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At the Bottom of Everything(44)

By:Ben Dolnick


Floating somewhere in the scummy lake of my thoughts was: Don’t listen to your brain; you’re just very tired. Thomas is probably passed out on the street in Delhi, or wandering through some other city entirely, scattering misleading emails behind him like birdseed. People who pass out on temple steps don’t keep mental calendars.

I caught an auto-rickshaw in front of a Volkswagen dealership and handed the Batras’ address to the driver. He studied it for a minute before he waggled his head, which I was finally beginning to understand didn’t mean no, but instead meant something like, If you insist, sir.

Sector 8 turned out to be a ways away from the city center, in a part of town where there really were golf courses (empty ones surrounded on all sides by dirt pits) and gated condos with men gloomily sweeping the courtyards.

D-5 was on a street with short, shrubby trees and strips of dust and grass along the sidewalks. The sky was low and white; there were birds chattering in the trees; there was a man in a plaid shirt and rubber sandals walking along singing and bobbling a cell phone. The rupees I gave the driver were dark with sweat. I was now, to my bafflement, standing alone under a dusty tree, across the street from the house (which looked more like a motel or a compound) belonging to the family of the girl I’d killed twelve years ago. But exhaustion muddles everything. I was trembling, but I was also nauseated by the bitter film coating the inside of my mouth and distracted by a pressure at the back of my eye sockets that I worried might be the beginning of dengue fever.

I watched a trio of schoolkids in blue uniforms run past, throwing bits of gravel at each other. I watched a little brown bird wrestle with a chunk of bread. I watched an Audi with tinted windows pull out of the driveway a few houses down and speed off away from me. What I needed, really, if I wasn’t going to fall asleep or throw up, was another beer. I’d brought the six-pack of Kalyani from next to the fridge, with the thought that I’d drink it that night in my hotel room, but desperate times, etc.

By three, which is to say by the time I’d stood there shakily under my tree for about forty-five minutes, one empty bottle now at my feet and another in my hand, I’d decided on something like a plan: I’d hang out near their house for the rest of the day, maybe at some point taking just enough of a nap to sharpen my thinking, and then, once I’d realized/resolved that the whole idea of Thomas being there was impossible, I’d take an auto-rickshaw back to town and catch the ten o’clock bus to Delhi. I’d never tell anyone, especially not the Pells, about this little trip to Noida, and I’d fly back to D.C. on Sunday. That would mean that I’d spent two weeks looking, which would have to count, for the Pells and for myself, as giving it the old college try. I’d leave Thomas to whatever purification or cave exploration he and Guruji deemed necessary, and I’d get back, as soon as possible, to the distant disaster that was my life.

I’ve never, of course, been a burglar, so I’ve never cased a house, but I think I now know, based on that afternoon/evening in Noida, more or less what it would be like. I couldn’t sleep, as it turned out (every time I started to go under, I snapped awake, feeling like a bungee cord had saved me from a fall), so instead I set up a little stakeout fort and waited. My main base of operations was the space between a row of bushes and a low brick wall directly across the road from the Batras’. If you ever want to be transported back to being five years old, hide behind a bush for a few hours. I got to know the pattern of the leaves and the smell of the dirt and the feeling, against my knees and tailbone, of each rock in the vicinity. There were earthworms and red ants, neither of which showed the least bit of interest in the mini puddles of beer I poured for them. There were clouds moving over me like a slow-motion comb-over.

I don’t think I ever stared so long at any of the buildings we studied in my Introduction to Architecture class in college; I don’t think I ever stared so long at any house I ever lived in. I got to know the corrugated metal of D-5’s leaky gutter; the brass or fake brass of its balconies; the dusty stones of its driveway; the spidery lines on the white wall where there had once been ivy. Could people really grieve behind those walls? Could they mourn while opening that broken mailbox? Being sleepless and half drunk was giving my thoughts a collage quality; I was as close as I’d ever come to the locked room in the basement of my life, and I was having to remind myself, over and over, the name of the city I was in.

Every hour or so I stood up and walked to the end of the street, trying to keep my legs from cramping up. I saw the full beginning, middle, and end of the man in D-11 washing his beige sports car. I saw guests arrive at D-6 with a casserole dish and leave with a ceramic bowl. I saw, and felt deep kinship with, a brown dog lying tied to a tree in front of D-1, staring and sleeping and waiting and sleeping and staring.