The image in question is now stored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, labeled as an “artistic action,” as if one could keep an action in a drawer. Obviously not: at least one artist tried to copy Klein’s feat by throwing himself casually out a second-floor window, expecting to fly. In some accounts, he breaks a leg. In others, he escapes unharmed.

Scientific attempts have been rather more convincing. An artist in Barcelona recently developed a system that uses electromagnetic feedback and coupled resonant wireless power transfer to suspend a lit bulb between two blocks. The bulb will last for years, he says, floating there, and use half the energy of a regular incandescent fixture.

There are ways to do it with magnets. That much should be obvious to anyone. Magnetic quantum forces are currently being researched for use in nanomachines, which could, sometime soon, have tiny levitating parts whirring along within them.

My next-door neighbors have a trampoline, and their children spend hours on it, bouncing and bouncing, never satisfied. They too want to renounce the earth. They too feel the edges of something when they’re at the apex of a bounce, something that, if they could only get a little higher, a little longer, they know would change them.

Look, any Buddhist would be quick to tell you: levitation isn’t the point. But it fascinates.

After that night on the ledge, Serena removed herself from our lives. She stopped coming to meet us. We stopped going to her tent. Whole days went by without her. But just when I’d start to think that she’d evaporated entirely, she would appear in the shrine room for a moment or an afternoon. When she did, she did not try to speak to us. She meditated with intent. She nodded to Dominique, who blinked back. She looked far away, too tangled up in her own thoughts to even notice we were there.

This was worse, of course, than her not being there at all.

It’s hard to explain exactly how my feelings about her had shifted. If violence is primarily authoritarian, violence deferred should be a triumph for the intended victim. Why then did I feel so disappointed? I can liken it only to the moment when, during a climactic scene in a film you’re watching in the theater—perhaps it’s a horror, perhaps a romance—you notice, for an instant, the texture of the screen itself. The result is a kind of dissociation, stemming from the realization that the drama in which you’ve been so invested is merely a projection of light onto a flat, imperfect canvas. Which, of course, you knew all along. You understand what movies are. You’re not an idiot. But thereafter you can’t focus on the shimmering images because you keep returning to the worn spot in the center of your vision, the unseemly sight of that old gray screen, stripped of all its charming artifice.