The Empty Chair (11 page)

. . . to leapfrog the teachings, and rock the house of Impermanence.

There
are
a few pages of
How It Can Dance!
where
Ryder's cartoon avatar learns about
tulkus
, modern reincarnations of dead Buddhist saints. I can't help feeling that's
what he grabbed onto—the whole darkly mordant
Watchmen
superhero ethos married to that Hardy-Boy-with-flashlight-under-the-sheets thrill. “The great meditation of no-meditation,” “the great training of no-training”
 . . .
you can
hear
the woman on those CDs she burned for him to listen to as he fell asleep!

He grabbed an old tape recorder from the top of the bureau. It was already synched up; as fresh rain pattered the trailer's roof, the soft, slow-cadenced voice of his wife, Kelly, began. While we listened, he toked on a joint, and poured himself a glass of wine.

“The most important dharma is to practice impermanence.
[long pause]
 . . . To be at ease with impermanence is to open the Golden Doors of dharma . . . The contemplation of impermanence cuts all ties to samsara, allowing all beings to reach nirvana . . . As you train in the great training of no-training, it will take root and light up your journey on the Path . . . As impermanence flows through your heart, your discipline will become diamond-pointed, but only if you
never stop meditating on it . . .
Befriending impermanence will allow you to see the equal nature of all things and take you to a place beyond falling back . . . Once you're certain you will die, you'll have no trouble giving up evil actions and doing what is good . . . Impermanence is the Golden Wheel of dharma . . . This is the day! Turn the Thousand-Spoked Wheel! Turn it, turn it, turn it!”

He shut off the player.

Impermanence
sucks
!

See, but I
knew
my boy wasn't a suicide. Weren't never a doubt in my mind . . .

But why a hanging?

How come?

How comes it?
4

No further questions, Your Honor!

[sings]
“Big Thousand-Spoked Wheel keep on turnin', Proud
Tulku
keep on burnin'! Rollin'! Rollin'! Rollin' on the ri-ver!”
Golden Wheel
ever turning, tightening into a magic ring around his neck—“To every season,
turn turn turn
”—turning and turning in the widening gyre
 . . .
to every season in
Hell
—every
saison en enfer.
You know about Ouroboros, don't you? The serpent that devours its own tail? Right before you die, the sign of Death comes—your mouth forms a great O, those droll doctors call it “the O Sign.” The mouth O
-
pens (and o-pines its last)
and your eyes begin to flutter as they do in REM sleep—
RAM
sleep!—all roads lead to Rama, don't you know . . . that's what Gandhi said when he was shot, said “Rama” in his final exhalation. (And George Harrison, right after he was stabbed.) As the noose choked Ryder's neck, so the noose of his tiny anus opened (a lowercase “o” to be sure) to spill out the tainted, sacred contents of the Five Hollow Viscera: stomach, intestines, bladder, gall bladder, semen sac. Do you know the myth of the mandrake root? The medievals believed it sprouted from the semen that fell from innocent men who were hanged. And after the O, comes, as the drier wits like to say, “the Q sign,” tongue lolling from mouth, the mouth's last vowel. Wagging . . . oh those wags!

But why?
[sings]
“Who by fire? Who by water? Who in the sunshine? Who in the night time?” . . . why
hang
himself?

Kelly and I had to focus on
something.
You can't just sit there
not
thinking—the mind won't allow it!—about every possibility, every permutation, every everything. Like his nakedness . . . I actually think I might have solved that mystery—maybe solved them both—with this memory. A few years ago we went camping by the Red River. We skinny-dipped in a hidden spring and there was a rope Ryder swung from way out over the river, then let go with a shiver and a huckleberry shout. Did that all day. I'll bet part of stepping off that chair was recalling that time.

Whatever.

Kelly blamed herself for putting the hanging idea in Ryder's head. When she was going through her prison dharma phase, she loved having a glass of wine at dinner and sharing Big House scuttlebutt. There were a lot of suicides in the penitentiary and the most popular method by far was hanging. The inmates went about it with trademark resourcefulness. A guard told her that a child molester hanged himself with his
shoelaces
, while lying down! Some went kneeling, as in prayer; you only needed a few pounds of pressure to do the job. Kelly became
obsessed
by the notion that she'd inspired our son through an anecdote, sort of a copycat death with a peppermint twist of
naisthika.
That's Sanskrit for nihilism.
“That which denies the existence of objects and the laws of cause and effect.” I guess in Ryder's case, the concept of cause and effect was certainly denied . . .
naisthika
also refers to the Great Vow of celibacy. One who never wastes his semen. I suppose Ryder spilled at the end, but didn't actually waste. It's just semantics.

