THE CLOCK SAYS 7:20, because it always says 7:20, its hands frozen now for many years, but it was later than that when I took this picture. It was meant to be a picture of a door, on the other side of which is the room where I was writing something else—something I can’t recall, to which I never returned—when this book began.

It began with a phone call. A friend of my father’s. A few days before, my father, who was seventy-nine, had collapsed, breathless, climbing steep stairs from a beach on Cape Cod. I’d sat with him as he’d gasped, his olive skin veiling blue. A lifeguard had wheeled out an oxygen tank and given him a clear plastic mask that covered his mouth and nose. He kept trying to remove the mask. He wanted to thank the lifeguard. The lifeguard guided my hand to my father’s arm, the back of his biceps. It was enough. I did not hold him, only rested my hand there, and he rested his arm there, and he left the mask on. I watched him breathe. His eyes calmed.

I walked him to his car and returned us to our vacation rental, and then I drove him home. The blue had gone from his color, but what remained was ash. As if he were becoming a black-and-white picture. He listed in his seat, like a boat taking water. His breath was shallow. He said he felt fine. That it must have been something he’d eaten. Or maybe the sun. “All that bright light,” he said, his voice an echo of his once-deep baritone. We drove awhile. Then he asked if I remembered the Emily Dickinson poem he’d read to us when we were children. “Of course,” I said:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

He squeezed his fist and shook it gently, as he often did when he felt that something had been expressed correctly. He was thinking of the poem, he said, because he was thinking of his brother, who had died in 1969, and of two memories. Or not so much memories as images. I wrote him later to ask if he remembered what he’d told me in the car. He e-mailed back immediately. He couldn’t recall anything from that conversation, or much from the months that followed. But the pictures in his mind, yes: “I have two images I’ve long carried in my mind because they merge. No doubt I spoke to you of them.”

The first was from his freshman year in college. He’d gone on a football scholarship, a rough boy then nicknamed Rocky. One night the team went to a movie showing on campus. Rocky sat next to another boy also called Rocky. The movie was not what they expected. It was French, and it had subtitles. They had never seen subtitles. The movie was Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, a retelling of the Greek myth of Death and the Underworld in modern Paris. They had never seen anything like it, and they did not like what they saw. One Rocky was flummoxed, but the other Rocky, who soon after that would quit the football team, start reading books, and begin telling people his name was Bob, was transfixed. Even now he can see it. “It is the poet’s ‘time,’ ” my father wrote me, “and the grim reaper comes for him. Death, in the form of a tall, striking woman elegantly dressed in black from head to toe, arrives in a speeding black limo preceded by two motorcycle outriders. They are helmeted, goggled, in military-style attire with submachine guns slung across their backs. They are not large men, but formidable-looking.”

That was the first image.

The second was from the funeral for his younger brother Jeff, after whom I’m named, dead in 1969, age twenty-seven, of a cancer likely caused by a chemical predecessor to Agent Orange—Agent Purple—with which he was saturated in Vietnam.

“I was sitting between my parents in the back of a long black limo behind the hearse,” my father wrote. “My mother and father were silent, lost in their sadness. We were speeding along a broad, flat thoroughfare in Miami, it was a bright sunny day in June. I could see ahead of the hearse two motorcycle outriders on giant silver Harleys, obviously Miami police moonlighting, very large men. They were helmeted, booted, and wearing reflecting sunglasses. As the cortege approached an intersection, one would speed ahead, dismount, and with the flawless authority of a hand signal, stop all cross traffic until we passed. He then remounted, accelerated, and again took his position leading the hearse. Those impressive men were, as Emily Dickinson might have said, taking Jeff to eternity.”

Why did he think of that then? He couldn’t remember.

I brought my father to his little house in Schenectady, New York, and helped him walk up the stairs. He held on to the banister while I cleared from his couch piles of magazines and documents, evidence for a book about his brother we had been imagining we would write together. He was breathing fast, but he snapped at me to be careful, he knew just where everything was. I looked around; everything was everywhere. Piles and drifts of documents from 1969 and before, not so much collapsing as sliding into a field of white paper and black ink that covered the table, the floor, his study. In the kitchen he’d piled paper on top of the stove he never used, and then inside it. Once he had been a tidy man. But he had been sick, I realized then, for a long time. He’d been pinned to his couch by the growing pressure in his chest, his broad frame withering, his breath shallowing, not so much in and out as skimming across him.

I cleared a heap off a chair and sat with him late into the night—he had never slept before two, three in the morning—talking about the book about his brother, which, I knew then, we would not make together. “Will you see a doctor?” I asked. He nodded. He hated to talk about his body. “I’m fine,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you.” He said it twice, so I said good-bye and drove through the night over the mountains between us, back to my home.

