She fell quiet. I meant to reply, but as I began to calculate the appropriate response, I was seized with exhaustion. The moment ballooned; my silence became outsize, and it was too late to say anything. But our limbs were entangled, and I felt her hot and close, and it seemed clear that whether or not I was prepared, I was inextricably, obviously in—for this, and for all else she entailed.
* * *
? ? ?
I’d barely returned to Berkeley over the course of those first weeks with Anita, and when I had driven up 880, I’d just dipped into my apartment to grab more clothes. Chidi knew I’d started sleeping with a childhood friend in Palo Alto, though nothing more. And while I believed my near-constant presence at Anita’s had been mostly productive and pleasurable for both of us, we had begun to prickle at each other here and there: She woke up very early; I sometimes didn’t clean dishes properly. It was mostly stuff that could be fucked away, until one morning she came back sooner than I’d expected from a cloud-computing conference she’d been contracted to oversee. She found me pacing her apartment in my boxers, listening to a podcast on double speed and picking at my facial hair.
“I thought you were working,” she said thinly. She glanced around the apartment, which had grown untidier since I’d arrived. Some of the mess was due to our shared task—the whiteboard and markers, legal pads, piles of brochures featuring the hundred-plus expo vendors and their respective wares. But some of it was only mine—my library books, my preferred snacks （Cheetos, protein bars）， the hoodies I put on and pulled off during the day as my body temperature shifted.
I had been working. It had been an Adderall day—it’s best for sustained mental labor; coke is all fragile flashes. As I came up, however, I made a crucial mistake, and instead of turning to my sample chapter Word doc, I’d gone down a rabbit hole of lefty talking heads discussing the election.
“Why aren’t you working? It’s only five.”
“I was. And anyway, this is my home. I don’t have to tell you when or why I’m back.” She tapped her foot; she was still wearing her work shoes, and the knocking sound they made on her floor was menacing, like the sound of a teacher smacking your knuckles with a ruler. She kicked the pumps off and came nearer to me. She paused. “Are you on something?”
“Just Adderall.” I waved my phone to indicate that I was occupied; my earbuds were in, and the podcasters were still yammering.
“Jeez, Neil. Aren’t you a little old for this?”
“I have a prescription,” I lied.
“It’s an amphetamine. You’re high on an amphetamine. Look at you, you’re picking your face like a fucking meth-head.” She walked away, just as my mother did when indicating that the final word had been uttered. She opened the fridge. “And you ate the takeout already.”
“I didn’t eat all day. You finished the takeout last night, remember? You got up after we had sex and you finished the yellow tofu because you couldn’t sleep.”
“I’ve done Adderall, Neil.” She slammed the fridge door and a red Stanford magnet clunked to the ground. “I liked it, too. Too much. And I have to say that I don’t think you should plan on drinking the expo lemonade if you haven’t done some serious work on your addiction tendencies.”
“I don’t see how that’s your choice.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means,” I said, yanking out my earbuds, “I’ve been giving as much to this as you. And I don’t see how it’s your call whether or not I get a share of the gold I’m putting my ass on the line for.”
“I think you should go home for a while, Neil,” Anita said. “Like, now-ish.”
She stomped into her bathroom, and I waited for her to reemerge for another round of argument, but instead there was just the tap water running. I could see her wiping her face clear of makeup, shedding her daytime sheen.
I sped the whole way back to the East Bay, too irate to absorb anything as my podcasters wrapped up their doomed polling predictions, all of them so certain about the future.
I decided to hang around Berkeley for at least a few days, to cool off and （I told myself） to immerse in work in a way that had been less possible with an often-pantsless girl wandering around the house. I wrote all morning, then found, in the afternoon, that I needed a book I’d left in the TA office a few weeks earlier. So, into Dwinelle I went, fat noise-canceling headphones on to ward off small talk. I nabbed the book from the bottom drawer of the desk I nominally shared with two other PhD candidates, and was on my way back out when I stopped, absently, to check my mailbox. Few people ever sent me mail, save some librarians who’d kick over reserved copies of requested books or specially called-up archives. But sitting in the wire tray labeled neil narayan, grad ’20, was a mustard-yellow unmarked legal-size envelope. There was no return address.