Maps reappear throughout Lost Children Archive, beckoning the reader to examine the different “routes” we follow in our day-to-day lives, as well as different ways of being or feeling lost.

In the beginning of the novel, the narrator describes the imaginary “map” of their family’s lives in New York City as a web of routes to familiar places—“school, work, errands, appointments, meetings, bookstore, corner deli, notary public, doctor’s office” (38)—with their shared apartment as the center of the web. The narrator starts to feel spiritually “lost” when her husband’s soundscape project takes them away from the center of this web, following a straight route on a road map to Arizona. She significantly insists on having the physical map as their sole guiding text, explaining that she resents GPS because it put her friend’s father’s paper map store out of business. Because she insists on using only the road map, she frequently gets lost (which augments her spiritual sense of lostness).

The mother’s map of the desert—which she keeps in her archive box—tellingly inspires the boy and girl to become “lost children” and search for the two Xs (which the boy believes to be Manuela’s daughters). The boy also draws his own ludicrously oversimplified map based on what he believes he sees in his mother’s map.