My Meteorite Read online

  Desert Jack Rabbit with white tail

  Ducklings, Mallard?, yellow and black head, about 1 lb. each

  Bats. Smallest 7 in., Biggest 12 in. about 10

  Wild Turkey, cream with brown spots, yellow face

  Red and gray ground squirrel

  Tawny-colored Rune

  One loud strange bird call, Falcon? Condor?

  Black and gray toads

  4 in. hummingbird, black head

  Weird tapeworm; dark white

  Ring-tail Cat

  January 2016 I have had an e-music membership for years. These credits, almost fourteen dollars’ worth, will lapse at midnight—in an hour—if I haven’t used them. Why can’t I think of anything to get here, jeez. Sampling the algorithmically generated suggestions is unproductive, but now Dead Moon pops into my head; a happy idea, tornado from nowhere. Click and click, yes. I abandon prudence, buy two.

  In Dead Moon the guy’s voice sounds like the singer from AC/DC, wiry, scraping birdish emanations, and there’s a jagged, fat guitar sound that falls apart as soon as it emerges from the amplifier. They have a girl in the band, Toody Cole, so the pleasures of listening are unmitigated, a pure stream without need for any transpositions or apologia. I saw them in New York live once and during a lightly thrumming, somewhat hypnotic musical bridge, the drummer poured a few bottles of beer onto his tom. When the song kicked back in they backlit his percussive eruption—two big sticks onto the head—which resulted in (not only an aural but a visual) beer-fucking-explosion.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the movie Transcendence the protagonist, as he dies, figures out a way to upload his consciousness into the hard drive of a supercomputer. As I remember it now, just over two years since viewing, he is then able to enjoin with the brute computational force of the machine and exponentially grow his intelligence until he is in possession of a sort of primal god-like understanding of the physical world. I recall watching him orchestrate this wild, incalculable eco-cleansing of every molecule in the observable universe and feeling (involuntarily) seduced by this idea—a technological crucible in which nature is re-rendered as perfect, uncontaminated.

  May 2017 By the time I got there, to him, to his body, he had started to cool. I pulled the sheet off his face and placed my flat hands on the sides of his head. Lukewarm head. My hands slid to the back of his neck which was warm, normal, perfect. I put my mouth on his cheek. And said the word okay like fifty times. We say things. His mouth was stuck open about an inch, and also I spent some time closing his eyes. I touched him all over his chest, he had got so thin, just bones and cooling organs now, I touched his arms, massaging and comforting him, and he paid no attention to me, was just cooling. I held his hand and waited for Maggie just like that, frozen, tugging at his fat paw (wept like a storm, like water, ugly crying) and the hand warmed back up, stealing my heat, felt normal, perfect. I haven’t been around corpses much, she said when she walked in. You get used to it pretty fast. I wiped the snot off my nose. Touch the back of his neck, it’s still warm.

  November 2015 Phone is ringing. I usually never pick up but it’s an Arizona number and I worry about my father who is questionably healthy. (Last time it was an Arizona number a nurse had phoned to inform me that my dad was fresh from a quadruple bypass! And after a week at Mayo Clinic, needed to go home! They were calling specifically to inquire was I sure he had enough daytime help. I was teaching in NY and knew of no one in the entire American Southwest that was prepared to help my dad repair from surgery. Even I, ashamed, waited two more weeks before catching a flight to check on him.) But this call—this time—it’s the police. A lady cop needs to be assured that I am my father’s keeper and forthwith hands him the phone. I hear blaring in the background.

  My dad’s voice is breathy, uncharacteristically squeaky. I can’t remember the number to the alarm. I, ah, can’t recall, and now the police are here and they found your number on the wall of my office. Can you remember the code to the alarm? He sounds like he will cry, like a little goddamn baby. And I can hear the alarm percussively whooping like an evil spaceship in the background. Why do they make that shit so loud? I feel bad for him.

  What the hell do I know Dad? I don’t know anything about your life. I don’t know any numbers Dad. He breathes into the phone, makes static happen. I breathe into the phone too there is nothing else to do. And then a number pops into my head. I do know one code!

