At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  Adam Sanecki

  From:

  To:

  Pls snd q’s IN WRITING- VSP v busy, face-to-f mtng not poss- stndrd proc re all official inq’s- [stat, pending frther rev: UNCONFIRMED]

  From:

  To:

  Hi Raymond—

  I don’t have a list of questions (I’m not any sort of official), so I think this would be a lot easier in person. I’m not a reporter or detective or anything else—my interest is purely personal.

  Thanks again for your help,

  Adam Sanecki

  From:

  To:

  VSP hlth v poor- intvw (WRITTEN/SPKEN) at pres imposs-[stat: UNCONFIRMED]

  This went on for days, like a meander through the circles of customer service hell, until finally, just an hour after he’d written to me for a third time to say that no meeting would be possible, Raymond sent an email with the subject line “URGENT”:

  From:

  To:

  VSP requests mtng- mo 3/8 14:30 - Cont Hotel sw side-V IMP: NO CAMERA- NO REC EQUIP- CLEAN SHOES-OFFRING OF VALRH 85% DRK CHOC- [20oz]- car to wait [stat: CONF. PENDING]

  So, just before two p.m. on my seventh day in India, after hours of auto-rickshaws and traffic cones, I stood alone outside what I was fairly sure was the southwest entrance of the Continental Hotel, wearing Rory’s basically clean size-nine penny loafers. In a plastic bag I had a worrisomely softening Valrhona chocolate bar, the procuring of which had been a morning’s work. I kept mistaking the tickle of sweat on my nose for a bug. Just when I was getting ready to go back into the lobby to see if I could convince the woman at the front desk to let me use the business center, an auto-rickshaw pulled to a stop and a disheveled, white-haired stork of a man unfolded himself from the passenger’s seat.

  “Adam? Raymond Broughton. In we go; you sit in back, please. Just shove my stick off the side. Drive, drive, drive.”

  Raymond was British; he looked to be about eighty, and he seemed to have dressed for a safari weeks or months ago and then not bothered to change. Stray feathers of white hair flapped from the sides of his head; his glasses made his eyes look like things preserved in jars. We were going straight to Guruji’s home, apparently. Raymond couldn’t have given me the address over email, of course. There were people who would very much like to know where Sri Prabhakara laid his head, as I must have known. The government was terribly frightened of him, terribly frightened, ever since the campaign in ‘84. Whether I ended up speaking to Guruji would of course depend on how he happened to be feeling just then, and there was quite a good chance, unfortunately, that he might not be feeling well at all. Sometimes these notions did overtake him; his ambitions were greater than his health. Was I staying at the Continental? That was the only place Raymond ever allowed guests to stay, because at all the rest of the hotels in central Delhi you were assured of being robbed, either by bandits or by the room rates. Was I familiar with Guruji’s forty-four precepts and twelve injunctions?

  While he talked he rummaged through my plastic bag and pulled out the chocolate bar, which he unwrapped and began to eat. “Dreadful for my teeth, really, but vital for the rest of me.” Whenever our auto-rickshaw stopped or even slowed down, he slapped the back of the driver’s seat and barked, “Chalo! Chalo! Chalo!” pointing in the direction of an alleged gap in the traffic. “They benefit from a bit of force, you know. Wonderful people but absolutely complacent.”

  We drove along a wide, dusty road through a part of town that looked something like Embassy Row in D.C., past trees with seedpods like brown leather baseballs. Guruji’s building turned out to be half an hour from the hotel, in a neighborhood that looked like an American suburb, if that suburb had been fending off an invasion. All the lawns were Wizard of Oz green and newly mowed, and at the base of every driveway, in front of a wall topped with chicken wire or broken glass, stood a bored-looking security guard in a blue uniform.

