At the Bottom of Everything (14 page)

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.