At the Bottom of Everything

by Ben Dolnick

  The hike divided into two basic phases. There was the this-is-a-much-longer-hike-than-I’d-like-to-be-on-but-I’m-basically-OK phase, which lasted from the time we left the house in the morning until sometime late that afternoon, when the path ended and we stopped to eat on a shale ledge overlooking what I’m pretty sure was Akki’s village (Ranjiv wouldn’t touch my crackers, and before he ate any of his lentils he insisted on bowing to me again). Up to that point my biggest immediate concerns were the heat and the blister on my heel, which had started leaving overlapping crusty bloodstains on the back of my sock and which was proving basically impossible to bandage. I couldn’t ask, of course, but I’d decided, based on Ranjiv’s calm and the fact that he didn’t have even a canteen with him, that we couldn’t have more than another hour or two to go; I thought, as we stood up and brushed ourselves off, that that might have been our farewell meal before we turned the corner and saw the cave. Instead, right after that commenced the this-is-the-hardest-physical-thing-I’ve-ever-done-and-I-might-die phase, which started when Ranjiv darted to a lookout at the top of a boulder, then gestured for me to follow him around to a clump of thorny vines that, so far as I could tell, we were the first people ever to disturb. This was a plateau at the top of the little mountain we’d been climbing all day, and it couldn’t have been more than a half mile across, but it felt like crossing a continent. Why couldn’t we go around the thorns? What we were doing felt, in terms of efficiency, like going from one room to the next by eating through the wall. I was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt, so there was no shortage of skin for these thorns to find their way into. Except “thorns” may not be exactly right, because thorns you can snap off or, if they happen to get you, pluck out; these were more like hairs, stinging little cactus-fuzz hairs that covered the entire surfaces of these woody vines. For the seven hundredth time I wondered: How the hell had Thomas managed this? I’d seen tears come to his eyes when someone clipped his heels with a shopping cart.

  To distract myself, and to keep from screaming, I decided that what I needed to do was play a game. Very few hiking games, it turns out, are designed to be played by one person. Not I Spy. Not that game where you say you’re Alice and you’re from Albuquerque and you like to eat apples. The only one I could think of how to play, unfortunately, was Sudden Death. Which is basically Twenty Questions, except that the answer always has to be someone who died unexpectedly. JFK. A passenger on the Titanic. Bambi’s mother. So what I did, since of course I couldn’t play in the traditional way, was to pick a person (Ritchie Valens) and then see how many questions it would have taken me to guess, if I hadn’t already known.

  At some point I discovered that the thorns hurt less on the backs of my arms than on the fronts.

  Were you real?

  And that the worst was getting them in the cheeks; that needed to be avoided if at all possible.

  Were you famous?

  And that if I stepped very high, while simultaneously keeping my arms in boxer-protecting-his-face mode, I could let my knees take the worst of it.

  Did you die in the last five years?

  Maybe hopping; hopping might actually be better.

  Was your death bloody?

  We’d now made it to the shady side of the mountain, which, along with my sweat-soaked shirt, meant that I wasn’t hot for the first time in days. But this seemed to be the hour of the late afternoon (and I would rather it have been fifteen degrees hotter) during which India’s versions of horseflies come out. Or maybe it was something in our smells, our particular level of filthiness, that drew them. The only time I saw Ranjiv look anything other than totally composed was when he was slapping at a pair that were tag-teaming his neck. They were the size and weight of sugar cubes; they made frantic, helicopter-circling noises as they hovered by your ears; they stung with deep, epidural sorts of needles. I spent those entire couple of hours fondling the thought of their extinction like a prisoner plotting his revenge.

