Still Holding

by Bruce Wagner

  HE STANDS AT bedside, dazed. Combative.

  Flails at his caretakers and finally connects, punching an older female nurse, who reels and falls, abrading herself. Burke holds him tight to his chest, to restore calm—he scuffs at the floor and tries to break free. Finally submits to his father’s ministrations.

  Burke is the only one who can soothe him.

  • • •

  VIV SITS IN a chair, facing him (Kit in a chair too, but seat-belted in).

  She takes his hand and traces it over her cheek. Flashes on Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Sometimes he looks at her and seems to smile. She calls a nurse when she smells feces.

  • • •

  VIV AND ALF, in a dark back booth at Chianti.

  They commune in relative silence and eat their comfort food: red wine, bread, and bouillabaisse.

  Occasionally, Alf says something to cheer her—crazy gossip about some actor they know or the beggar he saw on the median with a cardboard sign that said, I LEFT HOME WITHOUT IT. She says she saw one on San Vicente with a sign that said, START AGAIN.

  She takes his hand and traces on her cheek to show how things went with Kit.

  Nothing sexual about it.

  Just sorrow and fatigue.

  As always, she begins to cry. He is helpless to comfort her.

  • • •

  KIT RAISES UP as the RN removes the bedpan.

  An LVN enters and hands a little camera to the RN, who tells him to shut the door.

  They wiggle him into a shirt before posing with the superstar.

  They take turns.

  The poses are wholesome, not scurrilous.

  Mother and Child Reunion

  LISANNE WAS BESIDE herself, thinking that any moment she would learn that Kit was dead. She couldn’t rely on the media for updates, and whatever leaked from Tiff Loewenstein was invariably grim. It was like a bad dream. She couldn’t sleep anymore and watched Lord of the Rings DVDs nonstop. She was afraid to take pills because of the baby.

  She went back to the Bodhi Tree in desperation and bought the Bardo Guidebook, which delineated the Buddhist experience of dying and being dead. Much of it frightened and overwhelmed. The bardo was described as a kind of twilight zone or in-between state. (When Lisanne looked the word up on the Internet, she got cross-referenced to Robert Bardo, the stalker who murdered the television actress Rebecca Schaeffer. That creeped her out further.) There were actually five or six different bardos, but the easiest one to understand was called the “natural bardo of this life.” Apparently a human life span was merely an “in-between” to the states that came before and after. The guidebook said that what followed life was “the painful bardo of dying.” (Whoopee.) It said how, at the time of death, the white essence of the father descended from the head like a moon sinking in the sky, while at the same time the red essence of the mother ascended from below the navel like a rising sun. The essences merged in the middle of the heart.

  What really interested Lisanne was the book’s assertion that, after death, those who had meditated a lot in life—people like Kit—still had a window of opportunity to be “realized” or liberated. The guidebook said that when consciousness left the body, a person became confused and disoriented. “Karmic winds” blew around and made a person wonder where his body was. At the coming of the winds, it was especially important to keep your wits and realize that whatever you saw or heard (say, the blinding of 100,000 suns or the clapping of 100,000 thunderclouds), no matter how wrathful, peaceful, or seductive, was the demons that befell you, it was essential to realize that all those things were just a manifestation of your ego. They represented the part of you still clinging to something called samsara. If you could just see that those visions, those hideous or beautiful sounds, feelings, and experiences were only projections of the self, then you could escape the cycle of rebirth, or the Wheel of Becoming. You would then be totally realized. That was the state they called enlightenment or nirvana.

  If you got stuck on the wheel, the next bardo lasted forty-nine days and seemingly offered a little more time to achieve buddhahood. But even if you panicked and failed to “recognize the essence of your own mind,” you still had the chance to steer yourself toward a human rebirth, which the Buddhists said was a rare and privileged thing; that was why it was important not to squander one’s limited term in the so-called natural bardo of the living. Meditation and devotion to the path resulted in liberation. Animals couldn’t meditate—they were trapped in the animal bardo and could be liberated only by those who had escaped the Wheel of Becoming.