  Maybe it’s the same as your gate code Dad. It is his birthdate plus my birthdate, which is cute and like a miracle if you know my dad, who during my childhood had had a brick for a heart, a brick instead of a heart. Get a pencil, write this down, try 2931, Dad, 2-9-3-1.

  Okay, he says, and is talking to someone else, this lady cop I guess, and then the phone goes dead.

  March 2016 I’m reading that experts think of self-driving cars as imminent, in a few years’ time everyone’s gonna be zooming around like it’s goddamn Minority Report up in here, there’s gonna be little solo cabs with no steering wheels and flat hard seats like we’re on loungey little roller coasters or baby trains at the park. We will like them, these cars, or we’ll just fucking stay home. Apparently the most difficult part of the robotics challenge is to build nuanced perception into the visual abilities of the machine. Although this is something humans excel at—we’re intensely visual creatures and can easily parse two different iterations of the same breed of dog, for example—it is difficult for programmers to quantify and program the subtlety we so naturally employ when we see. (We like to watch, we’re professional biological voyeurs. No shame in that.) John Markoff, in Machines of Loving Grace, wonders not only when we’ll have the first self-driving car, but how long before we have the first fatality related to a self-driving car—and who will be held responsible? The web of inventors, testers, engineers, is extensive, and once a vehicle is liberated, once it’s out on the open road, there are infinite other forces brought to bear: other drivers, walkers, municipal infrastructure, weather, errant baseballs, and even momentarily refracted emissions of ancient sunlight.

  * * *

  • • •

  Narratives of invention are most often characterized by a lightbulb moment, e.g., a single idea has fruited in a single mind. But when one looks meticulously, one finds that each of these ideas had been incubating for a very long time and that any discovery is the emergent, even inevitable, result of hundreds of discoveries by hundreds of others. Technology is the manifestation of nature-cultures in time; a category of history. Another way of saying that is, knowledge accrues (and perspicacity prevails and knowledge accrues). But, sedimentation can still surprise (even the sluttiest philosophers). Take, for example, the accretionary lava ball, which is a rounded mass ranging in diameter from a few centimeters to several meters, carried on the surface of a lava flow (pahoehoe, aa, or even on cinder-cone slopes). An accretionary lava ball is formed by the molding and folding of viscous lava around a core of already solidified lava. It rolls. Hot, cold, hot, cold, thump, WHUMP, thump. This reality is a snowball of fire rolling down a hill of red-hot rock.

  * * *

  • • •

  I went to Houston the day after I ordered it. Each person I met I then told about the rock. Total strangers. I told them it was coming in the mail. From eBay. That it was expensive. That it was from outer space. That it had a deep bend in it, had been gooey at some point and then hardened, like a piece of chewing gum but the size of a large dog’s head. I made the shape of an invisible dog head by holding my hands into cuppish, claw-like shapes in front of me, down at waist level, for some reason, I never held the invisible dog head near their faces. I told them my rock was handsome, magnetic, and that it had a deep furrow, one total fold. Like a hand, like a heart. And made of iron straight from a star.

  2

  When I was seven I started to log all the books I read and finished. I worked on it with a ruler,
making a table, assiduously reinscribing each mildly industrial blue line with an obsessive, sweaty graphite one of my own. Books were registered chronologically, title, author and a sort of junior critic rating which started at zero stars and went up to four. Scores of books were catalogued in this manner until I was halfway through high school.

  At age ten, I read Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels, which was so moving to me, so exceptional that I’d had to add another star. This was the only book, among hundreds so recorded, for which five stars crowded the small box; and from this muster of stars, a thin, short line to the margin where I had printed, neatly, heavily, THEE BEST, in all caps; this was my favorite book. Each time I dug this index from the bottom of a drawer and made an entry, I would note this crowded box of stars and this particular marginalia.

  The Dreaming Jewels was a repulsive, violent, abject, proto-science-fiction novella in which people ate insects, regrew severed limbs, turned out to be from other planets, shape-shifted, went undercover by forming a circus, and communicated with interstellar energy via massive, throbbing, intelligent, ruby-colored crystals. It’s worth noting here: I’ve recently discovered that—an adult book—it had been misshelved in the children’s section of the bookstore, which was where I found it one day, and stole it, at the mall in 1976. The main character of this story is a little blond butterball of a kid called Horty and as the book opens he, an orphan, is stuck living with these brutal and appalling foster parents. I was adopted; and, while my parents were actually fine (they satisfied my material needs and also plied a 1970s-style of parenting marked by a moony, benign indifference), I had been regularly abused by my peers so I completely sympathized with Horty’s utter friendlessness, his almost extraterrestrial, alienated and violated status.

