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Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli


The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literatureSuppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then?A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head south west, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they’re hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they’re wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other.Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border.In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections – a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.























Copyright (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)


4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Aragi, Inc.: Excerpt of “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” from Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson, copyright © 2000 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Aragi, Inc. All rights reserved.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt of “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” from Collected Poems by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Galway Kinnell, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

International Editors’ Co., on behalf of Bárbara Jacobs and María Monterroso: “El Dinosaurio” by Augusto Monterroso, copyright © 1959 by Augusto Monterroso. Reprinted by permission of International Editors’ Co., on behalf of Bárbara Jacobs and María Monterroso.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008290023

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008290030

Version: 2019-01-09




Dedication (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)


To Maia and Dylan


Contents

Cover (#u79e51fbb-a697-51fb-90a5-0e57acefed4a)

Title Page (#u24ecfb4a-c659-5e50-9c81-9fe36cfd6ffb)

Copyright

Dedication

PART I: FAMILY SOUNDSCAPE

Relocations

Box I

Routes & Roots

Box II

Undocumented

Box III

Missing

Box IV

Removals

PART II: REENACTMENT

Deportations

Maps & Boxes

Box V

Continental Divide

Lost

PART III: APACHERIA

Dust Valleys

Heart of Light

Echo Canyon

PART IV: LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE

Box VI

Document

Box VII

Works Cited

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Valeria Luiselli

About the Publisher



PART I (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)




RELOCATIONS (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)


An archive presupposes an archivist, a hand that collects and classifies.

—ARLETTE FARGE



To leave is to die a little.

To arrive is never to arrive.

—MIGRANT PRAYER


DEPARTURE

Mouths open to the sun, they sleep. Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid. From the copilot seat, I glance back to check on them every so often, then turn around again to study the map. We advance in the slow lava of traffic toward the city limits, across the GW Bridge, and merge onto the interstate. An airplane passes above us and leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky. Behind the wheel, my husband adjusts his hat, dries his forehead with the back of his hand.



FAMILY LEXICON

I don’t know what my husband and I will say to each of our children one day. I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to pluck and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version—even though plucking, shuffling, and editing sounds is probably the best summary of what my husband and I do for a living. But the children will ask, because ask is what children do. And we’ll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.

The boy turned ten yesterday, just one day before we left New York. We got him good presents. He had specifically said:

No toys.

The girl is five, and for some weeks has been asking, insistently:

When do I turn six?

No matter our answer, she’ll find it unsatisfactory. So we usually say something ambiguous, like:

Soon.

In a few months.

Before you know it.

The girl is my daughter and the boy is my husband’s son. I’m a biological mother to one, a stepmother to the other, and a de facto mother in general to both of them. My husband is a father and a stepfather, to each one respectively, but also just a father. The girl and boy are therefore: step-sister, son, stepdaughter, daughter, step-brother, sister, stepson, brother. And because hyphenations and petty nuances complicate the sentences of everyday grammar—the us, the them, the our, the your—as soon as we started living together, when the boy was almost six and the girl still a toddler, we adopted the much simpler possessive adjective our to refer to them two. They became: our children. And sometimes: the boy, the girl. Quickly, the two of them learned the rules of our private grammar, and adopted the generic nouns Mama and Papa, or sometimes simply Ma and Pa. And until now at least, our family lexicon defined the scope and limits of our shared world.



FAMILY PLOT

My husband and I met four years ago, recording a soundscape of New York City. We were part of a large team of people working for New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. The soundscape was meant to sample and collect all the keynotes and the soundmarks that were emblematic of the city: subway cars screeching to a halt, music in the long underground hallways of Forty-Second Street, ministers preaching in Harlem, bells, rumors and murmurs inside the Wall Street stock exchange. But it also attempted to survey and classify all the other sounds that the city produced and that usually went by, as noise, unnoticed: cash registers opening and closing in delis, a script being rehearsed in an empty Broadway theater, underwater currents in the Hudson, Canada geese flocking and shitting over Van Cortlandt Park, swings swinging in Astoria playgrounds, elderly Korean women filing wealthy fingernails on the Upper West Side, a fire breaking through an old tenement building in the Bronx, a passerby yelling a stream of motherfuckers at another. There were journalists, sound artists, geographers, urbanists, writers, historians, acoustemologists, anthropologists, musicians, and even bathymetrists, with those complicated devices called multibeam echo sounders, which were plunged into the waterspaces surrounding the city, measuring the depth and contours of the riverbeds, and who knows what else. Everyone, in couples or small groups, surveyed and sampled wavelengths around the city, like we were documenting the last sounds of an enormous beast.

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 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″ × 12″ × 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.



FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS

In our beginning was an almost empty apartment, and a heat wave. On the first night in that apartment—the same apartment we just left behind—the four of us were sitting in our underwear on the floor of the living room, sweaty and exhausted, balancing slices of pizza on our palms.

We’d finished unpacking some of our belongings and a few extra things we’d bought that day: a corkscrew, four new pillows, window cleaner, dishwashing soap, two small picture frames, nails, hammer. Next we measured the children’s heights and made the first marks on the hallway wall: 33 inches and 42 inches. Then we’d hammered two nails into the kitchen wall to hang two postcards that had hung in our former, respective apartments: one was a portrait of Malcolm X, taken shortly before his assassination, where he’s resting his head on his right hand and looking intently at someone or something; the other was of Emiliano Zapata, standing upright, holding a rifle in one hand and a saber in the other, a sash around one shoulder, his double cartridge belt crosswise. The glass protecting the postcard of Zapata was still covered in a layer of grime—or is it soot?—from my old kitchen. We hung them both next to the refrigerator. But even after this, the new apartment still looked too empty, walls too white, still felt foreign.

The boy looked around the living room, chewing pizza, and asked:

Now what?

And the girl, who was two years old then, echoed him:

Yes what?

Neither of us found an answer to give them, though I think we did search hard for one, perhaps because that was the question we’d also been silently threading across the empty room.

Now what? the boy asked again.

Finally, I answered:

Now go brush your teeth.

But we haven’t unpacked our toothbrushes yet, the boy said.

So go rinse your mouths in the bathroom sink and go to sleep, my husband replied.

They came back from the bathroom, saying they were scared to sleep alone in the new bedroom. We agreed to let them stay in the living room with us, for a while, if they promised to go to sleep. They crawled into an empty box, and after puppying around for the fairest division of cardboard space, they fell into a deep, heavy sleep.

My husband and I opened a bottle of wine, and, out the window, we smoked a joint. Then we sat on the floor, doing nothing, saying nothing, just watching the children sleep in their cardboard box. From where we were sitting, we could see only a tangle of heads and butts: his hair damp with sweat, her curls a nest; he, aspirin-assed, and she, apple-bottomed. They looked like one of those couples who’ve overstayed their time together, become middle-aged too fast, grown tired of each other but comfortable enough. They slept in total, solitary companionship. And now and then, interrupting our maybe slightly stoned silence, the boy snored like a drunk man, and the girl’s body released long, sonorous farts.

They’d given a similar concert earlier that day, while we rode the subway from the supermarket back to our new apartment, surrounded by white plastic bags full of enormous eggs, very pink ham, organic almonds, corn bread, and tiny cartons of organic whole milk—the enriched and enhanced products of the new, upgraded diet of a family with two salaries. Two or three subway minutes and the children were asleep, heads on each of our laps, tangled humid hair, lovely salty smell like the warm giant pretzels we’d eaten earlier that day on a street corner. They were angelic, and we were young enough, and together we were a beautiful tribe, an enviable bunch. Then, suddenly, one started snoring and the other stared farting. The few passengers who were not plugged into their telephones took note, looked at her, at us, at him, and smiled—difficult to know if in compassion or complicity with our children’s public shamelessness. My husband smiled back at the smiling strangers. I thought for a second I should divert their attention, reflect it away from us, maybe stare accusingly at the old man sleeping a few seats from us, or at the young lady in full jogging gear. I didn’t, of course. I just nodded in acknowledgment, or in resignation, and smiled back at the subway strangers—a tight, buttonhole smile. I suppose I felt the kind of stage fright that comes up in certain dreams, where you realize you went to school and forgot to put on underwear; a sudden and deep vulnerability in front of all those strangers being offered a glimpse of our still very new world.

