At the Bottom of Everything(68)
Q: So guilt is a kind of vanity, you’re saying?
P: Guilt is story. Story is mind’s way to say, “I understand, it is in my control,” even if story is “Oh, I have no control, everything happening to me.”
Q: So I should try to stop telling myself stories, whether they’re good or bad?
P: Think of man holding a torch [mimes picking up a torch], and it is coming close to burning his fingers. Man waves the torch, tries to press it against ground, runs looking for river, flame only getting closer, closer, closer. I am saying to him, “Just open your hand. Let it drop.” No more burning. Yes?
There couldn’t be more than a few hundred people alive who really know absolute darkness. Deep-sea divers, unlucky miners. People think of the bathroom in the middle of the night, or the road when your headlights go off. Oh my God, it’s pitch-black. No, it isn’t. Actual darkness isn’t just not being able to make out shapes, or not being sure where the walls are. It’s got more in common with blinding light than it does with ordinary basement darkness; it presses on you, it fills you up, it’s all you can think about.
For a long time (I can’t say how long; my sense of time, which I’d already thought was haywire, was now untethered completely) I just sat there in the dark and tried not to scream. Each breath I took, each movement, seemed to require as much effort and attention as a step on hot coals. Me breathing, Thomas muttering, the cave breathing; I couldn’t tell one sound from another. My whole body was tensed, almost vibrating, in anticipation of some sort of explosion. There’s an exquisiteness to the moment before a tantrum, a kind of delicious pinpoint pain. I’d forgotten. It’s much more pleasant than the tantrum itself, anyway, which is all flailing and stumbling and shouting yourself hoarse. I’d forgotten that part too.
I did eventually scream; Thomas by then had fallen mostly silent. Again, I don’t know for how long, and I can’t even say what I shouted, except that it centered around the word help, but my throat was raw by the end of it. There was wall pounding too, in addition to the shouting. And kicking and shouldering and jumping and, at one especially hopeless point, biting: I scraped my teeth against the wall and spat a mixture of dirt and blood.
When Thomas and I were in middle school, first spending our afternoons together, we used to talk sometimes about what we’d do if we found out we had one week to live. Sometimes it would be a day, sometimes just an hour. Our answers were always along the lines of breaking into the houses of girls we knew and explaining that common sense dictated that they have sex with us. Running through school naked, telling all our teachers to go fuck themselves. We always seemed to imagine the news of our impending deaths as a liberation, as if our lives were dress shoes we couldn’t wait to take off.
God, there’s so little we understand, so little we’re actually capable of imagining. How many times had I read about human remains found in caves? A significant discovery, with the potential to reshape anthropologists’ understanding of … How had I not heard the screaming, the wheezing and weeping as the air ran out? Or what about Pompeii? I’d walked past those gray bodies as if they were mannequins, animals in a diorama, blithely waiting all these centuries to demonstrate everyday life in ancient Italy. No. Their deaths were horrible. I should have heard shrieking while I walked, sipping orange soda, behind my mom down those streets. I should have imagined skin melting like cheese.
I had a loose rock in one hand and I was pounding it, scraping it, against the ground. It didn’t matter, I realized, whether my eyes were open or closed. If I learned I was about to die, it turned out that what I’d do is have the most staggeringly intense Technicolor panic attack of which a human body is capable. No sex. No running. No triumphant speeches.
Before the attack really took hold, though, or before it became so crippling that I wasn’t capable of anything other than lying there and experiencing it, I did try talking to Thomas.
“What were you thinking?” I said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
I didn’t expect him to answer me, really. I had the impression by then that he was animate in some other way than I was, like a plant, or a reef. Instead, in a voice much more like the one he’d had in the hotel, he said, “This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I meant to happen at all. I know it doesn’t make any difference to you, but—”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“I was supposed to … Once I got here and sat, something was supposed to change. I thought I would, maybe not leave my body, but I would understand that something had left, I would feel something, I would finally be free. But I fell, and I panicked. It was the worst I’d felt since … since I first met Guruji. I forgot why I was here. I got so thirsty I started to cry. And then you came, and I’m so grateful, I finally understand what you’ve done for me, but I wish you hadn’t, because—”