Chapter 1: Katabasis

Sayre’s twin brother, Connor, asks if he wants to look for their birth father who they’ve never met. This episode also contains: strippers, distracted therapists, and wildfires. Want to support our independent journalism? Join Futuro+ for ad-free listening, early-access and exclusive bonus episodes with the chisme behind “Reaching Out” and all our podcasts: www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus http://www.futuromediagroup.org/joinplus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, this is Sayre. Once again, I just want to say how blown away I am by the response to this work. I never imagined that it would resonate so widely, and I am so grateful to all of you for listening. I'm also really happy to report that, as of this week, almost 3,000 of you have supported us by subscribing to Futuro Plus. So, thank you. Because of you, we are quite literally able to make this work possible. Memoirs and documentaries that are this ambitious and take this many risks are incredibly hard to get funded and hard to support with ads. So, we want to make more things like reaching out, and your subscription allows us to do that. The last episode is out now, but there are still lots of good reasons to subscribe.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  We have a bunch of subscriber-only episodes coming out in the coming weeks, including an Ask Me Anything, where I'll answer some listener questions, and an extended conversation with a special guest. But, most importantly, if enough of you subscribe, it'll allow us to make more shows like this for you to enjoy. So, thank you again, and on to the show. Join Futuro Plus for early access to the whole season, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content for reaching out. Go to futudomedia group dot org backslash join plus to get access today.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  On February 15th, 2020, Connor calls you to ask if you want to look for your birth father. You do not record this conversation. This is notable, if only because so much of your life has been recorded. Moments far less consequential than this. You're on Connor's fourth birthday.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Me and the rubber nose. Did you guys say that? Said, "Have me a rubber nose."

• 1:56Speaker 00

  A school performance. You play a scared rabbit. Your only line...

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I think we're lost. Don't worry, we'll just go back where we came. Which way did we come?

• 2:05Speaker 00

  A house party when you were 16, when you first began to record yourself.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  A few people, and I talked to them about what I'm recording about. And since it's about, like, me and it's about things I do, like, I figure I shouldn't record this.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  These records were made because you, or someone else, thought the moment was worth keeping. A sort of prescient act, one that assumes that you might want to return, that what is captured here may hold some significance, that what is remembered may cohere somehow with the story of your life as you are meant to understand it. There is a price for what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, for the story we make of it. If you had known how this would all turn out, maybe you would have recorded everything. Or if you'd known the cost, maybe you would not have recorded anything at all. But you did not know, could not have known.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  On February 15th, 2020, your brother calls you to ask if you want to look for your birth father, but there is no record of that call. There is, however, a recording of the call you make a few days later.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  Hello? Hey, brother. Hey, what's up? Nothing, my phone is at 10%, by the way. Oh, that's cool. I don't, I can't, I don't feel like talking on this phone very long, tired. I'm recording, I hope that is okay. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Hmm, alright, that's cool.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Are you recording because you want to talk about dad stuff? Yeah, well, not just because of that, but yeah. Hmm. I thought that's who you wanted to talk about. I have other things on my mind, but, hmm, I mean, yeah, that's just like a very intense conversation. Can I tell you something crazy that happened today that has nothing to do with him?

• 4:23Speaker 00

  These days, you rarely know where Connor is until he's already there. You call, and he's in Washington with his girlfriend. You call again, and he's barely got service. He's trimming weed in Arcata, or he's hopped a train to the Midwest, or he's crashing on a friend's couch in Oakland.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Just fucking, uh, so I'm in New Orleans right now, right? Hmm, you know that? You're where?