But later that night, back in the intimacy of our new apartment, when the children were asleep and were making all those beautiful noises all over again—real beauty, always unintentional—I was able to listen to them fully, without the burden of self-consciousness. The girl’s intestinal sounds were amplified against the wall of the cardboard box and traveled, diaphanous, across the almost empty living room. And after a little while, from somewhere deep in his sleep, the boy heard them—or so it seemed to us—and replied to them with utterances and mumbles. My husband took note of the fact that we were witnessing one of the languages of the city soundscape, now put to use in the ultimately circular act of conversation:

A mouth replying to a butthole.

I suppressed the desire to laugh, for an instant, but then I noticed that my husband was holding his breath and closing his eyes in order to not laugh. Perhaps we were a little more stoned than we thought. I became undone, my vocal cords bursting into a sound more porcine than human. He followed, with a series of puffs and gasps, his nasal wings flapping, face wrinkling, eyes almost disappearing, his entire body rocking back and forth like a wounded piñata. Most people acquire a frightening appearance in mid-laughter. I’ve always feared those who click their teeth, and found those who laugh without emitting a single sound rather worrisome. In my paternal family, we have a genetic defect, I think, which manifests in snorts and grunts at the very end of the laughing cycle—a sound that, perhaps for its animality, unleashes another cycle of laughter. Until everyone has tears in their eyes, and a feeling of shame overcomes them.

I took a deep breath and wiped a tear from my cheek. I realized then that this was the first time my husband and I had ever heard each other laugh. With our deeper laughs, that is—a laugh unleashed, untied, a laugh entire and ridiculous. Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh. My husband and I finally recomposed ourselves.

It’s mean to laugh at the expense of our sleeping children, yes? I asked.

Yes, very wrong.

We decided that what we had to do, instead, was document them, so we took out our recording gear. My husband swept the space with his boom pole; I zoomed my handheld voice recorder up close to the boy and the girl. She sucked her thumb and he mumbled words and strange sleep-utterances into it; cars drove by outside in the street into my husband’s mic. In childish complicity, the two of us sampled their sounds. I’m not sure what deeper reasons prompted us to record the children that night. Maybe it was just the summer heat, plus the wine, minus the joint, times the excitement of the move, divided by all the cardboard recycling ahead of us. Or maybe we were following an impulse to allow the moment, which felt like the beginning of something, to leave a trace. After all, we’d trained our minds to seize recording opportunities, trained our ears to listen to our daily lives as if they were raw tape. All of it, us and them, here and there, inside and outside, was registered, collected, and archived. New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.

Later, tired and having lost momentum, we carried the children in our arms into their new room, their mattresses not much larger than the cardboard box where they been sleeping. Then, in our bedroom, we slid onto our own mattress and wedged our legs together, saying nothing, but with our bodies saying something like maybe later, maybe tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll make love, make plans, tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.



MOTHER TONGUES

When I was first invited to work on the soundscape project, I thought it seemed somewhat tacky, megalomaniacal, possibly too didactic. I was young, though not much younger than I am now, and still thought of myself as a hard-core political journalist. I also didn’t like the fact that the project, though it was orchestrated by NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and would eventually form part of their sound archive, was in part funded by some huge multinational corporations. I tried to do some research on their CEOs—for scandals, frauds, any fascist allegiances. But I had a little girl. So when I was told that the contract included medical insurance, and realized that I could live on the salary without having to do the myriad journalistic gigs I was taking on to survive, I stopped researching, stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract. I’m not sure what his reasons were, but at around the same time, my husband—who was then just a stranger specialized in acoustemology and not my husband or our children’s father—signed his.

The two of us gave ourselves completely to the soundscape project. Every day, while the children were in daycare and school, respectively, we went out into the city, not knowing what would happen but always sure we’d find something new. We traveled in and out of the five boroughs, interviewing strangers, asking them to talk in and about their native tongues. He liked the days we spent in transitional spaces, like train stations, airports, and bus stops. I liked the days we spent in schools, sampling children. He’d walk around the crowded cafeterias, his Porta-Brace sound bag hanging from a strap around his right shoulder, his boom held up at an angle, recording the cluster of voices, cutlery, footsteps. In hallways and classrooms, I’d hold my recorder up close to each child’s mouth as they uttered sounds, responding to my prompts. I asked them to recall songs and sayings they heard in their homes. Their accents were often anglicized, domesticated, their parents’ languages now foreign to them. I remember their actual, physical tongues—pink, earnest, disciplined—trying to wrap themselves around the sounds of their more and more distant mother tongues: the difficult position of the tongue’s tip in the Hispanic erre, the quick tongue-slaps against the palate in all the polysyllabic Kichwa and Karif words, the soft and downward curved bed of the tongue in the aspirated Arabic h.

The months passed, and we recorded voices, collected accents. We accumulated hours of tape of people speaking, telling stories, pausing, telling lies, praying, hesitating, confessing, breathing.



TIME

We also accumulated things: plants, plates, books, chairs. We picked up objects from curbsides in affluent neighborhoods. Often, we realized later that we didn’t really need another chair, another bookshelf, and so we put it back outside, on the curbside of our less-affluent neighborhood, feeling that we were participants in the invisible left hand of wealth redistribution—the anti–Adam Smiths of sidewalks and curbsides. For a while, we continued to pick up objects from the streets, until we heard on the radio one day that there was a bedbug crisis in the city, so we stopped scavenging, quit redistributing wealth, and winter came, and then came spring.

It’s never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life. One day, our books didn’t fit in the bookshelves anymore, and the big empty room in our apartment had become our living room. It had become the place where we watched movies, read books, assembled puzzles, napped, helped the children with their homework. Then the place where we had friends over, held long conversations after they’d left, fucked, said beautiful and horrible things to each other, and cleaned up in silence afterward.

Who knows how, and who knows where the time had gone, but one day, the boy had turned eight, then nine, and the girl was five. They had started going to the same public school. All the little strangers they had met, they now called their friends. There were soccer teams, gymnastics, end-of-year performances, sleepovers, always too many birthday parties, and the marks we had made on the hallway wall of our apartment to register our children’s heights suddenly summed up to a vertical story. They had grown so much taller. My husband thought they grew tall too fast. Unnaturally fast, he said, because of that organic whole milk they consumed in those little cartons; he thought that the milk was chemically altered to produce premature tallness in children. Maybe, I thought. But possibly, also, it was just that time had passed.



TEETH

How much more?

How much longer?

I suppose it’s the same with all children: if they are awake inside a car, they ask for attention, ask for bathroom stops, ask for snacks. But mostly they ask:

When will we get there?

We usually tell the boy and girl it’ll be just a little while. Or else we say:

Play with your toys.

Count all the white cars that pass.

Try to sleep.

Now, as we halt at a tollbooth near Philadelphia, they suddenly wake up, as if their sleep were synchronized—both between the two of them and, more inexplicably, with the car’s varying accelerations. From the backseat, the girl calls out:

How many more blocks?

Just a little while till we make a stop in Baltimore, I say.

But how many blocks till we get all the way to the end?

All the way to the end is Arizona. The plan is to drive from New York to the southeastern corner of the state. As we drive, southwest-bound toward the borderlands, my husband and I will each be working on our new sound projects, doing field recordings and surveys. I’ll focus on interviews with people, catch fragments of conversations among strangers, record the sound of news on the radio or voices in diners. When we get to Arizona, I’ll record my last samples and start editing everything. I have four weeks to get it all done. Then I’ll probably have to fly back to New York with the girl, but I’m not sure of that yet. I’m not sure what my husband’s exact plan is either. I study his face in profile. He concentrates on the road ahead. He’ll be sampling things like the sound of wind blowing through plains or parking lots; footsteps walking on gravel, cement, or sand; maybe pennies falling into cash registers, teeth grinding peanuts, a child’s hand probing a jacket pocket full of pebbles. I don’t know how long his new sound project will take him, or what will happen next. The girl breaks our silence, insisting:

I asked you a question, Mama, Papa: How many blocks till we get all the way there?