  At the end of a cul-de-sac, in front of a beige three-story building, Raymond leaped out and rushed past the guard without so much as a nod. Outside the door he directed me to speak very quietly (“Guruji may well have reconsidered, you understand”) and then led me up into an apartment no bigger, but much cleaner, than the barsati. All the curtains were drawn, so it was dark inside; the floorboards were buckled and loose, the doorframes seemed to tilt. There was a low dresser covered in incense holders (hence the sweet, slightly sickening smell in the air) and, above it, a wall covered in mismatched framed photos of men who looked very much as if they might have been called Sri. There was a beatific dark-skinned man with wavy Jesus hair gazing upward; a wizened homunculus of a man seated cross-legged in an orange robe; a white-bearded man laughing and tilting his head.

  Raymond was the kind of person whose whisper is just as loud, and maybe more piercing, than his ordinary speaking voice. “I’m just going to step in and see how he’s doing, if you’ll excuse me.”

  As a little kid I’d gone with my mom on a few visits to a dying great-aunt in Connecticut, and the feeling in Guruji’s apartment—the hush and stillness—brought those awkward afternoons back. That and maybe the closed bedroom door, behind which I could hear murmuring voices now, not just Raymond’s, and some sort of low staticky chatter.

  After long enough that I wondered if I’d been forgotten, and whether I’d remember how to get back to the main road to catch an auto-rickshaw, Raymond cracked open the door and hissed, “Come now, please. Shoes off.”

  I’m not exactly sure how I would have pictured a spiritual guru’s bedroom (maybe a buckwheat mat, a hanging gong), but it wasn’t like this. An enormous bed with four dark carved posts as tall as the ceiling; overlapping Oriental rugs; gauzy curtains; a dozen burning candles scattered over brass tables and dark wooden dressers. A founding father could have died in this room. The air was like miso soup; the chatter turned out to be coming from a black-and-white TV with a broken antenna, tuned to a soap opera set in a hospital.

  Sitting in a tall, carved chair right next to the bed was a man who must have been the doctor; he had John Lennon glasses and a dark mustache and an actual white doctor’s jacket. He looked down at his feet like someone who wished he could be elsewhere or, barring that, invisible. Standing behind him, slowly flapping a woven fan in the direction of the bed, was a woman I took to be a nurse; she wore something multilayered and a white face mask, and seemed determined not to look at me.

  And there in the bed, tucked carefully under the covers like an E.T. doll, lay Sri Prabhakara. He was as dark skinned a person as I’d seen in India, and at least as old as Raymond. He had a silver shine where he’d once had hair, and a calm, vaguely amused expression. His head was much too big for his body, and his ears and nose were much too big for his face. What I could see of his chest was covered in white cotton; next to him on the bed sat a rusting silver bell. He’d been looking at the TV, but now he turned his eyes to me in a way that made me think of a long-suffering sea turtle.

  “Alone, please,” he said. Or mouthed; his voice was just at the edge of what I could hear. “TV, off.” The nurse and doctor began to go and Raymond held the door for them.

  “Shall I go too,” Raymond said, “or would you like me to stay, in case …”

  “Go.”

  “Of course.”

  As soon as the door was closed, leaving just the two of us, I was filled with the same fluttery, empty-headed feeling I’ve had the few times I’ve been around celebrities. Waiting for popcorn behind Cal Ripken in a Cleveland Park movie theater, standing next to Diane Keaton at baggage claim in the Denver airport; it was that kind of feeling. Guruji gestured with a shaky hand for me to sit in the doctor’s chair. From up close I could smell a peppery balm and something like sage. “You are … nervous. Why?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m really nervous, just sort of, you know, sorry, it’s a little weird,
I only came, I don’t know if Raymond told you, my friend Thomas? I think you might have known him—”

  “Breathing … please.”

  “Sorry. I’m just … Do you think I could maybe ask you a little bit about Thomas, because his parents actually—”

  “First … the calm body. Beginning … to consider … hearing … sounds … the moving air … the birds outside …” (I didn’t hear any birds, but for the first time since coming to India, I could hear the ticking of my watch.) “One hundred … breaths. Feeling … feeling.” He let his eyes fall shut, and I worried he might have died. But then he said, “One? … One. Two? … Two.” With every breath a single crimped nose hair shook.

