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

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