The house is a monolith, where southwest adobe meets Tuscan villa. Swallows nest in its shifted terra cotta roof tiles. Doves mate in a decorative mini-cupola as though it were designed for their union’s ceremony. On the north side, away from the street, cracks spider across the stucco where moisture confronts dry heat. The residents don’t seem to notice. We rarely see them come or go. Six months back, we watched out our window — rapt — as the proprietor’s plump younger sister, Kiana, supervised jardineros who pruned away all lower branches on every evergreen, then removed a desert willow that served as a border between our driveways. “He wants to see the volcanoes,” she said as we rolled our trash can to the street. Looking west to the three pockmarks on the horizon, we nodded. We thought we understood. Huddled together over satellite imagery at our kitchen table, we explored the house’s irregular footprint: jutting rooms and tiered peaks. We gaze every morning — while working, writing — over its desiccated dirt yard and wonder about the depths of shadow that comprise its interior: here may be an arched window filled with towering houseplants, but just there must be a cloaked corner. And there. An unoccupied bedroom? Sometimes, by some phantom hand, a door opens on the second story balcony, and we imagine a voice: …to take in the afternoon. We met the proprietors once, a middle-aged Iranian couple about our age, Leila and Dilan. As we interfaced from our parallel driveways, Leila explained: she is a cardiac surgeon sharing her time between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Her husband, a medical equipment engineer and technician, spends most of his time in the air, commuting between health centers across the United States. They moved to this country for the freedom, the education, the opportunity, to thrive. In their home with them, Leila further explained, abide her aging parents. Honestly, we couldn’t tell you even what sorts of cars they drive. We think one is a black (or silver, or red) Tesla. The other might be a Porsche. You see, we rarely see them come or go. Leila never mentioned children, and to be respectful, we asked no questions. Sometimes we pull into our driveway and witness a withered man, perhaps in his late seventies, perched on a large boulder by the road. The first few times we bustled past, parked the car in the garage, and shut the door. He reminded us of the ones we see on Central, now an apocalyptic Route 66, hunched and unstable, tripping behind stolen Target shopping carts packed with bedding and recyclables, on the hunt for their next hit. Or someplace to rest. “My father,” Leila said later, drawing a package from her mailbox. “It’s Parkinson’s.” Now when we pass him on his stone in the austere sun, we half stare, half wave. Half stricken. Our cleaning lady worked for Leila and Dilan until she quit: six bedrooms and six baths, she said, was her limit. The villa’s interior took a more distinct shape in our imagination that day, a sprawling mausoleum — or something between cathedral and crypt. 
For a time before we moved into this home, we realized that our own children were not our whole life, that they would eventually become adults and leave, and that we must each have some sense of self, purpose, and identity beyond parenthood to sustain us after their departure. Somehow, this crisis led to an obsession with the bleakness and solitude of death, then a terror of death, and finally landed us where every aging human mind must eventually land: researching the elongation of life. Longevity investigation guided us back toward family: one of the greatest predictors of longevity is community. To survive longer, the biologist and derontologist Valter Longo insists, we must surround ourselves with those who value us, who need us. Most commonly, he writes, this need is fulfilled by our children who then have children. By family. At this precise moment, our children are leaving home, and we are torn between the solitary, self-fulfilling lives of writers — and Longo’s assertion that we need family for health. We want to move to an A-frame mountain lodge with high raftered ceilings and soaring windows in the remote hills of western, rural North Carolina. We want a life of no distractions — of solitude — to write the next Great American Novels. But wants apparently conflict with needs. Four times since we moved to Albuquerque, the hush of clear desert night has been rent by sirens and flashing blue-red lights. EMTs rush into the manse next door. We imagine Leila’s father’s prone body rhythmically depressed into a Tempur-Pedic mattress under each pulse of a medic’s hands. We imagine Leila’s mother watching on from a corner, hand over mouth, wondering if this EMT visit will be the last. We imagine, in horror, that neither Leila nor Dilan are home. Leila, on night shift at Presbyterian Cardiology or perhaps at a hotel in Santa Fe, might of the event in the moment by phone. Dilan might not hear of it until the following day. Each time, sirens fade to silence. Lights extinguish. Fire trucks and ambulances filter away — back southwest toward Central. Within a few days, the balcony door opens for a few hours, then closes. After a week or two, a withered man reappears perched on the boulder by the street, torso swaying, arms gesticulating. As Leila’s father passes these fading days alone with his wife in a villa nestled between three volcanoes and Sandia’s cragged, lofty peak, we contemplate their happiness. We envision the family tree they left behind in Iran: profuse, profligate, verdant, and tiered with three, four, five generations. Might siblings’ children’s children have been better company than an absent daughter and these three somber sisters. Or are they so self-fulfilled that the hollow castle is enough? Discomfited, mid-thought, we turn from the window. The sepulcher yields to its
The Relocation
