José Orduña.
Joaquín,
The other night you asked how you were made—how everything is made—as though it were one question. We’d been reading about Saturn, its ice rings, its hundred and forty-six moons. I tried to deflect by saying there were parts of your question with answers and parts without, which only made it worse.
Like what? You asked. Like what?
Your toy flashlight, our one light source, made your wild head of curls glow like the Crab Nebula. I blurted out a succession of things I thought to be relatively settled, probably closer to folk knowledge, because I couldn’t tell you that Daddy—like most everyone else—fumbles around in the dark. Instead I told you it’s kind of like how a pumpkin seed turns into a pumpkin, a person seed turns into a person; that on a big enough family tree you’d find all your friends from school, all the people of Earth, even Pearly your secondhand goldfish, the purple sea stars we see in the bay, and the neon globs of Witch’s Butter that ooze from rotting logs on our walks. To my surprise the answer produced silence. I looked at you and again thought about Saturn, this time Goya’s, in which a monstrous god so violently grasps his child as he devours him that his fingers tear into his headless little back. Now that you and your brother are here, it feels like the truest painting on the condition of parenthood I’ve ever seen in how it captures the sadism of Time devouring his little hours.
You settled deeper into your silence. I turned off your flashlight and in the lightshow of total darkness before the eyes adjust I thought how strange it was that the universe can ask questions about itself in your small human voice. I thought how once, the size of the universe was as far as one could walk in a lifetime, and how despite its immensity today, the moment I saw your face emerge from your mother, mine contracted violently to a shape coterminous with your body.
Pressed into your back in the darkness, I felt your heartbeat in my chest and it reminded me of something I’d read, that the millions of cells of a human heart create an electromagnetic field with each beat. The field is measurable past the confines of the heart and its corresponding body and it produces a tiny amount of gravity. We know that everything in the universe is receding from everything else except if it's trapped in something’s gravity and I wonder just how much a human heart can produce. I lay with you like that every night until I feel your body spasm in that particular way that means I can leave the room, which, despite the feelings I’ve just described, I also somehow desperately want to do.
I’ve tried to write you this letter dozens of times and more often than not, I end on a blank page, your name at the top, a cursor blinking. The last time I tried to distract myself by browsing the internet, but stumbled on a headline about two bodies stuck to razor wire in the Rio Grande, one of them later identified as a child not much older than you, from Honduras. I closed the page without writing a thing, which in retrospect feels like the best version of this letter so far in how it captures the paralysis I feel when confronted with the contradiction at the heart of this endeavor—wanting to write you a love letter, and feeling that I need to write you a warning.
A week ago, we went to watch the Chinook run. On a bridge, I lifted you and your brother so that you could peer down at their thick bodies swimming in place, cutting a waterfall’s force with slow hypnotic swaying. I told you that Chinook, like other salmon, use the earth’s magnetic field to find their birthplace after years of wandering at sea. They must figure that if a place is good enough for birth, it must be a good enough place to die. But the Chinook we watched were hatched in concrete tanks beside the river so I wonder what drove them to slam their bodies repeatedly into jagged rocks in their journeying toward a place they’d never known. My birthplace, Veracruz—the place where half your family lives, where five generations are buried—was just named the state with the most clandestine graves in a country now riddled with them. And despite the fact that you and your brother were born a half hour drive north of the border with Mexico, you’ve never been.
I often wonder when and under what circumstances you’ll go. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been there myself, when I accompanied your grandfather as he escorted his brother’s body to its final resting place after dying of an overdose. It's strange to think that you’ll never meet this man, your great uncle, who you both resemble very much, especially in photographs where he and your grandfather, who were also two years apart, stand together as children.
