At the Bottom of Everything (18 page)
Read At the Bottom of Everything Online
Authors: Ben Dolnick
I’ve never, of course, been a burglar, so I’ve never cased a house, but I think I now know, based on that afternoon/evening in Noida, more or less what it would be like. I couldn’t sleep, as it turned out (every time I started to go under, I snapped awake, feeling like a bungee cord had saved me from a fall), so instead I set up a little stakeout fort and waited. My main base of operations was the space between a row of bushes and a low brick wall directly across the road from the Batras’. If you ever want to be transported back to being five years old, hide behind a bush for a few hours. I got to know the pattern of the leaves and the smell of the dirt and the feeling, against my knees and tailbone, of each rock in the vicinity. There were earthworms and red ants, neither of which showed the least bit of interest in the mini puddles of beer I poured for them. There were clouds moving over me like a slow-motion comb-over.
I don’t think I ever stared so long at any of the buildings we studied in my Introduction to Architecture class in college; I don’t think I ever stared so long at any house I ever lived in. I got to know the corrugated metal of D-5’s leaky gutter; the brass or fake brass of its balconies; the dusty stones of its driveway; the spidery lines on the white wall where there had
once been ivy. Could people really grieve behind those walls? Could they mourn while opening that broken mailbox? Being sleepless and half drunk was giving my thoughts a collage quality; I was as close as I’d ever come to the locked room in the basement of my life, and I was having to remind myself, over and over, the name of the city I was in.
Every hour or so I stood up and walked to the end of the street, trying to keep my legs from cramping up. I saw the full beginning, middle, and end of the man in D-11 washing his beige sports car. I saw guests arrive at D-6 with a casserole dish and leave with a ceramic bowl. I saw, and felt deep kinship with, a brown dog lying tied to a tree in front of D-1, staring and sleeping and waiting and sleeping and staring.
At one point behind the bush, my legs did fall asleep, all the way past tingling and pain and into the realm of immobility. By sunset, when the streetlights came on, I’d given up on walking, and I’d started feeling the individual grooves of parchedness on the roof of my mouth. I deeply regretted the beer I’d poured on the ground. In order not to waste any water (I had a quarter-full eight-ounce bottle of Nestlé Pure Life) I was parceling it out to myself, one warm capful per fifteen minutes. It was getting so dark in my stakeout fort that to check my watch I had to hold it so that it was almost brushing my eyelashes.
It was eight o’clock, at a moment when I happened to be busy unwrapping my third and final Nature Valley Oats ’n Honey bar, when a black Mercedes swung into D-5’s driveway and three people stepped out: two paunchy men in short sleeves and a small gray-haired woman in a purple sari that went past her feet. The men were talking (I couldn’t tell whether they were speaking English or Hindi) while the woman unlocked the door and led them inside. Could those be the Batras? Could that ten-second flash of faces and voices really be them? Suddenly I was sitting on my knees, a mound of unchewed granola in my mouth, staring as the light came on in the front hall. I held my breath. Why had I chosen a
hiding place so directly across from their front windows? I felt like a squirrel frozen in conspicuousness on a tree trunk.
The light in another room came on, then went off. I thought I heard an inner door closing, maybe an air conditioner whirring to life.
It wasn’t so much that I decided to miss the last bus back to Delhi as it was that I just watched the time come and go when I would have needed to stand up and leave for it. My watch said it was 8:45 and then that it was 9:20 and then that it was 10:15: time was tumbling down the cliffside next to me. I guess I’ll just sleep here, I decided. Or not sleep here. Maybe I’m done with sleep; maybe my body’s now learned how to make do on oats and anxiety. I should steal a letter to check their name, I thought. Wait for tomorrow’s mail. I wonder if mailmen in India drive on the wrong side of the road—wait, do mailmen in America drive on the wrong side of the road, or is it just their steering wheels, steering,
steering
wheels … is
steering
really a word?
It was almost eleven when I first noticed that some minutes had passed that I couldn’t account for. My head was doing that chemistry-class thing of drifting and snapping, drifting and snapping. So
now
I could sleep. I pinched myself on the thigh, which didn’t keep me awake but did, along with my tipped-over water bottle, introduce into my dreaming a plotline about blood seeping through my pants, soaking the ground.
I’m not making excuses, really; I’m just trying to explain, or to understand, why it was that I didn’t notice when it got to be midnight, and why it hadn’t occurred to me that that was the time to wait for. It was now August 7. The auto-rickshaw only stopped in front of D-5’s driveway for a few seconds. You’d think (I would certainly have thought) that I wouldn’t have recognized Thomas at first. But even in the half-dark of the street, even with his body so thin and a beard covering most of his face, I knew him before his driver had pulled away. He couldn’t have been fifty feet from me. He wore what
looked like rumpled pajamas and no shoes. His hair was short but shaggy. I once heard a woman on the news who’d woken up to find her house on fire say that she hadn’t known, even as she was running out to the street, whether she was dreaming, and I’d thought, That can’t really be true. But I really didn’t know as I sat there staring; as Thomas, in the light at the foot of the driveway, brought his palms together at his forehead and bowed, and then as he glided, smooth and solemn as a priest down an aisle, up the walkway and onto the porch. That must have been the moment I unfroze, because suddenly I was across the road and on the porch beside him, with my hand on his arm. The word on my tongue was something like
stop
or
wait
or
no
. But I didn’t have a chance to open my mouth before he turned to me (his calm, his complete lack of surprise, was the most dreamlike part) and said, “You came.” He was himself, minus twenty pounds and plus a beard in which you could have hidden a pencil. His eyes looked almost happy. His posture was weirdly rigid. I still hadn’t spoken and it was already too late; his pointer finger hung in the air as if he were a skeleton delivering a warning. He’d rung the bell.
