At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  Unfolding the bedsheets as carefully as layers of phyllo dough, then pulling on my shorts, my eyes fixed the whole time on Thomas, I slipped out into the hall. Hotel lobbies in the middle of the night are like wax museums: so much uninhabited brightness and cheer. The business center, down the same hallway as the bathrooms, was somehow five degrees colder than the lobby; I sat at the computer all folded over on myself, my leg hairs trembling. The Internet’s another wax museum. Looks Like You’re Signing In from a New Computer! Would You Mind Answering a Few Quick Security Questions?

  I typed the email with cold blue fingers, my brain lowering a curtain every time I blinked.

  From:

  To: ;

  Subject: I’m with Thomas

  Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:16 AM

  Richard and Sally—

  I’m writing this from a fancy hotel in a suburb outside Delhi, and I just wanted to tell you that I’ve got Thomas. He’s safe and asleep upstairs. My plan is to put us on a bus back to Delhi tomorrow and then to put us on the soonest possible flight back to D.C. I’ll explain everything about finding him when I have more time (I haven’t slept in a couple of days), but the short version is that some friends pointed me toward him and that he’d managed to wander a good ways out of the city. For now I just want to say that he seems healthy, he’s coherent, he knows where he is. He seems still weird on the subject of you guys, potentially, so I think the safest thing is for me not to tell him I’ve been in touch with you. In any event, hopefully we’re going to be back home as fast as Continental can carry us.

  With lots of love,

  Adam

  Back upstairs I dipped the key card in the door as quietly as I could; of course I knew Thomas would be there, but still, when I saw his back, saw that he hadn’t moved, I gave a silent nod of thanks. How long had it been since he’d slept on an actual bed, let alone a bed with a Serta-certified pillow-top mattress and a down comforter?

  And now I could give in to sleep too. Now I could relish climbing into bed, nestling into the stack of pillows, sealing the comforter around my neck, like a gourmand tucking into a five-course meal. It was 4:24. The next bed I lie down on will be in America. The land of tap water and well-paved streets and as much Internet/TV/alcohol as I decide to prescribe myself. Sometimes in bed, at moments of especially conscious tiredness, it feels like you can steer yourself into a particular dream region, like guiding a spaceship into a wormhole. No highways, please. Let’s dream about a forest, I told myself. It’s warmly raining and there are soft-furred animals nuzzling you and all the rocks are really trampolines. I dreamed and dreamed, slept and slept; I gorged on sleep, rolled around in it, drank it until I was full. Every now and then, to mark my progress, I checked the clock: 5:39, 6:50, 7:28. I checked Thomas too; he was as still as if he’d been unplugged. Maybe this was a sleeping technique that Guruji had taught him. Maybe I’d have to carry him to the airport like a dad with a baby strapped to his chest.

  When I opened my eyes at 8:45, my first thought was that I’d forgotten about all the states of being that don’t include a headache. For a minute I just lay there in bed not hurting, studying the light fixture in the ceiling, letting the sunlight from between the curtains fall across my chest. You can somehow tell, just from the pitch of the silence, when it’s snowed while you were asleep; I think the same organ can tell you whether there are other people in a room with you; I think that may have been why I gave myself a few extra seconds before I rolled onto my side, a few last breaths in which it wouldn’t be confirmed:

  Thomas’s bed was empty.

  I didn’t panic. I called out, “Thomas?” and walked over to the bathroom. I knocked; maybe he was taking another shower. Nothing—empty. Maybe I’d just overlooked him in all those pillows and sheets. I pushed aside the hard, fabric-covered pillows on his bed, as if he might be hiding between them. I scoured the bedside table, and then the floor on either side of the bedside table, for a note he might have left: Just gone for a walk, back in a few. Nothing, nothing. I’d just thrown back the curtains, as if it weren’t a person I was looking for but an earring, when I realized I was being ridiculous. Of course I knew where he was: breakfast. His body, with its scooped-out cheeks and countable ribs, must have craved food the way mine had craved sleep. I’d find him downstairs, planted behind a pair of buffet plates heaped with eggs and fruit and waffles.

