My mother broadcast her daughter’s impending nuptials to her clients—when I was in college, she had begun a second, fated career as a Realtor. The wedding talk helped close a deal, in much the way the scent of freshly baked cookies in an on-the-market house does—the general whiff of familial completion is infectious, makes everyone hot for suburban settling.
Preparations for Prachi’s shaadi-shaadi-shaadi were even impinging on my life on the West Coast. Our parents remained in Georgia, but my sister and I had each made our way to California by way of the tech bubble and academia, respectively. She lived on the third floor of a converted Victorian in San Francisco and I in a cannabis-infused walk-up in Berkeley. And on a particular foggy day in June, my roommate, Chidi, and I were running late to a party at said Victorian.
We stood by Alamo Square Park, taking in the vast bay windows of Prachi’s nearly three-grand-a-month apartment, while I sucked on my vape. I discerned the shadows of her friends moving about on the other side of those cakelike window trimmings, and something about their shapes startled me. I’d told Prachi, in trying and failing to beg off that night, that I was spending my summer ensconced in my dissertation and couldn’t be disturbed. In truth, I had no coherent justification for the social skittishness that had become my norm. Yes, there was the mounting pressure of graduate school, but there was also some other general allergy that erupted most acutely when I was surrounded by the hyperopic residents of my sister’s version of San Francisco.
“None for me, I’d like to be on tonight,” Chidi said, virtuously refusing a hit of my sativa-indica blend, which made me anxious that I’d already begun. “It’s a useful skill to be able to walk into any room and get along with people, Neil. Especially a room with a collective net worth of”—he frowned, doing mental math—“call it tens of millions?” He rubbed his hands together gleefully, prepared, as always, to charm, persuade, finagle, and fundraise. “If you thought more creatively, you could get one of these people to endow you a chair one day, or rethink the whole concept of a university, really bring it into the twenty-first century. . . .”
I was already walking away.
Upstairs, inside, we found the room arranged by twos. It reminded me of the opening of those Madeline books Prachi read growing up: twelve little couples in two straight lines; in two straight lines, they talked tech shop, they ate their Brie, they swirled their wine. The betrothed, Avi Kapoor, tapped on his phone, while Prachi, next to him, picked at red grapes and chatted with one of her Duke sorority sisters. Chidi shook hands with Avi, whom he knew from incestuous, elite tech circles. I spied, with great relief, Manu Padmanaban, gripping a Blue Moon and being talked at by Prachi’s friend Hae-mi. Manu had grown into himself after coming out in college. He’d briefly been Prachi’s colleague at a midsize start-up, and sometimes wrangled an invite to her affairs, where he was my life jacket. He didn’t see me.
“I own our tardiness,” Chidi lied to the happy couple on my behalf. （I’d dozed through the afternoon following a late night out with the girl I’d been sleeping with. I remembered little of the prior evening’s party, save the gas station whiff of coke and a dreadlocked white guy wearing a vial of ketamine around his neck, plucking solemnly at a sitar.） “My call with Fabian Fischer ran long,” Chidi went on. “He sends his best, Avi.”
Chidi had dropped out of Caltech when a billionaire awarded him a hundred thousand dollars to pursue a 3D printing venture. He’d since launched a wetware product dealing with longevity; that is, attempting to prolong the human life span to Old Testament proportions. He lived off a uniquely Californian income in the interim—exit money from the first company’s sale, supplemented with Bitcoin investments. He was half-Nigerian, the product of an Oakland Hills secular Jewish mother and a transplanted Lagos doctor, and I attributed all differences between us—his proclivity for risk, his openness with his parents—to the nonimmigrant side.
Avi appeared duly impressed. “Are you guys raising? I’m surprised you’re out.” Then, to me: “Book going okay, Neil?”
“Dissertation. A book implies someone’s going to read it. It’s coming.”
At that time, I was going to be an Americanist—a professional interpreter of this land and its layers. My specialty was to be late-1800s California, with a focus on the rise of immigration, the ballooning of enterprise, and the economic stratifications that buoyed the nation into the twentieth century. In other words, the aftermath of the gold rush. But these days, staring at the papers piling up on my desk, I couldn’t imagine spending decades burrowing into this corner of the past. It didn’t help that I stood out in this land of utopian technofuturists, committed as I was to the secular preservationist priesthood that is the history academy.