The Empty Chair

by Bruce Wagner

  Obliterating the past was one thing—the numbness of serotonin depletion would help take care of that—but knocking the present out of the box required a bit of fancy footwork. For Kelly, the past wasn’t really a problem anymore. She had bludgeoned it into amnesia and made it drink its own poison. Not only had the past forgotten itself, it had forgotten what forgetting was. Besides, Ryder hadn’t died in the past, he was continuously dying in the present. And so, next on the agenda was to assassinate the Now. My wife did a little visualization. (Whatever works.) She saw salmon going upstream . . . the stream being the past and the salmon being the present, but only while they were in the water—are you following me?—the minute the salmon jumped into the sky, they were out of the Now and living in the future. Frolicking. Though that isn’t really accurate . . . bear with me. What I meant was—what Kelly meant—is that when the salmon leave the water, they aren’t just in the future, they are the future. Okay? Does that make it clearer? Try visualizing one of those Eschers with the braided flying fishes. As long as Kelly saw the fish suspended in air, as long as she held the visual of them arcing from the water, that was the future. If she could hold that image in her head then she could be in the future with them. She could stay in the future. I’m trying to let you—to convey what it was like to be in our heads. In her head, because I knew what was going on in there. Want a baseball analogy? Think of the future pinch-hitting for the past and the present. What we did was put the future up to bat—then froze the game. Called a permanent time-out. That’s what we were going for . . . and the batter up was Ryder. Just do what Kelly did and picture a 12-year-old boy leaping from the water into the air toward whatever, toward us. He’s on his way to us. Picture him in the air—[mordantly] not hanging, though, don’t you dare!—picture him in the air, all goofy and sweet, and think: that little boy isn’t in the future, he is the future. He’s no longer a prisoner of past or present . . . he’s a child of Maitreya. Maitreya, the Future Buddha, up there in a cloud of unknowing, awaiting his moment to migrate to Earth, that unforeseen yet imminent time when the oceans shall shrink so that he may walk from continent to continent. You see, Maitreya’s next in line after Gautama and is prophesied to arrive in a time of great darkness—and boy, had that time come! It could not have been any darker, not for us—Maitreya is due when the teachings of the dharma have been forgotten and Gautama’s lost his mojo. Legend has it that Maitreya will bring the promise of Oneness. When Maitreya comes, there shall be no more fathers, mothers and daughters and sons. When Maitreya comes, there can be no loss of parents or children.

  That’s the legend of the Fifth Buddha . . .

  . . . the salmon-catcher Maitreya.

  But Kelly wasn’t at peace. She kept noodling back to ground zero, obsessed that Ryder had to have overheard one of our Merlot-fueled, sardonically tabloid conversations about a San Quentin hanging, our death gossip mixing with his esoteric anicca/impermanence training like a bad drug combo—potentiating it—until it pushed him over the edge (of the chair). No point in trying to dissuade . . . I understood this was her process. Hate that word! I think that what she really needed was communion. See, in the weeks that followed our son’s death, she’d wished him too far into the future, banished him too thoroughly. Whenever the anesthetic of grief temporarily wore off, she missed him desperately, unutterably, brutally, needed to see him again at any cost, even if that meant enduring the sumptuous torture of parsing her “involvement” in his death through the forensics of mental masturbation. It was totally nuts—like doing a crime lab spatter analysis of a Pollock painting.

  So she walked and talked us through. We sat on the floor of the living room, lights low, as in a séance. As she began to speak, Kelly set the scene, placing us in the kitchen like figures in a diorama. Laying out the bogus scenarios . . .

