At the Bottom of Everything (25 page)

Among the many impressions that I didn’t know whether to trust as I started into the cave: a breeze, like the wind off the ocean in winter, coming from somewhere in the depths. Was that possible?

I called out, tentatively at first, “Thomas? Thomas?” I got nothing back, except an echoey fullness and dripping. The ground slanted down sharply enough that I had to walk with my feet sideways, as if I were easing along on skis. All the stone (and everything was stone) was wet, a from-within wetness, as if the walls were sweating, clammily. The ground was broken up in places, piled into rubble heaps. I probably didn’t need my flashlight yet, but I thought about stopping to put on my sweatshirt. The entrance, when I looked back, was a bright yellow parallelogram.

I’d been in a cave before, as a kid, at the same camp in Virginia that had turned me against hiking. I remembered it mainly as hunch-walking down a tunnel behind a boy named Daniel who wore the same Alice in Chains T-shirt every day for three weeks. And I remember not being afraid. I was lonely and cold and, since my being at camp was one of my mom’s attempts to have me make friends with people other
than Thomas, resentful of just about everything I experienced. But I wasn’t scared, and that, as much as anything, gave me hope that this too would be tolerable. I was having to stoop now (the floor and the ceiling were converging, as if I were walking toward the corner of an attic), and it was just about dark enough to turn on my flashlight, but still:
I’m not afraid of caves
.

“Thom-as? Oh, Thom-as?” By that point I was calling out to him mostly as a kind of verbal cane tapping. My attention was almost entirely on my body (the floor had gotten steep enough that I’d started scooting on my butt), but there were things I couldn’t help noticing: that the walls were smeared with white; that there were puddles so still they could have been mirrors; that the bats (and there were bats everywhere I shone my light) were making a faint, collective chittering, like mice in the walls. I was talking to myself now, in addition to calling out to Thomas, a mix of encouraging babble (“… all right now, just right down here and careful, careful …”) and a kind of free-form cursing. Not only did it seem impossible that Thomas was in here, it seemed impossible that anyone had been in here. I imagined bears. I imagined cavemen frozen in amber (how had I never really heard the
cave
in
caveman
?). I clenched the flashlight like a cigar between my teeth.

It was around this point that I began to think, with a snowballing certainty, that this had all been an elaborate plot of Guruji and Raymond’s to kill me. I imagined I could hear boulders being rolled back in front of the entrance; I saw my beloved Ranjiv reporting guiltily to Raymond that he’d seen me go in. The terrible perfection of it sent a chill through me like an ice-water IV. I couldn’t turn back, couldn’t leave Thomas (or couldn’t leave without being sure I hadn’t left Thomas), but I was in less and less doubt: this was what they did, they entrapped American people, cleaned out their bank accounts, stole their identities, told their families they’d gone missing and to please send money for recovery of the body.
“Ranjiv?” I shouted, idiotically. “Thomas?” I was a moron, a clueless foreigner; the nightly news would do a couple of stories (“Sad news from India tonight …”), accompanied by an incongruously smiling photo sent in by my mom. Was Thomas part of the scheme, or was he another of its victims? There was no one, just then, I wasn’t ready to suspect, no one that seemed to me free of a hint of murderousness. The Batras could have been in on it. My stepdad. The girl who’d sold me water at the village store. The word
motherfuckers
had now come into heavy rotation in my curse-stream.

