At the Bottom of Everything (21 page)

Back upstairs I dipped the key card in the door as quietly as I could; of course I knew Thomas would be there, but still, when I saw his back, saw that he hadn’t moved, I gave a silent nod of thanks. How long had it been since he’d slept on an actual bed, let alone a bed with a Serta-certified pillow-top mattress and a down comforter?

And now I could give in to sleep too. Now I could relish climbing into bed, nestling into the stack of pillows, sealing the comforter around my neck, like a gourmand tucking into a five-course meal. It was 4:24.
The next bed I lie down on will be in America. The land of tap water and well-paved streets and as much Internet/TV/alcohol as I decide to prescribe myself
. Sometimes in bed, at moments of especially conscious tiredness, it feels like you can steer yourself into a particular dream region, like guiding a spaceship into a wormhole. No highways, please. Let’s dream about a forest, I told myself. It’s warmly raining and there are soft-furred animals nuzzling you and all the rocks are really trampolines. I dreamed and dreamed, slept and slept; I gorged on sleep, rolled around in it, drank it until I was full. Every now and then, to mark my progress, I checked the clock: 5:39, 6:50, 7:28. I checked Thomas too; he was as still as if he’d been unplugged. Maybe this was a sleeping
technique that Guruji had taught him. Maybe I’d have to carry him to the airport like a dad with a baby strapped to his chest.

When I opened my eyes at 8:45, my first thought was that I’d forgotten about all the states of being that don’t include a headache. For a minute I just lay there in bed not hurting, studying the light fixture in the ceiling, letting the sunlight from between the curtains fall across my chest. You can somehow tell, just from the pitch of the silence, when it’s snowed while you were asleep; I think the same organ can tell you whether there are other people in a room with you; I think that may have been why I gave myself a few extra seconds before I rolled onto my side, a few last breaths in which it wouldn’t be confirmed:

Thomas’s bed was empty.

I didn’t panic. I called out, “Thomas?” and walked over to the bathroom. I knocked; maybe he was taking another shower. Nothing—empty. Maybe I’d just overlooked him in all those pillows and sheets. I pushed aside the hard, fabric-covered pillows on his bed, as if he might be hiding between them. I scoured the bedside table, and then the floor on either side of the bedside table, for a note he might have left:
Just gone for a walk, back in a few
. Nothing, nothing. I’d just thrown back the curtains, as if it weren’t a person I was looking for but an earring, when I realized I was being ridiculous. Of course I knew where he was: breakfast. His body, with its scooped-out cheeks and countable ribs, must have craved food the way mine had craved sleep. I’d find him downstairs, planted behind a pair of buffet plates heaped with eggs and fruit and waffles.

Elevators are such a terrible form of transport when you really want to get somewhere. I rushed past the baffled hostess (who was, I was fairly sure, the same woman who’d checked us in the night before) and did a quick lap around the dining room. Purple paisley carpet, mirrors, white tablecloths. White families, Indian families, a group of women all reading from different guidebooks.

“Excuse me, did someone named Thomas Pell come down here and eat, do you know? Room 8021?”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Did a man from room 8021 come down here already? Would you mind checking?”

“I’m sorry. Would you like to sit for breakfast, sir?”

I hurried back through the lobby and out into the driveway, where it was already as hot as the middle of the afternoon. I ran past the line of cars and out to the sidewalk; I looked one way toward the traffic circle, the other way toward a high-rise, and realized that my running off in any direction would only make it much less likely that I’d find him.

You know what?
I thought.
He must be in the room
. Maybe I somehow overlooked him, or maybe he was just out meditating in the hall. By the time I’d run up the stairs and reopened our door, I was feeling nearly hopeful. “You scared the shit out of me!” I’d tell him, and he’d nod at me like a benevolent tree being.

But the room was precisely as I’d left it. The bathroom door was open at just the same angle, the pillows on his bed were still where I’d thrown them. Now I was permitting myself, however slightly, to panic. I looked under both of our beds, even though these were the kinds of beds in which the “under” consists of a wooden box that goes all the way to the floor. I opened the shower curtain and looked in the tub not once but twice. I even, knowing it was insane as I did it, looked inside the minibar.

I spent the rest of the morning, and really the rest of the day, engaged in one of my least favorite (and lately most frequent) activities: anxious waiting. I sat on the bed, with the room phone beside me and the ringer turned up to maximum volume, watching more hours of cricket than I would ever have expected to consume. I ate all the dried apricots from the minibar, and then all the ginger snaps, and then all the Peanut M&M’s, for a running total of $21.50. Every time the maids, or anyone else, went by in the hallway, I momentarily
convinced myself that Thomas was about to open the door. How (really:
how
) was I going to tell his parents that I’d lost him again? I should have handcuffed myself to him. I should have slept with one hand clasping his beard.

