Ben Lerner reads.
Hey I understand you’re angry, the first message said. A man’s voice, probably a man my age. I would be angry, too. I know I messed up. I know it’s not the first time I messed up. I have been dealing with a lot. I know you’re dealing with a lot, too, it’s not an excuse, but I just want to tell you how I see it, and how I can make it right. And most of all I want to listen. To what you want to say and to what you need from me. To make it right. We’ve come too far. I’m sorry, call me back, O.K.?
The number, which was not in my contacts, had appeared while I was walking Ava to the school bus. I’d never recorded a voice-mail greeting and I guess the person he meant to call hadn’t either. The area code was the same as ours. We were stomping lanternflies to death every few yards, the bright red of their hind wings vivid against the pavement’s gray. After I left Ava, I listened to the message—I’d put my earbuds in—several times as I walked to the train. On the corner of Church and McDonald, before I descended to the F, I encountered a cracked but intact full-length mirror somebody had set beside the curb, first taping a piece of paper to the glass that read: “Still works.” Underground, when I refilled my MetroCard, the machine asked me if I wanted to add value or add time. It was too much, too beautiful: the bright red, the curbed cracked mirror, the deepest question in the world.
I listened again as I took the F toward Manhattan, inferring a body from the voice. A white man in his forties, though I couldn’t specify what aspects of the voice led me to these conclusions about race and age. I was powerless not to infer them. Tall, strong—why did I think that? Something about depth and resonance. A little hungover. His voice a mix of desperation and the remnants of sleep, as if he were still sifting what he did from what he dreamed. Traces, but only traces, of a New York accent, from which I formed my assumptions about class. I looked around at the people on my train and tested the voice against their bodies. There was a broad-shouldered white man—bluejeans, hooded sweater, brown leather jacket—with his black hair slicked back. He was leaning against a pole, reading a newspaper and holding a cup of bodega coffee. I played the message again while staring at the man, trying to attach the voice to him.
We pulled into Carroll Street. Ava’s bus would be arriving at her school, just a couple of blocks away. I’d put her on the bus, gone underground, caught up with her. I imagined that she was walking on the gray pavement scattered with lanternfly corpses directly above me. I think you can sense it, if you walk over your father. I believe we have thousands of senses, that we are shedding and gaining senses all the time.
Dada, she would say, having materialized at the foot of the bed, street light through the blinds catching the sequinned cat shape on her pajama top, I have a question. Most nights she had a question. I had a draft e-mail where I wrote them down. I opened it now to add the one she’d asked last night:
Yes. Go back to bed. I swiped away from the tender archive. When the Internet came back at the first stop in Manhattan, I Googled the lanternflies the radio had told us all to kill on sight and read: “The tree of heaven is a preferred host.” When everything is poetry I know I am unwell. The advent of new senses is a sign.
And seeing signs is a sign, as in: I emerged from the train at Bryant Park and there, on the corner of Sixth Avenue, was a pile of broken silvered glass along the curb. The fragments still worked. What you need to do is resist seeing pattern where there is none, said a reasonable voice. But hearing voices is a sign, I joked to myself. You can’t function when everything takes on meaning. The sense that everything that happens happens on cue, a sudden shower of ginkgo leaves. That a message has been left for you.
Hey I understand you’re angry, he said, as I walked to the staff entrance on West Fortieth. A barely perceptible spring in my step produced by the carpet of yellow fan-shaped leaves. I would be angry, too. I know I messed up. I know it’s not the first time I messed up. I have been dealing with a lot. I know you’re dealing with a lot, too, how you can perceive the crimson hind wings through the semitranslucent forewings. It’s not an excuse, but I just want to tell you how I see it.