At some point maybe a hundred feet in, the cave, or what I could see of it, narrowed dramatically. There was rubble and water around me, but the enterable part, now, was not much bigger than the space under a table. Carved on a big rock next to this tunnel entrance was another of the little sitting figures from outside. I’d thought that what I’d done already counted as searching the cave, but apparently to that point I’d only been milling around the lobby. So in I went. There are so few occasions for crawling in an adult’s life, I felt like I’d almost forgotten the mechanics of it. Palm, palm, knee, knee, palm, palm, knee, knee. It reminded me of crawling through the blue whale’s veins at the Natural History Museum. When had that been? The echoing breathing, the feeling of tininess.
I am not afraid of caves
. After fifty or so feet the tunnel took a turn, and to go on (I was now officially to the point where going on was easier than going back), I had to do a pull-up onto a little ledge, which I didn’t realize until I was back on all fours held a pool of water almost a foot deep. “Oh, Thomas? Thomas? Can you hear me? I hate you very much, Thomas. You’re a motherfucking idiot, Thomas. Can you hear me, you fucking moron? I’m about to leave you.” My knees and shins and hands were now soaked and freezing; I pulled on my sweatshirt, but that seemed only to make me heavier, not warmer. To do a U-turn now would have entailed scraping the top of my head on the wall. Only by making certain promises to myself could I keep from panicking completely:
If it gets any
narrower, I’ll turn around. If it gets to where I’m not absolutely certain which direction the entrance is, I’ll turn around
. “I hate you so fucking much, Thomas, I really do. I’m going to go home and I’m going to be clean and happy and you’re going to be fucking dead here, and it isn’t going to be my fault. Are you happy now? Are you purified?”

The tunnel did get narrower, and I didn’t turn around. A part of me must have known that I wasn’t the only person in there; or maybe it was just that by then I was so miserable and confused that dying seemed like a kind of mercy. The ceiling of the tunnel lowered and lowered until the space between the ceiling and the floor, the space for me, was not much taller than my lying-flat body. Geology too seemed to be in on the conspiracy. I took off my backpack and held it under my armpit like a football. Each time I inhaled deeply (and I was taking wide-mouthed, noisy breaths around the light between my teeth) I felt the ceiling touch the back of my shirt. My teeth were chattering. My head was sideways, and I was advancing by sliding myself forward on my palms.
You’ll turn around in ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty
. Everything looked like it had been painted in red and black; was my light getting dimmer or was that my eyes? The sound in the cave, something like running water, had gotten louder now, but I wasn’t at all certain that it wasn’t just my blood. Would mine count as a sudden death?
Were you real? Were you alone when you died? Were you older than forty?
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I hate you. I’m sorry.”

The tunnel had finally opened up again, letting me rise back up onto my knees, when I first really thought I heard a voice. I was on all fours, hanging my head, gasping, and I knew, if there had ever been a moment in my life when I was going to hallucinate, this would have been it. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear angels singing. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Mira Batra screaming. But what I did hear, or what I thought I heard, was someone saying, “Help! Help! Help!” Part of what made me think I might not actually
be hearing it was that the voice seemed to be coming from far away, and from a place somehow
beneath
the ground I was kneeling on, where it didn’t seem possible for anyone to be.

I called out, for the thousandth time, “Hello? Thomas? Hello?” Nothing. Or maybe something, but too faint to hear. You can hear voices in drips, in cave breaths, just the way you can hear music in airplane roars. I drank water, my first sip in an hour or two, and blew grit from my nose into my hand; the smell of wet, cold rock suddenly became much sharper. I slumped back against a wall, to keep my legs from freezing up. My knees were purple and pruny. My right sock was red with either blood or dirt. I was doing, and had apparently been doing, something between crying and whimpering. The tunnel went on, but I’d decided, or discovered, that I wasn’t capable of following it. It wasn’t that I didn’t know which way the entrance was, but I could feel my sense of orientation wavering, going in and out like a radio signal, and I knew it would only get worse.

There was, I noticed when I went to wipe my hand, a puddle at the place where the wall met the floor, and there were drops falling into the center of it:
pock, pock, pock, pock
.

If I die here
, I thought,
that’ll be the last thing I hear
. What I didn’t think right away, and again, I blame my mental state, was:
Where is the dripping coming from?
When I followed the shine on the ceiling with my light, I came to a crack right over my head, not much bigger than a pebble. I didn’t touch it, for fear of bringing the tunnel rubbling down on me, but it was that crack that gave me the idea, at a moment when I didn’t think I was capable of ideas: there was more to the cave than this tunnel I was in. If there could be water above me, there could be tunnels below me. I don’t know if this was even coherent thinking, but it was my thinking. There could be an actual voice.

