Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

Sadge had diarrhea, something he’d picked up in the Canary Islands and couldn’t shake. A little bonus from the skeev-hump. Plus, he had some kind of worm in his foot. The doctor said the way you killed the worm was by freezing. You didn’t even try to extract it. It gave Sadge the willies to just leave it in there, and Becca thought that was why he seemed underwhelmed when she told him she got the Viv Wembley gig. Maybe he was just jealous.

She slowly chewed an overdone cheese melt. It was too soon to talk about his moving out; she didn’t want to kick him while he was down. She read aloud another item, clipped from the L.A. Times for her “Drew archives,” about the former actor John Barrymore III getting beat up inside his “upscale Mountain View” home by a bunch of crazed teenagers who were after his pot stash. She wondered how Drew and John III were related — a half brother? Then she told Sadge about how she met this adorable young actress at the Coffee Bean who had actually grown up in the house where Drew and Tom Green lived before it went up in flames. The girl said her dad used to be Marlon Brando’s agent, and back then the property had four or five different houses on it. One of them was underground, with windows peeking through the hill — very Alice in Wonderland. Without looking up from his i-mail, Sadge said, “Would you please shut up?” Becca blithely ignored him. The girl said they had a screening room, and the mom, who was a painter, had fashioned a studio from inside a famous hamburger stand on La Brea that the dad bought lock, stock, and barrel and had trucked onto the grounds. The girl said she cried when the house burned down but then Ben Affleck had apparently bought the parcel and the girl and her dad drove by and all kinds of construction was already being done. Sadge literally threw his sandwich at her, and Becca burst into tears. She told him he could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t even supposed to be here, that he was supposed to find someplace else to live, and Sadge stopped typing, then sulked in that simmering way a man has of signaling a woman he is not a little boy but a coiled snake who by rights could rape and kill her if it weren’t for the fact that he was a good person, a good man, who conscientiously exercised extraordinary sobriety, discipline, and restraint. And that one day she would see with what wisdom he had held himself back and would recognize her shrewish ways but by then it would be too late.

She tossed some things into an overnight bag and cried all the way to the car. She was on her way to Annie’s, but Annie didn’t answer any of her phones so Becca took Fairfax to Washington and then turned and headed for the beach.

The World of Mu

LISANNE MOVED TO Rustic Canyon. The house was empty except for the few rooms Philip inhabited, just as he described. She had her own wing. Mattie took Lisanne on a Beverly-Melrose furniture outing and spent a small fortune. She liked the idea of finally having an excuse to decorate her eccentric brother’s house. She couldn’t have been kinder if Siddhama had been her blood nephew.

Philip put thirty thousand dollars into an account for her to draw on for living expenses and whatever Sidd might need. They had sex twice a week. He liked taking her pants off and licking her there while she nursed. She remained passive, simply widening her legs. Anything he ever did made him come within a few minutes. He told her it had always been like that, he couldn’t hold it, and Lisanne said she didn’t mind, which she really didn’t. She was actually grateful. Philip became active only when the baby was nursing. As long as he did his business without involving Siddhama, she was OK with it. He drew comfort from her easeful indifference. That she never judged him made him less ashamed.

• • •

LISANNE RECEIVED AN e-mail from L.A. Dharma, a Buddhist Web site she corresponded with, announcing that a great teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, would be giving a series of talks at a Zen monastery in the West Adams area. She didn’t know those kinds of places even existed, locally. Something about his name looked familiar, so she confirmed on-line that Kit had once spent time at the Mount Baldy center where the roshi lived. He was almost a hundred years old.

The zendo was long and woodsy. When she arrived, male and female monks already sat in meditative posture upon cushions lining the walls. A wide bench bisected the room, and people sat on that too. Everyone took the lotus position, spines ramrod straight, but Lisanne knew she couldn’t hold that too long (she hadn’t really lost much weight since the birth), so she tucked a leg underneath instead and let the other one dangle. The roshi appeared and slowly made his way to a tall oaken throne on a raised platform. He was tiny and broad, and Lisanne thought he looked just like Yoda as he shuffled past in elaborate, impeccably arranged robes. An interpreter sat on the floor in readiness.

There was once a teacher and his student, he began. Teacher and student were in deep meditation when suddenly, a dog appeared between them. The student asked, “Does the dog have the Buddha nature?” To which the teacher replied, “Mu.” The roshi explained that both teacher and student represented Oneness. He said that, in an eternal act of cosmic beneficence, Oneness divides itself to make room for sentient beings — bird, dog, self. It then becomes the duty of sentient beings to return to that Oneness, to rejoin the great Source whence they came. The roshi said Buddhists sometimes call such Oneness “the singular reality” or True Love. The act of division itself was an act of True Love.

She struggled to understand, but her mind kept drifting. Slowly, as she grew more aware of her surroundings, Lisanne became cognizant that she was sitting beside the singer Leonard Cohen. How strange. Her back hurt, and she stirred, to avoid spasm. No one else moved — all were yogic veterans of self-abnegation, insightfulness, and zen combat. Why was she even there? She was a coward, a poseur, a grotesque. A dilettante. Unworthy. She thought of Kit, in the Painful and Unnatural Bardo of Neurological Netherworlds. She could shift a leg if her pose grew unpleasant, but what was he experiencing? What could he shift? How could she dare even presume? One of the books she got at the Bodhi Tree said that, through the vehicle of dream yoga (whatever that was), a person might be able to realize that dreaming life and waking life were the same — mere projections. Last night Lisanne woke up with a jolt because she dreamed she was riding bareback on a gigantic horse, galloping with such primal velocity that it frightened her. She was born in the Year of the Horse; maybe the dream meant this would be the year her life ran away with her. In her own analysis, the horse didn’t seem to represent so much her personal life as the wild, rushing force of life itself. (Most of the time, Lisanne felt as if she were in the midst of a dream that she couldn’t control, inescapable even by death.) What kinds of dreams was Kit having? Were they mundane or surreal? Or was there even a distinction? When he awakened, when he floated back from dreaming into the waking life of his disconnected body, each time that he consciously inhabited his newly ruined world afresh, the circumscribed, humiliating, crater-pocked landscape far from arc lights and movie sets, from gilded Buddha and sylphlike fiancée and the simple pleasures of food and drink, where exactly did he find himself? How did he perceive? Did he wear a chain-mail shroud made from the vortex of unfamiliar words and faces, where thought and syntax continuously stuck and unstuck like worn gears, veiling the possibility ever to make his most basic or nuanced needs known? Abject and disoriented, unmoored… And if, while in such a state, he could actually glimpse with any lucidity the cataclysm that had befallen him, such a revelation alone might be enough to drive him mad. Another scary Buddhist text spoke of the “ kundalini crisis” sometimes elicited by drugs or trauma, in which subjective and objective states, waking and symbolic, merged together and broke apart in an endless loop until “consensus reality” died as surely as did the proprioception of those suffering vertigo. (A blow to the head could evoke both such crises, she thought.) A person subject to this energetic chain reaction was said to literally disintegrate but not in a good way. Oh, who needs consensus reality anyhow. Lisanne comforted herself by thinking, Just because it’s something I wouldn’t be able to deal with, doesn’t mean it’s something Kit can’t. Yet what if, on top of everything, his literal practice hadn’t been “right”? What if he’d made gross missteps (on the Path) that hadn’t been corrected along the way, particularly since his root guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi, was long since dead — making Kit the equivalent, now, of a pilot in a small plane flying by instruments in a thunderstorm on a moonless night. There was no one to guide him but his derelict father and a bunch of lame RNs.