The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  “Do you know what a pussy is?” he asked. (I blushed as I reported this, both to my father and again, years later, to Luke, but it felt like an important part of the story.)

  “Yes,” I said. I was thirteen, after all. Back then I knew everything.

  “It’s this,” he said, and pressed two fingers between my legs, right there on the sidewalk, in the middle of the day. I took a step backward.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Nice bike,” he said, shifting his attention easily, my pussy and my ten-speed being of about equal interest to him. He asked if he could ride it around the block.

  “Just once?” I said. Just once, he assured me. My heart was beating fast. I handed it over and he hopped on and pedaled away. Shocking twist: he did not come back. I waited for a long time, and eventually stomped home to tell my mother that I had been pushed, yes, pushed off my bike, through absolutely no fault or stupidity of my own.

  “You lied to the police?” my father asked at the end.

  “Yes,” I said, miserably. I waited; he didn’t say anything, and after a minute or two he eased himself up off the railing and went into the house. I was sure I would hear him lock the door, because I was a criminal now, a deviant to be barred from all decent homes, but he left it open. I could hear him walking around behind those thin transportable walls. Soon he came back outside and sat beside me. He pressed a small jade figurine into my hand.

  “I was going to wait and give this to you on your birthday,” he said. “But I think you should have it now.”

  It was a young woman, naked from the waist up, her bare breasts covered by a thoughtfully arranged string of beads. She had one leg tucked in, and the other was beginning to wander off her lotus-ringed platform. She wore an elaborate crown, and the tiny look on her tiny face was one of serenity.

  (Here, I caught myself, embarrassed again. The description of the jade breasts was somewhat less important to the story. But Luke was smiling. “Tara,” he said.)

  “This is Tara,” my father said. “One of her major forms, at least. Green Tara.”

  I rubbed my thumb over her face. I did not think of my mother.

  “Tara is a great bodhisattva, a benevolent protector goddess, and the personal favorite deity of many Tibetans. Buddhist stories are full of Tara springing into action to save her devotees from certain death, snatching them away from the edge at the last moment, pulling their feet from the fire. She is the ultimate compassionate warrior. But the most important thing she protects you from is fear of fear. When you call on Tara, you’re asking to be freed of the delusions that keep you from seeing the world as it is. You can recite Tara’s mantra whenever you need her: om tare tuttare ture soha.”

  I repeated it until I had it memorized, and two days later, when I returned to my mother’s house, I hid the figurine inside the secret wall compartment. I wanted to put it on the dresser in my bedroom, with all of my other tiny things. It might even have gotten lost there, I realize now, amid the bracelets and matchbooks and the many delicate glass animals that had once belonged to the grandmother I had never met, the one who had brought my mother here. I might have forgotten all about her, the Green Tara. But I was afraid that my mother would see her, and so I hid her, and because I hid her, I looked at her all the time.

  “Not many American girls get gifts of Green Tara,” Luke said.

  “My father is a Buddhist,” I said. I hesitated. Shastri Dominique had dismissed me. Luke wouldn’t. I knew he wouldn’t, from the way he was looking at me. There are some things you can tell no matter how old you are. “He was here last year. John Ellis? About as tall as you. Blond hair, blue eyes?” I could feel my heart beating in my ankles.

  He made the face people always make when remembering on cue: squinting upward as if his experiences were being projected on an invisible screen two feet above his head. As if that helps. “Rings a bell,” he said at last. “He came for a dathün?”

  “I don’t know.” I was already memorizing it. Dathün.

  “It’s a month of silent meditation. Lots of people stick around for a while after. If you only do a week, it’s torture. But if you do the full month, it’s like you can’t get enough.”

  “Do you know where he went?” I said. “After the after, I mean.”

  He laughed. “That’s not the sort of question I ask people,” he said.

  “He didn’t come home,” I said. My eyelids burned. I looked at the sky to keep from crying; the clouds that day were fat and fluffy, smug as aftermaths.

