From: <Richard Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:19 PM
Subject: re: greetings
Those first couple of years when he was back home, we lived at doctors’ offices. My dreams were full of waiting rooms, insurance forms, jars of tongue depressors. Nothing quite as disillusioning as those appointments—you could die of hope, just the way one of those clever quotable people said about Hollywood. His GP—overmatched pink-faced man—did a thousand dollars of tests and told us Thomas should drink Ensure to regain some weight. A Bethesda shrink—office full of tribal masks and tissue boxes—spent six months finding out that Thomas didn’t talk until he was two. One great coup of Sally’s was an appointment with an NIH neurologist—pompous whisperer in a lab coat, Nobel craver—who ran tests, found nothing, then recommended that we see the shrink he’d stopped seeing months before.
Daily mechanics felt like we’d slipped fifteen years backward—elementary school sick days, stacks of books, untouched toast on a plate. The living-room couch was his alpha and omega. He’d lie there, beatific, Christ thin, not moving. Getting him anywhere—the doctor, the shower, the kitchen table—was like reeling in a marlin. I’d forgotten, since my mother—she had MS, before anyone knew what it was—the time signature of sickness, how each day is endless but you look up and a year’s passed, suddenly your son has been on the couch for two winters.
He and I would do these Pinter plays—me on the edge of the couch, him staring at the ceiling fan.
“What’s up? What’re you feeling?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right, so what’s that like?”
“It’s unpleasant. I would like to be left alone, please.”
“We can do that, but look, here’s the deal. You’re in our house, you’re getting fed, you’ve got a roof …” My father’s words, my lips. Then I’d go weep in the bathroom until it was time to start on dinner.
At some point every leaf-blowing neighbor, concerned cousin, FedEx man had given us their “take”—overlapping soliloquies of advice. I became a good nodder.
“It’s because of the expectations he’s had on him, this is just his way of saying, Whoa, let’s make sure I’m doing what I’m doing for myself and not my parents.”
“So often when this kind of thing happens you dig and dig, thinking there’s something psychological or medical at the bottom of it, and actually it turns out to just be some cute brunette …”
“You must know, but this is the age … Men between nineteen and twenty-five. My nephew’s roommate in Boston …”
Sally and I strapped on horse blinders: small victories, days not worse than the day before—OK, he drank half a smoothie. He asked me to hand him the computer. I haven’t heard him going out for walks at night. And then, just when we’d started to think, you know, this may be it, the life of our son, Thomas announced he’d applied for a job—I had to actually hold myself up on the back of the chair. He wanted money of his own, he said. Independence. He’d been printing out applications, making calls. And so now Thomas—reader of Kant, Most Likely to …—got a job behind the counter at the Subway on MacArthur, $6.75 an hour. And we were weak with joy.
Again, a slip back in time—this time to first days of school, nervous bus-watching. He refused to be driven to work, so he walked forty minutes each morning, already in his green uniform—he’d had to get one for women, the men’s small hung on him like a tarp. I went a couple of times for lunch, half spy, half customer, he’d be there turning on the ovens, pouring the chopped pickles, stacking the coffee lids. No hello. I’d watch him make a sandwich, slow as folding a flag. Watch him watching “chicken” rotate in the microwave, his head cocked. And after six weeks he got fired. Or maybe quit—not clear, wouldn’t explain. Something to do with a customer he didn’t like, or with refusing to change his gloves. This was the first of the jobs—Blockbuster, Papa John’s, Kate’s Paperie—which got to have a feeling of … slipping even further back, watching him cross a room, eighteen months old, knowing he’s going to fall, knowing I’ve got to let him … He needed money, he kept saying. Something of his own.
Until that visit to Sri Prabhakara, I’d treated the possibility that Thomas might have found the Batras mainly as a thing in need of ruling out. In D.C., in the day or two before I decided to go, I’d done a couple of deliberately hopeless Google searches, to prove to myself that finding them would be impossible. And then once I saw Delhi, once I’d waded into the crowds and chaos, I’d lowered the chances even more; my job here was just going to be finding Thomas and bringing him home, or (more likely) declaring him unfindable and heading home myself with a sad story and a clear conscience (or at least a no-less-clear-than-before conscience). By the time I’d been there for a few days, I thought that he had a better chance of being dead than he did of having found what he was looking for.