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Right now, Connor is partying in New Orleans with his girlfriend. Right now, you are pacing around your room in Harlem, staring at a whiteboard where you have scribbled a list of vague to-dos. Dentist, student loans, respond to email, and clean. You do not bother to erase these tasks each week. The tasks will remain undone, or they will be rewritten.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Today, me and Claire were walking to go get my bike, and we walked by this guy who apparently used to live here. We keep walking, and all of a sudden, like, hear your steps, and I look behind, he's like, walking really quickly to catch up with us. He's walking, he's like, "You faggot, you can't bring," he's like, "You can't bring females here." Um, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I was, it's my girlfriend. And then, he kind of just mean-mugged and blank-stared, and then he walked, but he started walking back to his chair, right?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Connor does not like it when you point out your differences, but contrast is the rightful and unavoidable dominion of twins. They're superficial distinctions, the kind of differences strangers point out when you inevitably pull up a photo of Connor after they learn you're a twin. You're tightly coiled curls, Connor's loose, wavy hair, Connor's growth spurt at 16, you're 5'7", which you say is 5'8". But nothing makes you feel more different from your brother than when he tells you these kinds of stories, because it is in these stories that your critical difference becomes most obvious.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  And then we, and then we keep walking. It's about like a mile and a half or so back to the house, and I like turn around, and the fucking guy is like a block away from us. Whoa. I just had fucking like these knives in his hand, and like polishing his knives on his shirt, and like looking at us.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  The critical difference between you and Connor is this: long ago, without realizing it, you chose a kind of freedom. The kind that imparts stability and safety, and that you pay for in unsubsidized loans, quarterly job reviews, happy hours with coworkers, boring party conversation, conferences with field practitioners, mid-century modern furniture, boxing classes, and dental checkups. And Connor chose a kind of freedom that comes with land projects, one-off jobs at biker festivals, wide-open mountain ranges from the Union Pacific Line, and that he pays for in a persistent smoker's cough, weeks on remote weed farms with fish fans, and being pursued in New Orleans by a guy with a knife.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  It was just like psycho-ass move. So, yeah, that was crazy, that's why, that's why I was talking to you.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  You do not return to the subject of your birth father tonight. You talk about your mother, who left her apartment in Oakland after they raised the rent a few months ago. She's dog-sitting for strangers now to save money.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  She's like talking to me about how she's like bouncing around a bunch right now. Yep, living that nomadic lifestyle, am I right? Uh-huh.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  You wrestle about timing for your next call.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, probably can't talk tomorrow, but I can talk sometime in the next few days. Tell me what time, and day you do. Dude, I don't have a schedule.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Your brother thinks you are a judgmental normie, and you think he is a judgmental hobo. This is the shared cost of your divergent freedoms. You both pay for your choices with the degree of distance it puts between you. But you do love each other, and you are trying to be better, to be nicer, to be closer. This routine of phone calls, which began a few months ago, is your attempt.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  I want to drink water. And eat meals. Yeah, we have a house. I love you. We can cook and stuff. Yeah, I know you're not like... Talk to you later. Eating over a trash fire. Okay, I love you. Okay, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  It's unlikely you speak about your father again, but it's hard to say for sure. There are no records of phone calls with Connor that week or the next. You assume his impulse to look for your father is a passing one. You doubt you follow up. You went through your phase, of course, the one that you imagine most fatherless teenagers go through, in which your father's absence took on an outsized significance, in which your adolescent brain dissected and disassembled its meaning in relation to your sense of self. Was your fatherlessness why you felt so apart from others? Was his abandonment a sort of permanent wound on your psyche? Only one way to find out: write a lot of shitty poetry. None of those poems are recorded, thank God.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  But one vested remains: a play about two boys waiting to meet their father at a café. You wrote it when you were 17. It was called, perhaps a little over precisely, "Waiting to Meet Your Father," and was haltingly, painfully acted out by two fellow art students. What if he doesn't show? He will, and if he doesn't...

• 9:46Speaker 03

  I'll be okay.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  The central tension of the play is that the two boys are waiting at a café to meet their father, who they've never known. But he is running late, or maybe he is standing them up. The brothers argue about whether or not they should wait to find out which one it is. One boy is sure it won't be worth it. The other is adamant they stay.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Do you think about him a lot?

• 10:13Speaker 05

  No, do you?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Well, sometimes. Like, we're about to fall asleep. It's usually while I'm not thinking that I think about him the most, you know? It's one of those things where when my mind is just drifting, I'll suddenly start wondering about him, and then I'll have to make myself do something to take my mind off him. The more I think about trying to think about him, the more I end up thinking about him.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  In the end...

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Are you sure?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Their father arrives a few moments after they walk out the door.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  The poetry and playwriting phase was short-lived. When you were 20, you wrote a radio commentary, also over-precisely titled, "Searching For Dad."

