At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  We were going to Thomas’s apartment, or anyway to an apartment where he’d lived at some point recently. The neighborhood was called Paharganj. Everything else I knew about where Thomas might have been could have fit on an index card (in fact it fit on the first few lines in the black-and-white notebook in my carry-on). I’d expected Thomas’s parents to be brimming with leads and notions, but they’d proved surprisingly hopeless. Or maybe just fatalistic, after years of trying and failing to understand what their son was doing. A couple of weeks earlier, just after I’d agreed to go, I’d spent an awkward evening perched on the edge of their couch, feeling like I was being bid farewell before shipping off to war. At one point Sally had handed me a semirecent photograph of Thomas; he had long hair pulled back and a wispy beard, and he was smiling in a way that suggested drunkenness or maybe just the effects of whatever pills he was on. I held it with two hands, not sure how long I needed to stare before I could tuck it into my bag. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” Richard said, seeming to sense that we’d slipped into a moment out of Saving Private Ryan.

  For the past couple of weeks, Richard and Sally had been writing me emails; first just practical—addresses and phone numbers—then more and more a kind of journal of what they’d been through these past few years—things they couldn’t say to Thomas, maybe, or things they’d tell anyone who’d listen. I hadn’t felt so wrapped up in the Pells, so close to the daily workings of their lives, since I was fourteen.

  Anyway, with each turn the road narrowed by a couple of lanes, until we were in a grim, dusty neighborhood where dogs slept on top of cars and the buildings seemed to be made of cinder block. The Pells had said that Thomas might have fallen in with some spiritual-burnout types, and this looked like the right place for it.

  Decoding the building’s buzzers, a plate-sized grid of silver nubbins, was just at the edge of my mental capacity. A barefoot, elfin man named Rory met me at the top of three flights of stairs; he wore loose cotton pants and stood looking recently asleep, with a slight smile and eyes just barely open. We’d talked once when I was still in D.C., and he’d seemed bizarrely unfazed that I was hoping to come stay in his apartment while I looked for a lost friend. “No worries, no worries.” He’d never actually met Thomas (he’d only been in Delhi since May), but he knew people who knew him, and he said they had a spare bed. He was, I saw now, a man with the metabolism of an iguana; he wouldn’t be fazed by the explosion of the sun. He took my bag and shuffled ahead of me into an apartment that felt like it had once been a locker room. It was dim the way fluorescent-lit rooms are dim, with a color-flecked cement floor and a half-dozen wooden partitions. There were collapsed, filthy couches, lamps set on top of plastic crates, a strip of speckled flypaper hanging in the corner. There was a cloying, oily smell in the air coming from a candle burning on a trunk.

  “Your bed’s that one. Sheets are in that stack.”

  The word bed was like a glimpse of water in the desert, but before I could sleep Rory took me up onto the roof. One of the girls who was over had lived there when Thomas had, Rory said. The night sky was like a sagging yellow tent ceiling. From the street I could hear firecrackers and frantic technoish music. The forecast on the plane had said “Smoky heat,” which I’d assumed was a mistranslation, but the air actually was both smoky and hot; since the second we’d landed I’d been smelling burning tires, which probably explained my stinging eyes and running nose. In the half-dark of the rooftop I got an impression of a scene like a concert lawn: candles and devil sticks and skunky pot.

  I think travel must have made more sense, psychologically, in the era of ocean voyages; in the three months it took to get from America to India you would’ve realized the extremity of what you were doing; you would have stepped off the boat knowing exactly how far you were from your old life. But I, sitting in a plastic lawn chair on that rooftop, gazing out through the smog at what seemed to be the dome of a mosque, still had a receipt from the Bethesda Row CVS in the front pocket of my jeans.

  A group of people was sitting around a beach towel, playing a game that involved pressing a card against your forehead. There was a brutish barefoot guy with a shaved head. A forest-sprite girl leaning against the brute’s knee. A dreadlocked smirking guy who kept doing something double-jointed with his wrists.

  “—I think I’ve got to fold again, fuck.”

  “—maybe that’s exactly why she can’t, you know?”

