The way we treat each other changes at a pace that in all other arenas of human experience we would find intolerable. We might call the pace slow or unhurried or, most accurately, glacial. A glacier is a body of ice and firn that shows evidence of movement, occurring where the production of snow is greater than ablation and so continues from year to year, persisting even when a change in climate reverses the conditions that have allowed it to exist. So it is with the indecency, harm, and evil we inflict on each other, prejudice, neglect, torture, and slavery. Like glaciers, they are not unique to any one part of Earth. Like ice, it is both mineral and rock.

In case you forgot, my name is Zach Wells. It would not be so strange or awfully bad if you had forgotten. After all, my dear daughter will forget me, my face, my voice. It is inevitable. That means I cannot stop it from happening. It means that no one can stop it from happening. I suppose God could, but of course It has better things to do, bombs to drop, tornadoes to wind up, disease to unleash. There finally is also the fact that, well, there is no God. But there is a devil.

As my daughter moved ever closer to losing her voice, what young voice she had managed to attain in her brief and beautiful life, beautiful until life became what life becomes, my voice too changed, as inevitably, as necessarily. Logic is a harsh master. However, another quite undeveloped voice remained constant, stabile, even resolute. That voice had no timbre, no volume, no depth, no resonance, was a voice scratched out across small paper in blue ink, an unwavering plea for aid.

The postman will not tell you who belongs to what mailbox in the post office. I knew that, and so I didn’t bother wandering into the tiny Bingham, New Mexico, post office to ask the question. I could not hang out in the post office waiting to see who opened the box of interest. It was a one-room affair. I therefore mailed a big red-paper-covered box to PO Box 219, Bingham, NM, 87832. Then I waited hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, three days in my Jeep, pretending to look at topographical maps and aerial photographs on my dash, three days in the diner across the road, pretending to study maps and photographs on the table in front of me. I told anyone who wondered about me that I was a petroleum geologist and that I believed there was oil in the area. I left my perches when the postman left for lunch. When the postman left at five I drove to the little town of San Antonio at the junction of the I-5 and US 380 and slept in a Motel 6, with air-conditioning and cable TV.