Lost Children Archive

In Parts 1 and 2 of the novel, chapters interspersed within the narrative feature listed inventories of an archive box from the family journey. Box I belongs to the husband and contains four notebooks with notes he has written—“On Collecting,” “On Archiving,” “On Inventorying,” and “On Cataloguing”—10 books (including nonfiction, fiction, and poetry), and a folder of “facsimile copies, clippings, scraps” including whale sound charts, Iain Foreman’s essay “Uncanny Soundscapes,” and Cathy Lane’s paper “Voices from the Past: Compositional Approaches to Using Sound and Recorded Speech” (34).

As the family drives from New York to Arizona, the radio and their music playlist are constant sound presences. Sometimes, these sounds are background noises. Sometimes, they seem to blend with family conversations. Radio stories about refugees migrating from Mexico to the United States—being mistreated, deported, and shuffled away—resonate with stories about Apache history that the husband tells the children. The daughter asks questions about the radio stories, including the definition of the word “refugee.” The mother tells her that a refugee is someone who has to find a new home, then attempts to distract her by shuffling the playlist.

The family also shuffles and meanders over the course of their drive, as the narrator only uses printed maps and refuses to use a GPS. She explains that her friend’s father once ran a company that sold beautiful maps, but the company was essentially destroyed by the development of the GPS. Thus, they keep getting lost on the road.

Listening to the radio, the narrator begins to feel spiritually lost in her migrant story project. She is overwhelmed by the ignorant language she hears surrounding the plight of refugees coming to the United States. She reflects, “Everyone keeps asking: […] Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?” (51). Meanwhile, she seems resentful of the ease with which her husband approaches his own project and doesn’t understand why he’s recording certain sounds (such as a dog barking near their motel).

The narrator attempts to regain some sense of direction with her project by secretly going through her husband’s archive boxes. She reasons, “by trying to listen to all the sounds trapped in his archive, I might find a way into the exact story I need to document, the exact form it needs” (42). She is particularly compelled by a book galley copy titled Untitled for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She pulls the book from his box, reads it, and underlines parts that resonate with her experience, such as, “the story of a woman who has lost something important but does not know exactly what” (44). Eventually, she finds a notebook containing a line from one of her own books, Marina Tsvetaeva’s Art in the Light of Conscience. She realizes that the line was probably something she underlined herself, and she feels oddly violated.

The boy complains that his Polaroid photos are coming out white-washed and blank, worrying that his camera is broken. The mother replies, “Perhaps they’re coming out white not because the camera is broken […] but because what you’re photographing is not actually there. If there’s no thing, there’s no echo that can bounce off it” (55). She reads the Polaroid instructions and figures out how to protect his photos from the sun to keep them from turning white. To test the camera, she takes a photo of her husband and son together. She muses that the photo has an eerie, ethereal quality, like they aren’t really there and they’re already no more than memories.

Box II also belongs to the husband and contains a combination of notebooks, nonfiction books, and photography books (including two iconic books: Robert Frank’s The Americans and Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, both of which the narrator references in “Routes & Roots”). The box also contains three CDs of other soundscapes—including Voices of the Rainforest, Lost & Found Sound, and Desert Winds—and another folder of “notes, clippings, facsimiles.”

The family drives through Appalachia, listening to an atmospheric playlist of Aaron Copeland, Dolly Parton, and Johnny Cash. They also hear an interview on the radio with a young boy who recently migrated to the United States from Mexico. In the interview, the boy describes how he rode on top of a train that migrants refer to as La Bestia (The Beast). His younger brother fell off the train and died before they crossed the border. The son remembers that Manuela’s daughters also rode La Bestia and becomes concerned for them.

The narrator realizes that the children are disturbed by the stories of refugee migrants they hear on the radio. The children refer to the refugees as the “lost children,” and they seem to deeply identify with them. To distract them, their parents turn off the radio and tell stories of famous Apaches, including Geronimo and Chief Cochise. In the midst of these stories, the son ponders what might have happened if Geronimo had never surrendered to the white-eyes. He and his sister gleefully declare that the lost children would have become the rulers of Apacheria. Building on the theme of lost children, the parents play an audiobook of Lord of the Flies (which the son quickly becomes obsessed with).

Observing a mixture of disturbing responses to the migrants’ plight in media representations, the narrator worries it might not be possible to develop her migrant story sound project in a responsible way. She reflects:

Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, […] 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 [becomes] a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward (79).

