At the Bottom of Everything (13 page)
Read At the Bottom of Everything Online
Authors: Ben Dolnick
I’m going to need to expand my vocabulary when it comes to the varieties of bad sleep, the way someone on an ocean voyage would need to distinguish between types of storms. That first night in Thomas’s old apartment, anyway, was a collision of various fronts: nervousness, heat, jet lag, digestive unrest. My bed turned out to be a green canvas cot, wedged onto the floor behind a partition. The conversation of the people on the roof came directly down to me as if they were shouting through a pipe; every time the techno music seemed to have stopped it would turn out just to have paused to gather its strength. I kept being woken up by something tickling my forehead and gusts of black-smelling mold. By two a.m. I’d decided that unbeknownst to me, India, like Iceland, must have a season of sunless days, and at three I took a sleeping pill and then had a dream about choking on chalk dust.
Apparently at some point in the last aching stretch before dawn I got out my notebook, because when I woke up it was open on my pillow, with a new line at the bottom of the first page in handwriting I almost didn’t recognize as mine:
shouldn’t have come. check flights. to find him would be a literal miracle, something to teach in schools, a moon landing.
From:
To:
Date:
Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:43 AM
Subject:
re: (no subject)
… You mention guilt but I would say that for years, despite reason to be, I was not a guilty person, my mind ran along other tracks, sophomore year, junior year, it started, I would lie in my room at Columbia, ninety-eight-square-foot cell, remembering everything, not the crash, but other things, older, I would dream of my toad Lewis whom I killed or thought I killed at seven years old, before you knew me. He was loathsome to me, physically repellent, he ate mice and crickets, they puffed their bag with jumping, I used to imagine him dead, I would think of birds coming through the window and carrying him away, one morning I came downstairs to feed him, I was devout, the glass of his case was hot, the dial had been turned to High, he was a briquette, his eyes were dried currants. When I called to S and R they came downstairs, bathrobes and bare feet, said, Oh no Rosabelle must have
done it cleaning up, or one of them must have brushed against it, they wanted to absolve me, but I knew I had, I had no memory of it but I knew with my wishing, it had to be. I wept in my room that night, S came in, not understanding, she sat with me, said, Yes, it was so sad, he had been such a wonderful toad, hadn’t he, she was sure he hadn’t suffered, it had happened while he was asleep, we’d get another. I was not good, I was not well, terrible things happened when I wasn’t careful, this may have been the first time I understood it.
From:
To:
Date:
Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:02 PM
Subject:
re: greetings
… My worry started to tick—parental Geiger counter—sometime his junior year, when phone calls started to have an edge of hastiness, partial accounting. Classes? Fine. Dorm? Fine. Roommate? Fine. He was staking out mental residence elsewhere.
All this, keep in mind, had 9/11 in the background—it had only been a year, so still very much in the penumbra of
everything changed
. If anything was going on with him, we thought it might be that—going to school a few miles uptown from Ground Zero, we’d assumed some of the atmospheric panic—Cipro and Wolf Blitzer touch-screen maps of Afghan caves—might have seeped in. He’d started kind of fear-blurting—should he ride the subway? Get a gas mask? So we probably misread the signs. A
nervous breakdown after 9/11 was like a lost voice in a Trappist monastery.
Thanksgiving was another worry-tick—I remember mostly o’er-leaping talk, clattering plates, and Thomas at the center, wax figure in a gallery. This was his vegetarian debut, so a part of me thought, OK, projecting holiness, making clear he’s not a party to the feast, got it. (In college, my meatless years, I sat at my parents’ table in front of a plate of bacon, fingers of enticement beckoning like cartoon pies on a ledge.) But he was establishing the mental territory.
Then a few months later the phone rang too late on a Sunday night, a girl from Columbia—she’d just talked to Thomas and she was scared. He’d told her he was very sick—brain tumor, months to live, she’s the only one who can know. My first thought was: shrapnel from a romantic blowup. Thomas, at that point, was very much a novice, so I was thinking, OK, he falls for a girl, nothing doing, he comes up with this story to try to get her attention. Somewhere between a protester setting himself on fire and John Cusack with his boom box: you have no choice but to feel for me.
But when we talked to Thomas, he sounded—sweaty. Upset to hear she’d called us, panicky about what we knew, what we weren’t saying. Asking me if he was going to have to go to war—this was just before Iraq, fear becoming anger in the national forebrain. I started thinking drugs. Some party where he gave in, tired of protecting the prize intelligence.
Day or two later we got a call from the dean. Thomas is missing class, blowing off his adviser. Flunking three out of four courses. OK. And oh, by the way, if he doesn’t shape up we’re going to need to ask him to take a semester off and make up credits elsewhere. Lion pride. Right.
