The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  The bitterness in her voice surprised me. “Everyone wants what they want,” I said.

  “Some more than others,” Janet said.

  On the other side of the room, I could see Paola and Jamie sitting close together on Paola’s low bunk. Paola had her fingers threaded through Jamie’s fragile toes. Samantha was staring at them, her face drawn. I had no idea what was going on between them. They slept so close to me and still I hadn’t noticed whatever saga of love or friendship or betrayal was playing out between their beds. It struck me how isolated I was, even in this mass of girls, how my loneliness hadn’t decreased so much as widened its scope ever so slightly.

  “I thought you wanted this too,” I said.

  “I do,” Janet said. “It’s just—look, I sacrifice a lot to come here. My aunt pays for it, but I lose all the wages that I could have made over the summer. It’s a lot of money for me. And Laurel waits all year to come. She doesn’t really have anyone at home, you know.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ve seen the pictures. She’s got a million friends.”

  “Most of those pictures are at least two years old,” she said. “All those kids she goes to school with—they’re not really her friends. Not anymore. She made a mistake, a couple years ago. They don’t say anything outright, because her father’s important, and their mothers make sure they don’t burn bridges. But they all hate her, and she knows it. I don’t know how she can sleep like that, with all their faces around. Or why she wants to.”

  “What kind of mistake?” I said.

  “Exactly the kind you’d think.”

  I laid down my cards.

  “What I’m saying is that if the Center burned to the ground, Laurel would be devastated. I would be, too. But Serena doesn’t need this place. She doesn’t even like it here. I don’t blame her. She’s done a lot for me. But we could get in actual trouble for this. If he gets sick. Or, I don’t know. And who knows what’s next? I’m just saying, don’t ever think she’s actually thinking of anyone other than herself. Not Luke, that’s for certain. Not you. Not even me. She’s playing her own game, and nobody but her even knows what it is.”

  I had the distinct feeling that Luke getting sick wasn’t really what Janet was worried about. “She cares about us,” I said carefully. “And why wouldn’t she like it here? She’s like the queen of this place.”

  “True,” Janet said. “But don’t forget that it also killed her mother.”

  Then Evie jumped up onto her bed, ignoring us but too hard, and we played in silence until Laurel came out of the bathroom and made us touch her newly shaved legs, which were so smooth, she said, look how smooth everywhere, so smooth, she said, they could burn you.

  When I approached the garden the day after Luke ate the chili, Serena was already there. She was inside the fence this time, sitting on the bench next to him. She looked particularly lovely, I thought. She wore no makeup, and her dress was almost sheer. How I wished I could look like her, in those or any clothes. I felt a pulse between my legs at the idea.

  “The Buddha said to work on your own salvation with diligence,” she was saying. She placed her hand on Luke’s bare knee.

  “Yes, well, the diligence is the hard part,” he said. He didn’t move her hand. Instead, he reached out and touched her cheek. Despite everything, my first thought was triumphant. It had worked.

  I stepped on a stick and they both looked up.

  “Perfect timing,” Serena said. I came through the gate and stood in front of them. I felt awkward, like a dingy chaperone, looming over two pretty young dancers. Leave room for Jesus! “I’ve remembered something,” she said, turning her attention back to Luke. “I know exactly what you need to teach us.”

  “What’s that?” Luke said.

  “Tummo. That’s what my mother was studying, right?”

  Luke grimaced. “She really shouldn’t have told you about that.”

  “It took me a while to remember. And then I wasn’t sure, because I can’t find it in any books. I’ve been looking.”

  “It is written in a few obscure places,” he said. “But it’s a sacred, secret practice. It’s not for beginners.”

  “I am not a beginner,” Serena said.

  Luke began to laugh, but stopped at the look on her face. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The tummo teaching is self-secret. You can’t learn it from a book. You need a guide, and even then, the practice will only make itself available to you once you’re ready.”

