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.

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.