The Lightness

by Emily Temple

  “What now?” Laurel said. She was leaning on Janet’s shoulder.

  “Now we step off,” Serena said. She looked unstable, listing slightly to one side. For the first time, there was something uneasy about her. Now I wonder how many of her own rules she had broken.

  “It’s a long way down,” Janet said.

  “Exactly,” Serena said.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” I said.

  “Then we’ll die,” Janet said.

  “Luke only thinks he’s the most powerful person here,” Serena said, almost to herself. She raised her arms above her head. “He thinks he’s the chosen one, that he can do anything he wants. But he’s wrong. We are the ones. And this is going to transform us,” she said. “This is going to turn us into beautiful, wrathful, whole new creatures.”

  Nobody moved. She lowered her arms.

  “Laurel,” she said, her voice soft now. “After this, you won’t have to let anyone touch you. Unless you want it. Imagine what they’ll say. Or don’t, because you won’t have to listen.” Serena reached out her hand. “Come on, dearest,” she said. “Don’t you know I love you?”

  Laurel only hesitated for a moment before she took Serena’s hand and stepped forward to join her on the rock lip. I could see her trembling from where I stood.

  “Janet,” Serena said. “You need this too.”

  “Do I?” Janet said. She sounded like she really wanted to know.

  “I know you didn’t break your arm falling off a bicycle. Since when have you ever fallen off a bicycle? Please. You’re strong, but they’re men now.”

  I looked at Janet, but she was staring straight ahead.

  “Consider the possibilities,” Serena said.

  Janet didn’t move.

  “Janet,” Laurel said. “I need you to come.” And it was only for this, for Laurel, that Janet finally stepped forward. Laurel reached for her and held her tightly to her side.

  Then Serena turned and looked at me. “What about you?” she said. She was relaxed now. She already knew she had won. “Your dear old daddy will be so proud.”

  Thrall is an almost perfect word. Old Norse for “slave.” Shades of Dracula, and that persistent, tiresome Anglo-Saxon bleat about evil and sex being inextricable. In thrall. The word is like the sound a sudden change makes, or like a spell resolving. Say it out loud and listen: thrall. That guttural glissando. Like all real magic words, it’s a little hard to get out. Mechanically, I mean. The tongue, asked to roll two ways at once, revolts. Don’t worry; she gets there in the end.

  What I mean to say is: no one ever tells you how good it feels.

  What I mean to say is: I stepped toward the edge.

  “Imagine yourself standing on a ledge above a canyon,” Serena recited. “Imagine yourself stepping off. You don’t fall, you hang there. The earth’s energy holds you up. Imagine yourself as a feather, floating upward. Imagine yourself as a bird, hollow-boned and small. Imagine the distance between yourself and the ground growing, growing, growing.” Serena reached out her hand, and I took it, slotting in beside her, my toes toward the edge. I couldn’t see the bottom.

  Her hand was cold and dry in mine. The wind had begun to blow. It was unusual for summer, wind like that. I thought of the sand twister from the first day, and wondered if it was spinning now in the empty driveway. If a twister spins on a mountain, and no one is there to see it, etc. A few strands of Serena’s hair flew into my face. She began to lead us through the tummo visualization we’d been doing with Luke. If they were surprised by this, Janet and Laurel did not react. They both had their eyes closed. I tried to conjure the ball of light whirling in my pelvis, but the wind distracted me. Serena distracted me. She was more like herself than I was like anybody. She could lead three girls up a mountain and make them fly. I knew then that if I stepped off this cliff, at this moment, my body would become perfect and holy at last. All my charmed particles would light up and rise.

  “We are what we think,” Serena said. “Are we ready?” She seemed to be faceless, there on the ledge, her features darkened by the shadow of the drop.

  “Yes,” I said quietly. This is what it meant, belief. I saw Laurel nod. We were four figureheads on the prow of a ship, all holding hands, all facing outward, our chests raised, our hair whipping and writhing in the freakish wind.