• 11:02Speaker 05

  Over the last couple of years, I found myself at the computer Googling my biological father's name. I'd sort through the different characters that came up. There was the pastor, the photographer, the game designer. I'd look at images and try to recognize parts of their faces in mine, see if anything about them struck me. I even had some numbers I found in online directories, saved under his name in my phone, just in case I ever got the guts to call.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  You turned 20 the month before this commentary aired. On the eve of this new decade of life, you decided it was not worth it to actively think about your birth father anymore. It was not cool to still feel hurt about it, and so you could choose to feel nothing. Whether or not you truly believed that was beside the point. Writing it down, recording it, would remind you, and remembering it, would make it true.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  Biology may connect us, but I'm a product of so much more than that. The decisions I make, the family and friends I choose to keep around me, those are the things that make me who I am. So for me, the new year means deleting those old numbers from my phone and spending more time searching not for my dad, but for myself.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Again, a little over-precise, maybe even a little cliche. The reality is, most people spend their lives searching for their parents. You know people with dead parents who search for them through baby photos and old letters. You know people with living parents who search for them in tense dinner conversations. You belong to the special sect of seeking offspring: boys without fathers. Connor wants to initiate you into the cult of boys who search for those fathers. This cult, historically, mythologically, tend towards self-destruction. Chariots shattered by thunderbolts, blending themselves with golden pins, wandering into arctic tundras to self-immolate. In choosing to give up your father at 20 to write the ending of your story, you are

• 12:52Speaker 00

  avoiding this fate, and you plan to continue to do so now. You will not sabotage your brother's efforts, but you will not help them either. So you do not follow up with Connor about looking for your father, and Connor does not call. But there are also no records of other calls either. If you had recorded everything, you would hear three sessions here with your new work-subsidized teletherapist. The first, an intake session, a concise summarized biography of your life as it relates to your inner problems. You make radio documentaries. You won some awards for this last year.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Phew, wow, hold on, one second. There are two parts to this speech, and I was gonna keep it short, but what the hell, I got gold, so...

• 13:36Speaker 00

  You crave the attention and acknowledgement, and it also repulses you. You work at the biggest newspaper in the world, at one of the biggest shows in the country. Lately, you've been leaving early to see if anyone notices. They don't.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  You were raised by a loving, single mother in the Bay Area.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  You would hear yourself tell your teletherapist that your birth father left before you were born, and you've never met him, that you suspect, based on nothing more than an elementary understanding of Freud and a few Instagram therapy videos, that this is the root of some of your problems: daddy issues. You have a twin brother.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  But you're not identical. You probably make the same joke you always do, that you're sorry to disappoint your therapist. People are always more excited when they think there's some other version of you out there. Most relevant to your teletherapist, what you would like to fix about yourself. It is mostly one thing, which you are almost embarrassed to admit. You have the sneaking suspicion that you will never fall in love. Then you would hear the second session. In this recording, you would hear your teletherapist say that she gets clients like you all the time, who have succeeded by every other metric in their lives, except love. You would hear your equivocal "Hmm," unsure if that assessment makes you feel better

• 15:05Speaker 00

  or worse, that your failure is not unique, but a species of pain felt by other people who pay for therapy offered on discount in podcast commercials. You can hear her fumbling plates beneath a running faucet in the background as you describe your last relationship. She tells you, you think, perhaps a little quick to the draw, that it "sounds emotionally abusive." Then you would hear the third session, in which her voice sounds diffuse and distant. You will eventually figure out it is because she is speaking to you from her car, and you are on speakerphone. You imagine her kid sitting silently in the backseat, listening in as you talk about this mysterious illness all over the news. Your job sent you home a few days ago. There are rumors there's going to be a state of emergency soon.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  She ends the call by telling you that she has decided to step away from her practice, to focus on her family in this uncertain moment.

• 16:07Speaker 00

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• 16:54Speaker 06

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• 17:22Speaker 01

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• 18:07Speaker 00

  The memories of the first months of the pandemic are stored data points in your phone. Nike says you run 51.8 miles in the first three months. Quit Smoking says you managed to stop for that same period of time. Otherwise, the only reliable testament of this time are the recordings you make of your phone calls.

