At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  Mostly he listened. He could be kind of scarily attentive, actually, sipping tea from his Thermos, staring. He started sitting in on the post-dinner meditations sometimes, folded and still on a cushion in the corner of the room. He became like the apartment’s mascot, an actual wanderer whose strangeness lit up the rest of them. When he wasn’t meditating, he was either staring out the front window, trying to feed pieces of Ready Brek to the little black birds, or typing furiously on other people’s computers (he was always appearing next to your partition and asking, in a voice so quiet you almost couldn’t hear it, if he could borrow yours).

  He started going to Guruji’s Sunday-evening discourses, sometimes staying at the center all night afterward. He walked barefoot through the market where he’d almost died, patting children and goats on the head, chewing salty-sticky squash seeds that you could buy wrapped in newspaper for five rupees. Every June Guruji gave a six-week series of introductions to the practice, and this happened to be when Thomas had come into the picture.

  Practice? Discourses? At this point, the people I was talking to became hard to pin down. Not, I didn’t think, out of any sense of secrecy; it was more just the weirdness of explaining to an outsider something absolutely fundamental. See, there’s this thing humans do every night where they lie down and close their eyes and just sort of wait for strange visions to come …

  Anyway, here’s what I got: Sri Prabhakara was a spiritual mini-celebrity who’d somehow cultivated, over the past couple of decades, a group of foreigners who bought his pamphlet-looking books, listened to his crappily recorded talks, and, if they were especially devoted, flew to Delhi and spent a few months living in one of the barsati apartments near his center. Once they were there they’d go on retreats and take classes on his precepts and do the sort of work (scrubbing toilets, sweeping stairs) that interns and cult members are best at. Guruji was uneducated, a former shopkeeper, and he wasn’t associated with any particular religion or group; he was an all-purpose expert in suffering, the self, the veils beyond the veils, etc. When he was young he’d been taught by Sri Something-or-Other, who’d been taught by an even holier Sri Something-or-Other, and so on and so on back to the beginning of time.

  Thomas had apparently revealed himself, over the course of those six weeks, as being especially adept (is it weird that I felt a flicker of jealousy at first hearing this?). Guruji had taken an interest in him from the first time they’d talked, and by the end of June (when we were exchanging emails and I was doing data entry not much more interesting than toilet scrubbing), Thomas was meditating more than anyone in the apartment. He’d spend whole days cross-legged on his corner of the roof, or walking slow lines back and forth along the railing. At some point he’d shaved his head; he’d memorized the precepts; he’d tied the red string around his wrist that was the symbol for having given yourself over to the practice. And after just a couple of months—less time than anyone had ever heard of it taking—Guruji had declared Thomas ready for the retreats that were, apparently, something like final exams. First a day alone in the center (the center, which I walked past on my second night, looked like a low-on-funding public library). Then a couple of days of fasting in the forest. Then another couple of days of walking along the bank of the Yamuna while contemplating death. Then finally, if each of those had gone well (not the usual course of events, apparently), a week in a cave in the Kumaon Hills, where Sri Prabhakara and the various Sris before him had all achieved their enlightenments.

  Thomas still wasn’t anything like normal looking by the time he started on his retreats; if you’d passed him on the street you would have thought he was homeless and/or starving. But compared to how he’d looked before, he could have been in Men’s Health. He must have gained ten or fifteen pounds since moving into the barsati, and he’d taken to wearing a pair of baby-blue pajamas that one of the girls had lent him, so at least his clothes weren’t rags. He did the day at the center, the nights in the forest, and the walk by the river all without a problem, but then in July, just when he was about to go off to the cave (he’d been training himself for the dark by sitting between retreats in the supply closet), he’d disappeared.

  Weren’t they worried that he’d died? That he’d maybe tripped on a rock going into the cave and bled to death at the foot of some godforsaken Indian mountain? No, apparently he’d never left Delhi at all. A couple of people knew people who said they’d seen him since then, back in the Paharganj bazaar, almost as skinny and filthy as he’d been when they first took him in, or else meditating in various places around the city, like the star of a Where’s Waldo? for spiritual expats. This must have been the phase when he wrote me the note about the Batras. A spiritual nomad, wandering the streets with his pajamas and Thermos, just sane enough to duck into an Internet café and terrify me.

  And did he ever, I asked Cecilia, mention anything about a girl named Mira or a family named the Batras? (Saying her name out loud, which I’d never done with anyone other than Thomas, felt bizarre and reckless, like walking naked up to the hostess at a restaurant.)

  “No, I don’t think so. Who are they?”

  “I’m not sure. He just mentioned them in a couple of emails.”

  “Sorry. He almost never talked about his personal life. It’s hard to think of him even having one.”

  What seems weirdest to me, in retrospect (one of the many things that seems weird to me), is how readily I accepted all this, how little I wondered at it being my Thomas Pell these people were talking about. I seemed to be carrying into waking life something like the attitude I took when I was dreaming.

