“I should get back to my apartment,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet my roommate, Chidi. We haven’t seen each other in—” I’d reached the neighborhood at the base of the peak, with its wide, child-friendly sidewalks. “Wait. Chidi. Chidi. Chidi can do replacements!” I shouted. “Chidi can do them!”
With just under three weeks left till the expo, Anita and I had still been wondering if there was a way to buy ourselves more time—true forgeries seemed too onerous and traceable to invest in. But I’d just remembered Chidi’s first start-up, the one that had earned the grant from the billionaire—the 3D printing company. He had made jewelry before. Cubic zirconia bearing a discomfiting resemblance to real diamonds. I’d once watched him trick female shoppers at a Berkeley tech fair. He’d even done gold-colored products; holding one, I’d been briefly reminded of the rush that came from grasping a piece of newly acquired gold; it was that convincing.
* * *
? ? ?
“Where the fuck have you been?” Chidi asked when I got back to the apartment.
He folded his arms; his muscles were veiny and casual. His cheeks were still sweetly chubby, boyish, augmenting his hacker-wunderkind identity. Together we got a little stoned and a little drunk—a rarity, as Chidi’s longevity company, with its youngblood transfusions and telomere-lengthening studies, had caused him to drop alcohol in his effort to live a thousand years. Perhaps it was the months that had passed since he and I had truly talked, or perhaps it was the particular melding of the substances that night that created the right alchemy, but I wanted—was surprised to find myself longing for—a chance to speak some truths aloud at last. Or maybe it was just that I needed his help, and knew first I would have to spill.
He sat on a meditation bolster on the floor while I sprawled on the futon. And I began to try to fit the basic story of who Anita was to me into twenty or thirty minutes. There were some elisions and omissions, and I felt, as I spoke, like one of those accordion files we used to use in debate; stretched out they held hundreds of pages, but pressed into a purple Rubbermaid tub they became meek and discreet.
“Is it just sex now?” Chidi asked.
And that was when I knew I had to go back, to fill in what I had left out. The magic, and all we’d broken. Was it just sex? It had never been just anything.
“Well,” I said, “there’s a lot more.”
“You know how little you tell me about yourself, Neil?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d actually decide I deserved to know things about you. I’ve never understood privacy.” He kicked his legs up and began to do bicycle crunches, saying the next part through gritted teeth. “It’s a social world for a reason.”
“Chidi,” I interrupted, in part to get him to stop before he began to tell me about Twitter’s crucial import to humanity, but in part because he was right, because now that Anita was around again, I’d seen that he was right—the past was lighter when I wasn’t the only one shouldering it. “If you’re free now . . .”
It was to Chidi’s great credit as a friend and a general believer in the improbable that as I talked on for nearly another hour, describing the Lemonade Period, he asked only a few clarifying questions. I explained things like the properties of the gold, and the matter of Shruti.
“I feel like I . . . did it,” I admitted. It was the first time I had ever said it this way, with the neatness I’d begrudged Anita. I waited to see how it felt on my tongue. The short sentence, with no ambiguity, no spirit to it. “I did it.”
“You probably did.” He had switched from crunches to push-ups on the hardwood while I talked, but he halted when it became clear the story was darkening. He now lay on his belly. “Maybe it was like a firing squad, though, man. A bunch of people’s guns pointed at her. Yours, too. You all pulled triggers. But you can’t be certain which bullet was responsible.”
And then, unbidden, came a memory. A field trip in middle school. We were on a school bus going somewhere—up into the North Georgia mountains. It might have been to Helen or Dahlonega, one of those boomtowns shaped by the twenty-niners’ rush, the one that followed the Carolinas’ and preceded California’s. What I remembered was Shruti sitting alone at the far front of the bus. And I remembered Manu, my seatmate, looking at her the way he often did, with fellow-outsider sympathy, and saying, I’m going over there. I remembered shaking my head vigorously and saying, She likes to sit alone. But Manu stood and made his way up to her, and because we were jerking up a hill full of switchbacks, it meant the whole bus saw him wobbling to reach Shruti Patel. That was a naked risk, seeking her so publicly. The teacher didn’t even yell at him to sit down when she saw that he was coming to Shruti. I remember them sharing silence as we wound higher. She likes to sit alone, I kept thinking, even as I bristled at Manu for having left me all by myself.