Which may explain why the voices, when they finally sounded above us, seemed like such tiny things, negligible, raindrops against a window. I don’t think I understood what was happening, that something was happening, until I looked up and saw light like a steel spike falling toward us; or maybe it wasn’t until the rope, the wet rough knot of it, touched my arm. I just know that there was a lot of clattering and talking and then there was an era of people grabbing me, pulling me, as if I were a ball of dough, and then that I had my face buried in someone’s chest, and I was clinging to a rope so hard that my eyes were flashing white. Afterward, once we were outside, they told me I kept insisting that we be careful with Thomas’s leg, and that I kept asking him if he was OK, asking if he was with us, saying I was sorry, but I don’t remember any of that.
What I do remember, the first thing that registers as an actual memory, rather than as a kind of mental oil rainbow, is walking, with my arm slung over Ranjiv’s shoulder, up out of the cave and realizing, once the brightness had begun to resolve itself, that it was pouring rain. Standing there on a ledge just outside the mouth of the cave, like the discoverer of a new continent, dripping, squinting, shaking, I felt newborn; I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from spare parts.
Ranjiv had been having doubts all the way back to Akki’s village, it turned out. He’d almost turned around a dozen times before he’d finally decided what he was going to do. He’d told Akki, who’d bought rope and lights and borrowed a little Soviet-era ATV sort of thing from a nearby village. It had, according to the clocks aboveground, been just over thirty-six hours since I’d gone in, and almost twice that long for Thomas.
But I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew that I somehow wasn’t dead. And that the rain sounded like a thousand drumrolls. It might have been the contrast to the sensory deprivation of being underground, but I think it really was the kind of rainstorm you only experience two or three times in your life, the kind of rain during which you think, I guess the world’s just going to wash away. There wasn’t, by the time they’d crammed us into the back of the ATV and covered us with a tarp, a thread of my clothing, including my shoes, that wasn’t soaked. I was wetter than if I’d jumped into a swimming pool. I heard a voice I didn’t recognize that must have been the car-owning neighbor’s. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us and every muscle in my body hurt. Someone had put a horsehair blanket under my head, and that was soaked too. I kept calling out to Thomas, thinking he might have fallen out of the car on one of the bumps, and he kept being just a few inches away, wedged and shivering next to me. The only food Akki and the monks had brought with them were crackers that tasted like pepper. The rain was so loud that we couldn’t have talked even if we’d tried. It seemed inconceivable that we’d ever get there; it seemed possible at any moment that we’d flip onto our side and be washed away.
But the thought that kept floating to the top of my mind like an ice cube in a glass, even as I shivered and shook and tried to bite the cracker someone held against my lips, was: What a narrow range of weathers we have in mind when we describe a day as beautiful! Water is falling, in gouts and cups and gushes, from the sky, onto us, who can feel and hear and smell and taste it. What a lock! What a key! Breathable air, spread out in every direction. Trees and dirt and rocks for us to look at, teeth with which to chew our food. This is most of what I was thinking, if you can call it thinking, all the way back to Akki’s front door, where it was nighttime, and where Shima greeted us with dry blankets and scalding tea. This, or something like this, is even what I was thinking when they finally changed me into dry pajamas and eased Thomas and me into side-by-side beds, and I fell into a sleep that was almost a hibernation. Akki’s disappointment, the questions I couldn’t even try to answer, a look at the shaking, bruised wrecks of our bodies, came much later.
Before I fell asleep, though, or before I lost touch completely with what was happening, I said to Thomas, or thought to Thomas, “Are we still in the cave?”
“No.”
“So we lived?”
“I think so, yes.”
What I felt, when I finally believed it, wasn’t entirely relief. Or if it was, it was a different sort of relief from any I’d ever felt before. Because I remembered now what I’d been thinking when we were being saved, when Ranjiv was reaching down and lifting me up like a sack of feathers. It was the strangest thing; it felt, even as I knew that this meant life, and food, and light, like being handed the wrong jacket at a party. I’d tried to say something. There had been a misunderstanding. We didn’t need rescuing at all.