At the Bottom of Everything (12 page)

His response came at four in the morning my time, which I didn’t have the brainpower to translate into India time. I was on my way to the bathroom, standing in my boxers, not at all sure that I wasn’t still asleep.

For the next couple of hours I lay in bed wondering how you knew if you were having a heart attack. And the next night, after a sleepwalking day at work, I wrote to Thomas again, and again he wrote back at four in the morning. He’d been in India for just over a year, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain what he’d been doing there, except occasionally to ramble like someone dictating with a high fever. Mostly he just wanted to talk about his past, particularly the parts related to our friendship and to the accident, as if he were fact-checking an encyclopedia.

Over the next few weeks, even if it probably wasn’t what Sally had in mind, I don’t think you could have said that I didn’t care. I was having my highway dream again, only now instead of praying to be run over I was praying not to be. Thomas and I were writing emails, sometimes three or four a day, that were as strange and as personal as any interaction we’d had since we’d exchanged boxers in eighth grade, for solidarity.

As the summer wore on, I figured that this might be the extent of it; that I’d keep writing to Thomas and keep talking
to his parents and keep lying in my apartment at night thinking about being fifteen, and in this way I’d pay my debts. Wrong. At the beginning of July, Thomas wrote to his parents to say that if they didn’t stop trying to get him home, they’d never hear from him again. Around the same time he stopped responding to my emails, and at first, despite Richard and Sally’s mounting panic, I felt relief. He’d moved on to some other obsession, I figured, some other long-lost correspondent, and I’d be free to resume my life in the present. But after a week or two, by which time I’d begun to drift back toward pretending he didn’t exist, another email came from him, just one line long:

Right then I decided, or maybe I should say I realized that it had been decided; it didn’t seem to originate with me. I didn’t write back. Instead I spent a couple of hot gray afternoons shuttling along Massachusetts Avenue between the Indian embassy and my doctor’s office, getting my tourist visa and my typhoid shot. Then on July 26, with my old camp backpack stuffed in the overhead bin, I ate dinner in an upright and locked position two miles above Maine. I slept for a few hours and woke up in white sunlight to a breakfast of microwaved rolls and freezing fruit. My left leg was completely asleep. My malaria medicine, or something, was making me feel dry mouthed and edgy. The cartoon airplane ticking across the ocean on the monitor in front of me showed us 2,063 miles from New Delhi.

As the taxi, which was really a kind of windowless van, carried me and my bag through the much-darker-than-America night, I kept having to fight down the impulse to tell my driver to turn around. It was just after nine, apparently, but my sense of time had gotten multiply exposed; I couldn’t count the meals I’d eaten or sunsets I’d seen or Ambiens I’d taken since leaving home. Every couple of minutes I was having the same embarrassingly stupid thought, which was: Everyone here is Indian. The soldiers standing by the doorways with machine guns; the eight-year-old boys clamoring to shine my shoes; the women arranging candies and wind-up toys on bedsheets.

The right side of the highway was being constructed at that very minute by men standing on hills of steaming asphalt, which meant that the left side was clotted with trucks and bikes and rickshaws and little golf-cart-ish things like green-painted Flintstones cars, each with a horn blaring at a slightly different pitch. A few times my driver, a sweating, frowning bald man, had to swerve around dogs standing in stupors in the middle of the road like zombies in a video game. Also like a video game: we kept passing the same two billboards—a full-lipped woman in red laughing while she held a cell phone
to her ear, and a wavy-haired soccer player kicking a ball straight out of a TV.
WELCOME TO “THE BEST” HI-DEF!

We were going to Thomas’s apartment, or anyway to an apartment where he’d lived at some point recently. The neighborhood was called Paharganj. Everything else I knew about where Thomas might have been could have fit on an index card (in fact it fit on the first few lines in the black-and-white notebook in my carry-on). I’d expected Thomas’s parents to be brimming with leads and notions, but they’d proved surprisingly hopeless. Or maybe just fatalistic, after years of trying and failing to understand what their son was doing. A couple of weeks earlier, just after I’d agreed to go, I’d spent an awkward evening perched on the edge of their couch, feeling like I was being bid farewell before shipping off to war. At one point Sally had handed me a semirecent photograph of Thomas; he had long hair pulled back and a wispy beard, and he was smiling in a way that suggested drunkenness or maybe just the effects of whatever pills he was on. I held it with two hands, not sure how long I needed to stare before I could tuck it into my bag. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” Richard said, seeming to sense that we’d slipped into a moment out of
Saving Private Ryan
.

For the past couple of weeks, Richard and Sally had been writing me emails; first just practical—addresses and phone numbers—then more and more a kind of journal of what they’d been through these past few years—things they couldn’t say to Thomas, maybe, or things they’d tell anyone who’d listen. I hadn’t felt so wrapped up in the Pells, so close to the daily workings of their lives, since I was fourteen.

Anyway, with each turn the road narrowed by a couple of lanes, until we were in a grim, dusty neighborhood where dogs slept on top of cars and the buildings seemed to be made of cinder block. The Pells had said that Thomas might have fallen in with some spiritual-burnout types, and this looked like the right place for it.