  For a minute, nothing happened. One cloud moved slowly toward another. Then I felt Luke pull me against his chest, wrap his heavy arms around me. I shuddered, sure for one wild instant that I was going to be electrocuted by his touch—but that was the fence, not his body. I knew the difference. “It’s all right,” he said. He hugged me tight. “It’s not your fault.” I could feel his heart beating. I could feel my neck beginning to sweat. “What can I do?” he said.

  I closed my eyes and saw Serena. Her fingers in my hair, her raised eyebrow, her crowded grin. I didn’t think about the blurred logic of her plan, or what it could mean. I thought only that I could get something for her, something that the other girls couldn’t. He never lets anyone past the fence.

  I took a deep breath and felt my body expand against his. “I know you can levitate,” I said into his shoulder. “Can you teach me?”

  Did his heart begin to beat a little faster, or was I imagining it? “Levitation is not something you should be trying to learn,” he said after a moment. “Who have you been talking to?”

  “Please,” I said. I turned my face up toward his. Maybe Serena wouldn’t have to promise him anything after all. Maybe he would tell me now, and I could give her exactly what she wanted, and she would be grateful, so grateful she would never leave me.

  He hesitated, looking down at me. He sighed. “Close your eyes,” he said at last. I closed them, and he held me a little tighter. “Imagine yourself as a feather, floating upward,” he said. I could not imagine myself as anything. I could only feel the dampness of his shirt against my cheek, two soft things. “Imagine yourself as a bird, hollow-boned and small.”

  I tried. He adjusted his arms a little. One hand slipped onto the bare skin of my back, between my shirt and shorts. He left it there, and after a few seconds, began to move his thumb up and down, almost imperceptibly, against my skin. It felt like a little animal there, curious and rough and rubbing.

  “Imagine the distance between yourself and the ground growing, growing, growing. Imagine you are lightness itself, nothing but lightness and air.” His thumb kept moving against my skin. What did it mean? I wished he would spread his palm against my back, run it up my spine, clutch at my vertebrae, scream into my face. Something.

  But instead, he stepped away from me. “You can open,” he said.

  “What was that?” I said. I scanned his face for some clue as to what had just happened. Was it possible I had imagined the thumb? I knew he had held on to me for much too long. My skin was buzzing, as if he had some electricity in him after all.

  “It’s a visualization some practitioners have found useful,” he said. “Let’s call it the first step toward what you seek.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Good girl,” he said. “There’s the smile I was looking for.” I hadn’t realized I was smiling. “Rota’s over,” I said.

  That evening, the Garudas and Dragons had what the staffers called Transcendent Yogic Exploration. This was essentially a yoga class, led by Dominique in a large meeting room whose chief feature was an enormous slab of rock pushing in from the mountain like an inserted tongue. To my surprise, right before the class began, Serena slipped into the room. She didn’t come straight for us, but instead made a lazy lap, looking around, dragging her fingers along the stippled rock, like Niobe reformed. She seemed to make the other girls nervous. The Dragons were whispering furiously among themselves. Look, look: the virgin witch gypsy werewolf slut
in the flesh. Don’t startle it, no sudden movements, you don’t know what might happen.

  “What’s their problem?” I asked Janet, to cover the fact that Serena’s appearance had unsettled me too. The hug, the thumb: what would Serena think, and had I done something to invite it, and either way had it left any signs?

  “Some people find Serena unsettling,” Janet said, with approval.

  “She is a bit strange.”

  “These girls just aren’t used to encountering anyone with purpose,” she said. I thought this was not at all what made Serena strange, but didn’t say so. Anyway, by then she had sat down beside us, and was looking up at Dominique.

  In her brown leggings and tight black tank top, Dominique seemed halfway a tree already; the gods would have made short work of her. That day, her hair was collected into one thick braid, which hung straight and shiny down her back, like a coal-black spine. When she hopped up into a handstand at the front of the room, the braid flopped to the side, and we saw one wide-open eye tattooed at the base of her hairline. We all stopped looking at the eye when she raised one arm out to the side and then rose to the fingertips of the other, her only connection to the earth the barest bits of skin and nail.