I was aware, in a theoretical way, that some of my panic and grief at not knowing where he was (and by then I was sweating freely, shredding the packages in my hands into plastic strips) may have been borrowed emotion; which is to say, the fact that I hadn’t really allowed myself to think or feel very much regarding the visit to the Batras the night before may have been causing me to feel more than I otherwise would have about what was happening today. Plus I was almost certainly still suffering from certain psychological effects of sleep deprivation. But still. Every thirty minutes or so I called the front desk to ask if anyone had been by to see me. Every hour I went down and checked my email (
YOU’VE FOUND HIM! Oh, Adam, we are dizzy with gratitude
). I kept standing up to look out the window, as if he might pop up swimming laps or sunbathing.

The sun had already started to set again (there’s almost nothing more discouraging than the sunset on a day when you’ve hardly gone outside) when I decided, or admitted, that I needed finally to do the thing I’d spent the past few hours hoping and pretending I could avoid. I went back down to the business center, where I took my usual seat beside the preteen sibling British girls who’d spent the entire afternoon playing a game starring Dora the Explorer.

My teeth were chattering as I typed.

I should have (and under ordinary mental circumstances would have) known:

There was never a chance of Thomas not going to the cave. Running into me in Noida, being dragged to the hotel; all that, for him, was like having lint brushed from his costume as he headed toward the stage. He’d written himself directions, down to every last bus transfer and switchback. He’d made his way to the cave without a guide, with less struggle and complication than I would have thought possible for even the most capable local, let alone a half-crazy, starving foreigner. Maybe at some point in the past couple of years he’d developed a leather-soled native deftness; maybe he was just so desperate to get on with his enlightenment or his rebirth or whatever it was that it wouldn’t have made a difference whether the cave was on a mountain or at the bottom of the ocean.

All of this is to say, I don’t know exactly how or why, after the relative ease of getting there, he got into trouble. It may have been that by the time he found the cave, having traveled by train and bus for a day and then walked for a day after that, he was delirious with exhaustion. Or it may have been
that, in the dark, he just got lost; maybe he got turned around and ended up crawling in deeper when he thought he was crawling out. Again: almost all of this is speculation.

About my own troubles, which started well before I found the cave, I can be much clearer.

Raymond responded to my email within a couple of hours, sounding somewhere between chastened and indignant; his note reminded me of the instructions for a scavenger hunt. First I needed to get to a city called Nainital (a surprisingly easy train ride, another set of town squares and city gates and auto-rickshaw drivers sleeping with newspapers shading their faces). And from there I needed to take a bus, which turned out to mean a couple of buses, thirtyish miles (most of them across a landscape so scrubby and bare that it made the whole problem of human overpopulation seem incomprehensible) to a tiny village in the Kumaon Valley near a city called Mukteshwar.

Throughout the trip I was performing a kind of triage on myself. To my running list of ailments I’d added a burning pain in the right side of my neck (which meant that to turn my head I needed to turn my entire body, like the Tin Man), a possibly infected blister on my left heel, and constipation paired with such vile gas that at each new occurrence I’d pause for a second, watery eyed, in miserable wonder that my body, or any body, was capable of such horrors. I did my best, on the bus, to linger at a level of sleep just deep enough to refresh me and just shallow enough so I wouldn’t lose track of my bag. By four thirty that afternoon, when we pulled onto a dusty shoulder that was apparently as close as we were going to come to a bus station, I’d finished an entire liter of water, and I needed to pee so badly that the pain in my bladder had, in a weird sort of mercy, eclipsed every other sensation in my body.

The village ended up being not much more than a cluster of mud-brick houses. It was the sort of place that a long-sought mobster or Nazi might disappear to in order to reinvent himself
as a bearded eccentric. In all four directions there were shaggy green mountains, carved in some places into terraced crops that looked like staircases. I didn’t know if it was the off-season or if this was just a part of India that existed in a permanent state of heat-stunned emptiness. The town consisted of one main unpaved street, down which very few people walked, carrying much-reused plastic bags of things like tangled fishing line and dried reeds. All the dogs in town (there were at least a couple of dogs for every person) seemed to be either pregnant or sick or both. A group of boys kicked a plastic jug against a low, crumbling wall.

Raymond had told me to find a house belonging to someone named Akshay, so I spent my first hour in the village wandering up and down the road, farting toxically, peering stiffly into each of the dark little houses to see if I could find someone to talk to. In one building a man was sleeping on a cot with a woven blanket spread over his face. In another there seemed to be nothing but rusting engines. On the terrace in front of one house an old woman sat sorting dried beans on a towel while a shirtless little girl chased a rooster in circles around her.

“Akshay?” I said to her. “English? Akshay? I’m looking for Akshay’s house?”

The woman had a daub of red on her forehead, and such deep wrinkles in her neck that their depths were a different color from the rest of her. She gave me an interested look, as if I were a squirrel that had happened to stop in front of her, but she didn’t give any indication of understanding me; the girl now looked in danger of crying, possibly at the sight/smell of me. I apologized vaguely and moved along. In the road, even though the sun was starting to go down, I kept getting that hand-over-a-grill feeling of imminent combustion. The rooster was now screaming in a way that the skin on the back of my neck interpreted, each time, as an emergency. I was starting to wonder if just this, the endless heat-stricken search, was my punishment. Maybe Thomas and I were like
Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, only for us the chase wasn’t funny, and we’d both end up as sun-bleached bones at the foot of a cactus.