Lost Children Archive. Valeria Luiselli

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      We argued that empty boxes would be a waste of space. But our arguments found good counterarguments, or perhaps we were tired of finding counterarguments in general, so that was that. In total, we had seven boxes. They would travel with us, like an appendix of us, in the trunk of the car we were going to buy. I numbered them carefully with a black marker. Boxes I through IV were my husband’s, Box VI was the girl’s, Box VII was the boy’s. My box was Box V.

      APACHERIA

      At the start of the summer break, which was only a little more than a month away, we’d drive toward the southwest. In the meantime, during that last month in the city, we still played out our lives as if nothing fundamental were going to change between us. We bought a cheap used car, one of those Volvo wagons, 1996, black, with a huge trunk. We went to two weddings, and both times were told we were a beautiful family. Such handsome children, so different-looking, said an old lady who smelled of talcum powder. We cooked dinner, watched movies, and discussed plans for the trip. Some nights, the four of us studied the big map together, choosing routes we’d take, successfully ignoring the fact that they possibly mapped out the road to our not being together.

      But where exactly are we going? the children asked.

      We still didn’t know, or hadn’t agreed on anything. I wanted to go to Texas, the state with the largest number of immigration detention centers for children. There were children, thousands of them, locked up in Galveston, Brownsville, Los Fresnos, El Paso, Nixon, Canutillo, Conroe, Harlingen, Houston, and Corpus Christi. My husband wanted the trip to end in Arizona.

      Why Arizona? we all asked.

      And where in Arizona? I wanted to know.

      Finally, one night, my husband spread the big map out on our bed and called the children and me into our room. He swiped the tip of his index finger from New York all the way down to Arizona, and then tapped twice on a point, a tiny dot in the southeastern corner of the state. He said:

      Here.

      Here what? the boy asked.

      Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, he said.

      And? the boy asked.

      And that is the heart of Apacheria, he answered.

      Is that where we’re going? the girl asked.

      That’s right, my husband replied.

      Why there? the boy asked him.

      Because that’s where the last Chiricahua Apaches lived.

      So what? the boy retorted.

      So nothing, so that’s where we’re going, to Apacheria, where the last free peoples on the entire American continent lived before they had to surrender to the white-eyes.

      What’s a white-eye? the girl asked, possibly imagining a terrifying something.

      That’s just what the Chiricahuas called the white Europeans and white Americans: white-eyes.

      Why? she wanted to know, and I was also curious, but the boy snatched back the reins of the conversation, steering it his way.

      But why Apaches, Pa?

      Because.

      Because what?

      Because they were the last of something.

      PRONOUNS

      It was decided. We would drive to the southeastern tip of Arizona, where he would stay, or rather, where they would stay, for an undetermined amount of time, but where she and I would probably not stay. She and I would go all the way there with them, but we’d probably return to the city at the end of the summer. I would finish the sound documentary about refugee children and would then need to find a job. She would have to go back to school. I couldn’t simply relocate to Arizona, leave everything behind, unless I found a way and a reason to follow my husband in this new venture of his without having to abandon my own plans and projects. Though it wasn’t even clear to me if, beyond this summer road trip together, he indeed wanted to be followed.

      I, he, we, they, she: pronouns shifted place constantly in our confused syntax while we negotiated the terms of the relocation. We started speaking more hesitantly about everything, even the trivial things, and also started speaking more softly, like we were tiptoeing with our tongues, careful to the point of paranoia not to slip and fall on the suddenly very unstable grounds of our family space. There is a poem by Anne Carson called “Reticent Sonnet” that doesn’t help solve this at all. It’s about how pronouns are “part of a system that argues with shadow,” though perhaps she means that we—people, and not pronouns—are “part of a system that argues with shadow.” But then again, we is a pronoun, so maybe she means both things at the same time.

      In any case, the question of how the final placement of all our pronouns would ultimately rearrange our lives became our center of gravity. It became the dark, silent core around which all our thoughts and questions circulated.

      What will we do after we reach Apacheria? the boy would ask repeatedly in the weeks that followed.

      Yes, what next? I’d ask my husband later, when we crawled into bed.

      Then we’ll see what next, he would say.

      Apacheria, of course, does not really exist anymore. But it existed in my husband’s mind and in nineteenth-century history books, and, more and more, it came to exist in the children’s imaginations:

      Will there be horses there?

      Will there be arrows?

      Will we have beds, toys, food, enemies?

      When will we leave?

      We told them we’d leave on the day after the boy’s tenth birthday.

      COSMOLOGIES

      During our last days in the city, before we left for Apacheria, our apartment filled with ants. Big black ants in the shape of eights, with a suicidal drive for sugar. If we left a glass of something sweet on a kitchen counter, the following morning we’d find twenty ant corpses floating in it, drowned in their own hedonism. They explored kitchen counters, cabinets, the sink—all normal haunts for ants. But then they moved on to our beds, our drawers, and eventually our elbows and necks. One night I became convinced that if I sat silent long enough, I could hear them marching inside the walls, taking over the apartment’s invisible veins. We tried sealing every crevice in the molding between the walls and floors with tape, but it peeled off after a few hours. The boy came up with the much better idea of using Play-Doh to seal cracks, and for a while it did the trick, but the ants soon found a way in again.

      One morning, the girl left a dirty pair of panties on the bathroom floor after her shower, and when I picked them up a few hours later to put them in the laundry basket, I noticed that they were alive with ants. It seemed like a deep violation of some sort, a bad sign. The boy found the phenomenon fascinating; and the girl, hilarious. Over dinner that night, the children reported the incident to their father. I wanted to say that I thought those ominous ants foreshadowed something. But how could I explain that to the family, to anyone, without sounding crazy? So I shared only half my thought:

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