The Empty Chair

by Bruce Wagner

  Before we begin, there are two things important to note. “Second Guru” actually preceded “First Guru” in the telling. The chronological order of our diptych has been reversed for reasons it is hoped will be clear to the reader at the end. Secondly, the storyteller had been grievously wounded in love, which was why she had taken to the road.

  When I came across this formidable woman, she was traveling in an imposing black bus with a full staff and every creature comfort one could imagine (and some that one couldn’t). In a droll tip of the hat to a storied bus of the ’60s, the destination above the windshield read “Father” not “Furthur.” Queenie wore kohl around her eyes and elaborately tailored gypsy dresses that were as dark as her land schooner, with the occasional splash of tie-dyed color: half–Zaha Hadid, half–Stevie Nicks. She said she was in the midst of searching for a lost city that was rumored to have the power to reunite couples that had been separated by calamity, farce—even death.

  I hope one day to be reunited with her myself, for maybe that story too will one day ask to be told.

  A single, massive bhakti* movement had been gathering force in other parts of India for a millennium. A favorite Sanskrit passage personifies it as a lovely woman who was born in the south, gained strength and maturity in the middle regions of the west, grew decrepit—and was revived to experience her full flowering when she reached the north . . .

  —John Stratton Hawley

  *Passionate love of God

  The following interview took place in October 2005 and was redacted in the summer of 2013.

  How does a story begin?

  With the simplicity of situating it in time—anyhow, that’s one way . . .

  Very well: it wasn’t too long ago, in the fall of 1997. I was living in Manhattan in a triplex penthouse overlooking Central Park, on 110th Street. My humble abode came complete with ballroom, landscaped terraces (one with infinity pool) and a small orchard guarded by a rooftop of gargoyles I’d become quite intimate with, having become one myself. The property belonged to my grandfather—or rather, his investment firm—rumor being it was once in the hands of a shadowy Jewish cabal of financial consultants to the Vatican. I was 47 years old and going through the mother of all depressions. I’d been out to sea too long and washed up on impotent shores. In my youth, I was a voraciously curious girl, an exotic wild child who cut a swath through all manner of New Age modalities. At the time, my mind/body explorations were thorough enough to have banished the need (or desire) to learn anything more. It was my modest opinion that I’d achieved a hard-fought measure of wisdom. Unfortunately, the moment such a thing is impetuously declaimed in one’s youth, even sotto voce, one acquires a nasty virus which lays dormant until awakened by the cue of that sometimes-fatal season, middle age.

  I never thought I’d need access to that bewitching witch doctor world again. But there I was, all grown up and fighting for my life. It was heal thyself redux. I plugged in to the corporatized, kickass machine of Self-Help America, encompassing every spiritual, homeopathic, energetic practice known to man, goddess and horse (cf. equine holistic healing): magnetic therapy, tantric breath work, biofeedback, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, marathon meditating, fungal scanning, sweat lodging, Adderall XR, Feldenkrais, Tensegrity, DBT, DMT, colloidal silver, craniosacral/chakra detox, Roman Catholicism, Reiki, Kabala and cancer-sniffing dogs, liposuction, ayahuasca, Watsu, What-The-Fuck, Qigong (it’s been good to know you), polarity, ibogaine, candidal querying, Munay-Ki, angel therapy, singing bowls, flushing bowels, benzos and botulinum rejuvenation, Lyme disease dousing, karma purification, cheap Thai massage, Third Eye vortexing, Lamictal, SSRIs, Christian Wholistics, Christian Louboutin, GABA, MDMA, AA, heroin, hypnotherapy, hysterectomy—

  Then I ran out of time . . . or time ran out on me.

  Yes, that’s better.

  I was jilted by Time.

  It was with more than a little fear that I realized help was definitely not on the way. I confined myself to quarters, false messiahs having dwindled to hormone replacement therapy, 450 milligrams of Wellbutrin q.d. and a hundred mgs of Seroquel, PRN.

