by Ben Dolnick
Another characteristic of this era was that I was treating Thomas, and thinking of him, the way a fireman treats someone he finds gasping inside a house. I was hardly looking at his face. I wasn’t saying a word about his disappearing from the hotel, or about his managing to have fallen down here. He was a trapped and damaged body and I was the person sent to save him.
I am, at best, an ordinarily strong person, and at that moment I was probably a good deal less than that, but Thomas was light enough that I was able, once I’d convinced him he was going to have to move, to pick him up like a barbell. My first set of attempts involved jumping, with him in my arms, and trying to lodge myself in the narrower part of the shaft, but I couldn’t get nearly high enough. Then I tried getting a toehold on one of the tiny rock ledges a few feet off the ground, but I couldn’t stay up for more than half a second, and even if I’d been able to, I wouldn’t have been able to use my hands to climb any farther, because they were busy holding Thomas. He was moaning and babbling, the verbal equivalent of drooling. “Oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry.” One of my most successful attempts was when I draped him over my shoulders like a mink scarf, then tried bracing myself against the walls with all four limbs spread out like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. The basic problem was that the shaft, in a way I hadn’t appreciated on the way down, was shaped more like a flask than like a test tube; we were stuck down in the fat part at the bottom.
I was actually managing to blot out my panic, or most of it, by keeping absolutely fixated on trying to get us out. Once I’d given up, for the moment, on jumping and climbing, I set about exploring the walls, in the hopes of finding another tunnel. For this I laid Thomas back down on the ground, his hurt knee in the air. “When was the last time you ate?” I said. “You need to eat.” I gave him a cracker, which I ended up having to more or less stuff into his mouth, then ate most of one myself. It was around this point, I think, that I began to notice that the light from my flashlight, which had started out a fairly robust yellow white, was beginning to go ashen. Or maybe it had just shifted on its shelf. It had been running for only an hour or so, anyway, so I didn’t think this was high on my list of things to worry about. I dropped to my knees and started feeling along the walls for places that might be made of something other than solid rock.
The most plausible patch turned out to be about the size and shape of an LP, right at ground level, on the wall where Thomas had been sitting when I’d first come in. There the rock, instead of feeling like the usual granite-ish slab, was almost crumbly. With my fingertips I managed to get a pretty good amount scraped off, and I was close to thinking I felt coolness, air, on the other side when I realized that what I was actually feeling was wetness; another surface of rock, just as solid as all the rest. I stayed there scraping at it for what must have been ten minutes, making no more progress than you would trying to scrape through stainless steel, and when I finally gave up it was the first moment in which I felt, unmistakably, the likelihood of death closing around me. It gave me a chill at a depth I didn’t know was capable of feeling such things. Bone marrow, spinal fluid; there was no part of me that wasn’t sending out distress signals.
There’s a tendency, I think, to discount the suffering in fear; after the fact, once the tests have come back negative or the call’s been returned, we think, It wasn’t as bad as all that. We let our present relief retouch our past terror. I want to make sure I don’t do that here; being down at the bottom of that pit, realizing I had no way of getting us out, was exactly as bad as all that.
I sat with my back against the wall and stared down at my legs, which were shaking freely. What the roar behind me sounded like more than anything, I realized, was a fire, a steadily approaching fire. My last act, I thought, might be murdering Thomas. He had his eyes gently closed and he was still muttering, almost soundlessly now. I kept looking up into the shaft, in case there might be a handhold, a shelf, a passageway I’d overlooked.
There was no question of the light’s dimming, finally. The end of a flashlight is a terrible thing; it shrinks and closes in on itself like the last gulp of water down a bathtub drain. I shook it, hoping the batteries might knock some life into each other. I twisted it off and on, off and on, off and on. Finally, I threw the light, as hard as I’d thrown anything since the last time I’d played baseball, against the wall next to Thomas; it made a small and unsatisfying sound, before it rolled back and bumped against my foot. We were in the dark.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about guilt? That’s something I struggle with a lot, going back over things I regret saying, people I regret hurting, all that sort of stuff, and I think it really gets in the way of my practice.
P: When feeling guilty, you are at the center of the story, yes? You are feeling, “Oh, I do so many things, I hurt so many people, me, me, me, me.”
Q: So guilt is a kind of vanity, you’re saying?
P: Guilt is story. Story is mind’s way to say, “I understand, it is in my control,” even if story is “Oh, I have no control, everything happening to me.”
Q: So I should try to stop telling myself stories, whether they’re good or bad?
P: Think of man holding a torch [mimes picking up a torch], and it is coming close to burning his fingers. Man waves the torch, tries to press it against ground, runs looking for river, flame only getting closer, closer, closer. I am saying to him, “Just open your hand. Let it drop.” No more burning. Yes?
There couldn’t be more than a few hundred people alive who really know absolute darkness. Deep-sea divers, unlucky miners. People think of the bathroom in the middle of the night, or the road when your headlights go off. Oh my God, it’s pitch-black. No, it isn’t. Actual darkness isn’t just not being able to make out shapes, or not being sure where the walls are. It’s got more in common with blinding light than it does with ordinary basement darkness; it presses on you, it fills you up, it’s all you can think about.
