The Lightness

by Emily Temple

  “I think without the dharma, I’d be a monster,” he said once. I suppose I should have asked him what he meant by this, but I couldn’t focus. I was sure he was no monster. How could he be? (Somewhere in the ether, Tolstoy rolls his eyes.) When he spread the mulch, he did it so tenderly, with his fingers, as if tucking each flower into bed. I still couldn’t identify that familiar smell. Soil and chocolate. Cinnamon and fern. Pomegranate baseball honeycomb leaf. Who knows what anything smells like? Things only smell like feelings.

  The first time Serena came to the garden, I had no warning. She simply appeared outside the fence one afternoon while I was pinching the mums. I heard a cleared throat, and there she was, on the other side of the fence, in a long goldenrod shift I could see her legs through. She raised a hand in greeting.

  “Don’t touch the fence,” Luke said.

  “I know,” Serena said. “It’s electric.” Her voice sounded different to me: higher, maybe. Sweeter. Luke turned back to what he’d been doing, washing some clothes and sheets by hand in a big blue basin. I tried to catch Serena’s eye, but she was focused on the back of his head.

  “Luke,” she said. “We need your help.”

  He didn’t turn around. “Is that so?” he said. His voice was stern, but I could see part of his face: he was grinning.

  “We’re getting close,” she said. “But we need a teacher.”

  “I think I heard something about this,” he said.

  Serena caught my eye. “As expected,” she said.

  “You of all people should know how foolish this is,” he said.

  “You of all people should know I’m not foolish,” she said. “Come to my tent tonight.”

  He finally looked at her, the smile gone. “You know I can’t do that,” he said.

  Serena took a few steps forward, until her face was inches from the wire. Luke came to meet her. She raised her hand again, and without hesitation, pressed it full and flat against the electric fence. Nothing happened. They stood there for what seemed like minutes, looking at each other, their bodies almost touching through the wires. I thought of Houdini’s wife at the Hippodrome, passing him the key to his restraints with a passionate kiss. It had been hidden beneath her tongue: a perfect place for a little key. Kisses, as you know, are often keys. They have been known to unlock sleeping damsels. They are adept at breaking curses. By their very nature they open mouths, and also arms, and often legs. Of course, kisses can also be locks: sealed with a kiss, kiss the bride, the kiss of death, kiss the gunner’s daughter.

  But it seems important to say, here, that Sleeping Beauty was never really woken by a kiss. In the original version of the story, published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile, after SB (here named Talia) pricks her finger and falls into stillness, her father, thinking her dead, leaves her body to rot, splayed uncovered on a velvet bier in one of his country mansions. It is there that another king on a hunting trip eventually stumbles across her. For some reason, he understands that she is asleep, not dead. (For the disparity in the two kings’ comprehension there is no explanation.) He tries to wake this beautiful maiden, calling out to her, but she will not wake. So he rapes her, and then he leaves.

  (The translation I have read puts it this way: “Crying aloud, he beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love. Leaving her on the bed, he returned to his own kingdom, where, in the pressing business of his realm, he for a time thought no more about this incident.”)

  Nine months later, Talia delivers twins (apparently a couple of fairies appear to cut the cord and, I don’t know, tip ice chips into her unconscious mouth) but does not wake until her daughter, rooting around for a nipple, finds the pink tip of her mother’s lifeless finger and, voila, sucks out the offending flax splinter. Later, the rapist king shows up for another round, and finds a little family, all three awake. On the one hand, he is overjoyed.

  On the other hand, he is married. And soon, because she is no fool, nor a woman asleep, the queen discovers all. She sends her best servant to fetch her husband’s misbegotten children, and orders them killed and cooked and served to him on silver platters. Then she summons Talia to the castle and tries to throw her in a large fire. What betrayed woman would wish for less? But alas, the cook takes pity on the children and serves lamb instead; the king catches his wife fireside and immolates her instead, and then he begins to plan a fancy wedding for himself and Talia. All the principals are saved! If being saved means getting married to your rapist.

