The Golden State: A Novel Read online

  We at the Institute are nesting dolls: Karen the admin assistant who has no M.A., then me who has an M.A. but dropped out of the Ph.D., then Meredith with her Ph.D., with Hugo encircling us all. Meredith is sensitive to slights from Hugo; I am sensitive to slights from Meredith and Hugo; Karen is sensitive to slights from everyone. The hierarchy is all we have. We are all publicly rather flirtatious with Hugo, privately disdainful, and occasionally afraid. I have spent so much time with these people that I can’t tell whether I hate them or whether I can’t live without them.

  Meredith endlessly counsels me to go back and finish. “You’re so smart,” she says. “You need to get a Ph.D.,” oblivious to the universe of condescension that lurks behind this formula. In my secret heart I am susceptible to the formula too, but since working at the Institute has amply illustrated the precarious shitshow that is a life of the mind in 2015 I can always talk myself out of it. The only time I think it’s not a bad idea is when something comes along like THE CONFERENCE as Hugo calls it when he e-mails me about it, and people I’ve never met are e-mailing me lists of demands regarding how to arrange the program, who will give the opening remarks and who will give the lunchtime keynote and who will introduce the person giving the evening keynote and who will be the panel chairs. Apart from the recent death and maiming THE CONFERENCE is the thing that is most intolerable about the Institute. It’s a big anniversary spectacular deal which has been looming for two years now and which I had been assured I wouldn’t need to take too great a hand in the execution of, but like so many things in the University it acquired so many cosponsors demonstrating so many exemplary strains of interdisciplinary collaboration that no one was actually tasked with planning it. Every few months in a desultory way someone would ask whether I had found a venue, or created a budget, or made the arrangements for the speakers and sooner or later it was clear I better make it my business to do these things.

  The more education you have the more removed you are from the ineluctable yawning core of work at the University, which is not in fact teaching but is the filling out and submission and resubmission of forms, the creation of scheduling Doodles, the collection of receipts and the phoning of caterers, the issuing of letters and the ordering of supplies and the tallying of points in poorly formatted spreadsheets. The secret work of us administrators—of everyone at the University—is to put as much distance between ourselves and this yawning core as possible, to be the thing rather than proximal to the thing. Your relative position in the hierarchy will dictate how much Doodling will be your responsibility, how many humiliating interactions with incensed French experts whose taxi got lost on the way to the lecture hall.

  I guess I could have kept up with the Ph.D. and also married Engin, but I wasn’t an optimal Ph.D. student to begin with. Doctorates require specialization, specificity, and all I ever wanted was to speak Turkish perfectly, to speak Arabic perfectly, to speak Persian perfectly, to understand everything, to go everywhere. Turkic verbs and Persian poetry; religion and migration; art and civilization and change. But choosing religion means learning classical Arabic and hours of reading hadith and hadith interpretation and counterinterpretation and choosing migration means counting surnames in dusty archives and making GIS maps and choosing change means picking one very specific thing like Mongol legal practice and establishing how it evolved after they invented postage stamps or whatnot, and choosing language means linguistics and all those god-awful equations and formulas on the white board. I wanted to study the world-altering beauty of Muslim civilizations, but that’s not a topic, it’s an enthusiasm, it’s a fetish for rug-collecting Berkeley-dwellers. But I made a show of choosing and thus have approximately one-third of a Ph.D. in Turkish Republican literature, clearly a mistake since it has taken me three years to not even finish for example a seminal work by Sait Faik Abasıyanık on the BART train.

  In a sense working at the Institute is perfect for me, since now I can just listen to all the people who did choose and presumably weave them into some tattered tapestry of erudition. But then I have to reimburse them for their taxis to and from the airport and write effusive introductions about them for Hugo to deliver.

