by Emily Temple
“For fun?” Laurel said. She stuck out her bottom lip. “Fun is something pretty girls like us are supposed to have at summer camp.”
“This is in no way summer camp,” Serena said.
“Would we call us pretty?” said Janet. “As a group, I mean.”
“You have to admit there’s archery,” I said.
“Zen archery,” said Serena.
“Arts and crafts, hiking, yoga,” Janet said. I smiled at her.
“You know who can really levitate,” Laurel said. “Planes. Planes!” She was drawing out her words again: Plaaaaaanes. She tried to stand and tipped over instead. She scrabbled around on her hands and knees, as if looking for something.
“How did you get so drunk?” Serena said. I knew how—I’d seen her drink almost half the bottle. But Serena had drunk almost as much, and she seemed only enhanced, herself and more. Laurel had flipped onto her back, legs and arms splayed.
“Maybe we should do it another night,” said Janet.
“How do they get up there?” Laurel said. “No, actually. Who thought of that? I mean, listen, I know who. I may be extremely attractive but I’m not stupid, Janet. But I mean, what was the step after the propeller?”
Serena made a disgusted sound. “Janet,” she said evenly, “take her back down, will you? It’s pointless for you anyway.” She gestured at Janet’s full cup.
Janet stood and pulled Laurel to her feet. Serena reached up and squeezed Janet’s hand. They exchanged a look that I couldn’t quite parse.
“Janet, Janet, Janet,” Laurel sang. “Let’s make out, okay? Just this once.”
“Behave, you,” Janet said, with obvious affection. She pulled her toward the path. Neither of them looked back at us before they disappeared.
Serena held up her hand until the sound of Laurel’s voice had dissolved.
“Finally,” she said. She pulled out her little wooden comb, the one I’d seen her use that first night, and scraped her thumb along its tines. This sound, she had told me, was the only one that ever truly gave her the Feeling. Even other, similar combs didn’t do the trick. This one had been her mother’s. I closed my eyes, but the hollow music of the comb sounded far away, overwhelmed by the crackling of the forest.
“It’s no use,” she said after a few minutes. “I don’t feel it anymore.” I opened my eyes. She had pulled out her silver cigarette box. “I’m tipsy, of course, but I don’t feel it, just normal drunk.” She held out the box. I shook my head. She put one in her mouth and snapped the lid closed. I didn’t ask her what it was.
There was a long silence. I realized that I had never been alone with her before. I looked down at my hands, and they seemed to me completely foreign, like someone else’s hands, like they had no relation to me whatsoever. I curled and uncurled my fingers.
“Come lie down,” she said. “I want to try something.” She moved backward and I obeyed. The rock was cold against my spine. She took my head into her lap and rested two fingers on each of my temples.
“Have you ever had sex?” she asked. So she had been wondering this too. I hesitated, too long. “I didn’t think so,” she said. “Don’t worry, it means I can trust you.” She began to rub my temples in small, slow circles. “You’re lying on a beach,” she said. “A beautiful, white sand beach. With palm trees. All of a sudden, four men come up to you, wearing deep blue robes that cover their faces and hands and shoulders, everything.”
Her fingers bored into my temples like awls.
“You don’t move. Then they slit open your arm.” Suddenly, Serena slid her finger from my shoulder to my wrist, hard and fast enough that I released a little breath. “And they start filling it with black sand.” She drummed her fingers along the length of my arm. “More sand, more, more,” she said. She switched to the other arm and opened and filled that one before running her finger lengthwise across my collarbone. “Pounds and pounds of it.” She slid one perfect nail between my breasts and I had to bite my own tongue to keep from crying out. “They pour and pour until all the blood and muscles in your body are replaced with black sand. The men say: You’re a beautiful girl, Olivia. That’s why we have to do this. You say nothing, because your mouth is filled with black sand.”
Then she rolled up my shirt and cut my stomach open in a cross, slice, slice, before filling it with her fingertips. Her hair brushed over my body as she leaned to fill my legs, her fingers finding my hip points under my cotton shorts and tracing downward, then upward again. By the time she reached my head, I was void of anything but the drumming of her fingertips and the tingling of my skin and the vague image of the men in blue, pouring burlap sack after burlap sack of coarse black crystals into my body.
