The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  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 on 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.

  I began to question myself. Had Serena’s blood really floated? I had seen it so clearly; then again, the strawberries.

  (What would my mother have said? But no, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about her anymore.)

  Still, we must have been accomplishing something in all those hours at the rock palm, because Dominique helped me into my first handstand during yoga at the end of that week, holding my heavy legs while my face turned red.

  “Closer,” she murmured, and moved on to press her palms into the small of Nisha’s bent back, coax some warmth into Jamie’s thin limbs. I had noticed by then that she never touched Serena.

  One night during this time, Laurel pulled a small bag of white powder out of her pocket. You must have known this was coming; I admit that I did not.

  “I asked Paola,” she said by way of explanation.

  Serena eyed the bag. “What did you tell her?”

  “Only that I wanted to lose my feet. She said this was guaranteed.” She shook the little bag. “Which it better be, because her markup is beyond.” It was ketamine, she told us, a drug she’d never tried, one famed for its powers of dissociation.

  “No,” Serena said, and I was ashamed at the relief that spread across my shoulders. I looked over at Janet, but she was absorbed in something else, pressing her fingers into her ankle, as if it pained her.

  “You don’t have to do it, if you’re scared,” Laurel said. She opened the bag and poured out a little on the side of her hand, too expertly, I could tell even then. “We’ll let you know if it works.” For a moment, I thought Serena did look afraid, and then her face cleared and she slapped the bag out of Laurel’s hand, sending all the white powder into the dirt, like a magic creature’s trail.

  “I said no,” Serena said. “That’s not the right way to do this.”

  Janet was paying attention now. “What’s the difference between this and drinking?” she asked as Laurel sputtered and knelt to salvage what she could.

  “You know the difference,” Serena said. “Don’t ask me any more stupid questions.”

  The next morning, Serena caught us as we were heading to breakfast. She had a thin blue book under her arm. She had decided that we needed to fast. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” she said. “All the famous levitators have done it.” We wouldn’t completely starve ourselves, of course. We’d eat nettles, like Milarepa.

  “Didn’t Milarepa turn green and furry?” Laurel said. She had not quite forgiven Serena for the night before.

  “Yes, but we don’t have time for that,” Serena said, unmoved by Laurel’s bad mood, or the sunglasses she was refusing to remove. “We’ll have to combine it with the things we already know work.”

  “Or sort of work,” Janet said. “Maybe worked, a little bit, one time.”

  “It can’t hurt, anyway,” Serena said. “I found a recipe for nettle soup, and tea.”

  “Buddhist Master Cleanse,” Laurel said. “All right, I’m in.”

  “Shocking,” Janet said.

  “It’s not so you can look hot in a bikini, Laurel,” Serena said.

  “I already look hot in a bikini, Serena,” Laurel snapped.

  “Where are we going to find nettles?” I asked.

  “We’ll just have to start looking.”

  According to Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, the nettle (Urtica dioica), also called stinging nettle, burn weed, and ortiga ancha, is a masculine plant, ruled by the planet Mars. It is most powerful in spells connected to exorcism, protection, healing, and lust. It can be used to reflect curses or repel ghosts. Its lusty properties are best invoked in the bath. But of course, fresh nettles must be handled with care. They cannot be eaten raw. Their leaves and stems are covered with tiny hairs called trichomes, which, when touched, detach and plunge themselves into the skin like little needles, depositing painful poisons. We weren’t planning to eat them raw, of course. We weren’t as dumb as all that.

  But it didn’t matter how dumb we weren’t, because we couldn’t find any. We spent the morning walking around in the woods, heads down, until our necks grew sore. Whenever anyone spotted a toothy-looking plant, she called Janet to come touch it. Janet had assured us she didn’t mind the prospect of the pain. I think after a while she was looking forward to it. By what would have been lunch, we still hadn’t found anything, and we were already exhausted.

  “It’s almost time for rota,” I said.

  “That’s an excellent idea,” said Serena.

  When Luke saw the four of us approach the fence, he stood, though not in greeting. Instead, he walked over to the door and locked it from the inside. There was something different about him that day. It took me a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t wearing his usual gardening clothes. He looked nice: jeans and a white button-down shirt. He looked clean.

  “Luke,” Serena said. Her voice was sweet again. “How are you?”

  “What do you need?” He seemed incapable of looking directly at Serena for long. He kept flicking his eyes to her, and then away.

  “We were wondering where we could find some nettles.”

  “Now what, I wonder, would you want with those?” he said.

  “We’ve been reading about Milarepa,” Laurel said.

