At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  Daily mechanics felt like we’d slipped fifteen years backward—elementary school sick days, stacks of books, untouched toast on a plate. The living-room couch was his alpha and omega. He’d lie there, beatific, Christ thin, not moving. Getting him anywhere—the doctor, the shower, the kitchen table—was like reeling in a marlin. I’d forgotten, since my mother—she had MS, before anyone knew what it was—the time signature of sickness, how each day is endless but you look up and a year’s passed, suddenly your son has been on the couch for two winters.

  He and I would do these Pinter plays—me on the edge of the couch, him staring at the ceiling fan.

  “What’s up? What’re you feeling?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right, so what’s that like?”

  “It’s unpleasant. I would like to be left alone, please.”

  “We can do that, but look, here’s the deal. You’re in our house, you’re getting fed, you’ve got a roof …” My father’s words, my lips. Then I’d go weep in the bathroom until it was time to start on dinner.

  At some point every leaf-blowing neighbor, concerned cousin, FedEx man had given us their “take”—overlapping soliloquies of advice. I became a good nodder.

  “It’s because of the expectations he’s had on him, this is just his way of saying, Whoa, let’s make sure I’m doing what I’m doing for myself and not my parents.”

  “So often when this kind of thing happens you dig and dig, thinking there’s something psychological or medical at the bottom of it, and actually it turns out to just be some cute brunette …”

  “You must know, but this is the age … Men between nineteen and twenty-five. My nephew’s roommate in Boston …”

  Sally and I strapped on horse blinders: small victories, days not worse than the day before—OK, he drank half a smoothie. He asked me to hand him the computer. I haven’t heard him going out for walks at night. And then, just when we’d started to think, you know, this may be it, the life of our son, Thomas announced he’d applied for a job—I had to actually hold myself up on the back of the chair. He wanted money of his own, he said. Independence. He’d been printing out applications, making calls. And so now Thomas—reader of Kant, Most Likely to …—got a job behind the counter at the Subway on MacArthur, $6.75 an hour. And we were weak with joy.

  Again, a slip back in time—this time to first days of school, nervous bus-watching. He refused to be driven to work, so he walked forty minutes each morning, already in his green uniform—he’d had to get one for women, the men’s small hung on him like a tarp. I went a couple of times for lunch, half spy, half customer, he’d be there turning on the ovens, pouring the chopped pickles, stacking the coffee lids. No hello. I’d watch him make a sandwich, slow as folding a flag. Watch him watching “chicken” rotate in the microwave, his head cocked. And after six weeks he got fired. Or maybe quit—not clear, wouldn’t explain. Something to do with a customer he didn’t like, or with refusing to change his gloves. This was the first of the jobs—Blockbuster, Papa John’s, Kate’s Paperie—which got to have a feeling of … slipping even further back, watching him cross a room, eighteen months old, knowing he’s going to fall, knowing I’ve got to let him … He needed money, he kept saying. Something of his own.

  Until that visit to Sri Prabhakara, I’d treated the possibility that Thomas might have found the Batras mainly as a thing in need of ruling out. In D.C., in the day or two before I decided to go, I’d done a couple of deliberately hopeless Google searches, to prove to myself that finding them would be impossible. And then once I saw Delhi, once I’d waded into the crowds and chaos, I’d lowered the chances even more; my job here was just going to be finding Thomas and bringing him home, or (more likely) declaring him unfindable and heading home myself with a sad story and a clear conscience (or at least a no-less-clear-than-before conscience). By the time I’d been there for a few days, I thought that he had a better chance of being dead than he did of having found what he was looking for.

