A miracle: here, within groping distance, was the body kept secret for so long. I discovered Anita’s dramatic particularity. Things both attractive and mundane. That her mouth smelled like pungent yogurt in the mornings. That sharpness of her pelvis, that feel of her elfish little hands digging into my lats. What had once been a brick wall between her sexual self and her life-self now became a permeable membrane, and I could and did reach through whenever I liked, to nip the edge of her ear with my teeth as she wrote a grocery list, to cup her breasts in the kitchen as she poured wine, to press myself into her hips while she talked on the phone.
After just a few nights, she left me a key. “We have to do some planning as soon as I get home,” she said sheepishly. “So you don’t need to drive back to Berkeley, and waste all that time.” She’d return to find that I’d been lying on her floor most of the day, reading, working. (Yes, working! For something about her presence had revived my commitment to the discipline of history. I saw how people did jobs. I could look upon my sample chapters with a kind of aloof pragmatism, because Anita would be home in a few hours, and we had something that needed us, which meant we needed each other.)
There we were: me, shaking myself off when she opened the door at six p.m., going on a run around the sterile Palo Alto streets. Me, permitted to be myself with dangerous ease in her company. Me, there must be something badly wrong with her if she could tolerate me, like this. Me, you know what’s wrong with her, it’s cousin to what’s wrong with you. Her, in bed, where she was surprisingly muted and mousy, that girlish tongue stealing out adorably between her teeth, that tightening concentration of her features before she undid my pants.
The revelations came like this: a week or so in—we were in bed. She had her back to me. I pushed my fingers against the nape of her neck and considered my thumb impression. There I was, briefly settled into her skin, and then I was gone.
“That feels nice,” she said, though I hadn’t entirely meant it to. “My mother used to rub her nails up and down my back when I was a kid.”
“This way?”
“Softer,” she said.
I tried again. Through her west-facing windows, the sun was lowering, darkening her. I had the impression that the years had accumulated on her skin and I was pulling them off, slight scratch by gentle scratch.
Wendi was the only person I’d ever really dated, and with her there had been a similar sense of having been vetted on some prior occasion, so that when things accelerated, it seemed the jolt had come from somewhere, from before, and there were no mundane introductions. After Wendi, I always wished I could walk into something having been seen in all the necessary ways, so bodies could be bodies and history lighter.
“You’ve done this a lot,” Anita said. It wasn’t a question. “Slept with someone quickly.”
“Quickly?”
“You know what I mean.”
I returned my nails to her back. “I find—found—it easier to sleep with someone when I didn’t know a whole story about them,” I said. “I’d start to feel entangled. The more you know, the more, I don’t know, narrative responsibility you have. You have to make sure you’re not one of those other terrible guys they tell you about.”
“Whereas if they hadn’t told you anything?”
“I wouldn’t have to think about what patterns they’re repeating or trying to correct with me.” I nuzzled her neck. “But that’s not an issue . . . here.” I waited to see if I would be bold enough to say more. “We’ve always known each other.”
She was silent for a beat too long. I heard only my own thumping pulse. I regretted that I’d spoken—maybe she fancied her inner self a mystery to me still, or wanted to maintain some psychic distance.
But: “Yeah,” she echoed eventually. “Yeah, I guess we have.”
She didn’t seem quite as relieved by that sentiment as I did.
Eight weeks till the expo, then six, then four. When we were talking, it was mostly about our unlikely jewelry heist. Anita had snagged a whiteboard from the events office and propped it between her kitchen and her hollow living room. Many evenings that early fall were like this one: I sat in my boxers on her leather sofa, shoving lukewarm takeout noodles into my mouth while she contorted herself on a yoga mat in a sports bra and tiny shorts. She talked, smacking Nicorette between clauses.
She tugged her foot up behind her, arch in elbow crease, her purple toenails touching the bottom of her bra. Her glutes flexed mightily. “Are you listening?” she said, her chin jutting toward the whiteboard—on it, a scribbled map of the planned plays, like a football coach’s blocking. “You don’t seem to be getting it.”
