Here’s a story I told Luke, some hot day in the garden: once, my father took me with him on one of his trips. I don’t remember the drive or the monastery or the exact purpose of the ceremony we attended, but I do remember that it too was high up in the mountains, maybe even higher than the Center. My mother was out of town, or I’d never have been invited along. I wasn’t supposed to be choosing, after all. My unformed brain, etc. “Our secret,” my father said, and I bloomed.

There were hundreds of people in attendance that day: faded colors, loose pants, faces turned up to an enormous statue of a meditating Buddha. The very last step in the ceremony was to paint in the eyes of the Buddha, and here the attendees were invited to participate. Two monks on two ladders held two paintbrushes in front of the Buddha’s two eyes, and hundreds of silk ribbons, in red and gold, were attached to the handle of each brush. The ends of the ribbons were distributed through the crowd, to connect us to the painter, the brush, the eye, the Buddha, the infinite. A boy with brown eyes and dreadlocks gave me a ribbon, and so I held it, but as the artists lifted their brushes and the attendees raised their arms, I began to feel unsteady. My vision popped and sparkled, and then began to fade, edges first. I tugged on my ribbon, which had turned wet and dark in my palm.

“Daddy,” I said. “I can’t see.”

I felt, rather than saw, his face turn to mine. Or perhaps that’s not exact. I could see the outline of his head clearly, his hair and ears glowing and distinct in a halo of afternoon light—but between them, where his features should have been, my dimming vision registered only a kind of bottomless pulsing blackness.

The empty-faced shape knelt beside me, holy, unknowable, wholly unknowable. “You need water,” it said.

It was at that moment that I fainted. I didn’t see what kind of scene I caused: maybe no scene at all. Everyone’s eyes were focused upward, and not at the girl on the ground. Isn’t that always the way?

When I woke, I was propped up on my father’s knee. I could see his face again, right where it was supposed to be, between his ears, and above him, I could see the looming face of the statue, its drying eyes clear and unconcerned.

“You gave your sight to the Buddha,” he said. He patted my sweaty forehead. “Very generous of you.”