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

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