Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

Her eyes filled with tears — the metaphor had transported her back to that time of severe depression. We took a 20-minute break then resumed. She seemed much refreshed.

When I’m in a normal frame of mind (ho ho! normal!) I’m actually quite capable of reveling — or wallowing, anyway — in the serene dullness of a familiar domestic landscape. But in the condition I was in then , it was those very things — hum of vacuum, chiding position of sun in the sky, sound of Spanish soap opera on kitchen TV — that held my feet to the flames. The more routine the trappings of my life became, the more banal, the more exquisite grew the pain. As the entry in my personal Devil’s Dictionary says, the sensation of speeding toward the abyss — insanity — is the thing that gets you. That unstoppable velocity before hitting your head on the ceiling of the air pocket… I was reading about a method of torture the narcos use called “bone-tickling.” They shove an ice pick in then click-and-drag. That I tickled my bones in the sanctuary of my own home was truly the devil’s work.

I was sitting there stewing about all this shit when my flip phone chirped. No one was on the line. I did that stupid thing we do and said “Hello?” over and over. Then:

“Queenie?”

I floated through shamanic dreamtime.

“Do you know who this is?”

It was almost 30 years since I heard that voice yet it was as familiar to me as any of my gargoyle friends. (The way I was feeling just then, I’d have been more than pleased to hear one of them speak.)

Knowing exactly , I still gave his name an interrogatory wisp.

“Kura?”

He laughed that laugh and my underground caves flooded.

I know it’s kind of one of those clichés (I have the feeling I’ll be using a lot of them during this story, apologies in advance), but this man actually saved my life. Back when I was oscillating between my own madness and another’s— oooh! To even think of that time before I met him absolutely makes me shudder, and to think of the time when we met… well, the woebegone part of me, the part whose head had been stuck for weeks in its 14-inch airspace, couldn’t help but wonder if the man behind the voice would save me. Again.

“Wowee zowee,” he said. (I hadn’t heard that one in a while.) “Stanley meets Livingstone!”

I’d been thrust into the way-back machine — Kura’s — where the cultural references were always a bit fusty.

“Though I have to say I didn’t look for you quite as long as Stanley searched for the good doctor, which was less than a year, I believe. I found you in a week’s time. Five business days to be exact.”

“This number is eight hours old! How in the world—”

“My Queen , you’ve been an endless presence in my thoughts. I was so happy to learn things turned out well for you.”

“They did? Someone forgot to tell me.”

“Ho ho! You’ve kept your wit.”

“While those about me were losing theirs.”

Ho ho, ha ha.

Okay, so we bantered. I always had a thing for The Lady Eve.

“You outlived your parents, which for many years was an iffy proposition , no? You routed the executors in court. All of the attempts to rob you of what was rightfully yours — and they were formidable — failed dismally .”

“True. But that’s a matter of public record.”

I wasn’t really in the mood for This Is Your Life , or the psychic TV routine either.

“Yes, it is. For the last few years, you’ve been depressed.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“How about if I tell you something you dare not utter, not even to yourself anymore?”

“Go for it.”

“A woman broke your heart.”

The wit and wind went out of me.

And I won’t talk about any of that — not to you, or anyone. You just have to trust me when I tell you this is something no one could have known.

“Dear Queenie, I must tell you that ‘more die of heartbreak’ is a phrase which only applies to myth and storybook. You, precious girl, are a survivor. ”

I always hated that word.

I masked my emotions best as I could and said, “Well, that’s comforting.”

Kura laughed again. His voice was a few registers lower since I’d last heard it, accompanied by an echo of phlegm that hovered just shy of unfriendly, blurring the border of good health. His accent seemed to have thickened too yet somehow had rendered his English simpler and more precise.

All at once I grew nervous about the motive behind the call.

“Queenie,” he said, “I don’t have too much time.”

Though I took it to mean “at this moment,” I absorbed the poignancy of the remark. Then his speech took on a certain brusque, still delicate formality, as it always did when he got down to “brass tacks.” (Kura had a weakness for archaic American idiom.)

“I wish to make you a proposal. Do you have time to listen?”

Another thing came rushing back: whenever Kura had something “heavy” to lay on me , as they used to say, he asked his wild child (who’d grown into a louche woman) if she had the time to listen. I did then — or fancied so — and I did now. Though I have to admit, “proposal” triggered an absurd millisecond fantasy he might ask for my hand.

“Tomorrow morning, at a little before 7:30 o’clock a.m., a Rolls-Royce Phantom will pull up to the kerb outside your building. A black Phantom, I may add.”

He sniggered over that small, deliberate touch; the black phantom’s black Phantom, whisking away a white wraith.

(He was actually more of a mocha phantom.)

“I know it’s a bit early for you, unless your sleeping habits have changed — I stopped my man short of delving further. If you agree to what I propose, I ask you to appear outside no later than eight. I grant you a half-hour’s grace!” Came the laugh, again; no need to rub my nose any further into the epic, pathological tardiness of years gone by. “When the driver catches sight of you — most likely, he’ll be having a morning smoke — he shall go briefly rigid in that timeless salutation of the servant class, then flick his fag to the street, gather up your things, and whisk you to Teterboro, depositing you on the tarmac beside a private plane. My plane, at least for this particular hajj .”

He pronounced the already sensual word as a lover would an intimate act, drawing it out like an exhalation of hasheesh —stratocumulus of perfumed smoke.

“It will be a long flight but I believe you’ll find it quite comfortable. I know how important superior comfort is to my Queenie!”

And by the way, I couldn’t remember the last time anyone called me that. I’d gone back to my birth name, Cassiopeia, in my mid-20s — she of the constellatory skies — and, as Kura once enlightened, the namesake of the legendary black queen that hailed from a region called Ethiopia.

“There shall be three pilots and two stewards looking after you, and a doctor onboard as well, though I’m certain he will remain well-hidden — unless of course you get lonesome and wish to chat him up, for he is at your service. The gentleman walks softly but carries a big syringe. Actually, he’s bringing me some medicine; a godawfully expensive courier. I strongly doubt that you’ll require his ministrations… not to worry! He’s very good at tending to that once in a blue moon in-flight heart attack. O, he’s absolutely keen on it. You might say it’s his specialty!” The honeyed laugh, then avuncular advice: “My Queen, if you accept your old friend’s mysterious invitation, I encourage you to pack a very small bag …” No need to rub my nose any further into the epic, pathological over-packing that was — still is — my predilection. Je ne regrette rien. “Anything you may possibly need shall be provided upon arrival. Bring nothing formal, as there shan’t be any galas or social fêtes on this end. Why don’t you come in your pj’s? Isn’t that a fine idea?”