  It was fascinating to her and a welcome distraction from the self-imposed deathwatch. Lisanne read pages of the guidebook aloud when she couldn’t sleep. She was amazed by something called phowa, an ancient technique in which a person literally shot his consciousness into space at the time of death, like an arrow. Mind mingled with prana (“life-wind”), ejecting itself through the central channel and out the top of one’s skull into infinity. Lisanne thought that was intriguing because supposedly an experienced phowa practitioner could actually liberate someone else’s consciousness upon that person’s death—meaning that if you weren’t the world’s greatest meditator (she’d bought some instructional tapes but wasn’t really into it), then fortunately a qualified guru or high lama or whatever could come along and give you that final shove.

  There was something called the ground luminosity and the path luminosity. At death they merged—in Buddhism, there was lots of merging and lots of death—“like a child jumping onto his mother’s lap.” She thought it achingly beautiful, and her respect for Kit and his years of dedication “to the cause” grew. How admirable it was that in the midst of Hollywood shallowness he would have been drawn to such a world! But she wondered . . . Was the Buddhism of the guidebook the particular form that he practiced? So much of the teachings seemed morbid and impossibly esoteric. It was one thing to have a book lay everything out in concise, no-nonsense terms. But if a person meditated, did he, at least over time, become privy to all of the rules? Did he get rewired? Was the educational material sort of magically downloaded as a consequence of incredible discipline? Lisanne wondered if the experience would be like living among a foreign people then one day waking up to speak the language, or at least realize one was dreaming in it. How many years did that take—two, five, twenty, fifty? And if a person finally did understand, by some kind of osmosis, was his knowledge something he was allowed to share with others if he was even able? Lisanne was possessed by the thought that Kit was nearly liberated but hadn’t, say, fully mastered a way of ejecting his consciousness, and was terrified that he would be trapped in some miserable bardo. Did he apprise Viv Wembley of his progress or lack of, before he got hurt? If Lisanne could learn something from the actress that was pertinent, it might give her comfort. Though it could be that Buddhism was like Scientology and you weren’t allowed to tell anyone about anything. Or did that apply only to outsiders? (Which maybe Viv technically was, not being, as far as Lisanne knew, a practicing Buddhist.) Not that she knew anything about Scientology, but you never heard Tom Cruise or Jenna Elfman or Lisa Marie Presley sharing their personal experiences. Lisanne thought that if she wanted to find out anything about Kit’s proficiency in terms of his struggle to be liberated, she would probably have to approach other Buddhists who knew him well. But why should they tell her anything?

  The guidebook said that near the end of the forty-nine days, if you were destined to take a human rebirth, you began looking around for couples who were engaged in intercourse. The rule of thumb was that swarms of lost souls were always hovering around the entrance of a woman’s womb as she made love, “like flies on a piece of meat.” The book was scandalous! Maybe Buddhism was just an elaborately kinky sham.

  There were so many questions. Did the fact that doctors had drilled into the skull to relieve pressure, bored into and broken bone in the crown chakra, from where consciousness waited to launch—did the surgical holes
make “ejection” easier or, instead, somehow traumatically seal his fate and his doom? Anyway, the classical texts declared that a person had to be dead in order for phowa to occur. What if Kit didn’t die but remained imprisoned in his body, conscious but unable to move or speak? He could stay like that for years. What then?

  There were evidently three different ways of dying (there always seemed to be three ways of doing this and three ways of doing that)—like a child, like a beggar, or like a lion. To die like a child meant to have no concept of dying or not-dying. Dying like a beggar meant not to care about the circumstances of one’s death. Dying like a lion meant to die in solitude. It was lovely, but what did any of it mean? She imagined that Kit would prefer to die like a lion, but with all those doctors and nurses injecting, monitoring, and restraining, how could he possibly have the chance?

  She lay prone on the couch and closed her eyes. Phil’s gift, the Amazing Technicolor Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha, was close at hand. An ashtray overflowed. Lisanne shifted onto her side, drifting. Her nose pressed against the cushion, and she smelled the musty imprint of her heavy body. In conscious imitation of the Bliss-Wheel’s counterpart—the Sotheby’s gift—she let her left hand lay atop the gravid belly while the right dangled down to touch the carpeted floor. In her mind, the cautionary words from the guidebook regarding the afterlife struggle absurdly merged with sorcerers’ voices from The Lord of the Rings.

