Desert

It' been raining all weekend: grim, gray, dire. The wind has been fierce; throughout the area, power lines are down, trees have been felled on cars, and the streets are scattered with the spidery corpses of umbrellas and the limbs of branches. Someone died. [That happened a few weeks ago as well: Someone was walking in Central Park and a tree branch, over-burdened with heavy snow, collapsed on him. Game over. God pressing the quick-recall button.]

And yet for me, all this cold wetness just evokes the desert. The mind playing tricks, a three-card-monty of memory and misfiring sensory perceptions. But what links the two is the wind, that force like a mythic serpent or lost spirit.

Mojacar is in Andalusia, on the southeast coast of Spain. The Moors once ruled here, and their influence can still be found in the patterns on pottery and the certain harsh sounds of the otherwise fluid Spanish speech. When the taxi dropped me off in Mojacar, I walked out onto the veranda of my room at the Fudacion Valparaiso, the artists' residency, and looked out into the dry landscape; a small herd of goats or sheep were bleating in the distance, their small voices somehow magnified in the vastness. The wind was blowing, but calmly, cool in the setting sun.

In the morning, I set out. There was a flat-topped hill like a small mountain next door, rumored to be haunted; a long-abandoned cistern was embedded at its summit, like at Masada. There were short tufts of grasses here and there, tenacious and darkly green. The ground was strewn with things that once had been living: branches, mysterious seed pods, the skeletons of small lizards. And everywhere were the tiny coils of snail shells, as though the entire desert had not so long ago been an immense ocean, teeming with undersea life. If one walked in the opposite direction and climbed another hill, suddenly the Mediterranean appeared, like a vision in blueness.

Day after day, I dragged in things from the desert. Long branches bleached from the sun, the dried hulls of pomegranates pecked open by birds. An entire dried tumbleweed, which I put out on the veranda and kept like a pet, listening to it roll around and around in the wind. And I wrote--for an entire month I wrote about a thunderstorm in Ohio because that's what one does in the desert in Spain. During my last week, I sent home a small parcel at quite an expense, filled with dried pomegranates and a few of the white bleached shells. They sit on my coffee table now, part of a still life of journeys.

On the night before I left, I could not sleep because of a horrible storm that was all wind and sound and fear. I was sure that I would be visited by the ghost on that final night, but if it came, I couldn't tell if it was the storm or the ghost or both. The building shook. The gusts were ferocious, and I thought that if I survived, then I might just go mad by morning from all the howling. But when dawn broke, the sun was bright, and all was still. 

I got up, walked out into the desert, and set the tumbleweed loose in the landscape.

Now, Voyager

When NASA launched the two Voyager spacecrafts in late summer of 1977, my parents and I were already living in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father has just embarked on a two-year assignment with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Although we were living in a posh home with house help--in the manner of any expat, then or now--we didn't have a television. In the evenings, the three of us read in the living room. Listened to cassette tapes of Chopin and Mozart. Sometimes, we went to the drive-in, where we watched Star Wars on the big screen. In 1977, I was eleven and self-absorbed, making my way through Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and writing in a series of small, green, U.S. Goverment-issue notebooks.


So it doesn't surprise me that I was completely oblivious to the launching of the Voyagers and the two Golden Records encased on their sides, though I became aware of them later: this whole notion trying to explain ourselves to Other Beings at some point in the future through sounds and images. For Valentine's Day, NPR did a lovely and charming segment on how Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan met through the making of the Golden Records; embedded in the record is an hour-long recording of her brain waves, converted into sound. She was in love by then. The first of the two spacecraft was launched on 20 August 1977; two days later, Carl and Ann announced their engagement. They married in 1981 and were together until Carl's death in 1996. But the recording of her brain remains on the spacecrafts, now already far beyond the reaches of our solar system, nearly 17 billion km from Earth.


We can hear and see all the music and images that are on the records.  These were, at the time, thought to be the best representations of ourselves. Bach's Brandenburg concertos. Ambassadors from the United Nations saying hello in a multitude of languages. Australian Aborigne songs, Peruvian panpipes, Louis Armstrong performing "Melancholy Blues." There's a photo of the color spectrum, diagrams of basic mathematics and our solar system. A series of photographs meant to explain human conception and birth [which, surely, to any being that reproduces in any other way must be freakish and horrifying]. Images of peoples from around the world, including a Chinese family having dinner around a table with a lazy susan. There's a desert and an ocean, fish and dolphins and frogs and a dragonfly. Pictures of bridges and highways, trains and planes, people sitting in traffic and a clogged street in India. "This Is Planet Earth. Welcome, Friends," seems to be the message.