“I’m getting it.” I plopped to my knees on her yoga mat and pressed one side of my face to the rise of her thigh. My forehead lined up with the crease where her leg met her ass. I looked out the window to see the weird darkness of Palo Alto at the witching hour—the crisscross of the streets around University Avenue all dead by eleven p.m. How odd yet apposite to be back with Anita, brewing strange schemes in a suburb! With little to do, in nowhere-nothing places, you turn to queer, harebrained plans. . . .
“I heard you,” I said into her flesh. I was feeling slow; I’d popped Adderall all day as I plowed through work and had therefore forgotten to eat until just now. “The raffle. You’ve got it set up and the winner gets the designer whatsit, the gown, by Mani—erm. Manilala Megatron.”
“Not a gown,” she said. She did not tug her leg away from me, but pressed one too-cold palm against my exposed ear. “A lehenga. By Manish Motilal.”
“That.”
“And?”
“Annnnd . . .” She flicked the top of my ear, hard, the sound of her fingernail on my skin like a woodblock being banged. “Ow.”
“I’m going to put on real clothes. Sit up.”
“Please, god, don’t.”
“Pay attention, then.” She stood. Her body was ruddy from her stretches. She pointed to the whiteboard: beneath the column Tasks, squeezed into the right-hand side, her centipede-shaped girly handwriting read Prachi.
I had slacked. I had yet to invite my sister to the bridal expo, courtesy of Anita Dayal. (What! she would say. Anita-Anita? You guys are in touch?)
Prachi, our bride, was to win a rigged raffle. Was to step onto the runway where, moments before, girls would have just modeled the high, fine fashions of brown bridal couture. Prachi was to flutter her French-manicured hands in delight at winning. She was to receive as bounty a designer lehenga—heavy, it was to be heavy, can-can skirt, brocading on the silk. Prachi would watch the dress’s mirrorwork reflecting the light staggering out from the gaudy oversize chandeliers in the convention center. She would feel tizzies being pulled backstage. A tailor would measure her for alterations. Prachi was to feel (Anita promised all girls feel this way) the creep of recognition as the tailor fitted the cloth to her, that sense that the world wished you to look this way.
Prachi was never to know that her brother had come along to this menagerie in order to stuff golden chains and bangles and tikkas into loose folds and trick pockets in the liner of the skirt, already so hefty one would not notice the extra weight. Anita would tell her, Let Neil take it to the tailor. I would gather it up. Carry it to Anita’s green Subaru parked in the employee back lot, through the doors without metal detectors. I would drive with the windows down on the highway and listen to the airstream whooshes and make straight for Sunnyvale.
We would give most of the bounty to Anjali Auntie, of course, but surely both of us would take a few fated sips. We would be foolish not to accept the blessing it could confer on our little union. Because now we were together. Because gold was what we did. Because I still badly needed it. Which meant she must need it, too. No matter that she claimed otherwise.
The junkie’s plan. The belief that another hit, the right hit, will settle everything.
“If anything goes wrong,” Anita said as she paced, “you do what?”
“Leave you.” I’d recited the words so often they’d become devoid of meaning. “Leave you, take the gold to your mother and grandmother.”
“And I do the same.”
Our eyes met. I rolled over on my stomach so that I did not have to return that stony stare for too long. I did a push-up, feeling strong.
“Your core is flopping.” She tapped me in the protruding belly with her big toe. “So,” she went on. “The lehenga’s down in L.A. with that tailor, and he’s not concerned why we might be tricking it out. People want weird shit on their wedding days. Little holders in dupattas and skirt hems to keep lucky charms, something borrowed and blue, blah, blah. But the point is, none of that matters unless you talk to your sister, you understand?”
She clasped her palms above her, and her stomach tautened. It was not as pillowy as it had been when we were younger. But what was I good for if not softening her?
“Mmhmm.” I reached for her hips, pulling her pelvis to my forehead.
“I’m putting on clothes.” She removed my hands from her flanks.
“No, keep talking,” I said. “Tell me more problems, I’ll fix them all.”
