The Lightness Read online

  A warm ringing filled the room. There was a woman sitting cross-legged next to the shrine. She wore a loose blue dress and a jade necklace so large and heavy-looking I couldn’t help but imagine the indents it must have been making on her breasts, which were large and heavy-looking themselves. This was Shastri Dominique, the Center’s program director, who would lead us in our meditation practice for the summer. She was probably in her early thirties, I think now, though the girlish braids she wore, thrown casually over her shoulders, made her appear far younger. “The basics of meditation are simple,” she said. “You sit, you follow the breath. Keep your eyes open, but soft, resting gently on the floorboards in front of you. You are trying to gain control of your mind.” She spread her hands for a moment before letting them fall back to her knees. “Do not force your thoughts away: simply watch them as they arise, note them, then let them fall away. If you notice yourself drifting off, say to yourself thinking and come back to the breath. That’s all you need to do, for now.” She struck the singing bowl again.

  I relaxed a little. This was something I knew how to do. I assumed the posture my father had taught me. The girls around me groaned. The girls around me sighed. The girls around me fidgeted and tittered and poked one another behind raised palms. But the three in the far corner sat as straight as Dominique, as silent as my father, their palms resting gently on their knees, their eyes on the floorboards in front of them. Even then I could tell they knew not only what they were doing, but why. Even then I could tell that they believed in all of this. For this reason, I couldn’t pry my eyes from their upright spines, their parted lips. For this reason, I knew I had come to the right place.

  It was despite my mother’s protests that my father had taught me to meditate at all. I remember her standing in the doorway of his shrine room as he arranged me on the cushion, her arms crossed. I watched her, not without prejudice, but confident she wouldn’t enter unless invited. She wasn’t, she didn’t. But she didn’t leave, either. My father taught me to focus on my breath by imagining a little girl, my own age but in miniature, with silver, sparkling hair, who rode the air out of my body like it was a wild horse, her hands loose above her head, my out-breath squeezed between her thighs. I still imagine her sometimes, though meditation is harder now.

  My mother rolled her eyes at this instruction. She did not approve of religion, of this kind or any other. But meditation was not religion, my father explained. “Nor is it relaxation, despite what people think,” he said. “It is preparation.” He and I sat beside each other on our cushions, the thin stick of incense turning to ash on the shrine. My mother had finally gone from the doorway. It looked smaller without her. I noticed for the first time that the clean white paint on one side was chipped, revealing a grimy taupe underneath, and I felt a small plume of anger, as if she’d broken something that was mine.

  “Preparation for what?” I asked.

  “For waking up to the true nature of things.”

  But when I asked what the true nature of things was, he only smiled and held a finger to his lips.

  It wasn’t that I expected to find my father at the Center that summer, of course, or not literally: waiting for me on my bottom bunk, say, soft hands folded in his lap. Too much time had passed for that. There were too many places to go. He had never been loyal to a single meditation community, or temple, or school. Retreats, plural. (Realities, plural too, if we’re being honest here.) My father drifted. My father sampled. But he had come here, to the Levitation Center, and it was here that something had changed. His pattern, once so familiar, had been broken. You know what they say: once you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. If you’re smart, that is.

  So once the world he’d left twice over became unbearable, I followed him. I thought the Center itself might have the answer—an old diary, a forwarding address, that sort of thing. I’d seen the movies. But more than that: I thought that if I learned this place, I would also learn him—that if I did what he did, loved what he loved, believed what he believed, I too might be transformed. Into what exactly, I didn’t know. Something new and pink-skinned, fresh and holy: a girl worth coming back for.

  Maybe the Center had that power, maybe not. But I knew I couldn’t go home, not to her, not anymore, not unless I found a way to change everything.