  “We are working here to become more spacious,” she said, her voice thick from all the blood running into her head. “In both mind and body. The more spacious you can become, the lighter you will feel.”

  The back of my neck prickled. I felt Serena’s hand on my arm, and when I looked up, I saw that her other hand was on Laurel’s knee, and that Laurel and Janet were holding hands. We let go only when Dominique began to lead us through the steps that might, someday, allow us to do what she had done. We kicked and struggled against the wall, lifting our legs, slamming and sweating, thrusting and slipping, trying to become spacious. Trying to become light.

  I want to say this: there was so much brazen touching between us that summer. You may have noticed it: Serena’s fingers on my scalp, Laurel’s elbows digging into Janet’s tight shoulders, all of us lifting, pulling, pushing into one another’s hair and skin and muscles. It wasn’t only our small circle either. I had noticed that Harriet loved to pick up Nisha, literally pick her up as though she were a child, and carry her around, Nisha always performing a protest but grinning sleepily. Samantha and Paola often slept in the same bed, twinned and curled like ears, though this might have been something else, a different kind of need fulfilled. Even the staff members thought nothing of touching us: remember the way Magda took my hand, the way Luke tugged on my fingertips. I had no experience being touched in that way, not so casually, with such easy affection. At first, I found it disconcerting, invasive even—but soon I grew to crave it.

  Now I see violence in all that touching. Now I see it as a prophecy. Mine, mine, mine, we said. Your body is a toy, a prop, a proof. Give it here, let me put my hands on it. Let me scratch deep into that first layer, catch flesh underneath my fingernails. The change I make will be irrevocable. The change I make will be a declaration. My spit and sweat will mark you mine. There’s nothing casual about it.

  This doesn’t mean I crave it any less.

  Yes, even now.

  That night, we didn’t meet, for the Feeling or otherwise. I lay in bed, whispering the bird visualization to myself, over and over again, so I would remember it. (Another man, another mantra.) I had learned something; I told myself that was all that had happened. Before I fell asleep, I thought I heard Janet slip out into the darkness on her own. By the morning, I had forgotten, and it wasn’t until the next night, when we were hiking up to the rock palm together, that I even thought to wonder where she had gone.

  But I soon stopped wondering, or even thinking about Janet, because as we hiked, Laurel entertained us with a running stream of what she called Important Information about the other girls at the Center. Harriet, she told us, had failed the eighth grade; she was older than us. Paola’s mother was in jail. Samantha had been in love with her cousin for years, and kept a photo of him under her pillow. We could look for ourselves if we didn’t believe her, it might as well be a picture of Samantha herself with short hair, so egotistical. Margaret was once so desperate for sex that she let her dog lick her between the legs. “And no one knows anything about Jamie,” Laurel said, “except that apparently she has a phobia of changing in front of other people. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s covered in scales.”

  When I asked her how she knew all of this, it was Janet who answered. “Laurel knows everything about everybody,” she said. “She’s like an idiot savant for secrets.”

  “I simply happen to have an excellent memory,” Laurel said. “Unlike some people whose names I could mention.” She tilted her head. “Janet’s basically a goldfish.”

  “Why would I bother to remember someone’s sordid past or complex series of illicit lovers or gross thing with their dog if I know you’re going to do it for me?”

  “What I’m hearing right now is that you can’t live without me,” Laurel said.

  “It’s really much too early in the summer for suicide pacts,” Janet said.

  I didn’t think so, I wanted to tell them. I was ready for a pact. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to give myself away.

  On the rock palm, Serena produced a small bottle of whiskey and four plastic cups. I never knew where she got any of this stuff—the cups, the whiskey, the Jordan almonds—but needless to say, it only enhanced her magic. “We are what we think,” she said again, standing above us where we sat on the blanket, rickety chairs eschewed. (The chairs were only for daytime, I’d been told. Another one of their rules, equal parts arbitrary and strict. Theme and ritual and symbol.)

  “We are what we think,” we echoed. I had never had any hard liquor before this. I took a deep swallow and then nearly gagged and spat it out.

