The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  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.

  “Daddy,” I said. “I can’t see.”

  I felt, rather than saw, his face turn to mine. Or perhaps that’s not exact. I could see the outline of his head clearly, his hair and ears glowing and distinct in a halo of afternoon light—but between them, where his features should have been, my dimming vision registered only a kind of bottomless pulsing blackness.

  The empty-faced shape knelt beside me, holy, unknowable, wholly unknowable. “You need water,” it said.

  It was at that moment that I fainted. I didn’t see what kind of scene I caused: maybe no scene at all. Everyone’s eyes were focused upward, and not at the girl on the ground. Isn’t that always the way?

  When I woke, I was propped up on my father’s knee. I could see his face again, right where it was supposed to be, between his ears, and above him, I could see the looming face of the statue, its drying eyes clear and unconcerned.

  “You gave your sight to the Buddha,” he said. He patted my sweaty forehead. “Very generous of you.”

  Later, he bought me an ice cream sundae and a t-shirt from the monastery gift shop to commemorate the miraculous occasion. As an afterthought, he also bought me a small canteen, to remind me to hydrate properly in high places. He told everyone we met what had happened, squeezing my small shoulders, beaming down at me. They all thought it was amazing, simply amazing. I even received a bouquet of wildflowers and a kiss on the cheek from the dreadlocked boy. He had a large gap between his two front teeth, the kind that made you want to put something in there.

  Luke liked this story, as I knew he would. He pressed me for details. He agreed that it was generous. He agreed that it was amazing. “There’s something special about you,” he said. “That much is clear.” He hugged me again, slipping his hand under my t-shirt in a way that might have been utterly unintentional and might have been a declaration. When he let go, I scanned his face for the answer, but he showed no sign, or the sign was too obscure, or I had invented it entirely.

  I didn’t tell Luke that the fight my parents had after we returned from that trip was worse than any before. I remember it like this: I lost consciousness, and when I regained it, my father moved out. There must have been time between the two, but in my memory, he doesn’t even unpack. We drive away from the lap of the giant Buddha, and when we get to our house, he simply drops me off and keeps going. Still, I had thought that trip was the start of something, as well as the end. Our secret. I thought there was something we shared. But he never invited me along again.

  Related, perhaps: once, I found my mother lying in her bed, fully clothed, alone, the sheets black with her hair. When I asked her what she was doing, she raised an arm into the air. “Your father,” she said, “is a beautiful vessel.” I waited. After a while, she raised the other arm, as if hoping to be lifted from the sheets by an enormous mother of her own. “But there’s a hole in the bottom,” she said.

  The days were getting hotter. I felt roasted, as on a spit, eight thousand feet high. We continued to meet at night, to give ourselves the Feeling, to play at lightness, but during the day, Serena said that it was too hot, too hot to do anything that mattered. We spent hours on the rock palm, eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches and popcorn and the small frosted cakes Serena liked and never seemed to run out of, drinking warm, sweet lemonade that grew warmer and sweeter as the day went on. Laurel plucked everyone’s eyebrows, even mine, into perfect comets. One afternoon, Janet taught me to do a cartwheel, which no one could believe I didn’t already know how to do, while Serena and Laurel sat back and gave us grades on form (very poor, in my case), writing numbers on their palms in eyeliner and holding them up. Janet taught us all to play poker; we made bets with small stones. Serena said it was purer that way. The fact that Janet won every game might have also been a factor. But most of all, I remember space. I remember doing nothing, but doing it together, which made it something after all. Now when I put a dish in the microwave for thirty seconds I am paralyzed by the discomfort of unorganized time. Is thirty seconds enough to read something? Check the weather? Pee? I reach for anything to occupy me, but now I’ve spent all of my time wondering how I should spend it, and the machine beeps, and I have purpose again.

  “What do you know about emptiness?” Serena said on one of these days, draped over a rock, her fingertips in the grass.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Good answer,” Janet said, and the other two laughed.

  I thought, before, that emptiness meant nothingness. But that’s not it, or not quite. Serena explained it: Emptiness doesn’t mean that nothing exists, but rather that nothing has a fixed identity or importance. While the objects and people and phenomena that populate our experience are there, in a relative way, they have no inherent nature, no ultimate existence. Rather they are in constant flux, acting and acted upon, utterly subjective and unstable.