  So I sat. I followed the breath. I tried to gain control of my mind. But a few minutes later I found myself staring through the picture window, watching a tall man with a black beard and a black topknot digging a hole in the lawn beside a wide path, a plant on the grass in front of him, exposed and unpotted, its roots a bouquet of bare legs, and thinking about the man’s strong digging arms, wet with sweat and reflecting the warm evening light, hairier and harder than my father’s, hairier and harder than any man’s I’d ever seen, then—thinking—thinking about thinking about the man’s strong digging arms, and then thinking about thinking about thinking about the strong digging arms, and then thinking about thinking about thinking—

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that two of the girls in the corner were watching the man through the window too: the smaller girl impassive, her head barely turned, the blonde leaning forward, biting down hard on one blood-red lip. The dark-haired girl was not looking at him. She hadn’t moved at all since the bowl had been struck.

  I turned back to the man, wondering who he was, and who he was to them, but he was gone. There was only a sunburst of loose soil on the close-cropped grass where he had knelt. I couldn’t even tell which plant was new.

  After what felt like hours, Dominique coaxed a long, final note from the bowl. I felt it settle in my stomach, as if swallowed. “Get some sleep,” she said as girls stomped past her. “Doing all this nothing is going to be hard work.”

  I was the last one to leave the shrine room, except for Dominique, who continued to sit, her eyes soft and unfocused. I bowed again in the doorway and followed the frantic sounds back to the dormitory. The dark-haired girl was nowhere to be seen, but her friends had claimed a bunk bed only two away from mine. The others seemed to give them a wide berth. Needless to say, this only made me curiouser.

  The blonde was tacking photographs of her friends to the green supports around her pillow, positioning one over another and then changing her mind, matching a red tack to a boy’s red sweater, then putting a yellow tack where the red one had been. The other girl had climbed to the bunk above and lay motionless on the thin mattress, her sneakers dangling. I was sitting still on my own bottom bunk, thinking about what I could say to them, how I might start, when a head swung down and introduced itself as Harriet.

  “I hope you don’t snore,” Harriet said. “Because I’ve been known to smother people in my sleep.” She grinned at what must have been my look of horror and reached out to pinch my cheek. How easy these things are for some; I still have not learned how to be so bold with strangers. This was Harriet’s third year at the Center, she told me. “It’s this or summer school. Math being much worse than meditation, in my opinion.” She rattled off the names of everyone else in the room, and I listened politely, though of course I only cared about two of them. The girl with the purple hair was named Janet and the one with the photos was Laurel. The other one, Harriet told me unprompted, maybe seeing the look on my face, was called Serena. None of them were to be approached.

  When I asked, as casually as I could, why not, Harriet yawned and flipped back up onto her bed. “You’ll wind up regretting it,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”

  For organizational purposes, we had been separated into four groups named after the four Tibetan dignities: Lions (traditional associations: joyfulness, freedom from doubt), Tigers (satisfaction, unconditional confidence), Garudas (freedom, boundlessness), and Dragons (power, ultimate wisdom). Our dormitory of twelve had been assigned the Garuda as our emblem, and once I saw its picture, I thought I understood. Lions, Tigers, and Dragons (oh my) were one thing, but the Garuda was the only one of the four that was truly a mon
ster, an enormous birdlike, humanlike thing with wings and arms and a beak, a fat belly and breasts and an unruly look on its face. (The word monster comes from the Latin root monere: “to warn.” Gruesome creatures are always, by etymological necessity, portents.) It seemed right that I had been put into this group, that I would spend the summer marching under the flag of this patched-together thing. My body felt to me the way the body of the Garuda looked: bulged and bulbous in all the wrong places, bones and fat in unholy organizations that seemed ready to tear or terrify.

  Of course, there was no point in thinking this way. Our group assignments were random, or perhaps alphabetical. Of course Laurel, who brushed her hair a hundred times each night, who had brought her silk sheets from home, who would wear that bright red lipstick every day that summer, right up to the horrible end, was no monster. (Though certainly, in retrospect, an unheeded warning.) It was only that I had a soft spot for metaphor, for the laying on of language, especially when it could be used against myself. I may not have entirely outgrown this habit.

