On the day I was to turn forty, I awoke early, a bit after 4 a.m., perhaps thinking that I’d still have time to do the things I wanted to do in my thirties, trying, the way I’ve tried all my life, to fit in as much as possible in the time that I had, the time I would have had to carve out—conjured, as if time was any other object—from the recesses of space, the void spun by the blur of movement, like an event horizon, maybe, which sucks in all, eating everything without distinction.

Though I recalled, almost in the same breath, that I was born even earlier, a few hours after midnight. So waking up early to get things done—whatever those things were would have to be made up in advance, I mean written—before the approaching end date of my third decade was already a failure.

No matter: I had by then understood that what made me a writer was not my capacity for recording or even construction, but my unbridled optimism: to write with the belief that there was something good on the other end of this; something that survives and would survive me, but also that I could (outside the text) endure through permutation, iterative practice, that I could become whatever it was I needed, whatever it was that would be necessary to continue a life that would have to be written if it was to be lived. I could change my career, the arc of my life, the way I changed jeans, learning, in my earlier decades, the technique of appearance; how to appear for others, and also, how to reappear, a special trick, which depended upon a certain interlude (however brief) of self-disintegration. The slope of the torso as it readjusts. The places you go when you write. Vanish mode.

If the child is the father of the man, couldn’t the reverse also be true? That the man, too, becomes a child again, in the presence of his own. Desi, not yet two years old, had already granted me permission to encounter the time before memory; the time before memorial, before the temptation, or tendency, to turn life into literature. To discover or recover such access, as if overnight, to childhood. To be able to read my own childhood, decades later; to read it again, and for the first time. I suddenly see what I was, what I might have been, before I knew who I was or wanted to be or would become, besides a father or a man: the child who remembers us in their gaze.

A few years ago, while writing a different book, deep in the beginning stages of a pandemic that remains now, like any virus, below the surface of things, my body began to undergo dysfunction. My eyes stopped working together. The disc upon which my right jaw revolved slipped beyond its path to my skull. My fingers began to move without permission, inadvertently, as if my body were enduring a rebellion, or maybe a reparation. A reconstitution that required a loss of control, the strength to accept my own disorder. For the first time in my life, I saw nothing but death. There was no future for me; it was difficult, too, as the sirens of ambulances ran across Ocean Parkway and Coney Island Avenue through the evenings as in the day, to envision a future for us. All the people I loved and would never love. Maybe, though, that’s when I really became a writer: to understand the imminence of my body’s breakdown and yet to continue writing with the body and in the body, in spite of that knowledge, the conviction of what would happen to me and when.

I began calling the book north by north/west, a gesture to the movie the narrator sets off to remake, but also a reference to the coordinates of a universalizing Global North/Global West that would have to be similarly remade, undone, in order to accomplish the task. “An attention to frequency” became a secondary title but also an acknowledgment: to accommodate the different vibrations within us, interferences whose intention was not to separate signal from noise but to collapse any distinction. Friction, I had to remind myself, is also an agent of growth. And fragmentation can serve the spotty lens through which we might deflect the domination of totality, of ascribing identity to a thing that does not or cannot be known. I remember the anguish and anxiety, each time the same feeling, followed by the interval, in the weeks between medical imaging visits, of dread. Each time I came away from another appointment with another doctor, another specialist who deals in diagnoses, without any determination. No judgment meant no absolution, no deliverance. I needed for the thing that was happening to me to be named. Gripped by the lure of naming, even if that thing is death. There was not a name for me, in that state of transition that I have tended, in fact, my whole life, ever since being born two months and two days early, a being unfinished.

