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 begun 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.