It’s been much too long, and I just wanted to see what you’re up to. Things have been the baddy with me (girl stuff, job stuff), but I just moved into a new place and now I’m trying to figure out what to do next. Write back if you get a chance. I go pretty much whole days without talking to anybody other than the front-desk guy at work. With superlative gut-bombs, Adam
His response came at four in the morning my time, which I didn’t have the brainpower to translate into India time. I was on my way to the bathroom, standing in my boxers, not at all sure that I wasn’t still asleep.
From:
To:
Date: Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 3:58 AM
Subject: re: ahoy-hoy
You ask what I’m up to but I know this question isn’t yours, I have an image of a hired hand waving a treat in front of an animal’s burrow. Know that I do not need trapping or rescuing (interchangeable) whatever S or R have said, I am not happy but I am not unhappy, I am where I should be. I know you can wash guilt from your face like dried mud, I can’t, S and R know about Owl Creek, they won’t admit it, I write to you rather than them because I know you understand, you suffer, and most important, whatever you pretend, you remember.
For the next couple of hours I lay in bed wondering how you knew if you were having a heart attack. And the next night, after a sleepwalking day at work, I wrote to Thomas again, and again he wrote back at four in the morning. He’d been in India for just over a year, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain what he’d been doing there, except occasionally to ramble like someone dictating with a high fever. Mostly he just wanted to talk about his past, particularly the parts related to our friendship and to the accident, as if he were fact-checking an encyclopedia.
Over the next few weeks, even if it probably wasn’t what Sally had in mind, I don’t think you could have said that I didn’t care. I was having my highway dream again, only now instead of praying to be run over I was praying not to be. Thomas and I were writing emails, sometimes three or four a day, that were as strange and as personal as any interaction we’d had since we’d exchanged boxers in eighth grade, for solidarity.
As the summer wore on, I figured that this might be the extent of it; that I’d keep writing to Thomas and keep talkingto his parents and keep lying in my apartment at night thinking about being fifteen, and in this way I’d pay my debts. Wrong. At the beginning of July, Thomas wrote to his parents to say that if they didn’t stop trying to get him home, they’d never hear from him again. Around the same time he stopped responding to my emails, and at first, despite Richard and Sally’s mounting panic, I felt relief. He’d moved on to some other obsession, I figured, some other long-lost correspondent, and I’d be free to resume my life in the present. But after a week or two, by which time I’d begun to drift back toward pretending he didn’t exist, another email came from him, just one line long:
I’ve found the Batras, I’m getting ready, when it’s time I will do what needs to be done, what’s needed to be done, I’m sorry.
Right then I decided, or maybe I should say I realized that it had been decided; it didn’t seem to originate with me. I didn’t write back. Instead I spent a couple of hot gray afternoons shuttling along Massachusetts Avenue between the Indian embassy and my doctor’s office, getting my tourist visa and my typhoid shot. Then on July 26, with my old camp backpack stuffed in the overhead bin, I ate dinner in an upright and locked position two miles above Maine. I slept for a few hours and woke up in white sunlight to a breakfast of microwaved rolls and freezing fruit. My left leg was completely asleep. My malaria medicine, or something, was making me feel dry mouthed and edgy. The cartoon airplane ticking across the ocean on the monitor in front of me showed us 2,063
His response came at four in the morning my time, which I didn’t have the brainpower to translate into India time. I was on my way to the bathroom, standing in my boxers, not at all sure that I wasn’t still asleep.
From:
To:
Date: Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 3:58 AM
Subject: re: ahoy-hoy
You ask what I’m up to but I know this question isn’t yours, I have an image of a hired hand waving a treat in front of an animal’s burrow. Know that I do not need trapping or rescuing (interchangeable) whatever S or R have said, I am not happy but I am not unhappy, I am where I should be. I know you can wash guilt from your face like dried mud, I can’t, S and R know about Owl Creek, they won’t admit it, I write to you rather than them because I know you understand, you suffer, and most important, whatever you pretend, you remember.
For the next couple of hours I lay in bed wondering how you knew if you were having a heart attack. And the next night, after a sleepwalking day at work, I wrote to Thomas again, and again he wrote back at four in the morning. He’d been in India for just over a year, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain what he’d been doing there, except occasionally to ramble like someone dictating with a high fever. Mostly he just wanted to talk about his past, particularly the parts related to our friendship and to the accident, as if he were fact-checking an encyclopedia.
Over the next few weeks, even if it probably wasn’t what Sally had in mind, I don’t think you could have said that I didn’t care. I was having my highway dream again, only now instead of praying to be run over I was praying not to be. Thomas and I were writing emails, sometimes three or four a day, that were as strange and as personal as any interaction we’d had since we’d exchanged boxers in eighth grade, for solidarity.
As the summer wore on, I figured that this might be the extent of it; that I’d keep writing to Thomas and keep talkingto his parents and keep lying in my apartment at night thinking about being fifteen, and in this way I’d pay my debts. Wrong. At the beginning of July, Thomas wrote to his parents to say that if they didn’t stop trying to get him home, they’d never hear from him again. Around the same time he stopped responding to my emails, and at first, despite Richard and Sally’s mounting panic, I felt relief. He’d moved on to some other obsession, I figured, some other long-lost correspondent, and I’d be free to resume my life in the present. But after a week or two, by which time I’d begun to drift back toward pretending he didn’t exist, another email came from him, just one line long:
I’ve found the Batras, I’m getting ready, when it’s time I will do what needs to be done, what’s needed to be done, I’m sorry.
Right then I decided, or maybe I should say I realized that it had been decided; it didn’t seem to originate with me. I didn’t write back. Instead I spent a couple of hot gray afternoons shuttling along Massachusetts Avenue between the Indian embassy and my doctor’s office, getting my tourist visa and my typhoid shot. Then on July 26, with my old camp backpack stuffed in the overhead bin, I ate dinner in an upright and locked position two miles above Maine. I slept for a few hours and woke up in white sunlight to a breakfast of microwaved rolls and freezing fruit. My left leg was completely asleep. My malaria medicine, or something, was making me feel dry mouthed and edgy. The cartoon airplane ticking across the ocean on the monitor in front of me showed us 2,063
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