At four I unlock my door. Across the hall, John’s is already open. We take our clothes off in front of one another, and when we are naked, John jumps from his room to mine. But today I tell him, softly, so as not to wake the others, that I want to go out earlier, to catch the sun coming out.
Outside we are not alone. We cannot see the horizon; we are in the middle of a pine forest and light is beginning to filter through the trunks of the trees. I look at the wet dirt underneath my feet and vomit a yellow substance, like jelly about to lose its consistency. One of the elder Buddhist teachers kneels down to pick it up on a plate.
The teacher returns with two yellow balls as big as his hands. They seem to be made of candle-wax rests that look like my vomit. In one of them there is a bone, a shrunk femur. Another teacher joins and observes the spheres. “What is it?” I ask. “Your evil,” I hear. One of them says it. “Evil?” I squeeze John’s hand. I want to kiss him but don’t, because we are not supposed to touch one another until we leave.