For a long time (I can’t say how long; my sense of time, which I’d already thought was haywire, was now untethered completely) I just sat there in the dark and tried not to scream. Each breath I took, each movement, seemed to require as much effort and attention as a step on hot coals. Me breathing, Thomas muttering, the cave breathing; I couldn’t tell one sound from another. My whole body was tensed, almost vibrating, in anticipation of some sort of explosion. There’s an exquisiteness to the moment before a tantrum, a kind of delicious pinpoint pain. I’d forgotten. It’s much more pleasant than the tantrum itself, anyway, which is all flailing and stumbling and shouting yourself hoarse. I’d forgotten that part too.
I did eventually scream; Thomas by then had fallen mostly silent. Again, I don’t know for how long, and I can’t even say what I shouted, except that it centered around the word help, but my throat was raw by the end of it. There was wall pounding too, in addition to the shouting. And kicking and shouldering and jumping and, at one especially hopeless point, biting: I scraped my teeth against the wall and spat a mixture of dirt and blood.
When Thomas and I were in middle school, first spending our afternoons together, we used to talk sometimes about what we’d do if we found out we had one week to live. Sometimes it would be a day, sometimes just an hour. Our answers were always along the lines of breaking into the houses of girls we knew and explaining that common sense dictated that they have sex with us. Running through school naked, telling all our teachers to go fuck themselves. We always seemed to imagine the news of our impending deaths as a liberation, as if our lives were dress shoes we couldn’t wait to take off.
God, there’s so little we understand, so little we’re actually capable of imagining. How many times had I read about human remains found in caves? A significant discovery, with the potential to reshape anthropologists’ understanding of … How had I not heard the screaming, the wheezing and weeping as the air ran out? Or what about Pompeii? I’d walked past those gray bodies as if they were mannequins, animals in
a diorama, blithely waiting all these centuries to demonstrate everyday life in ancient Italy. No. Their deaths were horrible. I should have heard shrieking while I walked, sipping orange soda, behind my mom down those streets. I should have imagined skin melting like cheese.
I had a loose rock in one hand and I was pounding it, scraping it, against the ground. It didn’t matter, I realized, whether my eyes were open or closed. If I learned I was about to die, it turned out that what I’d do is have the most staggeringly intense Technicolor panic attack of which a human body is capable. No sex. No running. No triumphant speeches.
Before the attack really took hold, though, or before it became so crippling that I wasn’t capable of anything other than lying there and experiencing it, I did try talking to Thomas.
“What were you thinking?” I said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
I didn’t expect him to answer me, really. I had the impression by then that he was animate in some other way than I was, like a plant, or a reef. Instead, in a voice much more like the one he’d had in the hotel, he said, “This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I meant to happen at all. I know it doesn’t make any difference to you, but—”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“I was supposed to … Once I got here and sat, something was supposed to change. I thought I would, maybe not leave my body, but I would understand that something had left, I would feel something, I would finally be free. But I fell, and I panicked. It was the worst I’d felt since … since I first met Guruji. I forgot why I was here. I got so thirsty I started to cry. And then you came, and I’m so grateful, I finally understand what you’ve done for me, but I wish you hadn’t, because—”
“Because we’re going to fucking die?”
“We are, yes, I am, I understand that now. And I understand that I needed to, that I always needed to die, for me to get where I’m going I couldn’t live, and I just wish you didn’t have to—”
If my consciousness had been a symphony, this next phase would have been the work of an experimental composer, someone shunned by the academy, someone whose pieces included things like musicians snapping their instruments over their knees and tearing up their sheet music. Bodily, I was now lying on my side, against the wall, every so often dipping my fingertip in the mouth of the water bottle to moisten my lips, but mentally, or anyway in the parts of the body that experience things invisibly, I was in hell. “Life flashing before my eyes” doesn’t describe it, because flashes are brief, and because this wasn’t my whole life, or even particularly important parts of it. It was more like someone had filled a row of buckets from the lake of my life, and now that person was dunking my head in them, one after another, until I nearly drowned.
One bucket:
I saw my mom sitting at the head of our kitchen table in Baltimore, eating soup from one of our chipped white bowls. The sky outside was silver; there was a sound somewhere of an airplane or an air conditioner. On the table in front of her, spread out under her bowl, was one of her health magazines. She had a big pale spoonful of broth and she was blowing on it in this way I would never have thought I remembered: the exact pattern of the wrinkles around her lips when she puckered, the precise little shushing noise. And for some reason the me in the memory was in agony; the sense was that I’d been told I had to wait for something, or that, as a punishment, I wasn’t allowed to speak. There was a willful-ignoring quality in how she was blowing on the soup, I think, a kind of defiant unconcern. How old was I when this had happened? Six? Seven?
