At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  I was too much in shock from the afternoon to know what I felt about anything, really. I wanted to write to Nicholas and tell him I was sorry I hadn’t gotten to say good-bye. I wanted to confess my sins and become a monk.

  The next day I got a message from Barbara that I could only stand to listen to the first few seconds of.

  Adam, I don’t know where you are right now or what’s going on, but you really need to call me, really need to call me, because I just had one of the most disturbing conversations of my life and I am freaking out because …

  I spent the rest of that week in the apartment, in my bedroom, like Saddam Hussein in his spider hole. I gathered, from the quality of light in my one high window, that it was beautiful outside, but I had no real idea. Eventually I turned off my phone. I told Joel I was fine but I needed to be left alone for a while. Every couple of hours I worked myself into a panic that I was going to be in some kind of legal trouble, which would send me to the computer, where I’d lose myself in dozens of pages of useless, panic-worsening discussion threads about people with distantly related, or not at all related, problems.

  On one of these afternoons I opened my computer and there was an email from Claire.

  Hey you. Is this totally awkward? I was all convinced that I definitely shouldn’t write to you and that you might still be mad at me, or that I should be mad at you or something, but I’m kind of hoping all that’s passed. Has it? I definitely feel on my end like there’s been some kind of clearing up. Or maybe I just miss you? Or maybe the weather’s just nice? Hard to say. But if you’re still around and if you feel like getting a cup of coffee, consider me up for it.

  x,

  C

  I understood that I’d been waiting for a note like this for a long time, that some important emotional buttons were being pushed, but for the moment the wiring in me all seemed to be disconnected. Hard to say. My adult life, which I’d thought I could build over the mess of my teenage life, had collapsed around me with a kind of beautiful speed. Sometimes I thought I was going to end up in jail, sometimes I thought I was going to end up driving into the Chesapeake Bay. My forearms were noticeably bigger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a glass of water.

  Barbara sent me a letter on Capitol Tutoring letterhead telling me that I was in no way associated with the company, and that if I sought contact with Peter or Anna or any of the Raffertys, she was leaving open the possibility of legal action.

  Claire sent me another email, this one saying she should never have reached out to me and that she wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  My mom called to say that they hadn’t heard from me in ages and they were making flatbreads on the grill for dinner if I felt like coming by.

  All of a sudden I had plenty of room in my life for thinking about Thomas. Room for thinking about everything.

  I didn’t sleep the night of the accident (one of the very few nights in my life about which I can say this unequivocally), and the next morning, under a sun like a bare bulb hanging just overhead, I had to walk down to Connecticut to get to the Metro to go to work. It was just after nine and it was already ninety degrees; throwing up seemed like a possibility that my body was just barely able to keep from becoming mandatory.

  You’d think that coming upon the actual scene of the crash for the first time would have been momentous and horrible, but one effect of not sleeping is that everything starts to feel gauzy. Even if I’d slept eight sound hours on a feather bed, though, there might have been something dreamlike about it: hundreds of cars obliviously pushing their way toward work, sealed against the heat, getting honked at by buses.

  Here was all the evidence I could see, in the few seconds I let myself slow down on the corner: an inside-out surgical glove in the gutter and a forked maroon trail in the middle of the road, about which my first thought was: Isn’t it weird that someone would have spilled something here that looks so much like blood? Because you’d think that actual blood would have had to announce itself, it would have had to be cordoned off or cleaned up or at least somehow set apart from the flattened 7-Eleven cups and Lotto receipts. Otherwise what was to keep someone from mistaking it for raspberry syrup or for the kind of fake blood that comes in a white tube and that we used to squeeze onto the corners of our mouths before the Halloween parade? What was to keep a dog, like the German shepherd now walking past with its nose to the ground, from licking it up?

  The worst of my suffering in those next few days—which felt like being poisoned, a freezing empty charge moving through me—came over me maybe once an hour, whether I was awake or asleep, helping to stack the nap mats at work or standing in the corner of my bedroom talking to Thomas on the phone. Each time I’d think: I can’t tolerate it, I’m going insane. This must be why people turn themselves in for things. But then it would … not pass, exactly, but slip back into some more inner part of my nervous system, leaving me sore and shaken, and I’d think, OK, I’ll survive, it won’t ever feel that bad again, and I’d try to more or less go about my life until it happened again.

  That the woman hadn’t died was the thing I clung to, the fact I muttered thanks for when I was lying clammy in my bed at night, waiting to fall asleep. Thomas had had to hunt in the back pages of the Post for any mention of it (I’d pictured three-inch front-page headlines, global manhunts). We called what happened, when we talked about it, the “Occurrence at Owl Creek,” and we both understood that he was going to have to be the one who monitored the news; within an hour of the accident I’d realized that he wasn’t in as much danger of falling apart as I was, that his coldness or his detachment or whatever it was that made him him was going to be the vessel that got us through this.

  The first story was on page A27:

  PEDESTRIAN HIT BY CAR ON CONNECTICUT

  A Cleveland Park woman is in critical condition at Sibley Memorial Hospital after being struck by a car close to midnight on Thursday. Charles Lowe, 41, was cited after his vehicle struck Mira Batra, 22, who was attempting to cross Connecticut Avenue near Macomb Street. Lt. Joseph La Porta of the Cleveland Park Police said that alcohol was not a factor in the accident.