Once, a friend, M, described his daughter’s face like one of those old timey slot machines, except instead of cherries and bells, it’s grandparents, uncles, and cousins spinning and spinning. He told me about an experience he’d had before his mother’s death—she’d been in good health but nearing the age where death becomes expected, so she’d invited him over to bequeath a few cherished items. As they rummaged through her attic, he found a tiny sepia photograph of his daughter suspended in glass, encased in a golden locket, except it wasn’t his daughter. When his mother saw him holding the locket she walked over and told him it had belonged to her mother, and that the photo was of her mother’s sister—a person M had never even heard of because she’d died shortly before her sixteenth birthday. A few years later, on the occasion of his mother’s passing, M—in what amounted to a total break from the individual I’d come to know—told me that a person is composed of many things and that not all of them are susceptible to death. I’d known M as an artist whose work moved him to look unflinchingly into the bleakest corners of humanity—a practice that had given him a brutally physicalist view of reality—so this shift struck me as the ruin left from buckling under immense grief. He said he’d come to believe, as Aquinas had written, that a person is a horizon where the finite and the eternal touch, and that within the impermanence of the body dwelt the pearl of something incorruptible and absolute.
Even now at your age, you’ve begun to crash onto the shore of this reality—the one on which you, little by little, become aware of how you’re bound in time. Arthur, a boy two years older than you, taught you the word die as he held an imaginary sword at your throat; one morning you stared for a small eternity at the rotting seagull in the grass, its milky eye, the flash of bone where there should have been feathers; and at home, you stared at the black-and-white photograph of your great grandmother, who died just after I met your mother, and asked Where’s Grandma Lucy? For a time we got away with saying she lived in our hearts, but that afternoon you pressed us—But where?
Where?
You stood in our living room just after your first birthday as the television played aerial footage of prisoners in hazmat suits lowering caskets into mass graves. Mercifully, you’ll have no memory of it, but your early life unfolded as death felt just there, right outside the front door, delivered by a friend's fingertips, floating on a loved one’s breath. I never told your mother, but in those early days, when it seemed entirely possible for the world to slip completely away, I obsessively followed the story of Nick Cordero, a 41-year-old actor and new father who’d contracted the virus and was hospitalized. Several times a day, for months, I went to the internet searching his name, I looked at photographs of him and his new baby, his smiling wife. I clung to the vague mathematics that it couldn’t happen to someone like him as it slowly and agonizingly did. Over months, along with countless others, he suffered blood clots, a leg amputation, severe lung damage, a series of heart attacks, and sepsis. When I read the news of his death, I clenched my jaw so hard that night as I slept that I chipped a tooth. And in one of those coincidences that feel like a message, I stumbled upon the story of Nezahualcóyotl, a pre-Columbian philosopher-king who witnessed his father’s assassination as a child, was exiled, and then returned to rule under the Triple Alliance. He rejected the official religion, and instead threw himself into a life of profound doubt and seeking. And while he allowed his subjects to worship the gods of the imperial religion, he consecrated a temple he kept completely and utterly empty for the God of the Everywhere. He wrote poetry that at once lamented our human inability to know the divine while nevertheless longed to experience its essence. He came to believe that at the innermost core of all things is cáhuitl, or that which leaves us behind. He wrote:
Eagle Men and Jaguar Men,
Though you were of jade,
Though you were of gold,
You, too, will go there,
To the place of the shades.
We must all disappear,
None will remain.
My Little One, Nico,
A surgeon pulled you into the world at a predetermined time, which is common enough, but no less strange. The umbilical cord, which was wrapped around your throat, prevented you from flipping into the head-down position. Start to finish, your birth took thirty-one minutes, while your brother’s ended in the forty eighth hour. Despite it being major abdominal surgery, and the three or four tugs that looked like someone grabbed your mother by the ankles and tried to yank her off the operating table, it was oddly peaceful. Maybe this was only in comparison to the violence and chaos of your brother’s. A few months before you arrived, I remember reading that at some point between the twenty fourth and twenty eighth week of gestation, the thalamocortical radiations—the fibers that merge the cerebral cortex to the world through the interface of a body—come online. Approximately two months after that, right around the time you were supposed to flip head-down for the final time, the electrical rhythms across hemispheres of your brain achieved a synchronicity that, as far as we can tell, means you, emerged as a distinct sentience in our shared existence. You became able to recognize statistical regularities in our muffled voices, which you experienced as gentle full-body vibrations, and with a long-term memory of about a day, you, possibly, began to know us. We both talked to you throughout the day, and your mother read you poetry, sometimes her poetry, while I watched, picturing the ripples her words made in your tiny world.
