Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

• • •

ALF, PUFFY-EYED and disconsolate, at Kit’s bedside.

An RN empties a catheter bag.

He smirks, then hangs his head low. Aggressively mutters, “Fuck this shit,” and bolts.

Darkness. He is met by a frenzy of paparazzi shouting his name. Across the street, behind barricades, fifty die-hard fans — bundled up in the cold dead of night — gather with signs, candles, flowers. Calling, “Alf! Alf! How is he? How’s Kit? Is he talking? Have you talked to him?”

Alf smiles tight-lipped. Gives a thumbs-up. Some applaud.

The lesser outcry, jokey, not really meant to be heard, of a prankster cuts through: “Hey, Alfie, did Cameron dump you?”

Paparazzo with an old grudge.

The others shout the insensitive shutterbug down, officially registering their distaste.

Alf ducks into the waiting Town Car.

• • •

A SPECIAL CREW obliterates all traces of biological debris from Kit’s bathroom. (A CSI producer had referred them to Kit’s agent, Kiki, who insisted on handling that sort of detail.) She told Alf that, supposedly, the company was profiled on the Discovery Channel. The LAPD hires them for crime scene scrubs — they restore rooms to their original pristine state. Kiki said they use chemicals that eat “smell” molecules.

• • •

HE EMERGES FROM coma, pulling the feed tube from his throat. Gagging. One eye won’t open — the muscle controlling the lid is damaged. A rakish pirate patch is provided, but he keeps tearing it off.

Viv and Alf rejoice in his feistiness.

Lightfoot Senior revels in his boy’s stubborn, genetic heroism. Headstrong.

There is some cause for celebration among Kit’s management posse, though Kiki still can’t see the light. She thinks people are grasping at straws.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. In a press conference, they guardedly announce that the actor is no longer comatose. Condition upgraded to serious. They refuse to talk details of status or prognosis.

Kit makes sounds — gibberish. Sings in his sleep. Jerks awake, as if he was falling. Gains weight. Likes to spit. As long as he holds on to something, he can stand by himself and try to whistle or make barking noises. His face still looks like a Francis Bacon. He cries. He laughs. He is diapered.

• • •

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.