It may not shock you to learn that in the years between that summer and this one, I’ve come to be suspicious of American practitioners of Eastern philosophies. There’s something so rapacious about them: all those blond ladies sitting on cushions in their work slacks, the round-faced, dirty-haired college sophomores with their elastic mala bead bracelets—or else with spectacles and sweaters, high-chair philosophers spouting the Glass family values—the sweaty middle-aged men with framed pictures of their dead cats in their pockets, looking for Inner Peace. All that performative kindness. All that practiced calm. I’m sounding like my mother, I know. I know, I know, I know. But I don’t mean that there are no American practitioners who are truly engaged in the concepts. There are. Of course there are. I only mean that I’ve seen a pattern. Upper-middle-class white people, looking for meaning. Looking to hook themselves to someone else’s old magic. (fig.1: the booming yoga pant industry. fig. 2: the glut of mindfulness apps.) Even Buddhism’s emergence in this country, primarily via the Beats, leaves something to be desired. Sure, Ginsberg was on the level, despite being probably a pedophile, and Snyder was a true believer—that beautiful man, still in the woods somewhere, because sometimes the good do grow old—but Kerouac, most famous of them all (typing), was a terrible Buddhist. He couldn’t even sit for meditation because he had knee problems, and on his deathbed, scared as hell of hell, he renounced his heretic Eastern practice and converted back to Catholicism. Like, as Serena put it once, a fucking punk.

I sat with Janet and Laurel the next morning at breakfast. Laurel ignored me, but Janet began telling us how Sarah had asked her to come back to the Center as part of a Kyūdō exhibition that winter, how she was trying to figure out a way to scrape the money together, how she was the only one to be asked. I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I swirled my spoon around and around in my oatmeal. “What’s the matter?” Janet asked me. What’s the matter, what’s the matter with you?

What’s the matter? we ask. Nothing, we answer. It’s a strange question, forward or backward. What’s the matter? Nothing is the matter. No thing is matter. There is no matter here. Only emptiness.

matter (n.) from the Latin mater “origin, source, mother,” or possibly from the same root as the Latin domus, “house”; see also: no one ever leaves the house where they were born. See also: my mother believed in nothing.

That afternoon, I went to the garden. Luke was watering the plants, his shirt tied around his head. He had his back to me, and with his head covered like that, he could have been almost anyone. Anyone with blue cloth hair, any kind of magical cartoon space prince.