“You used to do this when we studied together. You’d be paying zero attention, and as soon as I said we had to stop, you’d snap to.” She was twirling an Expo marker as she examined the map of which shops and stalls would be located where, along with an estimate of the location of all the Santa Clara Convention Center’s security cameras. I was struck by the sense that she was getting off on the planning, that it wasn’t just her mother’s well-being motivating her. She’d been itching for a challenge. God, she really did need a new job.
The convention center, like many of the industrial buildings in the Bay Area, employed Anita’s father’s technology, meaning it was studded with hundreds of small, beady lenses, each one like a nerve ending connecting to the brain of the whole beast—a cloud server. Every image collected beamed back to it. What the eyes saw, the brain would record indelibly. We had a notion, formed based on Anita’s understanding, which I gathered she’d gathered from a flirtation with one of her father’s old interns: a Wi-Fi interferer could knock out the images streaming to the server, sweeping clean the record of all we would do. As long as Anita could draw the security attendant’s gaze away from the live feed for an hour or so, he’d never notice the signal had gone out. It was one of those oddities of life in the Valley—with so much technology at hand, people presumed its infallibility.
“You really don’t want to taste even a bit of it?” I said. I felt terribly sad, looking around at her life, the granite and the wineglasses and the eerie nothingness of Palo Alto outside. “You don’t miss it?” And didn’t she miss her old self? The one who would have demanded more?
“Sometimes I manage to go months without thinking about it,” Anita said softly. “But then I remember that what we were consuming each time we drank some lemonade was an ambition or energy or power that once belonged to someone else. Which means some people come by this stuff honestly. And I guess I’d like to be one of those people. At some point.”
I swiveled her around to face me. I could do this now—move her, demand her gaze. But she shimmied away, and my palms went cold. For the first time since we’d begun whatever we were now doing, it occurred to me that perhaps we did not fully understand each other.
“I’m getting ready for bed. Just please contact Prachi, like, now,” she added, in a voice a less enlightened man than I would have called shrill.
She excused herself to the bathroom. (That sound of her in the shower in the next room now slightly less extraordinary than it had been when I was fifteen, yet still marvelous.) I began typing a note to my sister: Anita Dayal hit me up the other day . . . Deleted it. So it was Anita you saw . . . Deleted that, too. Clicked forward on the flyer Anita had emailed me a few days before: 15% off everything for vip shaadi expo guests.
Subject line: Fw: Random but . . . The body text: Hey this is random but Anita Dayal hit me up the other day and we’ve hung out a few times. Turns out that was her you saw. Anyway, she’s running this big Indian wedding thing, maybe you can make it? She says you get a discount with this coupon. Lmk if I can tell her you’re coming. She’d like to say hi she says.
I shut my laptop—that note had taken a half hour of dithering and blithering. In the bedroom, I found a damp-haired Anita asleep, a water stain blooming onto the cotton pillowcase. One hand rested on her stomach as it rose and fell. I turned out the light and tumbled into this, my new normal. Sometimes, it is not so hard to ad-just, not even to the most sublime unrealities. The new magic seeps into the old world, becomes as commonplace as the hoops strung through Anita’s small ears.
Our plan, I calculated quickly on pen and paper as I sprawled on Anita’s floor one weekday morning, would involve the abduction of several thousand dollars’ worth of property. Grand theft. Up to ten years in prison.
I wish I could have said I felt the kind of thrill a man is supposed to feel when he is released from the confines of daily existence in late capitalism and offered a chance to truly live. To overthrow the system, in some small way! Unfortunately, I was a coward rather than a revolutionary. My stomach gave a growl that suggested I had eaten something rotten. When Anita got home after working a late charity gala, I was on the toilet, reading Crime and Punishment. I came out waving it, only a little embarrassed to have been caught with a book in the bathroom.