• 18:25Speaker 05

  By the way, do you mind if I record our conversation? I'm recording all of my quarantine combos. By the way, I'm recording. I've decided I'm gonna start recording all my conversations, because it seems like a moment.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  You tell yourself that it is for a project you hope to make about this historic moment. Didn't touch my grandparents, obviously.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Did find out that my grandpa went to 7-Eleven to get a Pepsi.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I had kind of a panic attack and I realized that I had like a very small window of time to decide whether or not I was gonna stay here or try to get home.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Whatever, if you wanna get sick, but homie, if you get my grandma sick, I'll kill you.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a, it's.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  You and Connor call with the same tepid frequency as before the state of emergency. Connor's back in Washington now with his girlfriend.

• 19:14Speaker 07

  How's quarantine for you? I heard New York's in crazy lockdown.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  He doesn't speak about looking for your birth father again, and you don't bring it up. Flights are almost completely grounded. You can't leave your house, much less the state. And in this moment, you are both more focused on making life bearable, building fortresses of routine to keep the mania of your confinement from creeping in.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Also in the recordings, phone calls with your mom and her best friend, Michelle, who you call Auntie and Cathead. Your mom has been living with Michelle in Portland since quarantine began.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Hi, Mommy, how are you?

• 19:57Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I'm back. Your mommy's back. She's here.

• 20:00Speaker 07

  You're back.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  She's here.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  You think maybe you'll transcribe these recordings and complete a screenplay about Mom and Michelle's adventures as strippers in the eighties at the Century Club in San Francisco.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  So it's, does it go from bear to otter and then to something else? Or does it, is it just?

• 20:17Speaker 07

  It's not like an evolution. It's just different groups.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Okay. Twinks are a totally different category, right?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  This is your favorite kind of call. You get stoned and curl up in bed with the phone balanced on your cheek. You are still at 27, like most children. You like to hear stories of the world before you were in it, of your mother before she was your mother.

• 20:41Speaker 07

  Tell me about what my mom was like when you first met her.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  We were just talking about this the other night, actually. I was working at the Century before she came there. And so she was new, so I was curious. And she seemed a bit reserved and a little standoffish. And so, um, so one day I finally got my guess up and I was like, where are you from? And she goes, El Salvador. But then I said, um, oh, well, like, you're so pretty or something. And then she goes, oh, well, you're really pretty, too.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  You've learned your mother's story in pieces over years of your adulthood, and then all at once when you made a documentary about her a few years ago. Her schizophrenic mother, her alcoholic father, her molester grandfather. She ran away, and so she has no records, no photo albums, no videos, no trace of her childhood, and no family to ask. Michelle is the closest witness that you have to her life.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  The thing I remember also is that she was kind of the grown up out of all of like the girls that I knew and hung out with. She'd been on her own longer too, because like I loved her when I was 17, but she was like on her own at 15.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Your mother's life is a constellation. Points of interest float out there in the vast darkness. She or Michelle, at will, pluck these details from the void, and they become images and then stories, like the expensive condo she lived in before you were born, her twin Siamese cats, Hades and Persephone.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Siamese cat? Yes. And we would go out for sushi all the time after work and she'd bring them sashimi, huh?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Or the aquarium full of exotic fish shattered by the earthquake in 89. Or the other dancers, the girlfriend of a famous rock star, a girl cruelly nicknamed Pincushion for her favorite vice. Or Lady T, who wore a steward's uniform for her set, plane crashes projecting behind her as she danced.

• 22:38Speaker 07

  And what did you dance to? And what did my mom dance to?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Um, I would dance to Bob Dylan a lot, actually. Mm-hmm. Believe it or not, but so did your mom. Well, yeah, but his Christian album. I'm gonna scandalize your nephew now. Your auntie did like the schoolgirl thing. Let's just be honest. Let's just be honest. Yeah. Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 07

  Creepy, but I won't think about that.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I know. I know. When you think about it, it's super creepy. I want to warn you that my phone is, you know what, I'm gonna go upstairs and get the, get the cord, but I have to look at this message from your brother. Okay, now your chant's there. Your mom's going upstairs.

