The Empty Chair

by Bruce Wagner

  Kelly sat on a cushion in front of the broken, empty chair as if kneeling abjectly before a new altar, a sacrificial one honoring impossibly infinite, impossibly malevolent forces. She courted it, for her life . . . sitting with such helplessness, futilely waiting, not praying, for she knew that prayers were pointless, that such a thing would never respond to prayer, no, just waiting, abiding, for whatever it was that swallowed him to spit him out. Sometimes I positioned myself so I could watch her undetected through the open door (it was a house rule that it never be closed again). She was having a dialogue with that chair, with body and soul, maybe even her sex. Once I saw her sit in it stock-still—on the plank, rather—feet on the floor, back upright, eyes half-shut. Other times, she’d sit before it and lay her head on that infernal plank like an exhausted child in the lap of its mother . . . or a lover who betrayed her. Then she’d pace and circle, raging, an interrogator outgunned—

  And one day, she was done.

  She only asked one thing of me: to burn the chair.

  Kelly used to love that chair, isn’t it funny? She actually stole it—but I suppose that isn’t fair. Let’s say she borrowed it and never gave it back. She found it by chance, in a storage room at school. See, my wife’s family owned an antiques shop and she worked there every summer until she was 18. Her dad had an amazing eye that he passed on to Kelly. They were very close. By the time her apprenticeship was done, she could have gotten a job at Sotheby’s. So there it was, shoved in with a lot of other chairs in a forgotten storage room, only it was different. Very different. Not because it was bruised and battered—the canework seat was broken through—or because it was anachronous, out of time. All Kelly needed was one look to know what she had, she’d come across these types of chairs at her father’s shop before. I remember when she brought it home. She sat it in the middle of the living room, poured us some Chablis and commenced a frothy little Antiques Roadshow routine, with yours truly playing the excited rube. “Sir, this is a very fine elbow chair, Edwardian, circa 1900, and as you can see it is made from mahogany. That’s Cuban mahogany.” With an appraiser’s flourish, she informed that if put on the market it might fetch around $800. When I told her she was no better than a common thief (all in good fun), she assured me that no one would miss it. Besides, she said, it would cost a few hundred to do a halfway decent repair and the district certainly wasn’t going to shell that out. Shit, she did them a favor. Kelly couldn’t for the life of her deconstruct how it had come to be nestled among all those crampy, banged-up desks from the ’60s, the ones with the tiny, graffiti-carved tables attached. So she stuck it in the Volvo and drove on home. She never got around to fixing it; as a temporary measure, she laid a short piece of wood across the busted seat. That was what Ryder jumped from.

  I had very careful pre-incineration instructions: it was to be broken apart until its pieces were unrecognizable. The order wasn’t given so it would fit into our fireplace, though that certainly helped. She just didn’t want it to look like a chair when it burned. I knew what she was doing. She wanted to strip it of its identity, to humiliate it. She wanted it tortured—she wanted to hear it scream.

  You ask how I was doing? Well, you may as well ask how I’m doing now, because it’s kind of the same. I dissociate. Space out. I run from pain—to food, sex, drugs. The one thing I don’t do is overspend. There isn’t a shopaholic bone in me. I do bury myself in books pretty well . . . You know, talking about all this, Bruce, makes me wonder if I haven’t even come close to the point of grieving. Or if I’m even capable. See, those wonderful experiences with the Catholic Church helped me learn to compartmentalize. Don’t you hate that word? Did you ever hear of something called Compartment Syndrome? A friend of mine had it after an automobile accident. They wound up cutting off his arm, on Thanksgiving no less. Compartment Syndrome can happen after a fracture. A closed space gets created in your arm or leg—a little compartment—and for some reason the doctors can miss it. The pressure gets so bad in there that all the nerves and tissue and muscle die, it can get to where they can’t do anything but amputate. I guess you could say that psychologically, emotionally anyway, I’ve found a way to create closed spaces that don’t result in amputation. Though maybe I’ve lost more limbs than I think! When Ryder died, I busied myself with tending to my wife. I’m muy codependent, if you know anything about that. Then, wham!—the settlement came in. A million and change after the lawyers took their piece. (When I told Kelly, it didn’t seem to register. Since celebration wasn’t an option, there wasn’t anything for her to do with the information.) The windfall became one more compartment for me to chill in. Another room, and a well-decorated one at that.