  “You think that the things around you are real,” Serena said. “You think that they mean something, and that you—that is, the impermanent, illusory construct that you call you—can somehow possess them. But if you realize that you can’t, then you will begin to lose the pain that comes with attachment. You will shed the agony of clinging to solid concepts. Like the earth, for one. Like your body. Even your thoughts.” Everything she was saying felt new and familiar at once. It was as if I’d lived with a set of books on my shelves for years, walked past their spines every day, and had only just now taken one down to read it.

  “Which means that suffering doesn’t exist,” Janet said. “Not on an ultimate level. Neither does happiness, of course.” Serena laid her head on Janet’s shoulder, and Janet kissed it. Laurel dropped her head into Janet’s lap. They glowed in the late afternoon sun.

  “The more we realize our own emptiness, the lighter we will become,” Serena said. “Until eventually—pop.” She smiled and pointed at the sky.

  They were so sure. They believed without question. Serena sounded just like my father. I w
anted nothing more than to believe along with them. And sometimes I felt that I did. Sometimes, buoyed by Serena’s depth of knowledge, Laurel’s easy acceptance, Janet’s utter contempt for everything else, I did. But no matter how much we meditated, or how much we talked, my mother’s voice never entirely left my head.

  From the Heart Sutra: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness. Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.

  Or you know, as Schrödinger said: we’re all just atoms in the void. Not that it helps.

  His trapped cat, too, seems relevant here. Or not, as it were.

  Anyway, we may all just be atoms in the void, but according to quantum mechanics, no objects objectively exist at all, in the void or otherwise. Particles have no inherent values, only probabilities, and they only materialize when they are measured—which means that on a quantum level, reality simply isn’t there unless we’re looking directly at it. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, there is no tree, and no forest. (Is it any different if that tree was once a girl? I think it is not.) The world does not exist independently of us, theoretical physicists say. All perception relies on our own subjective consciousness. We call the world into being with our attention. Or put it this way: we are continually hallucinating our own realities, including the realities of our selves. Quantum physics, as you can see, is extremely Buddhist. Again, not that it helps.

  “Emptiness is what makes levitation possible,” Serena said. “When you understand the illusory nature of phenomenal experience, you can easily manipulate it.” Milarepa, it is said, could climb inside a conch shell without making his body any smaller or the conch shell any bigger.

  “So why can’t we do it?” Janet said. “We all understand that consciousness is an illusion.”

  “There’s a difference between intellectual comprehension and true understanding,” Serena said. “That’s why we need Luke.”

  “Speaking of Luke,” Laurel said, raising her arms in the air.

  Janet had begun to dig a little trench in the ground with her heel. Laurel looked at the trench, and then at Janet, and then dropped her arms to her sides as if in exhaustion.

  Serena was looking at the trench too. “I’m working on it,” she said.

  In the garden that afternoon, I bent over to pluck a trio of tiny ripe tomatoes from the vine, and when I straightened, Luke was staring at me. I smiled at him; he didn’t respond. I could feel his gaze on my skin like a touch. I felt the urge to bolt but only stood there, caught in the force of his attention. Deer, headlights. After what seemed like minutes, he spoke. “Oh good, the tomatoes,” he said, as if emerging from a trance. Was it a trance I had caused? I brought the basket to him, and that night I stood in front of the mirror, trying to re-create the way I had held my body, to catalogue whatever organization of limbs had caught his eye, had silenced him so completely, so that I might use it again and again, until Laurel pushed me out of the way to rub cream on her face and I remembered who I really was.

  Later, we snuck into the kitchen in search of the steaks the head chef, Tenzin, had hidden for herself in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer. Tenzin was a jolly Tibetan woman who’d been at the Center as long as anyone could remember. “Tenzin can’t go three days without red meat,” Janet had said. “Never mind three months.” (Tibetan Buddhists, unlike some other varieties, tend not to be vegetarians, despite the usual prohibitions against killing living beings. It’s too cold there, Serena told me. You can’t survive a Tibetan winter eating only plants.) Laurel, who did rota in the kitchen, had the keys, and after half an hour of searching, just as I was beginning to shiver, we found the steaks under an unmarked box in the far back corner of the freezer. Janet cooked four of them in a kitchen lit only by moonlight and the fire of the gas stove. Laurel produced two bottles of champagne she had found somewhere, but Serena refused them.

  “That’s not what we’re doing right now,” she said. Another rule: she never drank outside ritual. Alcohol was only useful for levitation. So instead, we accompanied our steaks with cold glasses of creamy organic milk, though I was almost certain I saw Laurel sneak something into hers. Afterward, we sat around eating strawberries from an enormous clay bowl.

