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SARGASSO SEA

It’s past noon when we finally get to the Baltimore aquarium. The boy escorts us through the crowds and takes us straight to the main pool, where the giant turtle is. He makes us stand there, observing that sad, beautiful animal paddling cyclically around her waterspace, looking like the soul of a pregnant woman—haunted, inadequate, trapped in time. After a few minutes, the girl notices the missing flipper:

Where’s her other arm? she asks her brother, horrified.

These turtles only need one flipper, so they evolved to having only one, and that’s called Darwinism, he states.

We’re not sure if his answer is a sign of sudden maturity that’s meant to protect his sister from the truth or a mismanagement of evolutionary theory. Probably the latter. We let it pass. The wall text, which all of us except the girl can read, explains that the turtle lost the flipper in the Long Island Sound, where she was rescued eleven years ago.

Eleven: my age plus one! the boy says, bursting into a flame of enthusiasm, which he normally represses.

Standing there, watching the enormous turtle, it’s difficult not to think of her as a metaphor for something. But before I can figure out for what, exactly, the boy starts lecturing us. Turtles like Calypso, he explains, are born on the East Coast and immediately swim out into the Atlantic, all alone. They sometimes take up to a decade to return to coastal waters. The hatchlings start their journey in the east and are then carried by the warm currents of the Gulf Stream into the deep. They eventually reach the Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.

I’ve heard that word before, Sargasso, and never knew what it meant. There’s a line of an Ezra Pound poem I’ve never quite understood or remembered the title of: “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.” It leaps back to me now, while the boy continues to talk about this turtle and her journey in the North Atlantic seas. Was Pound thinking barren? Was he thinking waste? Or is the image one of ships cutting through centuries of rubbish? Or is it just about human minds trapped in futile cycles of thought, unable to ever free themselves from destructive patterns?

Before we leave the aquarium, the boy wants to take his first Polaroid picture. He makes his father and me stand in front of the main pool, our backs to the turtle. He holds his new camera steady. The girl stands next to him—she, holding an invisible camera—and as we freeze, upright, and smile awkwardly for them, they both look at us as if we were their children and they the parents:

Say cheese.

So we grin and say:

Cheese.

But the boy’s picture comes out entirely creamy white, as if he’d documented our future instead of the present. Or maybe his picture is a document not of our physical bodies but of our minds, wandering, oaring, lost in the almost motionless gyre—asking why, thinking where, saying what next?

MAPS

If we mapped our lives back in the city, if we drew a map of the daily circuits and routines the four of us left behind, it would look nothing like the route map we will now follow across this vast country. Our daily lives back in the city traced lines that branched outward—school, work, errands, appointments, meetings, bookstore, corner deli, notary public, doctor’s office—but always those lines circled around, brought back and reunited in a single point at the end of day. That point was the apartment where we had lived together for four years. It was a small but luminous space where we had become a family. It was the center of gravity we had now, suddenly, lost.

Inside the car, although we all sit at arm’s length from one another, we are four unconnected dots—each in our seat, with our private thoughts, each dealing silently with our varying moods and unspoken fears. Sunk in the passenger seat, I study the map with the tip of a pencil. Highways and roads vein the enormous piece of paper, folded several times (it’s a map of the entire country, too big to be fully unfolded inside the car). I follow long lines, red or yellow or black, to beautiful names like Memphis, to names unseemly—Truth or Consequences, Shakespeare—to old names now resignified by new mythologies: Arizona, Apache, Cochise Stronghold. And when I glance up from my map, I see the long, straight line of the highway thrusting us forward into an uncertain future.

ACOUSTEMOLOGY

Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid upon it. For us, as a family, the sound of the radio has always charted the threefold transition from sleep, where we were each alone, to our tight togetherness in the early morning, to the wide world outside our home. We know the sound of the radio better than anything. It was the first thing we heard every morning in our apartment in New York, when my husband got out of bed and turned it on. We all heard the sound of it, bouncing off somewhere deep in our pillows and in our minds, and walked slowly from our beds into the kitchen. The morning then filled with opinions, urgency, facts, the smell of coffee beans, and we were all sitting at the table, saying:

Pass the milk.

Here’s the salt.

Thank you.

Did you hear what they just said?

Terrible news.

