Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

That’s the legend of the Fifth Buddha…

… the salmon-catcher Maitreya.

But Kelly wasn’t at peace. She kept noodling back to ground zero, obsessed that Ryder had to have overheard one of our Merlot-fueled, sardonically tabloid conversations about a San Quentin hanging, our death gossip mixing with his esoteric anicca/ impermanence training like a bad drug combo — potentiating it — until it pushed him over the edge (of the chair). No point in trying to dissuade… I understood this was her process. Hate that word! I think that what she really needed was communion. See, in the weeks that followed our son’s death, she’d wished him too far into the future, banished him too thoroughly. Whenever the anesthetic of grief temporarily wore off, she missed him desperately, unutterably, brutally, needed to see him again at any cost, even if that meant enduring the sumptuous torture of parsing her “involvement” in his death through the forensics of mental masturbation. It was totally nuts — like doing a crime lab spatter analysis of a Pollock painting.

So she walked and talked us through. We sat on the floor of the living room, lights low, as in a séance. As she began to speak, Kelly set the scene, placing us in the kitchen like figures in a diorama. Laying out the bogus scenarios…

“ Okay, let’s say we were in the kitchen talking about one of the hangings. And I’ve had a few glasses and I’m telling you how amazing these prisoners are, how resourceful they are — about the one who did it with an itty-bitty shoelace. Maybe Ryder was on his way to ask us something. And he hears something provocative and just stands there listening where we can’t see him. Who knows for how long. And maybe it sounds like I was complimenting the suicide on his ingenuity. Let’s say it happened, for argument’s sake, that one of us saw Ryder out of the corner of our eye but didn’t really pay attention. Saw him standing there but we’re blocking it out. That’s possible, isn’t it? That something like that might have happened and we’re blocking it out? That’s why I’m saying we really need to concentrate , like those people they hypnotize who suddenly remember all the details of a crime. You know, what the suspect was wearing or the license plate of a car… You have to admit it’s possible, Charley, isn’t it? [I agreed that it was. What’s a husband to do?] Let’s say he maybe even walked in and asked about it and we’re blocking that out too. Or maybe the phone rang and you went to answer and that’s when Ryder walked in and I got distracted too, maybe poured myself another glass of wine… [She closed her eyes as if she was being hypnotized] And when I’m trying to picture — I can see him in my mind and I’m wondering how much he heard — but I’m still distracted… maybe he asks about — about that shoelace thing — and if he did , if he did ask, Charley, what do you think I would have said? What would I have told him? I’ve been thinking about this and I believe I know. I know what I would have said. I would have seen it as a teachable moment. I’d probably say something like — maybe I actually did say it — I’d have said something ‘real,’ you know, like, ‘Honey, sometimes people are in so much pain in their lives that they make a choice. It’s not a good choice, but it’s their choice, and we need to respect that.’ I might even have used ‘honor’ instead of respect. Honoring the choice to hang yourself! Charley, doesn’t that sound like something I would have said? Or might have, if the situation came up? What a stupid, stupid thing! Why would I say something like that? Because I think I would have.”

She went on like that, rewriting a back-to-the-future history that never happened. The horror was that this berserk exercise allowed rare moments of peace, affording brief sanctuary for us both because it gave me respite from the agony of watching her suffer. It conferred a time-out from the storm of the event —event horizon of our son’s death — and any kind of escape was welcome, any brass ring placed around the black hole of our hearts from which no light would escape again. During the grace time provided by these dramatic re-creations, his tiny, dense solar mass somehow lifted off of her, allowing her briefly to be free.

Charley made some tea, and ruminated. After a few minutes, he sat down again. Instead of a joint, he lit a cigarette.

But it was all horseshit. Truth be told, my wife wasn’t capable of a teachable moment, not even retroactively! No, no, no. What pisses me off is that she lied to herself (and to me), even in theory. Because if Kelly would have said anything to Ryder about Mr. Shoelace, it would have been closer to “He was ready to leave his body. Maybe he’ll come back as the mother of a prison warden!” She was too cowardly to own up to the hypothetical implications conjured by her worst fears. She would never have stopped at the prisoner making a “choice.” That’s a liberal sentiment but not a mad one. No — she would have been aggressive . Jesus, maybe I do think she’s responsible! Some little part of me, anyway.

Because truth be told, she was so far up Buddhism’s ass all you could see were her feet dangling! The paradox of it, the hypocrisy — and I swear I’m trying not to be a cunt, Bruce, but I’m still angry about a lot of this, angrier than I realized — which is why it’s good I’m rehashing everything, because it’s probably going to be more helpful to me than I know — the hypocrisy was that the deeper she got in her practice, the more kudos the roshis and sangha threw at her, the greater her instincts were to blindfold Ryder to the realities of everyday life. A kind of insanity, to do that to a kid. But I was blind too… I was— am —culpable. Allow me to elucidate how that teachable moment (another phrase on my Top Ten Hit List) would have gone down. And I fully understand that what I’m about to say makes me a co-conspirator, a participant anyway, in her neurotic theorizing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if given the chance, Kelly would have chosen to refract Mr. Shoelace through the lens of maya , that tiresome golden oldie. The ol’ dance of illusion. She was up to her hips in prison dharmaworld, the “Path of Freedom,” and whatever else her crafty Jewish rinpoches gave counsel. “Ryder, that prisoner has been liberated !” would have been more her style — a party line knee-jerk diluting of the depressing savagery of such a violent, hopeless act.

Her head was beginning to clear. A new voice — the voice of the quote-unquote “real”!—the voice of self-preservation — began to insist, demand , she cleave toward a revisionist Buddhist weltanschauung , that of permanence. Bald-faced, plain-dealing, square-shooting Permanence, a concept she once considered not just bourgeois but fascist. If she was going to find the antidote for the fatal damage caused by indoctrinating our little boy in the we-shed-our-bodies-like-old-garments shtick, she would need to dip more than just a toe in Permanence Lake. Like the time-traveler who changed the course of history by stepping on a butterfly, so did Kelly want to arrest Ryder’s death by substituting a triple-decker reality sandwich for the wheatgrass and tofu of passive-aggressive homicidal Zen platitudes. She had to flush out all the from-the-world-of-the-senses bullshit—“From the world of the senses comes heat and cold, pleasure and pain. They are transient. Rise above them, Grasshopper!” She no longer had the stomach for answering our son’s (imaginary) thorny but simple questions about death — by hanging — with the bloodless, casual koans of an entitled urban sun salutator who paused during walking meditation to pluck Dzogchen daisy petals— it’s permanent… it’s permanent not… it’s permanent… — until the whole random holocaust of the world was hushed up, tucked in, brushed under, sanitized and Shambhala’d away. My wife now needed to adamantly believe that her “teachable moment” had or would have conveyed the wisdom that life was precious and that she wanted him to live to a ripe old age … but knew that she hadn’t or wouldn’t have answered in such a way, and that gaping hole in his education could only mean she had killed him. So there was no alternative other than to alter everything that came before, tweaking her teachings, her memory, her very self, so at least she could draw comfort that she’d done no harm. Do no harm —that’s Eightfold Path 101. Kelly had to submit to an Extreme Makeover because if she didn’t, it would mean that Ryder, with his keen intelligence, would have embraced the corollary: Mr. Shoelace had rapturously shed his old garments and Gone Fishin’ with all the other liberated beings— not snapped his own neck on the night he was gang-raped and sold!