“Now that you’re full,” she said, “they stitch you back up.” She ran her nails over all the open wounds as if closing a zipper, and then skimmed the pads of her fingers across the same places as a salve. “They take you out into their boat. You’re so heavy that the boat hangs low in the glassy water. There are no boats anywhere else on the water, or anywhere else in the world. They take you to the middle of the ocean, and then they drop you overboard.” She was rubbing my temples again. Her voice seemed deeper than before. “And then you go down, down, down, down, down. You go down forever. Your body rests at the bottom of the ocean, in the dark.” She pressed her hand against my forehead, hard. Then she leaned her forearms into my chest, and my stomach, legs, feet, pressing down. “It’s heavy down there, so heavy. There’s nothing but the dark dark dark, and the sand, and the heaviness.” She got up and lay on top of me, nestled her forehead against my own. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Her pubic bone bore into mine.
“But one day, you wake up, and you’re back on the beach.” She rolled off. “And you open your eyes.”
I opened my eyes.
“The waters have pushed you back, pushed you up from the bottom at last. You try to move, but you can’t. Because all of your insides have been replaced by black sand and seawater.” And for a moment, it was true. My organs were ossified, my limbs pinned. I tried to raise my arms and my body resisted, only for a beat, just enough for doubt, enough to set my heart, which had been so still a moment before, to a quick double beat. Then my fingers creaked to life and I sat up, feeling as stiff as if I had been asleep for centuries, hemmed in by brambles and dust. The trees swam around my head. Serena looked at me seriously. “That’s how it is,” she said. “But lightness is the antidote.”
She reached again for her cigarettes; this time, I accepted one. “Like this,” she said. I copied the way she held her hand, her mouth. I took a drag and erupted into coughs. She offered me no encouragement. She was looking out into the woods, as if she’d heard something moving there.
“When did you start smoking?” I asked when my throat had cleared.
“I’ve always smoked. I smoked in the womb.”
“Your poor mother,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. She took another drag and looked me over. “My poor mother was obsessed with levitation, you know.”
“Really?”
“She was devout, you might say. A devotee. My father indulged her. We used to come here together, the three of us, every year. My mother was a follower of this one particular teacher, who taught that the practices used for cultivating levitation also happened to be the fastest path to enlightenment. He taught that the two are uniquely connected. If you can achieve one, you’ll achieve the other. He’s part of why this place is so famous. He said that if you can learn to become light, truly learn, then you will also become enlightened.” She snapped her fingers and laughed, but it sounded hollow, hungry. “It’s right there in the word. And then you’ll be able to do anything. The world will be utterly open to you.” She stabbed out her cigarette, half-smoked, and lit another. “Every year, my mother came to study with him. Luke was there, too, at the end. They must have received the same teachings, only Luke was a quicker study, I guess. I remember how much she wanted it, how hard she tried. She was alw
ays with him, always trying to learn, get extra lessons, an overachiever, like my Janet. But anyway, that teacher died. And the next year, my mother killed herself. She hanged herself. Here, at the Center.”
My mind went blank—no, blank and racing, like a television tuned to static. Does that even happen anymore? Does anyone else think about the fact that static is anything but static?
Serena leaned back onto the ground. “It’s sort of a Brutalist solution to levitation, but she got what she wanted, I guess. Her teacher always said that the last things she would see before her enlightenment were her own feet lifted above the earth.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, too late and too lame.
“It was a long time ago,” she said. “It gets longer all the time. I wasn’t even the one to find her, though I do have this image in my mind: blue ankles, knocking together. They’re probably not even hers, though. They’re probably from TV. Someone else’s ankles are all I have of her.” She looked down at her lap. “That and all these dresses, which aren’t exactly my style. But otherwise they’d just be in a box somewhere.” The one she wore that night was a saturated ocher, like a late-September leaf.
