The Search for Life in Distant Galaxies

He lived in a modest third floor studio apartment in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. In the past forty years he had lived in many places but he had been here the longest, and over the course of time it had developed a type of gravitational field that spiraled out from this small private space into the world.

The apartment was crowded but obsessively orderly. One wall was filled with shelves of notebooks, binders and paper folders. Another wall held his library of books. A row of filing cabinets formed a screen between his bed, his drawing table, his desk, and the rest of the room. Any other free space, which was in short supply, was covered with drawings of distant galaxies--real and imaginary; strange and wondrous places and the creatures that inhabited them; maps of planets; star systems both known and unknown; and sketches of strange flying machines that could travel to these distant places.

This was the center of his universe and the place he called home.

He opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet near his desk.

The cabinet contained three drawers that were labeled as follows from top to bottom: Chaos + (Appendix A), The Paradox of Entropy, Big Bang(s).

Searching this drawer filled with folders with names like: shame and loathing, unusually cruel, indifference, abuse, remorseless, surprisingly disturbing, foreseeable, frequently missed, senseless, unavoidable, particularly painful to look at, unusually common, predictable, and a particularly large file named uncategorized—folders that were bursting with old photo clippings from magazines and newspapers—he carefully withdrew twenty images and pasted them into a new black scrapbook. He wrote on its cover, Manifestations of Violence (1968.2.1). Its index number indicated that there would be more work done on this subject.

“I really need to reorganize things,” he thought to himself as he started to insert the scrapbook along side the other notebooks that lined the shelves of his small room.

He then pulled it back from the shelf and inserted it in a box next to his desk that he had labeled 1968. This box contained several other notebooks and maps and miscellaneous items that he was beginning to assemble for a new research project.

The walls were covered with hundreds of drawings on odd scraps and bits of discarded paper. They formed his private array of dazzling star systems both real and imaginary that had grown dense over the years.

He began unfastening images from a section of drawings that he had hung by the single window of his room that opened to the fire escape and lead to the roof of his apartment building.

Although faded by the sun, he left these particular drawings there because he liked to look at them at night, in the starlight—when they seemed to come to life. He began lovingly inserting them into a portfolio that he had labeled, The Future. They were drawings of an imaginary world that he had created in his hippie days. Some of them were drawn at Doyle’s, some of them in Golden Gate Park and Land’s End; he didn’t remember exactly. They were part 2001-A Space Odyssey, part Yellow Submarine and other utopian fantasies from the late 60s. They pictured a multi-dimensional world inhabited by magical fairies and creatures that battled with the forces of light and darkness. These drawings were from an earlier time in his life; a time before he began his more serious work; a place where he believed everything was possible.

The Future would go in the 1968 box with other research materials and ephemera that he was gathering from his archive—parts of an imperfect past that needed sorting out.

On Saturdays he would go to the San Francisco Public Library to read and do research.

He opened a fresh notebook and copied a section from the new National Geographic Magazine that had arrived that week:

He then drew a sketch of the data image from the magazine and would later paste it over his desk next to his drawings of Hubble’s Deep Field and a picture of the SETI project’s Big Array.

He believed that there were mysterious connections between his life and life in distant galaxies, that the movement of the universe was mirrored in the streets he inhabited—that the great secrets of space and time were contained right here and now, in the place that circumscribed his life. Years ago, he had given up on the idea of a grand unified theory of everything, but he still believed that seemingly random patterns of places and events were aspects of a thought that was greater than the sum of its parts and that if we studied these fragments that we could come to understand something of this great unknown.

This was not just some fleeting flash of insight into the connectedness of all things that he had had on an acid trip in Golden Gate Park in the late 60’s, which it had been, but the idea of revealing these phenomena as they wove around him, of unraveling these threads, had become his passion and lifelong quest.

And so, over the years, the events of an ordinary life were transformed into an epic research project.

He mapped his neighborhood in search of evidence of collapsing stars, of meteor showers, and of wormholes that linked the various dimensions that were constantly shifting as he moved through the streets. He kept meticulous notes and detailed journals that chronicled the events and phenomenon that he witnessed in his daily life in the Tenderloin.