  Reflexively I navigate to the Purchasing Portal to see whether my $483 in miscellaneous catering expenses has been reimbursed. Half of them have gone through, although this only means they have successfully navigated the labyrinth of approvals associated with the original submittal. This means that our financial analyst looked at the fund number and confirmed that the Al-Ihsan Foundation would theoretically countenance the expenditure of endowment income on twenty-four donuts two meze platters and two coffee cambros to enliven a workshop on Islam: Theme and Variation, but that no one has actually released the money to pay me. I remember that I had to pay for extra daycare for that workshop for which I will not of course be reimbursed. I also remember that a man named Todd spent most of the allotted time talking about Yarsanism, which as far as I can tell has to do with Islam in only the most arcane and theoretical sense, and that Faisal from Religious Studies spent the rest of the time talking about Islamophobia, which is more of a unifying Islamic experience than a variety of it, and that Hugo then chided me mercilessly for letting things get off track. Hugo is of course notoriously and militantly irreligious, if not actually Islamophobic himself, but he has an Arab surname and family origin which was presumably what impelled the Vice Provost to appoint him director of the Institute, a post highly sought by many faculty members due to endowments that provide over 300K in no-strings-attached funds annually, most of it from Saudi entities with no mailing address. In fact currently none of the staff of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations is a Muslim. Not me, not Meredith, not Karen, not injured Maryam, and not the other work-study, a poli-sci-majoring redhead from San Diego whom we think Hugo personally interfered in the hiring process to select over Meredith’s and my preferred and head-scarfed applicant from Senegal because he found her sexually compelling. He can do this because we live in a lawless shadowland, one of the hundreds of Institutes and Centers and Programs and Initiatives that have blindly replicated themselves over the body of the University so that it is like a once-vigorous person covered with tumors that behave exactly as they please.

  I look at my remaining e-mails which are various things dealing with THE CONFERENCE. I already know that the end result of all these e-mails will be great personal frustration and the expenditure of $20,000 of endowment funds in direct costs and untold taxpayer dollars in person-hours. We will be left with a series of badly lit recordings wherein people either (a) deliberately ignore the exhortation not to read prepared papers and drone on at length from a journal article they are polishing up (b) talk in extreme generalities about things that any fool could read about online or (c) deliver a cogent and accessible statement on the topic at hand based upon a vast body of knowledge they have amassed in the course of their research. The latter people are typically about to be denied tenure or are in the middle of negotiations with another university and will be somewhere else within the year. The taxpayers are rarely in evidence at these events, although they are all ostensibly free and open to the public.

  There is no e-mail about Ellery, but I know the voice mail from the Office of Risk Management is still sitting inside my office phone like an evil charm. I smoke one more cigarette and then I feel sick and then I go back inside and lie down on the couch. With the eight books for Honey I brought no book for myself, the TV has five channels, I don’t have my Turkish notebook or poor Sait Faik, I have literally nothing to do except mother my child who, thank god, is still in her Pack ’n Play giving me a respite from this obligation. I am thinking about how stupid I am and wondering when Honey is going to wake up and suddenly I am myself waking with a start, my hand over my face and the skin baking a little in the sun.

  I dreamt people were queued up at the reception desk to see me and Maryam wouldn’t let them in. Prior to the accident Maryam sat at the front desk of the In
stitute between five and nine hours a week, answering phones and cheerfully dealing with Hugo’s bullshit and on slow afternoons going on Facebook to post memes about Palestinian liberation and watch tutorials for face contouring. I think about her broken fibula her broken occipital bone her concussion and then I am powerless not to remember the day she came into my office asking advice about summer research for her and her project partner, the offscreen Ellery, and I talked to her about Turkey and sent her to Meredith to talk about Syria and from what I understand Meredith told her “Of course to really dive into any substantive research you have to go abroad” and got Hugo to give the two of them an unofficial grant with Al-Ihsan money and had me write the ex post facto award letter and then I thought I might as well set them up with Pelin before they went east to Diyarbakır, and it was all so careless, so ad hoc, although I know that life is careless and ad hoc; as Hugo rather callously observed to Maryam’s parents on the phone, the truth is that she would be just as likely to get in a car accident in America. “In fact,” he told them, “the sad fact is that students are safer abroad than they are on U.S. campuses,” after which he was contacted by the Office of Risk Management and told not to have any further contact with the family without a representative present. I wrote the Institute’s formal statement of condolence to Ellery’s parents for him to sign.

