Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

Lisanne shook off her agitation, retucking first one leg, then the other. She took long, discreetly deep breaths to steady herself. She could smell her perspiration and was glad she wasn’t menstruating. Leonard Cohen stared ahead with downcast eyes, oblivious.

A gong sounded, and the old man said he was out of time. “What is time?” he casually inquired. “ Time is an activity of the Buddha. That is not a definition you are taught in schools!” He ended by saying that it was a shame the student interpreted his master’s response to the question, Does the dog have the Buddha nature? as “No” when in fact he had said “Mu.” Mu meant something entirely different. Mu meant nothing, non-existence, non-being. “Yet just because he misunderstood does not mean the student was unworthy.”

Chanting immediately began, accompanied by drums, as the translator helped the roshi from the throne. After he disappeared, Mr. Cohen was the first to stand. Lisanne noticed that, as he left, the poet kept one arm tucked to his side while the other jutted forward, parallel to the ground, the hand ritualistically cleaving sacred space like the ice cutter at the prow of a trawler.

The morning air stung her cheeks. She smiled at the world and made mental prostrations to the roshi, the gravel, and the trees — to Oneness itself. Everything was clear now. Just as the old monk had benevolently created a space for her liberating insight, Lisanne knew the destruction of the sand mandala had created a space for her child, for she remembered that as the very moment in which she had decided to keep him. The ejection of Viv Wembley’s doomed fetus’s consciousness into the great Source (a kind of innocent, unschooled phowa after all) had created the space for Siddhama Kitchener McCadden’s hastened birth. All were part of the Wheel — just as Lisanne herself had been instantly, fatefully bound to Kit Lightfoot through the cauterizing gift of the auction house Buddha. Tiff Loewenstein had obliviously played spiritual midwife. For this, he was and always would be a very important man in her life.

Again Lisanne felt a great peace, the same that had flooded over her on the day of Siddhama’s birth — the singular reality of True Love.

• • •

ON THE WAY BACK from West Adams, she stopped at Bristol Farms in Beverly Hills. She laughed to herself as the housewives stepped from their Range Rovers and Lexus SUVs — she was practically one of them. Her life had taken a peculiar turn.

“Hey!” said a big woman with frizzy hair. She planted herself in front of Lisanne like some rank frontier hippie. “I remember you. ” Lisanne stared, blinking. “From the lawyer’s office. You were at the meeting. ” She extended a hand. “Cassandra — Cassie Dunsmore.”

“Oh! Hi! How are you?”

“Couldn’t be better!” She rocked her newborn in the crook of her arm. “That’s my Jake. Ain’t he dreamy?”

Lisanne said, “Oh, he’s beautiful. ”

“Honey, what’s your name again?”

“Lisanne — McCadden.”

“You should come up to the house, Lisanne! You and your boss— Reggie. Oh, hey! We incorporated. QuestraWorld Productions. It feels good. Man, Grady and I can’t even believe it! Actually, it’s QuestraWorld Film and Television Productions. That’s the long and the short of it. We were gonna call it QuestraWorks but — Hey, know what we want to do? I mean, we wanna make movies and all but, man, I wanna do TV real fuckin bad. We’re gonna do The Osbournes —but hard-core. I mean hard fucking core. Cause that other shit is so tired. Don’t get me wrong, the Osbournes opened the door. But we wanna seriously show fucking. The final frontier! America’s been headin straight for it, right? Gonna take the Dunsmores to keep it real, cause it seems everybody’s been busy keepin it un -real. I am tellin you, folks want to see other folks gettin it on. Honey, we are the next wave! And you know what we got in our corner? The pathos of Baby Questra. Not as exploitation but as righteous inspiration. Where’s the pathos in Sharon Osbourne’s gut cancer? The girl had chemo and looks better than she ever did in her life, right? And now she’s gonna be out there hostin a talk show —where’s the tragedy? I mean, what’s the lesson? Get cancer and get glamorous? Lose weight now, ask me how? Get cancer and get rich? Or richer? OK, that’s bullshit. Let me tell you somethin. Big C ain’t nothin compared to watchin your baby die. OK? Right? Eric Clapton like to kill hisself when that little boy flew out the window. People at home want to see that shit— not babies dying! — they want to see survivors who still fuckin hurt, that you can survive, cause the people at home know some terrible shit like that could happen to them. An’ they need to be able to commiserate. Grady and I are gonna do it for HBO. Class it up. We ain’t had the meeting yet but they be fools to pass-ola. Gon’ be QuestraWorld’s first production, that’s right. We are virgin! We! Are! Fam-i-lee! I got all my sisters and me —Next week, I’m talkin to the Six Feet Under people, to partner up.”

A Day of Fun

BECCA AND RUSTY spent the afternoon at Mulholland. She liked playing mommy with Jake.

When Grady heard that she had moved in with Rusty, he bought them an expensive robot dog. The droid kept raising its hind leg to pee, and Rusty couldn’t figure out why. “This manual is two hundred fucking pages.”

Grady sipped his beer, watching the miscreant dogbot like a proud parent. “Every young couple needs an animal.”

They smoked dope while Cassandra prattled on about Questra-World ramping up production for the X-rated skein “Been There, Dunsmore” (working title) as soon as the Six Feet Under posse signed on. Their new lawyer supposedly was going to hook them up, but Cassandra argued that Becca already had a “relationship” with the show and should be able to get them “entrée.” Cassandra said the next time their little girl did “a guest shot”—“If there is a next time,” said Becca — she was going to come and watch. That way she could introduce herself to Their Highnesses, the two Alans. “Because in this town, that’s the only way things ever get done.” By extreme measure (if smuggling in during Becca’s corpse gig could be considered extreme). She cited Spielberg as an example of someone who “did what he had to do.” Broke into the Universal Studios backlot when he was first starting out — that’s how he got hired as a director. Pretended to work there and even scammed an office, just like that movie he did, Catch Me If You Can. Rusty interrupted, saying if they really wanted the “unreality show” (the catchy phrase Grady had come up with to promote it) to be a success, they should maybe think about adopting a few kids. Especially a few older kids. Because that was the secret to a show like that: teenagers. Rusty said that was the main thing the Osbournes got right. You had to have kids, for demographics, drama, and relatability. Ozzy and Sharon had ruthlessly cut the older daughter out of the series, the p.r. cover being that she had declined because she was “private.” Rusty said that was pure horseshit. It was “all about demos”—getting rid of their eldest was a smart business move, clean and simple. Cassandra loved the adoption strategy and got a brainstorm that the whole process should become part of the show. Definitely. “That is fantastic. Why can’t you come up with a million-dollar idea idea like that, Grady? I’m gonna have to make Rusty here a fucking exec producer.” Grady belched and said, “Right on. You go, girl. I don’t need me a million-dollar idea cause I already got a million. Got more than a million. So do what you have to do.” Rusty said Web sites existed where prospective parents could go shopping for kids who were currently wards of the state. Cassandra got superexcited. She said the cameras could follow them to the orphanage and they’d pick the kids out right then and there. The audience could even phone in preferences, to make it interactive. “Naw,” said Grady. “That interactive shit don’t never work. That’s a nineties thing.” “Yes, Mr. Gates,” said Cassandra. Rusty said he read in the newspaper that some of those places had special picnic days where people came to look the kids over like at a slave auction. Becca thought that Rusty knew way too much about it, as if it were all close to home, so to speak. But that was the kind of thing she would never ask him about.