Now, inside the car, when we drive through more populated areas, we scan for a radio signal and tune in. Whenever I can find news about the situation at the border, I raise the volume and we all listen: hundreds of children arriving alone, every day, thousands every week. The broadcasters are calling it an immigration crisis. A mass influx of children, they call it, a sudden surge. They are undocumented, they are illegals, they are aliens, some say. They are refugees, legally entitled to protection, others argue. This law says that they should be protected; this other amendment says that they should not. Congress is divided, public opinion is divided, the press is thriving on a surplus of controversy, nonprofits are working overtime. Everyone has an opinion on the issue; no one agrees on anything.

PRESENTIMENT, THAT LONG SHADOW

We agree to drive only until dusk that day, and the days that will follow. Never more than that. The children become difficult as soon as the light wanes. They sense the end of daytime, and the presentiment of longer shadows falling on the world shifts their mood, eclipses their softer daylight personalities. The boy, usually so mild in temperament, becomes mercurial and irritable; the girl, always full of enthusiasm and vitality, becomes demanding and a little melancholic.

JUKEBOXES & COFFINS

The town is called Front Royal, in Virginia. The sun is setting, and white supremacist something is playing full blast in the gas station where we stop to fill the tank. The cashier crosses herself quickly and quietly, avoiding eye contact, when our total comes to $66.60. We had planned to find a restaurant or a diner, but after this, back in the car, we decide we’d rather pass—unnoticed. Less than a mile from the gas station, we find a Motel 6 and pull into the parking lot. Checkout is prepaid, there’s coffee in the reception area twenty-four hours a day, and a long, clinical corridor leads to our room. We fetch a few basics from the trunk of the car. When we open the door, we find a room flooded with the kind of light that makes even soulless spaces like this one feel like a lovely childhood memory: flower-stamped bedsheets tucked tight under the mattress, dust particles suspended in a beam of sunlight that comes in through slightly parted green velvet curtains.

The children occupy the space immediately, jump between the two beds, turn the television on, turn it off, drink water from the tap. For dinner, sitting on the edges of our beds, we eat dry cereal from the box, and it tastes good. When we’re done, the children want to take a bath, so I fill the tub halfway for them, and then step outside the room to join my husband, our door left ajar in case one of the kids calls us in. They always need help with all the little bathroom routines. At least as far as it concerns bathroom habits, parenthood seems at times like teaching an extinct, complicated religion. There are more rituals than rationales behind them, more faith than reasons: unscrew the lid off the toothpaste tube like this, squeeze it like that; unroll only this amount of toilet paper, then either fold it this way or scrunch it up like this to wipe; squirt the shampoo into your hand first, not directly on your head; pull the plug to let the water drain only once you’re outside the bathtub.

My husband has taken out his recording gear, and is sitting by the door of our room, holding up his boom. I sit next to him quietly, not wanting my presence to modify whatever he’s trying to sample. We sit there, cross-legged on the cement floor, resting our backs against the wall. We open beer cans and roll cigarettes. In the room next door, a dog barks relentlessly. From another room, three or four doors down, a man and his teenage daughter appear. He is slow and large; she is toothpick-legged, dressed only in a swimsuit and an unzipped jacket. They walk to a pickup parked in front of their door and step up. When the motor roars, the dog stops barking, then resumes more anxiously. I sip my beer, following the pickup as it drives away. The image of those two strangers—father, daughter, no mother—getting into a pickup and driving together to a possible swimming pool for night practice in some town nearby reminds me of something Jack Kerouac said about Americans: After seeing them, “you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” Though maybe Kerouac had said it of Robert Frank’s pictures in his book The Americans, and not of Americans in general. My husband records a few more minutes of the dog barking, until, summoned by the children—in urgent need of help with the toothpaste and towels—we step back inside.

CHECKPOINT

I know I won’t be able to sleep, so when the children are finally tucked into bed, I go outside again, walk down the long corridor to our car, and open the trunk. I stand in front of our portable mess, studying the contents of the trunk as if reading an index, trying to decide which page to go to.

Well stacked on the left side of the trunk are our boxes, five of them, with our archive—though it’s optimistic to call our collected mess an archive—plus the two empty boxes for the children’s future archive. I peek inside Boxes I and II, both my husband’s. Some of the books in them are about documenting or about keeping and consulting archives during any documentary process; others are photography books. In Box II, I find Sally Mann’s Immediate Family. Sitting down on the curbside, I flip through it. I’ve always liked the way she sees children and what she chooses to see as childhood: vomit, bruises, nakedness, wet beds, defiant gazes, confusion, innocence, untamed wildness. I also like the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant. She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.