  “You can guide us,” Serena said. She moved her hand slightly higher on his thigh.

  He looked down at it. “I’m not really qualified,” he said. “I’ve received the transmission, but that doesn’t mean I can pass it along.”

  Serena leaned over and kissed Luke on the cheek. “You’ll teach us,” she said. Luke said nothing, only smiled at her with half his mouth, and Serena kissed him again, almost climbing into his lap this time. Luke slipped an arm around her waist. I examined the rosebushes. I am, actually, interested in roses. I don’t understand why they are held in such high regard. They are beautiful, yes, but like the rest of us, they all hide something ugly at the center.

  After a few moments, Serena extricated herself and left, opening the door delicately, as though she feared that even the wooden handle might shock her fragile skin. Of course she cared about us. Look what she was doing. She didn’t even want him, and look.

  “You girls are relentless,” he said once she had gone.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Luke dropped his head into his hands. “I do want her to have what she wants. Whatever that is.”

  I kept my body completely still. “She wants you to have what you want, too.”

  “I don’t want it to be a transaction,” he said.

  “She’s in love with you,” I said. “She’s just pretending she isn’t.” It was a lie, and I thought he knew it, but as the words came out, I wondered if there was any possibility that they were true.

  He looked up at me. “Can I tell you a secret?” he said. He didn’t wait for me to respond. “I still believe in fate. Not like karma. Like destiny. I know I’m not supposed to. It’s not a Buddhist concept. But I think the universe has plans for me. I think I’m going to do something big.”

  “So are we,” I said.

  Here’s what I have learned. In 2002, Harvard researchers found that Himalayan monks practicing tummo, also known as inner fire, had the ability to raise their body temperatures as much as seventeen degrees at will. For a sacred, secret practice, they weren’t particularly precious about it: sometimes, in their spare time, the monks would dip blankets in ice water, drape them over their bodies, and hold contests to see who could dry them the fastest. (Monks, I’ve noticed, love this kind of thing. The closer you are to enlightenment, it seems, the more easily amused.) Tummo is thought to not only allow meditators control over their bodies’ metabolic processes and hormones, but also to enhance their strength, sexuality, and creativity. And yes, their ability to levitate—but not only that. Serena’s mother had been right all along. “Inner fire is the real chocolate!!” wrote Lama Zopa Rinpoche. “It is the direct path to enlightenment that you have heard about. It is the secret key that opens you to all realizations.” However, it is widely agreed that tummo should not be taught to beginners. The techniques are simple enough to understand, but it is dangerous to attempt without training and competent supervision. Of course, there are always those who ignore such warnings, and forge ahead without bread crumbs or ropes or guides. But there are tolls, you know, on the roads that go off the edges of the map. Here be monsters, etc.

  The next day, I found myself sitting on the lawn alone after breakfast, though close enough to Harriet and Nisha that I could hear them talking about which tattoo Harriet should get next, and where—a white lotus on her rib cage, a dinosaur on her wrist, a bear, an eye, a ball of twine, her shoulder, her ankle, the smooth place behind her ear. I was only half listening to them. I could see Janet out at the edge
of the white sand driveway, about as far away as you could get from the main building while remaining in sight. She hadn’t been at breakfast. She had her hand on one of the boulders, and she looked, with her purple hair and black clothes, like an alien astronaut who had landed on an unknown planet. Alien Janet: blinking impassively at an unfamiliar world, observing its dress codes and government structures and waste protocols, making dry comments under her breath. This was essentially how she behaved anyway, I realized. She kicked at the sand and a little cloud bloomed at her toe. I felt very fond of her in that moment. I didn’t understand why she would say that Serena didn’t care about us. Serena cared, she did, and especially about Janet. I was overwhelmed by the urge to tell her this, except I knew I would ruin the scene by entering it, so I stayed where I was.