  “Okay, let’s say we were in the kitchen talking about one of the hangings. And I’ve had a few glasses and I’m telling you how amazing these prisoners are, how resourceful they are—about the one who did it with an itty-bitty shoelace. Maybe Ryder was on his way to ask us something. And he hears something provocative and just stands there listening where we can’t see him. Who knows for how long. And maybe it sounds like I was complimenting the suicide on his ingenuity. Let’s say it happened, for argument’s sake, that one of us saw Ryder out of the corner of our eye but didn’t really pay attention. Saw him standing there but we’re blocking it out. That’s possible, isn’t it? That something like that might have happened and we’re blocking it out? That’s why I’m saying we really need to concentrate, like those people they hypnotize who suddenly remember all the details of a crime. You know, what the suspect was wearing or the license plate of a car . . . You have to admit it’s possible, Charley, isn’t it? [I agreed that it was. What’s a husband to do?] Let’s say he maybe even walked in and asked about it and we’re blocking that out too. Or maybe the phone rang and you went to answer and that’s when Ryder walked in and I got distracted too, maybe poured myself another glass of wine . . . [She closed her eyes as if she was being hypnotized] And when I’m trying to picture—I can see him in my mind and I’m wondering how much he heard—but I’m still distracted . . . maybe he asks about—about that shoelace thing—and if he did, if he did ask, Charley, what do you think I would have said? What would I have told him? I’ve been thinking about this and I believe I know. I know what I would have said. I would have seen it as a teachable moment. I’d probably say something like—maybe I actually did say it—I’d have said something ‘real,’ you know, like, ‘Honey, sometimes people are in so much pain in their lives that they make a choice. It’s not a good choice, but it’s their choice, and we need to respect that.’ I might even have used ‘honor’ instead of respect. Honoring the choice to hang yourself! Charley, doesn’t that sound like something I would have said? Or might have, if the situation came up? What a stupid, stupid thing! Why would I say something like that? Because I think I would have.”

  She went on like that, rewriting a back-to-the-future history that never happened. The horror was that this berserk exercise allowed rare moments of peace, affording brief sanctuary for us both because it gave me respite from the agony of watching her suffer. It conferred a time-out from the storm of the event—event horizon of our son’s death—and any kind of escape was welcome, any brass ring placed around the black hole of our hearts from which no light would escape again. During the grace time provided by these dramatic re-creations, his tiny, dense solar mass somehow lifted off of her, allowing her briefly to be free.

  Charley made some tea, and ruminated. After a few minutes, he sat down again. Instead of a joint, he lit a cigarette.

  But it was all horseshit. Truth be told, my wife wasn’t capable of a teachable moment, not even retroactively! No, no, no. What pisses me off is that she lied to herself (and to me), even in theory. Because if Kelly would have said anything to Ryder about Mr. Shoelace, it would have been closer to “He was ready to leave his body. Maybe he’ll come back as the mother of a prison warden!” She was too cowardly to own up to the hypothetical implications conjured by her worst fears. She would never have stopped at the prisoner making a “choice.” That’s a liberal sentiment but not a mad one. No—she would have been aggressive. Jesus, maybe I do think she’s responsible! Some little part of me, anyway.

  Because truth be told, she was so far up Buddhism’s ass all you could see were her feet dangling! The paradox of it, the hypocrisy—and I swear I’m trying not to be a cunt, Bruce, but I’m still angry about a lot of this, angrier than I realized—which is why it’s good I’m rehashing everything, because it’s probably going to be more helpful to me than I know—the hypocrisy was that the deeper she got in her practice, the more kudos the roshis and sangha threw at her, the greater her instincts were to blindfold Ryder to the realities of everyday life. A kind of insanity, to do that to a kid. But I was blind too . . . I was—am—culpable. Allow me to elucidate how that teachable moment
(another phrase on my Top Ten Hit List) would have gone down. And I fully understand that what I’m about to say makes me a co-conspirator, a participant anyway, in her neurotic theorizing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if given the chance, Kelly would have chosen to refract Mr. Shoelace through the lens of maya, that tiresome golden oldie. The ol’ dance of illusion. She was up to her hips in prison dharmaworld, the “Path of Freedom,” and whatever else her crafty Jewish rinpoches gave counsel. “Ryder, that prisoner has been liberated!” would have been more her style—a party line knee-jerk diluting of the depressing savagery of such a violent, hopeless act.