  I read all the books on depression and came to the disgruntled conclusion they were just another venal publishing cycle perennial, always given a clever “fall release” (to capitalize on those legions with SAD—Seasonal Affective Disorder) and gussied up in literary clothing—when the smarmy truth of it is that “blues porn” found its way to the shelves and talkshows with the same calculated predictability as addiction memoirs and diet books. And why shouldn’t it be so? Why did I think the genre was sacrosanct? Still, it rankled. The quality of blues porn always fell so far off the mark. Styron was the pioneer—Darkness Visible became the gold standard and I didn’t like his book, either. The depression mavens just couldn’t be trusted. It was my opinion that what the monks called “the noonday demon” was best served by my own customized definition:

  de·pres·sion : a feverish oscillation between sorrow and remorse, simultaneously inducing grisly numbness and the too-real sensation one is hurtling into the abyss.

  It was a melancholy Monday.

  I was doing my daily exercises, panting on the treadmill of obliteration fantasies that kept me sane. These included selecting which of the twelve terraces would be the one I chose to leap from after lunch. To keep myself interested, I pictured exactly how I’d make that jump, and what my body would be doing during the fall. In my imaginings, it might take the form of a clean corkscrew, belly flop or spectacular swan. Inspiration struck when least expected. My head would rummage around and surprise me with a long-forgotten defenestration from Pasolini’s Salò—the piano player, having seen enough perversion and murder, steps off the balustrade with the eerie sangfroid of a maid dusting a sofa. I imagined one of my housekeepers catching (or not catching) my fall from the corner of her eye and promptly fainting. I saw myself flailing, a silent film of windmilling arms, gravity rushing me into the Lord of Pavement’s arms. These musings never failed to mischievously include a horrified gallery of sidewalk gawkers, some of whom impossibly watched my leap from its very beginning, and others whose heads whipped ’round at the explosion of metal, glass and bone-spray.