  Who am I kidding? I have never in my life come across a beautiful image without deciding to force myself into it. I can’t help it—show me a pretty patch of daisies and I’ll immediately sit down in its center, so all the stems break beneath me, so all the petals smear and fold, but at least for that moment I am part of it. Just look at what happened that summer. Look at me now. I stood up and crossed the driveway.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked as I approached. She looked much paler than usual. She was pressing two fingers absently to the side of her neck, right below her birthmark. Standing in the expanse of white sand, it seemed as though the sun were coming from every direction at once.

  “Taking in the sights,” she said.

  The sights: the golden seal on the main building; Harriet and Nisha still sitting together on their favorite rock; the mountain pitching upward, almost over our heads; a small clutch of girls practicing their Mudra Space Awareness on the grass. But these were as usual.

  “I’m fine,” Janet said. She let her hand drop away from her neck, took a step toward me, and then stopped, inhaling sharply. She pressed her fingers back into her neck, hard. She walked away from me, and then back, and then away. “I’m probably not dying, right?” she said.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh. “Probably not,” I said. “Why would you be dying?”

  “People die all the time.”

  “Old people. People in cars.”

  She stopped pacing. “You know what’s really fucking terrifying about this place?”

  I could think of a number of things.

  “If someone had a heart attack here, they’d almost definitely die. Even if, somewhere else, they might have been saved. Rushed to the hospital. If it happened here, they wouldn’t make it. We’re too far away.”

  “I don’t think you’re having a heart attack,” I said.

  “When I was little, my dad took me to the top of the Statue of Liberty,” Janet said. “Into her crown. I couldn’t believe how different the city looked from there. They even used to let people into her torch. But there was an attack, once.”

  “What attack?” I said.

  “Olivia,” she said. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here.”

  I felt a cold prickle in my throat. Her pressed fingers seemed to be growing white around the edges. I heard someone shout my name. It was Laurel, striding toward us, her eyes hidden by a pair of enormous pink sunglasses.

  “Leave her alone,” Laurel said. She marched up to us and pressed her fingers to the other side of Janet’s neck. Janet pushed her face into Laurel’s hand, and Laurel stroked her cheek with her thumb. “It’s normal, darling,” she said. “Strong.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say it,” Laurel commanded.

  “I don’t need to say it.”

  “I swear to fucking God, Janet.”

  “This has happened before, and I was fine then, and I’m fine now,” Janet said.

  “Good. Let’s walk,” Laurel said. She put her arm around Janet and steered her back toward the main building. I followed behind them uselessly for a while and then stopped. They didn’t notice. They kept on walking. I stood on the lawn, where I had started, and watched Jamie step carefully through the small forest of girls, weaving around their bodies. She looked more substantial than she ever had before, her skin sun-kissed, unbroken. When she was finished, they all smiled and hugged one another.

  They fit together, Janet and Laurel. Not only physically, although that too—Janet slipping neatly under Laurel’s arm. I hadn’t understood it at first. They were so different; they made no sense together. But Laurel already knew what was happening to Janet. She didn’t have to ask. She already knew what to do, what to say. They were a pair. I was extra. I could have come here or not come here, and they would have been the same. Complete. I realized this with a sort of dull ache; after all, I’d always known it. I was necessary to no one. Look: not even my parents needed me.

  Later, Janet would apologize and tell me she’d been having a panic attack. She’d been getting them for a couple of years, she said, and when she did, she had to walk, sometimes for hours, it didn’t matter where. Nothing else helped, except sometimes remembering that it wasn’t the first time. I wanted to tell her then about the naming, the counting, and the way it kept me from falling apart at night, though I knew instinctually that her problem was not understanding her body too little, but rather the opposite.

  “Is that where you are,” I asked instead, “when you go off on your own?”

  She nodded.

  It finally made sense: all her disappearances, her refusal to explain. Or almost. “What about Laurel?” I asked. “Does she go with you?”

  She looked at her hands. “No,” she said.

  I didn’t ask her, then or ever, exactly what it was I didn’t understand. Of course, in the end, I didn’t have to ask. I found out soon enough.

