Memorial

by Bruce Wagner

  SHE met him in his bungalow at the Bel-Air.

  Joan was a little nervous and had already played out the scenario of him wanting to fuck. She ran the loop in her head as if preparing for a court trial or presidential debate. She was pretty sure she’d be able to resist.

  Lew was genteel, having slipped off the alpha E-ring he wore around groups. After cordial smalltalk, he asked her to watch something on television: an amateurish CNN-style montage of what the tsunami had wrought. The famous hotel pool getting flooded. A pasty-skinned old man clinging tenuously to a railing as the fatal waters rose. Crowded buses rocketing like skateboards into floating taxicabs. Assorted indistinguishable riverroar flotsam. Then, the iconic image of that body outside the Astrodome: incongrously spliced in, rank and spookily clownish.

  A soundtrack, courtesy of Bobby Darin, accompanied the watery parade:

  First the tide rushes in…plants a kiss on the shore—

  “My son put that together. I guess it’s his way of dealing—with whatever. It didn’t make me happy.”

  “How old is he?”

  “14.”

  “It’s just that age. Teen angst.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m my age.” He sighed. “It’s creative, anyway. I think he got the clips from MTV. Burned them on his PowerBook. Or whatever they do.”

  “Was he close to his uncle?”

  “Very.” He ejected the disc. “Mr Darin: nice touch. Or maybe it was Kevin Spacey.”

  Joan changed tack, deciding to be heretical.

  “I know this is a weird segue but it’s something I wanted to ask. Architects are funny. Sometimes we work in a vacuum, and that’s good. Depends on the client. We like vacuums; we like to fill them up. (Oops. Wrong metaphor.) But sometimes we ignore the obvious, and that’s not good. Is there anything you envision for the Memorial, Lew? We’ve talked a lot, but is there anything that’s persistently in your head? When you wake up in the middle of the night. Or when you’re brushing your teeth.”

  He appeared to be musing. Then:

  “Not really. Something…simple—elegant. Not too much bullshit.” His mouth tensed at the word, before softening to a smile. “Big help, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, without irony. “It actually is.”

  He led her to the dining area. She sat at the table and he brought over wine. The fuck-loop streamed through her brain—she flashed on that hotel pool flood—before quickly shutting off.

  “Joan—I see all these…Holocaust memorials, and…the thousand slabs. The thousand crosses in Berlin. Oklahoma: the 168 Chairs, the 168 Seconds of Silence. I hate that—literal shit. One of the WTC things was only going to be open to the public from the exact minute the 1st plane hit to the exact minute the 2nd tower fell. Another of the…proposals had these lights—I don’t know how many—but it was the number of people in the towers that couldn’t be identified by DNA! The 92 trees native to New York planted in the soil of the 92 nations the victims came from, the wall with 92 Messages of Hope.”

  “I know,” said Joan, simpatico. “Paul Murdoch. He’s here in LA. Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. A 93-foot-tower with 40 wind chimes inside. One for each passenger and crew member. 40 groves of mixed maple trees the closer you get to the site. Then, 40 rows of—”

