Don Arturo, a fisherman I had met on a beach on Isla Pájaros, Quintana Roo, told me about a lake where thousands of birds gathered and made extraordinary noise. I asked him to take me there. Arturo and two of his friends set out in a small blue boat and rowed for twenty minutes through still water. My equipment was already recording.

The birds never came. The lake was silent.

I had asked the men to sit behind the camera and be quiet. They could not. What the recording preserved instead was the sound of them — their voices, their oars, twenty drops of water falling from the blades in a second. In the video, the boat appears empty: only its blue prow moves through the water, as if drifting on its own.

Back in the studio, I made the connection — between this recording and a collection I had made, for no particular reason, of all the deaf captions from nearly every season of Breaking Bad. Not the subtitles, but the brief descriptions of sound as they occur, written for those who cannot hear them. I had stored the list on a hard drive. Perhaps simply because I could. Months later, listening to the fishermen dry, the two things found each other.

Every sound in the recording I then transcribed as subtitle text — frame-accurately synchronized, each assigned a position on screen and a color corresponding to its place in the physical space. Twenty drops, twenty blinks. Almost two months, a few hours each day, second by second. The subtitles do not describe the soundscape. They are the soundscape, made visible. The reconciliation of impossibles. A video-cocaine for the deaf who hear.

The piece is a monument to the wrong thing. A meticulous record of an absence — and of what, stubbornly, filled it. What survives: the men, their voices, their presence, their inability to disappear on command. What does not: the birds, the silence, the sublime that was promised.

The title comes from a whisper at the end from one of the men, arriving at the silent lake. Se fueron los pájaros. The birds have left. As if they had been there at all.