But no one else was paying any attention to the room, or to the shrine, or to the threshold. No one else was holding their breath. Nearly every body I saw was in motion, girls scrambling to touch one another, shoulders and hair, all of them seeking the best positions, the best friends, the long-desired faces of their age-old enemies. The sounds—shrieks of recognition, cracked-jaw chattering, spiraled laughter—bounced busily back and forth between the walls, building to a cacophony that sparked around me like an electrical storm. To say hyenas is too pat, but: hyenas. They have the same stalk, the same hysteria. They are equally dangerous; this much should be obvious to anyone. At least here no one knew me, or knew I was any different from them. No one even looked in my direction. I found a safe, silent cushion and sat.
It was then, in the midst of the racket and rough, that I first saw her. She sat unmoving in the far corner by a wide picture window, her thick black hair like a calligrapher’s mark, swiped straight down her back, nearly to the floor. Next to her was a tall blonde, perched and pretty as a bow, and on the other side, a smaller girl with messy purple hair and something that looked like a crown painted on her cheek. But my eyes kept sliding to the girl in the middle. She wore a faded floral sundress in a room full of girls out to prove their grit; her brown shoulders shone. She was calm, expressionless: the small black eye of the storm. I felt a pulse of something as I looked at her, the same feeling you get when you turn a corner and are confronted with something unexpected: a magnificent mountain range, maybe, or the slick, fresh corpse of a deer. Direct experience, my father would have called it. When what you see bypasses language entirely. A slap to the face, for instance. A sudden fall. Don’t be fooled by the language I’m using now, that simply can’t be helped. She was beyond it, yes—but only for a moment.
A warm ringing filled the room. There was a woman sitting cross-legged next to the shrine. She wore a loose blue dress and a jade necklace so large and heavy-looking I couldn’t help but imagine the indents it must have been making on her breasts, which were large and heavy-looking themselves. This was Shastri Dominique, the Center’s program director, who would lead us in our meditation practice for the summer. She was probably in her early thirties, I think now, though the girlish braids she wore, thrown casually over her shoulders, made her appear far younger. “The basics of meditation are simple,” she said. “You sit, you follow the breath. Keep your eyes open, but soft, resting gently on the floorboards in front of you. You are trying to gain control of your mind.” She spread her hands for a moment before letting them fall back to her knees. “Do not force your thoughts away: simply watch them as they arise, note them, then let them fall away. If you notice yourself drifting off, say to yourself thinking and come back to the breath. That’s all you need to do, for now.” She struck the singing bowl again.
I relaxed a little. This was something I knew how to do. I assumed the posture my father had taught me. The girls around me groaned. The girls around me sighed. The girls around me fidgeted and tittered and poked one another behind raised palms. But the three in the far corner sat as straight as Dominique, as silent as my father, their palms resting gently on their knees, their eyes on the floorboards in front of them. Even then I could tell they knew not only what they were doing, but why. Even then I could tell that they believed in all of this. For this reason, I couldn’t pry my eyes from their upright spines, their parted lips. For this reason, I knew I had come to the right place.
It was despite my mother’s protests that my father had taught me to meditate at all. I remember her standing in the doorway of his shrine room as he arranged me on the cushion, her arms crossed. I watched her, not without prejudice, but confident she wouldn’t enter unless invited. She wasn’t, she didn’t. But she didn’t leave, either. My father taught me to focus on my breath by imagining a little girl, my own age but in miniature, with silver, sparkling hair, who rode the air out of my body like it was a wild horse, her hands loose above her head, my out-breath squeezed between her thighs. I still imagine her sometimes, though meditation is harder now.
My mother rolled her eyes at this instruction. She did not approve of religion, of this kind or any other. But meditation was not religion, my father explained. “Nor is it relaxation, despite what people think,” he said. “It is preparation.” He and I sat beside each other on our cushions, the thin stick of incense turning to ash on the shrine. My mother had finally gone from the doorway. It looked smaller without her. I noticed for the first time that the clean white paint on one side was chipped, revealing a grimy taupe underneath, and I felt a small plume of anger, as if she’d broken something that was mine.
“Preparation for what?” I asked.
“For waking up to the true nature of things.”
But when I asked what the true nature of things was, he only smiled and held a finger to his lips.
It wasn’t that I expected to find my father at the Center that summer, of course, or not literally: waiting for me on my bottom bunk, say, soft hands folded in his lap. Too much time had passed for that. There were too many places to go. He had never been loyal to a single meditation community, or temple, or school. Retreats, plural. (Realities, plural too, if we’re being honest here.) My father drifted. My father sampled. But he had come here, to the Levitation Center, and it was here that something had changed. His pattern, once so familiar, had been broken. You know what they say: once you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. If you’re smart, that is.
So once the world he’d left twice over became unbearable, I followed him. I thought the Center itself might have the answer—an old diary, a forwarding address, that sort of thing. I’d seen the movies. But more than that: I thought that if I learned this place, I would also learn him—that if I did what he did, loved what he loved, believed what he believed, I too might be transformed. Into what exactly, I didn’t know. Something new and pink-skinned, fresh and holy: a girl worth coming back for.
Maybe the Center had that power, maybe not. But I knew I couldn’t go home, not to her, not anymore, not unless I found a way to change everything.
So I sat. I followed the breath. I tried to gain control of my mind. But a few minutes later I found myself staring through the picture window, watching a tall man with a black beard and a black topknot digging a hole in the lawn beside a wide path, a plant on the grass in front of him, exposed and unpotted, its roots a bouquet of bare legs, and thinking about the man’s strong digging arms, wet with sweat and reflecting the warm evening light, hairier and harder than my father’s, hairier and harder than any man’s I’d ever seen, then—thinking—thinking about thinking about the man’s strong digging arms, and then thinking about thinking about thinking about the strong digging arms, and then thinking about thinking about thinking—
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that two of the girls in the corner were watching the man through the window too: the smaller girl impassive, her head barely turned, the blonde leaning forward, biting down hard on one blood-red lip. The dark-haired girl was not looking at him. She hadn’t moved at all since the bowl had been struck.
I turned back to the man, wondering who he was, and who he was to them, but he was gone. There was only a sunburst of loose soil on the close-cropped grass where he had knelt. I couldn’t even tell which plant was new.