At the time, my work at the library involved wearing white cotton gloves in a cool room with low light and low relative humidity where I received no signal and where I removed old photographs from brown folders and sorted them into green folders for digitization by subject, time period, process. These were first passes through some new donations, nothing of particular value, but full of punishing beauty, so I had to protect myself, even from the language: sensitized plates, silver salts. Is this a good example, every photograph asks, whether a cyanotype of algae or three men waiting for a bus in Yorkville, 1965. Yes, go back to sleep. I liked to think the gloves were protecting me from the oils the images gave off, that the oils could enter my pores and dreams, but I understood that to be poetic; it wasn’t an actual paranoid belief.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Ben Lerner read “The Ferry.”
So it wasn’t until I surfaced for lunch, it wasn’t until I was waiting to order at the salad place on Sixth Avenue, that I saw I had another message from the man. I also had a message from Camila and one from an unknown number, probably the dentist; I owed the practice money. I waited to listen to my messages until I had my food and had found a place to sit in Bryant Park, not far from the fountain near Forty-first, which was turned off. It was drizzling intermittently but I still didn’t eat inside and I liked the feel of the fine drops on my unmasked face, mist basically. The message from Camila, who was still remote, was about Ava’s new after-school schedule, You’re on for Tuesday pickups, and after the logistics there was a pause of three seconds, I replayed it and counted the seconds, this time hearing distant sirens in the background, before she said: I hope work is good, that you’re feeling good, see you this evening. In that three-beat silence was exhaustion, rage, concern. The second message was the practice calling about my balance.
Hey I know you are getting these, the man said, angry, trying not to sound angry. I could hear sirens in his message, too, the same sirens? I’m sorry and I want to tell you that and also figure this out, because we can figure this out, and we owe it to each other to figure it out and not let something get bigger than it needs to be. I was definitely way out of line, no excuses, and I want to make it right, but you have to talk to me, O.K.? Seriously, call me back.
The drops stopped being fine and fell on cue. They darkened the pavement, the wall around the park, the inactive fountain, first making coin-size individual areas of comparative dark where they struck, then darkening large swaths of pavement at once, as if something were spreading from inside the concrete. You’ve seen this before, but I just want to tell you how I see it, replaying the message again and again, the surfaces of the city darkening, a beautiful experience we share, I don’t want to make it bigger than it needs to be, but I really couldn’t eat, I set my compostable bowl of superfoods on a nearby chair for another person or pigeons or rats or lanternflies, and inhaled the odor of rain and exhaust and weed, Manhattan always smelled like weed now, even when no smoker could be seen, but marijuana is no excuse.
I texted Camila that I was feeling fine (basically mist, I didn’t say) and that I’d noted the new schedule and that I loved her and would see her later and then I dialled the man’s number and cancelled the call so I could message him. I wrote: Hey you have the wrong number good luck reaching who you are trying to reach, I hope you work it out. Then it really started to pour—a group of kids on a day trip waiting to reboard their bus began to shriek with pleasure, a teacher yelling, “Find your partner, everybody partner up.”
He’d had too much to drink and fought with her brother, no, cousin at a gathering for her birthday. I could vaguely see them in my head yelling at each other on Cortelyou, fucking try me. It had ruined her time. Or he’d bought her a horrendous gift for her birthday, why my focus on birthdays, two pairs of earrings from Macy’s, neither close to her style, the doubling of the gift compounding the injury, worse than forgetting. Strange that while I could conjure only a vague image of the man and the presumed woman I could see the chandelier and teardrop earrings vividly, glittering against someone’s palm. It looked like he’d left the tiny price tags on, but I couldn’t make the numbers out. Or she’d discovered his long string of flirtatious texts with a co-worker, or that he’d been sleeping with his co-worker, a last straw. Or she’d discovered mysterious charges on the credit-card bill, traced them back to the online gambling, mainly sports betting, that he’d forsworn. I could almost see him grab her wrists, screaming: listen, listen, listen, which is something he’d done once before, the summer before the pandemic, when they were on a trip in South America. The anger and the alcohol, how they were under the remorse, influenced these projections, as did various indefensible inferences I made based on the timbre of his voice, but the earrings were so vivid, felt like signals I was picking up through the stereotypes, we have so many senses. I didn’t think he’d hit her, but he’d thrown something in her direction, his phone or one of those big vape mods, which struck the mirror hard.