  “The 1,776-foot tower. Make me wanna holler!” (The last, he shouted like Eddie Cantor.) “And that’s not even going to remotely happen. That’s why I like Andy—Goldsworthy. Cause he’ll do something outside the box. Something natural. I’d like to do Goldsworthy and someone…something else, more permanent, or permanent-looking. Andy can do his cairns or his water and stones and snakes—I think he’s going to use water, which I don’t object to. We’ve got 400 acres and the actual Mem is gonna be a pretty small ‘footprint,’ as they like to say. But I want it churchy. Like stumbling across the ruins of a church. Now, whether that’s at the end of a grove, or an allée, or up on a hill—fuck, I don’t know, Joan. I just don’t want to wind up with something honoring a quarter of a million dead people! You can’t do that shit with any kind of literality. Is that a word? I mean, how? Did you know that a hundred thousand people died in Sumatra in 15 minutes? One of my guys said the quake was so strong, it actually affected the earth’s rotation. How do you memorialize that? You know what I’m saying, honey? What happened to my brother and his wife, and their kids, and to me and my family—is personal. And for that very reason, the scale should be intimate. For any fuckin reason. A prayer. Let the world fucking carp. The world is always going to carp and piss and moan. The world wants Trump and Disney—America wants to sell tram-tickets to cemeteries with bling. Hallowed ground don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing! Do you know how many calls we still get about Katrina? To help with that shit? Where is George fucking Bush? My brother didn’t die in St Bernard Parish, he died on the coast of India. I mean, is that OK? Does that not meet with everyone’s approval? It’s obscene. Do I know what it means to miss New Orleans? Maybe. But sorry! Samuel’s in Elysian Fields—and his Fields ain’t got a Looziana zip. Wanna hear a Katrina joke? My pilot told it to me—man, he’s dark! A drowned horse walks into a Texas bar. Bartender says, ‘Why the long, bloated, maggoty face?’ Oh, you don’t get it! Hey Joan, know how many people died over there? 230,000. There’s another 50,000 missing. And those are only guesstimates. Know how many died in Pakistan? 80 thou. Know how many people swallowed water in Louisiana? What was it, 900? Losing the city itself was the fundamental…that’s what’s tragic. And everybody knows it. That makes sense. The money poured into the tsunami? They don’t even know how to disperse it! There’s such a surplus, they’ve been asking people to divert to other causes. That’s how fucked up and confused everyone is. The relief agencies and the schmucks who run em are bankrupt, spiritually, morally, and every other kinda which way. A guy lost his entire family of 37 in Ban Bang Sak—send computers, Bono! You know, I have zero interest in donating PCs to all the little Sambos before they rape and burn each other. They will be raped and burned. I don’t want to save rifle-toting black children! Let Bono knock himself out! Does that make me a bad guy? I employ people. Right? Thousands of fucking people. Families. I don’t renege on healthcare or pension promises. Right? And I want to honor my brother and his wife and in so doing, honor those who died. You know what, Joan? I don’t believe ‘We All Have AIDS.’ I don’t—not so far as my doctor’s told me. Sharon Stone can suck my 5,000,000,000 dollar cock and write a song from the coal mines of menopause and go talk about it on GMA. I do have a foundation, but it’s not about relief, it’s about cancer research. My mother, Mamie, had leukemia. When she died, that was worse than 200,000 people getting swept away, OK? Can you understand? I mean, how do you…represent that? This isn’t ‘We Are the World,’ this is she was my world. And now it’s about He Was My Brother. Samuel Freiberg, RIP. Someone said I should put a plaque up for whatever we wind up doing. Joan, do we need a fucking plaque?”

  “No, Lew. You don’t need a plaque.”

  “FEMA can’t even figure out what to do with the money Congress gave them. It’s so radically fucked up that Congress is now asking for money back. Anyway, I got an email from one of my Inner Circle people at Guerdon—a sweet guy.” He riffled some papers on the table, then quoted. “ ‘I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary of my crying…rescue me from the mire, and do not let me sink.’ I mean, sentimental bibleshit, right? So, I’m just gonna do my thing—with a little help from my friends. I think any other way would be arrogant. My thing. People will have their ‘fuck that rich asshole’ moment—they’ve been having it! ‘He’s only honoring 2 people!’ The public won’t be allowed to stroll around and drop their trash…poor babies. No iPod commentaries! No gift shop! They’ll just have to sweat it out. Jerk off to the Iraqi civil war or the latest Amber Alert. Or see a Korean horror film instead. Cause all anyone wants is a gore fix. I sound like Howard Beale, huh? Great movie, Network. So get your tragedy fix, but not from me. I ain’t no dealer! I’m
not a healer either. But why isn’t Lew Freiberg helping to build new levees? Because Ted Turner will take care of it. Leave it to the Three Stooges: Carter, Clinton, and funk-breathed HW! Leave it to Halliburton! You know what? My foundation sends money, but I funnel it to Humane Society International. They’re the folks—a lot are Buddhists, by the way, like Esther was—who deal with animals. You know, animals saved a mess of people in the tsunami and wound up shit’s creek, literally. People can help each other but animals can’t. Animals are ‘sentient beings’ too, right? That’s the big Buddhist phrase. My sister-in-law was a pretty serious practitioner of Zen-whatever. We had our moments, but Esther was all right. Helped stabilize my brother. So that’s where I choose to send my money. To HSI! And if folks’re gonna cry, fuck em. People will cry, that’s what they do. That’s what they’re good at. But at the end of the day we got 400 acres. You’ve seen it, Joan. At the end of the day, long after we’re dead and gone, there’ll still be 400 acres and ‘the ruined church.’ What I’m calling the Ruined Church. And it’s going to be a sacred space. Esther loved that phrase. ‘Sacred space.’ And that sacred space will speak volumes for all the suffering of people and animals. You know what else disgusts me?”