“We are not Raskolnikov.” She rolled her eyes when I insisted on reading aloud the gory details of the old woman’s death, how her sister appeared at the wrong instant and the criminal had to kill twice. Blood, unplanned-for blood. “This isn’t a murder, Neil. We’re being sensible. There’s hardly even real security—there will be no weapons. I mean, I’m in control—”
I couldn’t help it, though. I was seeing a carousel of possible obstacles. I heard the convention center door banging open behind me as I laid hands on the car. Saw a figure standing there, twice my size, a great bearded Sikh vendor leading with a paunch, lifting a single brawny hand that could pound my brain into the wall. Me, pissing myself with fear. Or what about this? A train of cars, women leaving early to beat traffic, that signature desi move (arrive late, leave at odd times), blocking our route. Me, dropping the lehenga on the asphalt, gold winking on blackness, conspicuously brightened by the California sunshine. Gold, covered in my prints . . . Anita, racing past me, grabbing the stolen goods, turning her head only briefly before gunning it to Sunnyvale, leaving me alone. . . .
Her, reminding me: I’m just following the plan. Don’t take it personally.
“If you don’t think I’m sick about it . . .” She coughed. “But I’m being rational. I’m accounting for everything. If you’re nervous, put that energy toward working as hard as I am.”
I went into Anita’s room that night. She rolled over, and there she was, again, ready for me. She liked to feel small in bed, she’d whispered not long ago. I had the sense it was the first time she’d made that admission, clearly full of tempest and drama for her. She liked a little shove, a strength around her neck. She liked me to toss her here and there.
“Hey,” she whispered after we’d finished. She’d asked me to try calling her things. I was too awkward to comply. The daylight Anita bossed me through heist planning with the same efficiency she’d once used to run our childhood games of house, but the bedroom Anita wanted this constructed cruelty. I couldn’t always reconcile the two. “I feel weird about that stuff.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said, as I knew I was supposed to. “If it’s what you like.”
She bit her lip, weighing something, before speaking the next part at a rapid pace. “I saw my dad hit my mom once. I was eleven.” She drew me closer with her heels. “My mom never talked to me about it, but she saw me seeing it. I was kind of hiding in the hallway, and they were in the kitchen. She made eye contact with me, over his shoulder.”
“Fuck,” I said, and left it there, because it seemed like she wanted to add more.
“It never happened again in front of me,” she said. “But sometimes that image pops into my mind at the wrong moment. Like, before sex. Or during sex.”
“Did Jimmy—?”
“No. But control comes naturally to him. And I liked that. And that made me feel wrong. Like I was just like my mom. Like I needed someone else to tell me what I was.”
She fell quiet. I meant to reply, but as I began to calculate the appropriate response, I was seized with exhaustion. The moment ballooned; my silence became outsize, and it was too late to say anything. But our limbs were entangled, and I felt her hot and close, and it seemed clear that whether or not I was prepared, I was inextricably, obviously in—for this, and for all else she entailed.
I’d barely returned to Berkeley over the course of those first weeks with Anita, and when I had driven up 880, I’d just dipped into my apartment to grab more clothes. Chidi knew I’d started sleeping with a childhood friend in Palo Alto, though nothing more. And while I believed my near-constant presence at Anita’s had been mostly productive and pleasurable for both of us, we had begun to prickle at each other here and there: She woke up very early; I sometimes didn’t clean dishes properly. It was mostly stuff that could be fucked away, until one morning she came back sooner than I’d expected from a cloud-computing conference she’d been contracted to oversee. She found me pacing her apartment in my boxers, listening to a podcast on double speed and picking at my facial hair.
“I thought you were working,” she said thinly. She glanced around the apartment, which had grown untidier since I’d arrived. Some of the mess was due to our shared task—the whiteboard and markers, legal pads, piles of brochures featuring the hundred-plus expo vendors and their respective wares. But some of it was only mine—my library books, my preferred snacks (Cheetos, protein bars), the hoodies I put on and pulled off during the day as my body temperature shifted.
I had been working. It had been an Adderall day—it’s best for sustained mental labor; coke is all fragile flashes. As I came up, however, I made a crucial mistake, and instead of turning to my sample chapter Word doc, I’d gone down a rabbit hole of lefty talking heads discussing the election.
“Why aren’t you working? It’s only five.”