  I always knew I was adopted and the whole of the evening, around age seven, during which I realized what the word actually meant—that I would never see my birth mother again—was harrowing in no small measure. We were in the car, it was snowing (I can’t go on). The important thing to relate here is that somehow over the stentorian water of my sobs, I did hear my mother guarantee that when I was eighteen years old she would help me find her. That promise, no matter how casually uttered, effectively hammered back at the cruelty of the finitude, overwhelming for any human, even one unpracticed at conceiving of things vast, like never.

  I spent most of my childhood after that point unmoved by the conditions of my conception. I was blithe about the subject, sometimes even forgetting to tell friends I was an adoptee. The mystery of the situation served to augment a vivid sense of interconnectedness, a presumption that I was a child of the universe entangled with and comprised of all things ranging from the animate to the supposedly inert. (I could talk to trees.) And since I was born in San Francisco in 1966 (this I did know) and since my imagination was admittedly psychedelic (and to the extent that this fact had again and again shuttered the possibility of normal friendships with peers) I had more than toyed with the idea that my conception had occurred in Golden Gate Park during the summer of love and had been abetted by an LSD-addled haze and multiple orgasms. My dad did gift me one detail they’d filched from the adoption paperwork: the birth mother’s name was Donny Molloy; I was Irish by descent. This is all to say that with regard to the subject of my birth mother, I was patient to the point of sedation; my consciousness unmarred by the waiting.

  There was one notable exception to this: at thirteen, I had written a hideously long, hideously depressing research paper on the psychological stresses that attend adoption. The primary source, LOST AND FOUND: The Adoption Experience, was a book—first published in 1979 and still in print—whose titular perspicuity was apparently enchanting enough that I couldn’t help but recycle it as my own. LOST AND FOUND, a Report by Harry Dodge.

  In the middle of my senior year of high school I secretly enrolled in university (an early entrant) and decamped, summarily. While I studied a few hours south, my parents’ divorce was finalized and the family house sold away. Just preceding my eighteenth birthday, my mother (who, in a wash of orgiastic carnality, had suppressed the fact of our long-standing investigative agenda) took off driving toward a high-end double-wide just outside of Phoenix with her new husband, a guy whose nickname was (perhaps prophetically) Art.

  After a year of classes, and underenthusiastic about the arrogations (and vagaries) of higher ed, I decided to move to San Francisco. I announced—clear-stepping the obvious and implicit erotic promise of relocation to an international gay mecca—that I might also try to find my birth mother. This was always followed by the optimistic, Who knows? Maybe she’s still there.

  Two high school friends, Cairo and Jimmy, and I convinced my dad to rent us a car (Hertz in Libertyville, Illinois), which we promptly filled with crap we thought we’d need once we got to SF. There was some problem with insuring us as drivers so we forwent the insurance and promised we’d have the car turned in before anyone even knew it was gone. We were so amped up, even my dad. We drove continuously, stopping only for gas and, periodically, to pee. (We actually jogged into and out of the little gas station snack bars.) Somewhere in the middle of the Great Plains we pulled over on a pitch-black secondary highway to switch drivers; I paused behind the car, just happened to look up for a moment. I remember worrying there were more stars than black space to hold them.

  The morning of our arrival, after coffee and a decidedly impecunious bout of emptying clove cigarette butts into a “beaker bong” for smokes, Jimmy and I took a long streetcar ride to Ocean Beach. The air was opaque, droplets impersonating vapor landed on our faces. Off the train, we greeted the gray and wailing sea for a cold moment and headed north on the sand toward a massive, chalet-type structure clinging to a squally, treeless cliff in the distance. We were shocked with a cold which leaked into armpits, inner thighs, tops of ears, back of neck. Just over the highway, inland from this abandoned chateau, we came upon a steep escarpment that had been slathered in concrete—presumably as an encumbrance to erosion; it was climbable, with jutting footholds, so we went up, unroped, perhaps fifty or sixty feet to arrive at the top. Here we realized we were far, but not too far, from North Beach. We hiked through brown weeds, along cliffs, the sullen sea larboard, for hours and then veered into old San Francisco.