“They suit you,” I said.
“They don’t,” she said.
I wondered what she wore the rest of the year. I found that I couldn’t imagine her in winter, or in school. “The very worst part,” she said after a few moments, “is what my father said. I wasn’t supposed to hear, of course. He was on the phone. He thought I was in my room. She was a sucker, that’s what he said. It was her own stupidity that killed her.” She blew out a stream of smoke.
“What an asshole,” I said, finding my voice again. But secretly, I thought: Serena’s father and my mother would almost certainly get along. I thought: Maybe they could meet. I thought: Maybe they could meet and fall in love over their devotion to nothing, their refusal to be suckers, and then they could get married after a whirlwind romance, and Serena could move into my house, no, my room, my bed, and be mine forever, tangled in my sheets, blowing smoke at the ceiling. Unless of course my mother rejected him, and wouldn’t that be just like her, to ruin this for me.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s gone too. I live with my grandmother now, in this old defunct creamery she inherited and won’t leave. She fixed up one of the milk barrels with a little bed and a light, and that’s where I sleep.”
“You’re joking,” I said. “You sleep in a barrel?”
“I dream of milk,” she said. “My grandmother says one day I’ll grow too much in my sleep and be trapped in my room forever. High levels of calcium in the air, or something. But I’ll be gone long before that happens.” She laid a hand on my leg. “I never told my mother about seeing Luke, you know,” she said. “I hoarded it. Sometimes I think that if she had known levitation was possible even without her teacher, or that Luke could teach her too, she wouldn’t have done it. Sometimes I think it’s my fault.”
“No,” I said.
“It was the same summer,” she said. “I saw him. She died.” I couldn’t find anything to say to that. She shifted a little on the rock. “But I want you to know up front that I would personally never kill myself,” she said. “I’m telling you that now. No matter what. I wouldn’t want to have to start everything over.”
“Okay,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “Good,” she said. “Tell me your secret now.”
“What secret?” I said, but she only looked at me and waited, and so in the end I did tell her: about my missing father, at least, and about the year of nothing, but not about my mother, and what I had done to her, and not about Luke.
Unlike Luke, Serena did not touch me. Unlike Dominique, she looked thoughtful. “No daddies allowed at Buddhist camp,” she said.
“I know.”
“It’s part of the charm, really.”
I said nothing. There was something feral about her, I decided, underneath that still-lake exterior.
“What’s his name?” she said after a minute, and I told her. “I’ll make some inquiries,” she said. “Dominique is full of shit. I’m sure I can find out where he’s gone.” She stroked my cheek. “Just wait until he finds out you can levitate,” she said. “That’s obviously how you’re going to win him back. That’ll show him what kind of girl he abandoned.” She looked so fierce then, so sure, and I believed her, and it was like something breaking open. Yes, of course: if I learned this, my father would realize he’d made a mistake. It would be the ultimate proof of my worth, of my belonging to him and not to my mother: I would surpass him at his own obsession. I imagined myself floating in his living room, and his gasp of awe, his rush to wrap me in his arms.
“Don’t tell the others,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Those two wouldn’t understand anyway. They both think they know the world so well. Despite the fact that they’ve reached totally opposite conclusions.” She was scrutinizing the ground. As I watched, she collected the ends of our cigarettes, held them loosely in her left hand. She never left anything behind. I noticed again the soft red strings that circled her wrists.
“Protection cords,” she told me, when I asked. “Whenever an advanced teacher comes to the Center, they make a few of them. They tie a knot, and say a mantra into it.”
“They’re pretty,” I said.
“They serve a purpose,” she said. “There’s a difference.”
Here, this may help. Six teachers on the nature of enlightenment:
Dōgen: “Like the moon reflected on the water.”
Chögyam Trungpa: “Ego’s ultimate disappointment.”
Osho: “You are, but the mind is utterly empty.”
Krishnamurti: “A state of negation.”
Bodhidharma: “Lots of space, nothing holy.”
Suzuki Roshi: “What do you want to know for? You may not like it.”