  “Thirty-one? … Thirty-one. Thirty-two? … Thirty-two.” He counted as slowly and steadily as a roof leak. By the time we got to a hundred I’d passed through disbelief and outrage and arrived at something like acceptance, as if I were listening to one of my tutees mangling an interminable joke. I’m sitting at the bedside of an Indian guru who’s counting to a hundred with his eyes closed. This is in fact what’s happening.

  “Now … calm?”

  “Yes, much better, thank you.”

  “You see? Is … available … always.”

  “That’s very useful, thank you.”

  “Now … question?”

  I told him that I’d come here, all the way from America, because I was looking for my friend Thomas Pell. Did he know Thomas?

  “Yes, I know Thomas-ji … very much.”

  Good. Various people had told me that he was the person to talk to, and if he could shed any light on where Thomas might have gone, when he’d disappeared a few weeks ago, I’d be deeply grateful, and so would his parents, who are of course …

  “Who tell you … has disappeared?” (Now I noticed that Guruji was missing most of his top teeth.)

  Well, an old student of his named Cecilia had told me, most recently. And I’d actually been in touch with Thomas earlier in the summer, until he’d all of a sudden stopped writing. But if Thomas hadn’t disappeared, then by all means, he should please tell me where he was.

  “You … do not … watch … the self. Suffer … very much. Thomas-ji say to me.”

  “Thomas told you something about me?”

  “Precept … seventeen. Before the mind … can be … clear … the guilt must be …” He made a gesture like someone pulling out a vegetable by the roots. “You act, but do not … understand.”

  “If you could maybe just tell me whatever you—” I was having trouble, all of a sudden, distinguishing between the sound of my watch and the feeling of my heartbeat. I was like the crocodile in Peter Pan who swallows a clock.

  “Thomas-ji … did … very bad. Very harmful … thing. Young woman … years ago. You know this, yes?”

  “I … yes, I know this.” For some reason lying wasn’t a possibility.

  “Before … can escape … must confess. Before … can confess … must purify … intention. Noida. You understand?”

  “No.” I felt, suddenly, as if I were in danger of bursting into tears, and I was fairly sure that Guruji recognized it, and maybe even that he’d intended it.

  “Day … please?”

  “Today? Today’s Monday. The, um, third. August third.”

  “Moon … please?”

  “The moon? I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean.”

  He shut his eyes again, and I only noticed after a few seconds that he was counting something on his fingertips against the bedspread. “Tuesday … four. Wednesday … five. Thursday … six. Friday … seven. Vesak moon coming Monday … ten. Right condition … for cave puja … The beginning August is … for you, for Thomas … very important, yes?”

  If I’d been at full strength in that moment, there were a hundred things I would have asked, but I had to use all my energy not to faint. I could have been breathing through the straw in a juice box.

  Now Sri Prabhakara let his head fall to the side, so he was facing me directly, and he reached out to touch the back of my hand, which was trembling on my knee.

  “You know … I, Sri Prabhakara … I am … close. Three month … four month. Short time.”

  “You’re sick, yes, I’ve heard. I’m sorry.”

  He waved his hand. “Doctor try to give me … medicines. I do not. Pain … is OK. Dying … is OK. Your friend Thomas-ji. You must help him … purify. You understand?”

  “No.”

  “Is … pure. Nothing …” He made a gesture like wiping something off his hands.

  “I just want to know where he is.”

  “Bring me … candle. Two candle … there.”

  His tone of requesting something was the same as his tone of explaining something, so it took me a second to realize what he wanted, but I stood up and grabbed the two white candles from the table behind me; they were the size of salt-shakers. He took them lightly in his crabbed hands and blew out the one on the right.

  “You see?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Now he relit the extinguished candle with the still-burning one in his left hand. There was a knocking at the door, and Raymond’s voice saying something, but neither of us looked up.

  “Now … you see?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Is new candle … is same fire. Your friend … Thomas-ji … when you help … purify … when I am away … he is the new.

  You see?”