  “Tell me, Lew.”

  “Newsvultures standing on some tsunami beach—those Big Wave anniversary reports are just nice excuses get some Phuket R & R—saying—intoning—‘No one can explain why some areas have received bounty and others have slipped through the net.’ Right. Right. Well, that’s just the way it is. Same as it ever was. Always was, always will be. That’s ‘duality.’ Buddhism 101. No one can fucking explain. Or splain, as Ricky Ricardo used to say. And guess what? No one should even try.”

  He stood.

  “Here’s what I think.”

  “Tell me what you think,” she said, girlishly.

  “Let’s get this party started.”

  XXII.

  Ray

  RAY left a message with the cop who sent the note, inviting him to drop by if he was ever in the neighborhood. 3 hours later, the detective knocked at his door.

  He was in his early 50s, sandy-haired and red-faced. Funny, he reminded Ray of Robert Redford in that Twilight Zone, thicker and older of course, in a sport jacket instead of a uniform. Ghulpa seemed suspect of his visit and Staniel Lake (“My granddad was Daniel and my father was Stan, and yes, the kids called me ‘cocker staniel’ in school”) picked up on it. He made it clear right at the beginning that he wasn’t there as a representative of the department and whatever legal course Ray decided to take meant nothing to him. He said he was here for strictly personal reasons: though he didn’t want to “talk it to death,” he felt bad about what happened, plain and simple. BG made tea and offered to heat up prawns in grated coconut. The detective politely declined, indicating that he didn’t want “to add to the paunch.” He didn’t really have much of a stomach, but his manner charmed them both.

  Detective Lake kept it light.

  Ray was again touched to hear he’d come to the hospital, and apologized for not being awake. “That was plain rude,” he said.

  Staniel laughed. “I was happy to see you get your rest.”

  He said that his father, a retired police officer, died about 2 years ago from emphysema in that very same place. Ray had a few choice words for the night shift’s bedside manner and the detective mordantly chuckled. The assumption he already knew that his host was partial to the shield hung in the air; a tough old bird who wasn’t litigation-happy. Nowadays, that was practically a miracle. Ray started to feel like a retired cop himself—one of the boys.

  Staniel asked after the dog. The old man said he’d been to visit the Friar, who was on the mend and would probably be home in a couple of weeks. The guest was genuinely happy to hear it. “The night was a royal fuckup,” he said, violating his own informal rule, once Ghulpa was out of earshot. (He dipped his voice so she wouldn’t hear the vulgarity.) Ray thought that gutsy because anything the detective said might technically be used against him and his department. Not that Ray would ever break confidence, not in a million years, and Staniel Lake seemed to know it.

  To be conversational, Ray said he used to live in Mar Vista, and how he once owned a miniature golf course; a magic shop; then a bigger place on Sepulveda called Ray Rausch’s Game Emporium. How he’d lost everything in the slot-car craze of the late 60s after buying a miniature racetrack—Racer Ray’s Indy 100. How he’d gambled away whatever savings he had. How he got divorced in ’73 and lost contact with his kids. The grim years before going back to work at a hobby “hatch” in Montebello. (The old man covered a lot of ground. Even Ghulpa learned a few things she didn’t know.) The owner of the place “up and died,” leaving Ray the entire inventory, which he sold just in time: mostly trains and model planes. Kids were collecting different kinds of things now, computer-related. He couldn’t pretend to even understand the gaming market anymore. But he’d done all right, he said.

  By the time the detective got paged and had to run, Ray had been beating his gums for almost an hour. Later, he realized how lonesome he’d been for intelligent male companionship.

  THAT night the old man had crazy dreams triggered by his pell-mell reminiscence. His bedroom got mixed up with the CCU, and the clinic Nip/Tuck was at. Joanie and Chester peered out from weird foliage, frozen at the ages when he left—3 and 7—and Ray began whimpering in his sleep. He awakened with a jolt when a lion sprang on his chest, and Ghulpa comforted him, fetching a cool, damp rag. He shook his head in dismay. With a sardonic smile, he told BG he had her to thank; she always regaled him with tales of man-eaters from the Gir Forest that she’d seen as a child at the zoo in Calcutta. She loved telling him the stories her parents recounted of lions that crept up on pilgrims who lay sleeping in camps, leaving only bloody saris behind. They’d walk right into houses and silently carry out children by the napes of their necks in the dead of night. Whenever there was something in the news about a little boy or girl who’d been stolen from her room, in California or Florida or wherever, then found murdered down the road or in a creek, Ghulpa’s face darkened. She could never see the human hand.

