Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

Only the flutter of an eyelid betrayed his emotions. “I arrived at a dead-end. A wrong turn had been taken, and it was too late to go back.”

After a dramatic pause, Kura said:

“My guru vanished into thin air.”

I didn’t mind being left with a cliffhanger. I knew more would be revealed, and soon. (And I should probably add that I already knew a little about the American’s disappearance through gossip I’d heard over the dharma grapevine, and from the New Age rags too. But I never had the desire to do follow-up.) As we set upon our journey, I felt like a character in a story being written in real time. I could smell the pages we nestled in — tea-stained, dog-eared, bloody as his maiden copy of The Book of Satsang , and redolent of cigar smoke too. The passing landscape seemed like a dusty, petrified forest of Words. I was glad Kura had brought me up to speed before we left because now I was free to enter that delicious contemplative state evoked by Wanderjahre into unknown regions.

The convoy motored past the ecstatic, messy diorama of India while our knees jostled against each other; sometimes he took my hand in his. In close quarters, the tinted windows were defenseless against a world shot through by a midday cruelty of winter light. Kura looked frail, mortal. The sky was cloudless, its cupboards looted by katabatic winds… the profoundly unprofound thought occurred that even one day he would vanish, for good, as would the memory of all loves, old and new, as surely as “the American” had, never to be found nor perhaps meant to be. What’s that poem of Dickinson? “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. The Carriage held but just Ourselves”—while Kura looked out from our carriage, I studied him with involuntary vulture’s eye. The purple blossoms on the back of a hand that bespoke a recent hospital stay he’d chosen not to divulge… the contrived, carefree tom-tom of the carotid, a Trojan Horse that one day would betray him. It seemed to know I was watching and threw everything it had into its palpitations. There was something vulgar about the skin-deep show it put on— vein -glorious! — as if too eager to throw me off the scent that she was coming, Mother Death, gunning for this 62-year-old and whatever trombones he could offer. A few more floats and the parade would be over, the majorette could lay down her arterial drum… An overwhelming sadness fell upon me, far and away beyond the variety to which I was accustomed. I was used to being slowly pinned in the ring, a ragtag-team of tricyclic antidepressants and MAO inhibitors in my corner — but this sadness was out of reach of my tricked-out, penthouse-sized, suicidal splendor. When our backseat gaze met, Kura graced me with a sweet, plaintive smile. I had the queerest sensation he was reading my mind. I know it sounds corny but that was when I had a newsflash: I swore for the life of me the missing guru was him. I fought the urge to tell him to call off the dogs and turn the frickin’ car around. Everyone’s always saying, “Find the guru within”—well ain’t it the truth. But to each his own Easter hunt.

Driving deeper into the hinterland, the road grew more challenging. One of the cars in the motorcade peeled away as planned, dropping off like ballast. The subtraction felt organic, as if part of the logic of the expedition — to keep shedding our skin until we were newborns at the lost guru’s door.

We ate sandwiches from little coolers. Having a meal loosened his tongue.

“When ‘the American’ disappeared, Mogul Lane went wild… an ant hill stirred by the stick of a small boy. But this time the community reaction bore no relation to the period of mourning that followed the Great Guru’s death seven years earlier. The police brought their limited expertise to bear; the investigation was blasé, desultory, laissez-faire . They hung around the shop with long faces, laboriously filling out paperwork before moving on to the precinct where gendarmes lazily auditioned the raft of crackpots, ascetics and prognosticators who had come forward with visions of my guru’s fate — he drowned in the Ganga or repatriated to the U.S. or went up in a blaze of self-immolation, leaving only crystalline relics of the rainbow body behind, albeit in red, white and blue! As the spectacle wore on, my contempt for that conniving widow and her pack of jackals went off the charts . I never liked her but now I did nothing to conceal it; she unabashedly returned the favor. At odd moments I caught her japing, as if to gloat that ‘the American’ ( she called him that too, but always with a sarcastic twist) had finally gotten his comeuppance. In a matter of hours, my guru was purged from history, having evanesced under a lurid cloud of suspicion. Within days, his portraits were removed from the walls and burned; the books of his satsang I helped publish were no longer available. Even pages of the Great Guru’s classic that bore the American’s name under ‘translated by’ were torn out and replaced.

“That horrible woman! No matter that she was his earliest champion, urging him to take the chair. Something hardened her toward him those last few years. She was getting on in age, and became careless in dress and tongue. A few days after ‘the American’ went missing, she invited me into the very den that my guru — and his — once used as a sanctuary to meditate and sing psalms. I thought surely she was going to ask me to step into his shoes! She talked my ear off for the better part of an hour, anxious to promote the theory he’d been ‘done in’ by an enigmatic consortium of power-hungry thuggees, the same men, she said, who once plotted to kidnap and murder her husband. Another possibility lay in the realm of the supernatural. She spoke of flying yogins, skilled in the dark art of ‘translating’ themselves through the ether… then went in for the kill. ‘Have you considered what I believe to be the very real probability that your American guru may simply have had enough? That he decided to return home, to find fame and fortune? He would not be the first of his countrymen to capitalize on the Source!’ O, she cast her meretricious net far and wide, tarnishing all the fishies in the sea! So base , and thoroughly contagious as well — the same cheap, haughty mannerisms and grating inflection cropped up in those dastardly aunties who were under her stern sponsorship.

“It came to me in a sickening flash: No one had understood a single word of my guru’s teachings! And Queenie, let me tell you, that terrifying insight gave me comfort. I sat with the damnable conclusion a while until I swear I caught a glimpse of the form of mankind’s ignorance itself. Diabolical! Could it possibly be true that I was the only one who understood that a saint had walked among us? I’ll admit he had many strikes against him. After all, he was American, which cost him the lion’s share of his followers from the git-go. I watched him assiduously win that share back, not through contrivance or campaign but sheer valence . The naysayers came to deeply respect him. Still, there were many, shall we say, opposing camps — it would have been naïve not to have noticed. I’m convinced the widow kept the conspirators’ fires burning… the Janus-faced ones who clambered to press his feet had for a while now worked most avidly against him, whispering that his seat was a fraud and a heresy. A blasphemy…

“The colder went the trail, the more determined, the more invigorated was I to solve the invidious riddle. And I had considerable resources — don’t forget those numbered accounts in Switzerland. I set up shop in a building a few miles from Tobacco Road. I employed a crew of ten — half a dozen locals with the rest flown in, individuals I absolutely trusted and had worked with before. Gaetano did a brilliant job of organizing the entire operation. I’ll spare you the innovative details… you already know how creative I can be when an important project is at hand, no? Suffice to say I went to great lengths, some not entirely legal, to find him.