At the Bottom of Everything(64)

It was around this point that I began to think, with a snowballing certainty, that this had all been an elaborate plot of Guruji and Raymond’s to kill me. I imagined I could hear boulders being rolled back in front of the entrance; I saw my beloved Ranjiv reporting guiltily to Raymond that he’d seen me go in. The terrible perfection of it sent a chill through me like an ice-water IV. I couldn’t turn back, couldn’t leave Thomas (or couldn’t leave without being sure I hadn’t left Thomas), but I was in less and less doubt: this was what they did, they entrapped American people, cleaned out their bank accounts, stole their identities, told their families they’d gone missing and to please send money for recovery of the body. “Ranjiv?” I shouted, idiotically. “Thomas?” I was a moron, a clueless foreigner; the nightly news would do a couple of stories (“Sad news from India tonight …”), accompanied by an incongruously smiling photo sent in by my mom. Was Thomas part of the scheme, or was he another of its victims? There was no one, just then, I wasn’t ready to suspect, no one that seemed to me free of a hint of murderousness. The Batras could have been in on it. My stepdad. The girl who’d sold me water at the village store. The word motherfuckers had now come into heavy rotation in my curse-stream.

At some point maybe a hundred feet in, the cave, or what I could see of it, narrowed dramatically. There was rubble and water around me, but the enterable part, now, was not much bigger than the space under a table. Carved on a big rock next to this tunnel entrance was another of the little sitting figures from outside. I’d thought that what I’d done already counted as searching the cave, but apparently to that point I’d only been milling around the lobby. So in I went. There are so few occasions for crawling in an adult’s life, I felt like I’d almost forgotten the mechanics of it. Palm, palm, knee, knee, palm, palm, knee, knee. It reminded me of crawling through the blue whale’s veins at the Natural History Museum. When had that been? The echoing breathing, the feeling of tininess. I am not afraid of caves. After fifty or so feet the tunnel took a turn, and to go on (I was now officially to the point where going on was easier than going back), I had to do a pull-up onto a little ledge, which I didn’t realize until I was back on all fours held a pool of water almost a foot deep. “Oh, Thomas? Thomas? Can you hear me? I hate you very much, Thomas. You’re a motherfucking idiot, Thomas. Can you hear me, you fucking moron? I’m about to leave you.” My knees and shins and hands were now soaked and freezing; I pulled on my sweatshirt, but that seemed only to make me heavier, not warmer. To do a U-turn now would have entailed scraping the top of my head on the wall. Only by making certain promises to myself could I keep from panicking completely: If it gets any narrower, I’ll turn around. If it gets to where I’m not absolutely certain which direction the entrance is, I’ll turn around. “I hate you so fucking much, Thomas, I really do. I’m going to go home and I’m going to be clean and happy and you’re going to be fucking dead here, and it isn’t going to be my fault. Are you happy now? Are you purified?”

The tunnel did get narrower, and I didn’t turn around. A part of me must have known that I wasn’t the only person in there; or maybe it was just that by then I was so miserable and confused that dying seemed like a kind of mercy. The ceiling of the tunnel lowered and lowered until the space between the ceiling and the floor, the space for me, was not much taller than my lying-flat body. Geology too seemed to be in on the conspiracy. I took off my backpack and held it under my armpit like a football. Each time I inhaled deeply (and I was taking wide-mouthed, noisy breaths around the light between my teeth) I felt the ceiling touch the back of my shirt. My teeth were chattering. My head was sideways, and I was advancing by sliding myself forward on my palms. You’ll turn around in ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty. Everything looked like it had been painted in red and black; was my light getting dimmer or was that my eyes? The sound in the cave, something like running water, had gotten louder now, but I wasn’t at all certain that it wasn’t just my blood. Would mine count as a sudden death? Were you real? Were you alone when you died? Were you older than forty? “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I hate you. I’m sorry.”

The tunnel had finally opened up again, letting me rise back up onto my knees, when I first really thought I heard a voice. I was on all fours, hanging my head, gasping, and I knew, if there had ever been a moment in my life when I was going to hallucinate, this would have been it. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear angels singing. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Mira Batra screaming. But what I did hear, or what I thought I heard, was someone saying, “Help! Help! Help!” Part of what made me think I might not actually be hearing it was that the voice seemed to be coming from far away, and from a place somehow beneath the ground I was kneeling on, where it didn’t seem possible for anyone to be.