During most months of the year, the Levitation Center was a panspiritual contemplative community that held meditation retreats, organized talks by spiritual leaders of various lineages, and offered programs with names like “Intermediate Mindfulness Training” and “Open Sky Intensive” and “Walking the Path of Indestructible Wakefulness.” Its visitors practiced Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, among other things. Dowsing, psychology, iridology, judo, aikido, tae kwon do, oil painting, law, yoga, croquet, bodywork, vegetarianism, Reiki, piano, lucid dreaming, crystal healing, palm reading, gratitude, abstinence, tantric sex. The usual assortment of practices for people like these: people who are looking for something.

The Levitation Center wasn’t its real name, of course. That’s just what everyone called it. According to legend, it was the only bit of land left in America where levitation was still possible, at least for those with the correct set of aptitudes. They said there was something about the place—a balancing aura or geological phenomenon or holy spirit, depending on the they in question—that made it easier for anyone with the potential for levitation to achieve it. It was like one of those thin places you stumble across once in a while on sea-beaten cliffs or in toothy graveyards, where the ancient pagan Celts would have said heaven and earth nudged even closer than their usual three feet. Most people walking by would feel nothing. But a bare few might find room there, space for upward motion, for unfurling like paper.

My father was a Buddhist. He too was looking for something. All my life, he’d flown across countries and continents, visiting meditation centers and monasteries, temples and contemplative schools, their names strange and musical: Paro Taktsang, Vajrapani Institute, Dechen Chöling, Samyé Ling, Naropa. I sounded them out to myself in bed while he was gone, spelled them in wet fingertip on my thigh. No one but us knew words like these. He’d go for a week, sometimes a month, while I did homework and ate breakfast and sat alone in my room, and then he’d come home, sliding his suitcase under the bed in the manner of turning a latch. He always seemed different to me in the days following his return: there was a new delicate rawness there, a lingering sense of sublimation, as if his external layers had been steamed loose and peeled away. After a while, they would grow back. A while after that, he’d leave again. It was not dissimilar to ecdysis.