  Elevators are such a terrible form of transport when you really want to get somewhere. I rushed past the baffled hostess (who was, I was fairly sure, the same woman who’d checked us in the night before) and did a quick lap around the dining room. Purple paisley carpet, mirrors, white tablecloths. White families, Indian families, a group of women all reading from different guidebooks.

  “Excuse me, did someone named Thomas Pell come down here and eat, do you know? Room 8021?”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “Did a man from room 8021 come down here already? Would you mind checking?”

  “I’m sorry. Would you like to sit for breakfast, sir?”

  I hurried back through the lobby and out into the driveway, where it was already as hot as the middle of the afternoon. I ran past the line of cars and out to the sidewalk; I looked one way toward the traffic circle, the other way toward a high-rise, and realized that my running off in any direction would only make it much less likely that I’d find him.

  You know what? I thought. He must be in the room. Maybe I somehow overlooked him, or maybe he was just out meditating in the hall. By the time I’d run up the stairs and reopened our door, I was feeling nearly hopeful. “You scared the shit out of me!” I’d tell him, and he’d nod at me like a benevolent tree being.

  But the room was precisely as I’d left it. The bathroom door was open at just the same angle, the pillows on his bed were still where I’d thrown them. Now I was permitting myself, however slightly, to panic. I looked under both of our beds, even though these were the kinds of beds in which the “under” consists of a wooden box that goes all the way to the floor. I opened the shower curtain and looked in the tub not once but twice. I even, knowing it was insane as I did it, looked inside the minibar.

  I spent the rest of the morning, and really the rest of the day, engaged in one of my least favorite (and lately most frequent) activities: anxious waiting. I sat on the bed, with the room phone beside me and the ringer turned up to maximum volume, watching more hours of cricket than I would ever have expected to consume. I ate all the dried apricots from the minibar, and then all the ginger snaps, and then all the Peanut M&M’s, for a running total of $21.50. Every time the maids, or anyone else, went by in the hallway, I momentarily convinced myself that Thomas was about to open the door. How (really: how) was I going to tell his parents that I’d lost him again? I should have handcuffed myself to him. I should have slept with one hand clasping his beard.

  I was aware, in a theoretical way, that some of my panic and grief at not knowing where he was (and by then I was sweating freely, shredding the packages in my hands into plastic strips) may have been borrowed emotion; which is to say, the fact that I hadn’t really allowed myself to think or feel very much regarding the visit to the Batras the night before may have been causing me to feel more than I otherwise would have about what was happening today. Plus I was almost certainly still suffering from certain psychological effects of sleep deprivation. But still. Every thirty minutes or so I called the front desk to ask if anyone had been by to see me. Every hour I went down and checked my email (YOU’VE FOUND HIM! Oh, Adam, we are dizzy with gratitude). I kept standing up to look out the window, as if he might pop up swimming laps or sunbathing.

  The sun had already started to set again (there’s almost nothing more discouraging than the sunset on a day when you’ve hardly gone outside) when I decided, or admitted, that I needed finally to do the thing I’d spent the past few hours hoping and pretending I could avoid. I went back down to the business center, where I took my usual seat
beside the preteen sibling British girls who’d spent the entire afternoon playing a game starring Dora the Explorer.

  My teeth were chattering as I typed.

  From:

  To:

  Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 7:06 PM

  Raymond: I need you to tell me the location of the cave where Thomas was planning to go for his final retreat. I know you don’t always respond to emails right away, and I know this is the sort of thing you’ll say you have to confirm with Guruji, and I know he’s sick … so I just want to be very clear. You need to respond to me as soon as you get this message, and you need to tell me, with absolutely no ambiguity, where to find him. I’ve just spent the day with a lawyer specializing in financial audits of religious institutions, and I hope you’ll give me an excuse not to retain his services.

