Excerpt from Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The two of us were paired up and given the task of recording all the languages spoken in the city, over a period of four calendar years. The description of our duties specified: "surveying the most linguistically diverse metropolis on the planet, and mapping the entirety of languages that its adults and children speak." We were good at it, it turned out; maybe even really good. We made a perfect team of two. Then, after working together for just a few months, we fell in love—completely, irrationally, predictably, and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird, not knowing who was the rock was and who the bird—and when summer arrived, we decided to move in together.

The girl remembers nothing about that period, of course. The boy says he remembers that I was always wearing an old blue cardigan that had lost a couple of buttons and came down to my knees, and that sometimes, when we rode the subway or buses—always with freezing air pouring out—I'd take it off and use it as a blanket to cover him and the girl, and that it smelled of tobacco and was itchy. Moving in together had been a rash decision—messy, confusing, urgent, and as beautiful and real as life feels when you're not thinking about its consequences. We became a tribe. Then came the consequences. We met each other's relatives, got married, started filing joint taxes, became a family.


Inventory

In the front seats: he and I. In the glove compartment: proof of insurance, registration, owner's manual, and road maps. In the backseat: the two children, their backpacks, a tissue box, and a blue cooler with water bottles and perishable snacks. And in the trunk: a small duffle bag with my Sony PCM-D50 digital voice recorder, headphones, cables, and extra batteries; a large Porta-Brace organizer for his collapsible boom pole, mic, headphones, cables, zeppelin and dead-cat windshield, and the 702T Sound Device. Also: four small suitcases with our clothes, and seven bankers boxes (15" x 12" x 10"), double-thick bottoms and solid lids.


Covalence

Despite our efforts to keep it all firmly together, there has always been an anxiety around each one's place in the family. We're like those problematic molecules you learn about in chemistry classes, with covalent instead of ionic bonds—or maybe it's the other way around. The boy lost his biological mother at birth, though that topic is never spoken about. My husband delivered the fact to me, in one sentence, early on in our relationship, and I immediately understood that it was not a matter open to further questions. I don't like to be asked about the girl's biological father, either, so the two of us have always kept a respectful pact of silence about those elements of our and our children's pasts.

In response to all that, perhaps, the children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They're like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism. The girl asks to hear the same stories over and over again. The boy asks about moments of their childhood together, as if they had happened decades or even centuries ago. So we tell them. We tell them all the stories we're able to remember. Always, if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time. So we rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning.

Excerpted from Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. Copyright © 2019 by Valeria Luiselli. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.