The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  “I thought tummo was secret,” I said. “I thought you didn’t know how to teach it.”

  “What can I say?” Luke said. “You girls are very persuasive.”

  Serena gestured to the ground, and I sat, obedient to the last. First, we meditated. Luke led us through the bird visualization yet again. Serena led us through the Feeling. Finally, after an indeterminable period of time, we began.

  “You begin by visualizing yourself as empty, completely hollow, a balloon,” Luke said. “Outside you’re glowing, but inside is nothing. You are a balloon with a shimmering face.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself hollow. At first, I could only picture myself filled with blackness. Black sand, heavy and glittering. But after a while, I thought I could scrape it away, replace the scrim of colored-in, covered-up organs with real nothingness, negative space. I imagined air inside, pushing against the skin of my stomach, and then the opposite of air, pulling.

  When Luke spoke again, I nearly jumped. “Now visualize a channel,” he said. “The channel begins between your legs and goes up through the top of your skull. Take all of the energy from your body and make it into a ball of heat. The ball of heat will start at the bottom, at your sacrum, but then you can move it up, toward your crown, where there’s a hum. Don’t let it out.”

  I pictured a small white-hot ball with a little red tail, like a comet. I let it rest in the bowl of my pelvis. I thought I could hear the noise it made, a hot whir like a gas stove. I held it down between my legs until I couldn’t hold it there any longer, because I didn’t know what would happen if I did, and then I let it go, and it jumped up into the channel I had made, which was blue, and filled it with red light. The light climbed up through my body. I wanted it to go slowly, but it wanted to go fast, and I could barely control it.

  “Breathe deeply into the space four inches below your navel, and focus on the ball of heat, let it rise, and then let it fall. Hold the heat in your mind and the breath in your body.”

  I had to keep the ball from escaping through my mouth by gritting my teeth. Rebuffed, it found its way into my head, and for a moment I thought my skull would explode. Then I remembered what I was meant to do next, and I started pushing it down, back toward my pubic bone, which seemed cold, and so far away, as though my body stretched forever between the two.

  “Don’t let it out,” Luke said again, or maybe it was only an echo.

  My eyes were closed, and I could see the ball of light, but I also thought I could see Luke, who had begun to speak in a language I didn’t know, or in a language I knew but couldn’t understand. I opened my eyes slightly and saw only darkness. It wasn’t frightening; it was inviting, a bedroom darkness. I closed them again and the world looked the same. Open, closed. If we’re inventing our reality, why not do it in the dark? The light inside of me was blocking out everything else; the pressure was building, blinding.

  “Okay,” I heard him say at last. “Let it go, and exhale through every pore in your body.”

  And so I let the light escape through my skin, and as I did, I felt an immense release, and as I did, I felt myself lift off the ground.

  Saint Teresa: “It comes, in general, as a shock, quick and sharp, before you can collect your thoughts, or help yourself in any way, and you see and feel it as a cloud, or a strong eagle rising upward, and carrying you away on its wings. I repeat it: you feel and see yourself carried away, you know not whither. For though we feel how delicious it is, yet the weakness of our nature makes us afraid at first, and we require a much more resolute and courageous spirit than in the previous states, in order to risk everything.”

  My eyes flew open, expecting mountaintops, clouds, continents. But I saw only trees, barely blacker than the night they cut into, and I saw that I was seated securely among them, a root or rock digging into my right thigh. Again? Still? I crawled toward Serena, who was sprawled out on her back, her hips raised, moving her head slowly back and forth in the dirt.

  “You see,” she said. “You see, you see, you see.”