  The story ends with this proverb: Those whom fortune favors / Find good luck even in their sleep.

  Again, if good luck means, etc.

  When Serena finally looked over at me again, she was smiling. “Electric,” she said, “my ass.”

  Then she turned on her heel, and it was only once she was out of sight that Luke moved away from the fence. “Finish up, will you,” he said, to me, I suppose. Then he went into the garden shed and closed the door and didn’t come out again, even when I called his name. So I finished washing his shirts and drop cloths, and before I left, I hung them all to dry on the fence I now knew couldn’t hurt me, ignoring the clothesline, feeling both stupid and proud.

  But look. Have I explained him properly? Do you understand it yet? That piled hair, like a mystic. The way his t-shirts pulled against his ropy muscles, but not too tightly, not like he wanted you to look, only when he moved the right way. The little round sunglasses he sometimes wore, like John Lennon, and how you could see yourself in them, only a smoothed version of yourself, and how easy it was to believe that was the way he saw you, too. How silent he was, some days. How you had to earn his attention. How sometimes he gave it when you weren’t expecting anything. How he would never laugh at something unless he found it funny, would not entertain conversations that did not interest him. How I would try topic after topic, each one greeted with polite disinterest, a holy man’s serenity, until I struck upon something he fancied. Then he’d turn to look at me, delighted—that radiant smile, that rare laugh. His face would change. “Well,” he would say. “Tell me more about that.”

  Now I see it all for what it was, of course. Or, mostly.

  As for her, I won’t even try to explain. Like the Feeling, you’ll never understand unless you’ve felt it.

  That night began like any other—tap, tap, shoes, tongues, the dark, the path—except that when we reached the rock palm, it was deserted. Someone had obviously been there, though, and had dragged an old futon onto the smooth rock. There was a large rip in the center of the upholstery, and through the wound I could see a sliver of the futon’s insides: sad wet foam, the color of burnt sugar. There was a lantern hanging on a branch, swinging slightly, emitting a feeble squeak.

  “This seems normal,” said Janet.

  “I hope we’re not supposed to sit on this thing,” said Laurel.

  I could see Janet gearing up to push her down onto it, but then we heard footsteps, and Serena appeared, coming from the direction of the tents.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’ve brought us something.” She paused for effect, and then beckoned toward the darkness, and after a few seconds Luke came up the path behind her, beaming around at us all. I’d rarely seen him outside the garden before; he looked wrong here, in our place. He was too tall. His head was much too big.

  “How did you get him to come?” I asked. I felt strangely betrayed, though I couldn’t have explained exactly how.

  She thought about it for a second. “I went back,” she said, and both of them smiled.

  “For the record,” he said, “I don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

  “Then why are you here?” Janet said. She had taken a few steps away from them. Her hands were in fists at her sides.

  “Serena told me what she was planning, and I thought it would be safer to have someone here to keep an eye on things. Since there doesn’t seem to be a way of dissuading her.”


  “We don’t need supervision,” Janet said.

  Serena walked over to her, wrapped her arms around her neck, and whispered something in her ear. Janet’s face didn’t change, but her hands relaxed slightly.

  We sat in a circle, and Luke began to lead us through the bird visualization he had taught me in the garden. Sweat gathered in the small of my back. I couldn’t look at him. “Imagine yourself as a feather, floating upward,” he said.

  “Imagine yourself as a bird, hollow-boned and small,” Serena said, to show him that she already knew. Luke did not look at me. He only smiled at her again.

  As soon as it was over, Serena began giving us instructions. Janet positioned herself at the edge of the futon and squatted down with her head between her legs. She breathed deeply as Laurel counted to a nervous twenty. Then Janet straightened, put her thumb in her mouth, and Serena pushed, hard, on her solar plexus, and Janet crumpled as if dead onto the futon. I held back a gasp at the whites of her eyes. But after only a moment or two, she shook her head and blinked up at us.

