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.