  “—I guess I just can’t see how that’s not just another kind of decision …”

  “Hey, so you’re Thomas’s friend?”

  It took me a couple of seconds to register that someone was talking to me. It was an Earth Mother–ish girl with a nose stud and a yellow bandanna, pulling a Kingfisher from the water in the cooler I hadn’t noticed I was sitting next to. “You went to high school with him, right?” Her name was Cecilia, and she was from a town in Minnesota where people just didn’t, she was eager to have me understand, go to India. She made me remember for the first time in years a hippie camp counselor I’d once had, the first woman I’d ever seen with armpit hair, belter of Sly and the Family Stone in the camp van. Cecilia had moved to Delhi a couple of years ago to study “bodywork,” and now she was taking, or maybe teaching, a course in conflict resolution.

  “I’ve been worried about Thomas. Have you talked to him since his solo?”

  “Hmm?”

  “He was supposed to be back for a session with Guruji almost a month ago. Somebody said they saw him a couple of weeks ago at the cremation grounds.” While she talked she kept adjusting her neck, like a pigeon.

  “And where was he supposed to be?”

  “He was on his precept retreats. He was just about to do the cave.”

  The forest sprite came bubbling up, dragging the brute along behind her (“What’s up?! Did you just get here?”), and Cecilia melted off toward the card game. The sprite, Nicola, looked vaguely South American and had eyes that made her seem permanently surprised. Another obvious thought I kept finding myself having: There are so, so many people in the world.

  I stayed up on the roof for another half hour or so, drifting in and out of conversations, being introduced and introduced again, telling people how I knew Thomas, saying yes I’d be sure to do that, no I’d make sure to avoid doing the other, hearing the word guruji, sometimes the name Sri Prabhakara, like a recurrent scrap of melody.

  “So he’s a meditation teacher?”

  “Mmm … I would say more a philosopher.” (This was Nicola’s brutish boyfriend, Rik, who turned out to be somber and Danish, and to have spent the past couple of years playing semiprofessional basketball in Japan.)

  “And is he old?”

  “Seventy-five? Eighty? It’s not obvious to look at him.”

  There was a nervous excitement that fluttered around any mention of Guruji, as if he were a movie star someone heard might be eating in the back room. Everybody who’d ever lived in the apartment knew him, apparently; it was a kind of study-house. I found myself picturing an old man with clouded-over eyes, a long beard, fingernails grown into rams’ horns; a cross between Ben Gunn and Gandhi.

  “I didn’t actually see it,” the dreadlocked kid said to me, tilting his head back to finish a beer, “but somebody rode past your friend meditating by the train tracks like way the hell out. I think maybe he’s like a … dharma ghost.” This could be one of the frat houses at Penn, I kept thinking. But instead of talking about who was bringing Jägermeister and who was having sex, they were talking about compassion retreats and private sessions with Guruji. I was standing by the railing listening to an intense Israeli man named Jonah tell me about hijras, a caste of Indian transvestites who apparently have the power to curse people, when I realized I was sleeping with my eyes open.

  I’m going to need to expand my vocabulary when it comes to the varieties of bad sleep, the way someone on an ocean voyage would need to distinguish between types of storms. That first night in Thomas’s old apart
ment, anyway, was a collision of various fronts: nervousness, heat, jet lag, digestive unrest. My bed turned out to be a green canvas cot, wedged onto the floor behind a partition. The conversation of the people on the roof came directly down to me as if they were shouting through a pipe; every time the techno music seemed to have stopped it would turn out just to have paused to gather its strength. I kept being woken up by something tickling my forehead and gusts of black-smelling mold. By two a.m. I’d decided that unbeknownst to me, India, like Iceland, must have a season of sunless days, and at three I took a sleeping pill and then had a dream about choking on chalk dust.

  Apparently at some point in the last aching stretch before dawn I got out my notebook, because when I woke up it was open on my pillow, with a new line at the bottom of the first page in handwriting I almost didn’t recognize as mine:

  shouldn’t have come. check flights. to find him would be a literal miracle, something to teach in schools, a moon landing.