  The comic relief provided by those arpeggios didn’t last very long. I’d surface to the pitiless present fast enough to get the soulsick bends, a rotten cork bobbing on dead calm domestic seas, mocked by the distant hum of vacuuming armies . . . I wouldn’t really surface, though, not entirely. I felt like a spelunker. Let me be more specific. Think of yourself as a spelunker—join me in my nightmare, won’t you? One who scubas through uncharted cave waters. Cave divers, they call them. You’re running low on oxygen—perilously low—you’re not sure how that happened, but there it is. A bad valve in the tank or a bad whatever. And when you realize this, you’ve been swimming for a quarter of a mile. Some of these caves are completely sealed off from each other, the only way they’re linked is by common waterway . . . and let’s say you already swam a quarter of a mile to get from one to the other, there’s no in-between, only an implacably hard ceiling of lava above your head. You’re running out of air and on the way back to your point of origin when your lights fail, even your back-up lights, a perfect-storm kind of thing. A perfect shitstorm. You try to get your bearings. You think you’re still heading back to that initial manhole that you lowered yourself from at the beginning of your little adrenaline-junkie adventure. You were supposed to come with a friend but they bailed because their kid got sick. You decided to go anyway. You didn’t tell them because you knew they would think that was a bonehead move and would just try to talk you out of it. So today, you’re extra careful about your prep: you’ve checked and double-checked the equipage. And everything was going so well but now you’re running out of air and there are no lights and the water’s dark as a moonless midnight. There’s no way to surface—nothing to do but go along laterally until the tube ends. You marshal your energy and say: Okay. This
is shitty but I can do this. You really believe you’re swimming toward where you started but can’t be sure anymore. One of your feet feels funny and you reach back—you’ve lost a fin. Not good. You acknowledge a devilish voice that tells you you’re righteously fucked, but because you’re a pro—you’ve been doing this for 20 years, been in touchy situations before and always gotten out—whatever panic that arises is quickly tamped down by a reflexive athlete-warrior’s confidence that soon you’ll be out. Soon be savoring late afternoon sights, sounds and smells, throwing your gear into the backseat and talking with friends over wine and dinner about the already-legendary anecdotal hairiness of the day. Laughing about it . . . You see something faintly illuminated—a hole? phosphorescent lichen?—something in the distance that you jerk-flutter toward with your one fin. You understand it’s not your destination but right now you’re a pilot who needs to land, you need a runway, a clearing, anywhere, before the wings and wheels come off completely. You close in . . . it is a hole! You break surface. Remove the mouthpiece and inhale deep, germy draughts, a literal second wind—and with horror realize you’ve merely exchanged one darkness for another—darkness visible! That creepy, slamming doomsday sensation as the eyes adjust: it’s only an air pocket. By habit, you put the mouthpiece back in so you can get the hell out of there then remember the tank’s kaput. Done. You’re done. By perfect satanic design, the short-lived promise of escape—and sweet familiarity of breathing uncylindered air—jumpstarted your adrenaline, heightened your faculties. The full understanding of your predicament comes with nauseating certainty: sealed off. Your head just above water, elbows resting on the hole’s rocky rim to more or less comfortably keep it there—the rest of you wading in the grave. Now the other fin drops off too . . . finito. Somewhere into the void. That fin is lucky, you think. That fin is already dead, was never alive, and now, at least, is free. A moment of panic before instinct forces you to arch back your neck to create more space between you and the low ceiling of the pocket. Instinct requires the organism to seek more space or the illusion of more space. Heart hammering as your brain fritzes in the effort to solve an insoluble problem, instinct/habit makes you grab that useless mouthpiece again. You even keep it in your mouth a moment, as if to give yourself “distance” to help gather your wits. Sadly, there is no instinct that cleaves to the extinction of the entity it protects, no natural cyanidal impulse that shuts down systems in the face of certain annihilation, to allow one an easy (easier) death—no. (None of it is easy.) Only that relentless, dumb, primal imperative to save the organism at all costs, brain ordering neck to lean back on the fatal pillow of a slurried shelf, a brief truce before you drown. Nature has thoughtfully—so thoughtful—provided a small comfort cushion for your head on the available silt, an ergonomic bolster that instinct kindly arranges for you to make use of on your deathbed . . . nature and instinct, working together! The irony! Because at its terminus, the organism supercharges the integrity of its mandate: to survive at all cost (including death), to keep eyes and nose above the water until the end. Just doing its job . . . as when, with lightning speed, the animal—you—assayed the pocket’s height to be 14 inches and change, a sidebar left brain measurement made in the instant after you first exuberantly, accidentally smacked the top of the cryptspace with your skull. Unforgiving, non-negotiable instinct then bid you retreat and regroup. Come: lay your head on this silty pillow to sort things out. Come stay awhile. One never knows how one will behave at the end but this ending is so hopeless, so monumentally lonesome and grotesque that it comes as a shock that you’re still capable of logical thinking. Soon, you reason, hypoxia (and the attendant) hallucinations will put an end to my suffering. Not only is this true but its wise reiteration has the effect of soothing the panicked organism. (It was instinct that orchestrated that thought in the first place—instinct needs the organism to be calm because panic is the harbinger of erasure.) Resting on your sad pillow, waiting for your buddy-system pal hypoxia, you remember seeing a documentary about a man who survived falling overboard in a storm-tossed sea. He said there was a point when every cell in his body told him to let go . . . you draw succor from his words, and await such a directive. In your vertical, phone booth–like coffin, you berate yourself for having foolishly dived alone but self-recrimination is soon replaced by thoughts of your husband, your baby, a trip you once took to Poland and other random things, then wonder how long it will take to find your body or if it ever would be found and for some reason the idea of never being found makes you yelp like a dog accidentally stepped on by a party guest, nothing more pitiful than a human yelp, this one has a gasp thrown in and the yelp-gasp robs most of the remaining air, hastening your end—no! You get a fourth, an eighth, an eleventh wind! Instinct won’t let go—won’t let you go—yanking you to full awareness again. It slaps your cheeks and wants you alert, still wanting to save your life! Like the old joke about the patient dying but the operation being a success. Again, instinct arches your neck and bids you rest your head on the pillow. Instinct rallies, like a drowsy fly on a corpse. Instinct stage-whispers: Hey! aren’t you wondering where the light is coming from? From the beginning, a pathetic amount of light lit up the pocket, “lit” too strong a word, still, enough to draw you toward it from the waterway, to your phone booth grave, because the nearly invisible alteration in color—from below, it was a dime-sized deep grayness amid the black—was enough to catch your reptilian eye. It’s the end of the play; in the middle of your big death scene, instinct keeps interrupting from the wings, telling you—politely asking—to please make an effort or at least consider making an effort to dig or even think your way toward wherever that light is emanating. But your brain understands the feeble radiance is seeping from microscopic fissures in the rock. The brain overrules instinct’s clownish, crude, surreal fantasies of ascent and escape, and won’t let you take the bait. Your brain at last provides what it rarely seemed to, in life: dignity.

