by Emily Temple
The Center sent us home a week early. There was no ceremony. The board sprang for the changed plane tickets. The staff hired vans to get rid of us quicker. The monks watched us go without a word. Coming down from the mountain in a clean white van full of crying teenage girls, I nearly choked on all the extra air rushing into my lungs. I knew I was supposed to feel stronger, more powerful with all that new, thick air inside of me. I knew I was supposed to feel as if I could run forever without stopping. But instead I felt weighed down, pinned to my seat, some old wound in the vinyl scratching at my thigh. Laurel was at the front of the van. Through the spaces in the rows, I could see her head against the window, smacking it hard with every bump. In the seat directly behind her, Harriet was making out extravagantly with a Tiger who I thought was called Penelope. Janet wasn’t even in our van. She had gone on ahead. In the end we hadn’t even said goodbye. We drove past an old church, moss and bricks. A flashing blue cross was stuffed into its crumbling roof, neon tubes bent into a symbol of salvation instead of eat or open or xxx. And why not? All are, finally, offering the same thing. There was a squadron of tall nuns circling in the courtyard, but when I looked again, their figures resolved into demure blue umbrellas, folded against the wind. The van swerved and squealed, but I felt nothing in my stomach. The summer had cured me of one affliction, at least.
Saint Teresa, on the moment after: “Here comes the pain of returning to this life; here it is the wings of the soul grew, to enable it to fly so high: the weak feathers are fallen off.”
Poor Saint Teresa. On the day she died—young, only sixty-seven—the proximate cause likely being uterine cancer, she collapsed after communion and proceeded to hemorrhage from the vagina for fourteen hours. The gathered witnesses declared she died in ecstasy; her doctors interpreted her vaginal bleeding as evidence of the inevitable consummation of her long relationship with God. They were overjoyed, the lot of them, to see that God was taking her virginity at last: look at all this blood to prove it, the moment of the truly unbearable; put a veil on her, a new bride, her blush seeping away. This was everything she wanted, they told one another. Praise the Lord.
Later, when I was in college, a boy would go missing in the middle of winter. He’d be missing for months, while the search parties tracked parallel lines through flat sheets of virgin snow, while the campus erupted in histrionics, in candlelit vigils, in collections. Missing while his ashen parents moved across the country to our small college town with their other (their only) son, enrolled him in grade school, rented an apartment, posted flyers, waited and waited and waited and waited. Someone would find the boy in the spring, at the end of a long river, a long winter, long dead. He’d drunk too much, he’d wandered, he’d slipped. A freshman. How cold I must have seemed to the people I knew then. I did not engage in the vigils. I did not help in the search. I did not hold a candle. Why, when this boy’s death could only be an echo?
But it wasn’t the familiarity that chilled me, not really. It was my own relief. It was my own ecstatic, overwhelming relief that this time, at least, it had nothing to do with me.
Even later, my mother would ask me: can you imagine what it is like to have your husband renounce passion, aggression, and ignorance? To renounce desire? “For a while, after he left, I tried to embody them all,” she told me. “I let myself indulge in every base instinct. I only wanted to feel human again.” We were sitting in a restaurant. I’d been drinking, she hadn’t. “I’m sorry for hitting you so much,” she said. “It was what I needed at the time.”
You may think I only saw her jump—that I have stretched the moment in my memory, pulled out her trajectory like taffy, so that she seems to float, to wait for me to see her fully before she goes down. You may think that I made her catch my eye, wave goodbye, my own personal Berryman sailing down into the Mississippi River mud. You may, if you are a remarkably attentive reader, think about the height of that overhang, which I only mentioned once, and whether anyone could have distinguished it, in the darkness, from air. You may simply think the whole thing was a hallucination, or perhaps a dream. Folie à trois. Sometimes I would agree with you. But at night, when I close my eyes, I think she did it.
Now I keep a Post-it with the definition of levitation above my paper-strewn desk: stuck there indefinitely with glue, an uncertain magic (polyvinyl acetate emulsions or, barbarically, animal collagen) all of its own.
Levitation (n.) to rise by virtue of lightness, from the Latin levitas (lightness itself).
This definition, like the pressure cooker, dates back to the 1670s. It was only some two hundred years later that we began using the word to refer to the mystical ability of humans to lift themselves or one another off the ground. Now, levitation is practiced by charlatans with staffs on Prague street corners and young YouTube mountebanks and scientists with mice and magnets, and perhaps (perhaps, perhaps), also in some secret places by the genuine, by the truly light. No, you say, you’re thinking. No. No. After everything, no. You’re probably right.
Not so long ago, on a night when I was sure that no amount of bristling or therapy or little white pills would ever shake that summer from me, I tried to give myself the Feeling. I was in the back seat of a car—whose, I can’t remember, but the leather seats were gray and tattered and I was alone. I pulled the seat belt toward my face and ran my fingernails along it: scritch scritch scritch. I felt nothing. Desperate, I made long scratches, then short, staccato ones, taps. I tensed my fingers, making the sound as small as possible. Then I felt it, what I hadn’t felt in so long: that tingle walking its way up my spine. I focused both on it and away from it; the Feeling had always been something like a Magic Eye image, only legible in the middle distance. The tingling grew stronger as I scratched faster, but as soon as it hit the base of my skull, it exploded into blinding pain, as though something hot and pointed had been driven into that spot. I let go of the seat belt. It hit the car door with a cold thwack, and I curled into myself again.
