At the Bottom of Everything(35)

Weren’t they worried that he’d died? That he’d maybe tripped on a rock going into the cave and bled to death at the foot of some godforsaken Indian mountain? No, apparently he’d never left Delhi at all. A couple of people knew people who said they’d seen him since then, back in the Paharganj bazaar, almost as skinny and filthy as he’d been when they first took him in, or else meditating in various places around the city, like the star of a Where’s Waldo? for spiritual expats. This must have been the phase when he wrote me the note about the Batras. A spiritual nomad, wandering the streets with his pajamas and Thermos, just sane enough to duck into an Internet café and terrify me.

And did he ever, I asked Cecilia, mention anything about a girl named Mira or a family named the Batras? (Saying her name out loud, which I’d never done with anyone other than Thomas, felt bizarre and reckless, like walking naked up to the hostess at a restaurant.)

“No, I don’t think so. Who are they?”

“I’m not sure. He just mentioned them in a couple of emails.”

“Sorry. He almost never talked about his personal life. It’s hard to think of him even having one.”

What seems weirdest to me, in retrospect (one of the many things that seems weird to me), is how readily I accepted all this, how little I wondered at it being my Thomas Pell these people were talking about. I seemed to be carrying into waking life something like the attitude I took when I was dreaming.

Which in some sense I guess I was: I’d seen a bejeweled, wet-eyed elephant (guest of honor at a wedding party) lumbering along the side of a highway. I’d seen a three-story statue of a He-Man monkey towering over a town square in which shrink-wrapped Paulo Coelho books were arranged on card tables next to copies of Mein Kampf. I’d seen a bearded, half-naked man crawling on all fours, except his hands were twisted inward, so really he was dragging himself along with his elbows; a little girl with scarred lumps where her eyes should have been; a woman whose head seemed to have been held in a fire. At some point the sleeping/waking distinction had begun to blur.

But still: people from Dupont Prep, people who’d never missed a meal in their lives unless they had to make up a test during lunch—people like that didn’t end up homeless and half dead in Delhi. It just didn’t happen.

Except apparently to Thomas.

He’d told me once, when we were fourteen, that the only belief system he’d ever been able to take seriously was empiricism (I’d nodded thoughtfully, and made a note to check Encarta when I got home). Well, the data were clear: the only people who had any idea what had happened to him were the types who keep Ziploc baggies of bee pollen on the kitchen counter and have their minds unselfconsciously blown by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Apparently I needed to take whatever I thought I knew about him, whatever I thought I knew about what he would or wouldn’t do, and toss it into the blue-smoking garbage fire I passed each afternoon on my way back to the apartment.





From: <Thomas Pell>

To: <Adam Sanecki>

Date: Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 2:56 AM

Subject: re: (no subject)

… Until I was twenty-one I had never, I don’t think you could say, experienced true fear, of course I knew conventional fear, I’d known fear of being caught, but never as a bodily emergency, never so overwhelming that you’d kill yourself just to end it if you could only move. The first was on a date, a girl I wanted very much to impress, I’d worn a blazer, I became afraid, we were at a movie in Lincoln Center, I became convinced sitting in the dark that I had left the iron plugged in back in my room. More and more certain, until I couldn’t see the screen, I smelled smoke, I saw the boy who lived next to me on fire, I could see his cheeks burning, his lips melting, his teeth bare as a skull, I ran from the theater, north on Broadway, couldn’t speak, fought through crowds, thinking of jail, thinking of grief, telling his parents, my life would end, and there was nothing, of course, it wasn’t plugged in at all, but I didn’t feel relief, I felt empty … After that I could see each fear coming, small in the distance, fear of cancer, fear of being mugged, fear of loneliness, fear of insanity, then closer and closer, larger and larger, I dreaded them, begged myself please no, I wouldn’t be able to move, would have to lie in bed and shake, I never knew cold sweats, each morning I would wake up with wet sheets, meanwhile classes, meanwhile tests, meanwhile I couldn’t sleep, night was the worst, I’d never been afraid of the dark, you know, suddenly I’d sleep with the door open, or in the library, once or twice out on one of the lawns, a security guard told me to move along, thought I was homeless, I showed him my ID, he didn’t care, thought I was drunk. Fear is muscular, cardiovascular, I had never been so tired, constant ache of having just been sick, constant dread, fear of fear. I would think, in quiet moments, how did I once meet people, walk down sidewalks, stand in elevators, how did I go about unterrified, what a miracle, what a feat, all these people uncelebrated in every room, they could do what I couldn’t, no one appreciates the stacking of days, the launching of a personal space shuttle, we who can’t, we Challenger explosions, shake in bed, stare at our knuckles. They don’t tell you, no one does, that losing your mind is, more than anything else, terrifying …