  Unbidden, I saw an image of our bodies smashed down at the bottom of the crevasse, limbs all mixed together, reddening the sharp rocks. I shuddered. I wondered vaguely if the wind was a warning, if the mountain was trying to stop us the only way it knew how.

  “Don’t look down,” Serena said, reading my mind again.

  Om tare tuttare ture soha, I thought, but it brought me no release from the fear that had begun to clutch at my throat.

  “What if,” Laurel started, but Serena only pulled her closer.

  “Death comes without warning,” Serena said. “This body will be a corpse.” She spat into the abyss. “But not today.” She laughed. “We didn’t need Luke after all.”

  Om tare tuttare ture soha. Om tare tuttare ture soha. Om tare tuttare ture soha.

  I couldn’t get the image of our broken bodies out of my head. I thought of my father, who had said something so similar once, before wrapping me in his arms. Death comes without warning. But this isn’t what he had meant. Om tare tuttare ture soha. Where was Tara, to pull me back from the edge? To save me from fear of fear? Still trapped in the wall in my mother’s house, I realized with a jolt. I’d forgotten about her after all.

  “On the count of three,” Serena said. “One. Two.”

  Serena paused, and I felt in that brief moment that Tara had come despite my negligence—my fear was gone. I was ready to jump. I might have even done it. But our imminent deaths were interrupted by a loud crack that echoed across the valley. Even in the dark, I knew it was the willow, its gnarled trunk forced prostrate, bending to the wind past the point its body would allow, forced over the edge, falling to the cold rocks below, as Harriet had predicted it would.

  Something else had broken too. Janet scrambled backward, away from us, onto the grass. “This is ridiculous,” she said, but the look on her face was one of longing, as if someone she loved had just left her forever.

  “It’s only the wind,” Serena said. “You can’t be afraid, Janet. Not you.”

  Janet ignored her. “Laurel,” she said. “Do you want to die right now?”

  Laurel kept looking out into the air. She seemed like she didn’t quite know the answer to that question.

  “I’m surprised at you, Janet,” Serena said, pulling Laurel closer, rethreading her fingers through mine.

  At some point in her story, every true heroine realizes that she is fundamentally unlike other people. She may be the chosen one (we’re going to choose ourselves) or have trained for many years, or be merely damaged, or merely strange. She may have had an accident involving radioactive material or nuclear waste. She may have natural abilities. She may be molded by circumstance. But I have had to realize that no matter how much I desire to be different, I am not. That I am, finally, just like everyone else. I cannot be the heroine, even of my own story. (Is that what this is?) I could tell you that it was me, and not Janet, who pulled away first. But it wasn’t. I could tell you that I was still ready to leap, even then, to face the fall. But I wasn’t. You know this. My body seeks safety every time. My body only follows.

  I unclasped my hand from Serena’s. If I never saw my father again, fine. I would live. I crawled backward and sat down heavily on the rock. “I don’t need to levitate,” I said. “I’m okay with the idea of not levitating.” I felt completely sober.

  “And here I thought you really believed,” Serena said. I had been thinking the same thing, which is what hurt the most.

  “Come on, Serena,” Janet said. “This isn’t you.”

  “Is it not?” Serena said, as if amused. She was still looking at me. “I know what you did, Olivia,” she said. “Even after I told you what m
ight happen.”

  Janet stiffened at my side. “What’s she talking about?” she said.

  “It was an accident,” I said. How long had she known? Was that why she had brought us here, to the edge of the world? Was it me she wanted to throw off?

  “He told me all about it, you know,” Serena said. But she didn’t look sad, saying this, or angry. She looked hungry. “He was trying to make me jealous. But it didn’t work—at least, not the way he wanted.” She smiled, her hair whipping out behind her.

  No, it wasn’t revenge. Now I think she just needed more, as she always did: more sensation, more power, more meaning. She wasn’t satisfied with tummo. She wasn’t satisfied with Luke. She was tired of waiting, of wanting, of opening her eyes and finding herself still on the ground. She had to change something, anything, even if the change was a violent one. Especially then. I’m not saying I don’t understand.

