Bruce Wagner - Memorial

He looked back at the TV, finally unmuting it.

He was drunk.

Joan was drunk.

“You dumb cunt,” he said, staring at the model. “Oh! And people are calling in to ask her shit. I’m telling you, Joan, I have this fucking show memorized!”

“I can see that,” she said, with a smile.

“It’s on my hit parade! I had someone at Guerdon burn DVDs, I’m serious, I’m givin em out for Christmas. (Don’t tell Axel!) She keeps talking about the garbage, crushing her pelvis! Look, look,” he said, raising then lowering the volume. “One of the callers — a guy, of course — is asking Shtup ermodel if she’ll need ‘further surgery’ on her hips! On her hips! Loose lips sink shtuperhips! He was just like Larry, a horny motherfucker, you could tell all he really wanted to know was When can you get back to spreading for cock. A woman calls and says, ‘Think you’ll ever fall in love again?’ and Shtuperwhore says something like, ‘ Ya, ya, it’s too soon,’ blah. ‘Ya, it’s too soon, but I am looking for the future, whatever it brings.’ Bringing up baby! Coming soon to a theater near you! Coming soon on her shattered pelvis! Another guy has trouble spittin out a question but finally says he was a survivor —that’s why Larry’s people probably patched him through — says he was just up the beach from where Slippery Nip Shtup mod was stuck in the tree, but oh! Larry’s a hardass! Toughass Jew. Man, he was rough on this call-in motherfucker! Ol cardio-fartin Larry keeps cuttin the slob off, saying, ‘What’s your question, what’s your question ?’ just like he was at Nate ’n’ Al’s with the gang — then he hangs up on the guy! See, Larry doesn’t want any fellow victims bonding with her, she’s his, he wants that wet, fractured pussy all to himself! The answer my friend is blowin in his wind! See, Larry doesn’t dig the idea of some guy who was on the same beach when the wave hit — he don’t dig it at all. So Larry’s passin gas under the desk, sounds like fucked-up muffler, soiling his jock, marking his turf! Surf and turf! I’m tellin you, look at him, he’s got new suspenders — look! — new suspenders, a fresh haircut, and horny as hell! I look at that bitch and all I can think of is my sister-in-law, impaled on that sundari. I guess God smiles on the beautiful. Esther was no prize. And let’s face it, Shtup ermodel Fiancée is beautiful. Up in the tree for 9 hours, it held her in its arms, that’s what she said— Esther’s whorefuck tree wasn’t so benevolent. At least they found the boyfriend’s body. Poor Superfiancé. Samuel wasn’t that lucky. Maybe if he had a manicured bush, the bureaucrats wouldn’t have ‘misplaced’ him. Stupid fucks.”

Joan brought up a Faulkner story she’d read in college about a Mississippi River flood. A pregnant woman, stranded in a tree. (Indirect reference to Katrina, which she always tried to avoid around him, but she was inebriated and couldn’t help it.) A convict rescues her.

Then Joan blurted out that she was pregnant, she, not Faulkner’s lady, not Esther, not Superwhoever, but she, Joan Herlihy, and Lew was quizzically, quietly uncomprehending before soberly nodding his unsober head. She hadn’t expected such speedy, almost elegantly impersonal acquiescence, but that was why he’d made billions, he could reframe and conform his energies to the wildly brand-new. His expression became that of someone listening to a confession of illness, humbly attending the details of what could or couldn’t be done to effect a healing.

She didn’t stay much longer. He asked her not to leave, but suddenly Joan got nauseous and emotional and didn’t want to be that way around him, not now, not tonight, and didn’t want to hear the inevitable question: whether she was certain, but more, whether she was certain it was his, didn’t want to hear that now, not tonight. Joan knew she would have to take a paternity test, both parties would demand it — she would reserve the right of dignity to beat him to the punch and suggest (she would need to move soon: tomorrow morning) what she knew his attorneys would require anyway — she was going to keep this child, Joan knew it was his and she wanted to raise it, but not tonight, she did not want to discuss any of it tonight, did not want to feel anything more, no strength or will or heart or bowels to engage in dialogue, spoken or unspoken — not tonight.

AT home, she dreamed of the Lost Coast. It was carpeted by a macadamized boulevard that morphed into Eisenman’s Mem to the Murdered Jews of Europe, pillar after pillar, slab after slab, until the touristy petrified forest resembled a jail for villains in a Marvel comic. But the vast necropolis had a teeming underground life — in her netherworld, things went topsy-turvy, the dead lived aboveground and the living, below — as in some bad Czech sci-fi novel, dark figures clambered amid the labyrinth, scavenging among darkly crosshatched monoliths, fudgey tooth-some mugwumps, extraterrestrial carpetbaggers and the like, deaf and dumb silhouettes floating in mimed and weirdly gesticulative dreamworded rotomontade, the whole memorial metastasized in stop-motion, slowly unfurling red-carpet black-tie Gehry gala, a granite, boulder-holed, dwarf-oaked Ajanta unfurling, dripping slate-gray basins and ornamental asphalt bodhisattvas that crushed the populace and drove them to grottoes, besotted dilatory shadowclumps futilely attempting to outrun the cubist tsunami lava that slowly and surely advanced over all the acreage of this gob- and Godsmacked earth until every living-now-dead-

thing was sheathed in stone, hardcloth’d dandified forest curated by Lagerfeld, incapable of nourishment yet paying blackened homage to that which once had nourished and been nourished in return: now everything in static, ecstatic haute couture, a dynamically moribund gorgeously abstract iron maidenhead machine. Somewhere in the nightmare came Rem and Zorro with their shticks and dirty tricks, and somewhere came this baby, their baby, Baby Jane Doe (née Herlihy-Freiberg), and the Faulkner tree-house woman’s — and Larry King, and her mother Marj, and the Taj Mahal and Domino’s elephants, and the city of Madras AKA Chennai where Esther Freiberg was gutted and pilloried by a spirit tree whose roots, having giddily performed their sacred dilatation & curettage, now covered the entire universe itself (Joan would scribble it down best she could upon awakening), the 18-inch-deep inverted sarcophagus of Napa too with its inconceivably expensive, minutely calibrated pumps and drains overseen by mean old Calvinist Thom Mayne, his no-foam latte dispensed from her Impressa at Pritzker High in Diamond Ranch; woven into the somatic tapestry like cheap golden thread were all of Joan’s failures and all of her lusts and all of her loss of desire.

All there:

The Perfect Memorial.

THEY took Friar Tuck to a rehab center in Covina.

BG said the place looked like a resort. The woman at check-in was expecting them. Ghulpa confirmed they wouldn’t be “outlaying any monies” and their greeter said yes, she was correct, the City of Industry was taking care of everything. The couple were treated like VIPs.

The Friar snarled at Rahul, the assigned trainer, then spat out a beaded necklace of coughs, in nervous spasm. The unruffled therapist in swim trunks, flip-flops, and medical smock bent down and stroked his new patient, telling him how brave he was. Without taking his eyes off Friar Tuck, he told the owners this wasn’t the 1st dog he’d worked with who had been shot. The old man was surprised yet glad the helper was experienced. Rahul gently drew his hand over the injured hip to assess pain and mobility.