  I haven’t told you about the note. It wasn’t a suicide note per se—though the authorities referred to it as such.

  Kelly’s meditation room was her holy of holies. Unless we were invited, Ryder and I were instructed to stay the fuck out. The door had a kitschy Gone Fishin’ sign on it at all times—now where the hell’d we pick that up? I want to say a yard sale in San Rafael. O, that little sign really tickled her! She said her dad used to hang one just like it on the door of Ballendine’s Second Penny whenever they were closed. The man hadn’t been near a fishing pole in his life.

  Ryder took the sign and pasted over a handwritten edit:

  GONE TO BOODAFIELD!!!!!!!

  You can imagine how many ways I’ve looked at this.

  The strongest theory was the one that hit Kelly the hardest: that for all the arcane knowledge he’d absorbed, for all her “Little Buddha” projections of our son’s scholarship, for all the tutelage in phowa—transference of consciousness—for all the cozying up to Maitreya’s merry band of bodhisattvas, for all the instructions in the Great Embodiment of Impermanence and the Tathagata (“One Who Has Thus Gone”) plus the Four Immeasurable Aspirations, the Eight Worldly Concerns, the 19 Root Downfalls and the 46 Transgressions, for all the rides thumbed on Greater and Lesser Vehicles, for all the picnicking with Vajra brothers and sisters, for all the comforts of the Six Mantras, Six Perfections, Six Gestures, Six Pristine Cognitions and Six Types of Bone Ornaments Worn by Wrathful Deities, for all the “mother and child aspects of reality,” for all the protections promised by the thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, for all manner of Nyingma masters, lovingkindnesses, dream bardos and intermediate states of rebirth, for all the inherent existences, inner radiances, illusory bodies and causally conditioned phenomena, for all the songs of dualism and dream yoga, the burnt offerings and calm abidings, the apparent and actual realities—for all that, well, Ryder was just going to impress Mom (especially) and Dad with an unthinkably bold act of tantric precocity, a supercalifragilistic Peter Pan leap into the Void from which he could boomerang back to the welcoming arms of that dimensional continuum he called home—

  . . . to leapfrog the teachings, and rock the house of Impermanence.

  There are a few pages of How It Can Dance! where Ryder’s cartoon avatar learns about tulkus, modern reincarnations of dead Buddhist saints. I can’t help feeling that’s what he grabbed onto—the whole darkly mordant Watchmen superhero ethos married to that Hardy-Boy-with-flashlight-under-the-sheets thrill. “The great meditation of no-meditation,” “the great training of no-training” . . . you can hear the woman on those CDs she burned for him to listen to as he fell asleep!

  He grabbed an old tape recorder from the top of the bureau. It was already synched up; as fresh rain pattered the trailer’s roof, the soft, slow-cadenced voice of his wife, Kelly, began. While we listened, he toked on a joint, and poured himself a glass of wine.

  “The most important dharma is to practice impermanence. [long pause] . . . To be at ease with impermanence is to open the Golden Doors of dharma . . . The contemplation of impermanence cuts all ties to samsara, allowing all beings to reach nirvana . . . As you train in the great training of no-training, it will take root and light up your journey on the Path . . . As impermanence flows thro
ugh your heart, your discipline will become diamond-pointed, but only if you never stop meditating on it . . . Befriending impermanence will allow you to see the equal nature of all things and take you to a place beyond falling back . . . Once you’re certain you will die, you’ll have no trouble giving up evil actions and doing what is good . . . Impermanence is the Golden Wheel of dharma . . . This is the day! Turn the Thousand-Spoked Wheel! Turn it, turn it, turn it!”

  He shut off the player.

  Impermanence sucks!

  See, but I knew my boy wasn’t a suicide. Weren’t never a doubt in my mind . . .

  But why a hanging?

  How come?

  How comes it?4

  No further questions, Your Honor!

