📒 Iron Mountain

As a documentary, this is an American story of a certain time. My parents wanted to distinguish themselves from their parents’ traditional expectations: my mother was a city administrator and founded important nonprofits; my father was a physicist, an avant-garde filmmaker, a composer, a musician, a poet and a computer pioneer. 

Outside our apartment, my mother successfully fought for the rights of women and marginalized communities in the working world. At home, meanwhile, it was forbidden to challenge my father. His delusions—like that all ovens leak deadly gas—were enshrined as rules, then enforced or self-enforced by her. (They had the oven removed; we had only a microwave.) My father was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis I learned about from my uncle when I was in my twenties. 

When I was about 10 years old, I became an object of their delusions. They told me I was a threat, trying to infect them, steal from them, "betray" them. It was thought that if I could get into my father's study, I would find out secrets I would somehow use against him. Even my father's age was kept from me for this reason. 

When he was home, my father worked in "the study," the room designed to be the second bedroom of the apartments in that line. (I slept in what was designed to be the maid's room.) The walls were always full of books, file cabinets and reels of tape, both sound and film. I wasn't allowed in.

My parents didn't hoard, but they did believe it was important to retain many things. On paper, this was indicated with the written word SAVE, which I was to see hundreds of times on all kinds of documents and media after they died, especially in the study.

To preserve his reels of film, my father kept them more formally, gathering many of them and putting them in a special climate-controlled storage facility: DuArt Film and Video, a still-famous Manhattan lab. He paid to keep them there, sending monthly checks every month starting in the eighties until he died in 2006.

One project on those reels was a series of films he made by programming in Fortran and then filming the computer screen. He used carefully chosen texts by deaf writers, animating their words in a specific way. Students in local deaf high schools and Gallaudet participated in his work. 

Though he started with computers in the 60s, it was only in the 80s that my father achieved some celebrity, specifically for this work with the deaf community. He won national grants and there was local and national TV and newspaper coverage. My parents seemed to treat this period of fame as the high point of his life. The rest of his life—including his achievements in physics and music—seemed to be less important.

When my father died, my mom started spending a lot of time in the study, trying to create an appropriate archive of my father's work. She didn't want me involved, but she did tell me how things went.

The first thing she did was call DuArt. They said that, though they had always cashed my father's monthly checks, they had lost all of his films at some point in the past. So all that remained of my father's body of work were the reels he had left in the study.

No one knew if what he left in the study was rejected material or maybe exact copies of what he thought he had so preciously stored at DuArt. And the study was often dusty—too hot or too cold and too dry for ideal preservation of anything. But my mom gathered whatever reels there were, however poorly they had been stored for so long, and loaned them all to DuArt, which, by way of apology, agreed to spend thousands of dollars to strike new prints.

They screened every reel, deciding with my mom what the "canon" was, creating new prints, CDs, DVDs, Digibetas, and gave them to her. She meanwhile had all the audio reels in the study transferred to digital format. She stored the new copies of his work in the study too.

My mother worked hard to archive his work after he died, but she couldn't find a museum or library that would accept it. At the same time, though she was only in her sixties, she was sick. Her full-time job became getting to doctors, obtaining medicine, otherwise staying alive and managing her day-to-day existence. As it happens, her own papers became part at NYU's labor history archive around this time, but she cared less about this. She died before my father's films could be added to any major archive.

She left very specific wishes with people she trusted that the study's important contents were to be kept. In fact, when she was on her death bed, her only wishes concerned my father's work. As she told the chaplain at the hospital, taking care of that was the only thing she felt she had left undone.

In the last months of her life, she knew the apartment would go back to the landlord and, because of how I was perceived, she felt she had no heir. So she picked out a storage facility for the work, an outfit called Iron Mountain, and told the executor of her estate that she wanted them to be stored there. "How long?" he asked. "Ten years," she said. "Ten years is a long time, Judith. What do you say to five?" And she said, "Seven and a half."

So when my mom died and a few days later I started the months-long process of packing up the apartment and making piles of things to keep, things to give away and things to send to specific people all over the world, I also made boxes for Iron Mountain. It's hard to describe how much I wanted to obey her and how much I wanted her to like me, even though it was too late.

Now that I was allowed in, I could see that the study was full of things for me to choose from—original reels, copies, four filing cabinets filled with his work on all subjects, not to mention two closets full of hardware supplies, paintings, old dresses, records, ties and typewriters. There were 40 years of secondary source material about my mom's slow-growing cancer; all her X-rays; all records of her career as a civil servant and political activist; all my father's work in all areas; every prescription ever filled for any of us; records of my father's attempt to sue various perceived plagiarists (and some actual plagiarists); drafts of all his published articles on any subject as well as the final versions themselves; performance programs; punchcards; the contents of my father's mother's house from when she died including all correspondence between my father and her from previous decades; more than 60 of my mom's journals, spanning 40 years; hundreds of pages of sheet music; and my childhood drawings.

Many personal things, I found, existed not only on paper but in audio recordings: me talking and singing as a kid, interviews with my mom on the radio, my father playing clarinet and piano, my mom on flute, my father practicing speaking to get over his stutter, test sounds from the computer instruments my father developed at Bell Labs in the 1960s. My mom had already transferred the reels that I would soon listen to, but I also gathered old microcassettes and cassettes, packed them carefully into boxes for myself, unpacked them later, and had them transferred exactingly to MP3s.

I listened to every second. These were the first times I heard myself as a child, heard how my grandmother died, heard my mom laughing with her sisters in the days when everyone was healthy. Families tell stories and look at photo albums together, don't they? Now that I could get into the study, it was like I was part of the family.

While this was going on, the landlord was waiting impatiently for the keys so he could sell our rent-controlled apartment for millions. So I had to move fast selecting objects. I asked myself, "What is it she imagined would go to Iron Mountain?"

And then I answered the question too, because there was no one else to decide. I packed the boxes and they were sent off.

It turned out that Iron Mountain charged $250 a month to store even half a dozen boxes, even in a non-climate-controlled room. And it turned out that they are a terrible company: they repeatedly lost my payments, were unreachable by phone, threatened to turn me over to a debt collector and continuously addressed me by my mom's name.

After about six months, I brought myself to cancel the arrangement. I had the boxes shipped to me at my rented apartment in San Francisco, where they sat until late 2012. Though only two and a half years had passed since I packed them, I had little recollection of the contents.

In 2013, it was three years since I had returned our family's apartment to the landlord. In that time I had managed to look through, listen to or actually read everything else that was there—including the contents of the rest of the rooms and the many file cabinets—while attending to everything else that had to be done. And grieving. I dreamed about the apartment every week for the first two years; I still have nightmares about my mom and dad.

I don't know if anyone else will ever know what life was like at home for us three. It's impossible to explain why I needed to hang out there still, however I could. But also I didn't want to be alone there any more. So I opened the boxes from Iron Mountain.