It comes to me that maybe, by shuffling around in my husband’s boxes like this, once in a while, when he’s not looking, and 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. I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you’ve finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface.

I search inside my husband’s Box III, which at first glance seems like an all-male compendium of “going a journey,” conquering and colonizing: Heart of Darkness, The Cantos, The Waste Land, Lord of the Flies, On the Road, 2666, the Bible. Among these I find a small white book—the galleys of a novel by Nathalie Léger called Untitled for Barbara Loden. It looks a little out of place there, squeezed and silent, so I take it out and head back to the room.

ARCHIVE

In their beds, they all sound warm and vulnerable, like a pack of sleeping wolves. I can recognize each one by the way they breathe, asleep: my husband next to me, and the two children next to each other in the contiguous double bed. The easiest to make out is the girl, who almost purrs as she sucks arrhythmically at her thumb.

I lie in bed, listening to them. The room is dark, and the light from the parking lot frames the curtains in a whiskey orange. No cars pass on the highway. If I close my eyes, disquieting visions and thoughts churn inside my eye sockets and spill over into my mind. I keep my eyes open and try to imagine the eyes of my sleeping tribe. The boy’s eyes are hazel brown, usually dreamy and soft, but can suddenly ignite with joy or rage and blaze, like the meteoric eyes of souls too large and fierce to go gentle—“gentle into that good night.” The girl’s eyes are black and enormous. Come tears, and a red ring appears instantly around their edges. They are completely transparent in their sudden mood shifts. I think when I was a child, my eyes were like hers. My adult eyes are probably more constant, unyielding, and more ambivalent in their small shifts. My husband’s eyes are gray, slanted, and often troubled. When he drives, he looks into the line of the highway like he’s reading a difficult book, and furrows his brows. He has the same look in his eyes when he’s recording. I don’t know what my husband sees when he studies my eyes; he doesn’t look very often these days.

I turn on my bedside lamp and stay up late, reading the novel by Nathalie Léger, underlining parts of sentences:

“violence, yes, but the acceptable face of violence, the kind of banal cruelty enacted within the family”

“the hum of ordinary life”

“the story of a woman who has lost something important but does not know exactly what”

“a woman on the run or in hiding, concealing her pain and her refusal, putting on an act in order to break free”

I’m reading the same book in bed when the boy wakes up before sunrise the next morning. His sister and father are still asleep. I have hardly slept all night. He makes an effort to seem like he’s been awake for a long time, or like he’d never fallen asleep and we’d been having an intermittent conversation all the while. Wrenching himself up, in a loud, clear voice, he asks what I’m reading.

A French book, I whisper.

What’s it about?

Nothing, really. It’s about a woman who’s looking for something.

Looking for what?

I don’t know yet; she doesn’t know yet.

Are they all like that?

What do you mean?

The French books you read, are they all like that?

Like what?

Like that one, white and small, with no pictures on the cover.

GPS

This morning we’ll drive across the Shenandoah Valley, a place I don’t know but had just seen last night—all partial slivers and borrowed memories—through Sally Mann’s photographs taken in that same valley.

To appease our children, and fill the winding hours as we make our way up the mountain roads, my husband tells stories about the old American southwest. He tells them about the strategies Chief Cochise used to hide from his enemies in the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains, and how, even after he died, he came back to haunt them. People said that, even today, he could be spotted around the Dos Cabezas Peaks. The children listen most attentively when their father tells them about the life of Geronimo. When he speaks about Geronimo, his words perhaps bring time closer to us, containing it inside the car instead of letting it stretch out beyond us like an unattainable goal. He has their full attention, and I listen, too: Geronimo was the last man in the Americas to surrender to the white-eyes. He became a medicine man. He was Mexican by nationality but hated Mexicans, whom Apaches called Nakaiye, “those who come and go.” Mexican soldiers had killed his three children, his mother, and his wife. He never learned English. He acted as an interpreter between Apache and Spanish for Chief Cochise. Geronimo was a sort of Saint Jerome, my husband says.

Why Saint Jerome? I ask.

He adjusts his hat and begins to explain something, in professorial detail, about Saint Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin, until I lose interest, the children fall asleep, and we both fall silent, or perhaps fall into a kind of noise, distracted by sudden demands of the route: highways merging, speed checks, roadwork ahead, dangerous curves, a tollbooth—look for spare change and pass the coffee.