  Hugo excels at unwelcome true remarks. When he found me crying in my office after Engin’s green card was taken and Engin returned ignominiously to Istanbul he patted my back tenderly and said “I know this must be very hard,” before his innate didacticism was activated. “In some respects, Daphne, you are experiencing a sort of very mild form of Casualties of Capital!” (This is Hugo’s catchphrase; he has a very well-known book on South Asians in the Gulf.) “Just last week I read a dissertation chapter about Filipinas who leave their children to become nannies in the U.S. My student is doing her fieldwork in Westchester County. Imagine it!” This made me feel ashamed to feel so very sorry for myself, although Hugo has no kids and no fucking clue what that would really be like. “But I have capital, sort of,” I sniffled. “This is a casualty of militarized bureaucracy and nativism.” He laughed and patted me again. “Do you think those things aren’t related?” and then gave me the titles of two books I probably won’t read but will try to find summaries of at some later date. Hugo can be obscurely comforting on his better days.

  I bury my head back in the couch cushion and count to twenty. I forgot how utterly quiet it is here.

  Honey is still asleep, going on three hours, a miracle. Poor monkey. She must be very tired and mixed-up. I go back out on the porch to smoke. Cindy Cooper steps out onto her porch at the same time and we exchange a formal wave. “Hello,” I say. “Hello,” she says. “Haven’t seen anyone up at the house in a while,” and I say “I’m Jeannie’s daughter,” and she says “Yep I remember, I met Rodney a few times.” She lights what looks like a Capri 120. “What brings you up here?” “Well, I have the baby” and she nods and says “How old” just as I am starting to say “Well I just wanted to show her—” and I decide to forge ahead “—the place now that she’s a little bit older, check on the house. Ah, she’s almost sixteen months about.” Cindy nods. She looks to be in her late forties and has long thin brown hair and mild rosacea on her cheeks and some weight around her middle and slouches down into her lower back, one arm resting across her paunch, the other bringing her slim cigarette back and forth to her mouth. I am having a little pity party on her behalf until I catch a glimpse of myself in the sliding glass door, a pudgy apparition like a Cindy of yesteryear. In those first eight weeks or so after Honey was born I can’t believe how good I looked, I mean I never looked better in my life. The weight just incinerated right off, for one. They tell you that breastfeeding will ruin your boobs, but they don’t tell you that if you’re small-breasted they’ll first flare out into archetypal perfection and give you just long enough to become accustomed to filling out a dress properly. It’s not just your original body that you can’t get back—you can’t get your pregnant body back either. Since weaning I’m heavy across the shoulders and hips and thighs, and the pouch that Honey vacated has achieved greater prominence. And my boobs—now they are little coin purses, the overall effect being that my body is much smaller on the top and much bigger on the bottom.

  Cindy’s placid reaction to my arrival is a good reminder that the exigencies of my situation may not be immediately clear to anyone else. It is anyway a true statement on its face. I am visiting the house, which is my house and Honey is my child. I have not stolen, except for the laptop, which I will at some point return. We are fine here. I know with my lizard brain that it is not my fault that a twenty-year-old girl is dead, even though other parts of my brain, say, the part that manufactures dreams, are still not sure. When my mom was mad at me in adolescence she told me I was a “hard creature” and sometimes I think that’s true and sometimes I don’t think I’m any harder than anybody else. But Cindy doesn’t need to know all this. I put out my cigarette and say “See you later” and step inside and Honey has started to coo and I feel a legitimate surge of happiness at the prospect of seeing her face searching for mine from within the closet dark.

  I get her out of the Pack ’n Play and change her diaper and she kicks her legs and grins at me and I put my mouth on her stomach and blow and she grabs my hair and pulls hard. If she is confused about our situation she doesn’t show it. I like to think actually that she is having a nice time scooting across the wall-to-wall carpet. Moreover due to my smart forward thinking of the morning I have a nicely roasted sweet potato to feed her. I mush this up and fry her an egg and cut it into small pieces and wash some blueberries and arrange them around the side of the plate and set her in her high chair with her sippy cup of milk and the feast before her. She has very good motor control and uses her little spoon to scoop up the sweet potato and before long the plate is empty and I feel the atavistic pleasure of having provided a reasonably balanced meal for my child with things that I made or had, requiring no angst no digging no last-minute run to the store no cooking plain noodles with butter because there was nothing else in the house. Whenever I have this feeling which is maybe full force in one-third of meals and a faint glow in one-fourth, I think I could live on the feeling, like this could sustain me as a life pursuit, but it only lasts a few minutes and then there’s the next meal to think of by which time I’ve usually decided to go to the Chinese place around the corner where we go at least once a week.

