At the Bottom of Everything(36)

From: <Sally Pell>

To: <Adam Sanecki>

Date: Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 8:12 AM

Subject: re: thank you

I’m afraid in any honest version of these past few years we’re going to come across as just about the most naive people on Earth. For our sakes, just keep in mind how much we wanted to believe he was all right.





For much too long (easy to say now), we figured this was a blip. Our Thomas would never drop out of school! This was the boy who used to make us all read short stories together instead of watching TV. This was the pride of AP Chemistry.





So getting him off to college, we really thought we’d done it, we’d gotten this package out into the world. After we moved him into his dorm we stopped for dinner in New Jersey, and I just looked at Richard and said, “Now what?” Because for eighteen years we’d been following this recipe. Giving him trumpet lessons; hiring tutors; taking him to plays; reading him books; driving his carpool; tying his shoes; zipping his jacket; wiping his bottom; drying his tears; cooling his fevers; removing his warts; trimming his hair. And now we were done! He was grown up.





But then he came home, and I just couldn’t believe that this twenty-one-year-old needed more help than he had when he was eleven. You know something strange I’d sometimes think? That he might be faking. Or not faking, but playing up the drama of things a little, as part of the genius act. He was always so self-aware about that type of thing, how old Einstein had been when he’d gone off to college, all that.





… You do feel awfully embarrassed, bad as that sounds. At first I’d lie to people. I’d hear neighbors say they’d seen him going to the mailbox (that was as far as he’d go, at first) and I’d say he was just home for a visit. Some people didn’t recognize him. Anne Wicker (she lives on Macomb, knew Thomas since he was five years old) asked did we have a relative in town, because she’d seen a skinny guy with a beard. Sometimes I was so mad I couldn’t look at him. I wanted to say, Don’t you know there are people in the world with actual diseases? Don’t you know how much hurt you’re causing your father? Sometimes I didn’t recognize him. It just wasn’t our Thomas.





He’d been home for maybe six months when we first heard him going out at night. I remember thinking, Good Lord, what next? So I sent Richard out to follow him. I figured what he was doing was going out and buying drugs. He’d sworn up and down he wasn’t on any, but I just couldn’t think what else made sense. I had the whole TV movie in my head: flushing things down toilets, tying him to the bed, really having it out.





But all he was doing, it turned out, was walking. Just like you two used to do, except alone. He’d walk a few blocks, stop in front of somebody’s house, lie down, get up again. One of those mornings I said, “We heard you going out last night.”





“Oh.”





I said, “Where’d you go?”





“For a walk.”





I cried like I hadn’t in years, once we really knew it wasn’t drugs. Can you imagine?





A problem with trying to accomplish anything when you’re visiting a place like Delhi is that just living, getting up in the morning and staying on your feet until it’s time to go to bed at night, feels like such an accomplishment already. I felt like the world’s most incompetent private detective. Only instead of my incompetence turning out to be a tricky sort of asset, where I’d stumble onto the bad guys in their lair like the Pink Panther, I was going to end up stabbed and tubercular in a gutter, picked over by wild dogs, no closer to finding Thomas than if I’d never left D.C.

Never mind finding Thomas; just finding the hotel where I was supposed to meet Guruji’s assistant (this was the major chore of my first week) somehow turned into a three-hour adventure. First the auto-rickshaw driver (auto-rickshaws were what people called the Flintstones cars, it turned out) misheard the address I gave him and took me, through unspeakable traffic, to Chandni Chowk when I wanted to be taken to Barahkhamba Road. Then, once I’d found another auto-rickshaw to take me back, and once I’d finally found the right street, the hotel turned out to be three-quarters closed due to construction. Then, trying to find somewhere to email Raymond to say I’d be late, I got lost in the electronics/Styrofoam district, and by the time I made it back to the hotel, another entrance had been marked off with caution tape. I was never unsweaty. I was never rested. I was never entirely uninterested in finding a bathroom.

In a roundabout way, all this difficulty was reassuring. If I, sane and healthy and armed with Lonely Planet: India, was finding Delhi hard to navigate, then Thomas must have found it impossible. He could no more have found the Batras, assuming they were really there, than he could have found a particular pebble on the beach.