Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

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HE COULDN’T REMEMBER anything that had happened in the months before the assault. (Albeit he never made much effort.) It took everything he had to be present and fight the panic of being entombed, synaptically stuck in a berserk new reality. Not until he was transferred to Valle Verde did Kit try to recall what life had once been like. In rehab, there was much more space and time. Ram Dass came, angel-faced and self-deprecating (Ram was an initialism for run at the mouth, he said). He told Kit to remember his Buddhist teacher, Gil Weiskopf Roshi — and Kit realized he’d been thinking of the guru all along, visualizing his face before him, whenever, as in Ram Dass’s phrase, he “surfed the silence.”

Ram Dass jovially, gently, literally guided him back to vipassana, got him focused on the breath beneath his nose, on body and sensation, dispersement of pain and dread. The pain and dread would arise and fall away, he said, the fear would come and go, though nothing ever came and nothing ever went, there was only the luminous fullness of the now. Vipassana, he said, was the gift that dissolved all makeshift borders. Ram Dass brought him a light and sound machine so Kit could watch the universe switch on, dancing beneath the goggles. He became a particle in the rainbow’s spectrum, a divine, lowly microbe. Now he remembered his first retreat, awakening at four in the morning, sixteen hours of vipassana a day for two weeks, remembered the silence and segregation of sexes, the prostrations, walking meditations, and mealtime prayers, cosmos in a teacup, all barriers transient, dissolved, impermanent. At Valle Verde his practice slowly returned, long preceding the recalled details, the linear landscape, of his life. Wasn’t that as it should be? Wasn’t the practice the only thing that was real?

He couldn’t remember meeting Ram Dass at Yoga House, yet his mind lit on the Getty boy: beneath goggles’ pyrotechnics, Kit saw himself in an elevator, rising… stepping from the gunmetal door that opened with a whoosh to the invalid’s master bedroom, then, as in 2001 ’s finale, standing at the foot of the bed where the ruined scion lay— himself now prone, Coptic prince dead on a sepulchre, though made not of stone: wizened and unborn, timeless and untimed.

Nakedly clothed in the great Self.

• • •

THE MONTHS PASSED, and he was not so imprisoned.

His body was stodgily effective and hadn’t lost much tone. He had gained weight because the cocktail of drugs made him ravenous. He could finally look in the mirror and court the being who stared back. He knew him a little more each day. He would know him intimately and be filled with compassion and resolve. Such was the power of his will.

• • •

(THE WILL THAT, to his celluloid image, had married and mesmerized billions of eyes.)

• • •

THE QUIET PEOPLE patiently tutored. They reasserted that the name of the Buddha meant “one who is awake,” and again and again offered up the Three Jewels — the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. They said “Buddhism” did not exist. That Siddhartha Gautama was simply a man who saw things as they were: that to live was to suffer, that suffering was caused by attachment, that there was a cure for suffering and that cure was the Eightfold Path. They said bodily sensations gave rise to aversion and craving and that one could train oneself not to react to what inevitably arose then passed away. Over and over they told him that the difference between buddhas and sentient beings was that a buddha realized all phenomena were totally devoid of arising, dwelling, and ceasing, and had no true existence, whereas sentient beings believed all phenomena to be real and solid; a buddha understood that things and the world were nonexistent, whereas sentient beings believed that things and the world existed. None of this was new to him, but of course everything was new and infectiously, primally urgent. Kit had no choice but to passionately embrace the diamond-pointed construct, to dissolve in it, and in time he became grateful that his own temple had collapsed, it had after all been shoddily built, its upkeep wanting, its materials poor, already in shambles when it came down, he was grateful to near ecstasy that the foundation had remained and proved sound, grateful he’d long ago taken refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and that for all his warped and lurid rendezvous, his sleazy affairs of self, the vows still held. At Valle Verde he took refuge again, a sacramental honeymooner with no choice but to rewed infinity, and all the mysterious rigors and ceremonies that honed consciousness, he could either do that or give himself to madness because his life had at last become nothing but what it always had been — a dream.

… Beginner’s Mind. Again and again, over and over they spoke of the irrefutable peace as prescribed by the Great Scientist, guiding Kit through the Four Sublime States and Four Vows, the Three Sufferings and Three Stains, the Three Poisons, Three Dharma Seals, Three Aspects, and Three Lesser Pains:

Not getting what one wants.

Meeting with what one does not want.

Being separated from loved ones and encountering enemies.

Mediation

A GRAY DAY at Department 11 of the Superior Court of Los Angeles, California, the Honorable Lewis P. Leacock presiding.

The flag had been dutifully faced; principles for which it stood, recognized; pledges and oaths, sworn. A phalanx of attorneys lined up before the judge, who busied himself with paperwork, ignoring them. An unhappy Burke Lightfoot sat eight rows back.

“I see there was a motion for sanctions and that motion was denied,” said the judge.

“Your Honor,” said an attorney, “as a matter of housekeeping, the court has bifurcated those original issues.”

“What happened to the one-oh-one?”

“The one-oh-one,” said another attorney, “has been compromised through the public administrator.”

“You’re saying the eleven-seven hundred is frivolous?”

“Your Honor, the petition was never consented to.”

“Then doesn’t it make sense to get all these things before one person?”

“Counsel is asking the court to put the remaining matters over to March,” said a third attorney.

“You’re not answering the question,” the judge said testily. He looked over his eyeglasses. “I repeat: doesn’t it make sense to get all of these things before one person?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said one of them.

“We are simply asking that 070441 be consolidated into 070584,” said another.

The judge said to a fourth, “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, Your Honor.”

He returned to his paper sifting. “Then 070441 will be consolidated into 070584. This looks like it’s ready for mediation. Let’s clear the notes. When would you like your hearing date, with the understanding it will not be continued again?”

“We’d like ninety days, Your Honor,” said the first.

“All right. How about the week of April the twenty-eighth?”

“Your Honor, I have a three-day trial on the thirtieth,” said another.

“How about the second week of May — May seventeenth?”

A third said, “Your Honor, I have a five-day trial on that date.”

“June the fifteenth.”

A fourth said, “Your Honor, I have a three-day trial on the sixteenth.”

There was some laughter from the spectators though not from Mr. Lightfoot.

Or the judge. “Whichever trial comes first takes precedence! There’s a lot of money involved in this case — I should think that would act as an incentive. See you on the fifteenth!”

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