Remember how the night Ava was born, when they took her to the nursery, I stood there by the glass with a few other manic parents, and all of the babies were swaddled in identical blankets, blue stripes, they all had identical caps, and the little skin you could see was purple or red, the color changeable, and you couldn’t sort anyone by gender, race, process? We were looking through thick glass trying to attach an incredibly specific possessive love–my love for my child—to each of these bodies, but all of them and none of them were ours. And another dad said what I was thinking, that they all looked the same, and I said, only half joking: You know, they should just give you a baby at random, and then everybody, even the rich, would start investing in prenatal care, health care in general, housing, food security, etc. I was going on about this until a nurse who must have been behind us pushed me gently into one of those plastic upholstered chairs and handed me a tiny carton of orange juice—she’d opened it for me, she’d inserted a straw—and said, Drink this, take some deep breaths and drink this. It was punishingly sweet, how the one and the many get confused, these pronouns that can hail you out of the air.
And then there was hail when I came out of the basement for my break, white stones melting everywhere on the steps, the sidewalk. The sun was out so the storm must have been brief; it was dizzying to think how I almost missed these tiny ice moons sparkling in autumn light, how I would have missed all these calls if I’d gone to my desk to eat my Kind bar and check my e-mail. I got out my phone to take a picture of the hail—I’d send it to Camila and ask if it had fallen in Brooklyn, too—but it just didn’t show up in the picture, it just looked like nothing, so I picked up a few hailstones to take a closeup in my hand. But when I held my phone over my palm the diminishing hail became those earrings, just for a second, much less than a second, and “became” isn’t really the word, I didn’t fully believe it, but I drew my hand back suddenly, as if from a stinging insect or a burn.
I don’t know how it is for you, which ones you save, but at the time there were several I could neither listen to nor erase. One was from a dead friend and the message was mundane; I’d read the transcription my phone produced, could recite it for you, but the recording was like a little vial of her breath and I couldn’t listen to it, couldn’t expose myself, but I also couldn’t delete it, return it to the air, although I’d marked it for deletion before, and then restored it before emptying the trash of other messages.
Then there were a couple from Ava when she was a toddler, when Camila had held the phone for her and said, Say hi to Daddy, one that was more babbling than speech, she was really young, and the other full sentences but much higher than her current voice. Those messages had grown too beautiful to listen to or destroy, I’d waited too long. And then I’d saved one long voice mail from Camila that she hadn’t meant to send.
She was, is, talking to a man in what sounds like high wind, although that’s just the fabric of her pocket and distortion, but since it sounds like wind, I picture the exchange she inadvertently recorded as taking place on the ferry to Governors Island, where Camila was working at the time. She says my name early in the message, it’s one of only a handful of unmistakable words in the three-minute recording. Nothing the man says is intelligible, although at moments his tone is clear, is clearly interrogative, the vibrations gentle, asking her careful questions in response to what she’s saying about me, about us, amid this thunderous wind, the water glittering around them, as they lean on the rails, shoulder to shoulder.
I thought she was telling him what I’d done, or maybe he already knew and she is saying that what’s complicated is this question of what my illness, if it is an illness, explains or excuses, and what repair might mean in that context, or what liberties she might be justified in taking, because she deserves to feel alive, too, doesn’t she, don’t you get to feel alive without having to have “an episode,” I imagine her saying, and the man, I don’t hold this against him, feels a distinct sexual thrill at her talking this way.
Except it might have been me: she might have pocket-dialled me while we were talking, maybe that’s why she says my name. Strangely, this made it more difficult for me to imagine the muffled speech, because it had been so long since she’d talked to me at any length by that point, save about logistics, and maybe we were just talking about piano and gymnastics, drop-off and pickup, but it didn’t sound that way, the tonalities and rhythms implied emotional depth and resonance, and so, in the version in which it’s me, it’s like an abstract performance of a lost intimacy, the recording preserves its shape.