We follow a map. Against everyone’s recommendations, we decided not to use a GPS. I have a dear friend whose father worked unhappily in a big company until he was seventy years old and had saved enough money to start his own business, following his one true passion. He opened a publishing house, called The New Frontier, which made thousands of gorgeous little nautical maps, tailored carefully and lovingly for the ships that sailed the Mediterranean. But six months after he opened his company, the GPS was invented. And that was it: an entire life gone. When my friend told me this story, I vowed never to use a GPS. So, of course, we get lost often, especially when we’re trying to leave a town. We realize now that for the past hour or so, we’ve been driving in circles and are back in Front Royal.

STOP

On a road called Happy Creek, we get pulled over by a police car. My husband turns off the engine, takes off his hat, and rolls down his window, smiling at the policewoman. She asks for his license, registration, and proof of insurance. I frown and mumble in my seat, incapable of restraining the visceral, immature way my body responds to any form of reprimand from an authority figure. Like a teenager washing dishes, I reach heavily and wearily into the glove box and collect all the documents the policewoman requests. I slap them into my husband’s hands. He, in turn, offers them to her ceremoniously, as if he were giving her hot tea in a porcelain cup. She explains that we’ve been pulled over because we failed to stop fully at the sign, and she points to it—that bright red octagonal object over there, which clearly pins the intersection between Happy Creek Road and Dismal Hollow Road and signals a very simple instruction: Stop. Only then do I notice this other street, Dismal Hollow Road, its name written in black capital letters on the white aluminum signpost, the name a more accurate label for the place it designates. My husband nods, and nods again, and says, sorry, and again, sorry. The policewoman returns our documents, convinced now we are not dangerous, but before she lets us go, she asks a final question:

And how old are these lovely children, may God bless them?

Nine and five, my husband says.

Ten! the boy corrects him from the backseat.

Sorry sorry sorry, yes, they’re ten and five.

I know the girl wants to say something, too, to intervene somehow; I sense it even though I’m not looking at her. She probably wants to explain that soon she will be six instead of five. But she doesn’t even open her mouth. Like my husband, and unlike me, she has a deep, instinctive fear of authority figures, a fear that expresses itself in both of them as earnest respectfulness, even submissiveness. In me, this instinct comes out as a sort of defiant defensive unwillingness to admit to an error. My husband knows this, and he makes sure I never talk in situations where we have to negotiate ourselves out of something.

Sir—the policewoman says now—in Virginia, we care for our children. Any child under the age of seven has to ride in a proper booster seat. For the child’s safety, may God bless her.

Seven, ma’am? Not five?

Seven, sir.

Sorry, officer, so sorry. I—we—had no idea. Where can we buy a booster seat around here?

Contrary to my expectations, instead of claiming her right to rhetorical usufruct of his admitted wrongs, instead of using his defeat as a trampoline from which to spring her own power into a concrete infliction of punishment, she suddenly parts her lips, layered in bright pink lipstick, and offers a smile. A beautiful smile, in fact—shy but also generous. She gives us directions to a shop, very precise directions, and then, modulating her tone, offers us advice on which exact booster seat to buy: the best ones are the ones without the back part, and we must look for the ones with metal buckles, not plastic. In the end, though, I convince my husband to not stop to buy the booster seat. In exchange, I agree to use the Google Maps GPS, just this once, so we can get out of the maze of this town and back onto a road.

MAP

We drive onward, southwest-bound, and listen to the news on the radio, news about all the children traveling north. They travel, alone, on trains and on foot. They travel without their fathers, without their mothers, without suitcases, without passports. Always without maps. They have to cross national borders, rivers, deserts, horrors. And those who finally arrive are placed in limbo, are told to wait.

Have you heard from Manuela and her two girls, by the way? my husband asks me.

I tell him no, I haven’t. Last time I heard from her, right before we left New York, her girls were still at the detention center in New Mexico, waiting either for legal permission to be sent to their mother or for a final deportation order. I’ve tried to call her a couple of times, but she doesn’t pick up. I imagine she’s still waiting to hear what will happen to her daughters, hoping they will be granted refugee status.

What does “refugee” mean, Mama? the girl asks from the backseat.

