At the Bottom of Everything (26 page)

I lowered myself into the shaft, bracing myself with the flat of my back against one wall and the soles of my feet against the other, as if I were trying to hold the walls apart. My backpack was hanging against my chest. Inch by inch, I shuffled my feet, shimmied my back, and moved down into the depths at the speed of an inchworm. My light was still in my mouth. If the walls had suddenly broadened out at any point, I might have plummeted, I might have landed directly on Thomas, but I proceeded so slowly that I could feel the walls’ every bump and indent. I was concentrating so hard that there wasn’t even room in me to be afraid, really. My plan, or “plan,” was to give Thomas my water, and then for the two of us to climb out very much the way I was climbing in, like a pair of Santa Clauses shimmying our way up a chimney. Or maybe his little chamber would connect with another tunnel that would take us back to the main part of the cave. Or maybe he’d stand on my shoulders and jump.

I could hear him closer and closer now. When I came to where I could finally see a patch of ground clearly between my knees, I lowered my legs and let myself drop; it was like hopping off a wall, that little jolt in the feet and ankles. Thomas looked like a bearded skull set on a pile of rags. His eyes were socket-sized and fixed on me. “Oh my God, thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said, and he was patting me, my legs and feet; at first I thought it was to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, that I was really there, but he was looking for water. When I handed him a bottle he drank so fast that it spilled over his lip and soaked his beard.

My back felt scraped where it had been pressing against the
wall. My knees would actually have been knocking, if I’d let them. It was surprisingly unquiet down there, something like the sound of being in a boiler room. My first order of business was to get my breathing under control; my chest felt like a pumping bellows. Pits, I realized, seem a lot deeper from their bottoms than from their tops. I could only see where I’d come from as a diffusing of my light. “What are we going to do?” Thomas said. “I’m hurt. I’m really hurt.” The space we were in was slightly broader than the shaft we’d come down; it was about the size of a small elevator cab, with a dirt floor and rock walls, and he was sitting against a wall with one leg, his hurt leg, extended away from him, crying and talking to himself.

The next stretch of time divided itself into eras. Some of them lasted minutes, some of them lasted hours, but they were distinct periods, like the movements of a symphony. This one, immediately after I’d lowered myself into the pit, was the era of assessments and practicality. I knelt over his leg, as if I had the slightest idea what I was doing, and asked him what part hurt. His feet were bare, and he was still wearing the white terry-cloth robe from the hotel. His ankle, in my hands, felt thin enough to snap. I balanced the light on a little rock shelf next to us. It was his knee, it turned out; his kneecap was shiny and swollen, and when I touched it his whole body jumped. “OK,” I said, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do about this right now.”

Another characteristic of this era was that I was treating Thomas, and thinking of him, the way a fireman treats someone he finds gasping inside a house. I was hardly looking at his face. I wasn’t saying a word about his disappearing from the hotel, or about his managing to have fallen down here. He was a trapped and damaged body and I was the person sent to save him.

I am, at best, an ordinarily strong person, and at that moment I was probably a good deal less than that, but Thomas was light enough that I was able, once I’d convinced him he was going to have to move, to pick him up like a barbell. My
first set of attempts involved jumping, with him in my arms, and trying to lodge myself in the narrower part of the shaft, but I couldn’t get nearly high enough. Then I tried getting a toehold on one of the tiny rock ledges a few feet off the ground, but I couldn’t stay up for more than half a second, and even if I’d been able to, I wouldn’t have been able to use my hands to climb any farther, because they were busy holding Thomas. He was moaning and babbling, the verbal equivalent of drooling. “Oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry.” One of my most successful attempts was when I draped him over my shoulders like a mink scarf, then tried bracing myself against the walls with all four limbs spread out like Leonardo’s
Vitruvian Man
. The basic problem was that the shaft, in a way I hadn’t appreciated on the way down, was shaped more like a flask than like a test tube; we were stuck down in the fat part at the bottom.

I was actually managing to blot out my panic, or most of it, by keeping absolutely fixated on trying to get us out. Once I’d given up, for the moment, on jumping and climbing, I set about exploring the walls, in the hopes of finding another tunnel. For this I laid Thomas back down on the ground, his hurt knee in the air. “When was the last time you ate?” I said. “You need to eat.” I gave him a cracker, which I ended up having to more or less stuff into his mouth, then ate most of one myself. It was around this point, I think, that I began to notice that the light from my flashlight, which had started out a fairly robust yellow white, was beginning to go ashen. Or maybe it had just shifted on its shelf. It had been running for only an hour or so, anyway, so I didn’t think this was high on my list of things to worry about. I dropped to my knees and started feeling along the walls for places that might be made of something other than solid rock.