We have to remind ourselves to be patient. We know—I suppose even the boy knows—how confusing it must be to live in the timeless world of a five-year-old: a world not without time but with a surplus of it. My husband finally gives the girl an answer that seems to satisfy her:

We’ll get all the way there when you lose your second bottom tooth.



TONGUE TIES

When the girl was four and had started going to public school, she prematurely lost a tooth. Immediately after, she started stuttering. We never knew if the events were in fact causally related: school, tooth, stutter. But in our familial narrative, at least, the three things got tied together in a confusing, emotionally charged knot.

One morning during our last winter in New York, I had a conversation with the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates. We were in the auditorium, waiting to vote for new parent representatives. The two of us stood in line for a while, exchanging stories about our children’s linguistic and cultural stalemates. My daughter had stuttered for a year, I told her, sometimes to the point of non-communication. She’d begin every sentence like she was about to sneeze. But she had recently discovered that if she sang a sentence instead of speaking it, it would come out without a stutter. And so, slowly, she had been growing out of her stuttering. Her son, she told me, had not said a word in almost six months, not in any language.

We asked each other about the places we were from, and the languages that we spoke at home. They were from Tlaxiaco, in the Mixteca, she told me. Her first language was Trique. I had never heard Trique, and the only thing I knew about it was that it is one of the most complex tonal languages, with more than eight tones. My grandmother was Hñähñu and spoke Otomí, a simpler tonal language than Trique, with only three tones. But my mother didn’t learn it, I said, and of course I didn’t learn it either. When I asked her if her son could speak Trique, she told me no, of course not, and said:

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

After we voted, right before saying goodbye, we introduced ourselves, though it should have been the other way around. Her name was Manuela, the same as my grandmother’s name. She found the coincidence less amusing than I did. I asked her if she might be willing to let me record her one day, and told her about the sound documentary my husband and I were almost finished working on. We had not yet sampled Trique—it was a rare language to come by. She agreed, hesitantly, and when we met in the park next to the school a few days later, she said she would ask for one thing in exchange for this. She had two older daughters—eight and ten years old—who had just arrived in the country, crossing the border on foot, and were being held in a detention center in Texas. She needed someone to translate their documents from Spanish into English, at little or no cost, so she could find a lawyer to defend them from being deported. I agreed, without knowing what I was getting myself into.



PROCEDURES

First it was just translating legal papers: the girls’ birth certificates, vaccination records, one school report card. Then there was a series of letters written by a neighbor back home and addressed to Manuela, giving a detailed account of the situation there: the untamable waves of violence, the army, the gangs, the police, the sudden disappearances of people—mostly young women and girls. Then, one day, Manuela asked me to go to a meeting with a potential lawyer.

The three of us met in a waiting room in the New York City Immigration Court. The lawyer followed a brief questionnaire, asking questions in English that I translated into Spanish for Manuela. She told her story, and the girls’ story. They were all from a small town on the border of Oaxaca and Guerrero. About six years ago, when the younger of the two girls turned two and the older was four, Manuela left them in their grandmother’s care. Food was scant; it was impossible to raise the girls with so little, she explained. She crossed the border, with no documents, and settled in the Bronx, where she had a cousin. She found a job, started sending money back. The plan was to save up quickly and return home as soon as possible. But she got pregnant, and life got complicated, and the years started speeding by. The girls were growing up, talking to her on the telephone, hearing stories about snow falling, about big avenues, bridges, traffic jams, and, later, about their baby brother. Meanwhile, the situation back home became more and more complicated, became unsafe, so Manuela asked her boss for a loan, and paid a coyote to bring the girls over to her.

The girls’ grandmother prepared them for the trip, told them it would be a long journey, packed their backpacks: Bible, water bottle, nuts, one toy each, spare underwear. She made them matching dresses, and the day before they left, she sewed Manuela’s telephone number on the collars of the dresses. She had tried to get them to memorize the ten digits, but the girls had not been able to. So she sewed the number on the collars of their dresses and, over and over, repeated a single instruction: they should never take their dresses off, never, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American, be it a policeman or a normal person, they had to show the inside of the collar to him or her. That person would then dial the number sewed on the collars and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.

And it did, except not quite as planned. The girls made it safely to the border, but instead of taking them across, the coyote left them in the desert in the middle of the night. They were found by Border Patrol at dawn, sitting by the side of a road near a checkpoint, and were placed in a detention center for unaccompanied minors. An officer telephoned Manuela to tell her that the girls had been found. His voice was kind and gentle, she said, for a Border Patrol officer. He told her that normally, according to the law, children from Mexico and Canada, unlike children from other countries, had to be sent back immediately. He had managed to keep them in detention, but she was going to need a lawyer from now on. Before he hung up, he let her speak to the girls. He gave them five minutes. It was the first time since they’d left on the journey that she’d heard their voices. The older girl spoke, told her they were okay. The younger one only breathed into the phone, said nothing.

The lawyer we met with that day, after listening to Manuela’s story, said sorry, she could not take on their case. She said the case was not “strong enough,” and gave no further explanation. Manuela and I were escorted out of the courtroom, along corridors, down elevators, and out of the building. We walked out onto Broadway, into the late morning, and the city was buzzing, the buildings high and solid, the sky pristine blue, the sun bright—as if nothing catastrophic were happening. I promised I’d help her figure it out, help her get a good lawyer, help in any way possible.



JOINT FILING

Spring came, my husband and I filed our taxes, and we delivered our material for the soundscape project. There were over eight hundred languages in New York City, and after four years of work, we had sampled almost all of them. We could finally move on—to whatever came next. And that was exactly what happened: we started to move on. We were moving forward, but not quite together.

I had gotten involved further with the legal case against Manuela’s two girls. A lawyer at a nonprofit had finally agreed to take on their case and, although the girls were still not with their mother, they had at least been transferred from a brutal, semi-secure detention facility in Texas to a supposedly more humane setting—a former Walmart supercenter converted into an immigration detention center for minors, near Lordsburg, New Mexico. To keep up with the case, I had been studying a bit more about immigration law, attending hearings in court, talking to lawyers. Their case was one among tens of thousands of similar ones across the country. More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.

At that time, the radio and some newspapers were slowly starting to feature stories about the wave of undocumented children arriving in the country, but none of them seemed to be covering the situation from the perspective of the children involved in it. I decided to approach the director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. I presented a rough idea of how to narrate the story from a different angle. After some back-and-forth, and a few concessions on my part, she agreed to help me fund a sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border. Not a big production: just me, my recording instruments, and a tight time line.

I initially hadn’t noticed, but my husband had also started to work on a new project. First, it was just a bunch of books about Apache history. They piled on his desk and on his bedside table. I knew he’d always been interested in the subject, and he often told the children stories about Apaches, so it wasn’t strange that he was reading all those books. Then, maps of Apache territory and images of chiefs and warriors started filling the walls around his desk. I began to sense that what had been a lifelong interest was becoming formal research.

What are you working on? I asked him one afternoon.

Just some stories.

About?

Apaches.

Why Apaches? Which ones?

He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they’d been the last Apache leaders—moral, political, military—of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender. It was, of course, a more than compelling reason to undertake any kind of research, but it wasn’t quite the reason I was waiting to hear.

Later, he started referring to that research as a new sound project. He bought some bankers boxes and filled them with stuff: books, index cards full of notes and quotes, cutouts, scraps, and maps, field recordings and sound surveys he found in public libraries and private archives, as well as a series of little brown notebooks where he wrote daily, almost obsessively. I wondered how all of that would eventually be translated into a sound piece. When I asked him about those boxes, and the stuff inside them, as well as about his plans, and how they fit with our plans together—he just said that he didn’t know yet but that he’d soon let me know.

