At the Bottom of Everything(32)
I’m going to need to expand my vocabulary when it comes to the varieties of bad sleep, the way someone on an ocean voyage would need to distinguish between types of storms. That first night in Thomas’s old apartment, anyway, was a collision of various fronts: nervousness, heat, jet lag, digestive unrest. My bed turned out to be a green canvas cot, wedged onto the floor behind a partition. The conversation of the people on the roof came directly down to me as if they were shouting through a pipe; every time the techno music seemed to have stopped it would turn out just to have paused to gather its strength. I kept being woken up by something tickling my forehead and gusts of black-smelling mold. By two a.m. I’d decided that unbeknownst to me, India, like Iceland, must have a season of sunless days, and at three I took a sleeping pill and then had a dream about choking on chalk dust.
Apparently at some point in the last aching stretch before dawn I got out my notebook, because when I woke up it was open on my pillow, with a new line at the bottom of the first page in handwriting I almost didn’t recognize as mine:
shouldn’t have come. check flights. to find him would be a literal miracle, something to teach in schools, a moon landing.
From: <Thomas Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:43 AM
Subject: re: (no subject)
… You mention guilt but I would say that for years, despite reason to be, I was not a guilty person, my mind ran along other tracks, sophomore year, junior year, it started, I would lie in my room at Columbia, ninety-eight-square-foot cell, remembering everything, not the crash, but other things, older, I would dream of my toad Lewis whom I killed or thought I killed at seven years old, before you knew me. He was loathsome to me, physically repellent, he ate mice and crickets, they puffed their bag with jumping, I used to imagine him dead, I would think of birds coming through the window and carrying him away, one morning I came downstairs to feed him, I was devout, the glass of his case was hot, the dial had been turned to High, he was a briquette, his eyes were dried currants. When I called to S and R they came downstairs, bathrobes and bare feet, said, Oh no Rosabelle must have done it cleaning up, or one of them must have brushed against it, they wanted to absolve me, but I knew I had, I had no memory of it but I knew with my wishing, it had to be. I wept in my room that night, S came in, not understanding, she sat with me, said, Yes, it was so sad, he had been such a wonderful toad, hadn’t he, she was sure he hadn’t suffered, it had happened while he was asleep, we’d get another. I was not good, I was not well, terrible things happened when I wasn’t careful, this may have been the first time I understood it.
From: <Richard C. Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:02 PM
Subject: re: greetings
… My worry started to tick—parental Geiger counter—sometime his junior year, when phone calls started to have an edge of hastiness, partial accounting. Classes? Fine. Dorm? Fine. Roommate? Fine. He was staking out mental residence elsewhere.
All this, keep in mind, had 9/11 in the background—it had only been a year, so still very much in the penumbra of everything changed. If anything was going on with him, we thought it might be that—going to school a few miles uptown from Ground Zero, we’d assumed some of the atmospheric panic—Cipro and Wolf Blitzer touch-screen maps of Afghan caves—might have seeped in. He’d started kind of fear-blurting—should he ride the subway? Get a gas mask? So we probably misread the signs. A nervous breakdown after 9/11 was like a lost voice in a Trappist monastery.
Thanksgiving was another worry-tick—I remember mostly o’er-leaping talk, clattering plates, and Thomas at the center, wax figure in a gallery. This was his vegetarian debut, so a part of me thought, OK, projecting holiness, making clear he’s not a party to the feast, got it. (In college, my meatless years, I sat at my parents’ table in front of a plate of bacon, fingers of enticement beckoning like cartoon pies on a ledge.) But he was establishing the mental territory.
Then a few months later the phone rang too late on a Sunday night, a girl from Columbia—she’d just talked to Thomas and she was scared. He’d told her he was very sick—brain tumor, months to live, she’s the only one who can know. My first thought was: shrapnel from a romantic blowup. Thomas, at that point, was very much a novice, so I was thinking, OK, he falls for a girl, nothing doing, he comes up with this story to try to get her attention. Somewhere between a protester setting himself on fire and John Cusack with his boom box: you have no choice but to feel for me.