  “I bet you have,” Luke said.

  “They’re supposed to be really healthy,” I said. “There are nutrients.”

  “Do you grow them in here?” Serena asked. She took a step forward.

  “I don’t cultivate weeds,” he said.

  “Help us search, then,” Serena said. “You know what they say: a young back is a terrible thi
ng to waste.”

  Luke snorted, and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Nettles grow near water,” he said. “Find some water, find some nettles. Good enough?”

  In answer, Serena pulled her dress over her head and let it fall to the ground.

  She wasn’t naked; I would tell myself later that what she’d exposed was little more than what you’d see if you came upon her at the beach. And yet it was more. Her bra was white lace, and when she turned, I could see the brown skin of her proud little breasts and the shadows of her nipples, bigger and darker than I’d imagined them. (I had, yes. Hadn’t you?) Her panties were heartbreakingly girlish: pink cotton with white scalloped trim and a little bow in front.

  “What are you doing?” Luke said. There was no alarm on his face, or even surprise, but his voice had gone hollow, as though he were at the bottom of a bowl.

  “I’m making sure you understand the rules,” Serena said. She raised her arms. The shadow of a hawk passed over her like a blessing.

  “Put your clothes on,” Luke said. Serena only laughed at him. He was following the script, but he wasn’t selling it. She did a few twirls, tucking one leg in like my Green Tara, and then, without saying anything, began to walk back up the path.

  Laurel scooped up the discarded dress. “Well,” she said. “Bye.”

  I tried to catch Janet’s eye, but Laurel had already taken her hand; they followed Serena’s retreating form without looking back. I only realized later that Janet hadn’t said a word during this entire exchange.

  Serena: I wish I could describe her body to you now. But you know it, you’ve seen it. Anyway, the image I retain isn’t of her flesh at all, but of the sun half blotted out by her hip, lighting up the little hairs there, piercing my vision when she moved, so that when she finally disappeared around the bend, I could see the negative imprint of her body in shimmering bruise pink, patterned over and over again against the grass.

  Once they were all out of sight, Luke unlocked the door. But instead of stepping back to let me in, he stepped forward, and left the garden without a word, disappearing into the woods, in almost the exact opposite direction that Serena had gone.

  Without anything else to do, I sat on the bench in the garden and waited for him to return. After a while, I lit a cigarette. I had been carrying around a pack of Serena’s for a few days; they were squashed and loose from my pocket. I didn’t mind. I was trying to get addicted to them. I had heard so much about addiction, that furious body craving that had spawned an industry of patches and psychotherapies, but the feeling eluded me. I didn’t know what it was to want something that way, in the cells. (Didn’t I?) I wanted to want that way, and to satisfy my want, and to want again. I was getting closer: the smell of the smoke made me think of the black sand. I lay back on the bench and closed my eyes.

  Serena wanted to escape the role of the slit-open damsel, that was clear. But it wasn’t only that. I understood it now, the smoke piling around my face, the nicotine turning my stomach, her body twirling behind my eyelids. She wanted to be the robed men. She wanted to wield the knife, pour the sand. She wanted to say who was a beautiful girl, and what that meant we had to do. Lightness was antidote, perhaps—but it was also the flaming sword.

  Serena would not wait, if she were here. Serena would act. I stood and walked around the perimeter of the garden, toe to heel. I touched the red door of the shed, still too shiny. I pushed it open. Inside there was nothing but tools and bags of soil. I touched everything, just to be sure, like checking teeth. Then I went out through the gate and around to the back of the fence, where a little matted path revealed itself. I had seen Luke walking from this direction on days he’d arrived late to rota. I thought he must live somewhere down that path. I had told no one about this, not even Serena, though I’d considered reporting it to Nisha, who still believed he lived “nowhere.”

  Without really thinking about it, I started walking. Why not? The trees rose up enormous around me almost immediately, and after only a few minutes, I might have been in the middle of an ancient forest, nowhere near a clearing of any kind, never mind a whole meditation center crawling with teenage girls. The change in temperature was almost shocking, like jumping off a pier. But I was not afraid. My body did not resist. I kept walking, and eventually, a small cabin materialized before me. It was the kind of structure that told you nothing at all about a person: simple, wooden, the inside hidden by old floral curtains that might have been hanging in the windows for decades. An ax leaned against the side of the house. Faded prayer flags fluttered from the eaves.

  I knocked.