And when he did, a few weeks later, we discussed our next steps. I said I wanted to focus on my project, recording children’s stories and their hearings in the New York immigration court. I also said I was considering applying for a job at a local radio station. He said what I suspected he’d say. What he wanted was to work on his own documentary project, about the Apaches. He had applied for a grant and had gotten it. He also said the material he had to collect for this project was linked to specific locations, but this soundscape was going to be different. He called it an “inventory of echoes,” said it would be about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.

The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger. What I didn’t expect my husband to say was that, in order to be able to work on his new project, he needed time, more time than just a single summer. He also needed silence and solitude. And he needed to relocate more permanently to the southwest of the country.

How permanently? I asked.

Possibly a year or two, or maybe more.

And where in the southwest?

I don’t know yet.

And what about my project, here? I asked.

A meaningful project, was all he said.



ALONE TOGETHER

I suppose my husband and I simply hadn’t prepared for the second part of our togetherness, the part where we just lived the life we’d been making. Without a future professional project together, we began to drift apart in other ways. I guess we—or perhaps just I—had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed. But can anyone really prepare? Can anyone tackle effects before detecting causes?

A friend had told us during our wedding party, some years earlier, with that oracular aura of some drunk men right before they fade, that marriage was a banquet to which people arrived too late, when everything was already half eaten, everyone already too tired and wanting to leave, but not knowing how to leave, or with whom.

But I, my friends, can tell you how to make it last forever! he said.

Then he closed his eyes, sunk his beard into his breast, and passed out in his chair.



ITEMIZATION

We spent many difficult evenings, after putting the children to bed, discussing the logistics around my husband’s plan to relocate more permanently to the southwest. Many sleepless nights negotiating, fighting, fucking, renegotiating, figuring things out. I spent hours trying to understand or at least come to terms with his project, and many more hours trying to come up with ways to dissuade him from pursuing his plan. Losing temperance one night, I even hurled a lightbulb, a roll of toilet paper, and a series of lame insults at him.

But the days passed, and preparations for the trip began. He searched online and bought things: cooler, sleeping bag, gadgets. I bought maps of the United States. One big one of the whole country, and several others of the southern states we’d probably cross. I studied them late into the night. And as the trip became more and more concrete, I tried to reconcile myself to the idea that I no longer had any other choice but to accept a decision already taken, and then I slowly wrote my own terms into the deal, trying hard not to itemize our life together as if it were now eligible for standard deductions, up for some kind of moral computation of losses, credits, and taxable assets. I tried hard, in other words, not to become someone I would eventually disdain.

I could use these new circumstances, I said to myself, to reinvent myself professionally, to rebuild my life—and other such notions that sound meaningful only in horoscope predictions, or when someone is falling apart and has lost all sense of humor.

More reasonably, regathering my thoughts a little on better days, I convinced myself that our growing apart professionally did not have to imply a deeper break in our relationship. Pursuing our own projects shouldn’t have to conduce to dissolving our world together. We could drive down to the borderlands as soon as the children’s school year finished, and each work on our respective projects. I wasn’t sure how, but I thought I could start researching, slowly build an archive, and extend my focus on the child refugee crisis from the court of immigration in New York, where I had been centering all my attention, to any one of its geographic points in the southern borderlands. It was an obvious development in the research itself, of course. But also, it was a way for our two projects, very different from each other, to be made compatible. At least for now. Compatible enough at this point, in any case, for us to go on a family road trip to the southwest. After that, we’d figure something out.



ARCHIVE

I pored over reports and articles about child refugees, and tried to gather information on what was happening beyond the New York immigration court, at the border, in detention centers and shelters. I got in touch with lawyers, attended conferences of the New York City Bar Association, had private meetings with nonprofit workers and community organizers. I collected loose notes, scraps, cutouts, quotes copied down on cards, letters, maps, photographs, lists of words, clippings, tape-recorded testimonies. When I started to get lost in the documental labyrinth of my own making, I contacted an old friend, a Columbia University professor specializing in archival studies, who wrote me a long letter and sent me a list of articles and books that might shine some light on my confusion. I read and read, long sleepless nights reading about archive fevers, about rebuilding memory in diasporic narratives, about being lost in “the ashes” of the archive.

Finally, after I’d found some clarity and amassed a reasonable amount of well-filtered material that would help me understand how to document the children’s crisis at the border, I placed everything inside one of the bankers boxes that my husband had not yet filled with his own stuff. I had a few photos, some legal papers, intake questionnaires used for court screenings, maps of migrant deaths in the southern deserts, and a folder with dozens of “Migrant Mortality Reports” printed from online search engines that locate the missing, which listed bodies found in those deserts, the possible cause of death, and their exact location. At the very top of the box, I placed a few books I’d read and thought could help me think about the whole project from a certain narrative distance: The Gates of Paradise, by Jerzy Andrzejewski; The Children’s Crusade, by Marcel Schwob; Belladonna, by Daša Drndić; Le goût de l’archive, by Arlette Farge; and a little red book I hadn’t yet read, called Elegies for Lost Children, by Ella Camposanto.

When my husband complained about my using one of his boxes, I complained back, said he had four boxes, while I had only one. He pointed out that I was an adult so could not possibly complain about him having more boxes than me. In a way he was right, so I smiled in acknowledgment. But still, I used his box.

Then the boy complained. Why couldn’t he have a box, too? We had no arguments against his demand, so we allowed him one box.

Naturally, the girl then also complained. So we allowed her a box. When we asked them what they wanted to put in their boxes, the boy said he wanted to leave his empty for now:

So I can collect stuff on the way.

Me too, said the girl.

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:

A catastrophe.

My husband listened to the children’s report, nodding, smiling, and then told them that ants, in Hopi mythology, are considered sacred. Ant-people were gods who saved those in the upperworld from catastrophes by taking them down to the underworld, where they could live in peace and freedom until the danger had passed and they were able to return to the upperworld.

Which catastrophe are the ants here to take us away from? the boy asked him.

I thought it was a good question, involuntarily poisonous, perhaps. My husband cleared his throat but didn’t answer. Then the girl asked:

What’s a catastrophe?

Something very bad, the boy said.

She sat silent for a moment, looking at her plate in deep concentration and pressing the back of her fork against her rice to flatten it down. Then, looking up at us again, very serious, she delivered a strange agglutination of concepts, as if the spirit of some nineteenth-century German hermeneutist had possessed her:

The ants, they come marching in, eat my upperworldpanties, they take us where there’s no catastrophes, just good trophies and tooshiefreedom.

Children’s words, in some ways, are the escape route out of family dramas, taking us to their strangely luminous underworld, safe from our middle-class catastrophes. From that day on, I think, we started allowing our children’s voices to take over our silence. We allowed their imaginations to alchemize all our worry and sadness about the future into some sort of redeeming delirium: tooshiefreedom!

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?



PASSING STRANGERS

There’s a part in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that used to be a kind of ur-text or manifesto for my husband and me when we were still a new couple, still imagining and working out our future together. It begins with the lines:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you, and slept with you …

The poem explained, or so we thought, why we had decided to devote our lives, alone but together, to recording the sounds of strangers. Sampling their voices, their laughter, their breathing, despite the fleetingness of the encounters we had with each of them, or perhaps on account of that very fleetingness, we were offered an intimacy like no other: an entire life lived parallel, in a flash, with that stranger. And recording sound, we thought, as opposed to filming image, gave us access to a deeper, always invisible layer of the human soul, in the same way that a bathymetrist has to take a sounding of a body of water in order to properly map the depth of an ocean or a lake.

That poem ends with a vow to the passing stranger: “I am to see to it that I do not lose you.” It’s a promise of permanence: this fleeting moment of intimacy shared between you and me, two strangers, will leave a trace, will reverberate forever. And in many ways, I think we kept that promise with some of the strangers we encountered and recorded over the years—their voices and stories always coming back to haunt us. But we never imagined that that poem, and especially that last line, was also a sort of cautionary tale for us. Committed as we were to collecting intimacies with strangers, devoted as we were to listening so attentively to their voices, we never suspected that silence would slowly grow between the two of us. We never imagined that one day, we would somehow have lost each other amid the crowd.



