“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m coming.”
But my secret had taken hold of me: I was going to leave him there. I wouldn’t die for him. No one would want me to. Even he wouldn’t want me to, if he were thinking clearly. Have you ever walked out of a room where a baby’s crying? I had that kind of charge running through me, the guilt and the anticipated relief. I’ll never tell anyone that I heard him. I’ll sneak off, he’ll call for me, he’ll suffer and I’ll suffer, it will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it will be right. It will be horrible but it will be right.
One of the very few benefits of having caused someone’s death before is that you have a nonimaginary sense of just how much it weighs emotionally. You understand what it would do to you to cause another. I can’t pretend to know how much of it was that, as opposed to feeling for Thomas, or even the latent suicidalism that seemed to have been pushing at my back since before I left for India, but I just know that at some point I was telling Thomas I was coming for him and lying, and then that I was saying it and telling the truth. And that not more than ten minutes after finding him I was making my way down to him, starting to make my way down to him, via one of the strangest physical maneuvers of my life. Your body knows a huge amount more than you do about how to get along in the world.
I lowered myself into the shaft, bracing myself with the flat of my back against one wall and the soles of my feet against the other, as if I were trying to hold the walls apart. My backpack was hanging against my chest. Inch by inch, I shuffled my feet, shimmied my back, and moved down into the depths at the speed of an inchworm. My light was still in my mouth. If the walls had suddenly broadened out at any point, I might have plummeted, I might have landed directly on Thomas, but I proceeded so slowly that I could feel the walls’ every bump and indent. I was concentrating so hard that there wasn’t even room in me to be afraid, really. My plan, or “plan,” was to give Thomas my water, and then for the two of us to climb out very much the way I was climbing in, like a pair of Santa Clauses shimmying our way up a chimney. Or maybe his little chamber would connect with another tunnel that would take us back to the main part of the cave. Or maybe he’d stand on my shoulders and jump.
I could hear him closer and closer now. When I came to where I could finally see a patch of ground clearly between my knees, I lowered my legs and let myself drop; it was like hopping off a wall, that little jolt in the feet and ankles. Thomas looked like a bearded skull set on a pile of rags. His eyes were socket-sized and fixed on me. “Oh my God, thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said, and he was patting me, my legs and feet; at first I thought it was to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, that I was really there, but he was looking for water. When I handed him a bottle he drank so fast that it spilled over his lip and soaked his beard.
My back felt scraped where it had been pressing against the wall. My knees would actually have been knocking, if I’d let them. It was surprisingly unquiet down there, something like the sound of being in a boiler room. My first order of business was to get my breathing under control; my chest felt like a pumping bellows. Pits, I realized, seem a lot deeper from their bottoms than from their tops. I could only see where I’d come from as a diffusing of my light. “What are we going to do?” Thomas said. “I’m hurt. I’m really hurt.” The space we were in was slightly broader than the shaft we’d come down; it was about the size of a small elevator cab, with a dirt floor and rock walls, and he was sitting against a wall with one leg, his hurt leg, extended away from him, crying and talking to himself.
The next stretch of time divided itself into eras. Some of them lasted minutes, some of them lasted hours, but they were distinct periods, like the movements of a symphony. This one, immediately after I’d lowered myself into the pit, was the era of assessments and practicality. I knelt over his leg, as if I had the slightest idea what I was doing, and asked him what part hurt. His feet were bare, and he was still wearing the white terry-cloth robe from the hotel. His ankle, in my hands, felt thin enough to snap. I balanced the light on a little rock shelf next to us. It was his knee, it turned out; his kneecap was shiny and swollen, and when I touched it his whole body jumped. “OK,” I said, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do about this right now.”
Another characteristic of this era was that I was treating Thomas, and thinking of him, the way a fireman treats someone he finds gasping inside a house. I was hardly looking at his face. I wasn’t saying a word about his disappearing from the hotel, or about his managing to have fallen down here. He was a trapped and damaged body and I was the person sent to save him.