  “Strawberries are the sexiest fruit,” Laurel said. “Look: they force your mouth into the kissing position.”

  “Just what you need,” said Janet. “More kissing.” I still wonder what Luke did to those strawberries. I’ve never had redder, or sweeter.

  “Everyone could use more kissing,” Laurel said. “Well, almost everyone.”

  Serena hopped off the counter where she’d been perched and approached the mirror that hung by the door. She faced her reflection and stuck a strawberry in her mouth, green end first. It looked like a tongue, protruding there, and I thought of the first night I had followed Janet and Laurel out of our dormitory, their own real tongues silhouetted in the dark.

  She gestured for us to join her, and soon we were all sticking out our red tongues at the mirror, the seeds of the strawberries melting into taste buds, the shine of the ripe fruit into spit. Laurel posed, tossing her hair, winking. Janet stared herself down, suddenly serious. Serena found a sharp pair of kitchen shears. She held them in front of her face, blades open wide. She looked herself in the eye. Then, with one swift movement, she cut off the tip of her tongue. It landed, half a strawberry, on the floor. She handed over the scissors.

  It was hard to go through with it, much harder than you’d think. My hand fought me. I had to push my real tongue back and forth against the strawberry’s leaves, create a little physical distinction between what I saw and what I knew to be true, in order to snip off the end. Our eyes are liars; the best.

  I’d have a similar feeling years later, when trying to jump off a high ledge into the ocean. I’d seen countless people do it before me; I knew it was safe. But when I approached the edge, it didn’t matter what I knew. Again and again, my body forced me back. (Though I suppose I should be grateful for my physical cowardice. After all, it is the only reason I am here to tell you this story.)

  Janet, of course, sliced through her strawberry without hesitation. She knew what was real and what wasn’t. Laurel dropped the scissors twice and had to turn on the light before she could make herself close the blades.

  “We’re fighting the snake brain,” Serena said. “Intellect versus instinct. When you have power over the snake, you can do anything. We are what we think.” We ate all the remaining strawberries, except for the ones we had cut. These, Serena buried deep in the trash. “Just in case,” she said.

  This is all to say: I had never had friends like these.

  Friends like these: Janet had accepted my companionship easily, but it was clear that Laurel still had her reservations. She treated me like a small but irritating nuisance: the flatulent cat your neighbors leave with you for a month while they’re in Bermuda, the baby screaming upstairs, the weird lump on your leg that you can’t identify and won’t go to the doctor about, which might be cancer or a colony of spiders or nothing. I noticed she didn’t like being alone with me; it was only when the choice was between that and solitude that she’d sometimes settle for my company.

  She had a point, of course. What right did I have, entering their perfect trinity? The square is infinitely weaker: all those parallel lines warp and bend under too much weight.

  And there were still some secrets that weren’t shared with me. Sometimes I would wake in the night, and either Janet or Laurel would be gone from her bed, and when asked about it in the morning they’d look at me blankly, or suggest I’d been mistaken, or simply change the subject. Once, I came into the dormitory to find Laurel red-eyed and furious and Janet sitting straight as a poker on her top bunk, staring at the ceiling.

  “I don’t care what you do,” Laurel said, before she’d noticed me.

  “You obviously do care,” Janet said.

  When I asked them wha
t had happened, they both ignored me. They’d clearly been fighting for some time; we all went to dinner and they refused to speak a word to me or to each other, even when a Tiger came and sat beside us and began to tell us all about her band, Death Plum, which featured no instruments, its members preferring to use whatever was around to create their songs. “We call it world music,” she said, drumming her hands on the table, pinging her fork against her water glass. Something about the texture of her leather jacket made it impossible to forget that it had once been another creature’s skin. Janet stared at a beam above her head. Laurel bit all the lipstick off her lips. But neither of them said anything, and so I asked her to play us a song, because I could, to punish them.

  Harriet and Nisha, sitting at the other end of the table and listening, laughed silently into their soup. When Janet and Laurel were looking the other direction, they flashed me a thumbs-up each. I smiled back, feeling traitorous to the core.

  That night, there were no taps. But I heard Janet get up, slip on her shoes, and leave. An hour later, I heard Laurel leave too. I knew without being told that they were headed in opposite directions.

  In the morning, everything was normal again. They didn’t mention the fight, and so I didn’t either, but later, I asked Serena what had happened. She narrowed her eyes; she didn’t know anything about it. “But I will,” she said. “I’ll find out.”