  When, pray tell, has any little girl ever found anything good in a cabin in the woods? Who inhabits such places? Cannibalistic gingerbread fetishists, cross-dressing wolves, recently eaten grandmothers, polyamorous dwarves in the market for a cleaning lady, loamy, malevolent erl-kings, acorn-toothed vegetation gods, vine-spitting green men, hungry old ladies with iron teeth and mortars and pestles parked askew in the driveway, headless, deathless, deal-cutting, green-skinned knights & aging final girls & witches & hags & crones & chain saw enthusiasts & hillbilly horrors & bad scientists & cult leaders & the possessed, by demons or drugs or dreams.

  And here I was with no cape nor girdle nor fat tasty brother to protect me. Alone and unguarded, like the stupidest woodsman or princess.

  I knocked again.

  Luke opened the door. He looked as though he had been expecting me.

  “No rota today?” I said, as sweetly as I could manage. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the rind of Serena’s hip.

  “In fact, no,” he said. “I have an appointment today. I came to tell you, but …” He trailed off and spread his hands. Up close, his cleanliness was distracting. I had only ever seen him sweaty, covered in soil. Now he looked exposed, as though his last protective barrier had been painfully scrubbed away.

  He even wore a watch. I noticed because he looked at it. I was waiting for him to say something more about what had just happened, to chastise me or confide in me or commiserate with me, but he did not. “Actually, I’ve found something that might interest you,” he said. “I still have a minute, if you want to come in.”

  I wanted to come in.

  From the inside, Luke’s cottage looked a little like a tree house that had fallen out of its tree. It was modest: a single bed covered in a thin pink blanket, a kitchenette, and a low bureau crowned with four toothy towers of books. A table and two chairs were positioned by the window. On the table was a vase of wilting black-eyed Susans.

  “Can I offer you something?” he asked, oddly formal now. “Lemonade?”

  “Okay,” I said. I wandered over to the bureau and drew my fingers across the titles of his books. Some of them I recognized from my father’s bookshelves: The Heart of the Buddha, Catch-22, Siddhartha, The Rings of Saturn. Not Lolita. Lolita would really be too much, here.

  He set a glass on the table. “I put in a sprig of our lavender,” he said. “And here,” he said. He handed me a photo album bound in red leather. He smiled at me with half his mouth.

  I sat at the table and turned the pages of the album. The sweat on my fingertips made them slip on the plastic sleeves. All of the photographs were from the Center. They looked like they had been taken with disposable cameras and developed imperfectly, at a gas station or similar. There were multiple close-ups of plants with Luke’s thumb in the shot for scale. (That thumb—the sight of it made my spine tingle.) There was a photo of the Sweet Sorrows and another of the koi pond. There was a snapshot of a visiting monk, his head brown and smooth as a nut; a tall man I didn’t recognize was pushing a big white envelope into his stomach, somewhat missing the monk’s helpless hands. There was a whole page of Dominiques, here standing in front of the sunset, here laughing and looking over her shoulder. A few had been taken in the shrine room, meditating girls from summers past; I could pick out a familiar face or two. Not for the first time that summer, I felt a strange bruised tenderness, a nosta
lgia for the current moment.

  Then I saw it. It was a picture of the grounds, of nothing, really: a few scattered adults standing around. But a man I recognized sat on one of the Center’s trademark white boulders, his head turned slightly away from the lens. The photograph couldn’t have been taken more than a year ago. His hair was the same length it had been on the last day I’d seen him. There was a strange woman standing by his side. Her hand was on his shoulder. His feet were raised off the ground.

  “Did you find him?” Luke asked.

  I pressed my finger into my father’s face. When I took it away, nothing had changed. Father, woman, boulder, feet. I felt the room contract around me.

  “I want you to be careful,” Luke said. “It wasn’t just the nettles that made Milarepa levitate, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. The feet in the photo seemed significant to me. I recognized the boulder he was sitting on. I had sat on it myself. My thighs burned at the thought. It’s strange, the importance we assign to handling things our loved ones have touched, or to revisiting historic scenes, of epic battles or first dates. To sleeping in Lizzie Borden’s bedroom. These are attempts at folding time, at pinning one piece of fabric to another. But time doesn’t work that way, you know. That’s why you feel so empty afterward.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  Luke wiped his hands on a towel and came toward me. He reached out as if to tuck my hair behind my ear, then pulled his hand away at the last moment and put it in his pocket.

  “The bad news is: you’re falling through the air, with nothing to hang on to, and no parachute,” he said. “The good news is: there’s no ground.”

  I wanted to scream. My father used to say this exact thing. My father used to sit on the same rock I did. My father had gone to the Levitation Center, but he hadn’t come home. All of my life he had been looking for something. But what was it?