  “How long was I out?” she asked.

  “Just a second,” Laurel said.

  “Olivia, you go next,” Serena said. I stepped into my place in front of the futon, and finally looked over at Luke, who was leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets, as if he were watching the most mundane performance: a lawn being mowed, an animal being born.

  “Did you know,” Luke said, “in Ireland they call this game the American Dream.”

  There is a moment right before you lose consciousness, when you’re still aware of the world around you, but feel a profound dissociation from it, as though you’re merely a witness to a space you have no part in. Then comes the rush of euphoria and heartbeat, the lightening, the blackening. I had done this before, of course. On a mountain very much like this one. But back then I hadn’t understood what lightness meant. Maybe this was what my father had been looking for, I thought as I fell, maybe this was what I had missed.

  Now I know that the American Dream can leave you in a coma or even kill you. But of course, we knew that back then too. It wouldn’t have been any fun otherwise.

  When I opened my eyes, hours or minutes or years later, I saw, peering over me, the enormous head of the Buddha. But no, it was only my father, smiling, his hair long again, his eyes somehow dark. Then of course it was Serena pulling me upward, and I shook my head clear. I kept hold of her hand for a few extra moments, to make sure she was no imposter. I didn’t look at Luke, though I could feel him there, like a heat flare, burning.

  Next it was Laurel’s turn. Her eyes rolling, her sigh like cut flowers as she fell.

  “I was dead longer,” she said when she opened her eyes. “Wasn’t I? I was dead longer than both of you.” We nodded. She had been unconscious for nearly half a minute. It meant nothing to me, but I saw Janet lick her lips. Even at this she hated to lose.

  Serena went last. She squatted down, hyperventilated, and stood, blowing on her thumb. Janet pushed her in the right place, but Serena only took a step back.

  She frowned, wiped her thumb on her dress, and then looked at it, as if there were some possibility it was faulty.

  “Did you do it wrong?” Janet asked.

  “No,” Serena said.

  They tried again: nothing.

  “Maybe it just doesn’t work for you,” Janet said. She looked over at Luke for the first time all night. I couldn’t read her expression.

  Laurel, who had dropped to the ground in exhaustion, her hair and legs spread, drew a lazy circle in the fallen pine needles with a finger. “It wouldn’t mean anything,” she said. “If you couldn’t do it.”

  Janet cleared her throat.

  “Come here, Olivia,” Serena said. I stood in front of her and she took my hands. “You’re going to help me.” She placed my hands around her neck and reached around to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. She stroked my cheek with a finger. Then she lowered her hand again to touch my thumbs where they now rested against her windpipe, like an old woman absentmindedly fingering a brooch. I was old enough then, perhaps, to think of Plath: If the moon smiled, she would resemble you / You leave the same impression / Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

  If I wasn’t, I’m thinking of her now.

  “You’re going to choke me,” she said. I tried to move my hands away, but she gripped my wrists. Then she lifted one arm in front of my eyes to remind me of her countless protection cords, which I thought looked in danger of disintegrating at any moment. “I’ll be safe,” she said. “Just press down until I start to fall.”

  “Girls,” said Luke, but he didn’t move to stop us. He’d taken his hands out of his pockets and was watching us with interest.

  “I can’t,” I said. So she waited, and we stood like that, staring at each other, her skin sweating slightly beneath my fingertips, until after a while I did begin to choke her, a little at first, my thumbs exploring the ridges of her throat, and then harder, squeezing, thinking of that swirling, sexy, plump little goldfish, its eyelashes not unlike Serena’s, so long and so dark, begging to be touched, to be handled with rough, unyielding hands, to be undone, unmade, until suddenly she was falling backward away from me.