  [sings] “Big Thousand-Spoked Wheel keep on turnin’, Proud Tulku keep on burnin’! Rollin’! Rollin’! Rollin’ on the ri-ver!” Golden Wheel ever turning, tightening into a magic ring around his neck—“To every season, turn turn turn”—turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . to every season in Hell—every saison en enfer. You know about Ouroboros, don’t you? The serpent that devours its own tail? Right before you die, the sign of Death comes—your mouth forms a great O, those droll doctors call it “the O Sign.” The mouth O-pens (and o-pines its last) and your eyes begin to flutter as they do in REM sleep—RAM sleep!—all roads lead to Rama, don’t you know . . . that’s what Gandhi said when he was shot, said “Rama” in his final exhalation. (And George Harrison, right after he was stabbed.) As the noose choked Ryder’s neck, so the noose of his tiny anus opened (a lowercase “o” to be sure) to spill out the tainted, sacred contents of the Five Hollow Viscera: stomach, intestines, bladder, gall bladder, semen sac. Do you know the myth of the mandrake root? The medievals believed it sprouted from the semen that fell from innocent men who were hanged. And after the O, comes, as the drier wits like to say, “the Q sign,” tongue lolling from mouth, the mouth’s last vowel. Wagging . . . oh those wags!

  But why? [sings] “Who by fire? Who by water? Who in the sunshine? Who in the night time?” . . . why hang himself?

  Kelly and I had to focus on something. You can’t just sit there not thinking—the mind won’t allow it!—about every possibility, every permutation, every everything. Like his nakedness . . . I actually think I might have solved that mystery—maybe solved them both—with this memory. A few years ago we went camping by the Red River. We skinny-dipped in a hidden spring and there was a rope Ryder swung from way out over the river, then let go with a shiver and a huckleberry shout. Did that all day. I’ll bet part of stepping off that chair was recalling that time.

  Whatever.

  Kelly blamed herself for putting the hanging idea in Ryder’s head. When she was going through her prison dharma phase, she loved having a glass of wine at dinner and sharing Big House scuttlebutt. There were a lot of suicides in the penitentiary and the most popular method by far was hanging. The inmates went about it with trademark resourcefulness. A guard told her that a child molester hanged himself with his shoelaces, while lying down! Some went kneeling, as in prayer; you only needed a few pounds of pressure to do the job. Kelly became obsessed by the notion that she’d inspired our son through an anecdote, sort of a copycat death with a peppermint twist of naisthika. That’s Sanskrit for nihilism. “That which denies the existence of objects and the laws of cause and effect.” I guess in Ryder’s case, the concept of cause and effect was certainly denied . . . naisthika also refers to the Great Vow of celibacy. One who never wastes his semen. I suppose Ryder spilled at the end, but didn’t actually waste. It’s just semantics.

  Kelly hardly spoke a word in the beginning days of her sequestration, but one late afternoon started to murmur this very fear—the prison hanging anecdotes as virus fear—at first burbling the words under her breath, not really loud enough to hear, as if talking to herself, then eventually loud enough for me to understand. To be honest, it didn’t matter what she was saying, I was just glad to finally hear her speak. I’d become one of those schmaltzy figures at the bedside of a comatose spouse, waiting for a sign, any sign. There was only one flaw in the theory. Being the superbly protective mom she was, Kelly never spoke about violent penitentiary stuff in Ryder’s presence. To my knowledge, he didn’t even know about Little Ricky. She was fairly assiduous about that. When I pressed her on that point, she insisted that he must have overheard.

  That was problematic. First off, my son wasn’t the eavesdropping type. He wasn’t a surreptitious character, not even remotely. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he had heard something not meant for his ears. Well, Ryder’s no dummy, he’s impish too, my educated guess is that he’d have made a big guileless splash right away and sidled up to his mom to shake it out of her. See, he didn’t have it in him to remain hidden, wasn’t his nature. Too extroverted. And as I said, Kelly was extremely mindful of his presence in the house, moreso than her remorseful theory makes room for. Now if he had come into the kitchen or wherever while we were gossiping about some death, some hanging death, he’d naturally have been curious to know if Mom actually knew the deceased or was she at least there for the “discovery.” Of the body. This is all a bit exasperating, Bruce, because I have to—I’m going to have to spend a little time talking about things that never happened! Theoretical things. Hopefully, you’ll see why it’s important that I do.

  So I say it didn’t happen because if it had we’d have known. Let me go further. Even if it had unfolded that way—Ryder furtively in the hall, lapping up a morbid mommalogue—it still wouldn’t prove or mean a thing.

