At one point behind the bush, my legs did fall asleep, all the way past tingling and pain and into the realm of immobility. By sunset, when the streetlights came on, I’d given up on walking, and I’d started feeling the individual grooves of parchedness on the roof of my mouth. I deeply regretted the beer I’d poured on the ground. In order not to waste any water (I had a quarter-full eight-ounce bottle of Nestlé Pure Life) I was parceling it out to myself, one warm capful per fifteen minutes. It was getting so dark in my stakeout fort that to check my watch I had to hold it so that it was almost brushing my eyelashes.
It was eight o’clock, at a moment when I happened to be busy unwrapping my third and final Nature Valley Oats ’n Honey bar, when a black Mercedes swung into D-5’s driveway and three people stepped out: two paunchy men in short sleeves and a small gray-haired woman in a purple sari that went past her feet. The men were talking (I couldn’t tell whether they were speaking English or Hindi) while the woman unlocked the door and led them inside. Could those be the Batras? Could that ten-second flash of faces and voices really be them? Suddenly I was sitting on my knees, a mound of unchewed granola in my mouth, staring as the light came on in the front hall. I held my breath. Why had I chosen a hiding place so directly across from their front windows? I felt like a squirrel frozen in conspicuousness on a tree trunk.
The light in another room came on, then went off. I thought I heard an inner door closing, maybe an air conditioner whirring to life.
It wasn’t so much that I decided to miss the last bus back to Delhi as it was that I just watched the time come and go when I would have needed to stand up and leave for it. My watch said it was 8:45 and then that it was 9:20 and then that it was 10:15: time was tumbling down the cliffside next to me. I guess I’ll just sleep here, I decided. Or not sleep here. Maybe I’m done with sleep; maybe my body’s now learned how to make do on oats and anxiety. I should steal a letter to check their name, I thought. Wait for tomorrow’s mail. I wonder if mailmen in India drive on the wrong side of the road—wait, do mailmen in America drive on the wrong side of the road, or is it just their steering wheels, steering, steering wheels … is steering really a word?
It was almost eleven when I first noticed that some minutes had passed that I couldn’t account for. My head was doing that chemistry-class thing of drifting and snapping, drifting and snapping. So now I could sleep. I pinched myself on the thigh, which didn’t keep me awake but did, along with my tipped-over water bottle, introduce into my dreaming a plotline about blood seeping through my pants, soaking the ground.
I’m not making excuses, really; I’m just trying to explain, or to understand, why it was that I didn’t notice when it got to be midnight, and why it hadn’t occurred to me that that was the time to wait for. It was now August 7. The auto-rickshaw only stopped in front of D-5’s driveway for a few seconds. You’d think (I would certainly have thought) that I wouldn’t have recognized Thomas at first. But even in the half-dark of the street, even with his body so thin and a beard covering most of his face, I knew him before his driver had pulled away. He couldn’t have been fifty feet from me. He wore what looked like rumpled pajamas and no shoes. His hair was short but shaggy. I once heard a woman on the news who’d woken up to find her house on fire say that she hadn’t known, even as she was running out to the street, whether she was dreaming, and I’d thought, That can’t really be true. But I really didn’t know as I sat there staring; as Thomas, in the light at the foot of the driveway, brought his palms together at his forehead and bowed, and then as he glided, smooth and solemn as a priest down an aisle, up the walkway and onto the porch. That must have been the moment I unfroze, because suddenly I was across the road and on the porch beside him, with my hand on his arm. The word on my tongue was something like stop or wait or no. But I didn’t have a chance to open my mouth before he turned to me (his calm, his complete lack of surprise, was the most dreamlike part) and said, “You came.” He was himself, minus twenty pounds and plus a beard in which you could have hidden a pencil. His eyes looked almost happy. His posture was weirdly rigid. I still hadn’t spoken and it was already too late; his pointer finger hung in the air as if he were a skeleton delivering a warning. He’d rung the bell.
From: <Thomas Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 3:29 AM
Subject: re: (no subject)
You ask how, with such fear when I left the house, did I leave the country, I started by degrees, trained myself, habit is mechanical, a matter of currents, I decided ten minutes outside in daylight today, walking to the corner, then an hour, our old creek path, then two hours, then jobs, I needed money, this trip must be my own, for bosses I could pretend to be ordinary, I would say, Semester off, I would let S cut my hair, I would say, Columbia, cross my legs, normalcy is a role, a series of lines, then days of standing behind a counter, staring at cash registers, counting minutes. Fear would rise and I would tell myself, Bear it, welcome it, you can’t run, I would swim in fear like a wave, didn’t hear bosses, customers, tasted tears, heard a terrible roar. I needed two thousand dollars, every moment was a footstep, whether you want something or want to get away from something, the wanting is the same, two years, the people I’d known had jobs, were engaged, I knew until my ribs didn’t show, my parents would never let me travel, I ate peanut butter and grapes, these too are habits, I didn’t mention India, didn’t mention anything, began to say, I’m feeling better, let’s go to a movie, I’ll see a doctor again, this one was Dr. Lennard, marble lobby, elevator to six, I would sit in a leather chair, air-conditioning and water pitcher, he had framed pictures of antique cars, he would ask me how had the conversation with my mother gone, when else had I felt panic, what was my father’s history of depression, I was Homer, remembered every story, I didn’t lie, presented evidence, Easter eggs in close-cut grass, the pressure of school, the years of friendlessness, he nodded and nodded, touched his tie, had I considered, had I ever thought about whether, yes. He shook my hand, the ends of sessions, S and R in the waiting room, their hopeful faces, He’s very smart, I said, riding home, they were so happy. S kissed my forehead, I felt wet lips, trust was blooming, algae on a lake, my plans were swimming underneath.