Kelly hardly spoke a word in the beginning days of her sequestration, but one late afternoon started to murmur this very fear—the prison hanging anecdotes as virus fear—at first burbling the words under her breath, not really loud enough to hear, as if talking to herself, then eventually loud enough for me
to understand. To be honest, it didn't matter
what
she was saying, I was just glad to finally hear her speak. I'd become one of those schmaltzy figures at the bedside of a comatose spouse, waiting for a sign, any sign. There was only one flaw in the theory. Being the superbly protective mom she was, Kelly
never
spoke about violent penitentiary stuff in Ryder's presence. To my knowledge, he didn't even know about Little Ricky. She was fairly assiduous about that. When I pressed her on that point, she insisted that he must have overheard.

That was problematic. First off, my son wasn't the eavesdropping type. He wasn't a surreptitious character, not even remotely. But for the sake of argument, let's say he
had
heard something not meant for his ears. Well, Ryder's no dummy, he's impish too, my educated guess is that he'd have made a big guileless splash right away and sidled up to his mom to shake it out of her. See, he didn't have it in him to remain
hidden
, wasn't his nature. Too extroverted. And as I said, Kelly was extremely mindful of his presence in the house, moreso than her remorseful theory makes room for. Now if he
had
come into the kitchen or wherever while we were gossiping about some death, some
hanging
death, he'd naturally have been curious to know if Mom actually
knew
the deceased or was she at least there for the “discovery.” Of the body. This is all a bit exasperating, Bruce, because I have to—I'm going to have to spend a little time talking about things that
never happened
! Theoretical things. Hopefully, you'll see why it's important that I do.

So I say it didn't happen because if it had we'd have known. Let me go further. Even if it had
unfolded that way—Ryder furtively in the hall, lapping up a morbid mommalogue—it still wouldn't prove or mean a thing.

I knew what Kelly was doing. She was building castles of concrete instead of sand because sandcastles wouldn't do her any good. She needed constructs that were oblivious to time or tide, she was conjuring durable fairy tales that on completion could be hurtled into the past to provide Ryder with shelter that was at least up to code. Wasn't it sandcastles
that had done him in? (Maybe.) Kelly's new spin on that old bugaboo impermanence was . . .
permanence itself.

In permanence,
lay liberation!

Too late, of course—

Fresh from the nut house, she sat her butt cheeks down on permanence and waited for it to hatch. Actually, it was her theories she was incubating. (More about that later.) First, there were a few things she needed to get rid of. A little housecleaning. She needed to banish the past
and
the present: too 3-D. The only survivor would be the future. The past was a quagmire, the present a nightmarish fraud.
Had to be.
The
future
was the promised land—the land of Maitreya, the Fifth Buddha, “The Future Buddha” . . . To save herself from the unbearable anguish of the present—present imperfect tense—
present impermanent
—Kelly had to take up residence in the future:
future perfect permanent.
The present,
once venerated while she was an ecstatic, card-carrying member of the notorious All-We-Have-Is-This-This-Moment! cult, had been stuffed in the recycle bin along with its jealous, immutable, implacable shadow, the past
.

My wife pulled the plug on the Power of Now.

I knew what Kelly was doing, Bruce. See, the future was the only place we could breathe. It was the only timespace that hadn't been compromised because it had never happened, never
would
,
and we, its impassioned converts, became zealous phantom-footed soldiers in the world of what-will-but-never-will-be. The past needed to be erased, deleted,
a heroic task that could only be accomplished by order of law—Ryder's Law. (The legislation bore his name but it was Kelly who pushed it through the house.) There was a certain genius to the idea . . . because how could we be
expected
to live in the past, that time in which our son would always live and always die? The past itself was always dead or dying and being reborn, it lived to be regurgitated by those unfortunates who were addicted to nostalgia—or worse, who chased after it in a castrated misery of rage, grief and hysteria, driven mad by the idea there was healing to be found if one could just pick through its vomit for a mirage of diamonds. The past was a bully-god, it
thrilled
to watch us fools throw fits onshore as it receded, dragging our sandcastles and unbreathing sons with it. The past put on an air of regal indifference yet was secretly boastful of its getaways, its cowardice
 . . .
the past was haughty and demented. And yet, the past was tormented too. The past was lustful and desirous, and had ambitions . . . the cross it bore was that it waited in futility to become the present, or at least marry it, each time getting infinitesimally close, unable to accept what it already knew: that its fate was of a bride doomed to be eternally jilted. The past was the angel fallen from the perceived paradise of Now. (The real heaven—haven—was the future. But the past was blinded by its yearnings for the present.) Scorned, insulted, inconsolable, its monolithic, frozen-in-amber humility inexorably turned to hubris, its acquiescence and sorrow to vengeful, perverted sadism. Its greatest strength—storehouse of all that ever was, seen and unseen—was its greatest weakness. For the past was vain. Kelly was of the opinion that the only way to annihilate it
was by subterfuge. The past must be tricked into forgetting itself.