  I smear some sunscreen on Honey and take her outside in her T-shirt, her little diapered butt shuttling back and forth while she runs unsteadily around on the grass periodically sitting down hard on her butt. I make to chase her and she shrieks and I think good good this is fine and I run and scoop her up and fall onto my back squeezing her and cover her face with kisses and she screams with joy.

  The proprietress of Honey’s home daycare speaks to the babies in Cantonese. Engin is very distressed that he is not here to speak to her in Turkish, and asks me every time we talk whether his linguistic interests are being represented. I have told him that based on my limited understanding of human speech development, it’s no good for a nonnative speaker to talk to a baby, because the essential somethingness of it won’t be transferred. Engin feels however that hearing something is better than hearing nothing. What’s interesting to me is that on the rare occasions when I do force myself to speak Turkish to Honey beyond the terms of endearment that I use to give our conversation at least a sort of Turkish affect, she looks at me with perceptible puzzlement. She knows enough to know that I’m doing something different from what I normally do, which makes me feel both proud of her for being so discerning and bad that I’m being an American imperialist parent and boxing her dad out of her cultural formation. It has always been my policy to speak English to her because I pride myself on my English and Engin’s English is good not great and frankly a bit of a mystery since he so seldom uses it. But I want Honey’s Englis
h to be native perfect because English is her mother tongue and mine and I’m helpless not to love it, full of senseless grammar and airless flat vowels though it is. I have to remind myself, Engin is her father and we are married and his interests must be represented and I want her to be fully bilingual, trilingual even. It’s a gift a gift a gift to speak another language, my deepest wish is that I could do it effortlessly, that I was born to it.

  I look at my watch and once again we have missed the window to speak to Engin who is by now back in Istanbul but in bed probably after trying fruitlessly to Skype us again and again and I go limp and lay back on the grass staring up at the unsmiling blue sky and wonder when they are going to get some fucking cell service up here. I have at this point developed a shadow sense of time like two clocks on a banker’s wall, San Francisco and Istanbul, but so far having this shadow sense does not translate into actually timing my actions appropriately to contact him at the right time, and usually this just means that I am perpetually feeling harassed to make contact in our circumscribed window. During the week I am rushing too much to get to work to have a meaningful morning conversation. Engin is a night owl but Honey comes home at 6:00 and goes to bed at 7:00 which is 5:00 a.m. Engin time so typically we have a brief viewing on weekday mornings so he can at least look at her and exchange kisses, and then I call him before I go to bed and we can actually talk, which actually I hate, it’s boring to talk to someone on the phone every day. In the beginning there was a siege mentality—the Emergency had happened and there was the painful but necessary recounting and commiseration re: hours spent on hold with fucking USCIS and the NVC, there were action items and fact-finding and document checks and sharing of information. But now we are stalled waiting for something to happen and we talk about the future as though it’s a fantasy island we both know we’ll never see. I know that calls in these long-distance situations are not really about the sharing of news but about the maintenance of connection, the assurance that each party still exists and is living breathing in the world sending love across the sea, not to mention reassuring our child that her father still exists and giving him some glimpse of the true love of his life, but it’s come to feel like another fucking obligation. I know women who live apart from their men who keep Skype on in the background to chat while they cook or clean up the living room or paint their nails, but I do enough inane pointless narration at Honey. It’s easier to have TV shows on; the show doesn’t need anything from you. So I go about life thinking of Engin as something like my partner in a challenging and as-of-yet mostly unprofitable business venture, waiting for our ship to come in, until those moments when I really remember what he is like and would give anything to be sitting next to him on the couch, laughing with our shoulders together and Honey across our laps.