  She missed the futon. Her body jerked and twisted and she hit her head hard on the rock and then I saw it: a thin gyre of bright red blood that spooled upward from her temple and hung suspended and shining in the air above her face, hung there for a moment, like a smoke ring, before dissolving back down into the blackness.

  In Hindu tantric tradition, the goddess Chinnamasta is represented as a naked, full-breasted sixteen-year-old girl, her body the color of the hibiscus flower, which is also the color of blood. Traditionally, she stands above a couple in coitus, and has just a moment ago sliced off her own head. She holds her still-dripping scimitar in one hand and her own severed head in the other. Her long black hair hangs loose. She is inclined toward lust. From her neck erupt three shooting fountains of blood, two of which are caught in the mouths of her two female attendants, and the last of which makes its arc into the mouth of her own severed head. All three mouths suck greedily at the blood of the goddess. All three bodies wear garlands of skulls around their necks. A snake often slips among the garlands. Chinnamasta is revered for her sexual power, her fury, her self-sacrifice, and for her embodied reminder that life, death, and sex are inseparable, forever wound (wound: the word’s multiple meanings do not escape me in this moment). She is sometimes interpreted as being a symbol of sexual restraint and sometimes interpreted as a symbol of sexual energy. She represents death as well as immortality, self-destruction as well as self-renewal. She is a reminder that life feeds on death. She is a reminder that death requires life. She is not widely worshipped. She is considered to be too dangerous to approach, even in supplication.

  The three of us stood, staring at Serena crumpled on the ground. Her face was pale. I felt a black cavern opening up underneath me. My limbs felt heavy and immobile, filled with black sand. You’re a beautiful girl, Olivia. I looked at Luke, and he too was frozen. Serena had been right. This had something to do with him, with his presence here, his body filling the space that until tonight had been only ours. Janet and Laurel were deviations in the darkness somewhere in my peripheral vision. We stood. We stared.

  Finally, one of us—it was Laurel—screamed.

  We lurched forward as one body, arms outstretched. But Luke got there first. He moved Serena onto the futon, cradled her head in his large hands, and I felt a pang wholly unrelated to her safety. He brushed her hair out of her face and she opened her eyes.

  “That was incredible,” she said. She sat up, pushing Luke away and rubbing her head. I looked for the hole that had let out so much blood and saw only a little cut, the tiniest sliver, near her hairline. She pressed on it, closing her eyes.

  “I felt it. I was so close,” she said. She arched her back, rolling her head on her neck. The toes on her left foot spread apart. The toes o
n her right foot stayed pressed together.

  “Did you see it?” I said.

  I could feel my heart in my throat, as if it too had levitated, up out of my chest cavity, straining to sacrifice itself against my teeth. Laurel reached out and took my hand, her eyes fixed on Serena’s temple. I laced my fingers with hers, a little miracle in that.

  “You saw it?” Janet whispered.

  “What?” Serena said. “Saw what?”

  “Your blood,” Laurel said quietly. “Just a little bit of blood.”

  “Blood from your head,” Janet said.

  “What?” Serena said. She was looking at me, and so I had to answer.

  “It floated,” I told her. And then she wasn’t looking at me anymore. Then she only had eyes for Luke.

  7

  The four of us played the fainting game every night for a week, but we couldn’t re-create the results we’d had with Luke. Even when Serena cut open her own hand with a knife before we started, she only ruined her dress. We fell and fell and fell: that was all. We tried new things, whatever we could dredge up, hoping something would catch: I thought the most promising of these was yogic flying, sworn levitation tactic of Transcendental Meditators, though Serena called this practice “idiot hopping” and so it was. Luke refused to return to the rock palm, no matter how much I begged him during rota, no matter how many times Serena came to stand outside the fence. It was too dangerous, he said. He should never have come at all. He should never have encouraged it. In the garden, I settled into long silences. Luke told me I needed more sleep, and fed me berries out of his palm, but he wouldn’t talk about what had happened. He wouldn’t even admit that anything had.