the edges of ancient charts. Not even satellite photographs and computer algorithms could burn away the mystifying fogs of ambient information and fantasy through which from birth I had sailed.
Not long ago on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the novelist Julia Glass worried that her fellow Americans, “impatient with flights of fancy,” had lost the ability to be carried away by the “illusory adventure” of fiction, preferring the tabloid titillation of the “so-called truth.” Perhaps, concluded Glass, “there is a growing consensus, however sad, that the wayward realm of make-believe belongs only to our children.” I’d reached different conclusions. Hadn’t we adults, like the imaginative preschoolers Glass admires, also been “encouraged ”—by our government, by advertisers, by the fabulists of the cable news—“to mingle fact with fiction”?
“If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it to such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale.” So wrote Thoreau, and for a number of years I’d been inclined to agree with him. I’d been inclined to agree, but despite my experiments in the archaeology of the ordinary, I’d also been more inclined to be deluded than to steadily observe realities only. Ask me where plastic came from and I’d have pictured Day-Glo fluids bubbling in vats, or doing loop-the-loops through glass tubes curly as Krazy Straws. If you’d asked me how rubber ducks were made, I might well have pictured them emerging onto a conveyor belt—chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck —out of a gray machine.
Looking at the face of my unborn daughter or son adrift on a sonogram screen, I hadn’t felt the sorts of emotions expecting parents are supposed to feel—joy, giddiness, pride, all that. Instead I’d felt a fatalistic conviction that either I or the world and probably both would let down that little big-headed alien wriggling around in those uterine grottoes. How safe and snug he or she looked in there. How peacefully oblivious, no doubts and vanities bubbling through his or her gray matter, no advertising jingles or licensed characters or boogeymen, no fantasies, not even dreams—at least none of the sort that would animate his or her postpartum inner life. It seemed cruel somehow, this conjuring act of incarnation, this impulse to summon out of one’s DNA a person who’d had no choice in the matter. I’d had a choice, and I’d enthusiastically chosen to become a father. Now that the deed was done, I found my own paternity difficult to believe in. I could no more imagine being somebody’s father than I could imagine performing the Eucharist or surgery.
Truth be told, it wasn’t only my unborn child whom I was worried for. For months, a quote from one of Hawthorne’s letters had been bothering me. It came to mind at unexpected moments—during faculty meetings, or as I trudged home beneath the fruitless pear trees and proprietary brownstones of Greenwich Village, or browsed among aisles of Bugaboos and Gymborees at BuyBuy Baby. It had drifted there, upon my inward seas, like a message in a bottle, a warning cast overboard by a shipwrecked seafarer years ago: “When a man has taken upon himself to beget children,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Peabody, his fiancée, in 1841, “he has no longer any right to a life of his own.”
At the hospital, Beth hadn’t seemed to share my gloomy presentiments. Supine on the examination table beside me, gazing beatifically at the sonogram screen while a sullen West Indian nurse prodded her ballooning abdomen with a wand, Beth kept giving my hand little squeezes of motherly delight, squeezes that had the peculiar effect of making me gloomier still. Why? Guilt had something to do with it, no doubt. Self-loathing, perhaps. I think also that there exists a kind of chiaroscuro of the human heart whereby the light that another’s joy gives off, instead of shining brightly upon us, casts us more deeply into shadow.
Riffling the pages of my atlas, I turned to the North Pacific, found the coordinates—44.7°N, 178.1°E—at which, on that January day or night in 1992, the toys became castaways, and marked the spot with a yellow shred of Post-it. How placid—how truly pacific—that vaguely triangular ocean seemed in the cartographer’s abstract rendering. Its waters were so transparent, as though the basin had been drained and its mountainous floor painted various shades of swimming-pool blue. Way over there, to the east, afloat on its green speck of land like a bug on a leaf, was Sitka. And