Decoding the building’s buzzers, a plate-sized grid of silver
nubbins, was just at the edge of my mental capacity. A barefoot, elfin man named Rory met me at the top of three flights of stairs; he wore loose cotton pants and stood looking recently asleep, with a slight smile and eyes just barely open. We’d talked once when I was still in D.C., and he’d seemed bizarrely unfazed that I was hoping to come stay in his apartment while I looked for a lost friend. “No worries, no worries.” He’d never actually met Thomas (he’d only been in Delhi since May), but he knew people who knew him, and he said they had a spare bed. He was, I saw now, a man with the metabolism of an iguana; he wouldn’t be fazed by the explosion of the sun. He took my bag and shuffled ahead of me into an apartment that felt like it had once been a locker room. It was dim the way fluorescent-lit rooms are dim, with a color-flecked cement floor and a half-dozen wooden partitions. There were collapsed, filthy couches, lamps set on top of plastic crates, a strip of speckled flypaper hanging in the corner. There was a cloying, oily smell in the air coming from a candle burning on a trunk.

“Your bed’s that one. Sheets are in that stack.”

The word
bed
was like a glimpse of water in the desert, but before I could sleep Rory took me up onto the roof. One of the girls who was over had lived there when Thomas had, Rory said. The night sky was like a sagging yellow tent ceiling. From the street I could hear firecrackers and frantic technoish music. The forecast on the plane had said “Smoky heat,” which I’d assumed was a mistranslation, but the air actually was both smoky and hot; since the second we’d landed I’d been smelling burning tires, which probably explained my stinging eyes and running nose. In the half-dark of the rooftop I got an impression of a scene like a concert lawn: candles and devil sticks and skunky pot.

I think travel must have made more sense, psychologically, in the era of ocean voyages; in the three months it took to get from America to India you would’ve realized the extremity of what you were doing; you would have stepped off the boat
knowing exactly how far you were from your old life. But I, sitting in a plastic lawn chair on that rooftop, gazing out through the smog at what seemed to be the dome of a mosque, still had a receipt from the Bethesda Row CVS in the front pocket of my jeans.

A group of people was sitting around a beach towel, playing a game that involved pressing a card against your forehead. There was a brutish barefoot guy with a shaved head. A forest-sprite girl leaning against the brute’s knee. A dreadlocked smirking guy who kept doing something double-jointed with his wrists.

“—I think I’ve got to fold again, fuck.”

“—maybe that’s exactly why she can’t, you know?”

“—I guess I just can’t see how that’s not just another kind of decision …”

“Hey, so you’re Thomas’s friend?”

It took me a couple of seconds to register that someone was talking to me. It was an Earth Mother–ish girl with a nose stud and a yellow bandanna, pulling a Kingfisher from the water in the cooler I hadn’t noticed I was sitting next to. “You went to high school with him, right?” Her name was Cecilia, and she was from a town in Minnesota where people just didn’t, she was eager to have me understand, go to India. She made me remember for the first time in years a hippie camp counselor I’d once had, the first woman I’d ever seen with armpit hair, belter of Sly and the Family Stone in the camp van. Cecilia had moved to Delhi a couple of years ago to study “bodywork,” and now she was taking, or maybe teaching, a course in conflict resolution.

“I’ve been worried about Thomas. Have you talked to him since his solo?”

“Hmm?”

“He was supposed to be back for a session with Guruji almost a month ago. Somebody said they saw him a couple of weeks ago at the cremation grounds.” While she talked she kept adjusting her neck, like a pigeon.

“And where was he supposed to be?”

“He was on his precept retreats. He was just about to do the cave.”

The forest sprite came bubbling up, dragging the brute along behind her (“What’s up?! Did you just get here?”), and Cecilia melted off toward the card game. The sprite, Nicola, looked vaguely South American and had eyes that made her seem permanently surprised. Another obvious thought I kept finding myself having: There are so, so many people in the world.

I stayed up on the roof for another half hour or so, drifting in and out of conversations, being introduced and introduced again, telling people how I knew Thomas, saying yes I’d be sure to do that, no I’d make sure to avoid doing the other, hearing the word
guruji
, sometimes the name Sri Prabhakara, like a recurrent scrap of melody.

“So he’s a meditation teacher?”

“Mmm … I would say more a philosopher.” (This was Nicola’s brutish boyfriend, Rik, who turned out to be somber and Danish, and to have spent the past couple of years playing semiprofessional basketball in Japan.)

“And is he old?”

“Seventy-five? Eighty? It’s not obvious to look at him.”

There was a nervous excitement that fluttered around any mention of Guruji, as if he were a movie star someone heard might be eating in the back room. Everybody who’d ever lived in the apartment knew him, apparently; it was a kind of study-house. I found myself picturing an old man with clouded-over eyes, a long beard, fingernails grown into rams’ horns; a cross between Ben Gunn and Gandhi.

“I didn’t actually see it,” the dreadlocked kid said to me, tilting his head back to finish a beer, “but somebody rode past your friend meditating by the train tracks like way the hell out. I think maybe he’s like a … dharma ghost.” This could be one of the frat houses at Penn, I kept thinking. But instead of talking about who was bringing Jägermeister and who was
having sex, they were talking about compassion retreats and private sessions with Guruji. I was standing by the railing listening to an intense Israeli man named Jonah tell me about
hijras
, a caste of Indian transvestites who apparently have the power to curse people, when I realized I was sleeping with my eyes open.