At the Bottom of Everything(62)

It wasn’t cold, except compared with the temperature that afternoon. The dirt smelled strongly of dirt. There was wind making the leaves rattle and bugs clicking and water hissing and so many more noises that I couldn’t begin to identify: hoots and chitters and yelps and grunts. I’m not ashamed to say that I was crying, lightly. I was reverse-engineering civilization by the things that I missed. Sheets, pillows, heat, walls, and bug spray, good God, bug spray. Mosquitoes were working me over, draining me. One bite in particular, on the tendon on the back of my knee, had taken on a dark, hard, throbbing quality, as if my leg were trying to give birth to something. I covered it with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and X’d the bite with my fingernail, which someone (it was Anna! my middle-aged mistress was somewhere on the planet right at that moment!) had told me helped dissipate the poison.

Every square inch of ground beneath me turned out to have qualities all its own. A little divot that took my shoulder as if it had been built for that purpose; a slant under my legs that eventually felt as steep as a ski slope. When dawn finally came, and I saw the plainness of where I’d been lying, the smallness and bareness of it, it felt like a trick. I brushed off my clothes and swished water around my mouth to get the taste out. It’s much easier to get up, it turns out, when you’ve never really been asleep in the first place.

We must have been hiking again by five thirty or six; it was that kind of light, and there was a wetness on everything, a fresh-from-the-refrigerator chill. I ate half a packet of broken crackers, and I could feel my body burning them up, vaporizing them, like water droplets hitting a hot pan. The rest of our way was mostly downhill, through woods that were like pine but shaggier. I was seeing whitish question marks, little retinal floaters, everywhere I looked. I kept finding myself moved, almost to the point of tears, by the sight of Ranjiv; he was the little brother, or possibly the son, I never had and never would. Watching his shoulders and the back of his shaved head, I wanted to go and grab him, hug him, tell him to please go off and have a life, he could take my place in America. He was good and I wasn’t, it seemed so clear, so indisputable. I wanted to find his parents and make them promise to take care of him; I wanted to give him real shoes, warm food, an apartment full of Ikea furniture and electronic crap. I wanted to lie down and die.

I didn’t understand, at first, when we came to the mouth of the cave. It was less the crack-in-a-wall sort of cave that I’d been picturing than a kind of indoor amphitheater. We’d been following a steep path down, in front of a rock wall, and now here it was, only slightly obscured by trees, like the entrance to a small garage. I peered inside. There was a ceiling you’d have to jump to touch, wide walls, a slightly downward-slanting rock floor. I didn’t notice until Ranjiv went over and bowed to it that there was a figure carved in the rock just to the left of the entrance; it was someone seated, holding up his right hand, just a few degrees more sophisticated than a stick figure. The cave wasn’t exactly inviting, but here in the noonish light it didn’t seem especially fearsome either; there didn’t look like there was any point inside from which you wouldn’t be able to see back to the entrance. I actually felt relieved.

My notion was that Ranjiv would lead us in, and that within fifteen minutes we’d either know we’d come to the wrong place, or we’d find Thomas perched somewhere just inside, like one of the bats I was now beginning to notice, shiny black faces poking out from the burned-English-muffin surface of the ceiling. Either way we’d be back in Akki’s village by bedtime, or by tomorrow morning at the absolute latest, and I would have survived what had seemed like the least survivable thing I’d ever done.

By that point Ranjiv and I had developed a more or less reliable system of gestures and looks, but we’d mostly used it to express things along the lines of Look out for where the path drops off or Let’s rest until you’ve finished drinking. This was more complicated.

First he made a gesture that was something like, OK, this is it, you’re welcome.

I pointed inside the cave. Pointed to him and then to me.

He shook his head and repeated: Thank you, no, our time together is done. You, alone, go inside.

We wrestled over this basic point for a while. Was he saying he was afraid? That he wasn’t allowed to go in? He looked, the longer we stood there, almost embarrassed for me, as if I were trying to insist that he accompany me into the bathroom.

I made a face, and may even have said out loud, “How the fuck am I supposed to go in there alone? And then how am I supposed to get back? Look where we are!”