  And they wouldn’t, I don’t think, have been quite so hard to deter except that I needed both hands to cling to the long grass as we made our way down the hillside. This hill seemed, and may even have been, slightly steeper than an average peaked rooftop. And this was a rooftop that happened to be covered in a shiny, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sort of grass, all combed downward so as to facilitate maximum slippage. It’s such an unfamiliar feeling, for someone who takes elevators and orders takeout and confines his exertion to softly padded weight machines, to be flexing your muscles desperately, and for hours. Something about the angle at which I was crouching kept making my left thigh seize up in little walnut clusters of pain. The fingers on both my hands were cut up and stinging where I’d been clutching at roots. My veins were hard as shoelaces. At one point, just when I thought I’d developed a reliable grab-and-shimmy method, a handful of roots gave way and I did a thing I’d never done before in waking life: I tumbled freely and helplessly. For what couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds I was without resistance, without a notion of where I’d end up. I came to a stop maybe fifteen feet below our little non-path, my feet higher than my head, my entire body sunk in wet grass. Something had torn a strip of skin from my thigh. I’d crushed everything in my backpack. This wasn’t the first but it was probably the most serious of the moments in which I thought: I give up. I didn’t know exactly what giving up would have entailed (lying there until horseflies had stung me to death; rolling down the hill until I was carried away in the river), but I couldn’t imagine that it could be any worse than going on. If there had been anyone to tell me that it was all right, I would have cried; for the first time in India, maybe for the first time in years, I longed for the presence of my mom.

  Ranjiv, looking down at me with alarm, gripped me by the shoulder straps, lifted me like a doll (this despite his weighing at least forty pounds less than me), and placed me on my feet. From that point on he never got more than a few feet ahead of me, and once we were past the steepest part of the hill, he insisted that we stop and rest. He refused to drink from my bottle; instead he made a little cup with the bottom of his robe and, squatting by the stream, drank for the first time that I’d seen all day.

  His drinking, for reasons sensible or not, struck me as a very bad sign. As I say, I’d somehow taken his lack of water as an indication that this wasn’t going to be a long hike, but now I began to fear (and this too felt familiar from the Appalachian Trail, watching as my counselors quietly conferred) that this might actually involve spending a night outdoors. It was beginning to get dark, different sets of birds and bugs were beginning to make themselves known, and something about the way Ranjiv was moving, his energy-conserving lope, signaled to me that this was a person who knew he had many miles and many hours to go. It’s possible that my emotional state, like a fallen tree, was simply decomposing in hyperspeed, but I really, really didn’t want this hike to include a night in the woods. I even pled to Ranjiv’s back, in the hopes that my tone of voice might convey my meaning, “We’re going to get there tonight, aren’t we?” He just glanced back at me, concerned and a little irritated, as if I’d sneezed on his neck.

  We weren’t going to get there tonight. A couple of hours later (by which time it was nearly dark, and my legs had become numb little forward-motion machines) we came into a clearing, a dramatically pretty patch of fallen leaves enclosed by a creek and a wall of vine-swallowed trees, and Ranjiv pointed at the ground and made a sleeping-on-a-pillow gesture with his hands and head. Here we were. I sat down on the biggest rock I could find and took a glug of water that for some reason I had to work not to immediately throw up. I kept seeing little peripheral flickers in the underbrush, but it was probably just my eyes. I almost felt like laughing with unhappiness.

  I was, of course, incredibly tired, but past a certain point tiredness stops registering primarily as a desire to be asleep. It was as if my body or brain had at some point in the past few days accepted that I was never again going to get adequate sleep, so it had constructed a
jittery, pain-spiked simulation of wakefulness. It was to the real thing what a high school Into the Woods backdrop is to an actual forest.

  But before we could sleep (and by now it was becoming truly dark, so I had to use my flashlight when I went to pee), Ranjiv had various things to do, little ceremonies. I didn’t know if these were things he did every night, as a monk, or if these were things that had to do with me in particular. The whole time he kept the mildest, most blandly content expression on his face; he looked, here in the middle of the woods, alone with a white stranger he’d been told to revere, like someone unloading the dishwasher.

  The first thing he needed to do, apparently, was to start a little fire. I’d never seen anyone do this before, outside of Survivor, and he wasn’t, surprisingly, particularly good at it. Or maybe the twigs he was using were just wet. Either way, he spent what seemed like twenty minutes gathering sticks and branches and leaves, then spinning one stick against another, on and on and on, until I thought maybe he wasn’t trying to start a fire at all; maybe this was the whole ritual. But a string of gray smoke finally appeared, and then a flame about the size of the one in a votive candle. The whole time he was doing this, I was sitting on my rock, scraping thorns from my legs with the Pells’ MasterCard. I wanted, for some reason, to stomp Ranjiv’s fire out. I wanted to douse it in lighter fluid and burn every fly and plant and human on the mountain.

