Anjali Auntie, drawing me out of myself, just as she used to in the Hammond Creek basement: “Do you know why so many alchemists died, Neil?”
I shook my head—I didn’t seem to know anything at all, in that moment—but then a phrase returned to me, from a college history-of-science class. Mad as a hatter.
“Mercury poisoning is often incurable and often deadly,” she said in a terrible monotone. “And it’s a key ingredient in most alchemical rituals. You end up ingesting fumes. We drank it, too. A lot of it. I thought I’d found some methods the rasasiddhis—the Hindu alchemists—never knew in order to make it safe.” She scoffed. “Lyall believed me. That, or he was too hooked to object. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell when mercury starts affecting you. The symptoms can seem like something else. Depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s.” Her hand—her shaky hand—clutched her kneecap. “Your kidneys fail. A lot fails after that.”
“Why couldn’t you have drunk all the gold we were taking?” I burst.
“So much,” Anita whispered. “There was so much, Mama.”
Anjali Auntie shook her head, a professorial reprimand. We knew better. “Alchemy is bigger than that. We didn’t want to steal someone else’s ambitions. That’s petty, small-time. We were trying to steal from the universe, you could say. Steal time itself.”
Lakshmi Joshi stood, tracing the basin with her finger. Her eyes bore into that lumpy smelted metal. More than ever now, she seemed deaf to what we had just listened to; she was pacing some other plane, a plane where it was not too late.
“I didn’t see symptoms for a while,” Anjali Auntie said.
In Sunnyvale, she is miserable. She cannot find work. Her daughter hardly speaks to her, blaming her for Shruti’s death. Pranesh says he’s heard things. Says he knows what she is. He has learned the phrase gold digger—it’s on every radio station, on all the airwaves that year; even Pranesh cannot avoid it. He pushes, he pounds things, he shouts.
Slowly, Anjali starts to notice she is growing older. Lines and spots and a need for reading glasses and a back that twinges, sometimes spasms. She thinks at first that it is just the natural process. But then it seems to speed up. Isn’t she too young to have these tremors? To be forgetting things with enough frequency that she loses multiple jobs? She develops abstract suspicions: that time, in a way, is having its revenge on her. And then finally she admits it to herself. The mercury—and a few of the other untranslatable substances—are extracting their particular biochemical price. She researches chelation therapy, but what would she tell the internist when the lab work comes back?
She does not know how much damage she did to herself. Is she dying, too? Well, we’re all dying; is she dying faster, sooner, now? Is it the quality of time she’s ruined? Is it why she has a prescription for sleeping pills, why she sometimes shakes them out on her bathroom counter to imagine all of them clunking against one another in her stomach?
Anita inched away from me and placed her head in her mother’s lap. Anjali Auntie ran one hand through her daughter’s hair, her gaze fixed on the wall opposite, as though she was reading what came next on the sickly yellow motel wallpaper.
“Lyall got back in touch two years ago. He showed up at the house.”
Pranesh: answering the door, belly protruding, eyebrows grown into one long caterpillar, facing this man in horn-rimmed glasses with now fully white hair. Lyall was always slender but is now emaciated. A neighbor in a sun hat fiddles in his garden, pausing his spade at the surface of the soil, craning his neck to gauge what juicy scene is playing out at the Dayals’ front door.
Lyall tells Anjali he’s at Berkeley now. He, too, is sick. He blacks out, hallucinates. He is aging unnaturally. Anjali speaks with him in the backyard, beneath the citrus trees. She stays feet away from him, her back against the sliding glass door, while Pranesh harrumphs in the kitchen, eyes on them both. Anjali suspects Lyall has gone on drinking the brews from the Hammond Creek days, that he never detoxed as she did. Which explains why he looks so much worse, as though he’s survived a war.
After that, she goes to see Lyall at Berkeley a few times. They aren’t together-together. He needs tending. At this point, it’s a battle for months, maybe a year. “There must be something I can do,” she insists, because this is something she knows how to do—to orient her life around another person’s problems.
He says he has one hope—part of the reason he came to California. He still thinks about the promise the swamis made him. About the placer-lined Saraswati River, containing the holiest gold. Gold untouched by human madness and cravings. Gold that’s pure enough to extend one’s time. He knows there are only meager flecks left in Californian rivers. But he prays these waters can heal him. He and Anjali drive out to the American River, to the Sacramento, to the Trinity, to the Feather, to the Yuba.
She is always at the wheel, while he sits in the passenger’s seat. His forehead bounces against the glass as he dozes. Rainless clouds obscure the Sacramento Valley sun. Cornfields reach for the dry gray sky. Each time they arrive at a riverbank, they remove their shoes and wade into the water, splashing each other, copying gestures described in texts. Once, a historical reenactor in suspenders and Levi’s warns them not to keep their mouths open if they don’t want the worst fucking runs for weeks.
And?
And, nothing. The rivers are just rivers.
There is