Lilly will come down the stairs momentarily and kiss me on the cheek and put her arms around my neck and draw me closer and ask me if I’m okay, if everything is alright. Alma will be already at the door, sitting upright with her chin held high, eyeing me solicitously, and when I return from walking with her around the block, treading the circular route we’ve learned to revise, for the purpose of estrangement, so that sometimes it’s my left hand on the leash; sometimes, we move east to west, I’ll begin laying out Desi’s breakfast on the counter, and aid Lilly in organizing his snacks and lunch for daycare, my gaze finding the whiteboard on the fridge that, since Desi was born, lays out the day’s rough itinerary, and I’ll walk back upstairs, and wake him, rouse Desi from his dreams, so that he can begin to dream again, discovering the world anew as if it were a book, following the folds of consciousness and perception as if moving his soft index finger along a printed page, and I’ll hook his arms and lift him from his crib and take him into my chest, relishing his smell—an uncommonly aromatic bouquet, the miracle of aged urine interacting with overnight diapers—wanting some of Desi to rub off on me the way I’ve already rubbed off on him, the way I can recognize, in his twenty-month-eyes, myself, especially when I’m hiding. Hiding behind my eyes. Then dancing, then singing, then briefly bowing under the showerhead and sliding clothes on and blowing three theatrical kisses farewell before fumbling for my keys and rushing off to catch a bus, if I have someplace to be today, which I don’t, all appointments and employments, on this day, having already been cast aside. All of this and more (always more), but not yet. There’s still time, at this hour, to be with myself, to be within myself, to record and construct and divide the distance between a thing and its reception in the body through the swift movement of my fingers on a series of keys. The world of work, business, emails, lesson plans and lectures, the grinding of coffee and government—caregiving in the face of a governing administration that wants to deny your right to be here after all—briefly seeming, as if loaded with the negative time of a transatlantic flight, to be yet asleep, inanimate, as if all the other actors were still in wardrobe, awaiting the second skins each role required.

I have always been a storyteller. Probably even before I learned language, well before I ever learned what to do with it. But the kind of stories I am prone to telling have to do with experiences—sensations and observations, wanting to tell, to share, to cut into and also be cut open, to write to others in the hopes that we could see each other in ourselves; to be changed. Wasn’t that what reading was? Play, risk, the intelligence to know how to surrender. Writing was a way of untangling; a ceremony of order, of imposing some narrative logic onto the breath that evades syntactical harmony, the trade of figuration, of figuring out. Writing was a way of untangling and reading was entanglement. A sacred space, childlike, to create a world in relation to the author’s, to press your imagination upon even the most unimaginative prose. The text was and would always be my fantasy: what could be and might still become. Perhaps one of the reasons why Daisuke had asked me, just the day before yesterday, when I was still thirty-nine, about redemption. At a bookstore, go figure, called Unnameable. That my book felt to them, despite the story’s irremediable grief, despite its challenging narrative structure, its irregular cadences, so full of hope. I am a child, I might have told them. I would always be a child.

It was about protection, even if I didn’t think about it in those terms as a child. It was about refuge, harboring the occasion for something beyond the present. Tending to it as a beach tends its foam. To keep alive something despite the inevitability of its disappearance. And to believe so deeply that I was different—any different—from any other person.

That was my talent; that was my great folly. Though I didn’t say any of this then. What, after all, would the audience have thought? Forgetting that what makes readers who we are is our aptitude for, our attraction to, immersion. The drama of recovery.

If we deeply observe or analyze an author’s work, a student asked, earlier the same day, will we pick up their traits and habits? I like this notion of picking up, trying on, being infected with the textual habits of whatever it is we are reading. It calls to mind the recipe of vulnerability and exposure that, taken together, might produce an intimacy between persons; whether or not we have ever met is beside the point. The point, in other words, is excess and also omission. Infections, remember, undergo embedding, a process that makes a timeline of symptomatic expression impossible to predict; sometimes the infection will fester. In such cases, what the body experiences will continue to develop and may even intensify, without ever being brought to light.

By now my darkened cheeks were wet from yawning, having laid in bed for almost an hour, thinking these thoughts and wondering if I should write them down; to write them down or let them die in the flesh that first made them, which is always the choice, if one were to call it a “choice.” No decade goes softly.

Outside this text, the present is being interrupted by the future. Use this AI filter to see how your baby will age. Another advertisement for a technology that will capture and commodify our children, silencing them before they ever have the ability to speak. Having already sold out the present, tech giants, in tandem with the new oligarchy, want to foreclose any idea of a future. Still worse than that: they want to alter the future of our desires. The goal, in reality, is to rid reality of desire. No more desire; only pleasure. Only answers, only outcomes, only a trajectory that is already predetermined.