  Thanks for your cooperation,

  Adam Sanecki

  · Three ·

  I should have (and under ordinary mental circumstances would have) known:

  There was never a chance of Thomas not going to the cave. Running into me in Noida, being dragged to the hotel; all that, for him, was like having lint brushed from his costume as he headed toward the stage. He’d written himself directions, down to every last bus transfer and switchback. He’d made his way to the cave without a guide, with less struggle and complication than I would have thought possible for even the most capable local, let alone a half-crazy, starving foreigner. Maybe at some point in the past couple of years he’d developed a leather-soled native deftness; maybe he was just so desperate to get on with his enlightenment or his rebirth or whatever it was that it wouldn’t have made a difference whether the cave was on a mountain or at the bottom of the ocean.

  All of this is to say, I don’t know exactly how or why, after the relative ease of getting there, he got into trouble. It may have been that by the time he found the cave, having traveled by train and bus for a day and then walked for a day after that, he was delirious with exhaustion. Or it may have been that, in the dark, he just got lost; maybe he got turned around and ended up crawling in deeper when he thought he was crawling out. Again: almost all of this is speculation.

  About my own troubles, which started well before I found the cave, I can be much clearer.

  Raymond responded to my email within a couple of hours, sounding somewhere between chastened and indignant; his note reminded me of the instructions for a scavenger hunt. First I needed to get to a city called Nainital (a surprisingly easy train ride, another set of town squares and city gates and auto-rickshaw drivers sleeping with newspapers shading their faces). And from there I needed to take a bus, which turned out to mean a couple of buses, thirtyish miles (most of them across a landscape so scrubby and bare that it made the whole problem of human overpopulation seem incomprehensible) to a tiny village in the Kumaon Valley near a city called Mukteshwar.

  Throughout the trip I was performing a kind of triage on myself. To my running list of ailments I’d added a burning pain in the right side of my neck (which meant that to turn my head I needed to turn my entire body, like the Tin Man), a possibly infected blister on my left heel, and constipation paired with such vile gas that at each new occurrence I’d pause for a second, watery eyed, in miserable wonder that my body, or any body, was capable of such horrors. I did my best, on the bus, to linger at a level of sleep just deep enough to refresh me and just shallow enough so I wouldn’t lose track of my bag. By four thirty that afternoon, when we pulled onto a dusty shoulder that was apparently as close as we were going to come to a bus station, I’d finished an entire liter of water, and I needed to pee so badly that the pain in my bladder had, in a weird sort of mercy, eclipsed every other sensation in my body.

  The village ended up being not much more than a cluster of mud-brick houses. It was the sort of place that a long-sought mobster or Nazi might disappear to in order to reinvent himself as a bearded eccentric. In all four directions there were shaggy green mountains, carved in some places into terraced crops that looked like staircases. I didn’t know if it was the off-season or if this was just a part of India that existed in a permanent state of heat-stunned emptiness. The town consisted of one main unpaved street, down which very few people walked, carrying much-reused plastic bags of things like tangled fishing line and dried reeds. All the dogs in town (there were at least a couple of dogs for every person) seemed to be either pregnant or sick or both. A group of boys kicked a plastic jug against a low, crumbling wall.

  Raymond had told me to find a house belonging to someone named Akshay, so I spent my first hour in the village wandering up and down the road, farting toxically, peering stiffly into each of the dark little houses to see if I could find someone to talk to. In one building a man was sleeping on a cot with a woven blanket spread over his face. In another there seemed to be nothing but rusting engines. On the terrace in front of one house an old woman sat sorting dried beans on a towel while a shirtless little girl chased a rooster in circles around her.

  “Akshay?” I said to her. “English? Akshay? I’m looking for Akshay’s house?”

