At the Bottom of Everything(60)

At some point I discovered that the thorns hurt less on the backs of my arms than on the fronts.

Were you real?

And that the worst was getting them in the cheeks; that needed to be avoided if at all possible.

Were you famous?

And that if I stepped very high, while simultaneously keeping my arms in boxer-protecting-his-face mode, I could let my knees take the worst of it.

Did you die in the last five years?

Maybe hopping; hopping might actually be better.

Was your death bloody?

We’d now made it to the shady side of the mountain, which, along with my sweat-soaked shirt, meant that I wasn’t hot for the first time in days. But this seemed to be the hour of the late afternoon (and I would rather it have been fifteen degrees hotter) during which India’s versions of horseflies come out. Or maybe it was something in our smells, our particular level of filthiness, that drew them. The only time I saw Ranjiv look anything other than totally composed was when he was slapping at a pair that were tag-teaming his neck. They were the size and weight of sugar cubes; they made frantic, helicopter-circling noises as they hovered by your ears; they stung with deep, epidural sorts of needles. I spent those entire couple of hours fondling the thought of their extinction like a prisoner plotting his revenge.

And they wouldn’t, I don’t think, have been quite so hard to deter except that I needed both hands to cling to the long grass as we made our way down the hillside. This hill seemed, and may even have been, slightly steeper than an average peaked rooftop. And this was a rooftop that happened to be covered in a shiny, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sort of grass, all combed downward so as to facilitate maximum slippage. It’s such an unfamiliar feeling, for someone who takes elevators and orders takeout and confines his exertion to softly padded weight machines, to be flexing your muscles desperately, and for hours. Something about the angle at which I was crouching kept making my left thigh seize up in little walnut clusters of pain. The fingers on both my hands were cut up and stinging where I’d been clutching at roots. My veins were hard as shoelaces. At one point, just when I thought I’d developed a reliable grab-and-shimmy method, a handful of roots gave way and I did a thing I’d never done before in waking life: I tumbled freely and helplessly. For what couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds I was without resistance, without a notion of where I’d end up. I came to a stop maybe fifteen feet below our little non-path, my feet higher than my head, my entire body sunk in wet grass. Something had torn a strip of skin from my thigh. I’d crushed everything in my backpack. This wasn’t the first but it was probably the most serious of the moments in which I thought: I give up. I didn’t know exactly what giving up would have entailed (lying there until horseflies had stung me to death; rolling down the hill until I was carried away in the river), but I couldn’t imagine that it could be any worse than going on. If there had been anyone to tell me that it was all right, I would have cried; for the first time in India, maybe for the first time in years, I longed for the presence of my mom.

Ranjiv, looking down at me with alarm, gripped me by the shoulder straps, lifted me like a doll (this despite his weighing at least forty pounds less than me), and placed me on my feet. From that point on he never got more than a few feet ahead of me, and once we were past the steepest part of the hill, he insisted that we stop and rest. He refused to drink from my bottle; instead he made a little cup with the bottom of his robe and, squatting by the stream, drank for the first time that I’d seen all day.

His drinking, for reasons sensible or not, struck me as a very bad sign. As I say, I’d somehow taken his lack of water as an indication that this wasn’t going to be a long hike, but now I began to fear (and this too felt familiar from the Appalachian Trail, watching as my counselors quietly conferred) that this might actually involve spending a night outdoors. It was beginning to get dark, different sets of birds and bugs were beginning to make themselves known, and something about the way Ranjiv was moving, his energy-conserving lope, signaled to me that this was a person who knew he had many miles and many hours to go. It’s possible that my emotional state, like a fallen tree, was simply decomposing in hyperspeed, but I really, really didn’t want this hike to include a night in the woods. I even pled to Ranjiv’s back, in the hopes that my tone of voice might convey my meaning, “We’re going to get there tonight, aren’t we?” He just glanced back at me, concerned and a little irritated, as if I’d sneezed on his neck.

We weren’t going to get there tonight. A couple of hours later (by which time it was nearly dark, and my legs had become numb little forward-motion machines) we came into a clearing, a dramatically pretty patch of fallen leaves enclosed by a creek and a wall of vine-swallowed trees, and Ranjiv pointed at the ground and made a sleeping-on-a-pillow gesture with his hands and head. Here we were. I sat down on the biggest rock I could find and took a glug of water that for some reason I had to work not to immediately throw up. I kept seeing little peripheral flickers in the underbrush, but it was probably just my eyes. I almost felt like laughing with unhappiness.