Your birth was photographed by the lead nurse whose grace calmed your mother and me before she took her into the operating room. Her name was Libertad. The first image made of you is you sucking in your first breath in order to scream, which can be regarded as your first truly autonomous act. You’re framed by the blue surgical veil that surrounds the clear plastic window through which we saw you dangling upside down. The veil touches the edge of the photo so that the room beyond isn’t visible, giving the impression that you’re on one side and we’re on the other. Because of this, I avoid the photo, but occasionally scroll upon it by accident, at which point I can’t help but look.
Since your births, my photo library has ballooned to just more than one hundred thousand images. This may not seem like anything special to you, but to give you some perspective, there are entire years of my life for which there are only a handful of pictures, and your grandparents house all my childhood photos in one plastic tote. For you there’s hardly a day that goes by unphotographed. Your 20ish gigabyte childhoods are stored on a flat ceramic disc covered in grains of magnetized cobalt, a mineral mined by some of the world’s most brutalized people in the southern Congo. Your years so far take up an area of the disk about as wide as a single pea and as high as one red blood cell. It would take countless lifetimes in images like these to make their weight perceptible to the touch. In any case, I’ve developed a habit of viewing my library in a way I suspect has become somewhat common: I scroll, quickly, too quickly to look at individual images, seeing only the blur of objects, colors, and textures that elicit the trajectory of a particular life. Leading up to your births, the muted greens of the monsoons in the Sonoran, captured while depositing gallons of water in the desert so that our people may live, diffuse into the neon twinkling of an immigrant-led protest on the Las Vegas strip. The geometry of a city decomposes into the fog and chaff of endless wheat fields. The black accumulation of time on the soft marble surfaces of the so-called old world splinters into the vertical flashing of cypresses like rows of shark teeth.
Just before we left for France on what we called our baby-making moon, we took reference photos of a growth we’d noticed on your mother’s shoulder. We also removed her birth control. After our trip we took another series of photos of her arm, this time of the wound left by an excision. Between the photos, we unknowingly captured the last interval of our youth, marked by the very last of our ability to not assimilate our own deaths, but more so, one another’s, as the inevitabilities they truly were. There’s a bruise-colored swath within that interval—a night walk in Cassis where we came upon a woman drawing portraits under the light of a small lamp. We stopped to watch as she made the face of an older woman sitting for her emerge from what had just been a mess of charcoal. Your mother sat next, staring into my eyes in a way that reminded me of the fact that a mass barreling through space can be captured by a planet and forever changed into its moon.
When the drawing was finished, it was precisely this look—its silent exuberance—that the artist failed to capture, or perhaps failed to see. It reminded me of Merleau-Ponty’s writing on Cezanne, in which he argued that critics who’d regarded the painter’s curved walls, dancing perspectives, and uncontained colors, as failures had themselves failed to see the truth, the “chaos of sensation,” on his canvases. Of faces, Merleau-Ponty wrote that Cezanne did not “neglect the physiognomy of…faces: he simply wanted to capture it emerging from the color;” that “the painter who conceptualizes and seeks the expression first misses the mystery—renewed every time we look at someone—of a person’s appearing in nature.” He wrote that the motivation behind each stroke could “never be simply perspective or geometry or the laws governing the breakdown of color, or, for that matter, any particular knowledge.” Referring to landscapes, he wrote that Cezanne would set about
discovering the geological foundations of the landscape; then according to Mme
Cezanne, he would halt and look at everything with widened eyes ‘germinating’
with the countryside. The task before him was, first, to forget all he had ever
learned from science and, second, through, these sciences to recapture the
structure of the landscape as an emerging organism.
If this is true, the charcoal artist’s failure that night might have been practically inevitable. If she’d known we were attempting to conceive, she likely would have used the information to render that somehow in your mother’s expression, thereby falsifying it. But without it, her ability to ‘germinate’ in the pulsing of life in your mother’s gaze was foreclosed—she simply couldn’t see it in order to then forget it. Whatever the case may be, the Cassis portrait has become my favorite image of your mother because it captures, as an absence, that which is only ours.