  “Come to us, Laurel,” Janet called. “Come back.”

  “Okay, Laurel,” Serena said. “You and me.”

  Laurel looked back at Janet, and then at me, and then at Serena.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “Laurel,” Serena said. “Don’t you love me?”

  “Yes,” Laurel said. She had started to cry. “But let’s go down. Please let’s go down.”

  “No,” Serena said. “We’re going up.” Then she grabbed Laurel by the shoulders and pushed her hard, out into the empty air. Laurel screamed, but at the last moment, Serena seized her by the back of her shirt. The wind caught in Serena’s hair, and it streamed outward across the void, mixing with Laurel’s.

  Janet lunged, and I held on to her wrist.

  “You know what worked, that first time we fainted?” Serena said, her voice cold. “Spilling a little blood.” Laurel was crying, her tears dripping into the emptiness, her arms held tight to her body. Serena was holding on with one hand. I was shocked at her strength.

  Then, all of a sudden, she laughed, and this time it sounded sweet, so sweet, bluebells and coffee cake. “Oh, you babies,” she said. “I’m only kidding.” She hauled Laurel back up onto solid ground, wrapped her arms around her and kissed her wet cheek, and then pushed her toward us. “You’re all so gullible,” Serena said, as Janet stroked Laurel’s head. She looked right into my eyes. “Come on. I was never going to let you jump.” I would think of the look on her face in this moment later, as the police scoured the Center grounds, looking for bodies: it was open, girlish. There was nothing to distrust here. There was nothing to question. She looked utterly, completely believable.

  But for once in my life, I didn’t believe her.

  Because yes: beauty, in the end, it hurts us.

  13

  For the record, here are a few ways in which levitation can be reliably achieved:

  There’s the classic Asrah trick, in which the magician drapes a sheet over a prone assistant, whom he then appears to levitate and, after a moment, instantly disappear. This relies on a precise plastic mold of the assistant, which is snuck under the sheet, then raised up by wires, while the real girl disappears through a trap door. Trap doors, which may seem like the opposite of levitation, are often essential to its practice.

  On the other hand, the Balducci method is essentially advanced tiptoeing.

  David Copperfield, I’m sorry to tell you—for all his grand old speeches about the age-old human desire for flight—is also invariably raised up by wires, though they are very sophisticated, as wires go.

  There’s always mirrors, smoke.

  Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void is a beautiful hoax, an early example of photo-manipulation. But despite the lie, Klein’s heart was in the right place: in the air above Fontenay-aux-Roses. “We shall thus become aerial men,” he wrote before his jump. “We shall know the forces that pull us upwards to the heavens, to space, to what is both nowhere and everywhere. The terrestrial force of attraction thus mastered, we shall literally escape into a complete physical and spiritual freedom!”

  The image in question is now stored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, labeled as an “artistic action,” as if one could keep an action in a drawer. Obviously not: at least one artist tried to copy Klein’s feat by throwing himself casually out a second-floor window, expecting to fly. In some accounts, he breaks a leg. In others, he escapes unharmed.

  Scientific attempts have been rather more convincing. An artist in Barcelona recently developed a system that uses electromagnetic feedback and coupled resonant wireless power transfer to suspend a lit bulb between two blocks. The bulb will last for years, he says, floating there, and use half the energy of a regular incandescent fixture.

  There are ways to do it with magnets. That much should be obvious to anyone. Magnetic quantum forces are currently being researched for use in nanomachines, which could, sometime soon, have tiny levitating parts whirring along within them.

  My next-door neighbors have a trampoline, and their children spend hours on it, bouncing and bouncing, never satisfied. They too want to renounce the earth. They too feel the edges of something when they’re at the apex of a bounce, something that, if they could only get a little higher, a little longer, they know would change them.

  Look, any Buddhist would be quick to tell you: levitation isn’t the point. But it fascinates.