Another bucket:
I was in seventh grade, new to Dupont, and I was sitting in Principal Weaning’s office, watching her pull the door shut. What had I done? I felt as if I were trying not to cry. One of the venetian blinds was bent. I could hear the phone ringing and then the secretary’s voice out in the waiting room. There was a stringy half-dead plant on the windowsill. Now I remembered what I’d done: I’d lied that my real dad had been killed in a plane crash over the weekend in California. In homeroom, thinking it would be a joke, I’d leaned over to Scott Owens and whispered it, and then it had become too late: Justin Durand, Mrs. Nusk, shaky-handed sympathy hugs, a disastrous sense of being pinned in a trap. I was crying, wiping my nose with one of the thin and scraping tissues from the box on the desk, while Principal Weaning, her hands crossed in front of her, leaned toward me with a self-satisfied yellow smile and said, “Now, why did you lie, Adam? Why would you lie about something like that?”
On the floor of the cave, now, I was crying too, and shaking as if the ground beneath me had become electrified. Apparently drug addicts, in their first days of withdrawal, sweat out their substances; they writhe and scream and soak the sheets. “I hate you, Thomas,” I heard myself saying. “I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d never come.”
“I’m sorry. I wish it had been someone else, I really do. I’m going to pray now, OK? I’m sorry, I need to, I’m sorry.”
Another bucket, only it wasn’t my life, it wasn’t my memory:
It was the middle of the night and traffic lights were flashing and crickets were making a high hum, and I was standing alone on the curb of a familiar street. Everything had a kind of electron-microscope clarity: the glossiness of the asphalt, the ticking of the lights, the smell of the mulch, the reflections in the glass of the bus stop. I looked left, then stepped off the curb in a fluid hop. As I crossed the street I could feel, like a plunging thermometer, a car rolling out somewhere to my right. I couldn’t turn my head but I knew it was there. The other car came more as a blaze of light than as an object; it wasn’t there, and then it was.
At this point the memory, or whatever it was, branched in two, or maybe I branched in two. I was in my body and I was watching it. A piece of music with two parts.
The impact of a head against pavement is, when it happens, so ordinary; that’s maybe the worst part about it. The laws that govern watermelons dropped from overpasses, pumpkins thrown from porches; they apply to our most precious possessions too. I can’t say whether I jumped or screamed or what; I can only describe the feeling, which was pain, yes, the worst sort of ripping, brain-bursting pain, but also something much worse and much harder to explain. A kind of sinking into an icy ocean, maybe. The sort of falling you do in dreams but without the bolting awake: just down, down, down.
And then at some depth, streaming past, clearer than they’d been in actual life, were the Batras. Faces in a submarine window. The only way I can describe their expressions is: I knew I would rather be blind for the rest of my life than to have to look at them again. They were so clear I could see the tiny hairs in the pores of their cheeks. Words like devastation, grief, horror, shock are fingers pointing at an abyss; their faces were the abyss.
I must have screamed.
Somewhere far above me, or somewhere close but with many layers in between, I heard Thomas’s voice; I felt his hands on my shoulders, heard him saying something; I could feel the words but couldn’t understand them, they were like snowflakes or ash.
“Are we dead?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I was so, so tired, I wasn’t sure if I’d actually managed to speak.
“I’m going to save you,” Thomas said. “Like you saved me. I can’t keep you from dying, but I can save you.”
“OK.”
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Say something if you can hear me.”
“I am. I can hear you.”
“Are you breathing?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re breathing, just feel it. Forget your name.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re breathing.”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t dead.”
“No.”
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Move your hand if you can hear me.”
I moved my hand.
“Something was swi
tched on when you were born, and it’s never been off, not for a second. Do you understand me?”
“No.”
“It was there before you met me, before you met your mom. It’s been running through the accident and the trip here and every conversation, every dream, there’s been this thing; it never flinches, it never closes its eyes, not even now, it doesn’t love or hate, it doesn’t want or not want, nothing has ever happened to it. Do you understand?”
“No. Thomas, I’m so sorry. I’m tired. Please. I’m so sorry. I’ve made so many mistakes. I’m so, so tired.”
“Squeeze my hand.”
“I am.”
“Just listen to me. You can fall back into it. It’s always there. It doesn’t care where we are. It doesn’t care what we’ve done.”
“I don’t understand. Please.”
“Just fall back. Fall.”
“I can’t.”
But I could. Because I fell. And the thing in me I would have said was me—it was unplugged like a refrigerator. I hadn’t known what silence was.
“Hello?” I said.
“Yes. You’re talking.”
“Thomas?”
I was still conscious, I’m pretty sure, but I was in rooms of my brain that I’d never been in. The best way to describe what I was experiencing then is to say that I’d been poured back into the lake. And that I understood, in the way you “understand” you have a body and a name, that it wasn’t really my lake; I’d been, at most, a gallon or two; I was dissolved. And among the things I discovered, in this new state, was that it didn’t matter anymore whether I was speaking out loud. I could talk to Thomas without opening my mouth. I could think at him.
Remember when we lay side by side on our backs on the sofa in your room and walked on the ceiling, stepped over doorways.
