Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  “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.

&
nbsp; “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 ma
tter 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.