

I was only joking, love.

Okay.

Go to sleep, all right?

Okay.

Later that night, I stand in front of the open trunk of our car with a flashlight, just staring, trying to pick a box to open—a box in which I will find a book to also open and read. I need to think about my sound project, and reading others’ words, inhabiting their minds for a while, has always been an entry point to my own thoughts. But where to start? Standing in front of the seven bankers boxes, I wonder what any other mind might do with that same collection of bits and scraps, now temporarily archived in a given order inside those boxes. How many possible combinations of all those documents were there? And what completely different stories would be told by their varying permutations, shufflings, and reorderings?

In my husband’s Box II, under some notebooks, there’s a book titled The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer. I remember reading it many years ago and understanding only a meager portion of it but understanding at least that it was a titanic effort, possibly in vain, to organize the surplus of sound that human presence in the world had created. By separating and cataloging sounds, Schafer was trying to get rid of noise. Now I flip through the pages—full of difficult graphs, symbolic notations of different types of sounds, and a vast inventory that catalogs the sounds of what Schafer referred to as the World Soundscape Project. The inventory ranges from “Sounds of Water” and “Sounds of Seasons,” to “Sounds of the Body” and “Domestic Sounds,” to “Internal Combustion Engines,” “Instruments of War and Destruction,” and “Sounds of Time.” Under each of these categories, there is a list of particulars. For example, under “Sounds of the Body” there is: heartbeat, breathing, footsteps, hands (clapping, scratching, etc.), eating, drinking, evacuating, lovemaking, nervous system, dream sounds. At the very end of the inventory is the category “Sound Indicators of Future Occurrences.” But, of course, there are no particulars listed under it.

I put the book back in its box and open Box I, digging around inside it carefully. I take out a brown notebook, on the first page of which my husband has written “On Collecting.” I jump to a random page and read a note: “Collecting is a form of fruitful procrastination, of inactivity pregnant with possibility.” A few lines down there’s a quote copied from a book by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Genius: the highest degree of being mentally pulled to pieces, and the highest of being—collected.” The book, Art in the Light of Conscience, belongs to me, and that sentence was probably something I once underlined. Seeing it there, in his notebook, feels like a mental petty theft, like he’s snatched an inner experience of mine and made it his own. But I’m somehow proud of being looted. Finally, from the box, though it’s unlikely that it’ll help me think about my sound project or about soundscaping in general, I take Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963.

CONSCIOUSNESS & ELECTRICITY

I stay up on the porch outside the cottage, reading Sontag’s journals. My arms and legs, a feast for the mosquitoes. Above my head, beetles smack their stubborn exoskeletons against the single lightbulb; white moths spiral up around its halo, then plummet down. A small spider spins a trap in the intersection of a beam and a column. And in the distance, a redeeming constellation of fireflies—intermittent—landscapes the dark immensity beyond the rectangle of the porch.

I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books. I would never lend a book to anyone after having read it. I underline too much, sometimes entire pages, sometimes with double underline. My husband and I once read this copy of Sontag’s journals together. We had just met. Both of us underlined entire passages of it, enthusiastically, almost feverishly. We read out loud, taking turns, opening the pages as if consulting an oracle, legs naked and intertwined on a twin bed. I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. In our copy of Sontag’s journals, underlined once, twice, sometimes boxed-in and marked at the margins:

“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents & lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal.”

“In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.”

“1831: Hegel died.”

“We sit in this rat hole on our asses growing eminent and middle-aged …”

“Moral bookkeeping requires a settling of accounts.”

“In marriage, I have suffered a certain loss of personality—at first the loss was pleasant, easy …”

“Marriage is based on the principle of inertia.”

“The sky, as seen in the city, is negative—where the buildings are not.”

“The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal.”

This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

Rereading passages underlined in this copy of the Sontag journals, finding them once again powerful years later, and reunderlining some—especially the meditations around marriage—I realize that everything I’m reading was written in 1957 or 1958. I count with my fingers. Sontag was only twenty-four then, nine years younger than I am now. I am suddenly embarrassed, like I’ve been caught laughing at a joke before the punch line or have clapped between movements at a concert. So I skip to 1963, when Sontag has turned thirty-something, is finally divorced, and maybe has more clarity about things present and future. I’m too tired to read on. I mark the page, close the book, turn off the porch light—mobbed with beetles and moths—and head to bed.