  Like the confusion in the dreams of one’s sleep last night, later on it will be difficult to practice in the bardo.

  If he could not die as a lion, she mused, it would be better to leave the world as a child than as a beggar.

  Ladies Who Lunch

  BECCA, ANNIE, LARRY, and Gingher had lunch at Swingers in Santa Monica.

  Becca and Larry had met a few times for coffee since first sharing a table at Peet’s. Whenever they were together, she felt like the ingenue of a novel about the early days of a group of starving actors and artists, some destined for fame, others for tragic obscurity. When she finally made a date to introduce him to Annie, Larry brought along his chubby friend.

  “Tell them how she shits in front of you,” said Larry.

  Gingher laughed, jiggling all over.

  “Oh no!” said Annie. “I really like her show— please don’t tell me she’s one of those people who get off on that.”

  “Let us just say,” said Gingher affectedly, “that the lady tends to be rather unself-conscious in the washroom.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Becca, wide-eyed.

  Larry was smitten. “Girl, you are so Southern—très naïve et gentille. Or should I say gentile. You are so Virginia.”

  “That when she goes to the bathroom, she . . .”

  “We have meetings every morning,” said Gingher, “where she like gives me the list of stuff to do for the day?”

  “You meet in the toilet?” said Becca.

  “You betcha,” said Larry. “That’s when she’s apt to pinch off a large one.”

  “Oh my God!” said Annie, laughing. “That is so gross.”

  “The mirrors steam up like a jungle. Jungle fever. No: jungle feces!”

  “Larry, you are crazy!” said Becca.

  “Would I shit you, honeybear?” asked Larry. “Does a Viv shit in the woods? Who’s shittin who? Horton shits a Who. Tell it, girl.”

  “I think it’s like some kind of power trip,” said Gingher. “But, you guys, you cannot tell anyone. She’d fucking sue me.”

  “You’d never shit in this town again,” said Larry gleefully. “You’d be blacklisted—you’d be shitlisted!”

  “I don’t even care. I’m walking. She is such a cunt.”

  “You will never leave that job.”

  “Watch me.”

  “How did you even start working for her?” asked Annie.

  “Doing craft service on her show. Actually my friend was doing craft service and I was helping him out. And Viv was really, really nice to me—this was before they were making like a million dollars an episode. Viv had this really horrible relationship with her mother, so she does this maternal thing where she likes to take in sick puppies. I was puppy-of-the-week. But she really did do all these nice things for me.”

  “You ungrateful whore.”

  “She paid for me to have my tattoos removed at UCLA. They were really gnarly. She has this whole side of her that’s really sweet and nonjudgmental. She just started asking me to do stuff for her. Errands and shit. She liked having me around, I guess. Like while she was getting ready for big auditions or premieres. She’d like ask my opinion on her clothes or her makeup. Even though most of the time she totally had stylists and makeup people come in and do her. I never even really said anything except that she looked really good but I guess I calmed her nerves.”

  “She is really beautiful,” said Annie.

  “And when this other person she had working for her quit? Honey-chile, I moved right in. That girl was so fucked up. Chartrain.”

  “Chartrain?” said Larry.

  “Chartrain, Soul Train, whatever. Viv helped get me a car, and she was cool. But then I, like, saw this whole other side to her.”

  “How’s she dealing with what happened?” asked Becca, in hushed tones. “Weren’t they engaged?”

  “That’s actually really sad,” said Gingher. “Because Kit is very cool. Very sweet and down-to-earth. We always got along. I’ve, like, almost gone to see him at the hospital a bunch of times. But I heard the security was so intense.”

  “Does she visit him?” asked Annie.

  Gingher nodded. “She did at first, but now it’s like a lot less. A lot less. She never asked me to go with. But he’s really doing better from what I understand. I mean, they don’t know what’s going to happen—with his mind—but he’s supposedly doing a lot better.”

