At the Bottom of Everything(49)

He walked us to the front hall, past family pictures and a hanging rug. We’d been inside for forty minutes, the length of a nap, of a TV show. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sound like that front door locking behind us; it was like the bolt being thrown in a jail cell, but I couldn’t tell if we were on the inside or the outside. The moon above the trees was enormous. The air smelled like asphalt.

There used to be these green glow sticks that we’d carry on Halloween (they were probably full of poison; we kept them by the hot dogs in the freezer), and to make them light up, you’d crack them, like breaking a bone. I felt like one of those lights now, but instead of light I was glowing with shame and horror and a feeling of not quite being in my body.

Thomas walked slowly down the middle of the road; I picked up my backpack from behind the bushes and stood there in the dark just watching him go. What was he thinking? Where was he going? I was in the middle of India, in the middle of the night, in more pain than I’d felt since dislocating my shoulder when I was eleven. I was seriously considering heading off in the opposite direction and never talking to him or thinking about him again. Treat him, treat everything to do with him, like a bad dream you wake up from in the middle of the night and tell yourself to forget.

But something in me, even then, was apparently clearer headed than that, or at least working toward some other goal. I caught up with him at the corner (the same corner where my auto-rickshaw had turned a few hours earlier), and I was about to say, “Wait,” when I realized that he’d heard me coming up behind him and that he’d already spoken. His voice had been just as calm and strange as it was inside the house, so at first my brain took in the tone but missed the words; those came a second later. “You’re a coward.”





From: <Thomas Pell>

To: <Adam Sanecki>

Date: Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 4:02 AM

Subject: re: (no subject)

… What I learned here I didn’t come here to learn, it was an accident, not an accident, it was done by invisible parts of me, my suffering, I thought in India it would be better, it wasn’t, now I couldn’t talk, couldn’t sleep, I walked until my feet bled, didn’t feel them, the particular pain was not separable from the general pain, I wrote to S and R, three sentences would take an hour, I would tell them I was happy, I was working, not to worry, then back in the street I would knock on doors, beg for food, look for clear places to lie down, count hours like years of a jail sentence, I knew I had made the final mistake, it was so hot, I was lost, I thought, When does the body begin to eat itself, please start with the brain, I would sometimes think I’d become something else, a dog, a spider, I would touch my body, it was still my body, it was as strange to me as a farm tool, a broken machine, one day, I had been sleeping, sleep was not a relief, it was worse, someone found me, brought me to the center, carried me like a corpse, I thought, The cemetery, the pyre, I need to wake up so I can explain that I’m alive, why can’t they hear me. But I must have slept, I was inside a dark room, I heard quiet music, bells, my head was on a pillow, I opened my eyes and saw his face, he was on his seat, it was the first thing I’d seen since leaving home that didn’t scare me. He didn’t look at my clothes, my hair, I saw this in his eyes, he was so calm, so kind, I wondered had I met him before, he looked as if he knew me. Suddenly I was trying to sit up, to speak, my lips felt thick as thumbs. I wanted to say, saying it was the only thing I cared about, I’m so glad I didn’t die. I didn’t know where the thought had come from, I had forgotten the feeling of happiness, it was like a word in another language, no sounds came out, it was OK, he touched my hand, I understood, I needed to learn what he knew, this was what would let me live, this was what I’d been kept alive to do …





From: <Sally Pell>

To: <Adam Sanecki>

Date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:36 PM

Subject: re: thank you

… One phrase that came to mean a lot to me was “out of the woods.” When Thomas started working, and started seeing Dr. Lennard, and started talking about wanting to travel, I’d sometimes turn to Richard and ask, “Do you think we might be out of the woods?” (We never have to tell each other when we’re talking about Thomas. It’s the ongoing conversation for us, with occasional interruptions for what to make for dinner.)





I don’t know why it was “out of the woods” in particular. I’m not sure I’d ever used the words before in my life. I think it might have gotten into my mind from disease movies, you know, the sorts of things you find yourself watching a bit of on TV, crying when the doctor finally tells Sally Field that the cancer’s come back.