ARCHIVE

I wake up early the next morning in the cottage and make my way to the kitchen and living room area. I open the door to the porch, and the sun is rising behind the mountain. For the first time in years, there are slices of our private space that I’d like to record, sounds that I again feel an impulse to document and store. Perhaps it’s just that new things, new circumstances, have an aura of things past. Beginnings get confused with endings. We look at them the way a goat or a skunk might stare stupidly toward a horizon where there’s a sun, not knowing if the yellow star there is rising or setting.

I want to record these first sounds of our trip together, maybe because they feel like the last sounds of something. But at the same time I don’t, because I don’t want to interfere with my recording; I don’t want to turn this particular moment of our lives together into a document for a future archive. If I could only, simply, underline certain things with my mind, I would: this light coming in through the kitchen window, flooding the entire cottage in a golden warmth as I prepare the coffeemaker; this soft breeze blowing in through the open door and brushing past my legs as I turn on the stove; that sound of footsteps—feet little, bare, and warm—as the girl gets out of bed and approaches me from behind, announcing:

Mama, I woke up!

She finds me standing by the stove, waiting for the coffee to be ready. She looks at me, smiles, and rubs her eyes when I say good morning back to her. I don’t know anyone for whom waking up is such good news, such a joyful event. Her eyes are startlingly large, her chest is bare, and her panties are white and puffy, too big around her. Serious and full of decorum, she says:

I have a question, Mama.

What is it?

I want to ask you: Who is this Jesus Fucking Christ?

I don’t answer, but I hand her a huge glass of milk.

ORDER

The boy and his father are still asleep, and the two of us—mother, daughter—find a seat on the couch in the cottage’s small but luminous living room. She sips her milk and opens her sketchbook. After a few failed attempts at drawing something, she asks me to make four squares for her—two at the top, two at the bottom—and instructs me to label them in this order: “Character,” “Setting,” “Problem,” “Solution.” When I finish labeling the four squares and ask what they’re for, she explains that at school, they taught her to tell stories this way. Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long. I remember how one day, when the boy was in second grade and I was helping him with homework, I suddenly realized he probably didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard.

The girl concentrates on her drawing now, filling in the squares I made for her. I drink my coffee, and open Sontag’s journals again, rereading loose lines and words. Marriage, parting, moral bookkeeping, hollowed out, separation: Did our underlining these words foreshadow it? When did the end of us begin? I cannot say when or why. I’m not sure how. When I told a couple of friends, shortly before the four of us went on this trip, that my marriage was possibly ending, or at least was in a moment of crisis, they asked:

What happened?

They wanted a precise date:

When did you realize, exactly? Before this or after that?

They wanted a reason:

Politics? Boredom? Emotional violence?

They wanted an event:

Did he cheat? Did you?

I’d repeat to all of them that no, nothing had happened. Or rather, yes, everything they listed had probably happened, but that wasn’t the problem. Still, they insisted. They wanted reasons, motivations, and especially, they wanted a beginning:

When, when exactly?

I remember going to the supermarket one day shortly before we left on this trip. The boy and girl were arguing over the better flavor of some squeezable pureed snack. My husband was complaining about my particular choice of something, maybe milk, maybe detergent, maybe pasta. I remember imagining, for the first time since we had moved in together, how it would be to shop for just the girl and me, in a future where our family was no longer a family of four. I remember my feeling of remorse, almost instant, at having the thought. Then a much deeper feeling—maybe a blow of nostalgia for the future, or maybe the inner vacuum of melancholia, sucking up presentness and spreading absence—as I placed the shampoo the boy had chosen on the conveyer belt, vanilla scented for frequent use.

But surely it was not that day, in that supermarket, that I understood what was happening to us. Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.

The girl is finished with her drawing and shows it to me, full of satisfaction. In the first square, she has drawn a shark. In the second, a shark surrounded by other sea animals and algae, the surface of the water above them, the sun at the very top in a distant corner. In the third square, a shark, still in the water, looking distraught and facing a kind of underwater pine tree. In the fourth and last square, a shark biting and possibly eating another big fish, maybe also a shark.

So what’s the story? I ask.

You tell it, Mama, you guess.