As they journey through the Great Smoky Mountains, the family’s spirits are temporarily lifted by beauty and a sense of togetherness. In Asheville, North Carolina, they cheerfully visit a bookstore. The husband picks out a map they don’t really need. The boy picks out an illustrated copy of Lord of the Flies. The girl picks out a book called The Book With No Pictures (a playful text about how reading a book with no pictures is better than reading a book with pictures). The narrator buys Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and her annotated screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour (two texts that focus heavily on themes of ephemeral love and loss).

The narrator starts reading through a book called Elegies for Lost Children, which she claims is the sole work of an Italian writer named Ella Camposanto (though no such writer has ever lived, and she appears to be Luiselli’s fictional invention). The narrator often records her reflections as she reads Elegies for Lost Children, and reproductions of these “elegies” appear intermittently throughout the novel (though Luiselli never specifies if these “elegies” are direct quotations from the book, documents of the narrator’s recordings, or some combination of both).

As the family leaves Appalachia, old tensions seem to take over. The narrator and her husband argue more often. In the car, the boy argues with his sister when she doesn’t want to listen to Lord of the Flies. He stubbornly insists that she should care about the book because it’s a classic. The narrator realizes that the boy is performing the role of her husband in arguments with his sister, whereas the girl is performing the role she often finds herself in with her husband.

Though she claims to still love her husband, the narrator’s feelings of distance and alienation grow. She reflects on the subtle but deeply significant differences in their work, their perspectives, and their methods, musing:

I was a documentarist and he was a documentarian, which meant that I was more like a chemist and he was more like a librarian. What he never understood about how I saw my work—the work I did before we met and the work I was probably going to go back to now, with the lost children’s story—was that pragmatic storytelling, commitment to truth, and a direct attack on issues was not, as he thought, a mere adherence to a conventional form of radio journalism” (99).

She realizes that despite their love, they are probably going to get a divorce because they simply see things too differently.

In Memphis, however, the family experiences another moment of contented connection. They spend the night at a whimsical motel with a guitar-shaped pool and images of Elvis on every surface. At the boy’s request, they give each other “Apache nicknames.” The girl chooses the name Memphis. The father designates his son as Swift Feather and his wife as Lucky Arrow. The son calls his father Papa Cochise. The narrator happily falls asleep, feeling a sense of rare stability hearing these familial nicknames.

The husband’s third archive box contains four more notebooks, “On Reading,” “On Listening,” “On Translating,” and “On Time”; nine books, including the aforementioned Untitled for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger; and a folder with musical scores of Metamorphosis by Phillip Glass and Cantigas de Santa Maria by Jordi Savall.

Manuela calls the narrator to report that her two daughters have “disappeared.” Manuela explains that a Border Patrol officer called her a week ago, claiming her daughter were put on plane heading to Mexico City. Relatives waited at the airport to pick up her daughters, but they never arrived. Manuela suspects that the girls ran away or that they were secreted away by a helpful friend and are now on their way to reach her.

This call triggers a memory to a Mexican priest the narrator met at the New York City federal immigration court. The priest spoke at length with the narrator about all the migrants who “disappear” in ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids. He explained that there’s a daily federal quota for migrant detention centers of 34,000 people and that this number is still growing (meaning that every day, at least 34,000 people must occupy beds within the detention centers). After spending indefinite time in these centers, most migrants are either deported or pipelined to federal prisons, where they’re forced to work 16-hour days for less than $3 per day. Many, however, mysteriously vanish. The narrator then recorded a protest led by this priest wherein a line of people shouted out the names of their relatives who had “disappeared.”

“Missing” features more small, fleeting moments of family bonding. They all enjoy buying boots together at a Walmart in Little Rock. The boy insists on keeping the boot boxes to store his future collections, and the narrator reflects that this is something she would do. Walking across the vast Walmart parking lot, she recalls an underlined passage from her copy of Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: “the world was as deserted as a star” (118).

At the motel that night, the narrator feels restless and anxious. Unable to sleep, she walks to Dick’s Whiskey Bar. There, she meets an attractive, unattached man and contemplates sleeping with him. She decides not to, however, because their life situations are simply too different.

In the car, the husband tells the children the history of how the United States “stole” Arizona from Mexico. He explains that the United States refers to this theft as the Mexican-American War, but Mexicans call it the American Intervention. He also tells stories of ways the Apaches would avenge themselves by stealing from white ranchers, taking cows, whiskey, and children from ranches. He explains that the children would be adopted as Apaches and that they often enjoyed the freedom of their Apache lives more than the long work days they experienced on the ranches. The children contemplate these stories and claim that they would choose to stay with the Apaches if they were taken away.