But on the day that it had hailed the man called a third time while I was on the F heading back to Carroll Gardens to pick up Ava from after school. It took a few minutes for the message to appear. (I don’t fully understand that delay, sometimes I’ll get voice mails instantly when the signal returns, but it usually takes several minutes and sometimes it takes an hour, hours, as if the messages were having trouble finding me.) By the time I was alerted to the presence of his new voice mail—I was surprised to have another message from him, given my text—I was waiting outside what the school calls the “big yard.”
I often listen to my messages at pickup so I can avoid making small talk with the other parents and caretakers before the kids come bounding out of the building. Usually I don’t have new messages to listen to, so either I listen to trivial old ones, automated messages from the pharmacy, or the one Camila left on the ferry, or sometimes I just hold the phone to my ear and pretend to be listening, although when I do that I do hear messages—“hear” them the way I “hear” language when I read, the almost sound of reading, not an actual auditory hallucination.
I pressed the little triangle icon beside the new message, first swiping away the twenty-per-cent-battery warning—the intrusion of those warnings always irritates me—and held the phone to my ear and listened while I watched the cafeteria doors. And the doors burst open just as the man began to speak in my ear and all these beautiful children came running out, many holding coats in their arms, blue surgical masks dangling from many faces. When I am attending to a message, the visual world goes watery, a little transparent. And whatever I’m listening to starts to coördinate whatever movements I perceive, so that, while I listened to what the man was saying, all of those children rushing forth, spreading out across the blacktop, were increasingly vague to me, a wave of pale colors, and the advance of that wave seemed somehow keyed to, controlled by, the voice in my ear, as if the children could advance only as his sentences advanced, as if stopping the message would have stopped the kids in their tracks. Red light, green light.
Listen to me, the man said, and I could hear, or could feel, the contraction of the muscles in his jaw. You listen very carefully to me, you piece of shit, you need to mind your own fucking business, “good luck,” he misquoted me in a squeaky voice, “reaching your friend,” I don’t need your luck motherfucker, “I hope you work it out” (the same high pitch, but also very sarcastic, as if I’d written that to mock him), fuck you, man. (How did he know I was a man?) Ava was waving to me now, smiling as she ran, a large rolled-up piece of paper in one hand, but I could only vaguely see her in the golden light, could barely make myself return her smile, lift my free arm in greeting. I Googled this number, O.K., and I know where you live, remember that I know where to find you, “good luck,” fuck that, fuck you. It’s people like you, man, it is assholes like you, and Ava was hugging me, you better watch yourself. Then she stepped back to unroll the portrait of the three of us and the dog we didn’t have.
I’d Googled phone numbers before when I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing important calls—from the passport office before our trip to Argentina, for example, or from one of the extensions at Ava’s school, or from a doctor who didn’t want to leave sensitive information in a voice mail, and so on. The “reverse number lookup” had always implied the number was spam, telemarketing. I’d never had occasion to Google my own number until then, in the wake of the man’s message, on the train home with Ava. I was sitting with her backpack between my feet and she was spinning around on the pole in front of me, singing the chorus of “Anti-Hero.”
The first hit was from a Web site called Truepeoplesearch. I clicked it and was startled to find my name—Camila was listed under a section called “possible relatives”—and there was a list of addresses associated with the number: our current address, our two previous addresses in Brooklyn, even the place we’d had in Urbana, when we were in school. You had to pay for a search of public records.
I tried to take a deep breath, which is hard in a KN95, and told myself that this wasn’t surprising, that of course anybody can be located on the Internet, but somehow I’d never quite realized that anyone in possession of my phone number could also know my address, map it, see where we lived from above, or walk around it on Street View. Our other addresses had been in big buildings, maybe that made me feel more protected and anonymous, but now we were one of just three units, and it said which unit, so this man, whose voice in the last message was dripping with rage and violence, knew exactly where my daughter slept, where she woke me with her questions.
