18
I had a full day ahead of me in San Francisco. I suppose I could have canceled my long-scheduled lunch and our evening plans, but what was I going to do instead? Climb back into bed? If I stayed in the hotel room, I knew what would happen. I would check my email every five minutes, hoping to receive a reply from Benjamin Walden. I would probably do that anyway, but at least I’d be on the move. Who knew how long it would take him to write back—that is, if he was ever going to write back? Maybe he was out of the country. Or had fallen ill. Or maybe we were wrong, completely wrong about him, about everything. Was it possible? I kept asking Michael whether there was still some chance that all this was a crazy hallucination, a bunch of coincidences arranged so that they only appeared to be facts.
But this was shock talking. This is what shock does. The trapped, frozen mind looks to rearrange the data. In a recursive loop, I kept drifting back to the beginning: the Ancestry.com results, Philadelphia, A.T., Bethany Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, medical student, Ben Walden. I pored over the long-ago conversation with my mother, mining it for further clues. I could hardly bear to think of my father. To think of my father would bring him close to me, and then he’d be able to see what was going on. This is how my thinking went. I didn’t want to break my dead father’s heart.
Michael and I wandered through the sprawling structure called the Japan Center next to our hotel. Even in midmorning, the place was filled with tourists. Japanese families snapped photos beneath the five-story concrete Peace Pagoda. We walked the length of the indoor mall, past Japanese, Chinese, Korean restaurants, boutiques. A hair salon, a bakery. In a paper goods store, I combed the aisles, looking for the perfect notebook. Writers tend to be fetishistic about our materials, and I am no exception. Spiral-bound, perfect-bound, lined, unlined, pocket-size—as if the notebook itself might make a difference. Instead, I ended up buying the packages of index cards, understanding something I couldn’t have articulated: my life was now in fragments I would need to shuffle and reshuffle in any attempt to make sense of it.
My lunch date was with a friend whom I hadn’t seen since she’d moved to the West Coast a couple of years earlier. We were meeting at a vegan restaurant in the Mission. When I had made plans with her, weeks ago, I thought we’d cover the usual subjects: work, family, politics, gossip. Now, the conversation was probably going to go a little differently. How could I talk about what was happening to me? How could I not?
In the back of a taxi on my way to the Mission, I checked my phone. I had five new emails, and as I scrolled through them I felt a disconcerting emptiness. It had been two hours since I’d sent the note to Benjamin Walden. He lived in Portland. We were in the same time zone. Wouldn’t he have checked his email by now? I was insanely, unreasonably impatient. Refresh, refresh.
I imagined a home in the Pacific Northwest—just a short flight from where I now stood on the corner of Valencia and Mission. I pictured the old man with white hair and blue eyes wearing khakis and a fleece. Perhaps at that very moment, he was pulling a chair up to his desk, which was covered with papers and medical journals. By his side, a steaming earthenware mug of tea. There would be a picture window behind the desk that overlooked a backyard shaded by aspen and poplar trees. As a novelist, the characters I create are as real to me as the people in my everyday life. But this was no character. The noise in my head was so loud I wondered if it might travel all the way from San Francisco to Portland. Maybe just then Benjamin Walden was powering on his desktop computer and opening his email, scanning past fund-raising requests from the Democrats (it seemed all but certain that he was a Democrat), notices from his golf club (he looked like a golfer), and stopping at an email with the subject line Important Letter.
The restaurant my friend had chosen for our lunch was called Gracias Madre. The irony of the name didn’t strike me, and it isn’t until a year later when I try to piece together the events of that day that I look back in my calendar and can’t help but laugh. Gracias Madre. As I floated, dizzy and spectral as a junkie, down Mission on my way to the restaurant, it wasn’t my mother who was on my mind—and certainly I wasn’t in the mood to thank her. I had decided, if anything that day can be called a decision, that my parents had been completely in the dark about the circumstances of my conception. It had been an accident. A mistake. Or maybe a betrayal of them by someone at the institute. My parents had spent their lives not knowing, same as me. No other explanation was bearable.