• 23:20Speaker 07

  Um, what, um, what is her, what are her, uh, oh, did you ever meet my birth father?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 07

  And what was your general impression?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Um, he was okay. I only met your birth father a couple of times. I remember I met him once at the Zeitgeist. And he was really hella tall, for one thing. He was cute. He was like handsome.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Your mother is not exactly withholding about your father. She answers the questions if you ask them, which you did a lot when you were a teenager. Your origin story has remained consistent, but unsatisfyingly brief. Your father was a line cook. He played in a rockabilly band. They met at a bar called the Zeitgeist, dated for a while. She got pregnant. He wasn't ready to be a father. She decided to keep you. For a while, she exchanged letters with his mother, but she was always justifying his choice to not be involved in your lives, so they stopped communicating. Your mother tells you his name, but can't remember how it's spelled.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, so I met him a couple of times. I thought, I mean, he seemed nice. He was nice to me. He was polite. He was like clearly trying to like make a good impression on me because I was like your mom's friend. Yeah. And he was just, he was very tall.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  What you've learned by this point, having just turned 27 a few months ago, is that the stories most adults make of their lives are brief and unsatisfying, because most adult lives are full of false starts, abrupt endings, and omissions both purposeful and accidental. And so that your aunt's recollection comes down to tall and nice is not exactly surprising, as much as fairly consistent with the blunted, uneven shapes of most people's lives.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  You're not feeling depressed, sir? Uh-uh.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Weeks and months pass like this, signals bouncing back and forth across phone lines and cell towers and fiber optic cables. July now, and you've stopped running, started smoking again. Most of this time is spent getting high, masturbating, and scrolling on Instagram.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  How did we drink all of that aortiente and I felt like completely sober and cute Julie and I were the last day?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  If you're not alone, you're drinking on your roof with friends.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I haven't showered in days.

• 25:54Speaker 05

  I was that way this morning and then I finally took a shower.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  The new world permeates daily life, but more as a passing gesture.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Makes you feel better. I can't, I have no sense of smell, so I can't smell. You got the Rona? No, I just, I didn't have a sense.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  You got the Rona, fucker.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Your life is reduced to a crude hierarchy of habits, routines, and immediate pleasures. Strangely, it feels no different from your life before, only smaller.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, fucking with your head. Don't you miss your ex now?

• 26:38Speaker 00

  The last time you saw your ex was on your 27th birthday. You were shouting at one another beneath the rattling viaduct of the M-line, the high of the evening's drugs, long worn into a bleary, agitated kind of attention. Your ex shouting, it's been two years. You need to get over me. I got over you in a week. I know you said, I know, even though you didn't know. He texted you recently to ask how you're holding up in lockdown. You told him you need space, but not that you have decided to move to Los Angeles. By the end of July, you found an apartment there. You quit your job. You pack your belongings into seven 24 by 18 cardboard boxes and load them onto a Greyhound

• 27:21Speaker 00

  bus. You leave what won't fit or isn't worth the charge for extra weight. On the curb in front of your apartment, talismans of regret, the skateboard you bought with your ex, a wilting palm tree you forgot to water, a stack of books you never got around to reading. A friend once told you that in a good story, the ending feels inevitable, that by the time you arrive there, you have this feeling that the events preceding it and where they lead could not have happened any other way. This is how you feel the night before you leave New York City. You have reached your inevitable end here, which means you might actually have a chance to start again.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  In the first two months of your arrival to Los Angeles, catabatic winds, dry lightning, a gender reveal pyrotechnic, and an arsonist ignite a series of fires that turn the sky's slate with ash. Every surface is slick with a fine film, including the sun, which is now a matte red hole in the sky. You learn that here in Los Angeles, seasons are divided between dry or wet, which makes it harder to distinguish the passing of time. The short hand of the world stutters in place, but you trace the nearly imperceptible movement of the long hand by observing the pomegranate tree outside your living room window. When you arrive in July, the bulbs are pink, dwarfed by pale crowns. By the end of September, they are ruby red and fat,

• 29:07Speaker 00

  branches sagging under their weight.

