Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

That was problematic. First off, my son wasn’t the eavesdropping type. He wasn’t a surreptitious character, not even remotely. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he had heard something not meant for his ears. Well, Ryder’s no dummy, he’s impish too, my educated guess is that he’d have made a big guileless splash right away and sidled up to his mom to shake it out of her. See, he didn’t have it in him to remain hidden , wasn’t his nature. Too extroverted. And as I said, Kelly was extremely mindful of his presence in the house, moreso than her remorseful theory makes room for. Now if he had come into the kitchen or wherever while we were gossiping about some death, some hanging death, he’d naturally have been curious to know if Mom actually knew the deceased or was she at least there for the “discovery.” Of the body. This is all a bit exasperating, Bruce, because I have to — I’m going to have to spend a little time talking about things that never happened ! Theoretical things. Hopefully, you’ll see why it’s important that I do.

So I say it didn’t happen because if it had we’d have known. Let me go further. Even if it had unfolded that way — Ryder furtively in the hall, lapping up a morbid mommalogue — it still wouldn’t prove or mean a thing.

I knew what Kelly was doing. She was building castles of concrete instead of sand because sandcastles wouldn’t do her any good. She needed constructs that were oblivious to time or tide, she was conjuring durable fairy tales that on completion could be hurtled into the past to provide Ryder with shelter that was at least up to code. Wasn’t it sandcastles that had done him in? (Maybe.) Kelly’s new spin on that old bugaboo impermanence was… permanence itself.

In permanence, lay liberation!

Too late, of course—

Fresh from the nut house, she sat her butt cheeks down on permanence and waited for it to hatch. Actually, it was her theories she was incubating. (More about that later.) First, there were a few things she needed to get rid of. A little housecleaning. She needed to banish the past and the present: too 3-D. The only survivor would be the future. The past was a quagmire, the present a nightmarish fraud. Had to be. The future was the promised land — the land of Maitreya, the Fifth Buddha, “The Future Buddha”… To save herself from the unbearable anguish of the present — present imperfect tense— present impermanent —Kelly had to take up residence in the future: future perfect permanent. The present, once venerated while she was an ecstatic, card-carrying member of the notorious All-We-Have-Is-This-This-Moment! cult, had been stuffed in the recycle bin along with its jealous, immutable, implacable shadow, the past.

My wife pulled the plug on the Power of Now.

I knew what Kelly was doing, Bruce. See, the future was the only place we could breathe. It was the only timespace that hadn’t been compromised because it had never happened, never would , and we, its impassioned converts, became zealous phantom-footed soldiers in the world of what-will-but-never-will-be. The past needed to be erased, deleted, a heroic task that could only be accomplished by order of law — Ryder’s Law. (The legislation bore his name but it was Kelly who pushed it through the house.) There was a certain genius to the idea… because how could we be expected to live in the past, that time in which our son would always live and always die? The past itself was always dead or dying and being reborn, it lived to be regurgitated by those unfortunates who were addicted to nostalgia — or worse, who chased after it in a castrated misery of rage, grief and hysteria, driven mad by the idea there was healing to be found if one could just pick through its vomit for a mirage of diamonds. The past was a bully-god, it thrilled to watch us fools throw fits onshore as it receded, dragging our sandcastles and unbreathing sons with it. The past put on an air of regal indifference yet was secretly boastful of its getaways, its cowardice … the past was haughty and demented. And yet, the past was tormented too. The past was lustful and desirous, and had ambitions… the cross it bore was that it waited in futility to become the present, or at least marry it, each time getting infinitesimally close, unable to accept what it already knew: that its fate was of a bride doomed to be eternally jilted. The past was the angel fallen from the perceived paradise of Now. (The real heaven — haven — was the future. But the past was blinded by its yearnings for the present.) Scorned, insulted, inconsolable, its monolithic, frozen-in-amber humility inexorably turned to hubris, its acquiescence and sorrow to vengeful, perverted sadism. Its greatest strength — storehouse of all that ever was, seen and unseen — was its greatest weakness. For the past was vain. Kelly was of the opinion that the only way to annihilate it was by subterfuge. The past must be tricked into forgetting itself.

The present was defined solely by our son’s searing absence. It felt like being on fire. A crush injury. You looked for him and he wasn’t there. You’d hear him, smell him, taste him, but he wasn’t there. You’d absolutely know he was but he wasn’t. You saw children, children, children everywhere! An exquisite torture. Outside the window or on TV, being rude in the mall. Laughing and telling secrets to each other. (I always imagined they were talking about Ryder.) But my son wasn’t there. You wanted to end the pain any way you could; always in the back of your head was that you could hang yourself too. For my wife and I, each second of every minute of every hour of Now was like a cold slap, a pinch to the cheeks of an unconscious prisoner who awakens only to realize he’s about to be executed. Apparently, the human animal is poorly designed for mourning…

Erasing the present was a tall order because Kelly had been indoctrinated for years to believe in its power and relevance. She’d come to believe the New-Age Now was all there is, was, could be. This fresh idea of invalidating the present was antithetical to the thinking of her people, the Buddhists. It was heretical! Their whole raison d’être, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the wisdom brought by living in the moment.

Obliterating the past was one thing — the numbness of serotonin depletion would help take care of that — but knocking the present out of the box required a bit of fancy footwork. For Kelly, the past wasn’t really a problem anymore. She had bludgeoned it into amnesia and made it drink its own poison. Not only had the past forgotten itself, it had forgotten what forgetting was. Besides, Ryder hadn’t died in the past, he was continuously dying in the present. And so, next on the agenda was to assassinate the Now. My wife did a little visualization. (Whatever works.) She saw salmon going upstream… the stream being the past and the salmon being the present, but only while they were in the water —are you following me? — the minute the salmon jumped into the sky, they were out of the Now and living in the future. Frolicking . Though that isn’t really accurate… bear with me. What I meant was — what Kelly meant — is that when the salmon leave the water, they aren’t just in the future, they are the future. Okay? Does that make it clearer? Try visualizing one of those Eschers with the braided flying fishes. As long as Kelly saw the fish suspended in air, as long as she held the visual of them arcing from the water, that was the future. If she could hold that image in her head then she could be in the future with them. She could stay in the future. I’m trying to let you — to convey what it was like to be in our heads. In her head, because I knew what was going on in there. Want a baseball analogy? Think of the future pinch-hitting for the past and the present. What we did was put the future up to bat — then froze the game. Called a permanent time-out. That’s what we were going for… and the batter up was Ryder. Just do what Kelly did and picture a 12-year-old boy leaping from the water into the air toward whatever, toward us. He’s on his way to us. Picture him in the air— [mordantly] not hanging, though, don’t you dare! — picture him in the air, all goofy and sweet, and think: that little boy isn’t in the future, he is the future. He’s no longer a prisoner of past or present… he’s a child of Maitreya. Maitreya, the Future Buddha, up there in a cloud of unknowing, awaiting his moment to migrate to Earth, that unforeseen yet imminent time when the oceans shall shrink so that he may walk from continent to continent. You see, Maitreya’s next in line after Gautama and is prophesied to arrive in a time of great darkness — and boy, had that time come! It could not have been any darker, not for us — Maitreya is due when the teachings of the dharma have been forgotten and Gautama’s lost his mojo. Legend has it that Maitreya will bring the promise of Oneness. When Maitreya comes, there shall be no more fathers, mothers and daughters and sons. When Maitreya comes, there can be no loss of parents or children.