My hands and the back of my neck felt very cold, almost to the point of numbness; the fury in his voice, the believable threat of it, terrified me, made it hard to think, and Ava was saying Dada, Dada, Dada, over and over again while I was trying to make all this the right size, no bigger than it needed to be, and that exasperating ten-per-cent-battery-life message popped up while I was trying to Google the man’s number, and I snapped at her: Just be quiet for one minute, Ava, just be quiet. She froze, went silent, and the kids and grownups around us were suddenly looking at me or trying not to, because, while the words I’d spoken were unremarkable, the voice wasn’t mine. I put my phone away and said I’m sorry, sweetheart, what did you want to tell me. Did you bring a snack, she asked, trying not to cry.
Since I’d forgotten a snack, since I felt guilty, and since I wanted to collect my thoughts before facing Camila, who would know by looking at me that something was wrong, we got out a few stops early, at Seventh Avenue. I let Ava get whatever she wanted at the bakery, even though we’d recently made a rule about no dessert stuff on weekdays; she had good points about our hypocrisy, how she was allowed muffins that were basically cake, so why couldn’t she just have a cookie, so “just today” I let her get a cookie as big as her face and we walked the long avenue blocks to the park, where we found a bench. My phone was dead.
The sun was low and behind the giant sugar maples, and it was hard to sort which leaves looked orange and red from the quality of the light and which were in fact those colors, had changed with the season. I asked Ava, who was doing a “leaf study” in first grade, why they changed color. She told me that orange and red and yellow and the other colors of the autumn leaves were “really there all along,” but you can’t see them because the chlorophyll—she beat the syllables in her hand as she said them, as she did with all recently acquired words—hides all those other colors. But what does that mean, love, for a color to be there but be hidden, what is an invisible color? She shrugged, smiled, and said: It’s a thing. You could hear this little guh at the end of “thing” when she said that, and she said it a lot, this extra puff of breath, like she was launching the word onto a current.
She wanted to go to the Vanderbilt playground. We walked across the meadow holding hands, and she played for a while on the webbed, star-shaped climbing structure while I tried to decide if I should tell Camila about the messages. Then dusk was falling around Ava atop the structure and we needed to get home. We weren’t that far, but it would take ages for us to walk at Ava’s pace, and I couldn’t call a car. We headed uphill to the Fifteenth Street stop to get the F; it was delayed because of a signalling problem, and we waited forever underground, taking turns reading the latest issue of Ladybug, and I thought I did a good job imitating the affect of the characters, inhabiting my roles.
While I was finding the right key, the door swung open. Camila kneeled and pulled Ava toward her, enveloped her. Thank God, she said, thank God. Had the man come to the house, had he threatened her? Before I could ask what was wrong, what had happened, Camila demanded, voice trembling, Where have you been?
I heard myself say the park, the playground, the train, the battery, but my language floated away. Camila led Ava by the hand to her room. I dropped Ava’s schoolbag and took off my boots and walked to the kitchen. Without turning on the light, I disposed of our masks and filled a glass of water from the tap but didn’t drink it. The clock on the microwave said it was seven-forty-nine. We were usually home before five-thirty, dinner at six, eight o’clock was quiet reading in bed if it wasn’t lights out.
I plugged my phone into the charger on the counter and waited in the dark. I listened to Camila’s muffled voice in Ava’s room. Even from that distance I could register Camila’s struggle to sound upbeat, the exaggerated rising tones. Soon I could make out the tinny music of one of Ava’s iPad games (she normally didn’t get “screen time” on school nights), the sound of Camila carefully shutting Ava’s door behind her. Camila didn’t come to the kitchen right away; she went into the bathroom and ran the water.