The present
was defined solely by our son's searing absence. It felt like being on fire. A crush injury. You looked for him and he wasn't there. You'd hear him, smell him,
taste
him, but he wasn't there. You'd absolutely
know
he was but he wasn't. You saw children, children, children everywhere! An exquisite torture. Outside the window or on TV, being rude in the mall. Laughing and telling secrets to each other. (I always imagined they were talking about Ryder.) But my son wasn't there. You wanted to end the pain any way you could; always in the back of your head was that you could hang yourself too. For my wife and I, each second of every minute of every hour of Now
was like a cold slap, a pinch to the cheeks of an unconscious prisoner who awakens only to realize he's about to be executed. Apparently, the human animal is poorly designed for mourning . . .

Erasing the present was a tall order because Kelly had been indoctrinated for years to believe in its power and relevance. She'd come to believe the New-Age Now was all there is, was, could be. This fresh idea of invalidating the present was antithetical to the thinking of her people, the Buddhists. It was heretical! Their whole raison d'être, as I'm sure you're aware, is the wisdom brought by living in the moment.

Obliterating the past was one thing—the numbness of serotonin depletion would help take care of that—but knocking the
present
out of the box required a bit of fancy footwork. For Kelly, the past wasn't really a problem anymore. She had bludgeoned it into amnesia and made it drink its own poison. Not only had the past forgotten itself, it had forgotten what forgetting was. Besides, Ryder hadn't died in the past, he was
continuously dying in the present.
And so, next on the agenda was to assassinate the Now. My wife did a little visualization. (Whatever works.) She saw salmon going upstream . . . the stream being the past and the salmon being the present,
but only while they were in the water
—are you following me?—the minute the salmon jumped into the sky,
they were out of the Now and living in the future.
Frolicking
. Though that isn't really accurate . . . bear with me. What I meant was—what
Kelly
meant—is that when the salmon leave the water, they aren't just
in
the future, they
are
the future. Okay? Does that make it clearer? Try visualizing one of those Eschers with the braided flying fishes. As long as Kelly saw the fish suspended in air, as long as she held the
visual
of them arcing from the water, that
was the future. If she could hold
that image in her head then she could be in the future
with
them. She could stay in the future. I'm trying to let you—to convey what it was like to be in our heads. In
her
head, because I knew what was going on in there. Want a baseball analogy? Think of the future pinch-hitting for the past and the present. What we did was put the future up to bat—then froze the game. Called a permanent time-out.
That's
what we were going for . . . and the batter up was
Ryder. Just do what Kelly did and picture a 12-year-old boy leaping from the water into the air toward whatever, toward
us.
He's on his way to us. Picture him in the air—
[mordantly]
not hanging, though, don't you dare!—picture him in the air, all goofy and sweet, and think: that little boy isn't
in
the future, he
is
the future. He's no longer a prisoner of past or present . . .
he's a child of Maitreya.
Maitreya, the Future Buddha, up there in a cloud of unknowing, awaiting his moment to migrate to Earth, that unforeseen yet imminent time when the oceans shall shrink so that he may walk from continent to continent. You see, Maitreya's next in line after Gautama and is prophesied to arrive in a time of great darkness—and boy, had that time come! It could not have
been
any darker, not for us—Maitreya is due when the teachings of the dharma have been forgotten and Gautama's lost his mojo. Legend has it that Maitreya will bring the promise of Oneness. When Maitreya comes, there shall be no more fathers, mothers and daughters and sons. When Maitreya comes, there can be no loss of parents
or
children.