  But Guruji’s whispering had struck a match in me; I spent Tuesday pacing around the neighborhood feeling not much less fevered than Thomas, more and more convinced with every sweaty hour that he really was going to confess to the Batras, if he hadn’t done it already. Is there a name for a version of hypochondria in which, instead of being convinced you have a disease, you’re convinced that the thing you’d least like to happen is unfolding just outside your view? Every thought I had seemed to tug on the ends of a knot in my intestines. I’d known, of course, at some depths of my brain, that my trip would cover the anniversary of the accident, but the date had always been like a dead key on a piano; I did my best to play around it, or to speed on as if it didn’t exist. But now the dead key, the hollow tapping, was all I could hear. I’m getting ready, when it’s time I will do what needs to be done …

  I spent hours in the coffee shop/Internet café, doing exactly the kind of research I’d spent the past twelve years avoiding. The computer had a greasy mouse pad with a drawing of a butterfly riding a lion. My mouth tasted strongly of bitter, cold coffee, which I kept trying to fix by taking more sips of bitter, cold coffee. Manish Batra Amita Batra New Delhi. Manish Batra Amita Batra Washington D.C. New Delhi car crash. I sent emails to Raymond (Do you think I could possibly meet with Guruji again? Would he be willing to talk on the phone?) that I immediately wished I could take back. I even checked my old girlfriend Claire’s Facebook page, just to leave no seed of unhappiness unwatered. (Check out new half marathon pics—gotta love the short shorts!) Driving yourself insane on the Internet is as easy as checking the weather.

  Almost everything I managed to pull up about the Batras was nonsense: law associate listings, LinkedIn profiles, academic papers, consumer fraud websites. Maybe finding them really was hopeless. Maybe Thomas was right then babbling a confession to the Hanuman statue in Karol Bagh. But at some point on Wednesday night, when I was sitting at a computer in the back corner of the café, carving out new lows for myself on an hourly basis, I found what I was looking for, or what I was looking away from. It was in the June/July 2001 newsletter of the Hindu Temple of Greater D.C. This was where they’d held Mira’s memorial service (one of my first searches had turned up the ancient Washington Post story with the death announcement). My stomach wobbled as I sat waiting for the PDF to load, breathing through flared nostrils. WARNING: 3 Minutes Remaining in Session, Click HERE to Purchase 15 Extra Minutes.

  On the front of the newsletter, above a message from HTGDC president Deepika Sharma, was a logo like a Mardi Gras elephant sitting on a throne. The community announcements were printed in columns on the second-to-last page.

  As many of you know the strong and committed support of Manish and Amita Batra has been integral to our temple growing in leaps and bounds in these past fifteen years. It is therefore with heavy hearts that we must ask you to join us and say “farewell” and also “good wishes” as they prepare to leave the HTGDC community and return to New Delhi, where family and great opportunities await. May the remover of all obstacles bless Manish and Amita as he blesses you all.

  Many have asked questions as regarding the progress of the Rathi Spiritual Center, which we can happily tell you continues to advance rapidly with thanks to the generous work of …

  There should be studies done on the relationship between panic and bowel urgency. Within seconds of reading the newsletter, I was, for the fifth time that day, locked in the paper-towel-less unisex bathroom, trembling and sweating as if, on top of everything else, I had giardia. Being a human, having a body, can be such a terrible thing.

  I ran back to the apartment, past the hubcap heap and the man selling bananas for one rupee each, clutching the newsletter printout with wet hands, looking for Rory so I could borrow his phone. I kept having to remind myself that all I’d learned was that the Batras had moved back; Thomas still wouldn’t have been able to find them; they might even have moved again. But my inner organs weren’t having any of it. Rory was eating a bo
wl of Ready Brek at the kitchen table. “No worries, no worries,” he said, standing up, wiping his mouth. His crappy little blue phone worked only if you took it up to the roof and stood hunched in the corner that overlooked an alley full of old planks. The night was thick and breezy; under the layers of car exhaust it felt almost tropical.

  I pressed the dozen or so numbers, waited through a series of beeps, and then adjusted the angle of my hunching until the ringing came into focus. It was nine and a half hours earlier in D.C. than in Delhi, which is to say that for the woman who finally answered the phone at the Hindu Temple of Greater D.C. it was just after ten in the morning.

