I am, at best, an ordinarily strong person, and at that moment I was probably a good deal less than that, but Thomas was light enough that I was able, once I’d convinced him he was going to have to move, to pick him up like a barbell. My first set of attempts involved jumping, with him in my arms, and trying to lodge myself in the narrower part of the shaft, but I couldn’t get nearly high enough. Then I tried getting a toehold on one of the tiny rock ledges a few feet off the ground, but I couldn’t stay up for more than half a second, and even if I’d been able to, I wouldn’t have been able to use my hands to climb any farther, because they were busy holding Thomas. He was moaning and babbling, the verbal equivalent of drooling. “Oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry.” One of my most successful attempts was when I draped him over my shoulders like a mink scarf, then tried bracing myself against the walls with all four limbs spread out like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. The basic problem was that the shaft, in a way I hadn’t appreciated on the way down, was shaped more like a flask than like a test tube; we were stuck down in the fat part at the bottom.
I was actually managing to blot out my panic, or most of it, by keeping absolutely fixated on trying to get us out. Once I’d given up, for the moment, on jumping and climbing, I set about exploring the walls, in the hopes of finding another tunnel. For this I laid Thomas back down on the ground, his hurt knee in the air. “When was the last time you ate?” I said. “You need to eat.” I gave him a cracker, which I ended up having to more or less stuff into his mouth, then ate most of one myself. It was around this point, I think, that I began to notice that the light from my flashlight, which had started out a fairly robust yellow white, was beginning to go ashen. Or maybe it had just shifted on its shelf. It had been running for only an hour or so, anyway, so I didn’t think this was high on my list of things to worry about. I dropped to my knees and started feeling along the walls for places that might be made of something other than solid rock.
The most plausible patch turned out to be about the size and shape of an LP, right at ground level, on the wall where Thomas had been sitting when I’d first come in. There the rock, instead of feeling like the usual granite-ish slab, was almost crumbly. With my fingertips I managed to get a pretty good amount scraped off, and I was close to thinking I felt coolness, air, on the other side when I realized that what I was actually feeling was wetness; another surface of rock, just as solid as all the rest. I stayed there scraping at it for what must have been ten minutes, making no more progress than you would trying to scrape through stainless steel, and when I finally gave up it was the first moment in which I felt, unmistakably, the likelihood of death closing around me. It gave me a chill at a depth I didn’t know was capable of feeling such things. Bone marrow, spinal fluid; there was no part of me that wasn’t sending out distress signals.
There’s a tendency, I think, to discount the suffering in fear; after the fact, once the tests have come back negative or the call’s been returned, we think, It wasn’t as bad as all that. We let our present relief retouch our past terror. I want to make sure I don’t do that here; being down at the bottom of that pit, realizing I had no way of getting us out, was exactly as bad as all that.
I sat with my back against the wall and stared down at my legs, which were shaking freely. What the roar behind me sounded like more than anything, I realized, was a fire, a steadily approaching fire. My last act, I thought, might be murdering Thomas. He had his eyes gently closed and he was still muttering, almost soundlessly now. I kept looking up into the shaft, in case there might be a handhold, a shelf, a passageway I’d overlooked.
There was no question of the light’s dimming, finally. The end of a flashlight is a terrible thing; it shrinks and closes in on itself like the last gulp of water down a bathtub drain. I shook it, hoping the batteries might knock some life into each other. I twisted it off and on, off and on, off and on. Finally, I threw the light, as hard as I’d thrown anything since the last time I’d played baseball, against the wall next to Thomas; it made a small and unsatisfying sound, before it rolled back and bumped against my foot. We were in the dark.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about guilt? That’s something I struggle with a lot, going back over things I regret saying, people I regret hurting, all that sort of stuff, and I think it really gets in the way of my practice.
P: When feeling guilty, you are at the center of the story, yes? You are feeling, “Oh, I do so many things, I hurt so many people, me, me, me, me.”