• 29:20Speaker 07

  Hey. Hi. Hey, can you hear me? I can. Okay, cool. I'm, uh, I'm sorry I didn't call you earlier. I totally slipped my mind.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Connor is driving his truck up and down the Pacific Coast Highway. He's waiting to be called into the fires. You ask him to start recording himself while he's waiting. You think maybe he'll make a project about seasonal firefighters.

• 29:46Speaker 07

  Do you want to record me right now instead of me doing a thing? I'm recording you right now. Oh, you are? Yeah. Oh, good, because I didn't want to do it.

• 29:59Speaker 07

  Well, just don't record. I still want you to record yourself. It can be very therapeutic, you know? Yeah, I know.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  If Connor is lucky, he'll get a call and spend a few weeks or months digging long ditches, lines to contain fires. But so far, nobody has called, and he's spent the summer sleeping in his truck.

• 30:18Speaker 07

  Um, well, I guess I'll let you go.

• 30:22Speaker 07

  Are you sure? You feeling okay? Yeah, I'm fine.

• 30:30Speaker 07

  I've got, I fixed my radio yesterday.

• 30:34Speaker 07

  Well, um, are things going okay?

• 30:38Speaker 07

  They're okay. It's fine. It's okay. Okay. Love you, brother. Love you too. Bye.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  By October, the birds have hollowed out the pomegranates. The empty shells sway lazily on the branches like paper ornaments. You are surprised to find that your next-door neighbors, a young white couple, rarely return your greetings. You live in the heart of a gentrifying Central American neighborhood. When you speak to the cashier at the corner store in Spanish, she responds in English. You want to tell her that you're not like the rest of them. Your grandmother is from Santana. You couldn't have afforded to live here a few years ago. You moved here to be closer to something. You're just not sure what or how.

• 31:29Speaker 07

  I just thought about

• 31:32Speaker 07

  the fact that I'm a hungover and in a pandemic.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Friends visit on occasion, but mostly, you are alone.

• 31:43Speaker 07

  Anyways.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Your ex is dating someone new. You see on Instagram that they've adopted a dog. There's no one to share this news with. Your friends think you're over it, which you are. But he's your only ex, which gives the possibility of his happiness without you a cold clarity. Maybe the reason you will never fall in love is that your ex saw something in you which made love impossible, that you needed it more than other people.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Happy birthday to you.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  You turn 28.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  The pomegranate tree dormant in your window.

• 32:25Speaker 07

  Nine, seven, six.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  The long hand of the world lurches forward, and the short one trembles.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Happy New Year.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  On April 18th, 2021, a little over a year after he first calls you to ask to look for your father, Connor texts you a series of screenshots. They're of an exchange between him and someone from a DNA testing website, a distant relative. You bought a kit for your family a few years ago and forgot about it. In the exchange, Connor asks if there's someone in this distant relative's family with your birth father's name. "Yes, in fact," says the stranger. A few days later, Connor receives your birth father's first, middle, and last name for the first time, spelled correctly. When you search your birth father's name in public records, it returns a result in Los Angeles, in a suburb 40 minutes away from you.

• 33:47Speaker 07

  I mean, how do you feel about it?

• 33:50Speaker 07

  I feel good about it. Yeah, I feel good about it. Because for me, I feel, like, the first day we kind of got the info, I was like,

• 34:00Speaker 07

  I'm kind of excited.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  It has been a long time since you've heard Connor excited about anything. It's sweet and unnerving. To say no would be disappointing for him, a betrayal of your attempts towards closeness. But the thought of meeting your birth father inspires very little feeling in you, besides a nascent hope that you might finally finish a project, something you failed to do with your pandemic phone calls or your stripper screenplay or seasonal firefighter project.

• 34:27Speaker 07

  I mean, do you feel like that, like, if you met him, that, do you feel like you won't get anything out of it?

• 34:35Speaker 07

  I guess I'm just, like, trying to figure out, like, what,

• 34:39Speaker 07

  you know, like, I think he's about almost 30, you know? It's just like, what, you know, like, what is this guy going to tell us about ourselves that we don't already know? I hear you, because it's like, I'm not interested. I was like, I don't really give a shit about, I mean, I do give a shit. I do give a shit about meeting him. I don't, I don't like, I feel like I'm, I'm so much more ready to, like, confront this kind of thing because I'm, because we're almost 30. It's like, meeting him is not going to, like, necessarily affect me, I don't think, in some, like, crazy way. I think it is just going to, like, really, for me, I feel like I'm going to have some closure of, like, knowing what, like,

• 35:23Speaker 07

  I don't know, do you ever, like, look in the mirror and, like, say, like, like, think about dad? Or, like, dad, our biological dad?