The most plausible patch turned out to be about the size and shape of an LP, right at ground level, on the wall where Thomas had been sitting when I’d first come in. There the rock, instead of feeling like the usual granite-ish slab, was
almost crumbly. With my fingertips I managed to get a pretty good amount scraped off, and I was close to thinking I felt coolness, air, on the other side when I realized that what I was actually feeling was wetness; another surface of rock, just as solid as all the rest. I stayed there scraping at it for what must have been ten minutes, making no more progress than you would trying to scrape through stainless steel, and when I finally gave up it was the first moment in which I felt, unmistakably, the likelihood of death closing around me. It gave me a chill at a depth I didn’t know was capable of feeling such things. Bone marrow, spinal fluid; there was no part of me that wasn’t sending out distress signals.

There’s a tendency, I think, to discount the suffering in fear; after the fact, once the tests have come back negative or the call’s been returned, we think,
It wasn’t as bad as all that
. We let our present relief retouch our past terror. I want to make sure I don’t do that here; being down at the bottom of that pit, realizing I had no way of getting us out, was exactly as bad as all that.

I sat with my back against the wall and stared down at my legs, which were shaking freely. What the roar behind me sounded like more than anything, I realized, was a fire, a steadily approaching fire. My last act, I thought, might be murdering Thomas. He had his eyes gently closed and he was still muttering, almost soundlessly now. I kept looking up into the shaft, in case there might be a handhold, a shelf, a passageway I’d overlooked.

There was no question of the light’s dimming, finally. The end of a flashlight is a terrible thing; it shrinks and closes in on itself like the last gulp of water down a bathtub drain. I shook it, hoping the batteries might knock some life into each other. I twisted it off and on, off and on, off and on. Finally, I threw the light, as hard as I’d thrown anything since the last time I’d played baseball, against the wall next to Thomas; it made a small and unsatisfying sound, before it rolled back and bumped against my foot. We were in the dark.

There couldn’t be more than a few hundred people alive who really know absolute darkness. Deep-sea divers, unlucky miners. People think of the bathroom in the middle of the night, or the road when your headlights go off.
Oh my God, it’s pitch-black
. No, it isn’t. Actual darkness isn’t just not being able to make out shapes, or not being sure where the walls are. It’s got more in common with blinding light than it does with ordinary basement darkness; it presses on you, it fills you up, it’s all you can think about.

For a long time (I can’t say how long; my sense of time, which I’d already thought was haywire, was now untethered completely) I just sat there in the dark and tried not to scream. Each breath I took, each movement, seemed to require as much effort and attention as a step on hot coals. Me breathing, Thomas muttering, the cave breathing; I couldn’t tell one sound from another. My whole body was tensed, almost vibrating, in anticipation of some sort of explosion. There’s an exquisiteness to the moment before a tantrum, a kind of delicious pinpoint pain. I’d forgotten. It’s much more pleasant than the tantrum itself, anyway, which is all flailing and
stumbling and shouting yourself hoarse. I’d forgotten that part too.

I did eventually scream; Thomas by then had fallen mostly silent. Again, I don’t know for how long, and I can’t even say what I shouted, except that it centered around the word
help
, but my throat was raw by the end of it. There was wall pounding too, in addition to the shouting. And kicking and shouldering and jumping and, at one especially hopeless point, biting: I scraped my teeth against the wall and spat a mixture of dirt and blood.

When Thomas and I were in middle school, first spending our afternoons together, we used to talk sometimes about what we’d do if we found out we had one week to live. Sometimes it would be a day, sometimes just an hour. Our answers were always along the lines of breaking into the houses of girls we knew and explaining that common sense dictated that they have sex with us. Running through school naked, telling all our teachers to go fuck themselves. We always seemed to imagine the news of our impending deaths as a liberation, as if our lives were dress shoes we couldn’t wait to take off.

God, there’s so little we understand, so little we’re actually capable of imagining. How many times had I read about human remains found in caves?
A significant discovery, with the potential to reshape anthropologists’ understanding of …
How had I not heard the screaming, the wheezing and weeping as the air ran out? Or what about Pompeii? I’d walked past those gray bodies as if they were mannequins, animals in a diorama, blithely waiting all these centuries to demonstrate everyday life in ancient Italy. No. Their deaths were horrible. I should have heard shrieking while I walked, sipping orange soda, behind my mom down those streets. I should have imagined skin melting like cheese.

I had a loose rock in one hand and I was pounding it, scraping it, against the ground. It didn’t matter, I realized, whether my eyes were open or closed. If I learned I was about to die,
it turned out that what I’d do is have the most staggeringly intense Technicolor panic attack of which a human body is capable. No sex. No running. No triumphant speeches.