  The dark, when you’re in the middle of the woods, is so complete, and comes on so fast. I moved closer to the fire, now the size of a flame on a stove, and I just sat there, painfully cross-legged, a few feet from Ranjiv, for what seemed like an hour. My back hurt in every position I tried, so I settled on a hunch, with my elbows on my knees. If we’d been friends, if we’d spoken the same language, we would have been telling stories, complaining, tossing broken-off pieces of bark. As it was, we just sat. I tried toasting a cracker, which didn’t improve its taste. Life must have been so terrifying, and so boring, when there was nothing to do at night other than sit around in the dark and stare at fires. I tried to remember the exact layout of everywhere I’d ever lived. I tried to remember what Thomas had had on the walls of his childhood bedroom. I kept thinking I heard voices on the water, rustling in the bushes; and (this is painful to think about now) I kept switching on my flashlight, as if the pale circle might just happen to catch whatever it was, and as if I might be able to do something about it.

  At some point, just before he went to sleep, Ranjiv shifted around so he was facing me and launched into a set of prostrations that made last night’s look disrespectful. He stretched all the way out into a push-up frozen just above the ground. He cupped his hands at his forehead. He scooted forward on his knees and repeated it all closer to me.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I muttered, waving my hands. “Really.”

  When he opened his mouth I thought he was actually going to respond to me, but instead he let out a single, mournful note (it was him leading the chanting), which he then repeated, at intervals, like a wolf baying at the moon, or like a beautiful human car alarm. I had goose bumps all over my legs, and only the thinnest tissue of sense kept me from shouting, “Stop! Stop! Please stop! This is insane!” Instead I closed my eyes and thought, I don’t know what I’ve done in my life to be where I am, or actually I do know, but please tell me I’ve paid my debts. Tell me I’ve done enough.

  It was time for bed.

  Ranjiv swept dirt onto the fire, then curled up on the flat ground right where we’d been sitting. He tucked his knees toward his chest and pressed his hands together under his head (for him the sleeping gesture was apparently a literal reenactment). I curled up about five feet away, facing the opposite direction, and tried to understand that this was it, that these were the conditions under which I was going to spend the next however many hours of my life. I uncrumpled my sweatshirt and made a kind of blanket/neck pillow out of it. When I switched off my light, the darkness was almost perfect; there must have been cloud cover, because even the moon, which had been massive at Akki’s, was nowhere. If I ever made it back to America, I decided, I’d go on a speaking tour, imploring people to think daily about the miracle of artificial light. Night was an enemy we’d defeated so thoroughly that we forgot we’d ever been fighting it. In the dark woods on the side of a mountain you’re not the endpoint of all creation, you’re just a small and not particularly capable mammal; you’re a monkey curled in a tree, a wild dog with its nose buried in its paw.

  It wasn’t cold, except compared with the temperature that afternoon. The dirt smelled strongly of dirt. There was wind making the leaves rattle and bugs clicking and water hissing and so many more noises that I couldn’t begin to identify: hoots and chitters and yelps and grunts. I’m not ashamed to say that I was crying, lightly. I was reverse-engineering civilization by the things that I missed. Sheets, pillows, heat, walls, and bug spray, good God, bug spray. Mosquitoes were working me over, draining me. One bite in particular, on the tendon on the back of my knee, had taken on a dark, hard, throbbing quality, as if my leg were trying to give birth to something. I covered it with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and X’d the bite with my fingernail, which someone (it was Anna! my middle-aged mistress was somewhere on the planet right at that moment!) had told me helped dissipate the poison.

  Every square inch of ground beneath me turned out to have qualities all its own. A little divot that took my shoulder as if it had been built for that purpose; a slant under my legs that eventually felt as steep as a ski slope. When dawn finally came, and I saw the plainness of where I’d been lying, the smallness and bareness of it, it felt like a trick. I brushed off my clothes and swished water around my mouth to get the taste out. It’s much easier to get up, it turns out, when you’ve never really been asleep in the first place.