Sometimes I think: Well, at least he didn’t get me.
Sometimes I think: In my heart of hearts, I wish he had.
Sometimes I think: He did, of course. Look around, girl.
There is a map of the Center, creased and left over, pinned up next to the definition of levitation. I study it often, though it hasn’t offered me anything new in years. I trace my finger from our dormitory to the garden, from Luke’s cabin to Serena’s tent, from the rock palm to the place where they found him, trying to square the paths, to find something new in the pattern. It looks like a tangram, only without the puzzle pieces. And there’s no solving a puzzle without the pieces. It will only ever be empty, unfillable space.
Does this constant tracing and retracing make me less the witness, or more? I mean, I have to do something, even after all this time.
Alone at night, I slide my hand between my legs and think about the black sand. Even on those rare occasions when there’s someone next to me, on top of me, inside of me, the black sand is what I want. To be pressed down, down, down, to where there is no light. To where I have no control, to where my limbs are pinned, to where I can be blamed for nothing. Serena’s slow voice, her fingertips on my neck. I think about those too. I still keep her comb in my bedside drawer, though all remnants of her hair have long dissolved.
They never found Serena, or her body. The summer program at the Center was discontinued. What she told me about her father was a lie. But it was true in its own way. He might as well have been dead, gone, because he sent her to the place that had killed her mother every summer, paid to keep her quiet and contained, so he could be alone with his new wife, a wife who didn’t like this sullen, beautiful daughter, no, not at all. That old slog, indeed. It was a punishment. In my darkest moments, I think it was also an invitation. Serena didn’t want to be there at the Center, chasing her mother’s ghost into the trees. She wanted to stay with her father. He didn’t want to be bothered. She wanted to be loved, kept, important. He wanted to forget her, to live his new lif
e, to pretend to be childless, careless, free.
Well, he will not forget her now.
As for her mother: I found out much later that she was desperately in love with that famous teacher, the one who swore levitation was possible for those who followed his instructions. I heard that she snuck into his tent every night until the end. He was old, yes, but holy, which changes things. She believed in something. It was an open secret; everyone at the Center knew. Then suddenly he was gone, and her husband despised her. I see how it could have happened. Serena was too young then; she couldn’t be expected to understand. Would you blame her if she managed to confuse things?
Laurel told me that Janet moved out of her father’s apartment. She left her brothers there. She showed a judge her medical records; she became officially emancipated. Harriet told me she’d heard that she ended up going to Yale, but no one knew for sure. It might have been the University of Chicago. This was back when Harriet and I emailed once in a while, before she died in a car accident. It was the other driver’s fault, said Nisha, but I couldn’t help thinking of the burn on Harriet’s chin, the way she tumbled out of bed. I didn’t go to the funeral. I heard she was cremated. I heard her mother flew across the country to scatter her ashes at the Center. I never realized how much Harriet loved it there.
The word cremate comes to us quite directly from the Latin cremare, “to burn,” but I’ve always been a little swayed by the overlay of cream I hear in English. Cream-ated. A body creamed. A body reduced to that silky white-gray ash that slides sweetly between your fingers.
In recent years, companies have gotten fairly creative about cremation. Now, your survivors can shoot your ashes into space. They can make your ashes into jewelry. They can have your ashes pressed into a record, so anyone who spins you can hear—what? That’s the question, always. What is left? And can we make it mean more if we arrange it this way, treat it in this fashion, bury it, burn it, embalm it, smear it across our faces, work it into our hair, ingest it bit by bit by bone-flecked bit?
Luke was cremated too, of course. I have no idea who scattered his ashes, or where.
I still hear from Laurel sometimes. It seems like she’s doing better this year. She sent me a picture of her daughter. She’s beautiful.
It’s a miracle I didn’t overdose, she wrote in her last message. I confess that at first, I didn’t know what she meant. It took me some time to realize. But of course she had her own reasons for being out of bed at night, for being raccoon-eyed in the mornings. I learned the names just for her: oxy and Valium and E and fentanyl, which is a patch you can wear on your body, or the best lollipop you’ve ever had, developed for the battlefield and used on the front lines of our many wars, foreign and domestic.
My mother received a major grant and some degree of notoriety in the art world for her exhibition of the destroyed Fatties, each skeletal rebar sculpture presented in front of a blown-up photograph of the figure in its previous form. The Fatties, I realized only at the end, were perfect in every way. Beautiful, enormous women. I hadn’t seen it before. The power in weight, in taking up space. Beth, the sole survivor, stood in the middle of the room in all her flabby glory. My mother invited me to the opening, and I went. It was nice. She complimented my dress. She squeezed my hand. She still filled the room, but then, there, she was meant to. She introduced me to everyone, and everyone told us how alike we looked. How lovely we were. How lucky.