The next morning we sat in a square feeding fat insolent pigeons, when suddenly your mother leapt up and dashed to the nearest trash can. She’d been nauseous the previous morning but we hadn’t thought much of it because by midday it dissipated. After some dry heaving we hightailed it to the nearest pharmacy. In line near the register, an old man who resembled a drooping sunflower turned and raised his head enough to see the pregnancy test in your mother’s hands. He straightened enough to look into her eyes, then at me, then at her again before his face, which had until that point been hidden to us, broke into a smile. He grabbed her by the wrist, and pushed past the others in line shouting that our matters were urgent. The test was negative.
On our last morning your mother left one final unused test on the bathroom counter of the airbnb. And as our rental car cut through the fog blanketing the rolling hills, she asked if I knew that the towering Cypress, so ubiquitous in the landscape, had been imported from Persia, and that during the Graeco-Roman era its wood was used in coffin-making because it was resistant to decay, and because it could mask the stench of decomposition. The tree, which one can now order online in a two-pack from a hardware store, had been there at the rupturing of Pangea, and could be found among humanity’s first written documents; the great Persian poet Daqiqi wrote that Zarathustra, the prophet of the first monotheistic religion, and creator of the dualistic moral universe in which we live today, planted a cosmic Cypress that cleansed the world of evil. The last clear memory I have of that trip is looking in my rearview mirror just as a pair of black dogs emerged from the Cypresses beside the road and paused to watch us disappear around a bend.
It took some time to shake the gloom when we returned, but we resolved to continue trying to conceive. We’d also planned to rejoin a campaign we’d become involved with just before leaving for our trip. A mother of three, Cecilia Gomez, had gone into what she believed was her final green card appointment in a federal building in downtown Las Vegas where we lived at the time. Her oldest son—still a teenager—who’d sponsored her application, went with her, but wasn’t allowed into the office where they presumed the interview would take place. After some time, he was finally called in and an immigration agent talked at him as he stared at his mother’s purse on a table. Cecilia had been put on a bus—the beginning of her deportation—and if it hadn’t been for her son quickly contacting an attorney with ties to a local immigrant worker center able to scramble a group of activists into action, his mother would have been quietly ripped away from her life within a few hours of stepping into that office. Cecilia was brought back and given a court date, and it was at that hearing that your mother and I planned to rejoin the group, but just a few days before, we went to a dermatologist who took one look at the growth on her shoulder and abruptly ordered a biopsy. Days later a voice on the phone told us it was carcinoma, and until we understood that everything would likely be okay, it was as if a sinkhole had opened under our feet and swallowed our entire world. Even after the excision, after the doctor used the word “cured,” it felt like death touched us in a way that ended a phase of our lives and left us reeling with the understanding that we might have, at some moment, already crossed the midway point.
In the aftermath, we abandoned Cecilia’s campaign, slipped out of work commitments, and withdrew from our friends. Being alone together was the only thing we felt like we could muster. I can’t remember how long this went on, only that one morning it stopped when our eighty-nine-year-old neighbor Connie rang our doorbell in her nightgown and robe because she was locked out of her house in the middle of a heatwave that hit one hundred and sixteen degrees. We invited her in and brewed a pot of coffee. After apologizing profusely, she told us that her husband, Frank, a retired NYPD officer, had recently developed a habit of sneaking away to a nearby casino to play the slots and smoke against his doctor’s orders. She said he had diabetes, high blood pressure, prostate cancer and had recently gone through a bout of insomnia during which he’d leave in the middle of the night. She’d try calling, but he started turning his phone off when he figured out that, with the help of their daughter, Connie was tracking his phone. We assured her our morning was clear but we could see she was terribly embarrassed. Frank didn’t return until the afternoon so we burned through chit chat and pushed into the realm of really talking. By the time Frank pulled into his garage, Connie had reconstructed her life so completely it felt as though it lay between us on the table like a lace runner, all the contingency of life cinched into a fixed pattern. We walked her out and as she disappeared into her house, I was overcome with the feeling that I was like one of those toy cars pulled along a slot, and my will was nothing more than a byproduct of not knowing my fate. It was disturbing yet profoundly soothing to think that whatever lay ahead was already fixed and all there was to do was meet it. Within a year, Joaquín, you were born, and a few months later, Connie would bring us a tray of baked ziti from Frank’s wake.
