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At the Bottom of Everything(61)

By:Ben Dolnick


I was, of course, incredibly tired, but past a certain point tiredness stops registering primarily as a desire to be asleep. It was as if my body or brain had at some point in the past few days accepted that I was never again going to get adequate sleep, so it had constructed a jittery, pain-spiked simulation of wakefulness. It was to the real thing what a high school Into the Woods backdrop is to an actual forest.

But before we could sleep (and by now it was becoming truly dark, so I had to use my flashlight when I went to pee), Ranjiv had various things to do, little ceremonies. I didn’t know if these were things he did every night, as a monk, or if these were things that had to do with me in particular. The whole time he kept the mildest, most blandly content expression on his face; he looked, here in the middle of the woods, alone with a white stranger he’d been told to revere, like someone unloading the dishwasher.

The first thing he needed to do, apparently, was to start a little fire. I’d never seen anyone do this before, outside of Survivor, and he wasn’t, surprisingly, particularly good at it. Or maybe the twigs he was using were just wet. Either way, he spent what seemed like twenty minutes gathering sticks and branches and leaves, then spinning one stick against another, on and on and on, until I thought maybe he wasn’t trying to start a fire at all; maybe this was the whole ritual. But a string of gray smoke finally appeared, and then a flame about the size of the one in a votive candle. The whole time he was doing this, I was sitting on my rock, scraping thorns from my legs with the Pells’ MasterCard. I wanted, for some reason, to stomp Ranjiv’s fire out. I wanted to douse it in lighter fluid and burn every fly and plant and human on the mountain.

The dark, when you’re in the middle of the woods, is so complete, and comes on so fast. I moved closer to the fire, now the size of a flame on a stove, and I just sat there, painfully cross-legged, a few feet from Ranjiv, for what seemed like an hour. My back hurt in every position I tried, so I settled on a hunch, with my elbows on my knees. If we’d been friends, if we’d spoken the same language, we would have been telling stories, complaining, tossing broken-off pieces of bark. As it was, we just sat. I tried toasting a cracker, which didn’t improve its taste. Life must have been so terrifying, and so boring, when there was nothing to do at night other than sit around in the dark and stare at fires. I tried to remember the exact layout of everywhere I’d ever lived. I tried to remember what Thomas had had on the walls of his childhood bedroom. I kept thinking I heard voices on the water, rustling in the bushes; and (this is painful to think about now) I kept switching on my flashlight, as if the pale circle might just happen to catch whatever it was, and as if I might be able to do something about it.

At some point, just before he went to sleep, Ranjiv shifted around so he was facing me and launched into a set of prostrations that made last night’s look disrespectful. He stretched all the way out into a push-up frozen just above the ground. He cupped his hands at his forehead. He scooted forward on his knees and repeated it all closer to me.

“You don’t have to do that,” I muttered, waving my hands. “Really.”

When he opened his mouth I thought he was actually going to respond to me, but instead he let out a single, mournful note (it was him leading the chanting), which he then repeated, at intervals, like a wolf baying at the moon, or like a beautiful human car alarm. I had goose bumps all over my legs, and only the thinnest tissue of sense kept me from shouting, “Stop! Stop! Please stop! This is insane!” Instead I closed my eyes and thought, I don’t know what I’ve done in my life to be where I am, or actually I do know, but please tell me I’ve paid my debts. Tell me I’ve done enough.

It was time for bed.

Ranjiv swept dirt onto the fire, then curled up on the flat ground right where we’d been sitting. He tucked his knees toward his chest and pressed his hands together under his head (for him the sleeping gesture was apparently a literal reenactment). I curled up about five feet away, facing the opposite direction, and tried to understand that this was it, that these were the conditions under which I was going to spend the next however many hours of my life. I uncrumpled my sweatshirt and made a kind of blanket/neck pillow out of it. When I switched off my light, the darkness was almost perfect; there must have been cloud cover, because even the moon, which had been massive at Akki’s, was nowhere. If I ever made it back to America, I decided, I’d go on a speaking tour, imploring people to think daily about the miracle of artificial light. Night was an enemy we’d defeated so thoroughly that we forgot we’d ever been fighting it. In the dark woods on the side of a mountain you’re not the endpoint of all creation, you’re just a small and not particularly capable mammal; you’re a monkey curled in a tree, a wild dog with its nose buried in its paw.