  “You’re going to have to work on that,” Serena said.

  “What’s that toast,” I managed. She reached into her bag and tossed me her copy of the Dhammapada. I opened it. We are what we think. It was the very first line in the book, the very first saying of the Buddha that someone thought they should write down.

  “The Buddha wrote thousands of sutras,” Serena said. “They say any one of them can take you all the way.” She held up the bottle. “But there are also … other strategies. Alcohol is one way to access a different plane of experience. Maybe it’s not the purest ecstatic state, but I’m willing to try. There’s a reason lots of famous Buddhists died of cirrhosis. It does something.”

  I took another sip and grimaced.

  “Don’t you have anything for her to mix it with?” Laurel said. She had already drunk half of her pour.

  “Mixers are the girl’s way out,” Serena said.

  “We actually are girls, you know,” Janet said.

  “Which is better than the alternative,” I said.

  Serena bent down to grab my chin with her free hand. “No,” she said. “Don’t be stupid.” She shifted her hand and drove her fingers into my cheeks, and suddenly I became aware of my jaw as a system of bone and teeth. I thought of skulls I had seen, not human ones, but canine: enormous eye sockets above jawlines populated by sharp, ill-fitting molars. Just as it began to hurt, she let go and patted me on the head.

  I’ve said Serena was beautiful, but actually, that’s not quite right. Laurel was the real—or at least the conventional—beauty among the three: she looked like the women on magazine covers, the ones that the rest of us periodically reassure one another do not exist without Photoshop. No, there was something about Serena that kept her from being truly beautiful—something too arch about her mouth, too sharp about her eyes, maybe. Something cold or flat. Too narrow or too wide. Those teeth. I can’t quite explain it. Sometimes, like now, she looked hard, frighteningly hard. But still: her face was coercive, compulsory. It was hard to look away from her. And what else is beauty, after all?

  I took another sip. “Luke showed me something,” I said.

  “Was it s
omething hot?”Laurel asked. “Or long?”Janet pushed her over, and Laurel fell expertly, without spilling her drink.

  I repeated the bird visualization for them, leaving out the part about the embrace. “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “But at least it’s a start.”

  “You know,” Serena said, watching me, “we’ve tried new girls before. But you’re the only one we’ve kept.”

  “How come?” I said.

  “We like you,” Janet said.

  “Just in case,” Laurel said, at the same time, so that the sentiments were tangled.

  “We can smell our own,” Serena said.

  I thought this was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.

  As we drank, Serena read to us from her biography of Milarepa, the famous Tibetan yogi. Once he achieved enlightenment, we learned, he could not only levitate but fly around at will. Of course, before that, he had to live in a cave alone for years on nothing but nettle soup, until he was barely more than bones and covered in a light green fur. Of course, before that, he had to labor for many years in intense spiritual practice. Of course, before that, he had to murder thirty-five people at a party with black magic, an act of vengeance against the slobbering aunt and uncle who had cast him out into the cold. He summoned a hailstorm to bring down the roof. He reveled in the chaos, the destruction, the bloodshed. He danced on their blackened graves. We liked Milarepa. Even if he ultimately reformed.

  Of course, Serena explained, her finger in the book, levitation has never been limited to Buddhism, or Hinduism, or any of those arcane, far-off religions that most of the world practices. She reminded us of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, of Thomas Aquinas, of the ascension of Christ. She told us about Saint Teresa of Ávila, who was so shaken by her levitations that when she felt her body begin to rise, she’d call for the nuns to hold her down, as she begged her God with all her might to relieve her of the gift.

  Saint Teresa wrote of the experience: “It seemed to me, when I tried to make some resistance, as if a great force beneath my feet lifted me up. I know of nothing with which to compare it; but it was much more violent than other spiritual visitations, and I was therefore as one ground to pieces.” As one ground to pieces. Her face, in painting and in sculpture, is a sublime vision of ecstasy, her mouth opened, her eyes lifted, elevated by God and blood and something, something else.