  So she hadn’t died. So we weren’t killers. These were like rosary beads that I never let out of my sweaty hands. (And finding out that she was twenty-two meant almost nothing to me, or nothing more than any other age would have. Twenty-two, when I was fifteen, seemed solidly adult.)

  Another thing that kept me from collapsing completely was the idea, which didn’t seem quite so insane at the time, that maybe our car hadn’t had anything to do with the accident after all. Just a terrible coincidence. In middle school we’d read a short story in our dreary blue English class anthology called “The Necklace,” about a woman who borrows a diamond necklace from a rich friend for a party. She loses it, then spends the rest of her life miserably trying to earn enough money to buy a new one, only to find out on the last page that it was a fake diamond in the first place. (“But it was only a paste!” was the big, tragic reveal; the impact of this line in class was undercut by Mrs. Fleche’s monotone reading voice and the fact that none of us knew what “paste” meant.) Anyway, I kept thinking, and trying to convince Thomas to think, that we might be ruining our lives over something that really hadn’t been our fault: maybe the woman had been trying to kill herself; maybe the man driving the SUV had been falling asleep; maybe our car actually hadn’t rolled so far out into the road as it had seemed at the time. Who could really say?

  Driver says second car cause of Connecticut pedestrian accident; police seek witnesses.

  When you’re in a state of mind like I was for those couple of weeks, everything you hear takes on terrifying undertones. A few days after that second story ran we were eating dinner at Thomas’s when Sally said, “Admit it—were you out partying? You two look like you could just drop,” and I couldn’t answer right away because I couldn’t breathe. Police cars cried, A-dam, A-dam, A-dam. I saw a man on the street with a bald head like the SUV
driver’s and the cable snapped on an elevator in my chest.

  That Saturday morning we were driving with Thomas’s dad to the Potomac to watch a regatta, pulling the same car into the same intersection, and Richard seemed to stop for a full minute before he turned onto Connecticut, as if the car were whispering to him. And in fact he did horribly say, not then but on the way back, “You know somebody got hit crossing right around here? You be careful when you’re out walking around at night.”

  “We are,” Thomas said. “Do we have any cream cheese at home?”

  In one of the terrible dreams I had, starting that week and repeating for months afterward, I was standing in the middle of a highway knowing I was going to be run over and praying that the next car would be the one, that it would be done already.

  “I don’t understand how you’re not more insane about this,” I said one afternoon when Thomas and I were sitting on stumps in the homeless encampment, where we hadn’t been for months. It was that part of the end of summer in D.C. when the gnats gather around your head, trying to be swallowed.

  “I am, it’s bad. It’s really bad. But it’s just us who know, literally just the two of us. So if we don’t panic, I don’t think anything’s going to come of it.”

  “But how do you have a choice about whether to panic?”

  “What do you want me to do? Bite my nails? Punch something?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. But maybe you should acknowledge that because of you—”

  “Because of us.”

  “Because of you! You! I would never have been so fucking stupid!” By that age I’d learned how not to cry, but only by putting my face and voice through contortions that were every bit as weird looking as crying.

  But no matter how mad I got (and I did, in that conversation or another one, tell Thomas I hated him and that I was so sick of his fucking face that I never wanted to see him again), we were stuck together, closer, in a way, than we’d ever been before. My interactions with every other person in the world—the bizarrely sweet head counselor Carlotta at work; my mom, who would find me staring on the couch and ask if she could make me a sandwich; the homeless man who shivered all summer in his trench coat on the steps at the Friendship Heights Metro station—all of them took place on a stage, under lights, according to a script that couldn’t have had any less to do with what I actually felt than if I’d been playing Mary Poppins. The only backstage I had was with Thomas. Only with him could I say, “This whole thing is really the fucking baddy,” and feel that the pipeline between my brain and my mouth was finally, for a minute at least, open.

  CLEVELAND PARK WOMAN, 22, DIES AFTER BEING HIT BY CAR ON CONNECTICUT.

  When Thomas handed me the newspaper (we were sitting side by side on his bed, where we’d looked at New Yorker cartoons in seventh grade, where he’d shown me his drawings of Michelle Koller), I thought, for what turned out to be a last breath before going underwater, that this was about a different person. Connecticut was seriously dangerous for pedestrians, was the point, and it could always have been worse.

  A Cleveland Park woman, Mira Batra, 22, has died after being struck by a car early on August 7. The cause, according to a spokesman for Sibley Memorial Hospital, was internal injuries sustained in the accident. The driver who struck her, Charles Lowe of Fairfax, has cited a second car as the cause of the accident. Police continue to investigate. Ms. Batra is survived by her parents, Manish and Amita Batra, also of Cleveland Park, and her brother, Ajay Batra, 29, of Baltimore. A memorial service is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Hindu Temple of Greater Washington, D.C.

  “What do we do?” I said. I meant it on every scale: How do we live our lives? How do we go back downstairs? How do we survive the next minute?

