After what felt like hours, Dominique coaxed a long, final note from the bowl. I felt it settle in my stomach, as if swallowed. “Get some sleep,” she said as girls stomped past her. “Doing all this nothing is going to be hard work.”
I was the last one to leave the shrine room, except for Dominique, who continued to sit, her eyes soft and unfocused. I bowed again in the doorway and followed the frantic sounds back to the dormitory. The dark-haired girl was nowhere to be seen, but her friends had claimed a bunk bed only two away from mine. The others seemed to give them a wide berth. Needless to say, this only made me curiouser.
The blonde was tacking photographs of her friends to the green supports around her pillow, positioning one over another and then changing her mind, matching a red tack to a boy’s red sweater, then putting a yellow tack where the red one had been. The other girl had climbed to the bunk above and lay motionless on the thin mattress, her sneakers dangling. I was sitting still on my own bottom bunk, thinking about what I could say to them, how I might start, when a head swung down and introduced itself as Harriet.
“I hope you don’t snore,” Harriet said. “Because I’ve been known to smother people in my sleep.” She grinned at what must have been my look of horror and reached out to pinch my cheek. How easy these things are for some; I still have not learned how to be so bold with strangers. This was Harriet’s third year at the Center, she told me. “It’s this or summer school. Math being much worse than meditation, in my opinion.” She rattled off the names of everyone else in the room, and I listened politely, though of course I only cared about two of them. The girl with the purple hair was named Janet and the one with the photos was Laurel. The other one, Harriet told me unprompted, maybe seeing the look on my face, was called Serena. None of them were to be approached.
When I asked, as casually as I could, why not, Harriet yawned and flipped back up onto her bed. “You’ll wind up regretting it,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”
For organizational purposes, we had been separated into four groups named after the four Tibetan dignities: Lions (traditional associations: joyfulness, freedom from doubt), Tigers (satisfaction, unconditional confidence), Garudas (freedom, boundlessness), and Dragons (power, ultimate wisdom). Our dormitory of twelve had been assigned the Garuda as our emblem, and once I saw its picture, I thought I understood. Lions, Tigers, and Dragons (oh my) were one thing, but the Garuda was the only one of the four that was truly a monster, an enormous birdlike, humanlike thing with wings and arms and a beak, a fat belly and breasts and an unruly look on its face. (The word monster comes from the Latin root monere: “to warn.” Gruesome creatures are always, by etymological necessity, portents.) It seemed right that I had been put into this group, that I would spend the summer marching under the flag of this patched-together thing. My body felt to me the way the body of the Garuda looked: bulged and bulbous in all the wrong places, bones and fat in unholy organizations that seemed ready to tear or terrify.
Of course, there was no point in thinking this way. Our group assignments were random, or perhaps alphabetical. Of course Laurel, who brushed her hair a hundred times each night, who had brought her silk sheets from home, who would wear that bright red lipstick every day that summer, right up to the horrible end, was no monster. (Though certainly, in retrospect, an unheeded warning.) It was only that I had a soft spot for metaphor, for the laying on of language, especially when it could be used against myself. I may not have entirely outgrown this habit.
That first night, I couldn’t sleep. The wooziness brought on by the altitude was supposed to make sleep easier, or at least that’s what Dominique had told us. Our bodies craved rest to reorganize their expectations, to build new blood cells to combat the sudden oxygenlessness. But unfamiliar physical sensations have always driven me to distraction. It’s the reason I have never succeeded at doing drugs—other than the little pills that, these days, I need to get any kind of sleep at all. Now I can tell you that the equation for the physiology of altitude sickness is Vgas=A/TDk(P1−P2) and that really, we had it easy; we weren’t so far up. Still, my light-headedness kept me awake. I was overwhelmed by the suspicion that if I stopped thinking about my breath for a single moment, my body, with all its shoddily assembled parts—breasts, belly, beak—would simply forget to take in air and I would die.
So I lay there, staring at the planks above my head, the shallow impression Harriet’s body made in the mattress, concentrating on continuing to breathe. I tested my limbs, raising first my arms and then my legs, slowly, quietly, inches above my mattress so no one would see. But everyone else was snoring, knocked out by the thinned air.
Or nearly everyone else. After the lights had been out for hours, I heard a soft tap, fingertips on wood, and then another. Slowly, I turned my head. I could barely see Janet—she climbed down her ladder and landed silently on the floor. Laurel was already standing, holding her shoes. They crept to the dormitory door and, after a moment’s fumbling, let themselves out. I tried to watch them go, but I saw only the briefest bright slice of hallway light, and then its opposite, a bruise lingering on the backs of my eyelids. I forgot about my breath entirely as I wondered where they had gone, and why, and if they had been swallowed by the night, or if they were out there somewhere doing the swallowing. I waited up for them as long as I could, but I fell asleep before they returned.
I dreamed of nothing, or of falling.
2
I am a person of binges. I have never understood the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Look: it’s irrational, impossible. See fig. 1: when I was a child, I became obsessed with horses. I know, I know, all little girls are obsessed with horses. But I lived for them. I gorged on them. I begged for them in any incarnation: films, toys, patterns, photographs, posters. Once, I cut the hair off a Barbie and superglued it to the base of my spine. I thrilled to wear my pony tail under my clothes, in secret, my parents knowing nothing, thinking me merely human, but it rubbed off after two days, leaving long blond doll hairs clotting in the corners of the house. My birthday came, and my parents, who were still together then, splurged on an afternoon of horseback riding lessons. When it was time to leave, they found that I had knotted my hair into the horse’s mane so elaborately that they had to cut me away from it with a pair of rusted barn shears. I still have the clump of matted girl-and-horse hair hidden in a drawer, though after all the times I put it in my mouth, I admit that it is somewhat the worse for wear.
This is all just to say that in retrospect, I’m not so surprised by what happened that summer. Like everything, it was my own fault.
In the morning, a wild-haired Harriet came crashing down from the bunk above me. She hit the floor in a bra and a pair of boxers, and for the first time I could see that she had a pair of luminous wings tattooed across the pale skin of her back; upon closer inspection, I found that the wings were made of tiny knives. Once she had collected herself, I followed her to the Garudas’ shared bathroom, which was outfitted with six showers; four toilets; three sinks; two tiny, too-high mirrors; and one huge claw-foot bathtub that looked like it had simply been dropped into the middle of the room, disrupting the tile pattern. It wasn’t clear to me what the original intent for this building had been. Surely not this. What builder could have imagined it? I kept looking up into the tilted rafters, trying to figure it out. Creamery? Granary? Forge? Hotel? Hospital? Harriet tripped into one of the stalls; she cursed as she peed. Clearly, those wings were merely decorative: the girl was clumsy. I might have laughed, but I too felt unsteady. I balanced against the doorframe as I went through. We were dizzy, drunk on plain air, high on height.