  “The lions,” she’d whisper. “They are not stories!” She was defensive, eager to repel all argument. “It is still happening each year, in Bombay! In Delhi, in Calcutta!”

  XXIII.

  Chester

  MAURIE kept leaving messages but Chess didn’t feel like returning. He was moody and pissed. He still hadn’t met with that attorney.

  The bone doctor X-rayed and found nothing. He said Chess should probably see a neurologist for an MRI. He now had shooting pains in both hands and numbness in one of his thighs but wasn’t sure if the numbness was “real” or some sort of byproduct of pain. He hated being a pain patient; when you spoke to doctors it was like you’d fallen down the rabbit hole—the habit hole—where all perception was up for grabs. In order to gauge your “distress,” the nurses asked you to point to emoticons on a sliding scale: primitive renderings of faces that were smiling, indifferent, frowning, crying, screaming. It was infantile and regressive, demeaning and asinine. He saw his fellow travelers—the tired, poor, huddled asses of the waiting room—as losers, the low rung of doomed complainants in a new kind of hell. New to him, anyway. He was still a virgin, but pretty soon he’d be like one of those African girls forced into marriage that Oprah went to visit who were too young to give birth and wound up with fistulas from miscarriages, incontinent of feces and urine (Saint O gave them little purses with C-notes tucked inside; more than he would get)—soon he’d be turned out right and proper, gangbanged by the Ubangi pain tribe. Chess always imagined that if ever he got sick, it would be something definitive: a burst appendix, a kidney stone. Diabetes. Something organic that hadn’t been done to him. As a joke, and for money! At least his jawbone wasn’t rotting away from an OD of Fosamax.

  WAITING for the neurologist, he thumbed a brochure that said 30,000,000 Americans suffered from chronic pain that was
so bad they wanted to die. Then why was the FDA busy pulling meds? Someone wanted us to believe that if we took a vestige of Vioxx, a soupçon of Celebrex, a vial of vitamin C, a wicked wedge of Mom’s apple pie, well, then, we were right behind the stroke/heart-attack 8 ball. Someone really wanted us to believe that iddy-biddy Bextra caused “fatal skin reactions”—what the fuck was that, terminal psoriasis? People just wanted to feel better. Had to be some Recondite Brand vs Generic showdown, with trillions at stake.

  He flipped through Reader’s Digest, Metropolitan Home, and Surfrider. Read an article about a woman on disability heading to a conference that she organized. Staying at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Loved her room. Got vertigo and breathing problems from what she thought was the chlorinated water in the decorative pools. Wasn’t the hotel’s fault. Turns out she and who knew how many goddam thousands of others have something called multiple chemical sensitivities or environmental illness. Then there was a thing in Elle about a chick with “impingement syndrome” and decomposing cartilage. Her vertebrae were “slapping” against each other, bone spurs throttling nerve roots. Chess pictured barbed wire wrapped around fresh green stems from Whole Foods. The essay reinforced what he had learned: that chronic pain eventually became not a symptom but a disease in itself. Poor bitch wound up getting steroid injections right in the tailbone, which gave her “a faint beard and a kind of extreme PMS.” Well, far out! The piece ended by informing the reader that an operation often created a worse problem than the one it set out to repair (thanks for the tip). In fact, there was new evidence that, in some cases, exploratory surgery actually revitalized dormant cancers. But none of it mattered to Chess, because by the time you were so miserably desperate that going under the knife seemed like a rational option, well, by then your central nervous system was already so welded to pain that nothing could break the cycle, not yoga, pot brownies, hypnotherapy, methadone, not beaucoup $, not zip. Even making love, as they used to put it, could mortally exacerbate whatever was wrong. George Clooney said he got the sniffles and leaked spinal fluid through his nose after getting injured on the set, but Chess wondered if he’d actually wrenched his back on a 12,000 dollar Lake Como Duxiana.