My phone began to glow. The ghostly apple, then the home screen. No delay this time: seventeen new texts, seven new voice mails, three from Camila and four from an unknown number. I listened to those first, bending over awkwardly so the phone could stay plugged in. Hi this is Anna, the after-school coördinator, I’m pretty sure a parent picked up Ava but forgot to check her out before leaving the big yard, I just want to make sure she’s with a parent or guardian, please call me back. Hi this is Anna again, trying to reach Ava’s parents, I’ve tried the other number, too, but please call me back, and in the future please make sure to check out with staff before leaving the big yard. This is Anna, I talked to Camila but just wanted to try this number one more time before I head home for the day. I know she’s trying to reach you, hope everything’s O.K.
I erased the messages without listening to the fourth. I erased all the voice mails from Camila, then I made myself quickly scan the texts: Did you forget to check out again, let me know you have her, let me know you have her and that you’re all right, where are you, what do I do, I called Emily, I called Sam, do I call the police, just please please call me, it is fully fucking night, I can’t do this, can’t live like this, what is happening. I erased the thread.
I left the phone charging on the counter and looked out the back window. There was a cherry tree in our building’s small yard, and through its moving branches I could see the lit windows of the much larger building behind ours. I tried to organize my thoughts, what I’d say to Camila. I know it’s not the first time I messed up. Camila turned on the light as she walked in and the outside world was gone. I looked at her reflection and saw she’d put her hair up, something she did only when she had an important meeting. In the glass I watched her get a big pot from the bottom cabinet, fill it with water. It took forever. Then she put it on the stove, added salt and oil. A reasonable voice commanded me to turn around and say the reasonable things.
I turned around. Today I was maybe more scattered than normal because this weird thing happened, this man has been calling me, trying to reach someone else, these stray apologies that weren’t meant for me, although I guess the last message was. Camila said nothing, looking through the cabinet for one of the multiple boxes of half-used spaghetti; I always opened a new box accidentally. At first it was actually really beautiful, I said, but I was confused about what I was trying to explain, accomplish; what did the beauty have to do with my being unreachable and late? I was just telling her what it was like for me. Hey, did it hail here earlier? For the first time, she looked at me, then looked away.
Her silence was starting to make me angry. It angered me that it was less the silence of justified fury, my partner messed up, than a silence that implied I was crazy, not to be engaged. The carefulness of her movements—slowly pouring in the spaghetti so as to avoid causing a splash, pressing the spaghetti gently but decisively down into the water with a wooden spoon—suggested she must tread lightly because I was unwell. This is unfair, I thought or said. It’s unfair because anybody can forget to check out, can have a low battery. It’s unfair because if you leave silence around any language it starts to sound crazy, or sound like poetry, unhinged from reality, try it, just don’t respond to something a friend or lover or colleague at the library says to you, just let it hang in the air and vibrate and change color.
And then I was telling her how it had changed from this beautiful confusion of the one and the many to these very serious and upsetting threats, that this person knows where we live, do you understand that, it’s all online, and because Camila was saying nothing I really had no idea if I was making sense, which was, it was becoming clear to me, what she wanted: to amplify my confusion and to use that as evidence that I wasn’t functional, functioning.
I realized I’d had very little to eat, I’d barely touched my lunch, I still had my Kind bar, and so I interrupted myself to ask: Can you make enough for me? The incongruity—this man is after us, can you make me spaghetti—struck me as funny, and I laughed, it’s good to laugh at yourself, but it sounded off, wild, and still she said nothing. It was kind of crazy to ask if she could make enough for me when the pasta was halfway done. I tried to explain that I hadn’t really eaten, though Ava had had this giant cookie—why withhold it—and that’s what Camila responded to, in a surprisingly quiet voice she confirmed: You bought Ava a giant cookie?
I was astounded that she was ignoring everything I was trying to say about the messages and how exposed we were as a family but couldn’t pass up an opportunity to dwell on how I’d violated the dessert policy. She herself let Ava have scones from the place on Fort Hamilton all the time, which I pointed out to her. I pointed out that it was pretty fucked up for her to try to “score points” with the cookie thing, but she’d gone silent again. She opened the refrigerator door to get the cauliflower, which Ava liked to eat raw.
