don’t know, even as I feel like there are so many things now that I do know,
Part Japanese, Saki was orphaned by her mother, a former stripper from Las Vegas who vanished early in the girl’s life — into a religious cult, unconfirmed and dubious rumor has it — and by her American father she’s seen only in her dreams, a strange man who once charted a huge blue calendar that completely reordered history according to the chronology and logic of apocalypse, and from whom the daughter got her electric blue eyes. Kim can’t believe his luck to have a woman so beautiful. He and Saki move in together. When he receives a position at the university as a professor of musicology, Saki goes to work for a map maker, walls around her floating with brightly colored places of indefinite borders, oceans of uncertain shores; although it would make more sense for the couple to live in Berkeley where they work and the rents are cheaper, Kim can’t bring himself to leave a single-room flat not far from where he grew up near Van Ness. If he leans from the upstairs window as far as possible and turns his head sharply north, he can see a blue sliver of the view of the bay that the adopted father of one week who saved Kim’s life saw on the last night of his own life.
Kim marries Saki two months after she becomes pregnant. Angie is named after her grandmother even if it wasn’t the grandmother’s real name but the one she took from an old rock and roll ballad she loved while dancing underage in a Vegas strip joint back in the 1970s. So it is that two generations later Kim and Saki’s daughter has more music in her genes than she knows. When Angie is eight years old, long before he’s entitled to a midlife crisis her father has a ludicrous and cataclysmic affair with a student not nearly as beautiful as Saki; far from only a passing distraction, even after it comes to light the affair becomes an ever more disastrous obsession. It’s as clear to Kim as to everyone else that he’s taken leave of his senses. One afternoon Saki marches Angie to a hotel
even as now I know not only that Kirk’s father is dead but that my own mother
room and bursts in on the rendezvous at a particularly debauched moment, a scene that profoundly traumatizes Angie more than whatever indignant satisfaction on Saki’s part can compensate; in the years to come, she’ll hate the mother for it more than the father. Two years later, the relationship between daughter and father is finally reduced to Kim — now without job or family or lover, and in defiance of a restraining order — suddenly appearing one morning before Angie and her mother on the sidewalk outside the little girl’s elementary school, in rags and pleading for a single embrace, sobbing the little girl’s name as Saki curses him.
Angie never sees him again. He disappears, either to enlist in some distant crusade of some undetermined roman numeral or to fulfill a family tradition of disappearing fathers and mothers. Given this, on some level it doesn’t really make sense Angie would go to the same university as her father and, like her father, study musicology — or it makes complete sense. Perhaps it makes sense for all the reasons it doesn’t. The rational processes of mathematics aside, one chooses what it is she wishes to consider rational about her life; and in fact Angie is not one to set rational processes aside even if, Wang not being her true grandfather, technically his blood doesn’t run in her veins. She works hard in school to the exclusion of everything else. Except for one extremely perfunctory dating relationship that lasts five months with a young computer programmer, her life is consumed bycombinations of music and math (since all music is mathematic), and her theory that as there’s a basis for physical matter so there isfor psychic matter, that within a deconstructed and reassembledmelody there’s to be located the helix of freedom and desire, transcendence and oblivion, even — if she believed in either — god and chaos. She spends her life searching for this helix. By the late ’40s and early ’50s, called a genius by some and a crackpot by
is dead too, even as now I know that my own father was dead before I was
others, and utterly nonplused by either distinction, Angie has pursued her musical grail throughout Europe, the Middle East and America as the diminished skirmishes of what’s no longer called by anyone the “tribulation” but rather the Unrest have receded to the last bastions of certifiably insane Americans, Wyoming and Utah. For two years she conducts her research in lower Manhattan, for five years in the two hundred miles of desert west of formerly occupied Albuquerque, using as her headquarters an old Spanish hacienda once converted into a railroad hotel.
In wire glasses and dour attire, adopting an increasingly severe appearance in the way of women who believe no other physical identity is possible for them, Angie has neither her mother’s beauty nor her father’s handsomeness. If she did, it’s possible she wouldn’t marry anyway. But in the early ’70s, as she nears her fiftieth birthday, to her own surprise she finds herself seized by a compulsion.
This is the compulsion to adopt a child. She listens for the compulsion’s melody so she might analyze its mathematics, but all she hears is a fugue not of numbers but indecipherable runes. She pores over pictures of motherless children from all over the world, waiting for one to strike a chord. They all strike a chord. Her head fills with an awesome and heartbreaking symphony. For more than a year she wrestles with the decision, finally waking one morning in a strange ecstasy from a dream about her father; when she finally files the application, she’s stunned to be turned down, due to institutional doubts as to her “domestic stability.” Thousands of children in the world without mothers or fathers and she’s turned down? She appeals the decision and is turned down again. She applies to go to China where she might find one of the countless infant girls abandoned by their parents, but ironically is
born and it’s just as well, and in a way here in the birth canal of the lake none
denied not in spite of her Chinese heritage but because of it, as though there’s some subversiveness about it she doesn’t know. For months afterward she sits at night in her endless stream of hotel rooms poring again over the pictures of children, of sons or daughters who might have been. She runs her finger over their small faces. She holds the photos up to the light and peers into them as though some flicker in their faces, something in the backgrounds of their lives in Africa or Appalachia or the Andes, will offer clues as to why she isn’t worthy of them. Like all children who assume responsibility for their own desertion, she becomes convinced this is her punishment for leaving her errant father outside her school that morning she was a small girl when, in rags, he cried futilely for her arms in the company of the mother who cursed him.
She returns to looking for the helix. She privately despairs of ever redeeming her life with a purpose when, in the late ’80s at the far end of her career, she’s called to Los Angeles, the city that takes leave of men’s senses.
Arriving late afternoon, she asks to be taken to the site immediately but is convinced by excavation officials to rest first. She spends the night in one of the new hotels that have gone up near the old airport razed and rebuilt in the last five years after being closed more than seven decades. As dark falls, from the highrise window she can see a hesitant galaxy of lights growing across the basin, though still far less than the dazzling overturned jewel box that was night-time L.A. a century ago. The next morning, her driver explains that while the last of the freeways has finally been reopened, none takes Angie where she’s going so they make their way instead up Old La Cienega Road, one of the city’s major thoroughfares before the lake and now a narrow two-lane,