The day unfolded in a pattern that would become familiar to me over the next weeks. Morning meditation was followed by breakfast—always, always oatmeal, though there was a rotating selection of fresh fruit to go with it—and some kind of assigned activity. That first day the Garudas had ikebana, the ancient art of contemplative flower arranging. It looked simple enough to slot the cut flowers into the barbed half-moon bases they gave us, but I couldn’t get my arrangements to look anything like our instructor’s perfect curls of stem and stamen. Walking around the room, she praised Laurel’s elaborate construction, and nodded at Janet’s minimalist restraint, and ignored me completely. She was stamen-like herself, our instructor, a thin woman whose limbs seemed connected to her body by only the barest bits of bone and skin. Though she was very old, and the flesh on her face was loose and frayed, I could tell by the way she moved that she had once been beautiful. I wondered if she was surprised when she looked into the mirror at night. I wondered what, exactly, she saw.
At lunch, I sat with Harriet and her friend Nisha, a potobsessed Indian girl from Denver who told me that her adoptive parents had sent her to the Center instead of any other clean-her-up summer program because they thought she could learn about her “heritage.” Nisha was a Garuda too: the night before, I had noticed her stuffing fistfuls of wrinkled clothes from her rucksack directly into her cubby, transforming it into a swollen block of multicolored cotton before deciding she needed something from the center and pulling it all out again.
Nisha and Harriet asked me polite questions about my hometown, my favorite films, my preferred flavors. I liked them. Harriet was even funny: a jumble of stories and auburn hair and loud laughter, she was the daughter of some kind of Oregonian lumber baron and kept getting arrested for destruction of property. “Wood is surprisingly delicate,” she told me in a goofy stage whisper that made Nisha snort. “And so are my neighbors’ feelings.” Nisha, on the other hand, was tense and jittery—I could see why she preferred to be high—but she was nice enough, despite her habit of laboriously describing old drug experiences. Apparently, there is nothing in the world quite as mind-blowing as driving over a mountain, totally stoned, as the sun comes up and “The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts 2 & 3” plays on the stereo (not Part 1, she was sure to make clear; Part 1 is just a pop song). Even back then, when I more or less believed her, I was bored by stories like these. But which version, Harriet wanted to know, which car, which mountain, which strain?
After lunch, we had rota: our two hours of daily work around the Center. “Essentially, we pay through the nose for the privilege to come and do their chores,” Harriet said, raising her pinkie in the air as she took an elaborate slurp from her iced tea.
“But despite the name, there is no actual rotation,” Nisha said.
“You’ll notice that they always make the really violent girls do the dirty work,” Harriet said. She stood and stretched her arms, looking around the room; the knives on her back seemed to bend around the straps of her tank top, like a warning. “I’m not sure it’s such a great strategy.”
“Sometimes it kind of tires them out,” Nisha said. “Usually it just annoys them.”
I followed them to the corkboard outside the dining hall where our assignments had been posted, handwritten in ink on thick creamy paper.
“Office again,” Harriet groaned. “Kill me dead.”
“Laundry room,” Nisha said, pointing at her own name. “Boring.” She looked at me. “What’d you get?”
I pretended to scan for my name, though of course I had located it immediately. “Garden,” I said.
“Garden?” Harriet said. She gripped my arm. “Since when is there rota in the garden?”
The expression on her face alarmed me. “Does that count as dirty work?” I said. If Shastri Dominique thought I was violent, it had to mean that she knew what I had done. It had to mean that my mother had called, maybe that she was coming to get me.
Nisha took a step back and looked me over, as if I’d been in disguise this whole time, and had finally revealed myself. “No,” she said. “It definitely does not.”
The Center, Harriet and Nisha informed me, sourced much of its food from the large organic garden on the grounds. But the garden itself was not of particular interest to them. The appeal of the garden was the gardener. Luke lived at the Center year-round—though where exactly, neither of them knew. Not in the main building, where we slept, and where the rest of the staffers had their beds. Not in a tent. He seemed to sleep nowhere. Everywhere was also an option. He wasn’t the only man at the Center that summer—there were a few other male staff members, and some visiting monks who came and went on their own schedules—but for the girls, he may as well have been. Strong digging arms, etc.
“He’s kind of a legend,” Harriet said.
“He’s the most advanced practitioner here,” Nisha said. “Even though he’s really young.”
“He’s like a prodigy,” Harriet said.
“Our own personal holy man.”
“I heard he can actually levitate.”
“Meditate under water.”
“Fly, even.”
“He used to be engaged.”
“He’s not anymore.”
“He does something to the plants.”
“No one knows what it is.”
“He never lets anyone past the fence.”
“Especially girls.”
Nisha pointed me in the direction of the garden. “But I guess you’ll be the exception,” she said.
“Good luck,” said Harriet, in that singsong, ironic way she had, but when I looked back, neither girl was smiling.
The garden was just out of sight of the main buildings, down a matted path that curved gently around the side of the mountain. It was the size of a baseball field and, like many actual baseball fields, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, a man was squatting among the plants, half-hidden by leaves but clearly wearing a pair of pink floral gardening gloves. For the briefest of moments, he looked exactly like my father. Then I blinked and shook away the association. He was much too young, for one thing. The shoulders were as wide, but the coloring was all wrong. The hair wasn’t right, or the face. And yet, even through the blinking, the shaking: there was something.
“Don’t touch the fence,” he said without looking up. “It’s electric.”
I hadn’t been planning to touch the fence, but now I found that I very much wanted to.
“Why?” I said.
He stood and wiped the sweat away from his face, leaving a few traces of dirt in his beard. His shirt was open a little. His throat shone like a bird’s. I turned my face up to the sky to avoid staring. Was it bluer this far up, or was I imagining it?
“Keeps out the animals,” he said. “Girls included.”
“They said I had rota here,” I said. The fence was tall, at least eight feet high. I thought I could hear it vibrating.
He considered this. “How are you with plants?” he asked.
“I used to help my dad in the garden,” I said.
He smiled then, and pointed to a door in the side of the fence that I hadn’t seen before. “Come on in,” he said.