But what happens when the past intervenes in the present? Outside this text, I’ve received a message from the previous century: my dad’s high school classmate who escaped Cuba a few years after he did, and who took with him, during the humanitarian mission that would be dubbed “Operation Pedro Pan,” a number of items belonging to Juan José Campanioni Fuentes. Things that haven’t been seen by my dad in more than half a century; obliterated by time and memory, the psychic distance of a home that was, from the moment he had left, unreturnable. Didn’t they know when they left that they could never, would never, return? My dad was fourteen; my mom only six. She, at least, couldn’t have fathomed the implications of her family’s flight. The Berlin Wall was only erected, in its first, single-walled form, two years before, a barbed-wire warning that served as a provocation for people to leave while they still could. What I knew of my past, which were only fuzzy details, remembered in pieces, in passing, would be inherited by my son, with the accumulated toll—the debt collection of history—of another autocratic regime that has already unlawfully detained and deported its own people, persons that the government does not recognize as people. Perhaps what my mom and dad were fleeing from is happening in the country in which they’d each sought refuge; perhaps what they were fleeing from has never stopped occurring.

Everything I understand about the past insists that it is alive, teeming with hypostatic charges, latent outcomes, looming histories, in spite of the coordinates of my own life, my own past, which was not my own to taste; I could only stretch for it, drawing myself closer to the scraps offered by my parents. But the past, for them and in them, is dead. And because they’ve never been back, I feel that I, too, have no right to return unless and until they’ve already died. I wonder, though, whether they hadn’t already vanished a long time ago, as early as childhood, the moment they learned, despite the logic of physics and the laws of geometry, that not all borders have edges: no indication of endings or even a fixed beginning. I wonder then whether they didn’t already arrive here as ghosts.

Or that both trajectories could be true: that my parents never truly left their homes, that they kept their homes inside themselves even as their bodies fled, breath scattering across the earth—that my parents, like me, could still feel themselves as children, if only they could permit themselves to picture the landscapes of childhood in Poland and Cuba, in a rural village with no electricity, in a bustling port city surrounded by the jagged shadows of the Sierra Maestra, as they went on living, as they became adults and became US citizens and became parents, as they had children of their own. Isn’t it the task of all writers to believe in a world in which other worlds are possible? To hold both, to hold all, like the camera’s gaze upon the windshield of a moving car, spectral images passing across the faces in the front, gathering the inside and the outside in a single frame or revealing that, under involuntary circumstances or an unsystematic arrangement of events, there would no longer be any boundary between the two.

To write is to play a videocassette, which no one makes anymore and hardly anyone ever uses. I remember the element of time being reformulated by the space, the shape, of the physical media; to start the movie over, I would have to rewind, which means I would have had to watch the story unfold in reverse; everything happening again but this time happening backward. The early lesson that repetition would never be an exact duplication of any first time. Plus, the conviction (a complication) that nothing is as good as when you’re writing it. When it hasn’t yet hardened, when it isn’t crusted in the merit of placement, of publication.

My mom is probably the most overprotective parent I know. When I was a child, I was not allowed to go over to any houses of any children whose parents did not already know mine. You don’t know them from Adam, my mom would say. My mom would say: All we have is each other, so we have to stick together. I understood years later that perhaps the engine behind this urge for familial unity was the rupture of their native ties, of having to leave so much family behind. When I became a parent, I could hear her saying, though she’s never said it—I could hear her voice, as if it were my own—I have borne such great trauma so that you would never have to; my love is my protection. I wonder when she realized or remembered, as I have, that where there is love there is also pain.

I know my dad lost his cousins, cousins that were like brothers, after leaving Santiago for Havana, before boarding a chartered flight that would take him and his sister to Miami. I know my mom was the one to find her dad’s dead body.

But I only know that because she told Lilly, not long after we’d gotten married. The things we don’t tell each other because we’re family. And the things we can only tell each other because we’re family. Too close to say anything. The notion, maybe, that the communication of a tragic thing would be construed as a lack of love when in fact it’s the opposite.

I wanted to open the package—the mail that had found its way to my present, sixty-six years later, but I also wanted to let it accumulate its latent charge; the gift of the past, which was its catastrophe: the present being torn apart.