SAMPLES & SILENCE

After all that time sampling and recording, we had an archive full of fragments of strangers’ lives but had close to nothing of our own lives together. Now that we were leaving an entire world behind, a world we had built, there was almost no record, no soundscape of the four of us, changing over time: the radio in the early morning, and the last reverberations of our dreams merging with news of crises, discoveries, epidemics, inclement weather; the coffee grinder, hard beans becoming powder; the stove sparking and bursting into a ring of fire; the gurgling of the coffeemaker; the long showers the boy took and his father’s insistent “Come on, hurry up, we’ll be late”; the paused, almost philosophical conversations between us and the two children on their way to school; the slow, careful steps the boy takes down empty school corridors, cutting class; the metallic screech of subways halting to a stop, and the mostly silent ride on train cars during our daily commutes for field recordings, inside the grid or out into the boroughs; the hum of crowded streets where my husband fished for stray sounds with his boom while I approached strangers with my handheld recorder, and the stream of all their voices, their accents and stories; the strike of a match that lit my husband’s cigarette and the long inward hiss of his first inhalation, pulling in smoke through clenched teeth, then the slow relief of an exhalation; the strange white noise that large groups of children produce in playgrounds—a vortex of hysteria, swarming cries—and the perfectly distinct voices of our two children among them; the eerie silence that settles over parks after dusk; the tousle and crackle of dry leaves heaped in mounds at the park where the girl digs for worms, for treasures, for whatever can be found, which is always nothing, because all there is under them are cigarette butts, fossilized dog turds, and miniature ziplock stash bags, hopefully empty; the friction of our coats against the northern gusts come winter; the effort of our feet pedaling rusty bicycles along the river path come spring; the heavy pant of our chests taking in the toxic vapors of the river’s gray waters, and the silent, shitty vibes of both the overeager joggers and the stray Canada geese that always overstay their migratory sojourns; the cannonade of instructions and reprimands fired by professional cyclists, all of them geared up, male, and middle-aged: “Move over!” and “Look left!”; and in response to that, our voices either softly mumbling, “Sorry sir, sorry sir,” or shouting loud heartfelt insults back at them—always abridged or drowned, alas, by the gushing winds; and finally, all the gaps of sound during our moments spent alone, collecting pieces of the world the way we each know how to gather it best. The sound of everything and everyone that once surrounded us, the noise we contributed, and the silence we leave behind.



FUTURE

And then the boy turned ten. We took him out to a good restaurant, gave him his presents (no toys). I got him a Polaroid camera and several boxes of film, both black-and-white and color. His father got him a kit for the trip: a Swiss Army knife, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, and a small compass. At his request, we also agreed to deviate from the planned itinerary and spend the next day, the first of our trip, at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. He’d done a school project about Calypso, the five-hundred-pound turtle with a missing front flipper that lives there, and had been obsessed with her ever since.

That night, after dinner, my husband packed his suitcase, I packed mine, and we let the boy and the girl pack theirs. Once the children were asleep, I repacked for them. They’d chosen the most unlikely combinations of things. Their suitcases were portable Duchampian disasters: miniature clothes tailored for a family of miniature bears, a broken light saber, a lone Rollerblade wheel, ziplock bags full of tiny plastic everything. I replaced all of it with real pants, real skirts, real underwear, real everything. My husband and I lined up the four suitcases by the door, plus our seven boxes and our recording materials.

When we’d finished, we sat in our living room and shared a cigarette in silence. I had found a young couple to whom to sublet the apartment for the next month at least, and the place already felt more theirs than ours. In my tired mind, all I could think of was the list of all the relocations that had preceded this one: the four of us moving in together four years ago; my husband’s many relocations before that one, as well as my own; the relocations of the hundreds of people and families we had interviewed and recorded for the city soundscape project; those of the refugee children whose story I now was going to try to document; and those of the last Chiricahua Apache peoples, whose ghosts my husband would soon start chasing after. Everyone leaves, if they need to, if they can, or if they have to.

And finally, the next day, after breakfast, we washed the last dishes and left.



BOX I (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)


§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ × 5″)

“On Collecting”

“On Archiving”

“On Inventorying”

“On Cataloguing”

§ TEN BOOKS

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, Susan Sontag

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Notebooks and Journals, 1964–1980, Susan Sontag

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje

Relocated: Twenty Sculptures by Isamu Noguchi from Japan, Isamu Noguchi, Thomas Messer, and Bonnie Rychlak

Radio Benjamin, Walter Benjamin

Journal des faux-monnayeurs, André Gide

A Brief History of Portable Literature, Enrique Vila-Matas

Perpetual Inventory, Rosalind E. Krauss

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

§ FOLDER (FACSIMILE COPIES, CLIPPINGS, SCRAPS)

The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

Whale sounds charts (in Schafer)

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings World of Sound Catalog #1

“Uncanny Soundscapes: Towards an Inoperative Acoustic Community,” Iain Foreman, Organised Sound 16 (03)

“Voices from the Past: Compositional Approaches to Using Recorded Speech,” Cathy Lane, Organised Sound 11 (01)




ROUTES & ROOTS (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)


Buscar las raíces no es más que una forma subterránea de andarse por las ramas.

(Searching for roots is nothing but a subterranean way of beating around the bush.)

—JOSÉ BERGAMÍN



When you get lost on the road

You run into the dead.

—FRANK STANFORD


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.

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.



ARCHIVE

I wake up early the next morning in the cottage and make my way to the kitchen and living room area. I open the door to the porch, and the sun is rising behind the mountain. For the first time in years, there are slices of our private space that I’d like to record, sounds that I again feel an impulse to document and store. Perhaps it’s just that new things, new circumstances, have an aura of things past. Beginnings get confused with endings. We look at them the way a goat or a skunk might stare stupidly toward a horizon where there’s a sun, not knowing if the yellow star there is rising or setting.

I want to record these first sounds of our trip together, maybe because they feel like the last sounds of something. But at the same time I don’t, because I don’t want to interfere with my recording; I don’t want to turn this particular moment of our lives together into a document for a future archive. If I could only, simply, underline certain things with my mind, I would: this light coming in through the kitchen window, flooding the entire cottage in a golden warmth as I prepare the coffeemaker; this soft breeze blowing in through the open door and brushing past my legs as I turn on the stove; that sound of footsteps—feet little, bare, and warm—as the girl gets out of bed and approaches me from behind, announcing:

Mama, I woke up!

She finds me standing by the stove, waiting for the coffee to be ready. She looks at me, smiles, and rubs her eyes when I say good morning back to her. I don’t know anyone for whom waking up is such good news, such a joyful event. Her eyes are startlingly large, her chest is bare, and her panties are white and puffy, too big around her. Serious and full of decorum, she says:

I have a question, Mama.

What is it?

I want to ask you: Who is this Jesus Fucking Christ?

I don’t answer, but I hand her a huge glass of milk.



ORDER

The boy and his father are still asleep, and the two of us—mother, daughter—find a seat on the couch in the cottage’s small but luminous living room. She sips her milk and opens her sketchbook. After a few failed attempts at drawing something, she asks me to make four squares for her—two at the top, two at the bottom—and instructs me to label them in this order: “Character,” “Setting,” “Problem,” “Solution.” When I finish labeling the four squares and ask what they’re for, she explains that at school, they taught her to tell stories this way. Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long. I remember how one day, when the boy was in second grade and I was helping him with homework, I suddenly realized he probably didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard.

The girl concentrates on her drawing now, filling in the squares I made for her. I drink my coffee, and open Sontag’s journals again, rereading loose lines and words. Marriage, parting, moral bookkeeping, hollowed out, separation: Did our underlining these words foreshadow it? When did the end of us begin? I cannot say when or why. I’m not sure how. When I told a couple of friends, shortly before the four of us went on this trip, that my marriage was possibly ending, or at least was in a moment of crisis, they asked:

What happened?

They wanted a precise date:

When did you realize, exactly? Before this or after that?

They wanted a reason:

Politics? Boredom? Emotional violence?

They wanted an event:

Did he cheat? Did you?

