My father was a Buddhist. He too was looking for something. All my life, he’d flown across countries and continents, visiting meditation centers and monasteries, temples and contemplative schools, their names strange and musical: Paro Taktsang, Vajrapani Institute, Dechen Chöling, Samyé Ling, Naropa. I sounded them out to myself in bed while he was gone, spelled them in wet fingertip on my thigh. No one but us knew words like these. He’d go for a week, sometimes a month, while I did homework and ate breakfast and sat alone in my room, and then he’d come home, sliding his suitcase under the bed in the manner of turning a latch. He always seemed different to me in the days following his return: there was a new delicate rawness there, a lingering sense of sublimation, as if his external layers had been steamed loose and peeled away. After a while, they would grow back. A while after that, he’d leave again. It was not dissimilar to ecdysis.
My mother called these trips his retreats from reality, to which my father would say, when he returned, reality is a construct, consciousness an illusion, and my mother would either laugh or turn away, depending on how long he’d been gone that time. After a while, she stopped calling his trips anything, and a while after that, he moved to a small house one town to the east of ours. The direction seemed significant at the time; I see now that it was not. It was from this small house that he would eventually vanish entirely, without a word, without saying goodbye.
Of course: a vanishing preceded by a goodbye is no vanishing at all, though it can be just as incomprehensible.
The beginning I know for sure. Once upon a time, my father went to the Levitation Center. I also know the next part: and he never came back. He missed his weekend with me, and then the next. I remember my mother’s silence filling the car as we waited outside the darkened windows of that new eastern house, engine running, pretending the pile of plastic-wrapped newspapers breeding steadily on his porch meant nothing, nothing at all.
disappear (v.) from dis- “do the opposite of” + appear “come into view,” from the Old French aparoir, aperer “come to light, come forth”; see also: vanish, die out, abandon; see also: no letter, no call; see also: a year and more without a single message to your daughter, who is wondering what could have happened, who is alone with her furious mother, and who misses you.
“You’ve missed the welcome talk,” said Magda. Her bare feet were thin and coated in white dust from the driveway. They looked dead. “Are you hungry?”
My stomach recoiled. The cab, the mole. The slap slap slap of the body on the dash. I shook my head.
“All right.” She shrugged with one shoulder and I wondered how old she was. “Let’s drop off your bag.” She led me inside the building and down a short hallway. Most of the program participants slept in four small dormitories, she explained, though a handful would spend the summer in tents a half mile or so up the mountain. The tents were private, and more comfortable in the heat, but they also cost more, and, as I would soon find, few parents sending their daughters here wanted to grant them any extra comforts. Most of us were here to be punished.
The dormitory was unlit when we entered, but I could see that the wood supports of the bunk beds had been painted a dark green; the effect was of an encroaching forest, a bedroom Birnam Wood. The only single bed was positioned next to the door we had come through; Magda stepped protectively in front of it. The space was littered with sharp-colored detritus: suitcases half-gutted and abandoned, bottles of shampoo laid out on beds, sneakers all over the floor. But it smelled like cedar, and it was dark and cool, and there was a wide mirror on the back wall that reflected the door. Even then, before it all happened, I’d been the kind of girl who needed to be able to see the door in every room, to clock the exits, register all potential avenues of approach. It wasn’t cowardice, not exactly. I just wanted to see my murderer first. I wanted to see the blade, or the gun, or whatever it was going to be. Noose, wrench, kitchen knife. At home, I would bare my throat to the tight-latched door of my bedroom, eyes on the shadows until I fell asleep. But you know what they say: curiosity killed, etc.
The Center’s annual summer program was called “Special Teen Retreat: Becoming a Warrior in Body, Mind, and Heart.” The website had boasted that we’d spend eight weeks exploring the possibilities that unfold when we are fully present in the moment, and also that we’d deepen our awareness of our actions and their effect on the world, and also that there’d be lots of heart-cleansing activities. There was no air-conditioning. There was no internet connection. There was no cell service. We would be carefully supervised at all times. That “Special” was code, you see. Privately, I called it Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls. I was looking forward to the heart-cleansing activities.
So the girls at the Center were trouble. I knew that going in. They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot-blood girls. They were girls who reveled. They were girls who liked boys and back seats, who slid things that weren’t theirs into their tight pockets, who lit fires and did doughnuts in the high school parking lot. They were girls who left marks. They were girls who snuck. Girls who drank whiskey and worse by the waterfront, looking out at the smeared reflections of the streetlights, making plans instead of wishes. They were girls who ran away, who inked their own arms with needles and ballpoint pens, who got things pierced below the neck. Below the neck, ladies, can you believe it? Only whores, etc. etc., as my mother never tired of telling me. They pierced too, these girls, and hit, and were sent out of gym class for raising bruises on the girls whose daddies brought them to school in Porsches, though some of their daddies had Porsches too. That wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point! They had their problems. They had their demands. They were shoplifters and potheads, arsonists and bullies, boy crazy and girl crazy, split and scarred. They were, some of them, cruel. They were, more of them, angry—angry at their parents, at their schools, at their congressmen, at their bodies, at the painted white lines they saw everywhere, telling them no no no when they wanted yes—they were girls who were bored, so bored, or they were girls who were the opposite, who were so full up of feeling that they couldn’t simply do their times tables or learn their French conjugations or go to the movies on a Saturday night and discuss the relative cuteness of so-and-so’s haircut and let the age-appropriate boy next to them drag his sweaty palm around and around and around their pretty knees. They were too full up for that. They were too full up for caution. So they were girls who got caught. And they were girls who got sent away. They were girls whose mothers couldn’t deal with them for one more minute, not alone, not without help, not this summer while you sit in the office all day and come home late after “golf,” Carl, really, I can’t; girls whose fathers thought maybe some Good Clean Mountain Air and some Good Far Eastern Religion would cure them, since nothing else had. You know the girls I mean, because every school has them, every neighborhood, including yours, especially mine. I was not one of them, of course. Not yet.
There were some sixty of these girls in the Center’s main shrine room when Magda led me inside, all jostling and laughing and shouting at one another. I stood blinking for a moment in the doorway. This was an enormous version of a space I recognized: my father’s own personal shrine room, which had once been tucked in the attic of what was now my mother’s house. Here, as there, the white walls were hung with gold silks, the wood floor was patterned with red cushions, and there was a squat shrine at the front, which held candles, sticks of incense, framed images of old men and green goddesses, and several unidentified objects—one was definitely a cookie—stuck into little bowls of rice. Here, as there, I had to remove my shoes to enter. Here, as there, I was required to bow as I crossed the threshold.