“They’ve been at it since dawn,” someone said.
And there she was: Serena, standing next to me, looking down at the mandala. It was as if she had simply materialized there, close enough to touch. She was wearing that white dress again. Up close, it looked slightly wrong on her, as though it had been carefully handmade for someone else. I’ll say it now: she was beautiful.
“It’ll be ruined there,” I said.
“Everything is impermanent,” she said.
My stomach turned over at the echo. “It seems sad,” I said without thinking.
She reached out and touched my arm. Her fingers were cool against my skin, and I remembered something I had read: how at extreme altitudes, your heart can explode, without warning.
“There’s nothing sad about destruction,” she said. “Or oblivion.” She let go of my arm and took something out of her pocket—a mirror. She looked into it, turned it over a few times in her hands, looked into it again. Both of her wrists were ringed with red threads, like the tatters of fabric handcuffs. She lifted the mirror into the air, caught the sun in it, made it wink. Woolly continents of green polish floated in the centers of her fingernails.
“Impermanence is neither negative nor positive,” she said. “It is simply a fact.” She held the mirror out to me and twisted around to look at my reflection instead of my face, so that soon it became our reflection, her small shoulder pushing into mine. I saw myself blush.
Consider Narcissus, kneeling at the pond: While he desires to quench his thirst, a different thirst is created. While he drinks, he is seized by the vision of his reflected form. He loves a bodiless dream. Or consider the girl standing in front of the mirror, raising a hand. First the mirror-self obediently raises a hand back, but then she smirks, revolts. The horror of the self not quite reflected, the imprint with its own agenda, the created, imperfect double off to throttle its maker—well. It gets us every time.
“Who are you?” Serena asked my reflection.
“Where is the self?” I said. “What color is it?”
Her eyes widened a little. “Oh,” she said. “You’re one of us.”
I said nothing. How could I have, then? It was as if she had seen through me at once, put her finger on the tenderest place, the reason I was there, the reason I already loved her. How badly I wanted to be one of them, yes, one of anyone, but especially this, a believer, a Buddhist, yes, like her, like my father. Even if I wasn’t sure I knew what that meant. Did it mean anything at all? My mother’s voice was still in my head. Here was Serena, offering it to me anyway, like a crown, assuming it was already mine: behold the easy generosity of the truly secure.
She closed one eye, then the other. She slipped the mirror back into her pocket. “You’re also the girl who’s doing rota in the garden,” she said. I nodded, but it hadn’t been a question. One of the monks tutted softly under his breath. Another murmured in response. I wondered if they were listening to us. What drifted through their minds as they crafted their pristine monument to nothingness? It could have been anything. It could, of course, have been nothing.
Without warning, Serena took a step forward and kissed one of them on the very top of his bare head. He looked up at her and smiled. “Thank you,” he said. I was startled at his lack of an accent, and then ashamed.
“Bye,” she said, like she was leaving me at the mall.
“Wait,” I said, but she had already walked away, and if she heard me, she didn’t turn her head. I stood there, watching the monks work, vaguely hoping she might change her mind and come back for me, until I heard the blow of the conch shell that summoned us all to dinner.
That night, I heard Laurel tap, and Janet tap. As usual, I turned my face toward the door, waiting for that slice of light to open against the ceiling. But instead, after a few seconds, I felt a hand prod my shoulder.
“Get up.” It was Laurel. “Get your shoes.”
I sat up so quickly I nearly hit my head on the overhead beam. Harriet shifted above me.
“Come on, Olivia,” Janet said, her voice flat but not unkind. “Come with us. Carpe PM.”
Laurel snorted. I hesitated, wondering how it was that a girl who never smiled found it within herself to make a pun. Then I pulled on my sneakers and followed them out of the dormitory. They paused in the doorway, only long enough for each of their tongues to appear, dark wet shapes in the dim light, thrust toward Magda, who was snoring in her single bed, her night guard already spat onto the pillow next to her face. I kept my own tongue in my mouth, not ready, after all, to pledge my allegiance just yet.
They led me across the dark grounds in silence, until we finally turned into what I could barely identify as one of the canopied trailheads Magda had pointed out on the first day. Janet and Laurel stalked upward while I tripped over rock and root, dirtying my palms, scraping my knees. Neither of them stopped to help when I stumbled. After I cried out for the third time, Janet paused and lit a flashlight, a little mercy. It bobbed against her hip, and the circle of light it left on the ground widened and tightened, widened and tightened, as if breathing.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll find out,” Laurel said, her voice dim and disembodied.
But of course, I already knew.
When I think about Serena’s tent, I remember it as bigger than the others. Though I know that memory is false, or perhaps implanted. In reality, it must have been a utilitarian, one-person triangle like all the rest of the tents on the mountain. Inside, there would have been a thin mattress on top of a narrow wooden pallet, a small clapboard bookcase, and a single flashlight that expanded into a weak yellow lamp, all of it tinged green by the nylon sheeting, all of it smelling of bug spray. The expansiveness I remember must have been Serena herself, or the fact that, as I was about to discover, she had brought pillows and blankets and candles and a gold Moroccan ottoman and sheepskins and silks to throw over everything, like layers of luscious fat draped over cold gray bones.
Janet whistled as we approached, and when we heard an answering cough, Laurel unzipped the tent from the outside. I stepped in after them to find Serena sitting cross-legged at the head of her cot in a red silk kimono, a large book open in her lap and a box of ladyfingers, almost as large, on the pillow by her side.
“Oh good,” she said, without looking up. “You’re here. Listen to this description of Maya, will you? ‘Her hair is soft, clean, and sweetly scented, black like the excellent bee and arranged in braids.’” She raised her head. “Black, like the excellent bee!” Her mouth looked like it opened on fishhooks; she had a joker smile. Her teeth were a little disorganized, I noticed. This did not detract from her overall appeal.
Janet settled cross-legged on the ottoman in the corner. “What’s that now?” she asked.
“Lalitavistara Sūtra,” Serena said. “‘Her eyes are like lotus petals, her teeth are like stars in the sky, her thighs and calves are like the trunk of an elephant, and her knees have a shapely form. Surely she can only be a divine maiden.’”
“Shapely knees indicate divinity,” said Janet. “Noted.”
“It does make sense,” said Serena.
“I have ugly knees,” said Laurel mournfully. She lay down on the foot of Serena’s bed and stretched both legs into the air. Her knees looked normal to me, but I didn’t say anything.