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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 way over there, huge as a continent, was China, where, odds were, someone in some factory was at that very moment bringing new rubber ducks into the world. It was then, as I studied my map, trying in vain to imagine the journey of the toys, that there swam into my mind the most bewitching question I know of— What if?
    What if I followed the trail of the toys wherever it led, from that factory in China, across the Pacific, into the Arctic? I wouldn’t be able to do it in a single summer. It would require many months, maybe an entire year. I might have to take a leave of absence, or quit teaching altogether. I wasn’t sure how or if I’d manage to get to all the places on my map, but perhaps that would be the point. The toys had gone adrift. I’d go adrift, too. The winds and currents would chart my course. Happenstance would be my travel agent. If nothing else, it would be an adventure, and adventures are