IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I worked manically, drugfueled, on little sleep. Chidi was still away, and the building was emptied of our frat boy neighbors. The eerie silence of a college town in the summer was mine to fill. In came my alter ego, a Neil who, with the help of an upper, was easily convinced of his own extravagant genius. My pharmacist father meandered around the back of my brain as I fiddled. Him, in that white coat, green Publix badge affixed to his chest pocket. How he had smoothed the starched lapels before leaving for work each morning. When I was young, I’d sit on the bathroom tile and watch him get ready. Years of study for that white coat. Crossing oceans for that white coat. My mother’s voice in my head: Your father is a scientist, be proud. Hell, now I was my own, a homegrown expert in Little Pharma. I did the research, Asian-nerded the drugs, heeded numbers and neurotransmitters.

I wrote with the window open, listening to the creak of beech and gum trees. I poured every personal revelation I had that summer into the Bombayan, braiding my small history with his Big History. Bit by bit, I lent him my story. Imagined that he had lived some version of what we’d been through—what we did—during the Lemonade Period. For wasn’t he also a gold thief? What would he do with his stolen goods? How could he bear them? Memories flooded me as I did tiny bumps in the middle of the day, and I channeled them into the Bombayan. I remembered Anjali Auntie telling me about the Saraswati, that holy river lined with gold, so like the rivers that ignited the California rush; I left the apartment to drive alongside those rivers, through the Central Valley, growing emotional as I imagined transposing our eastern mythologies onto the pioneering West. Could they stick?

In early July, high as the Hindenburg, having spoken to no one besides food delivery people and librarians in about a month, I opened a new page in the Marysville material and saw a dark-skinned man staring back at me from a photocopy of a university-press book. It was taken in 1868. He looked like the black-and-white photos of my nana, posed unsmilingly, almost militaristically, on his wedding day. Below his daguerreotype was a small caption. ISAAC SNIDER, it read. Editor of the Marysville Gold Star, 1865–1885. My eyes flitted between his name and his image and my breath caught. I stood up, stole into Chidi’s room, pulled out his dime bags—I was running low on his party supply—and did a line.