She does not know how much damage she did to herself. Is she dying, too? Well, we’re all dying; is she dying faster, sooner, now? Is it the quality of time she’s ruined? Is it why she has a prescription for sleeping pills, why she sometimes shakes them out on her bathroom counter to imagine all of them clunking against one another in her stomach?
Anita inched away from me and placed her head in her mother’s lap. Anjali Auntie ran one hand through her daughter’s hair, her gaze fixed on the wall opposite, as though she was reading what came next on the sickly yellow motel wallpaper.
“Lyall got back in touch two years ago. He showed up at the house.”
Pranesh: answering the door, belly protruding, eyebrows grown into one long caterpillar, facing this man in horn-rimmed glasses with now fully white hair. Lyall was always slender but is now emaciated. A neighbor in a sun hat fiddles in his garden, pausing his spade at the surface of the soil, craning his neck to gauge what juicy scene is playing out at the Dayals’ front door.
Lyall tells Anjali he’s at Berkeley now. He, too, is sick. He blacks out, hallucinates. He is aging unnaturally. Anjali speaks with him in the backyard, beneath the citrus trees. She stays feet away from him, her back against the sliding glass door, while Pranesh harrumphs in the kitchen, eyes on them both. Anjali suspects Lyall has gone on drinking the brews from the Hammond Creek days, that he never detoxed as she did. Which explains why he looks so much worse, as though he’s survived a war.
After that, she goes to see Lyall at Berkeley a few times. They aren’t together-together. He needs tending. At this point, it’s a battle for months, maybe a year. “There must be something I can do,” she insists, because this is something she knows how to do—to orient her life around another person’s problems.
He says he has one hope—part of the reason he came to California. He still thinks about the promise the swamis made him. About the placer-lined Saraswati River, containing the holiest gold. Gold untouched by human madness and cravings. Gold that’s pure enough to extend one’s time. He knows there are only meager flecks left in Californian rivers. But he prays these waters can heal him. He and Anjali drive out to the American River, to the Sacramento, to the Trinity, to the Feather, to the Yuba.
She is always at the wheel, while he sits in the passenger’s seat. His forehead bounces against the glass as he dozes. Rainless clouds obscure the Sacramento Valley sun. Cornfields reach for the dry gray sky. Each time they arrive at a riverbank, they remove their shoes and wade into the water, splashing each other, copying gestures described in texts. Once, a historical reenactor in suspenders and Levi’s warns them not to keep their mouths open if they don’t want the worst fucking runs for weeks.
And?
And, nothing. The rivers are just rivers.
There is a moment, though. Once, at the South Yuba River State Park. When they step toward each other in the water. They swivel their heads to the far bank to see a white woman and a brown man. Lyall sobs. Anjali breathes heavily. The woman looks so like Miranda. The man reminds Anjali of Vivek. They paddle across the water.
When they reach the other side, their bare feet slip on the slimy rocks, and the woman is laughing and the man is not Indian but Hispanic. “What are you guys doing in there?” the woman asks. Her accent is all middle America twang. Miranda was English. “You really meet some crazies in California.”
Lyall dies. There wasn’t enough pure gold left in the waters to undo the mercury poisoning. It’s nearly all sapped up, by pans, by Long Toms, by barges, by dredges, by hydraulics, by the interminable yearning we share with so many other players in the long drama of history.
* * *
? ? ?
Anjali Auntie lifted her shirtsleeve to her eyes. “I’m sorry you put yourselves at such risk. If I’d known—if my mother had clued me in, or one of you . . . I would have told you, there’s no point. It’s too late for whatever blessing that wedding gold might’ve given me.”
Anita began to dig in the bags. “Mama,” she said metallically, “you need ibuprofen. A hot water bottle? Or, no. Is there an ice machine?” Her hair fell over her face, obscuring her features. Here she was, taking refuge in the hard edges of efficiency. Never one to dwell in grief or fear, or love. Then she looked at the basin next to her, at the gold that had settled into something pudding-like. “What do we do with this?” she muttered.
Which was when Lakshmi Joshi rose from her position perched on the desk chair. Her light eyes flicked themselves alive. Had we reached her plane now? A plane where something could be done?