I’d repeat to all of them that no, nothing had happened. Or rather, yes, everything they listed had probably happened, but that wasn’t the problem. Still, they insisted. They wanted reasons, motivations, and especially, they wanted a beginning:

When, when exactly?

I remember going to the supermarket one day shortly before we left on this trip. The boy and girl were arguing over the better flavor of some squeezable pureed snack. My husband was complaining about my particular choice of something, maybe milk, maybe detergent, maybe pasta. I remember imagining, for the first time since we had moved in together, how it would be to shop for just the girl and me, in a future where our family was no longer a family of four. I remember my feeling of remorse, almost instant, at having the thought. Then a much deeper feeling—maybe a blow of nostalgia for the future, or maybe the inner vacuum of melancholia, sucking up presentness and spreading absence—as I placed the shampoo the boy had chosen on the conveyer belt, vanilla scented for frequent use.

But surely it was not that day, in that supermarket, that I understood what was happening to us. Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.

The girl is finished with her drawing and shows it to me, full of satisfaction. In the first square, she has drawn a shark. In the second, a shark surrounded by other sea animals and algae, the surface of the water above them, the sun at the very top in a distant corner. In the third square, a shark, still in the water, looking distraught and facing a kind of underwater pine tree. In the fourth and last square, a shark biting and possibly eating another big fish, maybe also a shark.

So what’s the story? I ask.

You tell it, Mama, you guess.

Well, first there is a shark; second, he’s in the sea, where he lives; third, the problem is there’s only trees to eat, and he’s not a vegetarian because he’s a shark; and fourth, finally, he finds food and eats it up.

No, Mama. All wrong. Sharks don’t eat sharks.

Okay. So what’s the story? I ask her.

The story is, character: a shark. Setting: the ocean. Problem: the shark is feeling sad and confused because another shark bit him, so he goes to his thinking-tree. Solution: he finally figures it out.

Figures what out? I ask her.

That he just has to bite the other shark back for biting him!



CHAOS

The boy and his father finally wake up, and over breakfast, we discuss plans. My husband and I decide we need to get going again. The children complain, say they want to stay longer. This isn’t a normal vacation, we remind them; even if we can stop and enjoy things once in a while, the two of us have to work. I have to start recording material about the crisis at the southern border. From what I can gather by listening to the radio and fishing for news online whenever I can, the situation is becoming graver by the day. The administration, backed by the courts, has just announced the creation of a priority docket for undocumented minors, which means that the children who are arriving at the border will get priority in being deported. Federal immigration courts will process their cases before any others, and if they don’t find a lawyer to defend them within the impossibly narrow span of twenty-one days, they will have no chance, and will receive a final removal order from a judge.

I don’t say all that to our children, of course. But I do tell the boy that what I’m working on is time sensitive, and I need to get to the southern border as quickly as possible. My husband says he wants to get to Oklahoma—where we will visit an Apache cemetery—as soon as possible. Sounding like a 1950s suburban housewife, the boy tells us that we’re always “putting work before family.” When he’s older, I tell him, he’ll understand that the two things are inseparable. He rolls his eyes, tells me I’m predictable and self-involved—two adjectives I’ve never heard him use before. I reprimand him, tell him he and his sister have to do the breakfast dishes.

Do you remember when we had other parents? he asks her as they start with the dishes and we start packing up.

What do you mean? she answers, confused, passing him the liquid soap.

We had parents, once upon a time, better than these ones that we have now.

I listen, wonder, and worry. I want to tell him that I love him, unconditionally, that he does not have to demonstrate anything to me, that I’m his mother and want him near me, always, that I also need him. I should tell him all that, but instead, when he gets like this, I grow distant, circumspect, and maybe even unbiologically cold. It exasperates me not to understand how to ease his anger. I usually externalize my messy emotions, scolding him for little things: put on your shoes, brush your hair, pick up that bag. Most of the time, his father also turns his own exasperation inward, but he doesn’t scold him, doesn’t say or do anything. He just becomes passive—a sad spectator of our family life, like he’s watching a silent movie in an empty theater.

Outside the cottage, as we make final preparations to leave, we ask the boy to help reorganize the things in the trunk, and he throws a bigger tantrum. He screams horrible things, wishing he belonged to a different world, a better family. I think he thinks we are here, in this world, to thrust him toward unhappiness: eat this fried egg you hate the texture of; let’s go, hurry up; learn to ride this bicycle that you fear; wear these pants that we bought just for you even though you don’t like them—they were expensive, so be grateful; play with that boy in the park who offers you his ephemeral friendship and his ball; be normal, be happy, be a child.

He screams louder and louder, wishing us gone, wishing us dead, kicking the car’s tires, tossing rocks and gravel into the air. When he spins off into a spiral of rage like this, his voice sounds distant to me, remote, foreign, as if I were listening to it on an old analog recorder, through metal wires and across static, or as if I were a line operator listening to him in a faraway country. I recognize the familiar ring of his tone somewhere in the background, but I cannot tell whether he is reaching out to us in a desire to make contact, yearning for our love and undivided attention, or if he is somehow telling us to stay away, to fuck off from his ten years of life in this world and let him grow out of our little circle of familial ties. I listen, wonder, and worry.

The tantrum continues, and his father finally loses patience. He walks over to him, grabs him firmly by the shoulders, and shouts. The boy wriggles out of his clutch and kicks his father in the ankles and knees—not kicks intended to harm or hurt, but kicks nonetheless. In response, his father takes off his hat, and with it, smacks him twice, maybe three times, on the butt. Not a painful punishment, but a humiliating one, for a ten-year-old: a hat-spanking. What follows is expected but also disarming: tears, sniffing, deep breaths, and stuttered words like okay, sorry, fine.

When the boy has at last calmed down, his sister walks up to him, and with a little hopefulness and a little hesitancy, asks him if he wants to play with her for a while. She needs him to confirm to her that they still share a world. That they are together in this world, inextricably bound, beyond their two parents and their flaws. The boy turns her away at first, gently but firmly:

Just give me a moment.

Yet in the end, he’s still small, still susceptible to our fragile, private family mythologies. So when his father suggests we delay our departure so that they can all play the Apache game before we leave, the boy is overcome by a deep, primal happiness. He collects feathers, prepares his plastic bow and arrow, dresses his sister up as an Indian princess, taking care to tie a cotton belt around her head, not too tight and not too loose, and then runs around in circles howling like a madchild, wild and unburdened. He fills our life with his breath, with his sudden warmth, with his particular way of exploding into roaring laughter.



ARCHIVE

In the slow float of midmorning light, the children play the Apache game with their father. The cottage is at the crest of a hill in a high valley that undulates down toward the main road, invisible to us. No houses can be seen, just farmland and grassland, sprinkled here and there with wildflowers we do not know the names of. They are white and violet, and I make out a few orange patches. Farther away in the distance, a confederacy of cows grazes, looking quietly conspiratorial.

From what I can make out, sitting on the porch bench, the game consists of nothing more than collecting little sticks from the forest proper, bringing them back, and fixing them into the ground one next to the other. Intermittently, little disputes spice the game: the girl suddenly says she wants to be a cowgirl, not an Indian princess, not any type of princess. My husband tells her this game has no white-eyes. They quarrel. In the end, she agrees hesitantly. She’ll carry on being an Apache, but only if she can be Lozen and if she’s still allowed to wear that cowgirl hat we found in the cottage, instead of the ribbon, which keeps slipping off.

I sit on the porch, half reading my book, looking up at the three of them now and then. They look memorable from where I’m sitting; look like they should be photographed. I almost never take pictures of my own children. They hate being in pictures and always boycott the family’s photographic moments. If they are asked to pose for a portrait, they make sure their disdain is apparent, and fake a wide, cynical smile. If they are allowed to do as they please, they make porcine grimaces, stick out their tongues, contort themselves like Hollywood aliens in midseizure. They rehearse antisocial behaviors in general. Maybe it’s the same with all children. Adults, on the contrary, profess almost religious reverence toward the photographic ritual. They adopt solemn gestures, or calculate a smile; they look toward the horizon with patrician vanity, or into the lens of the camera with the solitary intensity of porn stars. Adults pose for eternity; children for the instant.