  Her eyes filled with tears—the metaphor had transported her back to that time of severe depression. We took a 20-minute break then resumed. She seemed much refreshed.

  When I’m in a normal frame of mind (ho ho! normal!) I’m actually quite capable of reveling—or wallowing, anyway—in the serene dullness of a familiar domestic landscape. But in the condition I was in then, it was those very things—hum of vacuum, chiding position of sun in the sky, sound of Spanish soap opera on kitchen TV—that held my feet to the flames. The more routine the trappings of my life became, the more banal, the more exquisite grew the pain. As the entry in my personal Devil’s Dictionary says, the sensation of speeding toward the abyss—insanity—is the thing that gets you. That unstoppable velocity before hitting your head on the ceiling of the air pocket . . . I was reading about a method of torture the narcos use called “bone-tickling.” They shove an ice pick in then click-and-drag. That I tickled my bones in the sanctuary of my own home was truly the devil’s work.

  I was sitting there stewing about all this shit when my flip phone chirped. No one was on the line. I did that stupid thing we do and said “Hello?” over and over. Then:

  “Queenie?”

  I floated through shamanic dreamtime.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  It was almost 30 years since I heard that voice yet it was as familiar to me as any of my gargoyle friends. (The way I was feeling just then, I’d have been more than pleased to hear one of them speak.)

  Knowing exactly, I still gave his name an interrogatory wisp.

  “Kura?”

  He laughed that laugh and my underground caves flooded.

  I know it’s kind of one of those clichés (I have the feeling I’ll be using a lot of them during this story, apologies in advance), but this man actually saved my life. Back when I was oscillating between my own madness and another’s—oooh! To even think of that time before I met him absolutely makes me shudder, and to think of the time when we met . . . well, the woebegone part of me, the pa
rt whose head had been stuck for weeks in its 14-inch airspace, couldn’t help but wonder if the man behind the voice would save me. Again.

  “Wowee zowee,” he said. (I hadn’t heard that one in a while.) “Stanley meets Livingstone!”

  I’d been thrust into the way-back machine—Kura’s—where the cultural references were always a bit fusty.

  “Though I have to say I didn’t look for you quite as long as Stanley searched for the good doctor, which was less than a year, I believe. I found you in a week’s time. Five business days to be exact.”

  “This number is eight hours old! How in the world—”

  “My Queen, you’ve been an endless presence in my thoughts. I was so happy to learn things turned out well for you.”

  “They did? Someone forgot to tell me.”

  “Ho ho! You’ve kept your wit.”

  “While those about me were losing theirs.”

  Ho ho, ha ha.

  Okay, so we bantered. I always had a thing for The Lady Eve.

  “You outlived your parents, which for many years was an iffy proposition, no? You routed the executors in court. All of the attempts to rob you of what was rightfully yours—and they were formidable—failed dismally.”

  “True. But that’s a matter of public record.”

  I wasn’t really in the mood for This Is Your Life, or the psychic TV routine either.

  “Yes, it is. For the last few years, you’ve been depressed.”