To: Shruti Patel, 2004. （I could write, in Wang’s fashion.） When, exactly, was the beginning of your end? Is suicide a complex concatenation of chemistry, culture, and cruelty? Or was yours never suicide, only a theft and murder? When someone says you took your own life, should I be stopping them to shout, no, I did? I study causality, Shruti. I try to understand how economies grow and collapse, and how one zeitgeist blows into another. When I’m doing my job well, I can see truths that politicians and financiers of their days missed. But I have never come close to grasping0 such patterns on the level of the personal.
“No, no, no.” And then I was saying it over and over—I did it—almost becoming addicted to the sound of the sentence, but then I stopped, lest it become itself a kind of absolution, like the rhythm of a bodily penance. “I did it, and I just live with that. Always.”
Chidi bowed his head. He waited for me to catch my breath.
“If you insist on carrying that around,” he said, “find a way to make it make you better.”
We talked still later into the night, and eventually reached the matter of the bridal jewelry and Anita’s mother, the suspected affair, and Lakshmi Joshi’s inkling that wedding gold could contain the particular energy Anjali Auntie needed to get back on her feet.
“It sounds risky,” he said. He was rubbing his palms together with glee. Chidi considered himself antiestablishment. He was all free information this and end copyrights that; during his youth he’d even once tried to release monkeys from a Berkeley primate lab. He was better suited for outlaw life than I. “Is it all planned out?”
“Actually, I could use your help. Could you still print good imitation gold?”
“Ohhh. To replace the shit? I’d need photographs.”
“Anita could do that . . . take pictures of a few vendors’ stock for, say, an ad brochure.”
He nodded. “I could manage. Nothing fantastic, but convincing at a glance.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I mean. That’d be amazing—I could—would you want some? Lemonade, I mean? In exchange?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. Judith and I are moving in together.”
I stared around our apartment, thinking how it would never be able to contain three bodies comfortably—and then I realized.
“You want to leave.” I managed not to say the full sentence: you want to leave me.
“Yeah,” he said. “So I don’t really want the knockoff version of this happy-home-happy-life-happy-wife shit. But you’re not seriously going to start all that all over again, are you?” He glanced around the room awkwardly. “I wasn’t expecting to come back from summer to find so much of my coke gone. Were you partying that much?”
“I’ll pay you back. And I’ve switched back to Adderall,” I said. “Better for endurance.”
“I just . . . I get your thing with substances a little better now.”
“You love drugs, Chidi.”
“I do them no more than once a week, as a strict rule.”
“Do you have it on your calendar or something?”
“My point is, Neil, that you’ve got this relationship now. Something that means something. I mean, do you see it with her?”
“It being . . .”
“You know what I mean. I saw it with Judith, really fast.”
“You wouldn’t want security? To have something to fall back on if it didn’t work out?”
“What does ‘work out’ mean? Living together for a hundred years? At least we could say we’d been something to each other for a while. Maybe Anita doesn’t have to be, like, the start of your nuclear family. I mean, why do you devote your life to these institutions we invented for different times—universities, marriage?” He was back to the push-ups now, which made everything he said come out in a rapid, sweaty pant. “The fun of California, I mean, the whole point of this place, is that there are other ways to be. Be fucking polyamorous. Be an entrepreneur. Live some other way than what they sold you on.”
Chidi had grown up with difference more readily at hand—his family did not ask him to be something specific; he was a programmer with sellable skills . . . there was no shortage of objections I could raise. But also, I didn’t want to start a fight, not when I’d just revealed so much about myself for the first time.
I talked over him: “I can’t let you do this without giving you something. It seems unfair.”