  I suppose it was only at this point, so late in the summer, that I truly began to believe. I should remember this: no matter what else, no matter the end we were speeding toward by then, no matter her real motives, her master plan—she did give me what I came for. Later, when Luke had gone, I lay stiff and flat beside her on her narrow mattress, barely wide enough for two bodies, if they don’t move, if their breaths are shallow. I heard somewhere that if you lie next to someone for long enough, your hearts begin to beat in unison. I wonder if the weaker heart slows to mirror the stronger, or if the stronger softens for the weaker, or if both drift slowly together, toward a new rhythm neither has felt before. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke. I thought I’d heard a sound, seen a shadow. But then it was gone, or it had never been there, and soon I was dragged swiftly back down, down, down into the deep sleep of a girl whose heart at last has a twin.

  12

  This is how my parents met: my father was standing on a table, a smear of blood across his cheek. My mother told me this story. He used to throw parties in his apartment, parties like the ones she threw, like the ones he used to come outside for, instead of turning the pages. Only his parties were even wilder, went even later. He was enormous when they met, she told me once, fully bursting at the seams. Yes, physically too, but that wasn’t what she’d meant. He’d just been hit with something, the first time she saw him, and his face was bleeding, and apparently you should have seen the other guy. He’d hopped down to greet her, the new girl, the friend of so-and-so, and she had kissed his cheek, her lips coming away bloody, and then he’d wanted more, so he’d buried his hands in her hair and kissed those bloody lips, and that had been that had been that. Plath herself would have wept.

  “But that was before,” she said.

  “So he’s better now,” I said.

  “Your father didn’t become a Buddhist until after we were married,” she said. “If I had known what was going to happen, you probably wouldn’t even be here.” I stood to leave then, because I always hated to hear her talk this way about him, and she knew it. “I’m glad you are, though,” she said as I walked away. I didn’t say anything. I went up the stairs and shut my bedroom door.

  My father never told me any stories about my mother. The only thing he ever said about her wasn’t even true, as it turned out. “Being married to your mother,” he said, “has been the greatest test of my spiritual practice. That’s why I can never leave her.”

  Think of it as a system of vectors: my father and mother were connected. My father and me. My mother and me. But there was no triangle; somehow that shape never made sense for us. Instead, the two of them were like tectonic plates, drifting slowly away from each other. I didn’t try to choose a side until I was almost completely lost between them. I think I did get lost. I think when I finally jumped it was already too late, and there was nowhere to jump to, or from.

  I know I should say that everything changed when my parents separated. That’s the narrative to which I should cleave. But it didn’t feel like that to me. My father had a new house, that was all, a bigger shrine room. It was my mother with whom I spent the most time, both before and after. Art projects and music, that’s what I remember, my mother dancing in her bare feet until my father came home. After the separation, the only difference was that I went to him.

  Serena was right, you know, about desire. Now that I’ve seen this story to its mortal end, I know she was right. We were all sick with want that summer, stupid with it. I wanted Luke. I wanted Serena. I wanted my father. I wanted belief. I wanted transcendence. It’s not as though I was unusual. In fact, I was trite. But now, I think this is what disturbs me most about religious seekers, as a group—they want so badly, so obviously. They want enlightenment, they want release, they want connection. They are like baby birds, their mouths and necks stretched to impossible sizes, their eyes enormous in their soft skulls, watery and blue with desire. They’re waiting and
waiting and waiting for a strange foreign man in authentic robes to come and pour a bucket of pure light marked Real Religion down their cold crying throats. It’s gross, in the end, to want something so badly. And look, after all, where all that wanting gets you.

  Now I prefer not to want. It is much more dignified. I guess I turned out to be a Buddhist after all.

  But maybe not quite, because these days, waiting in bars after a dull day of work to meet other unhappy strangers, or in my cold, empty apartment, reading desperate novels in the bathtub, it’s the act of desire and not its object that most effectively seduces me. It’s not strong shoulders or soft lips or kindness, or whatever it is women supposedly want in men, when they do, but simply being desired. What I’m saying is, I would get wet for a slab of granite if I was convinced it wanted me badly enough. Lithophilia, etc. This doesn’t change any of my above feelings re: want. It only makes me say, what a fucking masochist.

