Subject line: Fw: Random but . . . The body text: Hey this is random but Anita Dayal hit me up the other day and we’ve hung out a few times. Turns out that was her you saw. Anyway, she’s running this big Indian wedding thing, maybe you can make it? She says you get a discount with this coupon. Lmk if I can tell her you’re coming. She’d like to say hi she says.
I shut my laptop—that note had taken a half hour of dithering and blithering. In the bedroom, I found a damp-haired Anita asleep, a water stain blooming onto the cotton pillowcase. One hand rested on her stomach as it rose and fell. I turned out the light and tumbled into this, my new normal. Sometimes, it is not so hard to ad-just, not even to the most sublime unrealities. The new magic seeps into the old world, becomes as commonplace as the hoops strung through Anita’s small ears.
* * *
? ? ?
Our plan, I calculated quickly on pen and paper as I sprawled on Anita’s floor one weekday morning, would involve the abduction of several thousand dollars’ worth of property. Grand theft. Up to ten years in prison.
I wish I could have said I felt the kind of thrill a man is supposed to feel when he is released from the confines of daily existence in late capitalism and offered a chance to truly live. To overthrow the system, in some small way! Unfortunately, I was a coward rather than a revolutionary. My stomach gave a growl that suggested I had eaten something rotten. When Anita got home after working a late charity gala, I was on the toilet, reading Crime and Punishment. I came out waving it, only a little embarrassed to have been caught with a book in the bathroom.
“We are not Raskolnikov.” She rolled her eyes when I insisted on reading aloud the gory details of the old woman’s death, how her sister appeared at the wrong instant and the criminal had to kill twice. Blood, unplanned-for blood. “This isn’t a murder, Neil. We’re being sensible. There’s hardly even real security—there will be no weapons. I mean, I’m in control—”
I couldn’t help it, though. I was seeing a carousel of possible obstacles. I heard the convention center door banging open behind me as I laid hands on the car. Saw a figure standing there, twice my size, a great bearded Sikh vendor leading with a paunch, lifting a single brawny hand that could pound my brain into the wall. Me, pissing myself with fear. Or what about this? A train of cars, women leaving early to beat traffic, that signature desi move （arrive late, leave at odd times）， blocking our route. Me, dropping the lehenga on the asphalt, gold winking on blackness, conspicuously brightened by the California sunshine. Gold, covered in my prints . . . Anita, racing past me, grabbing the stolen goods, turning her head only briefly before gunning it to Sunnyvale, leaving me alone. . . .
Her, reminding me: I’m just following the plan. Don’t take it personally.
“If you don’t think I’m sick about it . . .” She coughed. “But I’m being rational. I’m accounting for everything. If you’re nervous, put that energy toward working as hard as I am.”
I went into Anita’s room that night. She rolled over, and there she was, again, ready for me. She liked to feel small in bed, she’d whispered not long ago. I had the sense it was the first time she’d made that admission, clearly full of tempest and drama for her. She liked a little shove, a strength around her neck. She liked me to toss her here and there.
“Hey,” she whispered after we’d finished. She’d asked me to try calling her things. I was too awkward to comply. The daylight Anita bossed me through heist planning with the same efficiency she’d once used to run our childhood games of house, but the bedroom Anita wanted this constructed cruelty. I couldn’t always reconcile the two. “I feel weird about that stuff.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said, as I knew I was supposed to. “If it’s what you like.”
She bit her lip, weighing something, before speaking the next part at a rapid pace. “I saw my dad hit my mom once. I was eleven.” She drew me closer with her heels. “My mom never talked to me about it, but she saw me seeing it. I was kind of hiding in the hallway, and they were in the kitchen. She made eye contact with me, over his shoulder.”
“Fuck,” I said, and left it there, because it seemed like she wanted to add more.
“It never happened again in front of me,” she said. “But sometimes that image pops into my mind at the wrong moment. Like, before sex. Or during sex.”
“Did Jimmy—？”
“No. But control comes naturally to him. And I liked that. And that made me feel wrong. Like I was just like my mom. Like I needed someone else to tell me what I was.”