Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

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