  Serena and I began meeting Luke every few nights for tummo. Each time I let the ball of light go, I felt closer to flight, but each time I opened my eyes, I found myself still on the ground. Luke talked more about himself at the rock palm than I had ever been able to coerce him to do in the garden—another of Serena’s small sorceries. He told us about his own dharma teacher, a woman who had changed everything for him. He told us, finally, about his sister, Eleanor. He described the color of her hair, and the way she had died, in an accident that he might have prevented, only he was out drinking, only he couldn’t be reached. She was supposed to be with him, but he left her at home. He thought she could take care of herself, but it turned out that she could not. She thought he could do no wrong, but it turned out that he could. He played the guitar at her funeral, a pretty song, his favorite, theirs—I’m in love with the world through the eyes of a girl—but the rest of his family only narrowed their eyes and waited for him to stop. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “But I don’t blame myself either.”

  I was confident that the tummo would work eventually. It was working. During yoga, I closed my eyes and imagined the comet, the channel, and found that I could raise my legs into the air with no assistance. This, on its own, was a miracle. Shastri Dominique clapped and cooed. Even Janet was impressed. And when the four of us met to faint and fall and give ourselves the Feeling, to play our lightness games, I felt we were all getting closer, lighter, smaller, that the tummo had spread to them too, somehow. Janet’s jaw set, her muscles straining. Laurel’s fingertips moving through the air. Serena was wrong. They believed. They wanted this, each in her own way, each desperately. They both wanted more power for themselves, more control of the imperfect lives they lived outside of this. Who wouldn’t? But as far as I knew, they still had no idea about the tummo, a fact that made me want to touch their hair and cheeks whenever we were together, and also made me want to slap them and laugh at the mark I had made.

  One night we climbed into a tree, all four of us, and lay with our spines pressed to its thick branches, our limbs dangling, heads spinning from the nettle tea and the whiskey Serena had let us drink and the number of times we’d fainted and awoken, fainted and awoken, the world becoming more hypothetical every time we looked at it.

  “Admit it, Janet,” Laurel said. “You feel it now. You feel it.”

  “I feel it,” Janet said. Her voice was softer than I had ever heard it. I could see her arms swimming. “Something is happening.”

  “We’re close,” I said. The branch seemed to disappear beneath me. I could feel myself rising, or maybe the ground was falling. “We’re so close.”

  “We are what we think,” Janet said.

  “We are everything,” Laurel said.

  “Form is emptiness,” I said. “Emptiness is form.”

  But Serena was getting impatient.

  “I’ve been thinking about Empress Consort Wu Zetian,” she said when we’d climbed down.

  “‘Consort’ being the nice word for ‘whore’?” Janet said. She leaned against the tree, as if loath to leave it entirely. Laurel dropped her head onto her shoulder.

  “She was the only woman who ever ruled China completely on her own,” Serena said. “She was a whore, I suppose, but that only makes it better.”

  “Well, everyone loves a good whore,” said Laurel, without humor. Janet squeezed her knee.

  Empress Consort Wu Zetian, Serena explained, was the favored concubine of the seventh-century Chinese emperor Taizong, and when he died, she married his son, and when the son had a massive stroke, she took control of China. She is said to be one of the most beautiful women who has ever lived.

  “She had an affair with a monk,” she said. “He betrayed his god for her.”

  “The best god is the one between a girl’s legs,” Laurel said. She reached into her pocket and slipped her button into her mouth: pop.

  “The only true religion,” Serena said.

  “People must be praying wrong,” Janet said.

  “She also installed secret mailboxes in government buildings so people could more easily inform on her enemies,” Serena said. “When she found out that three of her grandchildren had been talking shit about her, she forced them all to commit suicide.”

  “That’s not really suicide, then, is it?” Janet said. She was sitting up straight now, the dreaminess of the tree forgotten.

