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