Fretfully,
Richard
From: <Adam Sanecki>
To: <Thomas Pell>
Date: Wed, May 5, 2010 at 5:07 PM
Subject: (no subject)
Hey. You probably already know this but I tried visiting you yesterday. The desk person told me you or your doctors had put in a no-visitors note, which is totally fine, of course, but I just wanted to make sure you’re all right. Things are good with me. It’s Sonia’s birthday, so about to spend a painful amount of money on dinner. Let me know how you’re doing.
From: <Thomas Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Sun, May 9, 2010 at 1:15 PM
Subject: re: (no subject)
Adam,
I’m grateful for your emails, for your visits, I understand the feeling of duty, I don’t dismiss it, I only hope you realize the things my parents tell you are not the actual matters, they talk to doctors, gorge on gossip, the only course is to nod and murmur and keep things simple, life as a series of chores, a list to be dispatched, one second after another. I’m not complaining, not entirely complaining, their concern is misguided but not malicious, I was going to go home, but now I won’t, the being watched is too much, and the simplicity here does me good, it keeps me settled, I don’t feel fears, the fears I feel are not so full of hidden edges, the last drops of medicine will be out of me soon. What I want to tell you, the only thing I want to tell you, is not for my parents, is not to reassure you, I won’t be living an ordinary life, renting an apartment, tiptoeing around what happened in India, riding the Metro, telling people all is well. We did a terrible thing, I won’t say accident, we owe it to her not to waste it. What I want to say is that for the first twenty-seven years of our lives we were asleep, we were having bad dreams. Sleep is a vault, we dream inside it, weaving what sense we can from the scratches, the scrapes that make it to us from outside. I hope, I trust, your dreams are better now. I know you’re happy, I read your letters, I’ve seen your eyes, your trimmed nails, your shirts that someone else picked out. What you felt in the cave, I held your limbs as they twitched, was the moment in a dream when the noise outside becomes too loud, your eyelids flutter, your machinery falters, you grunt but don’t speak, and then you slip back into the dream but at another angle. I did die in the cave, I know that now, I was empty after that, the person you saw was not the person you knew, my parents, my doctors, even, I’m sorry, you, Adam, you’ve been calling into a tunnel and having conversations with the echoes. I knew it when Guruji died, you didn’t have to tell me, I felt the change, I’d been waiting and it came, and now I’m learning, relearning, what I have to do, but you don’t have to worry, you can keep living, keep writing, keep sitting on your rainy beach and saying “gut-bomb” and feeling more or less happy, I wouldn’t blame you for it. But I just want to tell you, if you do change your mind, if questions catch hold of you, if you can bring yourself, after everything, to trust me, that your quietest doubts are right, and that what seems, on sleepless nights, not to be a life in fact is not. I want to say there’s more, there’s always more, for you to do: it will feel like waking up.