  Which in some sense I guess I was: I’d seen a bejeweled, wet-eyed elephant (guest of honor at a wedding party) lumbering along the side of a highway. I’d seen a three-story statue of a He-Man monkey towering over a town square in which shrink-wrapped Paulo Coelho books were arranged on card tables next to copies of Mein Kampf. I’d seen a bearded, half-naked man crawling on all fours, except his hands were twisted inward, so really he was dragging himself along with his elbows; a little girl with scarred lumps where her eyes should have been; a woman whose head seemed to have been held in a fire. At some point the sleeping/waking distinction had begun to blur.

  But still: people from Dupont Prep, people who’d never missed a meal in their lives unless they had to make up a test during lunch—people like that didn’t end up homeless and half dead in Delhi. It just didn’t happen.

  Except apparently to Thomas.

  He’d told me once, when we were fourteen, that the only belief system he’d ever been able to take seriously was empiricism (I’d nodded thoughtfully, and made a note to check Encarta when I got home). Well, the data were clear: the only people who had any idea what had happened to him were the types who keep Ziploc baggies of bee pollen on the kitchen counter and have their minds unselfconsciously blown by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Apparently I needed to take whatever I thought I knew about him, whatever I thought I knew about what he would or wouldn’t do, and toss it into the blue-smoking garbage fire I passed each afternoon on my way back to the apartment.

  From:

  To:

  Date: Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 2:56 AM

  Subject: re: (no subject)

  … Until I was twenty-one I had never, I don’t think you could say, experienced true fear, of course I knew conventional fear, I’d known fear of being caught, but never as a bodily emergency, never so overwhelming that you’d kill yourself just to end it if you could only move. The first was on a date, a girl I wanted very much to impress, I’d worn a blazer, I became afraid, we were at a movie in Lincoln Center, I became convinced sitting in the dark that I had left the iron plugged in back in my room. More and more certain, until I couldn’t see the screen, I smelled smoke, I saw the boy who lived next to me on fire, I could see his cheeks burning, his lips melting, his teeth bare as a skull, I ran from the theater, north on Broadway, couldn’t speak, fought through crowds, thinking of ja
il, thinking of grief, telling his parents, my life would end, and there was nothing, of course, it wasn’t plugged in at all, but I didn’t feel relief, I felt empty … After that I could see each fear coming, small in the distance, fear of cancer, fear of being mugged, fear of loneliness, fear of insanity, then closer and closer, larger and larger, I dreaded them, begged myself please no, I wouldn’t be able to move, would have to lie in bed and shake, I never knew cold sweats, each morning I would wake up with wet sheets, meanwhile classes, meanwhile tests, meanwhile I couldn’t sleep, night was the worst, I’d never been afraid of the dark, you know, suddenly I’d sleep with the door open, or in the library, once or twice out on one of the lawns, a security guard told me to move along, thought I was homeless, I showed him my ID, he didn’t care, thought I was drunk. Fear is muscular, cardiovascular, I had never been so tired, constant ache of having just been sick, constant dread, fear of fear. I would think, in quiet moments, how did I once meet people, walk down sidewalks, stand in elevators, how did I go about unterrified, what a miracle, what a feat, all these people uncelebrated in every room, they could do what I couldn’t, no one appreciates the stacking of days, the launching of a personal space shuttle, we who can’t, we Challenger explosions, shake in bed, stare at our knuckles. They don’t tell you, no one does, that losing your mind is, more than anything else, terrifying …

  From:

  To:

  Date: Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 8:12 AM

  Subject: re: thank you

  I’m afraid in any honest version of these past few years we’re going to come across as just about the most naive people on Earth. For our sakes, just keep in mind how much we wanted to believe he was all right.

  For much too long (easy to say now), we figured this was a blip. Our Thomas would never drop out of school! This was the boy who used to make us all read short stories together instead of watching TV. This was the pride of AP Chemistry.

  So getting him off to college, we really thought we’d done it, we’d gotten this package out into the world. After we moved him into his dorm we stopped for dinner in New Jersey, and I just looked at Richard and said, “Now what?” Because for eighteen years we’d been following this recipe. Giving him trumpet lessons; hiring tutors; taking him to plays; reading him books; driving his carpool; tying his shoes; zipping his jacket; wiping his bottom; drying his tears; cooling his fevers; removing his warts; trimming his hair. And now we were done! He was grown up.

  But then he came home, and I just couldn’t believe that this twenty-one-year-old needed more help than he had when he was eleven. You know something strange I’d sometimes think? That he might be faking. Or not faking, but playing up the drama of things a little, as part of the genius act. He was always so self-aware about that type of thing, how old Einstein had been when he’d gone off to college, all that.

  … You do feel awfully embarrassed, bad as that sounds. At first I’d lie to people. I’d hear neighbors say they’d seen him going to the mailbox (that was as far as he’d go, at first) and I’d say he was just home for a visit. Some people didn’t recognize him. Anne Wicker (she lives on Macomb, knew Thomas since he was five years old) asked did we have a relative in town, because she’d seen a skinny guy with a beard. Sometimes I was so mad I couldn’t look at him. I wanted to say, Don’t you know there are people in the world with actual diseases? Don’t you know how much hurt you’re causing your father? Sometimes I didn’t recognize him. It just wasn’t our Thomas.