The first time we learned we’d conceived we’d driven into the desert. We started in the Mojave and at some point crossed into the Sonoran without knowing when. I’d read that species of cacti had been given the job of indicating which desert is which—the ghoulish silhouette of the Saguaro for the Sonoran, and the odd geometry of the Joshua Tree for the Mojave. But we’d driven a stretch where they both occupied the same landscape. We were going to Nogales, or more precisely, to the spot from which a Border Patrol agent fired sixteen shots from the United States into Mexico in thirty-four seconds, hitting a sixteen-year-old boy, José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, twice in the head and eight times in the back. When we pulled off the highway, the boy’s face was everywhere: vinyl stickers affixed to lampposts, wheat pasted onto bare walls, glowing on half-burned candles placed on the low concrete rim of the border wall. More than once his eyes locked us in what felt like a mutual stare, his expression demanding an explanation. We’d gone because a friend who worked with the boy’s family to keep José Antonio’s killing from being swallowed by indifference told us that when you stand in the spot from where Swartz fired, any question about what happened that night disappears. That day, in order to stand where Swartz stood, we had to walk directly up to an idling Border Patrol SUV and position ourselves inches from its hood. I knew all the information that made Swartz’s assertion that he feared for his life absurd—the fourteen-foot drop from the US to the Mexican side; the twenty-two-foot high border wall; the three-point-three inch gap between the six-point-five inch wide iron bars that make up that wall; the way a rock would have to thread those three-point-three inch gaps from seventy feet away, and fourteen feet down, around midnight, or defy the laws of physics by soaring over the wall and then suddenly losing all momentum to come straight down onto Swartz; the fact that he emptied his magazine, backed away from the wall, reloaded, and came back to fire into the boy, who was in all likelihood already dead or dying on the ground. My friend was right, but also wrong because my doubt was eradicated to reveal an execution, while the jury who visited the scene for four hours and forty four minutes saw innocence.
As we left that day, a woman and two young children—a boy and a girl—talked to a man through the iron bars. I watched them in the rear-view mirror and without thinking pointed my camera and began shooting. While the woman talked, the children took turns stepping onto the curb and falling dramatically backwards into each other's arms. The horizontal lines running across the rear windshield repeatedly caught the autofocus blurring and focusing. As we pulled away, one last sticker of José Antonio gazed at us from a lamppost as we made a turn, and for a moment his eyes became the fulcrum of the entire world. Your mother said it was Father’s Day, and I wondered what the boy’s brother and mother saw in his portrait that no one else ever could.
We rode in silence until your mother told me to get off the highway so she could pee. As she did, I stepped out of the car and noticed that in the sky a tiny bright orb drifted listlessly like nothing I’d ever seen. I used our camera’s zoom to see that it was a white blimp with no markings whatsoever. Later we discovered it was Customs and Border Patrol’s, and that it ran continuous surveillance from overhead. They called it their ‘eye in the sky.’ A few hours up the road in Eloy we pulled into the parking lot of a private immigrant prison run by CoreCivic whose company motto is “Better the public good™.” Eloy looked like it had been flattened by a cataclysm: front yards of packed dirt and long-dead machinery; boarded up houses; and cotton plants at the end of their maturation, when the stalks shrivel to brown wiry things. The roadsides were littered with clumps of white cotton that had tumbled for miles, picking up cigarette butts and pieces of fast food wrappers. From the parking lot I shot footage of the prisoners walking behind rings of concertina wire. Some of them looked like boys, and many of them looked like they could have been our family. It’s been years, and I have yet to use any of that footage in a film because whenever I watch it intending to do something with it I’m confronted by the reality of those seven jurors who stood in Swartz’s spot and concluded not guilty. I think about all the time I spend away from you writing words that don’t stand a chance.