“I was. And anyway, this is my home. I don’t have to tell you when or why I’m back.” She tapped her foot; she was still wearing her work shoes, and the knocking sound they made on her floor was menacing, like the sound of a teacher smacking your knuckles with a ruler. She kicked the pumps off and came nearer to me. She paused. “Are you on something?”
“Just Adderall.” I waved my phone to indicate that I was occupied; my earbuds were in, and the podcasters were still yammering.
“Jeez, Neil. Aren’t you a little old for this?”
“I have a prescription,” I lied.
“It’s an amphetamine. You’re high on an amphetamine. Look at you, you’re picking your face like a fucking meth-head.” She walked away, just as my mother did when indicating that the final word had been uttered. She opened the fridge. “And you ate the takeout already.”
“I didn’t eat all day. You finished the takeout last night, remember? You got up after we had sex and you finished the yellow tofu because you couldn’t sleep.”
“I’ve done Adderall, Neil.” She slammed the fridge door and a red Stanford magnet clunked to the ground. “I liked it, too. Too much. And I have to say that I don’t think you should plan on drinking the expo lemonade if you haven’t done some serious work on your addiction tendencies.”
“I don’t see how that’s your choice.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means,” I said, yanking out my earbuds, “I’ve been giving as much to this as you. And I don’t see how it’s your call whether or not I get a share of the gold I’m putting my ass on the line for.”
“I think you should go home for a while, Neil,” Anita said. “Like, now-ish.”
She stomped into her bathroom, and I waited for her to reemerge for another round of argument, but instead there was just the tap water running. I could see her wiping her face clear of makeup, shedding her daytime sheen.
I sped the whole way back to the East Bay, too irate to absorb anything as my podcasters wrapped up their doomed polling predictions, all of them so certain about the future.
I decided to hang around Berkeley for at least a few days, to cool off and (I told myself) to immerse in work in a way that had been less possible with an often-pantsless girl wandering around the house. I wrote all morning, then found, in the afternoon, that I needed a book I’d left in the TA office a few weeks earlier. So, into Dwinelle I went, fat noise-canceling headphones on to ward off small talk. I nabbed the book from the bottom drawer of the desk I nominally shared with two other PhD candidates, and was on my way back out when I stopped, absently, to check my mailbox. Few people ever sent me mail, save some librarians who’d kick over reserved copies of requested books or specially called-up archives. But sitting in the wire tray labeled neil narayan, grad ’20, was a mustard-yellow unmarked legal-size envelope. There was no return address.
“Do you know who dropped this off?” I asked the admin, who was watching reality television clips on her laptop.
“Not a clue.” She returned to The Bachelorette.
I peeked inside and extracted a photocopied newspaper page. The San Francisco Call, it read. The date of the paper was smudged, but I made out 185—1850-something. Below was a headline, above a single cold paragraph.
AN HINDOSTAN FOUND DEAD IN MINING CAMP.
Coroner Michael Rogers was yesterday called to hold an inquest upon the body of an Hindostan who was found dead from debility and injuries in Yuba County, near the banks of the Yuba River in Marysville. Nearby miners identified the man as a migrant from the East Indian city of Bombay, though at least one individual identified him in contradiction as Mamhood, of Egypt. The man has also been named as a known thief of gold dust. Injuries may have been visited upon him as a result, and the Coroner’s verdict was in agreement with the above statement.
There was nothing else.
I left Dwinelle Hall, stepping into the startlingly unrelenting East Bay sunshine, envelope in hand. So, the Bombayan was real. He had made it to Marysville. But no one knew him. I supposed he had never been my Isaac Snider. Isaac Snider was an unproven theory of history, formulated solely to explain me. I would never have a corollary in the past, never have a legible American ancestor to provide guidance on how to make a life. I would just have to keep on trying, tomorrow and tomorrow.