  He’d been home for maybe six months when we first heard him going out at night. I remember thinking, Good Lord, what next? So I sent Richard out to follow him. I figured what he was doing was going out and buying drugs. He’d sworn up and down he wasn’t on any, but I just couldn’t think what else made sense. I had the whole TV movie in my head: flushing things down toilets, tying him to the bed, really having it out.

  But all he was doing, it turned out, was walking. Just like you two used to do, except alone. He’d walk a few blocks, stop in front of somebody’s house, lie down, get up again. One of those mornings I said, “We heard you going out last night.”

  “Oh.”

  I said, “Where’d you go?”

  “For a walk.”

  I cried like I hadn’t in years, once we really knew it wasn’t drugs. Can you imagine?

  A problem with trying to accomplish anything when you’re visiting a place like Delhi is that just living, getting up in the morning and staying on your feet until it’s time to go to bed at night, feels like such an accomplishment already. I felt like the world’s most incompetent private detective. Only instead of my incompetence turning out to be a tricky sort of asset, where I’d stumble onto the bad guys in their lair like the Pink Panther, I was going to end up stabbed and tubercular in a gutter, picked over by wild dogs, no closer to finding Thomas than if I’d never left D.C.

  Never mind finding Thomas; just finding the hotel where I was supposed to meet Guruji’s assistant (this was the major chore of my first week) somehow turned into a three-hour adventure. First the auto-rickshaw driver (auto-rickshaws were what people called the Flintstones cars, it turned out) misheard the address I gave him and took me, through unspeakable traffic, to Chandni Chowk when I wanted to be taken to Barahkhamba Road. Then, once I’d found another auto-rickshaw to take me back, and once I’d finally found the right street, the hotel turned out to be three-quarters closed due to construction. Then, trying to find somewhere to email Raymond to say I’d be late, I got lost in the electronics/Styrofoam district, and by the time I made it back to the hotel, another entrance had been marked off with caution tape. I was never unsweaty. I was never rested. I was never entirely uninterested in finding a bathroom.

  In a roundabout way, all this difficulty was reassuring. If I, sane and healthy and armed with Lonely Planet: India, was finding Delhi hard to navigate, then Thomas must have found it impossible. He could no more have found the Batras, assuming they were really there, than he could have found a particular pebble on the beach.

  But of course I couldn’t mention reassurance to the Pells. My dispatches, which I usually sent from an Internet café on the second floor of a coffee shop around the corner from the barsati, must have read like the journal entries Scott wrote as he was dying in the South Pole.

  Another day of sweating and frustratingly little news about Thomas. I seem to be getting sick, so may try to get an appointment with a doctor. Electricity broken in the apartment.

  Walked around Old Delhi today, where Thomas apparently did one of his “retreats.” One of the most insane and overwhelming places I’ve ever been. Very steamy tonight. Electricity still spotty. No word on if/when I’ll be able to see Sri P.

  I never knew how much to say to them; they’d known bits about Thomas and his guru beforehand, from their own calls to people who’d lived in the apartment, but they hadn’t known the details of his being homeless, or anything about the retreats. Out of Lost Boys solidarity, or maybe just out of cowardice, no one in the apartment had wanted to tell his parents much about what he’d been doing, and it turned out that I didn’t either.

  But for myself, for the purposes of my own search, I’d been spending most of my time trying to meet Guruji. If I was going to say that I’d made a real effort to find Thomas—if I was going to go back to D.C. feeling any less ashamed of myself than when I’d left—then I needed to at least talk to him. But apparently meeting Guruji wasn’t going to be any easier than anything else; he’d been sick now for a month. Something with his heart, apparently, that people kept explaining by using a word that sounded like bicuspid. (At the barsati they’d been burning joss sticks and taking turns reading his old talks out loud.)

  But Guruji was definitely still in Delhi, Cecilia said; he’d never left the city in his life, and he’d never been to a hospital. He also didn’t use a phone or computer, so if you wanted to reach him, you had to write to Raymond, the man who handled all his worldly affairs.

  From: Sanecki>

  To:

  Hi Raymond —

  I’m a friend of Thomas Pell’s, and I was wondering if it might be possible for me to meet with Sri Prabhakara sometime in the next few days.

  Thanks in advance for your help,

  Adam Sanecki

  From:

  To:

  Vnerabl SP’s time v limtd, apol, mtng not poss. [stat: UNCONFIRMED.]

  From:

  To:

  Hi Raymond —

  I’m not sure I understood your email. I realize Sri Prabhakara must have lots of people tugging at his sleeve, but I’d hugely appreciate it if you would give some more thought to whether it would be possible for me to meet with him, even just for a few minutes. I’m not hoping for a spiritual consultation; I’m interested in talking with him about Thomas Pell, who I have good reason to think may be in some sort of trouble.

  Thanks,