  It was the mid-1980s but this neighborhood was still reverberating with the Beats, Kerouac, Gillespie. A free jazz shamble, full of dark pawnshops, filthy record stores (I heard Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue for the first time here while we sheltered out of a downpour), tattoo parlors and loud, ubiquitous cable cars. Fog came in like disaster. There were scores of bars in rows on a steep rake and then we passed one called THE LOST AND FOUND: big orange letters on a shingle barely visible through the cheesy, slowly whorling miasma. Lost and Found.

  I blew on my hands, roused by the jittery prospect of a hazy, sexy, psychedelic birth mother quartered nigh. What if she was in that bar? We moved on, chilled like organs.

  Fifteen years later I would write a scene for a movie in which my character pauses in front of a bar called The Lost and Found to stare at three drunken ladies he thinks could be his birth mother.

  While drunk, I sometimes checked phone books for her name.

  After totally and completely quitting drugs and alcohol one evening around age twenty-three, I happened to hear of an adoption “registry” organization which—if both parties (birth parent and adoptee) had turned in notarized forms to the Alameda County registrar—would facilitate a reunion. I mailed my form and waited. No word back, I eventually forgot about the registry altogether.

  Sometimes I imagined I saw her on the street, women who were her age. Forty.

  Then fifty.

  Short of hiring a P.I., there was nothing to be done.

  I was living.

  It was the late eighties and the nineties. I went to shows at Gilman, Chatterbox, Albion, etc., walked—no one had a car; we hopped trains and hitchhiked, alt
ernately rescued food from dumpsters / lit dumpsters on fire, were fired from jobs for insubordination, protested (hegemony?), conducted fragmented run-ins with college, studied poetry, generated community by making events, made art, especially performance.

  One day someone handed me Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I was shocked and strangely pleased that she and Pablo Picasso—and so many of these other people, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matisse—had known one another, been friends, made thoughts together. And that the narrative was overfull with social details, names of partygoers, people Stein had run into. (Curiously, the upshot of her book, as I understood it at the time, was that young artists ought to pay attention to each other and not some establishment art world.) I was myself part of a DIY, anarchist-inspired, queercore, radical art scene which was deeply satisfying. Later I ran—with Silas Howard and some others—this feral coffeehouse-cum-performance-space (salon?) called The Bearded Lady. It was the epicenter of some heavy third-wave feminist flow for quite a while. Kathy Acker conducted some Art Institute classes there. (Nao Bustamante, Nayland Blake, Justin Vivian Bond, Joan Jett Blakk, Catherine Opie, Michelle Tea, Chris Johanson, Alicia McCarthy were customers, and friends—just to name a few.) Woven into the fabric of this textured, gritty existence was an ongoing cosmic experimentation, in which I tried and sometimes managed to materialize the spiritual (sanctify the flesh?). These were experiments in radical sexuality, fucking. I thought I might find God this way. It was churchy.

  Well, you’ve been waiting for this—the internet was invented. The birth mother’s name started popping up on web searches that other people conducted for me; folks walked up and snuggled scraps of paper into my fist, DONNY MOLLOY jotted a few times onto each slip, accompanied by phone numbers, addresses. This was absolutely exotic at the time: raw databases suddenly thrown into the commons. Loath to know more, I forwent these tiny dossiers for a couple of years, often shuffling them into drawers, bags, the trash. Imagining the deliverance, dejection or blue funk that might attend what search angels call contact (lost child turns up at the fountainhead) caused me no small amount of trepidation. Plus, I luxuriated in the purity of the potential charged into each of these slips. I had grown up waiting and was, after all, not some hasty fireball rushing to renovate my approach to personal subjectivity. I was strung out on, comprised of particles that had skipped the specificity of one womb; I had grown tendrils to every cosmic iota and was not at all certain that I wanted a name, beyond EVERY. One day, however, I did write a letter.