As the family heads further and further south, people they meet seem suspicious of them. At first, they simplify explanations of their activities, claiming they’re working on a sound documentary. When people struggle to understand this explanation, they pretend to be French filmmakers. They go too far with their pretense, however, when they tell a local sheriff that they are working on a spaghetti Western. The sheriff insists they join him for dinner and a movie in his home. They plead that they’re too busy for dinner, and the sheriff suggests they visit the UFO Museum in Roswell.

The family goes to a town called Geronimo to visit the cemetery where Geronimo is buried. In the cemetery, the husband and son work together to record atmospheric sounds for his soundscape. The narrator reflects:

He’s somehow trying to capture their past presence in the world, and making it audible, despite their current absence, by sampling any echoes that still reverberate of them. […] The inventory of echoes was not a collection of sounds that have been lost […] but rather one of sounds that were present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost (141).

The narrator reads and records herself reading from Elegies for Lost Children, hoping that these recordings might become part of her project. The chapter includes the first two transcriptions from these readings, identified as “The First Elegy” and “The Second Elegy.” In these “elegies,” six children ride together on the back of a train in the dark, listening to the sounds of sparks and branches snapping. The narrator is struck by these sound details and the idea of “echoes” that the lost children leave behind.

As the section closes, the narrator begins to feel increasingly emotionally disoriented, as though she is living in an echo chamber of historic traumas wherein everything there is “not there: Geronimo, Hrabal, Stanford, names on tombstones, our future, lost children, the two missing girls” (146).

This box is more extensive than the other boxes, containing four notebooks (“On Mapping,” “On History,” “On Reenactment,” and “On Erasing”), eight books (mostly Apache-related histories), one brochure (“Desert Adaptations” from the National Park Service), four maps (of New Mexico, Arizona, Sonora, and Chihuahua), one tape (Hands in Our Names by Karima Walker), one CD (Echo Canyon by James Newton), and a folder with five stereographs and copies (a postcard of five men with their ankles chained, a photo of two young men who are chained, seven people outside an adobe house on the San Carlos Reservation, Geronimo holding a rifle, and Geronimo and fellow prisoners on their way to Florida by train, taken September 10, 1886).

In New Mexico, the family hears a radio story about a private plane that will deport “alien kids” (ironically, in Artesia, near Roswell and the UFO Museum). They decide to drive there and look for Manuela’s daughters, promising the boy they will go to the UFO Museum afterward.

The boy and girl continue their odd roleplaying games in the back of the car. They pretend to be “lost children” wandering in the desert without adults. They blend stories they’ve heard about refugees and Apaches into their games, pretending to shoot poison arrows at Border Patrol officers, imagining that they’re hiding in desert bushes. The girl repeatedly remarks that they need to get to Echo Canyon. The boy requests that they play the David Bowie song “Space Oddity,” which he has become very attached to. The boy and his sister play a game wherein one performs the role of “Ground Control” and the other performs the role of “Major Tom,” and they call to one another through imaginary walkie-talkies. The narrator feels oddly disturbed and lonely watching their games. She turns to her husband again and again and asks what he is thinking. He always replies, “Nothing.”

That night in the motel, the boy asks his mother about the meaning of Lord of the Flies. He is frustrated by her initial explanation: that it’s about Golding’s idea of human nature and social contracts. He asks, “If you and Papa and every adult disappeared, what would happen with our social contract?” (162). In response, she reads him the third elegy from Elegies for Lost Children, which describes children crossing a treacherous river on an inflated tire tube. In the story, when one of the children asks how long it will take to cross, the man guiding them throws one of her shoes into the water and tells the child she’ll reach the other side when the shoe does. After she believes he has fallen asleep, she reads the fourth elegy, which describes the children waiting in place, as they have been told to do when their adult guide goes away. As she falls asleep, she is haunted by the question of what happens when children are left alone.

The next day, they reach a fenced-in area of the airport where the “alien children” will take the private plane to Mexico. Through their binoculars, they see 15 children boarding the plane. They look for Manuela’s daughters in their matching dresses, but they don’t see the girls. As the “lost children” board the plane, the husband records the atmospheric sounds. The boy takes a picture and asks to use his binoculars. The narrator reflects:

I have an impulse to cover his eyes, the way I still sometimes do when we watch certain movies together even though he’s older now. But the binoculars have already brought the world too close to him, and the world has already projected itself inside him—so what should I protect him from now, and how, and what for? All that’s left for me to do, I think, is to make sure the sounds he records in his mind right now, the sounds that will overlay this instant that will always live inside him, are sounds that will assure him he was not alone that day (184).

She tries to make him feel less “alone” by playing the “Space Oddity” walkie-talkie game with him, repeatedly asking, “What do you see, Ground Control?”