I found my vape in my room and took it, along with the clipping, to sit in the park around the corner from my apartment. As I got stoned a few feet from some junkies busking, I read and reread the Bombayan gold digger’s obituary—if those few lines could be called such a thing. What made some people’s lives worth remembering, and what rendered others’ forgettable? Did it have something to do with belonging? If the Bombayan had been at home in America—settled, adjusted, seen, witnessed, loved—would someone today know his name?
I lay back on the grass, trying not to smell the sweat and grime of the burnouts drumming next to me. I closed my eyes and imagined that the yellow envelope containing the only record I truly had of the gold digger had not been placed unceremoniously in my history mailbox by a research librarian. I imagined, instead, that I had done Wang’s little thing: TO: THE BOMBAYAN GOLD DIGGER, 1851, written back to him—and that he had received my letter and been meaning to reply when he had the chance. And that he had whispered instructions to whatever being was nearest to him as he died; that said person had raced to the local paper to give news that a peculiar, unlikely American had died; and that the newspaper office had posted the clipping to me, with an apology for some details getting lost along the way.
I called Anita from a trail up to Wildcat Peak. I’d hiked it solo, legs jiggly and weak after my midday weed, but I sobered the higher I went. The silhouette of San Francisco was muted by fog, of course, but the evergreens and yellow-leafed oaks of the East Bay slanted down and lolled out to the water. There was enough space up there to see what Anita was right about. That there were parts of me, still, that were dangerous—parts that lacked a firm grasp on reality, parts that wanted something impossible. A certain story of history, a perfect fix, all of her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re stressed,” she said. It was not forgiveness, but it was maybe sympathy. “Your dissertation. We haven’t talked that much about it. You’re trying to do that, and do our thing, and I googled a bunch of blogs about what it’s like to be a grad student, and then I felt bad. Are you starving, Neil? Are you burning out or being abused as a nonunionized worker? Are you concerned about job prospects?”
I started to laugh. It was growing dark, so I began downhill, my tractionless shoes slipping on the path. “Maybe I’m all of those things. But I’m union.”
If I were to stick it out in the history academy, I would never find myself in the past. I would find images and characters who meant something to the present. I might even enjoy the rigor required to make an argument of those elements. But I couldn’t call what I felt for the study of history love, for the study of history had come to feel separate from the spiritual reality that Ramesh Uncle had once promised me to be true, that every timeline was unfolding simultaneously, over and over.
“I just don’t know what to do with all we took,” I said. “I don’t know how to make it all mean something.”
“Me, either,” she said.
I paused as I reached the flattening of the trail, to get one more look at California’s many geographies—the hills and rivers and coastline that once stood for nothing except themselves. It took gold-lust to make it into the place it was today, a palimpsest of errors and triumphs.
“I should get back to my apartment,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet my roommate, Chidi. We haven’t seen each other in—” I’d reached the neighborhood at the base of the peak, with its wide, child-friendly sidewalks. “Wait. Chidi. Chidi. Chidi can do replacements!” I shouted. “Chidi can do them!”
With just under three weeks left till the expo, Anita and I had still been wondering if there was a way to buy ourselves more time—true forgeries seemed too onerous and traceable to invest in. But I’d just remembered Chidi’s first start-up, the one that had earned the grant from the billionaire—the 3D printing company. He had made jewelry before. Cubic zirconia bearing a discomfiting resemblance to real diamonds. I’d once watched him trick female shoppers at a Berkeley tech fair. He’d even done gold-colored products; holding one, I’d been briefly reminded of the rush that came from grasping a piece of newly acquired gold; it was that convincing.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Chidi asked when I got back to the apartment.
He folded his arms; his muscles were veiny and casual. His cheeks were still sweetly chubby, boyish, augmenting his hacker-wunderkind identity. Together we got a little stoned and a little drunk—a rarity, as Chidi’s longevity company, with its youngblood transfusions and telomere-lengthening studies, had caused him to drop alcohol in his effort to live a thousand years. Perhaps it was the months that had passed since he and I had truly talked, or perhaps it was the particular melding of the substances that night that created the right alchemy, but I wanted—was surprised to find myself longing for—a chance to speak some truths aloud at last. Or maybe it was just that I needed his help, and knew first I would have to spill.