When we separated that night, Serena to return to her tent, me to go down the mountain, she squeezed my hand. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I think I’ve been waiting for you.” The sky was a scrub of stars, the kind of wide-open sky that only hangs above wilderness. But it didn’t make me feel small. I felt enormous. I felt that every star in that whole vast nothingness had pushed aside the drapes, opened her bedroom door, and turned her wide white face to look right at me.
I didn’t pull her comb out of my pocket until I was safely back in the dormitory. I hadn’t stolen it, I reasoned, I had simply picked it up from the blanket when she wasn’t looking. Borrowed, that was the word. I would give it back, if she asked. A few long black hairs were wound around the wooden tines. I crawled under the covers and held it to my heart like a talisman.
6
Often, when I was a child, I would sneak into my mother’s studio to commune with the Mournful Fatties. No part of their bodies, of course, was left to the ecstatic imagination. My mother found her ecstasy in overflow, not obscuration. This is an essential thing to understand about her.
My favorite Fatty was an old one, whom I couldn’t remember my mother making; she had always just been there. She was the ugliest of the bunch, her face like an imploding planet, her large breasts hanging almost to her crotch, her hands gnarled and monstrous, her kneecaps misaligned. I named her Beth, and when I was very young I would sit on the garage floor between those massive feet and tell her stories, bring her tiny treasures I’d found. Shells, beads, Jolly Rancher wrappers. Beth liked that sort of thing. Later, I tucked one of my favorite plastic ponies—the palomino, dearly beloved—between two rolls of Beth’s cold cracked flesh, a gift. Beth was my first refuge when my parents would argue, my mother’s voice rising like steam into my bedroom, my father’s an imperceptible murmur, or when I was home alone and afraid, seeing eyes in all the corners. I liked to rub Beth’s flabby butt; you can probably still see the small circle I wore down with my rubbing. I liked to see how much of my face I could fit into her massive hand. But when I began to become aware of my body and the ways it sho
uld and should not look, I stopped going into the garage. I became afraid of the Fatties, as if their grotesquerie might somehow be contagious. I thought that if I loved Beth, there was some chance I would become her. This is a logical fallacy to which I have willingly subscribed for many years.
Does beauty, in the end, hurt us? my mother used to ask, idly, as she smoothed the contours of a bulbous face, or packed a massive clay hump onto a shoulder or groin. I admit: until that summer, I never considered the answer.
Studies have shown that the act of looking at something attractive—a person, a product, some honest-to-goodness nature—triggers an involuntary series of synapse firings in the motor cerebellum. As it turns out, this is the exact same neural sequence that causes us to reach out a hand. Beauty, then, literally moves us. We all know this: beauty can easily force a hand. But will we ever shake the pressing delusion, as Tolstoy put it, that beauty is the same as goodness? After all, how often does goodness truly force a hand? More likely it stays it, and even then, barely, and even then, only for a time.
Here’s a story I told Luke, some hot day in the garden: once, my father took me with him on one of his trips. I don’t remember the drive or the monastery or the exact purpose of the ceremony we attended, but I do remember that it too was high up in the mountains, maybe even higher than the Center. My mother was out of town, or I’d never have been invited along. I wasn’t supposed to be choosing, after all. My unformed brain, etc. “Our secret,” my father said, and I bloomed.
There were hundreds of people in attendance that day: faded colors, loose pants, faces turned up to an enormous statue of a meditating Buddha. The very last step in the ceremony was to paint in the eyes of the Buddha, and here the attendees were invited to participate. Two monks on two ladders held two paintbrushes in front of the Buddha’s two eyes, and hundreds of silk ribbons, in red and gold, were attached to the handle of each brush. The ends of the ribbons were distributed through the crowd, to connect us to the painter, the brush, the eye, the Buddha, the infinite. A boy with brown eyes and dreadlocks gave me a ribbon, and so I held it, but as the artists lifted their brushes and the attendees raised their arms, I began to feel unsteady. My vision popped and sparkled, and then began to fade, edges first. I tugged on my ribbon, which had turned wet and dark in my palm.