Though as a recent parent, I had already learned that every vision of the past also offered a glimpse into the future. I knew that what I had experienced as a child Desi would also come to know within himself; a general inability to be placed and the escort of interrogation. Where are you from? would become What are you? What are you? would become Where are you? As in, right now, hand waved over the hypnotized face; again, where do you go when you write? The spell of being always elsewhere. Transport but also dislocation. A condition born in the so-called post dictatorship generation, the children of exiles, and carried into the next; I knew, too, besides my eyes, their function for concealment, that I would pass this on. Since dictatorships don’t end, and exile, too, is carried in transmission, like disease or genetic code. Desi, already so observant, already so susceptible to turning inward in public, haunted by the looks of others; wondering what it is he looks like to others, hiding behind his eyes but also expressing the irrepressible joy of being caught. The involuntary acknowledgment that hiding was a form of hunting and desire was born from that search.

I never thought I’d find myself here. The beginning of middle age, a parent, a father. Though I knew—I’ve always known—that even as I grew older, I would never become an adult, not in the way I viewed my own parents or even my partner, my friends and my colleagues, people driven by some internal circuit or a social track; I had always believed—implicitly understood—that my life could still go a thousand different ways. I needed only to modulate my mind and body to another velocity or pitch, channeling the empty space between each earlier permutation, forgetting or only denying the fact that there is a limit to what can be carved: cut too deep and you’ll be left with nothing.

Today I work as a professor of literature and media studies. I also work, now or in the past, as a reporter, a copy editor, a model, an actor, a maître d, a caterer, a fitness trainer, a research associate, a writing tutor, a translator. Whatever it was I had done with my life, I knew at least I had not wasted it. Though one has the feeling of wasting away, nevertheless, by the hustle: the faint or feint of movement necessary to balance the act.

I remember writing in my notebook, during another interminable photoshoot, awaiting further instructions from a crew of temporary assistants in a rented farmhouse in East Hampton while I counted the hours, then minutes, until I was due back in the newsroom that was hours away: I was there—of course I was there—but I was looking without listening. All the same. I knew it was, it would be, a time in my life that I’d always look back on, that I was already looking back, as I was living it. As after a dream, as when one wakes, the self and what we have only just experienced growing more and more distant with every passing moment of the day. (And this is why I can’t remember a thing beyond the facts.)

To make my life, like any other life, several conditions have had to emerge, to be activated, almost every day, for at least the last two decades; I am indebted to their inclination toward synchrony: the complex arrangement of events that would have to occur for the day to come off, for everything to work. One missing or unmet variable and the whole operation, this practice through which I’ve learned to sculpt solitude without the time to be alone, to be present for others in spaces in ways that exceed my body, could collapse. I knew it in every red light or missed bus or stalled F train; in every bypassed elevator and every prolonged seminar and every unhurried showroom, always here and also always on the way here; there is, I’d already heard, no “there” there; I was only ever here or I was coming. The performance, I’d long realized, requires only one tempo and it is the rush. But that was then. I remember thinking the morning that Desi was born, not long after lifting his wriggling pink belly from the nurse but before I delivered him to Lilly, so she could meet the child who had been growing inside of her all this time; the child who had been growing inside of us, the Desi we’d been imagining: From now on my life would be timed out by the repetitive motions of childrearing. I didn’t understand then that the complex arrangement of events only grows more complicated as a parent, everything and everyone having to cooperate to influence the desired outcome. It was not just me—it would no longer be me—whose survival, as I zigzagged from disparate points and places, I was responsible for. It would no longer, never again, be me. My life could so easily become as mapped out as my child’s, doodled nightly and affixed to the refrigerator door. Though hasn’t it always been this way? Everything plotted, prepared, rehearsed—that my life, after all, was not very different from the text; that living and writing required of me the same nurturance, the same discipline, the same readying and anticipation; the impulse to always look ahead, and to look without fear.

Would I still allow myself the gift of the text—the gift of any fantasy—in this new decade of my old life? To believe, against all odds, that there was something good or even greater, something to look forward to, somebody I could still become? Why else would I have woken up at 4am, driven from sleep by this compulsion to think, and to know that more thinking was on the way; that it would come only if I were to begin writing? Why else would I have woken up at 4am, except for the birds? Their lively chatter bears gossip: the enumeration of an earlier episode, some new understanding through which the day can, once again, begin.