“Somehow that doesn’t seem strong enough,” she said. “Hey. I googled you. You’re a historian? Sorry, do I have to say an historian?”

“You don’t have to say either. I’m just a grad student.”

Close up, this man didn’t look like a person about to absent himself. He just looked leathered by sun and time. He pointed over my shoulder. Behind me, to the west, the sun was setting over the bursting red of the Bok-Kai temple.

The man splashed the river onto his face, lifted his eyes to the sky, then walked back to his tarp. I pictured Snider making these gestures, kneeling at the bank, brushing the water.

Had I been silent too long? “Your mom,” I said. “She looked different.”

“Yes,” Anita said. “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. It’s about my mom.”

I followed the man’s tread marks down to the water and dipped my fingers in as he had. The lick of the cold Yuba on my hand made me shudder, and a wave of visceral déjà vu passed over me. After a moment, the initial uncanny jitter ceased, but I still felt like the very surface of the Yuba was glistening with recognition.

Of course, though, it was just the girl on the line, Anita’s old voice, skewing time.

“Listen,” she went on. It was as though her words were reaching me not across miles but across decades. I had to ask her to speak up. “I’m out of town for a few weeks hustling up vendors for this ridiculous event I’m working on, a bridal expo,” she said, louder. “I’ll be back in two weeks. I know it’s been ages. But can we meet up?”

7.

Those next two weeks were a kind of bardo; I hung between lifetimes. Flashes of who I had been ten years ago struck me in the mornings. One time I rolled over, my eyes foggy as strange dreams receded, to see that it was eight a.m.—I have a chemistry test! I thought, before realizing I was not sixteen. It was early August; San Francisco’s most flamboyant denizens had caravanned off to Burning Man, and Berkeley’s college students had been replaced by talented youths attending debate camps, science camps, philosophy camps, summer honors colloquia. I stepped into the sunlight only to buy the crap I ate but couldn’t call food, spicy hot Cheetos and ramen, and one afternoon bumped into a short brown boy with a bowl cut, maybe twelve years old. His bright blue shirt read BERKELEY SUMMER HONORS ENRICHMENT PROGRAM. Go on, enrich yourself, I considered shouting. Look at how wealthy all that enrichment made me. The boy spied something unstable in my pupils and bolted.