Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

He said, “I shan’t be saving you again.”

I was dreaming of New York, in quiet conversation with a gargoyle, when the voice of a stewardess whispered, “We’re beginning our descent.”

I nudged the drape aside to look out the window.

The great orange dust cloud of Delhi lay before me.

We resumed the following day.

What happened next is a blur.

I debarked into those rioting molecules of shit, perfume, death and rebirth that belong not just to Delhi but every Indian necropolis. Two golf carts raced toward us on the tarmac, holding porters and customs officials — and Kura with two bodyguards! He hugged me and I almost fainted dead away. How my old lover looked! And my tear-streaked self watching him watch me , seeing how I looked! We took each other in, sizing up like tailors for our three-piece eternity suits — that magnificent ache that embraced all coming-togethers and coming-aparts, and touched the exquisite sorrow that is the shadow of existence itself.

His smile was big as a catcher’s mitt.

He looked strikingly presidential in his Muga silk threads. Arms intertwined, our whole beings clutched, fussed and melded as we rode to the hotel in the small motorcade. We hardly said a word. Kura had a flair for the grandiose; the other cars were carrying “muscle.” (And the elusive doctor.) I was tongue-tied except for the powerful, almost jokey urge to ask how the hell he made a living these days. But I didn’t, discretion being the better part of valor. However the saying goes.

We had dinner in one of those dark, gaudy, empty restaurants that tend to live on the ground floor of 5-star Indian hotels. Wait a while though… did we go to a private club? Why am I thinking of this particular club? Maybe that was Bangalore… or Bangkok. Or Chicago! Memory’s failing me… a club? I actually don’t think so — no, probably not. Though he kept the details mysterious, Kura implied we had quite a journey ahead and I doubt he’d have wanted to trek off-campus on the eve of our departure, because we were slated to leave the next day. Though it is possible, more than possible that we took our meal in his room. Or should I say rooms, in that they occupied the entire penthouse. The Presidential Suite, indeed.

I told you this part was blurry. Starting the next morning, everything sharpens.

We had breakfast at a corner table in the coffee shop off the lobby. We’d slept well and allowed ourselves the exquisite luxury of enjoying each other’s company in the moment , unencumbered by the odd circumstances of our reunion. We were brighter than the day that was about to enfold us, we threw off sparks and made spunky prayers of thanks to the gods of Whatever for arranging things thus. Kura had gained a bit of weight but not too much — some whiteness and thinning of hair — a slight tremor when he lifted his glass. Yes, he still had the hôtel particulier in the Marais on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple. (Glory be!) Yes, he was single. ( Hmm. ) His father was dead coming up on twenty years but his mother had just celebrated her 100th. When British citizens reach their centennial, the Queen mails them a congratulatory card; an anti-royalist all her life, Mum secretly ate it up. As for his current line of work, he knew I’d be curious and threw me a bone—“I am in the recycling business.” I almost laughed, because it sounded so mafia.

We spoke in shallow generalities, packaging the broader strokes of our lives and exchanging them as gifts. At the end of the preliminaries, something shifted in him. He looked positively ancient — more battered pharaoh than beleaguered king.

“I remember everything about the day you left Bombay… a horrible, terrible day. A day that hurt me — as they say — more than it hurt you. I flogged myself for treating you so shabbily. Please accept my belated amends. ‘It’s been a long time coming, it’s going to be a long time gone.’ Do you remember how we used to sing that song?

“After you departed, I realized something I had been unable to voice or admit, even to myself. I was in love with you. There! I said it. O, how I suffered, Queenie! How I grieved. And all the while, I told myself such torment was unavoidable, that it was the anguish of the old, attached Self, an unhealthy aspect of the ‘me’ I was struggling to snuff out for good. After all, I had just begun my love affair with the renunciate’s way , my foolhardy fling with enlightenment. Ah, but enlightenment turned out to be a bigger tease than you ever were!

“As soon as you returned to Paris, I became very, very ill. Do you remember how sick I was when we first arrived, the night before going to Mogul Lane? That was merely a foreshadowing, the appetizer if you will. The entree came after you’d gone. Looking back, it’s clear I’d acquired that sickness unto death diagnosed by a certain melancholy Dane, the fear and trembling that accompany the realization the Self must die — this walking, talking collection of vanities, addictions and absurdities calling itself ‘Kura’ must die. As you may well know, my love, one has never been truly ill unless one has been ill in India! You lay in your sweaty bed of nails, riveted by the ceiling stains, scanning them like tea leaves for meaning — and none of the outcomes are good. One’s mood becomes quite dire. The American sent two ladies of a certain age to take care of me. The fever raged for two weeks. I hallucinated freely — mad dogs and midday sun but alas, no Englishmen. I was certain I would die, which in effect I did. Between visions I thought, What fatal idiocy to have journeyed all this way! I’d traveled thousands of miles to reach here— you traveled with me — to finally meet the Great Guru, the man I dreamed would consent to be my teacher. Astonishingly, I’d failed to give any credence to the rather ominous detail that I’d pinned the tail of my spiritual aspirations on a corpse! The aunties sponged me down with cold rags while my troubled mind wandered this way and that, like an imbecile in top hat and tails on a serious errand… and all of it came to nothing. In the end, I stood before pride’s funhouse mirrors and took my full measure. What reflected back was my obsession with the goal not the journey — ergo, finding my guru — and in that febrile moment, it became painfully obvious the adventure had been doomed to failure. My fate was sealed! How could I have been so blind? So you see I couldn’t very well run away and follow you , not after all the metaphysical ruckus I’d raised. I was like a mountain climber so close to summiting that he defies that inner voice telling him the weather has turned and he must descend if he is to live — the devil take it, he summits anyway! Now it was too late. I was near the summit, freezing, without oxygen… dying in a cheap room in Bombay, far from Paris, far from anyplace called home, far — oh so far, my Queen! — from the realm of Pure Land Rebirth. The fever raged, scorching the earth of the American, when I had no reason to fault him — not as yet. Fire and brimstone! I surmised that it was not a mountain I had tried to summit but a mountebank —and an American one, to boot! My descent would not be to the foothills but down, down, to the hell of Hungry Ghosts! And to make things worse, if that were possible, I’d chased off my lady. Whilst casting about for false gods I had excommunicated the real one, the yogini in front of my very nose! I tell you, Queenie, those were miserable times!

“When the fever receded, I lay seared in my bed, a shell-shocked soldier after furious battle. Weak but clear-headed. I don’t think I’ve ever been that lucid in my life — I no longer pined, nor did I mourn you, but celebrated your existence without remorse. I thanked the Heavens that our lives had intersected for the brief and beautiful time that they did. Upadana 8 left my body. Like dye entering water, my gratitude extended to everyone I’d ever loved and to everyone I’d ever hated too. My anger, fear and consternation, my seizures of longing became those of the world and the world gave them back; and somewhere in that process, gold was spun. My guru—‘the American’ as you like to call him — later said I’d experienced metta, an instantaneous if temporary bodhicitta. 9