To begin working in the clock tower the next day.

Then, the phone call. He’s seen the doctor, said my father’s friend. “What was it?” I asked.

She didn’t say “heart attack.” She didn’t need to. Maybe I, we, had known all along. What she said was “surgery.” A sextuple bypass.

“Six?” I asked. I had never heard of such a thing.

“Six,” she agreed. She hadn’t, either. Come quick, she said, he’s waiting for you in the hospital.

The day my father’s friend called was my first in the clock tower. I’d borrowed it from a poet who used it as a writing room because I’d imagined that a tower, two walls of windows overlooking a former factory town and a train station, and a clock always paused as if at either evening or dawn, might grant me a distance I needed; a pause. Time outside of time, to think, after a fashion, as I imagined the poet did, to worry over words as ends in themselves rather than parts of sentences, which were, in turn, of importance only as pieces of stories. But after I got off the phone I packed my books and my papers and began driving through the night, over the Green Mountains, to Schenectady. I would not return to the clock tower for two years.

My father, obviously, survived. And two years later, after the poet gave up the clock tower, I took over the lease.

On the first day of my return to the tower, I had a heart attack.

I was forty-four at the time, a fat man but not a very fat man. I did not smoke, I drank quite a lot, I’d never slept much, I’d begun eating little orange speed pills when I was writing, and then sometimes when I was reporting—but this, my doctor would tell me, does not explain anything—and I had eaten a hamburger earlier that evening, a Big Mac, no less. But that, too, when your forty-four-year-old heart starts grinding to a halt, does not explain anything. Nothing really does.

This is not a book about heart attacks. My father is alive, healthier, in many ways, than he was before; as of this writing, so am I. Good enough. What this book is “about” are the two years in between his cardiac event and mine, the two years that began with a long night drive to Schenectady. Two years of reporting; I am a reporter, and this is a book of other people’s lives, lives that became, for a moment—the duration of a snapshot—my life, too.

I Crossed Those Mountains

I crossed those mountains between us often in the months that followed. Almost always I drove at night. It seemed easier, the steep twisting road more likely to belong to me alone; the radio, when I could find a station, less clogged with news and yet more alive with voices. Night-shift voices. People who believed, they said, in God, or aliens, or blue-green algae. The dark all around me made it simpler to believe them, and I wanted to believe. Not in God, or blue-green algae, but in other people’s nightmares and dreams, projected onto the black night-glass of the car windows.

I felt very tired, finished with a narrative that had sustained me and occupied my imagination for many years of writing books and for magazines. I’d begun to notice patterns in the stories I told, and then I’d accepted that the patterns were really formulas. Plots that hurtled ever faster from beginning through middle to end—a brightly lit room in which all stories looked the same.

I began ignoring deadlines. I needed money, but I started saying no to assignments. I gave up returning calls. Instead, I took pictures. When I stopped at gas stations, diners, a junk shop that kept strange hours, a Dunkin’ Donuts, where the pictures began to lead to words when I admired the night baker’s T-shirt, its image of an ornately drawn skull, and asked if I could take a photograph. “For what?” he asked. “I’m a journalist,” I said. It sounded as empty to me as it must have to him. His T-shirt wasn’t news. He shrugged. It didn’t matter. He let me take my picture. I took it with my phone. Then I spoke to another night baker, and I asked if I could take her picture, too.

I thought I was just taking snapshots. And yet these snapshots, and the questions I asked, and other people’s answers, seemed to me, in the middle of the night, to matter more than the work I’d been publishing as journalism. Or maybe they mattered only to me. To my insomnia. I couldn’t be certain. I put the words and the pictures on Instagram. I pressed Share. It felt like the first story I’d ever written. As if I were only now, in the long night between my father’s home and mine, becoming a writer. My first words were pictures.

I Want to Say

I want to say I’m not a photographer—my lack of training is self-evident—but that’s a dodge that makes ever less sense. We’re all photographers now, all of us with smartphones, at least, creating vast image libraries of family and funny signs and architecture, party pics and cloudscapes and portraits of our morning lattes. We’re constantly practicing, extending our gaze, learning to see, letting our eyes and hearts and minds leap out into startling pools of light and color and shadow, and then reeling ourselves back in, retreating to selfies and cats and all our beautiful jambalayas. It’s a tentative process, this stepping out into the world.