  We must have been hiking again by five thirty or six; it was that kind of light, and there was a wetness on everything, a fresh-from-the-refrigerator chill. I ate half a packet of broken crackers, and I could feel my body burning them up, vaporizing them, like water droplets hitting a hot pan. The rest of our way was mostly downhill, through woods that were like pine but shaggier. I was seeing whitish question marks, little retinal floaters, everywhere I looked. I kept finding myself moved, almost to the point of tears, by the sight of Ranjiv; he was the little brother, or possibly the son, I never had and never would. Watching his shoulders and the back of his shaved head, I wanted to go and grab him, hug him, tell him to please go off and have a life, he could take my place in America. He was good and I wasn’t, it seemed so clear, so indisputable. I wanted to find his parents and make them promise to take care of him; I wanted to give him real shoes, warm food, an apartment full of Ikea furniture and electronic crap. I wanted to lie down and die.

  I didn’t understand, at first, when we came to the mouth of the cave. It was less the crack-in-a-wall sort of cave that I’d been picturing than a kind of indoor amphitheater. We’d been following a steep path down, in front of a rock wall, and now here it was, only slightly obscured by trees, like the entrance to a small garage. I peered inside. There was a ceiling you’d have to jump to touch, wide walls, a slightly downward-slanting rock floor. I didn’t notice until Ranjiv went over and bowed to it that there was a figure carved in the rock just to the left of the entrance; it was someone seated, holding up his right hand, just a few degrees more sophisticated than a stick figure. The cave wasn’t exactly inviting, but here in the noonish light it didn’t seem especially fearsome either; there didn’t look like there was any point inside from which you wouldn’t be able to see back to the entrance. I actually felt relieved.

  My notion was that Ranjiv would lead us in, and that within fifteen minutes we’d either know we’d come to the wrong place, or we’d find Thomas perched somewhere just inside, like one of the bats I was now beginning to notice, shiny black faces poking out from the burned-English-muffin surface of the ceiling. Either way we’d be back in Akki’s village by bedtime, or by tomorrow morning at the
absolute latest, and I would have survived what had seemed like the least survivable thing I’d ever done.

  By that point Ranjiv and I had developed a more or less reliable system of gestures and looks, but we’d mostly used it to express things along the lines of Look out for where the path drops off or Let’s rest until you’ve finished drinking. This was more complicated.

  First he made a gesture that was something like, OK, this is it, you’re welcome.

  I pointed inside the cave. Pointed to him and then to me.

  He shook his head and repeated: Thank you, no, our time together is done. You, alone, go inside.

  We wrestled over this basic point for a while. Was he saying he was afraid? That he wasn’t allowed to go in? He looked, the longer we stood there, almost embarrassed for me, as if I were trying to insist that he accompany me into the bathroom.

  I made a face, and may even have said out loud, “How the fuck am I supposed to go in there alone? And then how am I supposed to get back? Look where we are!”

  At this point he dropped to his knees and started in on what I gathered were the final, farewell set of prostrations. I hoped very badly that I was misunderstanding him, but I didn’t think so. When he finally stood up, he dusted off his robe, then looked at me, looked directly at me, and for the first time since we’d been together it wasn’t the look a lowly soldier gives a general; it was more the look a man gives his house as it goes up in flames. But his gesture was unmistakable: You stay here. Good-bye.

  I stood there watching his orange-robed back as he bobbed off up the path, not looking back, and then as he passed around the corner and out of sight. I felt like a dog being abandoned by the side of the road. There was an orbit of gnats around my head. I felt fear unfolding in me, expanding to fill my chest; I knew I should run after him, and kept feeling flickers of almost doing it, like someone at the edge of a diving board, but then it was too late, and I was standing by the cave mouth alone. The sun was making the ground steam, and a woodpecker was drilling away up high in a dead tree. I took a deep breath and, for the first time in my life, brought my hands together in prayer at my forehead. I turned and walked into the cave.