I look for possible answers to give her. I suppose that someone who is fleeing is still not a refugee. A refugee is someone who has already arrived somewhere, in a foreign land, but must wait for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived. Refugees wait in detention centers, shelters, or camps; in federal custody and under the gaze of armed officials. They wait in long lines for lunch, for a bed to sleep in, wait with their hands raised to ask if they can use the bathroom. They wait to be let out, wait for a telephone call, for someone to claim or pick them up. And then there are refugees who are lucky enough to be finally reunited with their families, living in a new home. But even those still wait. They wait for the court’s notice to appear, for a court ruling, for either deportation or asylum, wait to know where they will end up living and under what conditions. They wait for a school to admit them, for a job opening, for a doctor to see them. They wait for visas, documents, permission. They wait for a cue, for instructions, and then wait some more. They wait for their dignity to be restored.

What does it mean to be a refugee? I suppose I could tell the girl:

A child refugee is someone who waits.

But instead, I tell her that a refugee is someone who has to find a new home. Then, to soften the conversation, distract her from all this, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle. Immediately, like a current sweeping over us, everything is shuffled back into a more lighthearted reality, or at least a more manageable unreality:

Who is singing this fa fa fa fa fa song? the girl asks.

Talking Heads.

Did these heads have any hair?

Yes, of course.

Long or short?

Short.

We’re almost out of gas. We need to find a detour, find a town, my husband says, anywhere that we might find a gas station. I take the map out of the glove box and study it.

CREDIBLE FEAR

When undocumented children arrive at the border, they are subjected to an interrogation conducted by a Border Patrol officer. It’s called the credible fear interview, and its purpose is to determine whether the child has good enough reasons to seek asylum in the country. It always includes more or less the same questions:

Why did you come to the United States?

On what date did you leave your country?

Why did you leave your country?

Did anyone threaten to kill you?

Are you afraid to return to your country? Why?

I think about all those children, undocumented, who cross Mexico in the hands of a coyote, riding atop train cars, trying to not fall off, to not fall into the hands of immigration authorities, or into the hands of drug lords who would enslave them in poppy fields, if they don’t kill them. If they make it all the way to the US border, they try to turn themselves in, but if they don’t find a Border Patrol officer, the children walk into the desert. If they do find an officer or are found by one, they are put in detention and held to an interrogation, asked:

Why did you come to the United States?

Be careful! I shout, looking up from the map toward the road. My husband jerks the steering wheel. The car swerves a little, but he regains control.

Just focus on the map and I’ll focus on the road, my husband says, and swipes the back of his hand across his forehead.

Okay, I answer, but you were about to hit that rock, or raccoon, or whatever that was.

Jesus, he says.

Jesus what?

Jesus Fucking Christ, he says.

What?

Just get us to a gas station.

Unplugging her thumb from her mouth, the girl grunts, puffs, and tells us to quit it, punctuating our amorphous, flaky, ungrammatical yapping with the resolve of her suddenly civilized annoyance. Without losing her poise, she sighs a deep, weary period right into our stream of words, clearing her throat. We stop talking. Then, when she knows she has our full, silent, contrite attention, she footnotes a piece of final advice to round up her intervention. She sometimes speaks to us—though she’s still only five years old, not even six yet, and still sucks her thumb and occasionally wets her bed—with the same forgiving air psychiatrists exude when they hand out prescriptions to their weak-minded patients:

Now, Papa. I think it’s time you smoked another one of your little sticks. And you, Mama, you just need to focus on your map and on your radio. Okay? Both of you just have to look at the bigger picture now.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

No one looks at the bigger map, historical and geographical, of a refugee population’s migration routes. Most people think of refugees and migrants as a foreign problem. Few conceive of migration simply as a national reality. Searching online about the children’s crisis, I find a New York Times article from a couple of years back, titled “Children at the Border.” It’s an article set up as a Q&A, except the author both asks the questions and replies to them, so perhaps it’s not quite a Q&A. To a question about where the children are from, the author answers that three-quarters of them are from “mostly poor and violent towns” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. I think of the words “mostly poor and violent towns” and the possible implications of that schematic way of mapping the origins of children who migrate to the United States. These children are utterly foreign to us, they seem to imply. They come from a barbaric reality. These children are also, most probably, not white. Then, after posing the question of why the children are not deported immediately, the reader is told: “Under an anti-trafficking statute adopted with bipartisan support … minors from Central America cannot be deported immediately and must be given a court hearing before they are deported. A United States policy allows Mexican minors caught crossing the border to be sent back quickly.” That word “allows” in the final sentence. It’s as if, in answer to the question “Why are the children not deported immediately?” the author of the article tried to offer relief, saying something like, don’t worry, at least we’re not keeping the Mexican children, because luckily there’s a policy that “allows” us to send them back quickly. Like Manuela’s girls, who would have been deported immediately, except some officer had been kind enough to let them pass. But how many children are sent back without even being given a chance to voice their credible or incredible fears?

