Bruce Wagner - Memorial

They lay quiet awhile — Laxmi said they should be quiet — and Chess thought maybe he hadn’t taken enough little ones — then had the thought he might be coming on — then definitely, even though Laxmi said with a vacant smile that she wasn’t. Which made sense; she took half. Or maybe she lied and swallowed a full dose and only said she’d taken less because she knew how spooked he was. (Maybe she’d be the one to lose it.)

(Doubtful) (The Nancy Nurse fantasy was bullshit anyway)

He was coming on now. Oh. No. Industrial-strength—“ego-leveling dosage”—another favored phrase of the shamanguides — queasy and afraid. Stomach hurting. Body/mind changes churning vertigo/ hawhr fear: why did i do this i shouldn’t have done this what if i/we need a hospital what if it’s the same hospital they took Maurie. They hadn’t left their room at the perfectly named Miracle Manor, beautiful minimalist hotel with sweet utilitarian kitchen, clinical desert tile whites, he didn’t at all want to go outside. He lay on the floor.

feeling the presence of elephants.

He could sense the duststorms stirred by their powerful legs.

THE DISTANT MUSIC EMANATING FROM THEIR TRUNKS.

Trumpets.

Chess asked Laxmi if she minded if he spoke, that he was going to tell her “essential truths.”

She said she would like that: excited for him, giddy almost. And he said, like an anchor in Iraq

these are Her imperial troops. i am on the outskirts of the army’s gathering. these elephants are the imperial guards. because i have taken the little ones, the cubenses, they are allowing me here, but i can only be present at a great distance. getting too close would endanger. i feel like huckleberry. what is his last name. Finn, she said

these are Her imperial guards —

He sat flummoxed and shocky with the holiness of it and Laxmi grinned, quietly eager and respectful. He asked for reassurance that she’d help, that Laxmi would help with whatever came up because She —that’s how he referred to this energetic entity, misty mythopoeic colossus the elephants were guarding— She could easily crush him and all that is or ever was built or imagined. It would be nothing for Her! Laxmi made gentle oath. His girlfriend and journeywoman, splinter of She, was generous and bountiful, just like that whom the elephants guarded. But there was no danger in Laxmi, the human manifestation…

Chess began to cry and said

She is learning about me through you. She sees that i am afraid because i brought you, laxmi, to help. She sees i am a frightened, frail being, and because of that, She is going to treat me with tenderness. He convulsed in tears. Oh! (Laxmi cried with him, softly though, so as not to upstage) can you imagine? this being —(Laxmi told him it was Kali-Durga)— this being who could crush me — crush the world if She wished — has deigned to treat me with such compassion and tenderness i am so ashamed! i was so afraid, and among the infinite tasks She has before her, She has taken the time to make certain i am unharmed! for i am a fragile

Laxmi put her arms around him and said to let everything just wash over, and that she loved him.

How can there be shame? When

She never rests! he shouted, wild-eyed, filled with grace. because of her compassion she allows the elephants to guard Her, but only because She knows that is what they wish — She knows they are guarding nothing! (Laxmi was crying again) can anything be more beautiful than that? oh! so sad! it’s so sad! the plant! i feel the sadness of the plant— how can we bear up against the sadness of a plant? he asked rhetorically — quietly, Laxmi changed “plant” to “planet” but he didn’t hear— how can we bear the sadness of a plant, how can we take that, laxmi? She says that She knows we can’t. She knows we are too weak and that our backs would break under the weight of even a single tear of this mushroom, Her favorite pupil, Her most devoted student, can you see? She says the mushroom likes to observe the world through our eyes and that She lets us see things through Its eyes, though not for very long because it’s too much, we’re too frail, so She lets us be human, lets us forget, because it would destroy us if we walked around remembering

For hours (4 hours), Laxmi tended him, bringing fruit drinks. Still, he had no desire to go outside.

There was no outside.

Once, on her way to the kitchen, Chess said with a laugh:

“I don’t know if I’ll be here when you get back.”

He wasn

rode beachrocket from marinesub to subcontinent, Old and New testamentary Worlds, found himself at sea as well, Homeric ship on tsunami wave, crest of voice imploring him to let go, let go of the mast —Her again, commanding— let go, for the mast is already broken. She whom imperial elephants guarded and for whom mushrooms were merely students and Chess a speck Chesapeake of submarined subatomic dust, showed him cubensis Cubist crystalline prismpink mosaic of amethyst-emerald alien cityscapes, high-tension tessellated grids, he literally got knocked down by her wedding train — merely one more groveling suitor. He began to shiver/shudder, felt his mother Marjorie, the plant ingeniously wafting him from cosmoecstaticdemonic to interpersonal, now on Freudian couch feeling melancholic pain of that old woman’s heart and body — there were so many Mothers, why should Marjorie be any less scared/ sacred? He was already in India, thankful soon to be faraway, sadness and anxiety of separation and necessary revolt. Rocked in Laxmi’s arms. Those men beating Mom’s small white body in the night, robbing her, Mother alone without him, his protectorship, saw himself taking her money, asking for money, Die Rich, how could he, how could he make such a joke, he killed with his jokes, 1st Maurie than Marj, and now it must stop, She, the Great Mother, would help him, must help, he would call on Her imperial army, guarding nothing, do what he had to, he was good for Nothing, he would leave the useless killing part of himself behind, rocking a rock in Laxmi’s arms, Laxmi, cheap ineffable wondrous sterling knockoff of She, It, Chess now stereoscopically keening and wailing at Her unfathomable horror and Mercy.

I will go to India for I cannot be here for her death. I could not be here for her life.

O Mother Mother Mother I have

discarded the paper at her feet which she lifted to read the dingy ad blaring out at her

It’s never too late to finish rich.

Even if you are buried in debt — there is still hope.

Find your “Silver Lexus Nexus”—and turbocharge it to save money

you didn’t know you had!

from the floor of the bus that would take her (though she did not know it) to Long Beach.

The LOVE IS AROUND THE CORNER fortune and lucky numbers were tucked in pocket, she had gotten the original scrap back from Joan after her daughter had promised — sworn — to write the string of numbers down once and for all. They were to be used without exception when buying lottery tickets.

Marj left the bungalow while the nurse was dozing. She strolled the gardens awhile — a lovely hotel, she’d been to a reception there once with Hamilton — before going south on Beverly Drive to Wilshire where she sat and looked at the gutted Taj Mahal, the theater she took her babies to when they were young. A tear of sorrow on the cheek of time. Wasn’t that how a poet had described the palace in Agra?