  I knew what Kelly was doing. She was building castles of concrete instead of sand because sandcastles wouldn’t do her any good. She needed constructs that were oblivious to time or tide, she was conjuring durable fairy tales that on completion could be hurtled into the past to provide Ryder with shelter that was at least up to code. Wasn’t it sandcastles that had done him in? (Maybe.) Kelly’s new spin on that old bugaboo impermanence was . . . permanence itself.

  In permanence, lay liberation!

  Too late, of course—

  Fresh from the nut house, she sat her butt cheeks down on permanence and waited for it to hatch. Actually, it was her theories she was incubating. (More about that later.) First, there were a few things she needed to get rid of. A little housecleaning. She needed to banish the past and the present: too 3-D. The only survivor would be the future. The past was a quagmire, the present a nightmarish fraud. Had to be. The future was the promised land—the land of Maitreya, the Fifth Buddha, “The Future Buddha” . . . To save herself from the unbearable anguish of the present—present imperfect tense—present impermanent—Kelly had to take up residence in the future: future perfect permanent. The present, once venerated while she was an ecstatic, card-carrying member of the notorious All-We-Have-Is-This-This-Moment! cult, had been stuffed in the recycle bin along with its jealous, immutable, implacable shadow, the past.

  My wife pulled the plug on the Power of Now.

  I knew what Kelly was doing, Bruce. See, the future was the only place we could breathe. It was the only timespace that hadn’t been compromised because it had never happened, never would, and we, its impassioned converts, became zealous phantom-footed soldiers in the world of what-will-but-never-will-be. The past needed to be erased, deleted, a heroic task that could only be accomplished by order of law—Ryder’s Law. (The legislation bore his name but it was Kelly who pushed it through the house.) There was a certain genius to the idea . . . because how could we be expected to live in the past, that time in which our son would always live and always die? The past itself was always dead or dying and being reborn, it lived to be regurgitated by those unfortunates who were addicted to nostalgia—or worse, who chased after it in a castrated misery of rage, grief and hysteria, driven mad by the idea there was healing to be found if one could just pick through its vomit for a mirage of diamonds. The past was a bully-god, it thrilled to watch us
fools throw fits onshore as it receded, dragging our sandcastles and unbreathing sons with it. The past put on an air of regal indifference yet was secretly boastful of its getaways, its cowardice . . . the past was haughty and demented. And yet, the past was tormented too. The past was lustful and desirous, and had ambitions . . . the cross it bore was that it waited in futility to become the present, or at least marry it, each time getting infinitesimally close, unable to accept what it already knew: that its fate was of a bride doomed to be eternally jilted. The past was the angel fallen from the perceived paradise of Now. (The real heaven—haven—was the future. But the past was blinded by its yearnings for the present.) Scorned, insulted, inconsolable, its monolithic, frozen-in-amber humility inexorably turned to hubris, its acquiescence and sorrow to vengeful, perverted sadism. Its greatest strength—storehouse of all that ever was, seen and unseen—was its greatest weakness. For the past was vain. Kelly was of the opinion that the only way to annihilate it was by subterfuge. The past must be tricked into forgetting itself.

  The present was defined solely by our son’s searing absence. It felt like being on fire. A crush injury. You looked for him and he wasn’t there. You’d hear him, smell him, taste him, but he wasn’t there. You’d absolutely know he was but he wasn’t. You saw children, children, children everywhere! An exquisite torture. Outside the window or on TV, being rude in the mall. Laughing and telling secrets to each other. (I always imagined they were talking about Ryder.) But my son wasn’t there. You wanted to end the pain any way you could; always in the back of your head was that you could hang yourself too. For my wife and I, each second of every minute of every hour of Now was like a cold slap, a pinch to the cheeks of an unconscious prisoner who awakens only to realize he’s about to be executed. Apparently, the human animal is poorly designed for mourning . . .

  Erasing the present was a tall order because Kelly had been indoctrinated for years to believe in its power and relevance. She’d come to believe the New-Age Now was all there is, was, could be. This fresh idea of invalidating the present was antithetical to the thinking of her people, the Buddhists. It was heretical! Their whole raison d’être, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the wisdom brought by living in the moment.