So we drove up to New York, not getting anywhere on the phone. Both of us took off work, five hours up I-95, into the dorm, still half expecting the whole scene to dissolve into misunderstanding. The dorm, by the way, felt like a playroom: hallway of pajama-wearing girls lying on the floor trailing phone cords, boys bouncing lacrosse balls off concrete walls. Leaders of tomorrow.
We knocked—THOMAS PELL in bubble letters still from the RA—and he finally opened the door and the smell was … shocking, but not in any familiar collegiate way. Sinister. Rotting greens, decay. I found myself thinking, unbidden: This is the smell of a crazy person’s room.
And he was very much confused, embarrassed, overwhelmed. Skinnier than we’d ever seen him, dirty, this kind of pubic beard, still talking about being sick, about war. The room was a mess but almost sculptural, sheets wadded up on the windowsills, fans on chairs. He wanted to know—staring straight ahead—whether he had cancer, said he knew we’d been talking to doctors. He was on his bed, wrapped in sheets, the phone was next to his pillow, there was a cup of what smelled like piss. Sally was trying to pull him to his feet, crying, take the measure of him, I was kind of … feeling for the seam, like when he used to have night terrors: OK, where’s the awareness in there. Nothing doing. So I just hugged him—OK, we’ll get through this, you’re OK. Trusting that this, surprise of the dorm visit, had to be the worst moment. Except in the hug I realized two things—one, the smell, the worst of it, was his body, and two, the weight he’d lost. Imagine hugging an empty sleeping bag. For me that was the genre change, drama into horror, spring 2003—that hug with the body that was and wasn’t Thomas.
So: Sri Prabhakara. Here, from what I was able to gather during my first semiconscious couple of days, was the story. I heard some of this from the Earth Mother, Cecilia, who met me for lunch at a nightclub-feeling Mexican restaurant near her school, and some of it from people Cecilia introduced me to who’d vaguely known Thomas.
Apparently, until some point that spring, Thomas had been living on his own in Delhi. No one, or at least no one I talked to, had any idea where. Maybe he’d been homeless (there were groups of expats who lived with their wormy dogs and guitars outside the bus station at Kashmiri Gate), maybe he’d just been living in another apartment. Almost certainly he hadn’t been working for any sort of education company, the way he’d told his parents he was; by the time people in the study-apartment had started to see him he had long hair and sun-chapped skin, and he was wearing clothes that looked like they’d been pieced together from a children’s giveaway bin.
People occasionally saw him at the outdoor bazaar in Paharganj (goats wandering down the middle of the street, bearded men huddling over hookahs in doorways); the bazaar was on
the way to Sri Prabhakara’s center. Thomas would be muttering and handing out fennel candies to kids, or he’d be washing himself in a runoff pipe at the end of the alley. To each other, they called him Skeletor. Maybe this was his prime looking-for-the-Batras period, maybe this was pure fugue and craziness.
Anyway, after a few weeks of not having seen Skeletor, a couple of Guruji’s students took a different way to the center one night and came across him in terrible shape: barefoot, filthy, sprawled on the steps of a temple. At first one of them mistook him for a dead body. You could have scooped him up with a shovel and tossed him like a bag of empty cans. One of them went up and tapped his shoulder, and he bolted upright. “Fine, fine,” he said, when they asked if he was all right. “Good, just a little tired, was I asleep? I think I fell asleep. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
They convinced him to come along with them to the center. They made him eat rice and drink a bottle of Thums Up, then wadded up some paper towels and helped him wash the dried blood from his ear. After Guruji’s talk they took him home to the
barsati
, and once he’d showered (they said he left a ring of orange around the drain, still not entirely gone), he slept the night without sheets, at his own insistence, on a corner of the roof. He answered questions about what he’d been doing as if he were talking about a dream.
I was looking for someone. I had a fever. It wouldn’t stop raining
. As far as they could tell he didn’t own anything except the clothes he was wearing and a kid’s backpack in which he kept a rubber-banded wad of money and a camping Thermos. They asked the next day if he wanted to stay for a while and he murmured, Yes, thank you, OK.
Except for the rice that first night, all he ever seemed to eat were the little paper bowls of lentil mush the Hindu temple ladled out once a day in Shiva Mandir, but he was coming back to life. A splotchy red wound/rash he’d had on his neck and shoulder was clearing. His eyes were getting brighter. They
finally started getting bits of a slightly more coherent story out of him: from D.C.; in India for six months; looking for an old friend; sleeping outside because he didn’t like being alone.
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.