The truth is, I always loved her the hardest. I just didn’t know, for a long time, what love felt like. Children may worship the parent that isn’t there, but they usually wind up loving the one that is. Love may be uglier than worship, but at least it has bones, fingernails, skin. At least it can reach back to touch you. At least it braids your hair, even if it tears at your scalp in the process. At least it can forgive you, no matter what you’ve done.
I didn’t find my father for a long time. When I did, he was living with a woman named Clarissa in a one-bedroom apartment in Modesto, California. Yes, that old slog. The stucco exterior of the building had been painted a soft seafoam green, but inside all the hallways were pink as lungs. When he opened the door and saw me standing there, he put a hand over his mouth. The blueness above the hand was thin and faded. The hand was thin and faded too. Elsewhere, he’d grown slightly fat. He’d let his hair grow out, but it didn’t look the way it had in the pictures from his youth. He was exactly the man I remembered. I wrapped my arms around him anyway, while he whispered something too quiet for me to hear, even with my head so close. I let Clarissa pour me a beer. She had light brown hair that was a little frizzy.
My father said: It wasn’t you I was trying to leave.
My father said: Didn’t you get the letter I left you?
My father said: After a while it seemed too late.
My father said: Your hands are like the Buddha’s.
We sat. He didn’t ask for my forgiveness. I didn’t have the heart to bring up the Center. I knew by then that no amount of shared experience would allow me access to my father. No amount of listening, no amount of trying, no amount of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, no amount of knowing. Facts do not work. Loving what someone else loves does not work. Closeness cannot be manufactured. It knits itself from unseen fibers, and we can crochet the ends with approximations of our favorite flowers, but we can’t choose the color, or the kind of wool. It knits itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, I didn’t have to choose between my parents, because I couldn’t have either of them, not really. I could only be this cobbled-together thing, this Garuda girl, this monster. I could only be my mother’s daughter and my father’s daughter both. I could let Serena levitate. I could let her jump. I could let her live. I could let her die. It didn’t matter what I chose. It wasn’t that I believed in everything, or that I believed in nothing. It was that I had realized the limits. I think my father was a good person. I think he was trying. I don’t think it matters. When I left, I forgot to give him my telephone number. He didn’t ask for it, I mean. I shook Clarissa’s hand. She had long fingernails, but I don’t mean to imply she was trashy. I hugged my father a second time. He kissed his hand. He held it out to me. It stayed there, hovering in the air between us, its meaning still uncertain, as I climbed into my car and drove away.
And maybe that would have been the end at last, but yesterday, I saw Serena on the street. Though she was some distance away, I knew her instantly. I recognized the way she turned her head to look at things, the way the other pedestrians parted to let her pass. She wore a long black dress. Her hair was tied up. I’d never seen it that way before. It looked pretty on her. I crossed the street. I quickened my pace. She stepped sideways to avoid a small trash lake created by a dip in the concrete, the recent rain. You can learn a lot by watching people when they think they are alone, but in this city, everyone assumes a certain amount of observance. She gave nothing away. I followed her for eleven blocks, until she went into a small grocery and emerged with a fresh clutch of cut flowers. I followed her for three more, until she stopped to check her reflection in a large store window. She grimaced into the glass, smoothed her dress down her thighs. She was older, of course, like I am, but her face had lost none of its coercive quality. I wondered who had died, and if she had loved them.
“Excuse me,” I said. I had looked for her, of course. In the years following that summer, when everyone seemed to be findable online, I looked for her. There was nothing, not even a news story about the Center’s summer program, or about her disappearance, or about any of the schools and mental hospitals she’d supposedly attended or burned to the ground. I couldn’t find her parents’ names anywhere either. No address, no phone numbers. It was as though she had never existed.
She turned. “Yes?” she said. And was I, after all, sure that she had? I wasn’t sure of much anymore. Janet and Laurel had seen what I had seen. There was a time we would have all sworn to it. There was a time we would have sworn to a lot of things. But now, so many years later, would it be the same? Does it e
ven matter who saw what? Does it even matter what happened, and to whom?
“What are you doing here?” I said. It mattered, it mattered. I had dreamed about her for years. She looked the same now as she did in my dreams. Exactly like her old self; nothing like her.
Something passed over her face. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said. I saw that she was holding her purse tight against her body. The flower heads pointed at the pavement. Peonies.
“Those are lovely,” I said.
She stared down at them as if she’d forgotten what they were. “They serve a purpose,” she said. “There’s a difference.”
I took a step toward her. “Serena,” I said.
“That’s not my name,” she said. She hid the flowers behind her back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My mistake.”
And so I let her go.
Author’s Note
I have quoted, referenced, and borrowed liberally in this novel. Many instances are indicated directly in the text; some few others I will mention here, and the rest will be left to the reader to notice, Google, or ignore.
The Tolstoy line referenced in passing is from “The Kreutzer Sonata,” as translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude: “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”