  “Yes, hello, good morning, Hindu Temple?”

  “Hi, I’m calling with a question about a cousin of mine who used to belong to your temple?”

  “Yes, hello, good morning, Hindu Temple?”

  “Hi, I’m calling with a question about one of your former members?”

  “Oh, hello, yes. Membership question?”

  For the next fifteen minutes (minutes that cost me more than every bite of food I’d eaten so far in India), I lied that I was named Sanjay Batra, repeated again and again the story of how I’d left my address book in a cab, waited on hold while the woman talked to her coworkers, and kept my brain, or anyway my eyes, busy by staring at the acne-pitted moon rising behind an electricity tower.

  “Oh yes,” the woman said, after an especially long hold, “Manish Batra and Amita Batra, they move back to India, two thousand two. Move away. No more in Washington.”

  “Yes, and do you have an address for them?”

  “Address for them, sorry?”

  More holding, more swelling string music, more moon-staring.

  “OK, yes, sir, I have forwarding address, Manish Batra, Amita Batra. You have a pencil ready?”

  I had a British Airways pen and the back of a newsletter and a trembling knee. I looked like someone taking down the number of a pizza place and I felt like someone learning the date of his death. Manish and Amita Batra, D-5, Sector 8, Noida, India.

  So Noida wasn’t a Sanskrit word for purification. It was a place—a suburb an hour and a half outside of Delhi, it turned out—with its own map on page 839 of my guidebook. Good God.

  The bus didn’t leave until the next morning, so I had a full night to think about what I was doing. I didn’t even lie down; instead I took a shower, which entailed switching on the electric heater and ignoring the smell of burning plastic, and then I sat, wearing my last clean clothes, in the kitchen under the fluorescent tube light, failing to read a Philip Dick novel I’d bought at a bookstall, drinking beer after beer in the hopes of settling my brain and killing whatever parasites were thriving in my stomach. I stood up every half hour to rediscover that there was nothing to eat in the fridge except hot sauce and a head of cauliflower. It’s hard to reconstruct my mind’s state now, but I don’t think, if I’d really been forced to bet, that I would have said it was likely that I’d actually find Thomas or the Batras in Noida. I don’t think I really thought I’d find anything. But it was like not being able to remember whether you locked your apartment door; it was like my entire trip: I needed, with a helplessness that felt like tumbling down a cliffside, to know for sure.

  The bus depot in central Delhi, particularly on no sleep, particularly with a hangover, is as despair inducing a place as you’re ever likely to encounter. Drivers stand in front of their buses, shouting the names of their routes and waving indecipherable timetables; Dantean beggars of every age and variety of misfortune root through garbage drifts; wooden-seated toilets overflow behind broken doors. It was eighty-nine degrees at nine thirty in the morning.

  I somehow managed, after much gesticulating and stumbling and rushing from one side of the station to the other, to get on my bus. My seat was in the back, one of those shelf seats that folds down from the wall, and there was a better-than-even chance, I thought as we pulled out, that we were headed somewhere other than Noida, but by that point I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to. A dozen men with woven plastic suitcases stood crammed next to me in the aisle, and every few minutes we pulled over to pick up another group of men with woven plastic suitcases, until it felt like the bus’s underside was scraping the road. I eventually fell asleep against my backpack in my lap, breathing through my mouth, the sun roasting the right half of my face a deep maroon. I could probably have made better time by walking.