  The woman had a daub of red on her forehead, and such deep wrinkles in her neck that their depths were a different color from the rest of her. She gave me an interested look, as if I were a squirrel that had happened to stop in front of her, but she didn’t give any indication of understanding me; the girl now looked in danger of crying, possibly at the sight/smell of me. I apologized vaguely and moved along. In the road, even though the sun was starting to go down, I kept getting that hand-over-a-grill feeling of imminent combustion. The rooster was now screaming in a way that the skin on the back of my neck interpreted, each time, as an emergency. I was starting to wonder if just this, the endless heat-stricken search, was my punishment. Maybe Thomas and I were like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, only for us the chase wasn’t funny, and we’d both end up as sun-bleached bones at the foot of a cactus.

  At the uphill end of the road (the road literally just came to a stop, the dirt seeming to look out at the fields and the scrub and say, You know what, forget it) I found a general store, the first clearly open building I’d encountered. There was no door. The floor was covered in flattened cardboard boxes, and the shelves had so little (a tin of biscuits, a box of powdered soap) that the arrangements seemed more artistic than commercial. “English?” I said to the teenage girl who was leaning on the counter, making careful marks in a notebook that looked at least as old as she was. She shook her head. “Akshay?” I said. Again she shook her head, but after I’d bought a baby-food-sized jar of something that looked like mango jelly (she took a good two minutes to record our transaction in her notebook), she surprised me by leading me out of the store and walking a few steps ahead of me all the way down to the other end of the road, back to the terrace with the old woman and the little girl. She pointed to the house and made a sound that bore almost no resemblance to the way I’d been pronouncing Akshay; when I thanked her she just waggled her head and made a palms-up here-you-are gesture, as if she were introducing me to my brand-new washer/dryer.

  By that point the little girl, who seemed to be five or six, had cheered up. She’d picked up a long stick with which, seemingly for my benefit, she kept poking a black dog that was trying to sleep, or die, against one of the house’s outer walls. The girl would look at me, poke the dog, look at me, then burst into exaggerated, maybe teasing laughter, while her grandmother, now fiddling with a clothespin, shook her head disappointedly.

  In his email Raymond had said that Guruji’s disciples lived at Akshay’s house, and that one of them would take me to the cave where Thomas was doing his retreat. My only question, by that point, was whether this was maliciously untrue or accidentally untrue. I was reconciled to resting somewhere to eat my jelly, then getting back on a bus and devoting what was left of my energy to finding and confronting Raymond. I was, in that moment, tired enough that I was ready to treat a seven-hour trip across India like a walk back from checkin
g the mailbox.

  But, mostly so as not to just stand there being silently stared at by the grandmother, I pulled Raymond’s note from my pocket. Explain that you’re bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta, he’d written. This may cause a bit of confusion but simply get on with it and don’t flinch. I looked at the grandmother, cleared my throat, pointed at my chest, and pronounced each syllable with a hopeless little question mark attached, feeling very much like someone saying “open sesame” to a garage door. I could, for all I knew, have been telling her to please poison me; I could have been telling her I’d come from the city to eat her family. But she rose slowly to her feet (she turned out to be not much taller standing than sitting), bowed her head, and waved for me to follow her into the house. Open sesame. (She also shouted something at the little girl that sent her scrambling up the road as if someone were shooting at her feet.)

  Inside she called something out toward the backyard, then got involved in making tea, which entailed lighting a burner with a long match and stuffing leaves into a rusty mesh ball. Either my eyes were now joining my list of misbehaving body parts, or this was the darkest habitation I’d ever seen. There were thick brown walls, low ceilings, windows as high and small as in a prison cell. In the main room, where she’d directed me to a chair against a wall, there were three beds (two of which were actually tables piled with blankets) and a scattering of plastic chairs. She set the teacup on the chair next to me, then stood expectantly with her hands together. I took a sip that amounted to not much more than a lip-touch. She made drink-up-drink-up gestures with her hands and grinned. I nodded and made what I hoped were appreciative noises.