At the Bottom of Everything (27 page)

Before the attack really took hold, though, or before it became so crippling that I wasn’t capable of anything other than lying there and experiencing it, I did try talking to Thomas.

“What were you thinking?” I said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

I didn’t expect him to answer me, really. I had the impression by then that he was animate in some other way than I was, like a plant, or a reef. Instead, in a voice much more like the one he’d had in the hotel, he said, “This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I meant to happen at all. I know it doesn’t make any difference to you, but—”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

“I was supposed to … Once I got here and sat, something was supposed to change. I thought I would, maybe not leave my body, but I would understand that something had left, I would feel something, I would finally be free. But I fell, and I panicked. It was the worst I’d felt since … since I first met Guruji. I forgot why I was here. I got so thirsty I started to cry. And then you came, and I’m so grateful, I finally understand what you’ve done for me, but I wish you hadn’t, because—”

“Because we’re going to fucking die?”

“We are, yes, I am, I understand that now. And I understand that I needed to, that I always needed to die, for me to get where I’m going I couldn’t live, and I just wish you didn’t have to—”

If my consciousness had been a symphony, this next phase would have been the work of an experimental composer, someone shunned by the academy, someone whose pieces included things like musicians snapping their instruments over their knees and tearing up their sheet music. Bodily, I was now lying on my side, against the wall, every so often dipping my fingertip in the mouth of the water bottle to moisten my lips,
but mentally, or anyway in the parts of the body that experience things invisibly, I was in hell. “Life flashing before my eyes” doesn’t describe it, because flashes are brief, and because this wasn’t my whole life, or even particularly important parts of it. It was more like someone had filled a row of buckets from the lake of my life, and now that person was dunking my head in them, one after another, until I nearly drowned.

One bucket:

I saw my mom sitting at the head of our kitchen table in Baltimore, eating soup from one of our chipped white bowls. The sky outside was silver; there was a sound somewhere of an airplane or an air conditioner. On the table in front of her, spread out under her bowl, was one of her health magazines. She had a big pale spoonful of broth and she was blowing on it in this way I would never have thought I remembered: the exact pattern of the wrinkles around her lips when she puckered, the precise little
shushing
noise. And for some reason the me in the memory was in agony; the sense was that I’d been told I had to wait for something, or that, as a punishment, I wasn’t allowed to speak. There was a willful-ignoring quality in how she was blowing on the soup, I think, a kind of defiant unconcern. How old was I when this had happened? Six? Seven?

Another bucket:

I was in seventh grade, new to Dupont, and I was sitting in Principal Weaning’s office, watching her pull the door shut. What had I done? I felt as if I were trying not to cry. One of the venetian blinds was bent. I could hear the phone ringing and then the secretary’s voice out in the waiting room. There was a stringy half-dead plant on the windowsill. Now I remembered what I’d done: I’d lied that my real dad had been killed in a plane crash over the weekend in California. In homeroom, thinking it would be a joke, I’d leaned over to Scott Owens and whispered it, and then it had become too late: Justin Durand, Mrs. Nusk, shaky-handed sympathy hugs, a disastrous sense of being pinned in a trap. I was crying,
wiping my nose with one of the thin and scraping tissues from the box on the desk, while Principal Weaning, her hands crossed in front of her, leaned toward me with a self-satisfied yellow smile and said, “Now, why did you lie, Adam? Why would you lie about something like that?”

On the floor of the cave, now, I was crying too, and shaking as if the ground beneath me had become electrified. Apparently drug addicts, in their first days of withdrawal, sweat out their substances; they writhe and scream and soak the sheets. “I hate you, Thomas,” I heard myself saying. “I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d never come.”

“I’m sorry. I wish it had been someone else, I really do. I’m going to pray now, OK? I’m sorry, I need to, I’m sorry.”

Another bucket, only it wasn’t my life, it wasn’t my memory:

It was the middle of the night and traffic lights were flashing and crickets were making a high hum, and I was standing alone on the curb of a familiar street. Everything had a kind of electron-microscope clarity: the glossiness of the asphalt, the ticking of the lights, the smell of the mulch, the reflections in the glass of the bus stop. I looked left, then stepped off the curb in a fluid hop. As I crossed the street I could feel, like a plunging thermometer, a car rolling out somewhere to my right. I couldn’t turn my head but I knew it was there. The other car came more as a blaze of light than as an object; it wasn’t there, and then it was.