  After that night on the ledge, Serena removed herself from our lives. She stopped coming to meet us. We stopped going to her tent. Whole days went by without her. But just when I’d start to think that she’d evaporated entirely, she would appear in the shrine room for a moment or an afternoon. When she did, she did not try to speak to us. She meditated with intent. She nodded to Dominique, who blinked back. She looked far away, too tangled up in her own thoughts to even notice we were there.

  This was worse, of course, than her not being there at all.

  It’s hard to explain exactly how my feelings about her had shifted. If violence is primarily authoritarian, violence deferred should be a triumph for the intended victim. Why then did I feel so disappointed? I can liken it only to the moment when, during a climactic scene in a film you’re watching in the theater—perhaps it’s a horror, perhaps a romance—you notice, for an instant, the texture of the screen itself. The result is a kind of dissociation, stemming from the realization that the drama in which you’ve been so invested is merely a projection of light onto a flat, imperfect canvas. Which, of course, you knew all along. You understand what movies are. You’re not an idiot. But thereafter you can’t focus on the shimmering images because you keep returning to the worn spot in the center of your vision, the unseemly sight of that old gray screen, stripped of all its charming artifice.

  Well, I wanted to go back to the shimmering world. For once, I had no interest in the man behind the curtain.

  Another kind of levitation: in Nepal, a little girl is chosen when she’s three years old, and recognized by some as the Kumari, the embodiment of Durga, goddess of destruction and blood sacrifice. They say that she is a god, and also that she is a girl. They say she can see into the past and future. They say that if the Kumari smiles at you, it’s an invitation to heaven, and that you will die within the day. The Kumari has her every wish attended to. Her feet must not touch the ground, so she’s carried everywhere, covered in jewels and the finest fabrics. She is held in the air and worshipped.

  But when the Kumari reaches puberty, she becomes mortal again. The Nepalese believe that the energy of the goddess goes out with the girl’s first blood. So they put her down—but by then, her legs are unsteady. She has no social skills to speak of. She may not know her family. She’s mortal, but worse than mortal. She is an infant alien jammed into the newly bleeding body of a twelve-year-old girl.

  There are other legends about the Kumari: that if you try to deflower one, even years after her descent into the mortal realm, snakes will slither from between her legs and eat your penis whole. The legend goes that because of this legend, no man who knows a Kumari’s past will have her, and many must turn to pro
stitution to survive. But in all truth, there are some ex-goddesses who live quite normal lives. One of them opened a bank. A bank! I find this comforting.

  Without Serena as our center of gravity, my connection to Janet and Laurel began to fray. Laurel gave me up without a second glance; she forgot me so thoroughly she didn’t even think to avoid me. I remember her bumping into me once in the dining hall, jabbing her tray into my side. She was carrying a bowl of strawberries and two mugs of tea. Janet was waiting for her. “Oh,” she said, her face blank, her eyes wide and watery. “Sorry.” The smell of alcohol was overpowering, and when I looked into her mug, she pulled it away.

  Janet was different, but Janet, really, was Laurel’s. I knew that. Though the two of them seemed uneasy together too. Their bickering had turned sullen. Their silences had legs, fingernails.

  I began to hang around Harriet and Nisha, trying to catch up on their inside jokes, to remind them that they’d once been my friends, or almost. They mostly ignored me too. Girls who try to elevate themselves and fail are never much loved by those they crash-land among. With no reason not to, I began attending every activity again, and I could see that these weeks at the Center had been good for most of the other girls: they seemed relaxed, happy. All that mindfulness therapy, contemplative art, meditation—the girls who had really transformed were the girls who hadn’t tried to force it.

  I started eating again. Oatmeal and blueberries, kale and black beans. I felt heavier than I ever had in my life.

  There was no more tummo practice. No more nights attempting levitation. There was no more Serena coming by the garden unannounced, or at least not when I was there to see it. There was only me, moving dirt around, grinding my molars into paste, saying nothing, my hairline burning as I pruned. There was only Luke, asking concerned questions, but letting more and more time pass between them.