  I’d pictured Noida, based on the chirpy paragraph in my guidebook, as something like Tysons Corner: clean and fake and functional, golf courses and parking lots and new developments next to four-lane highways. But clean and functional turn out to be relative terms. We pulled into the station just past noon, and there were in fact office buildings, all swooping glass, that could have been built for insurance companies in Fairfax; but there were also traffic circles in which scarily muscled cows stood knee-deep in garbage and, off on a hillside, clusters of what looked like tepees made from plastic tarps. I’d been vaguely planning on either taking the last bus back to Delhi or else staying the night at the Noida Radisson, which was the only hotel listed in my guidebook, but what if I couldn’t get a room? What if I missed my bus and ended up stuck and wandering these cloverleaf intersections? Maybe it wasn’t wise to go to a city you’d never heard of without telling anyone your plans. Certain kinds of fear, along with certain states of hangover, make me hungry: within half an hour I was standing on a sidewalk in front of Domino’s, eating a whole deluxe veggie pizza that it took me three slices to realize tasted like paprika.

  Floating somewhere in the scummy lake of my thoughts was: Don’t listen to your brain; you’re just very tired. Thomas is probably passed out on the street in Delhi, or wandering through some other city entirely, scattering misleading emails behind him like birdseed. People who pass out on temple steps don’t keep mental calendars.

  I caught an auto-rickshaw in front of a Volkswagen dealership and handed the Batras’ address to the driver. He studied it for a minute before he waggled his head, which I was finally beginning to understand didn’t mean no, but instead meant something like, If you insist, sir.

  Sector 8 turned out to be a ways away from the city center, in a part of town where there really were golf courses (empty ones surrounded on all sides by dirt pits) and gated condos with men gloomily sweeping the courtyards.

  D-5 was on a street with short, shrubby trees and strips of dust and grass along the sidewalks. The sky was low and white; there were birds chattering in the trees; there was a man in a plaid shirt and rubber sandals walking along singing and bobbling a cell phone. The rupees I gave the driver were dark with sweat. I was now, to my bafflement, standing alone under a dusty tree, across the street from the house (which looked more like a motel or a compound) belonging to the family of the girl I’d killed twelve years ago. But exhaustion muddles everything. I was trembling, but I was also nauseated by the bitter film coating the inside of my mouth and distracted by a pressure at the back of my eye sockets that I worried might be the beginning of dengue fever.

  I watched a trio of schoolkids in blue uniforms run past, throwing bits of gravel at each other. I watched a little brown bird wrestle with a chunk of bread. I watched an Audi with tinted windows pull out of the driveway a few houses down and speed off away from me. What I needed, really, if I wasn’t going to fall asleep or throw up, was another beer. I’d brought the six-pack of Kalyani from next to the fridge, with the thought that I’d drink it that night in my hotel room, but desperate times, etc.

  By three, which is to say by the time I’d stood there shakily under my tree for about forty-five minutes, one empty bottle now at my feet and another in my hand, I’d decided on something like a plan: I’d hang out near their house for the rest of the day, maybe at some point taking just enough of a nap to sharpen my thinking, and then, once I’d realized/resolved that the whole idea of Thomas being there was impossible, I’d take an auto-rickshaw back to town and catch the ten o’clock bus to Delhi. I’d
never tell anyone, especially not the Pells, about this little trip to Noida, and I’d fly back to D.C. on Sunday. That would mean that I’d spent two weeks looking, which would have to count, for the Pells and for myself, as giving it the old college try. I’d leave Thomas to whatever purification or cave exploration he and Guruji deemed necessary, and I’d get back, as soon as possible, to the distant disaster that was my life.

  I’ve never, of course, been a burglar, so I’ve never cased a house, but I think I now know, based on that afternoon/evening in Noida, more or less what it would be like. I couldn’t sleep, as it turned out (every time I started to go under, I snapped awake, feeling like a bungee cord had saved me from a fall), so instead I set up a little stakeout fort and waited. My main base of operations was the space between a row of bushes and a low brick wall directly across the road from the Batras’. If you ever want to be transported back to being five years old, hide behind a bush for a few hours. I got to know the pattern of the leaves and the smell of the dirt and the feeling, against my knees and tailbone, of each rock in the vicinity. There were earthworms and red ants, neither of which showed the least bit of interest in the mini puddles of beer I poured for them. There were clouds moving over me like a slow-motion comb-over.