  Her head was beginning to clear. A new voice—the voice of the quote-unquote “real”!—the voice of self-preservation—began to insist, demand, she cleave toward a revisionist Buddhist weltanschauung, that of permanence. Bald-faced, plain-dealing, square-shooting Permanence, a concept she once considered not just bourgeois but fascist. If she was going to find the antidote for the fatal damage caused by indoctrinating our little boy in the we-shed-our-bodies-like-old-garments shtick, she would need to dip more than just a toe in Permanence Lake. Like the time-traveler who changed the course of history by stepping on a butterfly, so did Kelly want to arrest Ryder’s death by substituting a triple-decker reality sandwich for the wheatgrass and tofu of passive-aggressive homicidal Zen platitudes. She had to flush out all the from-the-world-of-the-senses bullshit—“From the world of the senses comes heat and cold, pleasure and pain. They are transient. Rise above them, Grasshopper!” She no longer had the stomach for answering our son’s (imaginary) thorny but simple questions about death—by hanging—with the bloodless, casual koans of an entitled urban sun salutator who paused during walking meditation to pluck Dzogchen daisy petals—it’s permanent . . . it’s permanent not . . . it’s permanent . . .—until the whole random holocaust of the world was hushed up, tucked in, brushed under, sanitized and Shambhala’d away. My wife now needed to adamantly believe that her “teachable moment” had or would have conveyed the wisdom that life was precious and that she wanted him to live to a ripe old age . . . but knew that she hadn’t or wouldn’t have answered in such a way, and that gaping hole in his education could only mean she had killed him. So there was no alternative other than to alter everything that came before, tweaking her teachings, her memory, her very self, so at least she could draw comfort that she’d done no harm. Do no harm—that’s Eightfold Path 101. Kelly had to submit to an Extreme Makeover because if she didn’t, it would mean that Ryder, with his keen intelligence, would have embraced the corollary: Mr. Shoelace had rapturously shed his old garments and Gone Fishin’ with all the other liberated beings—not snapped his own neck on the night he was gang-raped and sold!

  Kelly stepped up her pitiful attempt to derail a train already at rest at the uncrowded station of its destination. She became a high priestess of necromancy. She put on proleptic operettas, as if Ryder could be kept alive—was alive—by their stagings. Variation upon variation of impossible possible scenarios unfolded in the altered future of the past. She splintered amber and bid the fossils dance to a tense, grieving, bipolar shitstorm of tenses: past perfects were perverted, bare infinitives laid bare, conditionals unconditionally loved. So sad! In a Hail Mary, she staged a coup to restore democracy, backing the impoverished, exiled leader that was her old, has-been self: she would oust the ambitious, humorless, dharma-thumping, girl-fucking Ashtanga dictator, and restore to power the straight-up, samsara-loving woman of the people who got toppled in her mid-30s. She had a hunch she could be saved—he could be saved—we all would be saved by past-imperfect Kelly, she of the fine eye for antiques and other permanent things, she who believed in mortal sin and taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. She who had no truck with the Ganesha in the room with its prayer flags and banners of evanescence . . . the old Kelly had no compulsion to acknowledge or worship that tired old circus elephant, let alone sweep up its shit.

  With sick, outlandish ferocity my wife composed a speech she never gave, fantasizing that it might have had the power to prevent him from stepping off the chair. As she began to lose her mind, she paced the rug while votive candles burned, reconstructing and reenacting, talking in articulate, disarticulated tongues.

  “People kill themselves, Ryder, they do, but it’s a horrible thing! A taboo! They believe they’re escaping the world but the truth of it is that they’re actually going to Hell to be tortured by their enemies! Ryder, God punishes those who take their own lives or even try to! If I ever see you fooling around with a rope—listen: I know I gave you information that was challenging—‘sophisticated’—but it was supposed to be theoretical, it was Buddhist theory and wasn’t meant for everyday life! It was wrong of me, wrong, wrong, wrong! Now I’m going to give you another teaching, the teaching of all teachings! A powerful, secret transmission possessed by only the highest of Masters! Are you ready? Are you ready to hear? Because if you love your mother, this is the teaching you will follow—this is the teaching that is law! The secret teaching is that Permanence rocks! Ryder, do you understand? Permanence! Permanence is the right and natural cosmic law! Even impermanence is permanent! Do you understand? Permanence rocks! Say it, Ryder! Say it! Say it! Say it!”