This work, he believed, would explain some of the paradoxes of life here on earth—why there was something rather than nothing. He believed that his work, in spite of the sacrifices that he had made in its pursuit, would make a contribution to the understanding of our place in the cosmos; that this was a worthwhile mission, and a life worth living.

He often fantasized about being a real scientist, an astronomer working for NASA, being on a team of scientists that would lead to the discovery of extraterrestrial life and how different his life would have been if he had gone to college, had a mentor, made different choices, had not been sidetracked by the unfortunate circumstances of his past. But that was not his path and even Galileo and Copernicus had to find their own ways, had times of uncertainty, despair—lost hope—and had been outcasts too, he reminded himself, and this thought gave him comfort to carry on.

He continued writing in his notebook. This time an article from the San Francisco Chronicle:

For some reason this made him think about the lost souls that seemed to orbit around the public library. He jotted a memo in the margin of the page to find the maps that he had made of this phenomenon.

He would later transcribe these notes into a larger book that he used as a reference for his Atlas of the Universe, the latest of many ambitious cartographies of suffering that he had attempted over the years.

He walked from Powell Street up Eddy, then right onto Larkin and through the Gates of Little Saigon.

There appeared to be a newly forming galaxy in this location, birthing from two ancient colliding galaxies. A wondrous cosmic event was unfolding.

He made several entries about this in his field notebook that he always kept in his back pocket.

He labeled six constellations that day with a comment about the particular density of the configuration in this quadrant of the Tenderloin and would later begin to assemble this information into a map of the newborn stars.

The constellations were labeled as follows: Mangosteen, Saigon Cuisine, Turtle Tower, Pho 2000, Pagolac, Them Ky, Vietnam 2 Seafood.

He entered Them Ky.

The restaurant looked at first glance like the other small Vietnamese restaurants that now dotted his neighborhood. A few remnants of this year’s official San Francisco Tet celebration hung on the wall next to a plastic shrine with some plastic figurines and plastic flowers inside it. Was this the public face that the owners had created behind which another, private space existed; a hidden room where the real shrine to their ancestors was kept and lovingly cared for with fresh flowers and fruits and bathed in the smoke of sweet incense?

He ordered some Pho and looked out onto Larkin Street.

No. There was no secret room, no private space where a real shrine existed.

The galaxy of ancestors was crashing into the galaxy where his friend James had died–leaving the remnants of its violent origins behind as little more than interstellar space debris, floating in a vast dark void of forgetfulness—illuminating an unbroken here, a continuous present folding in upon itself creating the illusion of past and future.

He recorded none of these later observations in his notebook.

It was all becoming unbearable to Ed Marker. 

And so Ed Marker's idea about the Tenderloin holding some hidden plan of the universe can be traced back to this memory. Whether or not he remembers the exact details of this event is uncertain. It is possible that he has altered the details of the story over time.

So it was particularly heartbreaking after all of these years and after all that they had been through together—and this is where things come crashing into the present—that it was DB who had to tell Ed that he had to leave. The building was being converted into condos and everyone with the exception of DB, who was going to remain to manage the rehab, was told to vacate. This had been months ago and Ed was still in partial denial about what was happening. He was now the last remaining resident in a building that was the only real home he had ever known. And it had come to this: DB showed Ed a letter from the landlord that the contractors were coming in a few weeks and that the landlord was going to call the sheriff and have him physically removed if he didn’t move out. DB burst into tears. All of DB’s friends were either dead from AIDS or had moved away—and now he was the one who was sending Ed away—his flower child. He was so sorry he kept repeating. There was nothing that he could do to stop it.

DB told Ed that he could stay with him for a while until he got another place; but things were different now—he wasn’t a teenager, DB was getting old and had cats; it just wouldn’t work out and they both knew it. Ed said that he had a few leads on places to live; maybe their friend Hank could get him a room at the Ambassador Hotel. But he really didn’t know what he was going to do or where he would go.

DB told Ed that he could keep his things in his storage locker in the basement where he kept his old costumes and wigs from the Gilded Cage.

Yes, he would come back for them.

"No regrets," he tells DB.