Only the holder of the phone camera murmured in recognition at that.
“When she took her own life, people talked. Was whatever she had infectious? But within weeks, people boxed it away—boxed her away. When she lived, all the parents held her up as the paragon. She was what the first generation wanted the second generation to be. When she died, everyone told us to treat her as an aberration. But I don’t think she was an aberration. What happened to her was, as the people in my tech world say, a feature of the system. Not a bug.”
Anita began to recite facts and figures, things I’d heard many times by then. That parents were going hungry to pay for kids’ cram schools in Kota and Queens alike. That we, Asian Americans, dwelt in a troubling silence when it came to mental health. These stories had, through the years, filled my mother’s ears: an acquaintance of an acquaintance who had, upon receiving a 1200 on his third SAT attempt, taken himself to the Edison train station, lain down on the tracks, and waited until the Northeast Corridor train rolled in from Manhattan and over him. His father was aboard, commuting home from work. A girl in my aunt Sandhya’s chemistry class at Fremont High, threatened by her parents with a one-way ticket to Lucknow for screwing around with another girl—carbon monoxide in the garage. And others, and others.
“It’s on us,” Anita was saying, speaking with so much urgency that I wondered if someone was coming onstage to forcibly un-mic her. The person holding the phone—the person who’d decided this video ought to be “riposted”—was not steady enough to settle on Anita’s face as she concluded. Perhaps if I had seen a shade of uncertainty in her expression, I would have been less furious. But her voice was so sure as she tied up the speech, as though she were wrapping up the neatest story in the world, and in doing so, gliding into the next era with no ghosts at her back. “By it’s on us, I mean me,” she said, “and I mean you, whether you knew her or not. Us. Our community, our logics, our values. We did that to her.”
* * *
? ? ?
In the days that followed, I worked manically, drug-fueled, on little sleep. Chidi was still away, and the building was emptied of our frat boy neighbors. The eerie silence of a college town in the summer was mine to fill. In came my alter ego, a Neil who, with the help of an upper, was easily convinced of his own extravagant genius. My pharmacist father meandered around the back of my brain as I fiddled. Him, in that white coat, green Publix badge affixed to his chest pocket. How he had smoothed the starched lapels before leaving for work each morning. When I was young, I’d sit on the bathroom tile and watch him get ready. Years of study for that white coat. Crossing oceans for that white coat. My mother’s voice in my head: Your father is a scientist, be proud. Hell, now I was my own, a homegrown expert in Little Pharma. I did the research, Asian-nerded the drugs, heeded numbers and neurotransmitters.
I wrote with the window open, listening to the creak of beech and gum trees. I poured every personal revelation I had that summer into the Bombayan, braiding my small history with his Big History. Bit by bit, I lent him my story. Imagined that he had lived some version of what we’d been through—what we did—during the Lemonade Period. For wasn’t he also a gold thief? What would he do with his stolen goods? How could he bear them? Memories flooded me as I did tiny bumps in the middle of the day, and I channeled them into the Bombayan. I remembered Anjali Auntie telling me about the Saraswati, that holy river lined with gold, so like the rivers that ignited the California rush; I left the apartment to drive alongside those rivers, through the Central Valley, growing emotional as I imagined transposing our eastern mythologies onto the pioneering West. Could they stick?
In early July, high as the Hindenburg, having spoken to no one besides food delivery people and librarians in about a month, I opened a new page in the Marysville material and saw a dark-skinned man staring back at me from a photocopy of a university-press book. It was taken in 1868. He looked like the black-and-white photos of my nana, posed unsmilingly, almost militaristically, on his wedding day. Below his daguerreotype was a small caption. ISAAC SNIDER, it read. Editor of the Marysville Gold Star, 1865–1885. My eyes flitted between his name and his image and my breath caught. I stood up, stole into Chidi’s room, pulled out his dime bags—I was running low on his party supply—and did a line.
I returned to my desk and stared down at Isaac Snider. Snider was a Midwestern Jewish gold rush migrant and entrepreneur from St. Louis, the page read. Like many Jews in the California gold rush who opened stores, launched businesses, built Synagogues, and started schools, he helped establish Californian society as something beyond lean-tos and mining towns. He then became the editor of the largest newspaper in the Central Valley region. But I wasn’t looking at his biography. I was looking at his face. His eyebrows were thick and unruly, and his eyelashes girlishly long. His gaze was unsettled, as though he was sure some secret of his was about to be found out.