  When I got back to the dormitory, I found a note on my pillow:

  Dearest O,

  Come tonight, please. Let L & J sleep, we won’t need them.

  Instead of her name, she’d scribbled at the bottom: Where there is a sign, there is deception.

  Finally, it was my turn to sneak out alone, to leave the other two, if they were awake that night, to wonder where I was going, and why they weren’t going along. I waited until the room was silent. I showed Magda my tongue. I shut the dormitory door. I kept my eyes on the trees as I climbed to Serena’s tent. I was used to the forest at night by now, but not alone, not like this. I had the sensation of walking on a tongue, spongy beneath my feet. I had the sensation of magic. Could a certain patch of ground turn you from girl to bird? Could one misstep take you sideways, to an identical mountain in an identical world? You would never know, if it did.

  But no. I’d walked this path many times, and I knew where it led.

  Halfway up the mountain, I came across Ava, who had nestled herself between two bushes about a foot from the path. I would never have spotted her if I hadn’t heard her yowl. When I held up my lamp, I saw that she was curled around three tiny kittens, each one sucking busily at its own personal teat; she looked smug, smugger than I would have thought possible with only one eye. I knelt, and the kittens all turned to look at me too. One of them had two perfectly enormous blue button eyes, and I gasped involuntarily (destroy destroy destroy). His brother, though, had only one—his right eye was crusted over and red. But the worst was the third kitten, who looked blind, both eyes raw and ruined. He looked as though he had no eyes at all, only little pink blisters, ready to burst. I recoiled. The three kittens struck me even then as symbolic. (But who—? And who—?) I had always assumed that Ava had lost her eye in some violent way—cat, mountain, hawk, hunter—but now it seemed that it was a sickness, a genetic flaw that had half blinded her, and this seemed worse somehow. I reached out to pet the two-eyed kitten. I couldn’t force myself to touch the disfigured ones. Beauty moves us, after all. This we know. But ugliness moves us too.

  Serena unzipped her tent as I approached, letting the flaps fall open. Inside, a carton of cigarettes leaned against the tent wall. A box of chocolates lay open on the ottoman, its little paper doilies strewn arou
nd like wandering ghosts. She had kicked all of her luxurious blankets and pillows and sheepskins onto the floor. She had her shoes on.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Once there was a man who wanted to fly around the world,” she said. “But over Tibet, his plane lost power, and the man jumped out into the air. As he fell, he begged for help from his god, but none came. Then he looked down and remembered that Tibet was a Buddhist country, and so he began to pray to the Lord Buddha to save him. After a few moments, an enormous hand materialized and caught him, in midair.” Serena held out her hand, palm cupped, and clicked her tongue. “Oh, thank God, said the man. And then—” Slowly, she tipped her hand, letting the ungrateful man fall to his death.

  “Serves him right,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. She lit a cigarette, but for once she didn’t offer me one. Her eyes seemed to be all corners. “I want to try tummo tonight.”

  “Just us?” I asked. Something was interfering with my ability to feel excited about this—the story of the falling man, maybe, or the expression on her face, like barely bottled contempt.

  “Janet’s a spoilsport these days,” she said. “Laurel’s becoming a liability. She thinks I can’t see what she’s doing, but I can. God knows where she’s getting it all. You’ve noticed.”

  I nodded.

  “Besides, I don’t think either of them really believes in any of this. Not the way you have to, to make it work. But you believe, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’re my only goddamn hope.”

  Luke was waiting for us at the rock palm, as I suppose I should have known he would be. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, his hands on his knees, his back straight, eyes resting on the rock in front of him. He was clean again, which made me shiver. Next to godliness.

  “Hello, girls,” said Luke. Serena sat beside him. Luke leaned over to whisper something in her ear. Serena tapped his knee with a finger and then looked up at me. Something had obviously changed between them, and not only because of the blood.