Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

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1934—Kura is born.

1952—Cassiopeia (“Queenie”) is born.

1954—Kelly is born.

1960—Charley is born.

1967—Charley is molested by clergy through 1972.

1968—Kura and Queenie meet at a club in Chicago. A few months later, they reunite in Paris.

1970—They visit a guru in Bombay. Queenie stays four months; Kura remains for seven years.

1976—Kelly becomes a Buddhist. Her practice deepens over the next 25 years.

1977—Kura’s teacher disappears from the ashram. After months of fruitless searching, he returns to his home in the Marais.

1990—Kelly and Charley’s son Ryder is born.

1992—Kura has a heart attack. During convalescence, he renews the search for his teacher.

1997—After a near 30-year separation, Kura and Queenie rendezvous in New Delhi. She accompanies him to a remote village.

1997—Charley becomes a plaintiff in a class action suit against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.

1998—Kura dies at 63.

1999—Kelly’s mother dies; she and Charley are wed. Kelly takes a sabbatical from school teaching and tutors prisoners in the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation. She eventually helms a popular special education program for children. Kelly signs a contract to write a memoir.

2001—Kelly and Charley experience a terrible loss. Charley receives a settlement.

2005—Queenie tells her story (“Second Guru”).

2010—Charley tells his story (“First Guru”).

Bruce Wagner is the author of Dead Stars, Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN/Faulkner fiction award finalist), Still Holding, I’ll Let You Go, I’m Losing You , and Force Majeure. He lives in Los Angeles.

1. Lucien Carr died in 2005.

2. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was finally published in 2008. As current as he was on the Beats, I’m not sure why he missed it.

3. Johnson’s critically acclaimed memoir of her relationship with Kerouac was published in 1999. Her biography, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac , would not come out until 2012, a few years after this interview.

4. He got stoned very quickly; my initial thoughts were to end the day’s session but I let it go.

5. Briefly referred to at the end of the short preface.

6. Cf. Shri Padodaka , M. Cidandamurti (Mysore, 1983); Caranamrt Ramayana , Dvarkadas Parikh (Mathura: Sri Bajarang Pustakalay, 1991); Tobacco Saint , David Gordon White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); et alia.

7. Queenie’s impersonation of an overbearing Indian matriarch was deliciously venal, complete with bobbling head and comically fractured syntax.

8. Clinging or grasping — attachment. Sanskrit .

9. Awakening of mind or consciousness that strives toward compassion for all sentient beings.

10. Sadhana (literally, “a means of accomplishing something”) refers to a practice whose goal is liberation, be it enlightenment or freedom from the cycle of birth and death. Samasti sadhana is the highest form and most difficult path, impossible to perform without a guru.

11. Karma, bhakti and jnana yogas were first introduced in the Bhagavad Gita . (“Yoga” generally means spiritual path.) Raja yoga completes the “Four Yogas,” or paths to God, each chosen according to one’s temperament: the active, the emotional, the mystical, and the philosophical.

12. “It wasn’t until I got back to Manhattan that I realized how much I envied him this moment — for I too had relentlessly searched for the one I’d loved and lost. The difference between Kura and me was that I had given up. It was because of his example that I resumed my search, not long after his death.” [From a later conversation— Ed .]

13. The ancient practice of meditation amongst human remains.

14. Queenie later told me that, as faithfully recorded in Kura’s diaries, his host mixed past and present tenses at random.

15. Rereading Ryder’s tale, I was struck by the image of the shattered remnants of the chair burning in the fireplace — if you’ll recall, Charley’s wife instructed him to do so — and was reminded of the sleigh burning at the end of Citizen Kane . I could see “Ballendine’s Second Penny” melting too, but it was only a cinematic reverie; while Rosebud uncovered a lost childhood Elysium, the former revealed nothing. (Or, more tellingly, Nothingness.)

While assembling this book, I came across a passage in The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi , and thought it germane: “Creation is like a peepul tree: birds come to eat its fruit, or take shelter under its branches, men cool themselves in its shade, but some may hang themselves on it. Yet the tree continues to lead its quiet life, unconcerned with and unaware of all the uses it is put to.”