From:
To:
Date:
Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 3:29 AM
Subject:
re: (no subject)
You ask how, with such fear when I left the house, did I leave the country, I started by degrees, trained myself, habit is mechanical, a matter of currents, I decided ten minutes outside in daylight today, walking to the corner, then an hour, our old creek path, then two hours, then jobs, I needed money, this trip must be my own, for bosses I could pretend to be ordinary, I would say, Semester off, I would let S cut my hair, I would say, Columbia, cross my legs, normalcy is a role, a series of lines, then days of standing behind a counter, staring at cash registers, counting minutes. Fear would rise and I would tell myself, Bear it, welcome it, you can’t run, I would swim in fear like a wave, didn’t hear bosses, customers, tasted tears, heard a terrible roar. I needed two thousand dollars, every moment was a footstep, whether you want something or want to get away from something,
the wanting is the same, two years, the people I’d known had jobs, were engaged, I knew until my ribs didn’t show, my parents would never let me travel, I ate peanut butter and grapes, these too are habits, I didn’t mention India, didn’t mention anything, began to say, I’m feeling better, let’s go to a movie, I’ll see a doctor again, this one was Dr. Lennard, marble lobby, elevator to six, I would sit in a leather chair, air-conditioning and water pitcher, he had framed pictures of antique cars, he would ask me how had the conversation with my mother gone, when else had I felt panic, what was my father’s history of depression, I was Homer, remembered every story, I didn’t lie, presented evidence, Easter eggs in close-cut grass, the pressure of school, the years of friendlessness, he nodded and nodded, touched his tie, had I considered, had I ever thought about whether, yes. He shook my hand, the ends of sessions, S and R in the waiting room, their hopeful faces, He’s very smart, I said, riding home, they were so happy. S kissed my forehead, I felt wet lips, trust was blooming, algae on a lake, my plans were swimming underneath.
From:
To:
Date:
Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 8:44 PM
Subject:
re: greetings
My worry never exactly dissipated—I’d still bolt upright in bed from dreams of slipknots—but hope began to flicker when it suddenly seemed—this was the development we’d been told to watch for, by professional horror-treaters—he
wanted to be well
. He was “engaging in his own treatment.” Which refers not just to the jobs, but to finishing his plate at dinner. Taking showers. Referring to future things: “when I go back to school,” “when I move out,” even once (Sally cried, raced from the room) “when I have kids.”
He’d started seeing Dr. Lennard, and we thought it had to be the medicine—blue pill for depression, period-sized white one for panic. I could have written sonnets to Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, odes to the roses in corporate New Jersey flower beds. For the first time since he’d been
home Sally and I went out to dinner—asked for the check with our entrees, sudden gush of dread, but still, a step.
And then he’d mention travel—at first it was guidebooks on the coffee table, browser windows left open to Inca Trail tourist sites. We thought, Yes, please, to travel is to care, to refill your plate with experience. We thought, We must have misimagined his life, but no problem—we’ll gladly be the parents stepping off a plane in a strange city, meeting a foreign wife, hearing grandchildren arguing in someone else’s language. Compared with three months ago, when all we could think of was visiting a ward, a grave—we were in rapture.
So, India. Suddenly the focus was all India. And I began to—I’ve had time, an infinity of nighttime hours, to regret this—plug his enthusiasms into the amplifier of myself. India? Here’s the best bio of the Buddha. Narayan novel. Account of independence. This churn is what I do. Will it be north or south? Work or study? When will we visit? How large a supply of pills can Dr. Lennard prescribe at once?
Sally was less taken. More hesitant, to her credit. She said, If he’s ready to rejoin the world, he should prove it by holding a job for six months. Crawl before you walk. But it had been three, almost four years. That phone call from Columbia, an asterisk on the calendar. And I wanted another. Another date to mark—when he got well, when the avalanche revealed itself as something else. Benign.
In addition to which, I’d started to have—I shouldn’t be writing this—secret inklings. That his life, broken husk, might be given over to the supraworldly. Maybe the torments he’d been suffering, the terrors and private panics, were his induction. One of my—not regrets, but compromises in bringing Thomas up in D.C. was the paucity of … that which couldn’t be discussed on soccer
sidelines over orange slices. Teachers, parents, very charming, wonderful—but living, fundamentally, between the forty-yard lines of George Will columns. Spirituality as the Montgomery Mall Christmas choir.
My own twentysomething crisis, thirty years earlier, had entailed a trip, not to India but to Thailand, this was just after the war—thatch hut by the Chao Praya, morning mist, an actual tiger (seen once, at a hundred feet, mini-fridge head lowered to a riverbank). This had been, for many years, the great adventure. I’d try to describe it at dinner parties, second bottle of red wine, Sally kicking me under the table. But there had been—under the influence of kratom and possible undiagnosed malaria—a vision one dawn in my hut. The moment—until Thomas was born—that I would have presented if aliens had descended, asked us to sliver up our pasts like cold cuts.
You must, it occurs to me—if you ventured into the Penn philosophy department at all—have read William James. More humane than his brother, better writer too. He gets to the end of
The Varieties of Religious Experience—
brilliant babbling encyclopedia of trances, conversions, shivers beneath crucifixes—and finally offers up the great unifying X between Christians and mystics and lotus-posed Japanese: “the ‘more.’ ” The sap in the veins of all religion. The nagging feeling that outside the frame, or behind the canvas, there’s … that which all the costumes and stories and nonsense can only gesture at.
I wondered if that’s what Thomas had tasted, was seeking to taste. If—again, cursed vanity—the neighbors and ex-teachers who saw him in his Blockbuster uniform—no, no receipt, thank you—who played the parlor game of imagining what had gone wrong, if the joke might be on them. He could be great on a scale outside the stadium entirely. India.