He sat on a meditation bolster on the floor while I sprawled on the futon. And I began to try to fit the basic story of who Anita was to me into twenty or thirty minutes. There were some elisions and omissions, and I felt, as I spoke, like one of those accordion files we used to use in debate; stretched out they held hundreds of pages, but pressed into a purple Rubbermaid tub they became meek and discreet.
“Is it just sex now?” Chidi asked.
And that was when I knew I had to go back, to fill in what I had left out. The magic, and all we’d broken. Was it just sex? It had never been just anything.
“Well,” I said, “there’s a lot more.”
“You know how little you tell me about yourself, Neil?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d actually decide I deserved to know things about you. I’ve never understood privacy.” He kicked his legs up and began to do bicycle crunches, saying the next part through gritted teeth. “It’s a social world for a reason.”
“Chidi,” I interrupted, in part to get him to stop before he began to tell me about Twitter’s crucial import to humanity, but in part because he was right, because now that Anita was around again, I’d seen that he was right—the past was lighter when I wasn’t the only one shouldering it. “If you’re free now . . .”
It was to Chidi’s great credit as a friend and a general believer in the improbable that as I talked on for nearly another hour, describing the Lemonade Period, he asked only a few clarifying questions. I explained things like the properties of the gold, and the matter of Shruti.
“I feel like I . . . did it,” I admitted. It was the first time I had ever said it this way, with the neatness I’d begrudged Anita. I waited to see how it felt on my tongue. The short sentence, with no ambiguity, no spirit to it. “I did it.”
“You probably did.” He had switched from crunches to push-ups on the hardwood while I talked, but he halted when it became clear the story was darkening. He now lay on his belly. “Maybe it was like a firing squad, though, man. A bunch of people’s guns pointed at her. Yours, too. You all pulled triggers. But you can’t be certain which bullet was responsible.”
And then, unbidden, came a memory. A field trip in middle school. We were on a school bus going somewhere—up into the North Georgia mountains. It might have been to Helen or Dahlonega, one of those boomtowns shaped by the twenty-niners’ rush, the one that followed the Carolinas’ and preceded California’s. What I remembered was Shruti sitting alone at the far front of the bus. And I remembered Manu, my seatmate, looking at her the way he often did, with fellow-outsider sympathy, and saying, I’m going over there. I remembered shaking my head vigorously and saying, She likes to sit alone. But Manu stood and made his way up to her, and because we were jerking up a hill full of switchbacks, it meant the whole bus saw him wobbling to reach Shruti Patel. That was a naked risk, seeking her so publicly. The teacher didn’t even yell at him to sit down when she saw that he was coming to Shruti. I remember them sharing silence as we wound higher. She likes to sit alone, I kept thinking, even as I bristled at Manu for having left me all by myself.
To: Shruti Patel, 2004. (I could write, in Wang’s fashion.) When, exactly, was the beginning of your end? Is suicide a complex concatenation of chemistry, culture, and cruelty? Or was yours never suicide, only a theft and murder? When someone says you took your own life, should I be stopping them to shout, no, I did? I study causality, Shruti. I try to understand how economies grow and collapse, and how one zeitgeist blows into another. When I’m doing my job well, I can see truths that politicians and financiers of their days missed. But I have never come close to grasping0 such patterns on the level of the personal.
“No, no, no.” And then I was saying it over and over—I did it—almost becoming addicted to the sound of the sentence, but then I stopped, lest it become itself a kind of absolution, like the rhythm of a bodily penance. “I did it, and I just live with that. Always.”
Chidi bowed his head. He waited for me to catch my breath.
“If you insist on carrying that around,” he said, “find a way to make it make you better.”
We talked still later into the night, and eventually reached the matter of the bridal jewelry and Anita’s mother, the suspected affair, and Lakshmi Joshi’s inkling that wedding gold could contain the particular energy Anjali Auntie needed to get back on her feet.
“It sounds risky,” he said. He was rubbing his palms together with glee. Chidi considered himself antiestablishment. He was all free information this and end copyrights that; during his youth he’d even once tried to release monkeys from a Berkeley primate lab. He was better suited for outlaw life than I. “Is it all planned out?”