I don’t know how long I spent scrabbling along with my ear to the ground (time was one of the many senses that had gone wobbly), but it was long enough for me to be sure that the voice was not just an echo, and that it was coming from
somewhere below the part of my little chamber closest to where the tunnel continued. “Hold on! I’m coming! Wait!” So I did go on, now having to do a kind of military crawl on my elbows; by that point I was like a dog in the last frenzied stretch of a hunt.

It wasn’t until I came around a little bend that the voice suddenly became much clearer, and that I understood just how far down it was coming from. “Hello?” I called. “Hello?” And as I lay there, a trembling antenna, there was finally a moment of quiet, a pause in both of our yelling, in which I knew that I’d found Thomas and Thomas knew that someone had come for him; it gave me goose bumps on the inside of my skin.

The tunnel dropped off into what I thought at first was just a kind of pothole (if I’d had my light off I might have slid in headfirst), but what turned out to be something much deeper than that; it was as if I’d been crawling along in an air-conditioning duct and had suddenly come upon an elevator shaft.

“Help! Help! Help!”

“Thomas? I’m here. It’s Adam.”

“Help! Oh God, help.”

I was lying on my stomach, peering over the edge of the pit, struggling to find him with my light; the beam was barely strong enough to shine as deep as he was, and when I did finally find him, it was only his face, only the pale stretch of his forehead and cheeks, that showed up in all that dark. My heart was beating so hard that I thought I might faint or die before I’d even gotten to him.

“I fell,” he said. “I hurt my leg. I’m so thirsty. Please. Help.”

He didn’t sound anything like the Thomas who’d been rambling to me in the hotel; terror had sharpened his voice and raised its pitch. He must have been twenty or twenty-five feet below me. From what I could tell his pit was about the diameter of a well.

“Thomas? I’m going to come get you.”

“Yes. Yes. Please. Help. I need water. My light broke. I don’t have anything.”

“I just need to get down to you.”

“OK. Yes. Please.”

Again, I don’t know how long I lay there thinking of what to do, listening to the cave breathe and to my heart thud, staring down into the dark, but at some point the thought arrived in my mind, as if it had been spoken by another voice, one at an even greater depth than Thomas’s:
You need to leave
. And as soon as it had been spoken, a chorus of voices materialized to bolster it. How could I possibly get down to him without getting hurt myself? And how, if I did get down to him, would we possibly make it back up? I could tear up my sweatshirt and try to make a rope of it, but that would only reach a few feet, and it would never support a person, let alone two people, even if I could find something to attach it to. I could hurry back to the entrance of the cave and try to find someone to come back with me, but I’d never find anyone, and by the time I made it out and made it back, he’d probably have died.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m coming.”

But my secret had taken hold of me: I was going to leave him there. I wouldn’t die for him. No one would want me to. Even he wouldn’t want me to, if he were thinking clearly. Have you ever walked out of a room where a baby’s crying? I had that kind of charge running through me, the guilt and the anticipated relief.
I’ll never tell anyone that I heard him. I’ll sneak off, he’ll call for me, he’ll suffer and I’ll suffer, it will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it will be right. It will be horrible but it will be right
.

One of the very few benefits of having caused someone’s death before is that you have a nonimaginary sense of just how much it weighs emotionally. You understand what it would do to you to cause another. I can’t pretend to know how much of it was that, as opposed to feeling for Thomas, or even the latent suicidalism that seemed to have been pushing at my back since before I left for India, but I just know that at some
point I was telling Thomas I was coming for him and lying, and then that I was saying it and telling the truth. And that not more than ten minutes after finding him I was making my way down to him, starting to make my way down to him, via one of the strangest physical maneuvers of my life. Your body knows a huge amount more than you do about how to get along in the world.