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,