  From:

  To:

  Date: Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:43 AM

  Subject: re: (no subject)

  … You mention guilt but I would say that for years, despite reason to be, I was not a guilty person, my mind ran along other tracks, sophomore year, junior year, it started, I would lie in my room at Columbia, ninety-eight-square-foot cell, remembering everything, not the crash, but other things, older, I would dream of my toad Lewis whom I killed or thought I killed at seven years old, before you knew me. He was loathsome to me, physically repellent, he ate mice and crickets, they puffed their bag with jumping, I used to imagine him dead, I would think of birds coming through the window and carrying him away, one morning I came downstairs to feed him, I was devout, the glass of his case was hot, the dial had been turned to High, he was a briquette, his eyes were dried currants. When I called to S and R they came downstairs, bathrobes and bare feet, said, Oh no Rosabelle must have done it cleaning up, or one of them must have brushed against it, they wanted to absolve me, but I knew I had, I had no memory of it but I knew with my wishing, it had to be. I wept in my room that night, S came in, not understanding, she sat with me, said, Yes, it was so sad, he had been such a wonderful toad, hadn’t he, she was sure he hadn’t suffered, it had happened while he was asleep, we’d get another. I was not good, I was not well, terrible things happened when I wasn’t careful, this may have been the first time I understood it.

  From:

  To:

  Date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:02 PM

  Subject: re: greetings

  … My worry started to tick—parental Geiger counter—sometime his junior year, when phone calls started to have an edge of hastiness, partial accounting. Classes? Fine. Dorm? Fine. Roommate? Fine. He was staking out mental residence elsewhere.

  All this, keep in mind, had 9/11 in the background—it had only been a year, so still very much in the penumbra of everything changed. If anything was going on with him, we thought it might be that—going to school a few miles uptown from Ground Zero, we’d assumed some of the atmospheric panic—Cipro and Wolf Blitzer touch-screen maps of Afghan caves—might have seeped in. He’d started kind of fear-blurting—should he ride the subway? Get a gas mask? So we probably misread the signs. A nervous breakdown after 9/11 was like a lost voice in a Trappist monastery.

  Thanksgiving was another worry-tick—I remember mostly o’er-leaping talk, clattering plates, and Thomas at the center, wax figure in a gallery. This was his vegetarian debut, so a part of me thought, OK, projecting holiness, making clear he’s not a party to the feast, got it. (In college, my meatless years, I sat at my parents’ table in front of a plate of bacon, fingers of enticement beckoning like cartoon pies on a ledge.) But he was establishing the mental territory.

  Then a few months later the phone rang too late on a Sunday night, a girl from Columbia—she’d just talked to Thomas and she was scared. He’d told her he was very sick—brain tumor, months to live, she’s the only one who can know. My first thought was: shrapnel from a romantic blowup. Thomas, at that point, was very much a novice, so I was thinking, OK, he falls for a girl, nothing doing, he comes up with this story to try to get her attention. Somewhere between a protester setting himself on fire and John Cusack with his boom box: you have no choice but to feel for me.

  But when we talked to Thomas, he sounded—sweaty. Upset to hear she’d called us, panicky about what we knew, what we weren’t saying. Asking me if he was going to have to go to war—this was just before Iraq, fear becoming anger in the national forebrain. I started thinking drugs. Some party where he gave in, tired of protecting the prize intelligence.

  Day or two later we got a call from the dean. Thomas is missing class, blowing off his adviser. Flunking three out of four courses. OK. And oh, by the way, if he doesn’t shape up we’re going to need to ask him to take a semester off and make up credits elsewhere. Lion pride. Right. So we drove up to New York, not getting anywhere on the phone. Both of us took off work, five hours up I-95, into the dorm, still half expecting the whole scene to dissolve into misunderstanding. The dorm, by the way, felt like a playroom: hallway of pajama-wearing girls lying on the floor trailing phone cords, boys bouncing lacrosse balls off concrete walls. Leaders of tomorrow.