No one thinks of the children arriving here now as refugees of a hemispheric war that extends, at least, from these very mountains, down across the country into the southern US and northern Mexican deserts, sweeping across the Mexican sierras, forests, and southern rain forests into Guatemala, into El Salvador, and all the way to the Celaque Mountains in Honduras. No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?

NO U-TURN

Why can’t we just go back home? asks the boy.

He is fidgeting with his Polaroid in the backseat, learning how to handle it, reading the instructions, grunting.

There’s nothing to take pictures of anyway, he complains. Everything we pass is old and ugly and looks haunted.

Is that true? Is everything haunted? asks the girl.

No baby, I say, nothing is haunted.

Though perhaps, in a way, it is. The deeper we drive into this land, the more I feel like I’m looking at remains and ruins. As we pass an abandoned dairy farm, the boy says:

Imagine the first person who ever milked a cow. What a strange person.

Zoophilia, I think, but I don’t say it. I don’t know what my husband thinks, but he doesn’t say anything either. The girl suggests that maybe that first cow milker thought that if he pulled hard enough—down there—the bell around the cow’s neck would ding-dong.

Chime, the boy corrects her.

And then suddenly milk came out, she concludes, ignoring her brother.

Adjusting the mirror, I see her: an ample smile, at once serene and mischievous. A slightly more reasonable explanation comes to me:

Maybe it was a human mother who had no milk to give her baby, so she decided to take it from the cow.

But the children are not convinced:

A mother with no milk?

That’s crazy, Mama.

That’s preposterous, Ma, please.

PEAKS & POINTS

As a teenager, I had a friend who would always look for a high spot whenever she had to make a decision or understand a difficult problem. A rooftop, a bridge, a mountain if available, a bunk bed, any kind of height. Her theory was that it was impossible to make a good decision or come to any relevant conclusion if you weren’t experiencing the vertiginous clarity that heights impose on you. Perhaps.

As we climb the mountain roads of the Appalachians, I can think more clearly, for the first time, about what has been happening to us as a family—to us as a couple, really—over the last months. I suppose that, over time, my husband started feeling that all our obligations as a couple and as a family—rent, bills, medical insurance—had forced him to take a more conventional path, farther and farther away from the kind of work he wanted to devote his life to. And that, some years later, it finally became clear to him that the life we’d made together was at odds with what he wanted. For months, trying to understand what was happening to us, I felt angry, blamed him, thought he was acting on whimsy—for novelty, for change, for other women, for whatever. But now, traveling together, physically closer than ever before but far from the scaffolding that had sustained the daily work in progress of our familial world and distanced from the project that had once brought us together, I realize I had been accumulating similar feelings. I needed to admit my share: although I hadn’t lit the match that started this fire, for months I had been leaving a trail of dry debris that was now fueling it.

The speed limit on the roads across the Appalachians is 25 miles per hour, which irritates my husband but which I find ideal. Even at this speed, though, it took me a few hours to notice that the trees along the mountain path are covered in kudzu. We had passed acres of woodland blanketed in it on our way up toward this high valley, but only now do we see it clearly. My husband explains to the children that kudzu was brought over from Japan in the nineteenth century, and that farmers were paid by the hour to plant it on harvested soil, in order to control erosion. They went overboard, though, and eventually the kudzu spread across the fields, crept up the mountains, and climbed up all the trees. It blocks the sunlight and sucks out all the water from them. The trees have no defense mechanism. From the higher parts of the mountain road, the sight is terrifying: like cancerous marks, patches of yellowing treetops freckle the forests of Virginia.

All those trees will die, asphyxiated, sucked dry by this bloody rootless creeper, my husband tells us, slowing down as we hit a curve.

But so will you, Pa, and all of us, and everyone else, the boy says.

Well, yes, his father admits, and grins. But that’s not the point.

Instructively, the girl then informs us:

The point is, the point is, the point is always pointy.

VALLEYS

We wind up and down the narrow, sinuous road, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and head west into a narrow valley cradled between two arms of the range, once more looking for a gas station. When we start to lose signal again, I turn off the radio, and the boy asks his father for stories, stories of the past in general. The girl interrupts now and then, asks him very concrete questions.

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.