given a similar concert earlier that day, while we rode the subway from the supermarket back to our new apartment, surrounded by white plastic bags full of enormous eggs, very pink ham, organic almonds, corn bread, and tiny cartons of organic whole milk—the enriched and enhanced products of the new, upgraded diet of a family with two salaries. Two or three subway minutes and the children were asleep, heads on each of our laps, tangled humid hair, lovely salty smell like the warm giant pretzels we’d eaten earlier that day on a street corner. They were angelic, and we were young enough, and together we were a beautiful tribe, an enviable bunch. Then, suddenly, one started snoring and the other stared farting. The few passengers who were not plugged into their telephones took note, looked at her, at us, at him, and smiled—difficult to know if in compassion or complicity with our children’s public shamelessness. My husband smiled back at the smiling strangers. I thought for a second I should divert their attention, reflect it away from us, maybe stare accusingly at the old man sleeping a few seats from us, or at the young lady in full jogging gear. I didn’t, of course. I just nodded in acknowledgment, or in resignation, and smiled back at the subway strangers—a tight, buttonhole smile. I suppose I felt the kind of stage fright that comes up in certain dreams, where you realize you went to school and forgot to put on underwear; a sudden and deep vulnerability in front of all those strangers being offered a glimpse of our still very new world.
But later that night, back in the intimacy of our new apartment, when the children were asleep and were making all those beautiful noises all over again—real beauty, always unintentional—I was able to listen to them fully, without the burden of self-consciousness. The girl’s intestinal sounds were amplified against the wall of the cardboard box and traveled, diaphanous, across the almost empty living room. And after a little while, from somewhere deep in his sleep, the boy heard them—or so it seemed to us—and replied to them with utterances and mumbles. My husband took note of the fact that we were witnessing one of the languages of the city soundscape, now put to use in the ultimately circular act of conversation:
A mouth replying to a butthole.
I suppressed the desire to laugh, for an instant, but then I noticed that my husband was holding his breath and closing his eyes in order to not laugh. Perhaps we were a little more stoned than we thought. I became undone, my vocal cords bursting into a sound more porcine than human. He followed, with a series of puffs and gasps, his nasal wings flapping, face wrinkling, eyes almost disappearing, his entire body rocking back and forth like a wounded piñata. Most people acquire a frightening appearance in mid-laughter. I’ve always feared those who click their teeth, and found those who laugh without emitting a single sound rather worrisome. In my paternal family, we have a genetic defect, I think, which manifests in snorts and grunts at the very end of the laughing cycle—a sound that, perhaps for its animality, unleashes another cycle of laughter. Until everyone has tears in their eyes, and a feeling of shame overcomes them.
I took a deep breath and wiped a tear from my cheek. I realized then that this was the first time my husband and I had ever heard each other laugh. With our deeper laughs, that is—a laugh unleashed, untied, a laugh entire and ridiculous. Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh. My husband and I finally recomposed ourselves.
It’s mean to laugh at the expense of our sleeping children, yes? I asked.
Yes, very wrong.
We decided that what we had to do, instead, was document them, so we took out our recording gear. My husband swept the space with his boom pole; I zoomed my handheld voice recorder up close to the boy and the girl. She sucked her thumb and he mumbled words and strange sleep-utterances into it; cars drove by outside in the street into my husband’s mic. In childish complicity, the two of us sampled their sounds. I’m not sure what deeper reasons prompted us to record the children that night. Maybe it was just the summer heat, plus the wine, minus the joint, times the excitement of the move, divided by all the cardboard recycling ahead of us. Or maybe we were following an impulse to allow the moment, which felt like the beginning of something, to leave a trace. After all, we’d trained our minds to seize recording opportunities, trained our ears to listen to our daily lives as if they were raw tape. All of it, us and them, here and there, inside and outside, was registered, collected, and archived. New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.
Later, tired and having lost momentum, we carried the children in our arms into their new room, their mattresses not much larger than the cardboard box where they been sleeping. Then, in our bedroom, we slid onto our own mattress and wedged our legs together, saying nothing, but with our bodies saying something like maybe later, maybe tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll make love, make plans, tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Goodnight.
MOTHER TONGUES
When I was first invited to work on the soundscape project, I thought it seemed somewhat tacky, megalomaniacal, possibly too didactic. I was young, though not much younger than I am now, and still thought of myself as a hard-core political journalist. I also didn’t like the fact that the project, though it was orchestrated by NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and would eventually form part of their sound archive, was in part funded by some huge multinational corporations. I tried to do some research on their CEOs—for scandals, frauds, any fascist allegiances. But I had a little girl. So when I was told that the contract included medical insurance, and realized that I could live on the salary without having to do the myriad journalistic gigs I was taking on to survive, I stopped researching, stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract. I’m not sure what his reasons were, but at around the same time, my husband—who was then just a stranger specialized in acoustemology and not my husband or our children’s father—signed his.
The two of us gave ourselves completely to the soundscape project. Every day, while the children were in daycare and school, respectively, we went out into the city, not knowing what would happen but always sure we’d find something new. We traveled in and out of the five boroughs, interviewing strangers, asking them to talk in and about their native tongues. He liked the days we spent in transitional spaces, like train stations, airports, and bus stops. I liked the days we spent in schools, sampling children. He’d walk around the crowded cafeterias, his Porta-Brace sound bag hanging from a strap around his right shoulder, his boom held up at an angle, recording the cluster of voices, cutlery, footsteps. In hallways and classrooms, I’d hold my recorder up close to each child’s mouth as they uttered sounds, responding to my prompts. I asked them to recall songs and sayings they heard in their homes. Their accents were often anglicized, domesticated, their parents’ languages now foreign to them. I remember their actual, physical tongues—pink, earnest, disciplined—trying to wrap themselves around the sounds of their more and more distant mother tongues: the difficult position of the tongue’s tip in the Hispanic erre, the quick tongue-slaps against the palate in all the polysyllabic Kichwa and Karif words, the soft and downward curved bed of the tongue in the aspirated Arabic h.
The months passed, and we recorded voices, collected accents. We accumulated hours of tape of people speaking, telling stories, pausing, telling lies, praying, hesitating, confessing, breathing.
TIME
We also accumulated things: plants, plates, books, chairs. We picked up objects from curbsides in affluent neighborhoods. Often, we realized later that we didn’t really need another chair, another bookshelf, and so we put it back outside, on the curbside of our less-affluent neighborhood, feeling that we were participants in the invisible left hand of wealth redistribution—the anti–Adam Smiths of sidewalks and curbsides. For a while, we continued to pick up objects from the streets, until we heard on the radio one day that there was a bedbug crisis in the city, so we stopped scavenging, quit redistributing wealth, and winter came, and then came spring.
It’s never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life. One day, our books didn’t fit in the bookshelves anymore, and the big empty room in our apartment had become our living room. It had become the place where we watched