As soon as I started to become nihilistic about my nausea, the cab crested through a final bend and pulled into a white sand driveway the size of a swimming pool. A woman was waiting there, wearing a white dress. She introduced herself as Magda and took my hand, as though she knew me. For a moment, I tried to pull away, but she held on tight, and I was unsteady enough in the thin air that I let her. By now, we were almost eight thousand feet up.

I was late, Magda told me. I was the last, the very last to arrive.

She led me across the driveway toward the Center’s main building. Paths lined with globular pink peonies scribbled out in the grass to either side, but we didn’t follow any of them. Instead we strode, hands linked, across the white expanse. The duffel bag on my shoulder felt heavy, much heavier than I remembered, and I wondered, briefly, if someone could have hidden something inside of it at the airport, when I wasn’t paying attention—a hard-packed pallet of powder, say, or a recording device, or the body of a small child. No, no. Don’t be silly. That’s not what this story is about. (Isn’t it?)

Magda began talking, pointing out all the different buildings, the different trails, listing the daily activities, the times I’d be expected for meditation and meals. I couldn’t follow any of it. Commissary, dormitory, promontory, bedtime story. I stumbled on a bright white rock; it sparked across the sand like a popping kernel. Magda only tightened her grip. She gave an overall impression of linen and salt. They say everyone faints at least once during their first week at the Center, before they acclimate to the altitude. (Altitude is a perfect word for itself, don’t you think, all peaks and valleys and places to slip.) But I’d been drinking steadily from my battered canteen, the one my father had given me years before at a place very much like this one, and so I didn’t fall. Besides, I was busy looking back over my shoulder.

Back over my shoulder, the wind had caught in the loose white sand of the driveway, and was coaxing it upward into a steamy funnel. A group of strange-looking girls, who had clearly been installed at the Center long enough for their heads to become utterly untethered from the old brown world down below, appeared as if from nowhere. They yipped and laughed and took turns running through the snow-white mini-twister, holding hands, shrieking like children at a water park, coming out the other side with thick white eyebrows and heavy white eyelashes and red, sand-scratched cheeks, an instant aging. Magda turned and called out to them and, after a few more furtive whoops and peals, they ran past us toward the main building, sand streaming off their bodies like water.