—She’s probably in love with you.
—Please, I said. But I was grateful she considered me someone who could be loved.
—Let’s go, she said. This class will reset your head. It might knock some sense into you. You might go home and tell the little barnacle to fuck off.
THE STUDIO SMELLED OF RAW onions. The walls were lime green and the mats were threadbare rubber, even worse than the ones at the famous studio. Some yogis seem to believe that the cheaper the yoga accoutrements, the better the practice, but this was different.
At the head of the room a rangy instructor pulled his Christly hair into a topknot. His lips were buttered with balm, his neck snaked with tendons.
Alice and I took two places next to each other. Aside from the instructor there was only one man, skinny, in long black shorts and a white tee. He adjusted his towel at the top corner of his mat. I felt sorry for him but didn’t know why. Soon others trickled in. The instructor dimmed the lights and it felt like evening.
—Dear friends, the instructor said, his voice quiet and meditative but resounding all the same, I invite you to come into your bodies. Please take vajrasana, kneeling pose, and ease yourself into the forty-seven corners of your frames. Melt your bones out to the recesses of your skin, but at the same time stay within the boundaries of your flesh. Good. Very good. Take a deep breath in, now a deep breath out. Ahhhhhh. Excellent. Please go ahead and thank yourselves for coming into class tonight. For giving yourself this gift. We have a very whetted understanding of time in this room, don’t we, and we appreciate that this hour is precious. This is a special class. We are a special group. And because we are unique in yoga, I thought we deserved a unique flow. Our very own, this night.
He slipped his eyes closed and pressed his hands in prayer. The room was still. I looked at Alice, but her eyes were closed, too.
—When I was a boy, the instructor said, we used to hold these undercover séances. We’d turn off all the lights and repeat the names of our dead grandmas. Grandma Sue? Grandma Beth?
A small collective laugh filled the room.
—You there, Grandma Jo? To our great relief, we never heard back from our dead grammies. The last séance we ever held, one of us was trying to reach a dead parent. Our friend Bobby, his dad was a truck driver who died when his eighteen-wheeler flipped off a mountain pass in Idaho. Holy moly, how we all hoped he wouldn’t come to us. Even Bobby. We couldn’t fathom how far his dad had fallen, and we were terrified by the notion. If he spoke to us from beyond, we’d have probably pissed our dungarees. Looking back now, I realize that the purpose of those little séances was not to talk to these dead relatives but, rather, to scare ourselves “to death.” Because wasn’t that the scariest thought in the universe? Death?
In the darkness I saw the room nod. There were soft squeaking noises in the walls that I was sure were mice.
—Now, my friends, we have a unique gift in the world. All of us on this earth have a life sentence, we are walking around with an expiration date under our cap, but most of the people you see out there, bouncing around without a care in the world, they don’t know when. They might live to a hundred and ten. The way they act, it’s like coffins are for vampires, am I right? Well. For those of us in the room, the sentence is a tad bit sooner than that, isn’t it? And as I’m sure many of you have come to feel, there’s a marvelous freedom in that. We are not scared of death, not in the same way, because from this point forward, we begin at death. Are you with me?
Again the room nodded. A Poland Spring bottle crinkled. I heard the sound of water slipping down a throat. I used to hate the noise my father made when he smacked his thirsty lips to make moisture. He was a diabetic and sometimes his mouth ran dry.
—So this evening, I’d like us to begin in savasana, corpse pose. May we, in yoga, as in life, begin at death and travel onward from there. Now bring yourselves to lie down, release the legs, and push out through the heels. Soften the root of the tongue, the wings of the nose, and the taut flesh of the forehead. Let the eyes fall to the back of the head, then turn them downward to gaze at the heart. Release your heavy brain to the back of the skull.
Once the room was lying down, Alice’s hand found mine in the relative darkness, grasped it, and the instructor began to whisper.
—You are not your disease, dear friends, HIV/AIDS does not define you. HIV/AIDS are merely letters. You are not your body. Your body is a rental, as K. Pattabhi Jois famously, exquisitely said, and soon it will be time to return your lease. You won’t be penalized for the dents and the overage of miles. Instead, you will be given a brand-new car, more beautiful than you could have ever imagined, and this one, my dear friends, will have the ability to fly.
AFTER THE CLASS WAS OVER, we walked outside and stood in the sun. The line where Alice’s jaw met her neck was so beautiful as to be licentious.
—What the fuck? I said.
—When you’re depressed or in grave trouble, she said, people think you should be near children, amusement. They invite you to dinner, they prop you up and shine their happy light in your face. It’s bullshit. The opposite is true. You should seek out the dying.
I felt there was something evil about that, something evil in her. I asked her if she’d gone
