After getting permission from my mom, I personal messaged ten different Harveys from her profile who seemed “obviously” Native and lived in Phoenix. “You may not remember me,” I wrote. “We had a special night together some years ago. I can’t shake the memory of it. There were none like you before or since. I’m in Oakland, California, now. Are you still in Phoenix? Can we talk, meet up sometime maybe? Will you be out here? I could come to you.” I’ll never fully recover from the feeling of trying to write, as my own mother, in an alluring way to my possible father.
But here it is. A message from my possible dad.
Hey there, Karen, I do remember that wild night, I read with horror, hoping there will be zero details about what made the night wild. I’m coming out to Oakland in a couple months, for the Big Oakland Powwow. I’m the powwow emcee, the message reads.
Heart racing, a sick, falling feeling in my stomach, I type back, I’m so sorry to have done this. Like this. I think I’m your son.
I wait. Tap my foot, stare at the screen, clear my throat pointlessly. I imagine how he must be feeling. To go from hooking up with an old fling to having a son out of nowhere. I shouldn’t have done it like that. I should have had my mom meet him. I could have had her take a picture.
What? pops up in the chat window.
This isn’t Karen.
I don’t understand.
I’m Karen’s son.
Oh.
Yeah.
You’re telling me I have a son, and it’s you?
Yeah.
Are you sure?
My mom said it’s more than likely. Like 99 percent.
No other guys during that same time period then?
I don’t know.
Sorry. She around?
No.
You look Indian?
My skin is brown. Ish.
Is this about money?
No.
You don’t have a profile pic.
Neither do you.
I see a paper-clip icon with a JPEG extension. I double-click it. He’s standing there with a microphone in his hand, powwow dancers in the background. I see myself in the man’s face. He’s bigger than me, both taller and fatter, with long hair, wearing a baseball cap, but there’s no mistaking it. It’s my dad.
You look like me, I type.
Send me a picture.
I don’t have one.
Take one.
Fine. Hold on, I type, then take a selfie with my computer’s camera and send it to him.
Well shit, Harvey writes.
Well shit, I think.
What tribe are you/we? I write.
Cheyenne. Southern. Out of Oklahoma. Enrolled with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. We’re not Arapahos.
Thanks! I type, and then, Gotta go! As if I do. All of it is suddenly too much for me.
I log off of Facebook and go to the living room to watch TV and wait for my mom to come home. I forget to turn the TV on. I stare at the blank black flat-screen, think about our conversation.
For how many years had I been dying to find out what the other half of me was? How many tribes had I made up when asked in the meantime? I’d gotten through four years as a Native American studies major. Dissecting tribal histories, looking for signs, something that might resemble me, something that felt familiar. I’d made it through two years of grad school, studying comparative literature with an emphasis on Native American literature. I wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum policies on modern Native identity, and the literature written by mixed-blood Native authors that influenced identity in Native cultures. All without knowing my tribe. Always defending myself. Like I’m not Native enough. I’m as Native as Obama is black. It’s different though. For Natives. I know. I don’t know how to be. Every possible way I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong.
* * *
—
“Hey, Ed, what are you doing out here?” my mom says as she walks through the front door. “I thought you’d merged with the machines by now,” she says, and puts up her hands, sort of twiddling her fingers in a mocking way as she says “merged with the machines.”
I’d recently made the mistake of telling her about singularity. About how it was an eventuality, an inevitability, that we’d end up merging with artificial intelligence. Once we saw that it was superior, once it asserted itself as superior, we would need to adapt, to merge so as to not be swallowed, taken over.
“Well, that’s a pretty convenient theory for someone who spends twenty hours a day leaning into their computer like they’re waiting for a kiss,” she’d said.
* * *
—
She throws her keys on the table, keeps the front door open, lights a cigarette, and smokes there in the doorway, pointing her mouth and the smoke out the door.