Perhaps, more than anything, the Golden Records are a time capsule for ourselves. The images are already dated, like finding a wrinkled copy of National Geographic lodged behind a radiator of home you've just moved into. This was a vision of our best, most advanced selves, with all we knew. It is the music, not surprisingly, that is timeless. But for every choice of what sound or image to include, the team made a hundred about what to leave out. How to convey the nature of our societies and relationships? There is the sound of a kiss--but how to explain that?--but no warmth of an embrace. There are no sonnets or novels, no paintings or sculptures except those models that tried to convey our world and life. The sounds and images on the Golden Records are wondrous and maddening all at once. 

But they are, if anything, hopeful. Hello, hello, hello . . . We are here. We are. We were.

Frankie's Keys

I realize that I still have the keys to Frankie's apartment in Williamsburg.

Frankie is gone now. She died twelve days ago at the Shirley Goodman and Himan Brown Hospice on East 95th Street, a very beautiful facility filled with a wonderful staff. In the final weeks, it was reassuring to know that she was being cared for so well. Her room was blue and always tidy, filled with light and flowers and the things that people either sent or left; these items were strange talismans from all aspects of Frankie's life: a book quotions from Bill W., an angel pressed into a silver coin, a Christmas tree ornament with her name on it, notes and cards from friends, an odd pillowed silk album with paintings of a house in wintertime. The room had a large balcony, which she would have loved to walk out on to had she ever been able to; through the window was the skyline of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, clouds, sunlight.

By the time Frankie was transferred here, she slept most of the time, or was in Oz, as I called it. It was hard to know where she was--merely in the land of dreams or in a morphine haze or just resting in preparation of the final journey from this mortal world. Sometimes, when I called out her name softly or would hold her hand or stroke her forearms, she would surface suddenly and briefly. "What time is it?!" she would say, her voice filled with urgency, as if she was late for an appointment and was stuck on the train. Usually, I was there late. "It's 9 p.m.," I'd say. I knew I was only confusing her more; late visitors probably only made her days even more perplexing. "Oh," she'd answer. "Don't you have to be at work?" And then, very often, she would slip away again. But in that brief period, she seemed to know who I was, or at least not be frightened. I think she knew that someone had come to see her, and that seemed to be of comfort.

My offerings to the room were decidedly unprofound. Two emery boards--because Jeff, her health care proxy, wanted to clip her nails but was afraid she would cut herself if he could not file down any sharp edges--and a small tube of medicated lip ointment. At the drug store, the lip ointment came in a small cardboard box with two tubes. I didn't know what to do. Should I leave both? How much lip balm does a dying person need? On my last visit with Frankie, I squeezed the ointment on her always-dry lips, and she surfaced for an instant, not really opening her eyes. "Hi, sweetheart," I said. "I hope this makes you more comfortable, ok? Can you press your lips together for me?" And she did, which seemed to be a miraculous act of coordination, given how little command she seemed to have over her movements. I smoothed lotion into her hands, arms and face, and wiped her eyes with a paper towel moistened with warm water. I was always amazed how small her hands were, and quite delicate. It was strange to see Frankie take on a certain gracefulness as she slept, her hands cupped on her chest, sometimes cradling the stuffed dog that I had brought her around Christmastime.

Frankie was admitted to the hospital sometime around Labor Day. I still have a series of messages from her on my answering machine, the first one high-pitched and desperate. The later ones were from calls she made in error. "Hi, it's me, the pest," she'd say. "I'm trying to find Jeff. There's something wrong with my phone. He says there's nothing wrong with my phone, but there is." It's really strange to listen to these voicemails from someone who is no longer alive. They really are these audio postcards from the past. I taped some of them with my iPhone and one night kept listening to them over and over again on my computer; even if Frankie's voice was weak, there was the unmistakable cadence that was hers. "Ok," she would say, "bye-bye."

After Frankie died, I hung up her keys on the bulletin board behind my desk. She had given them to me when I lived about ten minutes away from her in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She wanted me to let myself in downstairs, because she was recovering from her chemotherapy and was too tired to walk down the two flights of stairs and then make her way back up. I still kept them after I moved away to Queens, to Astoria. Just in case, I suppose.

Our entire friendship was based on her illness, so it's strange that now Frankie is no longer ill, and I don't have the keys to where she is anymore. So often, I was angry about the decisions she made and the way she chose to spend her time. But they were her decisions, and it was her time so it was never for me to say. I will miss making those telephone calls to see how she is. Now, of course, I'd really like to make a call to see how it is wherever she might be. The mother of a graphic designer I work with died just a few hours before Frankie did. When I told this to a friend of mine, she said, "Oh, maybe Frankie and Linda's mother are on the train together." That made both of us smile. I hope their journey was a smooth one.

And, maybe one day, Frankie's keys will open an unexpected door.