  “One does what one must,” Serena said imperiously. “Her specialty was this thing she called the human pig. She did it to one of her rivals. A traitor.”

  “Don’t tell us,” said Laurel.

  “She cut out her tongue and poked out her eyes and cut off her arms and legs and then kept her alive, fed her slop, and left her to roll around in her own shit,” said Serena.

  “Pigs have legs, last I checked,” Janet said.

  “The point is,” Serena said, propping herself up on one elbow, “I’m tired of waiting.” Laurel put her button behind her lips again. Serena reached over and snatched it away: pop. “And I’m tired of this,” she said. “It makes you look ridiculous.”

  I looked at Laurel, waiting for outrage, but she was examining her own knees. “I never said it didn’t,” she said.

  “What is happening right now?” Janet said.

  “Nothing,” Serena said. “Nothing is happening. Nothing at all.” She stood, walked to the edge, and threw Laurel’s button over. “Nothing,” she said again. She looked out into the air for a long time. When she finally backed away, she didn’t return to the blanket. Instead, she walked past us and into the woods without a word. I had the feeling of being shipwrecked.

  “It’s not nothing,” I said, but they didn’t seem to hear me.

  “You’re not being careful,” Laurel said. “You’re antagonizing her.” She was looking into the woods, as if waiting for something.

  “I’m not asking you to do anything,” Janet said. “You know what I think.”

  “Careful about what?” I said.

  But they both looked at me in surprise, as if they had forgotten I was there.

  The next day, during our free hours, I came into the dormitory to find Laurel rooting through my things. My bed was a mess; the clothes in my cubby were all over the floor.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “You have no sexy clothes, did you know that?” Her eyes were glassy, unfocused. “You dress like my aunt Pearl.”

  “Serena said we’re not supposed to drink unless it’s for a reason,” I said primly.

  “Who said anyone’s drinking?” she said.

  “What happened with you and Harriet last summer?” I said, to hurt her.

  She set down the pair of jeans she was holding. “Oh, please. What did she say?”

  I raised my eyebrows, a bluff. She seemed to sway a little on the spot.

  “It wasn’t going to work,” she said.

  I still said nothing and Laurel looked down at her hands. “She didn’t fit in. Not everyone liked her.”

  “Janet liked her,” I said, and then as if summoned, Janet a
ppeared at Laurel’s side.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging at the t-shirt in Laurel’s hand. “There’s no point in this. What are you even doing?” She looked apologetic but did not offer to help me pick up my things. Laurel pointed at me and narrowed her eyes, but she let Janet tug her through the door.

  It was only when I started to replace my clothes, folding jeans and rolling shirts, that I noticed Nisha sitting on a bed in the corner, watching me and eating something out of a jar. MAMA’S FIRE TIBETAN HOT SAUCE. I wrinkled my nose.

  “Transcendence, right,” she said, and put another spoonful in her mouth.

  By then, we hadn’t eaten real food in weeks, only sugar and nettles. When we walked back up to the rock palm the following night, I thought I could see spots in the dark, green and watery blobs with empty centers, and then the spots clarified into faces, leering out from the woods with swollen tongues. I tried to keep my head down, but that made me dizzy, and so I put my hands around my waist again to comfort myself. Was this what all beautiful girls saw when they looked out into the night?

  “Tonight,” Serena said, once we had settled around her on the blanket, “is the night.” She kept flexing her fingers, pulling her hands into fists and then loosening them again. She passed around a bottle of whiskey. “I finally figured it out,” she said as we drank. She looked at each of us, one by one, meeting our eyes, taking her time. “I mean I really did it,” she said. “I levitated.”

  Laurel sucked in her breath. Janet only raised her eyebrows.

  “How?” I asked.

  “It was an accident,” she said. “I was on the ledge, alone, and the ground was wet, and I slipped and fell. I thought I was going to die. But then I just—stopped. Floated.” Her voice sounded sweet again.