• 35:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. You ever, like, I think I find myself always looking and being like, I don't even know what our family looks like. I have mom to compare that to. I like, oh, it's like, I have mom's face in a lot of ways, but I also wonder

• 35:51Speaker 07

  what our biological dad looks like.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  You have tabs open to several potential fathers on Facebook, a series of white men in rimless or squared sunglasses with varied hairlines and gradient pallid shades. Your top contender sports a buzz cut and a pair of gas station sunglasses. He's an amateur photographer who takes pictures of animals at the zoo.

• 36:14Speaker 07

  I found one picture of a person who kind of looks like he could be related to us, maybe. Yeah, I saw one that maybe did. I was like, damn, he's pretty ugly, I don't know. Is it the guy with the black hair and the sunglasses on? Yeah, that guy. I was like, is that really mom's type before she started dating really boring dudes?

• 36:34Speaker 00

  You have not told your mother about any of this, and you're not sure you will. It is very different, you think, to ask questions about your birth father than to meet him.

• 36:43Speaker 07

  And I'm curious about what he's, what his life is at.

• 36:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. I also hope he's fallen.

• 36:53Speaker 07

  No, I'm just kidding.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  A thought occurs to you now as you listen to this recording, a series of questions, really, unavailable to you then. Without experience, we are blind to the nature and intention of our own impulses and actions. To know why we do the things we do, we have to know ourselves, which at this time, you do not. But a hint lies in the contradiction between thought and action. Here's yours. You don't care about your father, so then why record? What do you think you will find when you return to this moment? If you record moments to keep them, to collect them, to cohere them in the story of your life, but you also believe that you have already written the end of this one, then what is it that you think you will find here?

• 37:37Speaker 07

  I am just really curious. Who he is.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Not knowing what you know now, you only think, "It's a good story. I'm recording a good story." Two boys search for their father. They receive the answers they need to relieve them of whatever weight his absence still carries for them. Yes, that's good. That will do.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Suddenly, it's June again, almost exactly one year since you arrived to Los Angeles. The pomegranate tree is blooming again. This time, you will manage to pluck one for yourself and eat it before the birds come to harvest the seeds.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  One night, you will absentmindedly Google your father's name and Los Angeles. The screen will populate with the same buzz-cut guy with gas station sunglasses, but now there are two new images. The first is a man standing beside a barber chair. He looks like he was ripped from a Time Magazine article from the 50s. Tall, a pencil mustache, slicked-back hair. There's an interview with him. He owns the barber shop. He grew up in California, moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'90s. Before he was a barber, he says, he was a line cook. The second image is of him standing in front of the shop. It looks familiar. You will type the address into Google Maps.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  You ate dinner across the street from the shop last night. You will type in your address to measure the distance between you and this barber shop. A short, nearly straight line will appear and an estimated arrival time from your apartment.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Five minutes.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Can't wait for the next episode? Join Futuro Plus for early access to the whole season, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content for Reaching Out. Go to futuromedia group dot org backslash join plus to get access today. Reaching Out is an original podcast from Futuro Studios in partnership with KCRW. It is written, produced, and narrated by me, Sarah Kevado. Editing by Maria Garcia with additional editing help by Marlon Bishop, Fernanda Chavati, and Sam Leeds. Special thanks to Sarah Rattay Maloney for editorial feedback. Our production managers were Jessica Ellis and Victoria Estrada.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Mixed by Stephanie LeBeau. Scoring by Lucy Little. Show art by Simran Chavla. Executive produced for Futuro Studios by Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia. Our marketing team included Aneloreyes and Luis Luna. Futuro Media was founded by Maria Inojosa. Special thanks to Yellen Cohen for feedback on the opening of this episode.

• 41:04Speaker 02

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• 41:35Speaker 04

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