  From:

  To:

  Date: Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:01 AM

  Subject: re: (no subject)

  … Here’s something I don’t think you know, I kept her obituary in the locked drawer of my desk, I would look at it, alone at night, she smiled like someone had made an old joke, she wore glasses, someone outside the frame had his arm around her, I would imagine I knew her, it was my arm, sometimes I could hear her voice, I could feel her sweater against my cheek, I’d shake like a tuning fork. To my parents I must have looked like I was doing nothing, lying on the couch, turning to face away from the sun, I could have been paralyzed, I could have been a house-plant, inside I was screaming, the fear was worse, when your mind turns against you, the felt experience, I didn’t know, was that the world turns against you. I wanted to see her parents, wanted to ask were they all right, had they lived their lives, I wondered if I’d taken their suffering (matter is neither created nor destroyed). I knew I was evil, I’d been a mistake, if I lived as I was, continued to live, I was a spinning blade, a driverless car. Not sleeping for days, I would have conversations with Mira, see her sitting with me on the couch, whispering to me, the back of her head was missing, she didn’t know, I would sit up sobbing, tell R I didn’t know why, must have been a nightmare, he would hold my head in his lap, I’d never known my parents, something had gone cold, these people I’d loved were strangers, obstacles, I needed to stop feeling the way I felt, endless planning. I would try, sometimes, to test whether parts were still OK, I would take down a book from the shelf, the sentences would close up as I read them, I would forget the meaning by each period. I would turn on the TV, daytime movies, I couldn’t follow plots, what plots I could understand had to do with terror, death, exposure. Sometimes I needed a blanket, I became cold, much colder than the temperature. Other days the floor, the couch was too soft, I would need my face against wood, I would quietly moan, feel the buzz, I would ask the floor, Did I deserve to live, if I did, please tell me how, please tell me how Adam manages. This lasted months. I started to walk sometimes at night to their house, 3409 Ordway, leaving my front door like walking into a fire, such terror, I would stare at my feet, every step, fifteen minutes, a street just like yours, red brick, shingle roof, the lights were off, island in the ocean, I thought of her parents asleep in their beds, I thought of her childhood room untouched, I would lie on the lawn by their brick path, imagine she was buried underneath, flesh turned sod, I would think, How will I get home, will I be found here, will I be buried here. I saw myse
lf, clear as a photograph, locked away somewhere, white walls, blue skin, life as a disease that must run its course, and I decided if I wasn’t going to end up there, I needed to be punished, killed or forgiven, otherwise the world would do it, otherwise nights of fear, worse than death. I started to sleep, sometimes, outside their house, praying for courage, imagining pressing the bell, moving closer each night to their front door. Grass is wet even when it doesn’t rain, I’d forgotten, one night, walking close to the window, I tripped, made a sound, I saw lights come on, my legs were burning, my moment had come, I heard doors unlocking, it was four in the morning. The man in the door was white, he wore a green robe, white beard, he said what the hell was I doing, I just stared, mind blank as paper, he said get away or he’d call the police, I said, Is this the Batras’ house? He stared, squinting, What? I said, The Batras, do the Batras live here? Who? he said, I said the name again, his face changed, the porch light was golden, there was a basket of soccer balls, he said, They moved, they moved away, now get out of here, and slammed the door, I walked home, wet socks, cold hands, I tried to run, couldn’t think, could hardly stand, cats crossed my path, it didn’t matter, my luck couldn’t get worse, I needed to find out where the Batras had gone, I couldn’t rest until I knew.

  From:

  To:

  Date: Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:19 PM

  Subject: re: greetings

  Those first couple of years when he was back home, we lived at doctors’ offices. My dreams were full of waiting rooms, insurance forms, jars of tongue depressors. Nothing quite as disillusioning as those appointments—you could die of hope, just the way one of those clever quotable people said about Hollywood. His GP—overmatched pink-faced man—did a thousand dollars of tests and told us Thomas should drink Ensure to regain some weight. A Bethesda shrink—office full of tribal masks and tissue boxes—spent six months finding out that Thomas didn’t talk until he was two. One great coup of Sally’s was an appointment with an NIH neurologist—pompous whisperer in a lab coat, Nobel craver—who ran tests, found nothing, then recommended that we see the shrink he’d stopped seeing months before.