At this point the memory, or whatever it was, branched in two, or maybe I branched in two. I was in my body and I was watching it. A piece of music with two parts.

The impact of a head against pavement is, when it happens, so ordinary; that’s maybe the worst part about it. The laws that govern watermelons dropped from overpasses, pumpkins thrown from porches; they apply to our most precious possessions too. I can’t say whether I jumped or screamed or what; I can only describe the feeling, which was pain, yes, the worst sort of ripping, brain-bursting pain, but also something much
worse and much harder to explain. A kind of sinking into an icy ocean, maybe. The sort of falling you do in dreams but without the bolting awake: just down, down, down.

And then at some depth, streaming past, clearer than they’d been in actual life, were the Batras. Faces in a submarine window. The only way I can describe their expressions is: I knew I would rather be blind for the rest of my life than to have to look at them again. They were so clear I could see the tiny hairs in the pores of their cheeks. Words like
devastation, grief, horror, shock
are fingers pointing at an abyss; their faces were the abyss.

I must have screamed.

Somewhere far above me, or somewhere close but with many layers in between, I heard Thomas’s voice; I felt his hands on my shoulders, heard him saying something; I could feel the words but couldn’t understand them, they were like snowflakes or ash.

“Are we dead?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

I was so, so tired, I wasn’t sure if I’d actually managed to speak.

“I’m going to save you,” Thomas said. “Like you saved me. I can’t keep you from dying, but I can save you.”

“OK.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Say something if you can hear me.”

“I am. I can hear you.”

“Are you breathing?”

“Yes.”

“If you’re breathing, just feel it. Forget your name.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re breathing.”

“Yes.”

“You aren’t dead.”

“No.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Move your hand if you can hear me.”

I moved my hand.

“Something was switched on when you were born, and it’s never been off, not for a second. Do you understand me?”

“No.”

“It was there before you met me, before you met your mom. It’s been running through the accident and the trip here and every conversation, every dream, there’s been this thing; it never flinches, it never closes its eyes, not even now, it doesn’t love or hate, it doesn’t want or not want, nothing has ever happened to it. Do you understand?”

“No. Thomas, I’m so sorry. I’m tired. Please. I’m so sorry. I’ve made so many mistakes. I’m so, so tired.”

“Squeeze my hand.”

“I am.”

“Just listen to me. You can fall back into it. It’s always there. It doesn’t care where we are. It doesn’t care what we’ve done.”

“I don’t understand. Please.”

“Just fall back. Fall.”

“I can’t.”

But I could. Because I fell. And the thing in me I would have said was me—it was unplugged like a refrigerator. I hadn’t known what silence was.

“Hello?” I said.

“Yes. You’re talking.”

“Thomas?”

I was still conscious, I’m pretty sure, but I was in rooms of my brain that I’d never been in. The best way to describe what I was experiencing then is to say that I’d been poured back into the lake. And that I understood, in the way you “understand” you have a body and a name, that it wasn’t really my lake; I’d been, at most, a gallon or two; I was dissolved. And among the things I discovered, in this new state, was that
it didn’t matter anymore whether I was speaking out loud. I could talk to Thomas without opening my mouth. I could think at him.

Remember when we lay side by side on our backs on the sofa in your room and walked on the ceiling, stepped over doorways
.

Yes
.

Remember when we sat at the top of that hill in the sun eating a Kit Kat and said this was the happiest we’d ever be, that there was nothing else we’d ever need
.

Yes
.

Did you mean to stop the car?

I think so
.

Did you think I would jump in the window?

I don’t know
.

Are we here as punishment?

I don’t know
.

Are we going to die?

Yes
.

Do you forgive me?

Yes
.

We were so young
.

Yes
.

The mistake was so small
.

Yes
.

The disaster was so big
.

Yes
.