  “A mind is a terrible thing to baste,” intoned Larry.

  The girls ignored him. “I don’t know why they hooked up,” said Gingher. “Well, I guess I know why she hooked up with him. She’s got that TV-inferiority thing. Kit gave her street cred.”

  “A mind is a terrible thing to taste, said Hannibal Lecter.”

  “He wouldn’t even say that! Would you shut up? God, you are so annoying!” She turned back to Becca and Annie. “I guess it’s just a stone sex trip. Or was. I know they’re kind of out there.”

  “Our Lady of the Perpetual Potty certainly is.”

  “But he’s like—intellectually and just as a person—Kit’s like, her total opposite.”

  “Really?” said Larry. “When I met him he acted like a total prick.”

  “You bring it out!” said Gingher.

  “You met him through Gingher?” asked Annie.

  “I told you,” said Becca, reminding her. “They met while Larry was working at the Coffee Bean.”

  “I was going to do that movie,” he said, filling Annie in. He loved telling the story. “The Aronofsky thing—Special Needs. But I got fucked by Mr. Brain Dead.”

  “That’s not nice,” said Becca.

  “Sorry, Virginia.”

  “You don’t know that you didn’t get the part because of Kit,” said Gingher. “He’s not vindictive like that. Maybe Aronofsky thought you couldn’t act.”

  “Well fuck Mr. Requiem for an Avant-Garde Blow Job too, honey-child, cause my audition was kick-ass. I was on my second callback when Mr. Lightfoot and I had our little run-in, and I got axed the next day.”

  “I will always love you for working at the Coffee Bean as a retard!” said Gingher.

  “He went off on me, and I just looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry. I mean, you’re only like making twenty-five million a picture, or whatever, and I’m out there doing what I have to do so I can pay my fucking phone bill—”

  “You didn’t say that,” said Gingher, agog.

  “Under my breath.”

  Gingher guffawed.

  “And how do you guys know each other?” asked Annie.


  “We met at the Grove,” said Larry.

  “We were by ourselves,” said Gingher. “We’d just broken up with our boyfriends.”

  “We were crying.”

  “It was so pathetic! We were sitting an aisle away from each other at E.T.”

  “The rerelease.”

  “E.T. is the perfect movie,” said Annie.

  “Gertie!” exulted Gingher. “How cute is Gertie?” She addressed the last to Becca, whom she deemed to be ambassador to the land of Drew.

  “What was that, like four years ago?” said Larry. “I’d never even seen it.”

  “Can you believe that?” said Annie to the others, outraged.

  “I saw Close Encounters,” he said, “but I never saw E.T.”

  “You know how the Grove—I love the Grove!—has those armrests you can lift up?”

  “Lovebird seats,” said Annie.

  “So Larry and I see each other crying. And we like started whispering to each other, really loud. Then Larry changes seats—”

  “I thought you were Julia Sweeney.”

  “—and we sobbed through the whole movie!”

  “People were telling us to shut up.”

  “Larry told this one person that he was really sorry he was crying but he just found out he had tuberculosis and AIDS. After the movie, we went to the Farmers Market and ran our stories.”

  “About the mutual breakups.”

  “Who were you going out with?” asked Becca.

  “Some pimply-faced Puerto Rican trash,” said Larry. “I think he was, like, twelve.”

  “Research for yet another amazing movie role,” said Gingher, with a wink. “And speaking of E.T., ohmygod, you do look so much like Drew!”

  “Thank you,” said Becca, as if in rehearsal for when she would finally come into her own.

  “Larry said you might be doing that Spike Jonze movie.”

  “I hope so,” said Becca. “Because the look-alike stuff doesn’t pay the rent. Not this month anyway.”

  Larry was saying how he read somewhere that look-alikes were always being flown to Japan for private parties, when Gingher gaped at a pregnant woman passing by their table. She took one look and blurted out, “Ohmygod, I can’t even believe I, like, forgot—Viv miscarried.” She clapped an embarrassed hand over her mouth, in exaggerated fear that the woman had overheard.