“Do you know who dropped this off?” I asked the admin, who was watching reality television clips on her laptop.
“Not a clue.” She returned to The Bachelorette.
I peeked inside and extracted a photocopied newspaper page. The San Francisco Call, it read. The date of the paper was smudged, but I made out 185—1850-something. Below was a headline, above a single cold paragraph.
AN HINDOSTAN FOUND DEAD IN MINING CAMP.
Coroner Michael Rogers was yesterday called to hold an inquest upon the body of an Hindostan who was found dead from debility and injuries in Yuba County, near the banks of the Yuba River in Marysville. Nearby miners identified the man as a migrant from the East Indian city of Bombay, though at least one individual identified him in contradiction as Mamhood, of Egypt. The man has also been named as a known thief of gold dust. Injuries may have been visited upon him as a result, and the Coroner’s verdict was in agreement with the above statement.
There was nothing else.
I left Dwinelle Hall, stepping into the startlingly unrelenting East Bay sunshine, envelope in hand. So, the Bombayan was real. He had made it to Marysville. But no one knew him. I supposed he had never been my Isaac Snider. Isaac Snider was an unproven theory of history, formulated solely to explain me. I would never have a corollary in the past, never have a legible American ancestor to provide guidance on how to make a life. I would just have to keep on trying, tomorrow and tomorrow.
I found my vape in my room and took it, along with the clipping, to sit in the park around the corner from my apartment. As I got stoned a few feet from some junkies busking, I read and reread the Bombayan gold digger’s obituary—if those few lines could be called such a thing. What made some people’s lives worth remembering, and what rendered others’ forgettable? Did it have something to do with belonging? If the Bombayan had been at home in America—settled, adjusted, seen, witnessed, loved—would someone today know his name?
I lay back on the grass, trying not to smell the sweat and grime of the burnouts drumming next to me. I closed my eyes and imagined that the yellow envelope containing the only record I truly had of the gold digger had not been placed unceremoniously in my history mailbox by a research librarian. I imagined, instead, that I had done Wang’s little thing: TO: THE BOMBAYAN GOLD DIGGER, 1851, written back to him—and that he had received my letter and been meaning to reply when he had the chance. And that he had whispered instructions to whatever being was nearest to him as he died; that said person had raced to the local paper to give news that a peculiar, unlikely American had died; and that the newspaper office had posted the clipping to me, with an apology for some details getting lost along the way.
* * *
? ? ?
I called Anita from a trail up to Wildcat Peak. I’d hiked it solo, legs jiggly and weak after my midday weed, but I sobered the higher I went. The silhouette of San Francisco was muted by fog, of course, but the evergreens and yellow-leafed oaks of the East Bay slanted down and lolled out to the water. There was enough space up there to see what Anita was right about. That there were parts of me, still, that were dangerous—parts that lacked a firm grasp on reality, parts that wanted something impossible. A certain story of history, a perfect fix, all of her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re stressed,” she said. It was not forgiveness, but it was maybe sympathy. “Your dissertation. We haven’t talked that much about it. You’re trying to do that, and do our thing, and I googled a bunch of blogs about what it’s like to be a grad student, and then I felt bad. Are you starving, Neil? Are you burning out or being abused as a nonunionized worker? Are you concerned about job prospects?”
I started to laugh. It was growing dark, so I began downhill, my tractionless shoes slipping on the path. “Maybe I’m all of those things. But I’m union.”
If I were to stick it out in the history academy, I would never find myself in the past. I would find images and characters who meant something to the present. I might even enjoy the rigor required to make an argument of those elements. But I couldn’t call what I felt for the study of history love, for the study of history had come to feel separate from the spiritual reality that Ramesh Uncle had once promised me to be true, that every timeline was unfolding simultaneously, over and over.
“I just don’t know what to do with all we took,” I said. “I don’t know how to make it all mean something.”
“Me, either,” she said.
I paused as I reached the flattening of the trail, to get one more look at California’s many geographies—the hills and rivers and coastline that once stood for nothing except themselves. It took gold-lust to make it into the place it was today, a palimpsest of errors and triumphs.