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.