My tears tasted salty and thin. I was rising, by that point, the sound was coming back into the world; I kept trying to open my eyes and realizing they were already open. My tongue was so dry it felt swollen. I could feel Thomas’s shoulder against mine; he seemed to be propping me up; he was tipping water into my mouth. I had to struggle to keep myself from falling asleep.

“Now are we dead?”

“No.”

I coughed and swallowed water.

The doors to the rooms where I’d been were still open, but I was back now in the ordinary, semi-ordinary, rooms of my brain; I didn’t know whether an hour had passed or a week. I felt as if I were treading water in a pool that was exactly the same temperature as my body. I was both as heavy as the mountain we were trapped in and completely weightless. The roaring behind the walls was louder than it had ever been, and I was trying to say this to Thomas, trying to ask him whether he heard it too, but I couldn’t remember what words to use, and it was too loud anyway.

Which may explain why the voices, when they finally sounded above us, seemed like such tiny things, negligible, raindrops against a window. I don’t think I understood what was happening, that something was happening, until I looked up and saw light like a steel spike falling toward us; or maybe it wasn’t until the rope, the wet rough knot of it, touched my arm. I just know that there was a lot of clattering and talking and then there was an era of people grabbing me, pulling me, as if I were a ball of dough, and then that I had my face buried in someone’s chest, and I was clinging to a rope so hard that my eyes were flashing white. Afterward, once we were outside, they told me I kept insisting that we be careful with Thomas’s leg, and that I kept asking him if he was OK, asking if he was with us, saying I was sorry, but I don’t remember any of that.

What I do remember, the first thing that registers as an actual memory, rather than as a kind of mental oil rainbow, is walking, with my arm slung over Ranjiv’s shoulder, up out of the cave and realizing, once the brightness had begun to resolve itself, that it was pouring rain. Standing there on a ledge just outside the mouth of the cave, like the discoverer of a new continent, dripping, squinting, shaking, I felt newborn; I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from spare parts.

Ranjiv had been having doubts all the way back to Akki’s village, it turned out. He’d almost turned around a dozen times before he’d finally decided what he was going to do.
He’d told Akki, who’d bought rope and lights and borrowed a little Soviet-era ATV sort of thing from a nearby village. It had, according to the clocks aboveground, been just over thirty-six hours since I’d gone in, and almost twice that long for Thomas.

But I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew that I somehow wasn’t dead. And that the rain sounded like a thousand drumrolls. It might have been the contrast to the sensory deprivation of being underground, but I think it really was the kind of rainstorm you only experience two or three times in your life, the kind of rain during which you think,
I guess the world’s just going to wash away
. There wasn’t, by the time they’d crammed us into the back of the ATV and covered us with a tarp, a thread of my clothing, including my shoes, that wasn’t soaked. I was wetter than if I’d jumped into a swimming pool. I heard a voice I didn’t recognize that must have been the car-owning neighbor’s. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us and every muscle in my body hurt. Someone had put a horsehair blanket under my head, and that was soaked too. I kept calling out to Thomas, thinking he might have fallen out of the car on one of the bumps, and he kept being just a few inches away, wedged and shivering next to me. The only food Akki and the monks had brought with them were crackers that tasted like pepper. The rain was so loud that we couldn’t have talked even if we’d tried. It seemed inconceivable that we’d ever get there; it seemed possible at any moment that we’d flip onto our side and be washed away.

But the thought that kept floating to the top of my mind like an ice cube in a glass, even as I shivered and shook and tried to bite the cracker someone held against my lips, was: What a narrow range of weathers we have in mind when we describe a day as beautiful! Water is falling, in gouts and cups and gushes, from the sky, onto us, who can feel and hear and smell and taste it. What a lock! What a key! Breathable air, spread out in every direction. Trees and dirt and rocks for us to look at, teeth with which to chew our food. This is most of
what I was thinking, if you can call it thinking, all the way back to Akki’s front door, where it was nighttime, and where Shima greeted us with dry blankets and scalding tea. This, or something like this, is even what I was thinking when they finally changed me into dry pajamas and eased Thomas and me into side-by-side beds, and I fell into a sleep that was almost a hibernation. Akki’s disappointment, the questions I couldn’t even try to answer, a look at the shaking, bruised wrecks of our bodies, came much later.