Well, first there is a shark; second, he’s in the sea, where he lives; third, the problem is there’s only trees to eat, and he’s not a vegetarian because he’s a shark; and fourth, finally, he finds food and eats it up.

No, Mama. All wrong. Sharks don’t eat sharks.

Okay. So what’s the story? I ask her.

The story is, character: a shark. Setting: the ocean. Problem: the shark is feeling sad and confused because another shark bit him, so he goes to his thinking-tree. Solution: he finally figures it out.

Figures what out? I ask her.

That he just has to bite the other shark back for biting him!

CHAOS

The boy and his father finally wake up, and over breakfast, we discuss plans. My husband and I decide we need to get going again. The children complain, say they want to stay longer. This isn’t a normal vacation, we remind them; even if we can stop and enjoy things once in a while, the two of us have to work. I have to start recording material about the crisis at the southern border. From what I can gather by listening to the radio and fishing for news online whenever I can, the situation is becoming graver by the day. The administration, backed by the courts, has just announced the creation of a priority docket for undocumented minors, which means that the children who are arriving at the border will get priority in being deported. Federal immigration courts will process their cases before any others, and if they don’t find a lawyer to defend them within the impossibly narrow span of twenty-one days, they will have no chance, and will receive a final removal order from a judge.

I don’t say all that to our children, of course. But I do tell the boy that what I’m working on is time sensitive, and I need to get to the southern border as quickly as possible. My husband says he wants to get to Oklahoma—where we will visit an Apache cemetery—as soon as possible. Sounding like a 1950s suburban housewife, the boy tells us that we’re always “putting work before family.” When he’s older, I tell him, he’ll understand that the two things are inseparable. He rolls his eyes, tells me I’m predictable and self-involved—two adjectives I’ve never heard him use before. I reprimand him, tell him he and his sister have to do the breakfast dishes.

Do you remember when we had other parents? he asks her as they start with the dishes and we start packing up.

What do you mean? she answers, confused, passing him the liquid soap.

We had parents, once upon a time, better than these ones that we have now.

I listen, wonder, and worry. I want to tell him that I love him, unconditionally, that he does not have to demonstrate anything to me, that I’m his mother and want him near me, always, that I also need him. I should tell him all that, but instead, when he gets like this, I grow distant, circumspect, and maybe even unbiologically cold. It exasperates me not to understand how to ease his anger. I usually externalize my messy emotions, scolding him for little things: put on your shoes, brush your hair, pick up that bag. Most of the time, his father also turns his own exasperation inward, but he doesn’t scold him, doesn’t say or do anything. He just becomes passive—a sad spectator of our family life, like he’s watching a silent movie in an empty theater.

Outside the cottage, as we make final preparations to leave, we ask the boy to help reorganize the things in the trunk, and he throws a bigger tantrum. He screams horrible things, wishing he belonged to a different world, a better family. I think he thinks we are here, in this world, to thrust him toward unhappiness: eat this fried egg you hate the texture of; let’s go, hurry up; learn to ride this bicycle that you fear; wear these pants that we bought just for you even though you don’t like them—they were expensive, so be grateful; play with that boy in the park who offers you his ephemeral friendship and his ball; be normal, be happy, be a child.

He screams louder and louder, wishing us gone, wishing us dead, kicking the car’s tires, tossing rocks and gravel into the air. When he spins off into a spiral of rage like this, his voice sounds distant to me, remote, foreign, as if I were listening to it on an old analog recorder, through metal wires and across static, or as if I were a line operator listening to him in a faraway country. I recognize the familiar ring of his tone somewhere in the background, but I cannot tell whether he is reaching out to us in a desire to make contact, yearning for our love and undivided attention, or if he is somehow telling us to stay away, to fuck off from his ten years of life in this world and let him grow out of our little circle of familial ties. I listen, wonder, and worry.

The tantrum continues, and his father finally loses patience. He walks over to him, grabs him firmly by the shoulders, and shouts. The boy wriggles out of his clutch and kicks his father in the ankles and knees—not kicks intended to harm or hurt, but kicks nonetheless. In response, his father takes off his hat, and with it, smacks him twice, maybe three times, on the butt. Not a painful punishment, but a humiliating one, for a ten-year-old: a hat-spanking. What follows is expected but also disarming: tears, sniffing, deep breaths, and stuttered words like okay, sorry, fine.