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.