I step back into the cottage to look for the Polaroid and the instruction booklet. I’d promised the boy I’d study them, because surely we were doing something wrong if the camera was indeed real yet his pictures still came out all white. I find them both—camera, instructions—in his backpack, among little cars, rubber bands, comics, his shiny red Swiss Army knife. Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings? I once had to look for an ID my sister had forgotten in her drawer and was suddenly wiping away tears with my sleeve as I went through her well-ordered pencils, colored clips, and random Post-it notes addressed to herself—visit Mama this week, talk more slowly, buy flowers and long earrings, walk more often. Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person’s absence. Perhaps it’s just that belongings often outlive their owners, so our minds can easily place those belongings in a future in which their owner is no longer present. We anticipate our loved ones’ future absence through the material presence of all their random stuff.

Back on the porch, I study the instruction booklet for the camera. The children and their father are now gathering rocks, which they place between the sticks fixed in the ground, alternating rock, stick, rock. The camera instructions are complicated. New Polaroid film has to be shielded from the light as soon as the photograph is expelled from the exit slide, the booklet explains. Otherwise, the film burns. The children and their father are taking over Texas, defending it from the American army, handing it over to their Apache fellows, and fencing it off, rock, stick, rock. Color film takes thirty minutes to develop; black-and-white film takes ten. During this time, the picture has to remain horizontal and in total darkness. A single ray of light will leave a trace, an accident. The instructions recommend keeping a developing Polaroid picture inside a special black-box, available from the store. Otherwise, it can be placed between the pages of a book and kept there until all its colors and shades are fully fixed.

I don’t have a special black-box, of course. But I have a book, Sontag’s journals, which I can leave open by my side and where I can place the Polaroid as soon as it comes out of the camera. I flip the book open to a random page, in preparation: page 142. Before I lay the book back down next to me, I read a little bit, just to make sure the page I found augurs something good. I’ve never been able to resist a superstitious impulse to read a page opened at random, any page, as if it were the day’s horoscope. One of those coincidences so small, yet so extraordinary: the page before me is a strange mirror of the exact moment I am witnessing. The children are playing the Apache game with their father, and Sontag describes this moment with her son: “At 5:00 David cried out—I dashed to the room & we hugged & kissed for an hour. He was a Mexican soldier (& therefore so was I); we changed history so that Mexico got to keep Texas. ‘Daddy’ was an American soldier.”

I pick up the camera, look around the field through the lens. I finally find the children—focus, refocus, and shoot. As soon as the camera spits out the shot, I take it with my index finger and thumb and tuck it between pages 142 and 143.



DOCUMENT

The picture comes out in shades of brown: sepia, ecru, wheat, and sand. Boy and girl, unaware of me, a few feet from the porch, stand next to a fence. He is holding a stick in his right hand, and she points toward a clearing in the woods behind the cottage, perhaps suggesting they look for more sticks. Behind them is a narrow path, and behind that, a row of trees that follow the declination of the hill from the cottage toward the main road. Though I can’t explain exactly why or how, they look as though they’re not really there, like they are being remembered instead of photographed.



BOX II (#uf2f7bbe4-319a-5f90-a38c-eee4f5b3b794)


§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ × 5″)

“On Soundscaping”

“On Acoustemology”

“On Documenting”

“On Field Recording”

§ SEVEN BOOKS

Sound and Sentiment, Steven Feld

The Americans, Robert Frank (introduction by Jack Kerouac)

Immediate Family, Sally Mann

Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

In the Field: The Art of Field Recording, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, eds.

§ THREE COMPACT DISCS (BOXED SETS)

Voices of the Rainforest, Steven Feld

Lost & Found Sound, The Kitchen Sisters

Desert Winds, Scott Smallwood

§ FOLDER “ABOUT SOUND MAPS”

(NOTES, CLIPPINGS, FACSIMILES)

“Sound Around You” project, University of Salford, UK

The Soundscape Newsletter, vols. I–X, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

“NYSoundmap,” the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology

“Fonoteca Bahia Blanca,” Argentina




UNDOCUMENTED (#ulink_950ea331-20ce-5f3c-92df-dd7bee0f5f3d)


An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound.

—DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ



Hearing is a way of touching at a distance.

—R. MURRAY SCHAFER


HISTORIES

Inside the car, the air is familiar and the smell our own. As we head southwest across the Appalachians, toward North Carolina, the world outside seems more foreign than ever before. My husband keeps his eyes steady on the road, which winds and curves higher into the mountains, and we all listen to the radio. A boy, maybe nine or ten, judging by the sound of his voice, is being interviewed by a reporter in a detention center in Nixon, Texas.

How did you travel to the United States? the reporter asks.

His voice calm and composed, the boy replies in Spanish, saying that he came on the Bestia. I translate his response for my husband.

Like Manuela’s daughters! the boy calls out from the backseat.

That’s right, I tell him.

The reporter explains that as many as half a million migrants annually ride on the rooftops of trains, which people call the Bestia, or beast, and says that the boy he’s interviewing today lost his little brother on one of those trains. The news report then switches to the boy again. His voice is no longer calm. Now it’s breaking, hesitating, trembling. The boy says that his little brother fell off the train shortly before it reached the border. As he begins to explain what happened, exactly, I switch off the radio. I feel a dull, deep nausea—a physical reaction to the boy’s story and his voice, but also to the way that news coverage exploits sadness and desperation to give us its representation: tragedy. Our children react violently to the story; they want to hear more but also don’t want to hear more. They won’t stop asking:

What happened next?

What happened to the little boy?

To distract them, my husband tells them Apache stories, tells them about how the Chiricahua tribe consisted of four different bands, tells them about the smallest band, which was also one of the most powerful, because it was led by a man who was six and a half feet tall, called Mangas Coloradas.

But did an Apache children band exist? the girl interrupts my husband.

What do you mean?

I mean, did they also have a children band? she says.

The boy rephrases her question, translates for her:

I think she means: Were there any bands that were only made up of children?

Their father, his eyes on the road, takes a sip of coffee from a cardboard cup and hands it over to me to put down again in the cup holder before he replies.

There was one that he knows of, he tells them, his gray eyes trying to find theirs in the rearview mirror. They were called the Eagle Warriors. It was a band of young Apache children led by an older boy. They were fearsome, they lived in the mountains, they ate birds that had fallen from the sky and were still warm, they had the power to control the weather, they could attract rain or push a storm back. He tells the children that these young warriors lived in a place called Echo Canyon, a place where the echoes are so loud and clear that even if you whisper, your voice comes right back to you, crisp.

I don’t know if what my husband is telling them is true, but the story resonates with me. I can perfectly imagine the faces of those child warriors as we drive slowly forward across Appalachia. Our children listen to him in silence, looking out the window into the dense forests, possibly also imagining these children warriors. As we turn on a closed curve, the forest clears, and we see a cluster of storm clouds—and intermittent lightning—gathering above the high peaks to the southwest.



STORIES

Traveling in the tight space of the car, we realize how little we know our two children, even though of course we know them. We listen to their backseat games. They are strangers, especially when we add them together. Boy and girl, two startlingly distinct individuals whom we often just consider a single entity: our children. Their games are random, noisy, uncanny, like a television suffering a high fever.

But now and then they find a better pace, establish a softer energy between them. They talk more slowly, thoughtfully. Sometimes they pick up the lost thread of their father’s Apache stories, or of the stories about the children stuck at the border, and enact possible outcomes:

If we are forced to stop hunting wild game, we shall raid their ranches and steal their cows!

Yeah, let’s steal the white cows, the white, the white-eyes’ cows!

Be careful with bluecoats and the Border Patrol!

We realize then that they in fact have been listening, more attentively than we thought, to the stories of Chief Nana, Chief Loco, Chihuahua, Geronimo—the last of the Chiricahuas—as well as to the story we are all following on the news, about the child refugees at the border. But they combine the stories, confuse them. They come up with possible endings and counterfactual histories.

What if Geronimo had never surrendered to the white-eyes?

