Bruce Wagner - Memorial

But maybe she meant “ma,” which is what the cousins called each other. Everyone — every girl — was “ma,” even babies.

MAURIE was transferred to St John’s.

His mother was dead and his father somewhere in Oregon. The sister, Edith, flew in from Milwaukee, but said she couldn’t stay very long.

Laxmi bunked at Chester’s. The 1st week after Maurie’s return from the desert (by ambulance), they lived like people who’d lost everything in a storm or a fire. The apartment was untidy. It was as if they had the same terrible flu. She often dissolved into tears, without warning. Chess was in a world of shock but couldn’t share the deeper source of his panic.

During visiting hours, he held his paralyzed friend’s hand and prayed, observing his own emotions with a new and special kind of agony, both exquisite and excruciating. A part of him hoped Maurie would die; a part was filled with self-loathing for allowing that thought. A part of him prayed with vehemence that Maurie was at least incognizant of what had befallen him; a part, with the nonhuman stinging energy of a hornet or wasp, dared insist the Jew deserved everything he got, but then the cycle of self-loathing started anew — like being tortured on the wheel or the rack — each and every siege causing Chess more psychic damage. (A damage that felt real-time and intensely chemical.) Again and again he thought of turning himself in but what good would that do, if Maurie wasn’t going to recover? What good would it do if Maurie did recover? He willed his friend to “snap out of it.” He willed himself to snap out of it: for the onerous trampoline of reality to bend and warp and spit them up, fluttering the pair down in some other place and time. The doctors refused to give out information because they weren’t family, so Laxmi and Chester had to rely on the sister, who wasn’t the communicative type, and regarded them with thinly veiled scorn and suspicion. None of her reports sounded good. I am a murderer, thought Chess. No: I’ve consigned him — and myself— to a fate worse than death. A double murderer. He wondered if he should make “bedside confession” but immediately rescinded the thought as self-serving and possibly sadistic because of the very real chance that Maurie Levin could understand everything being said all around him, and was, in fact, completely sentient — yeah, probably exactly the case, because Chester’s karma (Maurie’s too, right?) was and had always been so fucked.

This isn’t about me.

When not obsessing, he monitored his own neuroskeletal pain, the scale of which seemed absurd next to anything Maurie was going through, but still, it was there, it was authentic, and this man, afterall, had caused it. No way around that one. What if he, Chester Herlihy, needed surgery related to the FNF fiasco, what if something went wrong with the anesthesia or scalpels and Chess wound up in the same condition? He knew it sounded like an elaborate justification yet what if what had happened to Maurie was a macabre preamble to the very fate that awaited him? Maybe Maurie was a kind of burnt offering. He would be damned if he’d let someone put him under, slit his flesh open with a rongeur, and remove the soft discs between bony vertebrae before fusing everything together courtesy of a titanium cage. Fuck that.

The hippie and the scout slept together like siblings. They hadn’t done it since that time in the desert, probably because now they were even more shell-shocked and self-conscious. They never referred to their post-ER Morongo moment; it was clear they’d copulated as a reptilian reaction to death, a fairly common occurrence from what Chess had heard. People came back from war zones or funerals or what have you and their animal instincts kicked in. In the face of death, the species shouted (or grunted): breed.

LAXMI was stoned. She sat on the couch tearfully watching The Jungle Book for about the hundredth time.

The vultures were singing, “We never met an animal we didn’t like.” The couple stared at the screen very seriously before beginning to laugh, and they didn’t stop for 5 whole minutes. Laxmi started playing the McDonald’s What’s-A-Fruit-Buzz game. “What’s a fruit buzz?” she asked piquantly. “It makes me feel better than knowing my ex boyfriend is still single! It’s that feeling you get when everything’s 60 % off!” Chess retorted: “What’s a fruit buzz? It’s like snorting coke off a choirboy’s cock! It’s like doing meth and coming on a fat chick’s tits in Bakersfield while her army brats watch cartoons in the same room — and her husband’s getting triple-amputated in Tikrit! It’s like puking in Maya Angelou’s mouth! It’s like having diarrhea during sex—”

“With Maya Angelou?”

“—but you keep on truckin!”

They howled and did bong hits and ate Trader Joe’s chicken dumplings and watched more of The Jungle Book.

Then Chess had an epiphany.

He went to the bedroom and called Remar DeConcini.

“Remar! It’s Chess Herlihy.”

“Hullo, Chester!”

“Listen. Um, I know you’re not going to like this — but I think I want to settle out.”

“Whoa! You’re right. I don’t like it. What’s goin on, bro?”

“I don’t know. I guess, it’s just — I’ve seen what lawsuits do to people, man.”

“So have I, bro! I’ve seen lawsuits make people extremely rich. Dude, what have y’all been smoking?” Remar sounded a little fruit-buzzed himself. “Are y’all up in the trees?”

“Listen. Lawsuits create…shitty karma. I mean, I’m starting to feel like it’s controlling me, not like I’m controlling it.”

“And here I was thinking your life was being controlled by the pain you’ve suffered because of your injuries. You’ve got to chill, Chester. This is the pain talking. Sometimes it’s your worst enemy.”

“I just don’t know if I want to spend the next 3 years of my life on hold.”

“1st of all, Chess, it’s not gonna be 3 years. OK? There’s just no way it’s going to go on that long. No way. 2nd of all, your life does not have to be on hold. Because that way, they win. Understand what I’m saying, Chess? You go on with your life. Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart — remember the song? You’ll never walk alone? Well you better fucking believe you won’t be walking alone, you’re gonna be walking along, with a satchel full of cash! 3rdly, this is a perfect jury case, we’ve talked about that. There is simply no way you are not going be awarded with something in the 6 figures. Maybe 7. I’m thinking 7. And 4thly, you don’t need to be making a decision like this right now, aw-ite? Look. I know it can feel like this, like you’re in some twilight zone. And that’s normal. Everyone who was ever involved in a case, in my experience, no matter the merit, gets a bug up their ass and says, ‘I’m outta here.’ The higher the stakes, the more fucked up people get. Cause there’s a part of everyone who can see the armored truck coming with them sacks filled with cash and we get all, ‘I’m not worthy!’ So I totally get where you’re coming from. But what you don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater — my fear, Chester Herlihy, and I’ve been doing this a long-ass time so you gotta hear me, my fear is, if we move to settle, the bad guys are gonna smell that bathwater desperation and they’ll either stonewall us — now, they won’t succeed, but they’ll try, and they’ll eat up that precious time you were talking about — or lowball us. Stonewall or lowball. And believe me, that’s the game they like to play. And you deserve more than that.”