  Within her euphoric derangement—Dr. Bravo came to the house and gave her something for sleep, we were just about to commit her but she was a little better the next day and he said another stay in the hospital might not be such a great idea, he didn’t like the idea of her getting acclimated to institutions and said we should try to put it off and I was actually glad we did, even though it was scary touch-and-go—in this fugue state Kelly thought that if she could only be stern, forceful, parental, if she could rewrite the indelible, just maybe there’d be a chance Ryder might be granted a stay, and allowed to be something other than dead. Even in diminished capacity—she’d take him anyway she could—

  Please, Lord Buddha . . . I have failed the Fourth Noble Truth, for I suffer! I suffer so! I am attached . . . But Lord Buddha! Cessation of suffering is only attainable if my son should live!

  She was moonstruck. A hair away from a 5150—that’s a 72-hour hold. She told us that if Ryder was unpersuaded then at least maybe he could tell her—or me, or the doctor—someone—anyone!—just what it was that he wanted, what maybe he knew but no one else did . . . whatever the thing is that would allow him to live. To be alive in some way. She was determined to get resolution if it killed her. Which it already had. Would. Will?

  Had . . .

  O Bruce, how sad! How sad and unjust! In the day and the night she looped back to the living room to resume her hopeless, abstract disinterment: back to the future and forward to the past—I am telling you, it broke my heart. It was like watching a wildlife documentary of an elephant trying to nudge its stillborn calf to life with her trunk. Before she finally collapsed, the whacked-out musings came in a torrent as she fumbled and burrowed and downshifted, tenderly redacting her teachable moment . . . Ryder, sometimes when people are in lots of pain, they—well, sometimes—if a person had cancer and was in a hospice—the Dalai Lama said that if the pain of a cancer or someone burned in a fire, then—then it’s the choice of that person. But this is something very extreme. And irreversible! If Mommy or Daddy ever got sick, or even if you got very sick, this is not a path we would choose, darling! Because we have each other, and our love would see us through. And I know we’ve talked a lot about impermanence and rebirth but what is meant by that, what the Buddhists mean is that even a rock is considered impermanent, though a rock can live for thousands of years! I want you to know that life is precious and the main teachings of the Buddha are that birth in a human body—not animal, preta, Hell—is a rarity and a great privilege, and each of us have the sacred responsibility to live our lives joyously, to the end!—suddenly stammering in recognition that she’d already been over this ground, feeling the weight of Ryder kicking at her stomach, not from inside, but from out, tr
ying to climb back in so his rebirth could begin—again—wincing as she heard those imaginary words escape her doomed mouth—no! The contortions of her logic were already losing their power to distract and to numb, like heroin that’d been stepped on too many times. Everything was too much and too soon, death and life, wasn’t there something between the two? (A bardo?) Wasn’t there supposed to be? Because she wanted nothing to do with either of them. Only in deep sleep came the solace of pure, untrammeled consciousness . . . the house that gave shelter now sheltered no more, the food that gave sustenance no longer sustained, the glass of water once celebrated for its elegance and life-giving beauty was now a draught of poison. The crisp chimney-smoked air, redolent of winter, manna for breath meditation, had become sulphurous and mocking as the last gasp of her fanciful, phoney TMs—teachable moments—came crashing down around her without warning.

  She was overwhelmed by nameless dread.

  Words!

  —the words of friends’ and neighbors’ condolences left her on the floor with multiple stab wounds, only made worse by words of my own, when I consoled with some random anodyne assholism, cool rag of banalities pressed against her mutilated forehead to help her through a rough patch. My poor, poor wife.

  It was true. HRH 14—the Dalai Lama—had said that in certain instances self-murder was A-OK. So Kelly, engines failing, overthrew the notion of reckless playfulness ending in tragic accident and gave suicide a shot. Reluctantly embracing the monster rally factoid of it, she tried to accept sponsorship of the idea that the highest of Buddhist authorities had ultimately condoned the act. Only trouble being, Ryder hadn’t been sick. Hadn’t even been in any observable pain, psychic or physical. Nope. Ryder was boyish, seraphic, rambunctious, enthralled . . .