“Actually, I could use your help. Could you still print good imitation gold?”
“Ohhh. To replace the shit? I’d need photographs.”
“Anita could do that . . . take pictures of a few vendors’ stock for, say, an ad brochure.”
He nodded. “I could manage. Nothing fantastic, but convincing at a glance.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I mean. That’d be amazing—I could—would you want some? Lemonade, I mean? In exchange?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. Judith and I are moving in together.”
I stared around our apartment, thinking how it would never be able to contain three bodies comfortably—and then I realized.
“You want to leave.” I managed not to say the full sentence: you want to leave me.
“Yeah,” he said. “So I don’t really want the knockoff version of this happy-home-happy-life-happy-wife shit. But you’re not seriously going to start all that all over again, are you?” He glanced around the room awkwardly. “I wasn’t expecting to come back from summer to find so much of my coke gone. Were you partying that much?”
“I’ll pay you back. And I’ve switched back to Adderall,” I said. “Better for endurance.”
“I just . . . I get your thing with substances a little better now.”
“You love drugs, Chidi.”
“I do them no more than once a week, as a strict rule.”
“Do you have it on your calendar or something?”
“My point is, Neil, that you’ve got this relationship now. Something that means something. I mean, do you see it with her?”
“It being . . .”
“You know what I mean. I saw it with Judith, really fast.”
“You wouldn’t want security? To have something to fall back on if it didn’t work out?”
“What does ‘work out’ mean? Living together for a hundred years? At least we could say we’d been something to each other for a while. Maybe Anita doesn’t have to be, like, the start of your nuclear family. I mean, why do you devote your life to these institutions we invented for different times—universities, marriage?” He was back to the push-ups now, which made everything he said come out in a rapid, sweaty pant. “The fun of California, I mean, the whole point of this place, is that there are other ways to be. Be fucking polyamorous. Be an entrepreneur. Live some other way than what they sold you on.”
Chidi had grown up with difference more readily at hand—his family did not ask him to be something specific; he was a programmer with sellable skills . . . there was no shortage of objections I could raise. But also, I didn’t want to start a fight, not when I’d just revealed so much about myself for the first time.
I talked over him: “I can’t let you do this without giving you something. It seems unfair.”
He dropped from the plank he’d been holding and raised his index finger in a little Eureka flourish. “I want to meet Anita’s mother or grandmother.”
“What? Why?”
“You said they’ve been studying the properties of gold for years.”
“Yes.” I rubbed my forehead.
“You’ve lived with me how long, and you can’t guess what I want from them?” Chidi went into the kitchen and poured from a cloudy brown growler of Judith’s homemade kombucha.
“That stuff is alive,” I said. “It grosses me out.”
“You drink gold, man.”
I laughed—actually laughed. A millimeter of this secret’s power had loosened.
Chidi was rolling on. “Those women, Lakshmi and Anjali? They must know a thing or two about alchemy.”
“Alchemy? You want to talk to them about pseudoscience?”
“Alchemy was about the pursuit of longer life. Lon-gev-i-ty! People across tons of cultures thought drinking or making gold might help prolong the human life span, you know?”
I remembered, then, Anjali Auntie talking about things like this here and there, on those afternoons while she cooked and made up lemonade batches, as I snacked greedily.
“Wait. Right,” I said, recalling a spare detail from long ago. “It came from China?”
Chidi shrugged. “China, maybe—I think it started there and traveled to India, and the Europeans got ahold of it at some point. But see—thousands of years ago these alchemists were looking into the same thing I’m studying now. Everyone wants more time, Neil. For so many reasons. So they don’t have regrets. So they can just go on a few more hikes, or meet a few more grandchildren or great-grandchildren, or see the world change. We all just want time. And soon, we’ll actually be able to give it to them.” I nodded and sighed audibly, so Chidi would remember how many times I’d heard this spiel.
“Come on,” I said. “There’s magic, and then there’s nonsense.”