By the tail end of that drive home, when we crossed the state line into the Martian-like wasteland of Nevada, we made two decisions: to leave Las Vegas as soon as humanly possible even if it meant abandoning our careers, and to have you two boys two years apart so that you could hack through this life together. But when the time came for you, Nico, we’d just pulled through a summer of global lockdowns and empty shelves, of wiping groceries with medical-grade disinfectant before they entered our home. We’d ordered fifty pound sacks of rice, beans, and flour, and bought five hundred dollars’ worth of tinned sardines as newscasters talked about the possibility of supply chains dissolving. We washed our hands until they cracked and bled. Ethicists publicly debated the implications of rationing ventilators and other medical resources as shortages loomed throughout the country. Waves of the dying were forced to take their last breaths alone, surrounded by strangers in masks. And cities and towns across the country erupted in rage after the police murder of George Floyd. In one of those towns, a white seventeen-year-old with an AR15 strapped to his chest—a rifle he’d just used to kill two men and wound a third—was shooed away by police as he approached them, so he simply went home. COVID had just been declared the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States, losing only to heart disease and cancer, and suicide would see the sharpest annual increase in two decades of an already steady climb. Vaccines did not yet seem like an inevitability, and doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t say what the severity of disease might be during pregnancy. The world was on the verge of passing one million dead from the virus, and Nick Cordero’s son, like you, Joaquín, had just celebrated his first birthday.
The unspoken question we turned the first time for ourselves—could we give you a good life?—mutated into something audible and infinitely bleaker. Could we keep you alive? Could we keep ourselves alive for you? We had to sit and game out scenarios that in most other circumstances would be unspeakable. But we spoke them slowly and carefully, trying to figure out exactly where the depth of what we could endure was because the world seemed to teeter on the precipice of nothing less than collapse and annihilation. Each of us, your mother and I, needed to hear the other say I can do it without you, and be convinced that it was true. What became clear deep into that conversation was that your mother and I had each asked ourselves attenuated versions of these questions when wondering just how brown both of you would be, how closely your skin and face would resemble mine, and how that might mean sharing experiences like when that cop pulled us over for no reason and took your mother to his squad car to question her about me while his partner leaned into my open passenger side window with his hand on the butt of his gun. What we concluded, of course, is that there was no way to know what might happen, or how much we could take, so the only thing left to do was decide.
In these first five years with you boys, I’ve been made to learn that the cliché, although woefully incomplete, is true: when a person becomes a parent, they are inexorably transformed. For me, this has meant that my ceiling for joy has been immeasurably raised, but also that those heights come haunted by an awareness that as we live them, each of our shared moments is also completely and irrevocably lost. Before you two, I couldn’t truly assimilate the weight of that loss, but now, more than once it’s left me gasping for air. I find myself yearning for something that can make me believe you’re not doomed to variations of the past; that our resemblance, for instance, doesn’t yoke you with a field of ruinous possibilities; and most of all that things do not eternally go away.
When you two were babies and had just started to walk, you would announce your presence in a room by bubbling over with laughter at each wobbly step. For a long time I paid it no thought, but one day, you hobbled up from a nap and your laughter became my laughter. And for some reason, this quality—the feedback loop, what people call its “contagiousness”—made me wonder what, exactly, had been so funny to begin with. I thought, at first, that it was simply your unsteadiness, the sensation of almost falling, something akin to being tickled, but you looked down at your feet, scrunched and unscrunched your face in a way that suggested an experience beyond just the sensory. This other kind of laughter seems to involve memory and expectation—its subversion—but you were so young I figured it had to be something more elemental. I noticed that the laughter’s peaks coincided, precisely, with the moments when your feet struck the ground, as if meeting the floor this way was, to you, absurd; as though what was funny was the incongruence between your innate boundlessness and the world we have made. Your first impressions of the limitations of Being made you laugh, as they should. But in those moments I hadn’t realized all that. I simply laughed along with you, uncontrollably.
José Orduña earned an MFA at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement, published by Beacon Press, explores his experience as a Mexican immigrant living in the United States. His essays, which interrogate the entanglements between the human and the institution, have been published in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, The Nation and elsewhere. In his work, he strives to capture how histories are written not only in books but as lines on people’s faces, and to implicate readers in the intimate ways state violence and the violences of capitalism become part of peoples’ lives. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Washington University.
Photo credit: José Orduña