The reasonable voice was still there, it was saying you can stop this at any time, but I hated the self-satisfaction of that voice, that voice was on Camila’s side, it was beside her on the ferry, and then the other man was mocking me, “good luck,” which is not to say that I heard any of these voices, although it’s true that my own voice—I couldn’t stop talking now, I was on to Argentina—didn’t originate in my body, it was like a radio I couldn’t turn off, and Camila was rinsing the cauliflower, ignoring me, now she was breaking it up by hand, breaking it up into florets. Eventually I took her by the wrists to make her listen.
In my memory, I’m the only person at the early-morning session, a winter morning in downtown Champaign, but there were probably a couple of others in the back. I felt embarrassed for the panelists, for the woman who introduced them. I wanted to flee, but it was too late, and I was sitting too close to the front, fingering the lanyard they make you wear at such things. O.K., good morning, I think we should get started.
The main speaker was from a university in the South, maybe Emory, his PowerPoint: “Criteria for Deaccession.” Is an item out of date or inaccurate, has it been superseded, how often has it been requested in the past ten years, are there duplicates, does the preservation librarian report it’s too expensive to repair or maintain, can it be replaced with a digital resource—deep questions about value and time, but he was droning on about them in this bureaucratic way, flattening them into the language of “best practices,” addressing me and the empty chairs, addressing no one. And I listened with the terrible knowledge that I was going to have to ask something, that the moderator was going to say, when the panelists concluded their remarks, We have some time for discussion.
I guess I have more of a comment. I’m thinking about how these issues regarding what’s stored off site, or what’s shredded—I’m thinking about how all the issues around deaccession—well, let me say first that I’m grateful you are all talking about this, I wish more people were here, because everybody in the profession should be talking about this, grappling with it openly, really these conversations should be, should involve the public. People need to understand the relationship between preservation and destruction, I mean, how the former must entail the latter, or there can’t be—I mean, the cloud is no solution, that’s not a collection, collecting everything is collecting nothing. And I guess I’m thinking about the Genizah, I’m not sure how to pronounce that word, actually, but I recently read a great book about the Cairo Genizah, I’m blanking on the name, but I’m thinking about how in Judaism, as you no doubt know, there are all these rules regarding the storage and ritual burial of texts that contain the name of God, and I guess I’m just commenting about how—about how, setting God aside—I mean, I realize we represent secular institutions, but.
But Camila helped me with this; she had every reason not to, especially when we were taking a break, but she did. We met up in the park for a family day some months after I’d received the voice mails from the man. It was early spring, but warm. I’d brought Ava a new bubble wand, this thing with two handles and a cotton rope in between. She dipped the rope in the bucket, then held the handles up and out in front of her like a little air-traffic controller, and this wind sock of soap formed in front of her, iridescent colors sliding across the surface of the shape as it shifted, separated, burst. She had recently lost her front teeth.
While we watched Ava play, Camila asked if I ever heard again from that guy. It was the first time she’d mentioned him directly. I said no. Do you still have the voice mails, she asked, and I kind of smiled, kind of shrugged. She looked at me for a while and asked, Can I hear them? A tiny wave of anger: She doesn’t believe there ever were any messages. But I knew not to honor that anger, not to freeze it or make it bigger, just let the wave pass through me, and it was gone. I located the messages on the cracked screen of my phone, indicated which they were, and held it toward her. The green of the buds on the trees intensified as she listened.
It’s just like the phone book, she said, when she finally handed it back. There’s nothing magical about the idea that you can link up a name and number and an address, right? It’s really no worse than the phone books we grew up with. I nodded, although I disagreed. But then she put her hand on my leg and said: Maybe it’s different if you listen the way I did. I mean, in the order I listened in, so that he’s sorry in the end? Watch this, Ava was yelling, Dada, watch this. I could hear aircraft noise, birdsong, maybe sirens. Try it, Camila said. ♦
