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.
§ FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ X 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
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.