“Is honing one’s eye for phone pics ‘stepping out into the world’?” asks a friend. Yes. Or, rather, the stepping out is the everyday seeing we practice when we notice how lovely the light is as it seems to ruffle our cat’s fur, or how gracefully the bridge we cross on the way to work spans the river, or when we think we see a soul—or maybe soullessness—in the eyes of another. The individual image may be so ordinary as to be almost invisible. The online assembly is the most magnificent documentary art I’ve found.

I use both those terms, “assembly” and “magnificent,” with their ancestry in mind—the democracy implicit in the former, the royalty implied by the latter. The individual picture is clever or maudlin or harrowing or silly, “good” or “bad,” composed or simply clicked. Everyday people, a whole lot of them, each staking out the same-sized square. Social media cynics point out that the squares are laid out on a matrix, that Instagram is a form of submission to a distant corporate intelligence. True enough. We should not mistake the Instagram square for a public one. But nor should we miss the dignity afforded by the small solidarities of hashtags: the solidarity of recognition, of seeing one another.

Something I’ve noticed about Instagram: People rarely photograph other people. By “other people” I mean strangers. There’s street photography—hashtags like #street, #streetart, and #streetfaces—but these picture takers are ringers, even if they’re “iPhone only.” They’ve already learned how to break the fourth wall, that of the daily theater of self, to venture past the gentle solipsism of everyday life. Journalists know how to do that, too—when we have an assignment and a notebook in hand. It’s easy to take pictures when they’re notes for a story.

It’s much harder when the picture is the story. That’s not quite right, though, because the pictures I’ve been trying to take are not the story; they’re passages within it. Usually when words and pictures are paired, either image serves text, as “illustration,” or text serves image, as “caption.” But I grew up on comic books, words + pictures that are essential to one another. Instagram, when I first saw it, reminded me of a comic book. Like a comic book, it was arranged in panels. A picture, words, and the space across which you, the reader, carry the story to the next picture + words. The action between is implicit. Or maybe even contractual, like the deal the comic book artist makes with the reader: I’ll supply the pieces, the fragments of a story; you’ll make it real by setting it in motion.

The fragments in this book—some from the towns around my home and others gathered on reporting trips, in Los Angeles and Nairobi, Kampala and Moscow—are snapshots. That word might be read as a disclaimer or as advice on how to view them, but to me it has come to represent something more ambitious, or maybe just more hopeful. The very word snapshot expresses the essential exclamation point of its form. Snapshots say, Look at this! Snapshots say, I saw, and I want you to see, too. The you may be your friends or your kids or even just your future self, but it’s not a museumgoer viewing the image “preserved in sacred isolation,” as the critic John Berger wrote. It’s not a spectator; “there’s no mess or risk” to spectacle, as another critic, Lucas Mann, observes. It’s the deeply democratic, or maybe even religious, notion that what I see—one person’s vision—could matter to you so much that we could see together.

Darkness Isn’t the Absence

Darkness isn’t the absence of light, it’s the presence of ink. The stuff from which letters and words and stories are made. Darkness moves; it flows from one letter, from one image, to the next. The picture that begins this preface is the last I took for what would become this book. I took it because an editor asked me to, which means it’s also the only photograph I’ve ever taken that might be said to have been made on assignment. “Journalism.” The editor thought it might work to illustrate some words about my heart attack. We decided it didn’t, and discarded it. He also thought it might suggest something about beginnings and endings. I hope, here, it does. What I hope you see, beneath a clock the hands of which are forever paused at either evening or dawn—what I have come to see, anyway—is just how relative “beginnings” and “endings” are, how they, too, move according to the light.

I’m writing these words in another room I’ve borrowed. I came here hoping to find a beginning to this book, one that would allow me to conclude the work I didn’t know I was undertaking after my father’s heart attack, when I set out across the mountains. Tonight, like the night of my own heart attack, is a Saturday evening. I’ve been sitting at this desk for too long. Only the computer screen glows. A deeper blue seeps in through the windows, steeping the room in soft shadow. On nights such as these I think of that pressure that filled my chest, as darkness fell on the clock tower, as

I sat in the corner of that little room, unable to stand, watching shadows first gray, then blue, then black fill my vision, a kind of darkness show. That darkness remains. But tonight I’m also thinking of how, that evening, I thought I’d written this book’s final word; and how, on this night, I’m finally writing its first ones, after which my night shift can come to a close. Time for me to go home. My children are waiting.

I realize only now how many of the people I sought out and took snapshots of between my father’s heart attack and mine wanted to go home, too. I know now how hard that can be. But also, sometimes, like a snapshot, how simple. Like the little pictures between us, the moments on which we pause, together, as the darkness flows by.