  Thomas shook his head, making a face I didn’t recognize right away that meant that he was crying; it was the kind of crying, silent and painful looking, that can turn, with no warning, into wailing. But instead of wailing he managed to say, “See? Happy now? Better if I fall apart?”

  I shook my head like a dog shaking water from its ears.

  I wasn’t, and I’m still not, the kind of person who knows what to do when people cry (I’ve had more than one girlfriend interrupt her tears to ask me why the hell I’m just sitting there like a mannequin), but just then I didn’t wonder at all: I put a hand on Thomas’s back and kept it there as he lay down, kept it there as I lay down next to him, didn’t say a word as his breathing slowed down and as he finally, after what felt like half an hour, started shuddering less and less. The newspaper had fallen somewhere between the mattress and the wall. I found myself staring at a birthmark on the back of his neck, just above where my hand was, and every time I started to panic I made myself notice one new thing about it (a whitish hair, a pinprick red dot), and like that, vaguely comforted by the thought that at least whatever was going to happen would have to happen to both of us, I got through the hour.

  “Thomas?” I said at one point, as if he might have somehow managed to die. “Thomas?” But he was, like a baby after a bottle or a criminal after being caught, asleep.

  At some point in the spider-hole weeks after the Anna fiasco, I decided I couldn’t live anymore with Joel. The darkness of my bedroom, the cereal bowls soaking in the sink, the mildewy towels hanging on the bathroom door—they weren’t the cause of what had gone wrong in my life, but they were tangled up in it. So I called my mom one night (“I’d almost forgotten what you sound like!”) and asked her to talk to Frank about whether any of his new apartments happened to be empty.

  My stepdad, who’d made (and was continuing to make) more money as a lawyer than he had any idea what to do with, had bought a few apartments in a new condo in downtown Bethesda. He had the vague idea that he’d sell all but one, which he and my mom would move into when they retired, but I think he mostly just wanted something to talk about, to ask his secretary to make phone calls about, to keep track of now that they’d renovated every renovatable room in their current house. It’s in the nature of empires to expand.

  Adam, Mom tells me you’re interested in apartment possibility. Give a call so we can discuss. Thanks. —F

  As a stepfather Frank was uncomfortable (I remember once, when we were at the grocery store without my mom, that I reached up to tap his arm, and for a second, before he caught himself, he recoiled as if a stray dog had nosed him), but as a landlord he was a natural.

  I moved in that weekend, and I realized, settling in that first night on my mattress on the floor, looking out over the empty brick courtyard with its Lululemon and artisanal gelato, that I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. No girlfriend to know where I was. No roommate to stand in my doorway asking me to go out. Didn’t Lee Harvey Oswald have an apartment like this? I came home at the end of each day (for rent I was organizing files at Frank’s firm, sitting at the desk of a recently fired paralegal) and took the elevator to the ninth floor, where I’d lock my apartment door and proceed to make and break elaborate rules about when it was OK to start looking at porn and drinking.

  I’d long since given in to both porn and drinking, and to the empty seasick feeling that came afterward, on the night when Sally wrote to me again.

  From:

  To:

  Date: Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 8:58 PM

  Subject: old friend

  Dear Adam,

  I’ve been thinking about you since we ran into each other last month, and I keep thinking of things I should have said. In person I’m too polite, so I’m just going to be as honest as I can.

  Adam, we’re desperate. I’m not a writer like Richard, so I can’t tell you how awful these past few months have been (and they’ve been even worse for Richard than for me). I don’t know how much you know about what’s going on, but we’re losing Thomas, and if there’s anything we can do to get him back, you can bet we’re going to do it.

  So I’m writing to ask a favor. (“Favor” doesn’t sound right, but oh well.
) I’m asking you to care. I know this must sound like some nagging teacher, and I’m sorry. But I know that for everyone there are people on the outside and there are people on the inside, and what I’m asking you to do, I guess, is to move Thomas in.

  I don’t know whether this means coming to see us or writing him a letter or even (God help me) going to look for him. But the first step is just to want to help him. I think you might be able to get through to him in a way that we can’t anymore. I know it’s all ancient history and probably very silly to you, but I think you still mean an awful lot to him. He never had another friend like you. I think he might still say you’re his best friend, even now.

  I’m rambling now. What I really want to make sure you know is just that your old friend, skinny Thomas Pell, is drowning. We all are, and we’re reaching out to you for help. Let me know if you’re willing to lend a hand.

  Sally

  Certain emails I read and then slam my laptop shut, as if I might be able to keep whatever news is in them from leaking out into my life. This was one of those, but none of my tricks—not shutting the computer, not even opening a new bottle of Cutty Sark—seemed to be working: the leak had already started. We’re reaching out to you for help. A very bad idea, was all I could think. Your old friend is drowning. Well, so was I.

  Remembering the accident, after spending a serious chunk of my life avoiding thinking about it, I’ve found myself wondering: So how did the guilt not kill me? How did I manage to go to class or apply to college or to worry about girls or to do anything, really, other than pay secret visits to Mira Batra’s grave and weep?