  That first night, I couldn’t sleep. The wooziness brought on by the altitude was supposed to make sleep easier, or at least that’s what Dominique had told us. Our bodies craved rest to reorganize their expectations, to build new blood cells to combat the sudden oxygenlessness. But unfamiliar physical sensations have always driven me to distraction. It’s the reason I have never succeeded at doing drugs—other than the little pills that, these days, I need to get any kind of sleep at all. Now I can tell you that the equation for the physiology of altitude sickness is Vgas=A/TDk(P1−P2) and that really, we had it easy; we weren’t so far up. Still, my light-headedness kept me awake. I was overwhelmed by the suspicion that if I stopped thinking about my breath for a single moment, my body, with all its shoddily assembled parts—breasts, belly, beak—would simply forget to take in air and I would die.

  So I lay there, staring at the planks above my head, the shallow impression Harriet’s body made in the mattress, concentrating on continuing to breathe. I tested my limbs, raising first my arms and then my legs, slowly, quietly, inches above my mattress so no one would see. But everyone else was snoring, knocked out by the thinned air.

  Or nearly everyone else. After the lights had been out for hours, I heard a soft tap, fingertips on wood, and then another. Slowly, I turned my head. I could barely see Janet—she climbed down her ladder and landed silently on the floor. Laurel was already standing, holding her shoes. They crept to the dormitory door and, after a moment’s fumbling, let themselves out. I tried to watch them go, but I saw only the briefest bright slice of hallway light, and then its opposite, a bruise lingering on the backs of my eyelids. I forgot about my breath entirely as I wondered where they had gone, and why, and if they had been swallowed by the night, or if they were out there somewhere doing the swallowing. I waited up for them as long as I could, but I fell asleep before they returned.

  I dreamed of nothing, or of falling.

  2

  I am a person of binges. I have never understood the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Look: it’s irrational, impossible. See fig. 1: when I was a child, I became obsessed with horses. I know, I know, all little girls are obsessed with horses. But I lived for them. I gorged on them. I begged for them in any incarnation: films, toys, patterns, photographs, posters. Once, I cut the hair off a Barbie and superglued it to the base of my spine. I thrilled to wear my pony tail under my clothes, in secret, my parents knowing nothing, thinking me merely human, but it rubbed off after two days, leaving long blond doll hairs clotting in the corners of the house. My birthday came, and my parents, who were still together then, splurged on an afternoon of horseback riding lessons. When it was time to leave, they found that I had knotted my hair into the horse’s mane so elaborately that they had to cut me away from it with a pair of rusted barn shears. I still have the clump of matted girl-and-horse hair hidden in a drawer, though after all the times I put it in my mouth, I admit that it is somewhat the worse for wear.

  This is all just to say that in retrospect, I’m not so surprised by what happened that summer. Like everything, it was my own fault.

  In the morning, a wild-haired Harriet came crashing down from the bunk above me. She hit the floor in a bra and a pair of boxers, and for the first time I could see that she had a pair of luminous wings tattooed across the pale skin of her back; upon closer inspection, I found that the wings were made of tiny knives. Once she had collected herself, I followed her to the Garudas’ shared bathroom, which was outfitted with six showers; four toilets; three sinks; two tiny, too-high mirrors; and one huge claw-foot bathtub that looked like it had simply been dropped into the middle of the room, disrupting the tile pattern. It wasn’t clear to me what the original intent for this building had been. Surely not this. What builder could have imagined it? I kept looking up into the tilted rafters, trying to figure it out. Creamery? Granary? Forge? Hotel? Hospital? Harriet tripped into one of the stalls; she cursed as she peed. Clearly, those wings were merely decorative: the girl was clumsy. I might have laughed, but I too felt unsteady. I balanced against the doorframe as I went through. We were dizzy, drunk on plain air, high on height.

