At this point he dropped to his knees and started in on what I gathered were the final, farewell set of prostrations. I hoped very badly that I was misunderstanding him, but I didn’t think so. When he finally stood up, he dusted off his robe, then looked at me, looked directly at me, and for the first time since we’d been together it wasn’t the look a lowly soldier gives a general; it was more the look a man gives his house as it goes up in flames. But his gesture was unmistakable: You stay here. Good-bye.
I stood there watching his orange-robed back as he bobbed off up the path, not looking back, and then as he passed around the corner and out of sight. I felt like a dog being abandoned by the side of the road. There was an orbit of gnats around my head. I felt fear unfolding in me, expanding to fill my chest; I knew I should run after him, and kept feeling flickers of almost doing it, like someone at the edge of a diving board, but then it was too late, and I was standing by the cave mouth alone. The sun was making the ground steam, and a woodpecker was drilling away up high in a dead tree. I took a deep breath and, for the first time in my life, brought my hands together in prayer at my forehead. I turned and walked into the cave.
Q: It seems like everything’s good, very peaceful, when I’m here, but then as soon as I get home, around my family, I feel old patterns coming back. How do I keep from getting caught up in my old issues whenever I’m living my “real” life?
P: Prior to meeting your family, prior even to being conceived, you were somewhere, yes? Or did you come into creation from nothing? To return to that prior state, that is how you will be free in all of life.
Q: I get that as an intellectual idea, but to really experience it sometimes, especially when I’m away from the center …
P: Center is in imagination. Family is in imagination.
Q: But it’s hard, because my family doesn’t believe any of the same things that I do. Like if they heard what you were saying now, and saw me listening to it, they’d think I was out of my mind. [laughter]
P: Does family believe that when an object drops, it falls to the earth, or does it float away into the sky? Unless they believe, is there no more physical science, no more gravity? Does your mother control seven heavens? Must I make puja to her? …
Among the many impressions that I didn’t know whether to trust as I started into the cave: a breeze, like the wind off the ocean in winter, coming from somewhere in the depths. Was that possible?
I called out, tentatively at first, “Thomas? Thomas?” I got nothing back, except an echoey fullness and dripping. The ground slanted down sharply enough that I had to walk with my feet sideways, as if I were easing along on skis. All the stone (and everything was stone) was wet, a from-within wetness, as if the walls were sweating, clammily. The ground was broken up in places, piled into rubble heaps. I probably didn’t need my flashlight yet, but I thought about stopping to put on my sweatshirt. The entrance, when I looked back, was a bright yellow parallelogram.
I’d been in a cave before, as a kid, at the same camp in Virginia that had turned me against hiking. I remembered it mainly as hunch-walking down a tunnel behind a boy named Daniel who wore the same Alice in Chains T-shirt every day for three weeks. And I remember not being afraid. I was lonely and cold and, since my being at camp was one of my mom’s attempts to have me make friends with people other than Thomas, resentful of just about everything I experienced. But I wasn’t scared, and that, as much as anything, gave me hope that this too would be tolerable. I was having to stoop now (the floor and the ceiling were converging, as if I were walking toward the corner of an attic), and it was just about dark enough to turn on my flashlight, but still: I’m not afraid of caves.
“Thom-as? Oh, Thom-as?” By that point I was calling out to him mostly as a kind of verbal cane tapping. My attention was almost entirely on my body (the floor had gotten steep enough that I’d started scooting on my butt), but there were things I couldn’t help noticing: that the walls were smeared with white; that there were puddles so still they could have been mirrors; that the bats (and there were bats everywhere I shone my light) were making a faint, collective chittering, like mice in the walls. I was talking to myself now, in addition to calling out to Thomas, a mix of encouraging babble (“… all right now, just right down here and careful, careful …”) and a kind of free-form cursing. Not only did it seem impossible that Thomas was in here, it seemed impossible that anyone had been in here. I imagined bears. I imagined cavemen frozen in amber (how had I never really heard the cave in caveman?). I clenched the flashlight like a cigar between my teeth.