What if he’d won that war?

The lost children would be the rulers of Apacheria!

Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.



BEGINNINGS

The lost children’s stories are troubling our own children. We decide to stop listening to the news, at least when they are awake. We decide to listen, instead, to music. Or, better, to audiobooks.

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night …,” says the voice of the man on the car speakers, “he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” I press Stop as soon as it pauses at the end of the sentence. My husband and I agree that Cormac McCarthy, although we both like him, and even if we especially like The Road, seems a little too rough for the children. Also, we agree that whoever is reading for this audiobook version is an actor acting—tries too hard, breathes too loud—instead of a person reading. So I press Stop. Then I scroll down and press Play on another audiobook.

“I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there,” a mistranslation of the first line of Pedro Páramo—I think Juan Rulfo really writes “because they told me” and not “because I had been told”—that passive voice and that extra layer of pastness blurring the novel’s calculated austerity and temporal ambiguity. I scroll down again, then press Play.

“I am an invisible man.” It’s a barren, perfect first sentence. But no, not Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, either. What we want is to overlay the stretch of the drive ahead with a voice and a narrative that may glove itself upon the landscape, and not something that will jerk our minds elsewhere while we move across this humid entanglement of creepers upon forests. Next. Play.

“In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” This one I would want to listen to, but I gather no quorum from the two traitors in the backseat. My husband does not want it either, says Carson McCullers’s only achievement was that one novel’s title and only the title: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. He is wrong, and I say so, throwing back my disagreement with a little bit of poison, asking him if he doesn’t think that first line is exactly about the two of us, and if we might not want to listen to the rest of it as if visiting an oracle. He does not laugh or smile. Next book.

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” Pause. We discuss this one at greater length. My husband thinks Kerouac’s On the Road would be a perfect choice. Even if the children won’t get the meaning, he says, we can all enjoy the rhythm of it as we drive. I remember reading Kerouac in my early twenties, when I dated a bookseller. He was a Kerouac fan, and gave me all of his books, one by one. I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup. Every time I was about to finish, the bowl would be refilled. Later into my twenties, I reread a few of Kerouac’s books, started getting them, and grew to like some things in his prose: his untidy way of tying sentences together, his way of speeding through the story as if he’s not imagining or remembering it but catching up with it, and his way of ending paragraphs like he’s cheating on a test. But I don’t want to give my husband this victory, so I say:

I would rather listen to evangelical radio than to On the Road.

Why? he asks.

It’s a good question, so I look for a good reason. My sister, who teaches literature in Chicago, always says that Kerouac is like an enormous penis, pissing all over the USA. She thinks that his syntax reads like he’s marking his territory, claiming inches by slamming verbs into sentences, filling up all silences. I love that argument, though I don’t know if I quite understand it, or if it’s even an argument. So I don’t put it forward. We’re approaching a tollbooth, and I dig around for spare change. We halt, pay a machine—not a person—and drive on. Kerouac’s America is nothing like this America, so bony, desolate, and factual. I use the distraction to move beyond our Kerouac discussion, a dead-end street, no doubt. And as we gain speed again, I scroll down and press Play on the next audiobook.

“The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.” After listening to its opening sentence, we all agree: this is it, this is what we’ll listen to, Lord of the Flies, read by William Golding himself. We know it’s no fairy tale, no sugarcoated portrait of childhood, but it’s—at least—fiction. Not a fiction that will separate us and the children from reality, but one that might help us, eventually, explain some of it to them.

We listen to the reading for a few hours, and probably take some wrong turns, and get lost for a while, and so we listen to the reading some more, until we cannot listen anymore, cannot drive anymore, cannot sit anymore. We find a motel in a town called Damascus, near the Virginia–Tennessee border. I have no idea why it’s called that, but as we pull into the parking lot, and I read a sign that says Free Wi-Fi & Cable TV, it’s clear to me that some appropriations of names are more unsettling than others.

Outside the motel room, while the rest prepare for bed, I roll myself a cigarette and try to call Manuela. She doesn’t pick up, but I leave a message, asking how things are moving forward with the case, saying please call me when you have some time.



NARRATIVE ARC

The girl asks the waitress for crayons and paper while we wait for our breakfasts in a diner booth the next morning, and then asks me if I can draw four squares for her, and label them the same way I did in the cottage the other day. I’ll do it, I say, but only if she’s willing to let me make the game a little more challenging for her.

How? she asks, skeptical.

I’ll draw eight squares instead of four, I say, and you figure out what to do with the rest.

She’s not convinced, grumbles, crosses her arms and digs her elbows into the table. But when her brother says he wants to try it out, she says:

Okay, fine, fine, fine: eight squares.

My husband reads a newspaper, and the children concentrate on their drawings, piecing together a more difficult plot, working out how to arrange and rearrange information in an eightfold space.

When I sat through courtroom hearings in the New York City Immigration Court, listening to and recording children’s testimonies, my recorder on my lap, hidden under a sweater, I felt that I knew exactly what I was doing, and why I was doing it. When I hovered in hallways, offices, or waiting rooms, the recorder in my hand, talking to immigration lawyers, priests, police officers, people in general, sampling the sounds of that raw legal reality, I trusted that I would eventually come to understand how to arrange all the pieces of what I was recording and tell a meaningful story. But as soon as I pressed Stop on my recording device, put all my stuff into my bag, and went back home, all the momentum and certainty I had had slowly dissolved. And when I re-listened to the material, thinking of ways to put it together in a narrative sequence, I was flooded by doubts and problems, paralyzed by hesitance and constant concerns.

The food finally arrives, but the children aren’t interested. They are too caught up in working out how to finish their last few squares. I observe them with pride, and maybe a little envy, a childish feeling, wishing I also had a crayon and was participating in the eight-square story game. I wonder how I’d distribute all the concerns I have.

Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, 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 is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward. Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonized by Western-Saxon-white categories, what’s the correct use of personal pronouns, go light on the adjectives, and oh, who gives a fuck how very whimsical phrasal verbs are?



COPULA & COPULATION

My husband wants us to listen to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring while we drive up and down this meandering road through the Cherokee National Forest, toward Asheville, North Carolina. It will be instructive, he says. So I roll down the window, breathe in the thin mountain air, and agree to search for the piece on my phone. When I finally catch some signal, I find a 1945 recording—apparently the original—and press Play.

For miles, as we make our way up to the very cusp of the mountain range and across the skyline drive, we hear Appalachian Spring over and over, and then once more. Making me pause, play, and pause again, my husband explains each element of the piece to the children: the tempo, the tonal links between movements, the overall structure of the composition. He tells them it’s a programmatic piece, and says it’s about white-eyes marrying, reproducing, conquering new land, and then driving Indians out of that land. He explains what a programmatic composition is, how it tells a story, how each section of instruments in the orchestra—woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion—represents a specific character, and how the instruments interact just like people talking, falling in love, fighting, and making up again.

So the wind instruments are the Indians, and the violins are the bad guys? asks the girl.

My husband confirms this, nodding.

But what are the bad guys, Pa, really? she asks him, demanding more details to put all this information together in her little head.

What do you mean?

I mean are they beasts, or cowboys, or monsters, or bears?

Republican cowboys and cowgirls, my husband tells her.

She thinks for a moment as the violins strike a higher pitch, and finally concludes:

Well, I am a cowgirl sometimes, but I’m not ever a Republic.

So, Pa—the boy wants to confirm—this song takes place in these same mountains we are driving through right now, yes?

That’s right, his father says.

But then, instead of helping the children understand things in more subtle historical detail, he adds a pedantic coda:

Except it’s not called a song. It’s just called a piece, or in fact a suite.

And while he explains the exact differences between those three things—song, piece, suite—I stop listening to him and focus on the very cracked screen of my irritating little telephone, where I type in “Copland Appalachian,” and find an official-enough-looking page that contradicts my husband’s whole story, or at least half of it. Yes, this Copland piece is about people getting married, reproducing, and so on. But it’s not at all a political piece about Indians and white-eyes, and the violins in the orchestra are certainly not Republicans. Copland’s Appalachian Spring




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