  We knocked—THOMAS PELL in bubble letters still from the RA—and he finally opened the door and the smell was … shocking, but not in any familiar collegiate way. Sinister. Rotting greens, decay. I found myself thinking, unbidden: This is the smell of a crazy person’s room.

  And he was very much confused, embarrassed, overwhelmed. Skinnier than we’d ever seen him, dirty, this kind of pubic beard, still talking about being sick, about war. The room was a mess but almost sculptural, sheets wadded up on the windowsills, fans on chairs. He wanted to know—staring straight ahead—whether he had cancer, said he knew we’d been talking to doctors. He was on his bed, wrapped in sheets, the phone was next to his pillow, there was a cup of what smelled like piss. Sally was trying to pull him to his feet, crying, take the measure of him, I was kind of … feeling for the seam, like when he used to have night terrors: OK, where’s the awareness in there. Nothing doing. So I just hugged him—OK, we’ll get through this, you’re OK. Trusting that this, surprise of the dorm visit, had to be the worst moment. Except in the hug I realized two things—one, the smell, the worst of it, was his body, and two, the weight he’d lost. Imagine hugging an empty sleeping bag. For me that was the genre change, drama into horror, spring 2003—that hug with the body that was and wasn’t Thomas.

  So: Sri Prabhakara. Here, from what I was able to gather during my first semiconscious couple of days, was the story. I heard some of this from the Earth Mother, Cecilia, who met me for lunch at a nightclub-feeling Mexican restaurant near her school, and some of it from people Cecilia introduced me to who’d vaguely known Thomas.

  Apparently, until some point that spring, Thomas had been living on his own in Delhi. No one, or at least no one I talked to, had any idea where. Maybe he’d been homeless (there were groups of expats who lived with their wormy dogs and guitars outside the bus station at Kashmiri Gate), maybe he’d just been living in another apartment. Almost certainly he hadn’t been working for any sort of education company, the way he’d told his parents he was; by the time people in the study-apartment had started to see him he had long hair and sun-chapped skin, and he was wearing clothes that looked like they’d been pieced together from a children’s giveaway bin.

  People occasionally saw him at the outdoor bazaar in Paharganj (goats wandering down the middle of the street, bearded men huddling over hookahs in doorways); the bazaar was on the way to Sri Prabhakara’s center. Thomas would be muttering and handing out fennel candies to kids, or he’d be washing himself in a runoff pipe at the end of the alley. To each other, they called him Skeletor. Maybe this was his prime looking-for-the-Batras period, maybe this was pure fugue and craziness.

  Anyway, after a few weeks of not having seen Skel
etor, a couple of Guruji’s students took a different way to the center one night and came across him in terrible shape: barefoot, filthy, sprawled on the steps of a temple. At first one of them mistook him for a dead body. You could have scooped him up with a shovel and tossed him like a bag of empty cans. One of them went up and tapped his shoulder, and he bolted upright. “Fine, fine,” he said, when they asked if he was all right. “Good, just a little tired, was I asleep? I think I fell asleep. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  They convinced him to come along with them to the center. They made him eat rice and drink a bottle of Thums Up, then wadded up some paper towels and helped him wash the dried blood from his ear. After Guruji’s talk they took him home to the barsati, and once he’d showered (they said he left a ring of orange around the drain, still not entirely gone), he slept the night without sheets, at his own insistence, on a corner of the roof. He answered questions about what he’d been doing as if he were talking about a dream. I was looking for someone. I had a fever. It wouldn’t stop raining. As far as they could tell he didn’t own anything except the clothes he was wearing and a kid’s backpack in which he kept a rubber-banded wad of money and a camping Thermos. They asked the next day if he wanted to stay for a while and he murmured, Yes, thank you, OK.

  Except for the rice that first night, all he ever seemed to eat were the little paper bowls of lentil mush the Hindu temple ladled out once a day in Shiva Mandir, but he was coming back to life. A splotchy red wound/rash he’d had on his neck and shoulder was clearing. His eyes were getting brighter. They finally started getting bits of a slightly more coherent story out of him: from D.C.; in India for six months; looking for an old friend; sleeping outside because he didn’t like being alone.