  The day unfolded in a pattern that would become familiar to me over the next weeks. Morning meditation was followed by breakfast—always, always oatmeal, though there was a rotating selection of fresh fruit to go with it—and some kind of assigned activity. That first day the Garudas had ikebana, the ancient art of contemplative flower arranging. It looked simple enough to slot the cut flowers into the barbed half-moon bases they gave us, but I couldn’t get my arrangements to look anything like our instructor’s perfect curls of stem and stamen. Walking around the room, she praised Laurel’s elaborate construction, and nodded at Janet’s minimalist restraint, and ignored me completely. She was stamen-like herself, our instructor, a thin woman whose limbs seemed connected to her body by only the barest bits of bone and skin. Though she was very old, and the flesh on her face was loose and frayed, I could tell by the way she moved that she had once been beautiful. I wondered if she was surprised when she looked into the mirror at night. I wondered what, exactly, she saw.

  At lunch, I sat with Harriet and her friend Nisha, a pot-obsessed Indian girl from Denver who told me that her adoptive parents had sent her to the Center instead of any other clean-her-up summer program because they thought she could learn about her “heritage.” Nisha was a Garuda too: the night before, I had noticed her stuffing fistfuls of wrinkled clothes from her rucksack directly into her cubby, transforming it into a swollen block of multicolored cotton before deciding she needed something from the center and pulling it all out again.

  Nisha and Harriet asked me polite questions about my hometown, my favorite films, my preferred flavors. I liked them. Harriet was even funny: a jumble of stories and auburn hair and loud laughter, she was the daughter of some kind of Oregonian lumber baron and kept getting arrested for destruction of property. “Wood is surprisingly delicate,” she told me in a goofy stage whisper that made Nisha snort. “And so are my neighbors’ feelings.” Nisha, on the other hand, was tense and jittery—I could see why she preferred to be high—but she was nice enough, despite her habit of laboriously describing old drug experiences. Apparently, there is nothing in the world quite as mind-blowing as driving over a mountain, totally stoned, as the sun comes up and “The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts 2 & 3” plays on the stereo (not Part 1, she was sure to make clear; Part 1 is just a pop song). Even back then, when I more or less believed her, I was bored by stories like these. But which version, Harriet wanted to know, which car, which mountain, which strain?

  After lunch, we had rota: our two hours of daily work around the Center. “Essentially, we pay through the nose for the privilege to come and do their chores,” Harriet said, raising her pinkie in the air as she took an elaborate slurp from her iced tea.

  “But despite the name, there is no actual rotation,” Nisha said.

  “You’ll notice t
hat they always make the really violent girls do the dirty work,” Harriet said. She stood and stretched her arms, looking around the room; the knives on her back seemed to bend around the straps of her tank top, like a warning. “I’m not sure it’s such a great strategy.”

  “Sometimes it kind of tires them out,” Nisha said. “Usually it just annoys them.”

  I followed them to the corkboard outside the dining hall where our assignments had been posted, handwritten in ink on thick creamy paper.

  “Office again,” Harriet groaned. “Kill me dead.”

  “Laundry room,” Nisha said, pointing at her own name. “Boring.” She looked at me. “What’d you get?”

  I pretended to scan for my name, though of course I had located it immediately. “Garden,” I said.

  “Garden?” Harriet said. She gripped my arm. “Since when is there rota in the garden?”

  The expression on her face alarmed me. “Does that count as dirty work?” I said. If Shastri Dominique thought I was violent, it had to mean that she knew what I had done. It had to mean that my mother had called, maybe that she was coming to get me.

  Nisha took a step back and looked me over, as if I’d been in disguise this whole time, and had finally revealed myself. “No,” she said. “It definitely does not.”

  The Center, Harriet and Nisha informed me, sourced much of its food from the large organic garden on the grounds. But the garden itself was not of particular interest to them. The appeal of the garden was the gardener. Luke lived at the Center year-round—though where exactly, neither of them knew. Not in the main building, where we slept, and where the rest of the staffers had their beds. Not in a tent. He seemed to sleep nowhere. Everywhere was also an option. He wasn’t the only man at the Center that summer—there were a few other male staff members, and some visiting monks who came and went on their own schedules—but for the girls, he may as well have been. Strong digging arms, etc.