Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

I haven’t told you about the note. It wasn’t a suicide note per se — though the authorities referred to it as such.

Kelly’s meditation room was her holy of holies. Unless we were invited, Ryder and I were instructed to stay the fuck out. The door had a kitschy Gone Fishin’ sign on it at all times — now where the hell’d we pick that up? I want to say a yard sale in San Rafael. O, that little sign really tickled her! She said her dad used to hang one just like it on the door of Ballendine’s Second Penny whenever they were closed. The man hadn’t been near a fishing pole in his life.

Ryder took the sign and pasted over a handwritten edit:

GONE TO BOODAFIELD!!!!!!!

You can imagine how many ways I’ve looked at this.

The strongest theory was the one that hit Kelly the hardest: that for all the arcane knowledge he’d absorbed, for all her “Little Buddha” projections of our son’s scholarship, for all the tutelage in phowa —transference of consciousness — for all the cozying up to Maitreya’s merry band of bodhisattvas, for all the instructions in the Great Embodiment of Impermanence and the Tathagata (“One Who Has Thus Gone”) plus the Four Immeasurable Aspirations, the Eight Worldly Concerns, the 19 Root Downfalls and the 46 Transgressions, for all the rides thumbed on Greater and Lesser Vehicles, for all the picnicking with Vajra brothers and sisters, for all the comforts of the Six Mantras, Six Perfections, Six Gestures, Six Pristine Cognitions and Six Types of Bone Ornaments Worn by Wrathful Deities, for all the “mother and child aspects of reality,” for all the protections promised by the thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, for all manner of Nyingma masters, lovingkindnesses, dream bardos and intermediate states of rebirth, for all the inherent existences, inner radiances, illusory bodies and causally conditioned phenomena, for all the songs of dualism and dream yoga, the burnt offerings and calm abidings, the apparent and actual realities — for all that, well, Ryder was just going to impress Mom (especially) and Dad with an unthinkably bold act of tantric precocity, a supercalifragilistic Peter Pan leap into the Void from which he could boomerang back to the welcoming arms of that dimensional continuum he called home—

… to leapfrog the teachings, and rock the house of Impermanence.

There are a few pages of How It Can Dance! where Ryder’s cartoon avatar learns about tulkus , modern reincarnations of dead Buddhist saints. I can’t help feeling that’s what he grabbed onto — the whole darkly mordant Watchmen superhero ethos married to that Hardy-Boy-with-flashlight-under-the-sheets thrill. “The great meditation of no-meditation,” “the great training of no-training” … you can hear the woman on those CDs she burned for him to listen to as he fell asleep!

He grabbed an old tape recorder from the top of the bureau. It was already synched up; as fresh rain pattered the trailer’s roof, the soft, slow-cadenced voice of his wife, Kelly, began. While we listened, he toked on a joint, and poured himself a glass of wine.

“The most important dharma is to practice impermanence. [long pause] … To be at ease with impermanence is to open the Golden Doors of dharma… The contemplation of impermanence cuts all ties to samsara, allowing all beings to reach nirvana… As you train in the great training of no-training, it will take root and light up your journey on the Path… As impermanence flows through your heart, your discipline will become diamond-pointed, but only if you never stop meditating on it… Befriending impermanence will allow you to see the equal nature of all things and take you to a place beyond falling back… Once you’re certain you will die, you’ll have no trouble giving up evil actions and doing what is good… Impermanence is the Golden Wheel of dharma… This is the day! Turn the Thousand-Spoked Wheel! Turn it, turn it, turn it!”

He shut off the player.

Impermanence sucks !

See, but I knew my boy wasn’t a suicide. Weren’t never a doubt in my mind…

But why a hanging?

How come?

How comes it? 4

No further questions, Your Honor!

[sings] “Big Thousand-Spoked Wheel keep on turnin’, Proud Tulku keep on burnin’! Rollin’! Rollin’! Rollin’ on the ri-ver!” Golden Wheel ever turning, tightening into a magic ring around his neck—“To every season, turn turn turn ”—turning and turning in the widening gyre … to every season in Hell —every saison en enfer. You know about Ouroboros, don’t you? The serpent that devours its own tail? Right before you die, the sign of Death comes — your mouth forms a great O, those droll doctors call it “the O Sign.” The mouth O-pens (and o-pines its last) and your eyes begin to flutter as they do in REM sleep— RAM sleep! — all roads lead to Rama, don’t you know… that’s what Gandhi said when he was shot, said “Rama” in his final exhalation. (And George Harrison, right after he was stabbed.) As the noose choked Ryder’s neck, so the noose of his tiny anus opened (a lowercase “o” to be sure) to spill out the tainted, sacred contents of the Five Hollow Viscera: stomach, intestines, bladder, gall bladder, semen sac. Do you know the myth of the mandrake root? The medievals believed it sprouted from the semen that fell from innocent men who were hanged. And after the O, comes, as the drier wits like to say, “the Q sign,” tongue lolling from mouth, the mouth’s last vowel. Wagging… oh those wags!

But why? [sings] “Who by fire? Who by water? Who in the sunshine? Who in the night time?”… why hang himself?

Kelly and I had to focus on something. You can’t just sit there not thinking — the mind won’t allow it! — about every possibility, every permutation, every everything. Like his nakedness… I actually think I might have solved that mystery — maybe solved them both — with this memory. A few years ago we went camping by the Red River. We skinny-dipped in a hidden spring and there was a rope Ryder swung from way out over the river, then let go with a shiver and a huckleberry shout. Did that all day. I’ll bet part of stepping off that chair was recalling that time.

Whatever.

Kelly blamed herself for putting the hanging idea in Ryder’s head. When she was going through her prison dharma phase, she loved having a glass of wine at dinner and sharing Big House scuttlebutt. There were a lot of suicides in the penitentiary and the most popular method by far was hanging. The inmates went about it with trademark resourcefulness. A guard told her that a child molester hanged himself with his shoelaces , while lying down! Some went kneeling, as in prayer; you only needed a few pounds of pressure to do the job. Kelly became obsessed by the notion that she’d inspired our son through an anecdote, sort of a copycat death with a peppermint twist of naisthika. That’s Sanskrit for nihilism. “That which denies the existence of objects and the laws of cause and effect.” I guess in Ryder’s case, the concept of cause and effect was certainly denied… naisthika also refers to the Great Vow of celibacy. One who never wastes his semen. I suppose Ryder spilled at the end, but didn’t actually waste. It’s just semantics.

Kelly hardly spoke a word in the beginning days of her sequestration, but one late afternoon started to murmur this very fear — the prison hanging anecdotes as virus fear — at first burbling the words under her breath, not really loud enough to hear, as if talking to herself, then eventually loud enough for me to understand. To be honest, it didn’t matter what she was saying, I was just glad to finally hear her speak. I’d become one of those schmaltzy figures at the bedside of a comatose spouse, waiting for a sign, any sign. There was only one flaw in the theory. Being the superbly protective mom she was, Kelly never spoke about violent penitentiary stuff in Ryder’s presence. To my knowledge, he didn’t even know about Little Ricky. She was fairly assiduous about that. When I pressed her on that point, she insisted that he must have overheard.