Still Holding

The Healing

HE ENDURED the loss of his beloved, but could not endure being alone.

As always, the sangha mercifully engulfed him. Monks read aloud to Cela’s wandering soul from long wood tablets of painted Sanskrit. Friends who’d feared to visit during Kit’s own ordeal now overwhelmed with their generosity of heart. Even Viv came to cook for him.

All around the new zendo (deliberately humbler in construction than its Benedict Canyon forebear), pristine and by nature impervious to the farrago of tabloidal gore, a balm of practitioners did contemplations. Row upon row they lay in Shavasana—the corpse pose.

They breathed in death.

In just a week’s time, he was ready to visit the jail.

• • •

THE PRISONER was led in, unshackled — that had been Kit’s request. It was agreed that he posed no threat. Besides, there were enough guards in the room.

The look-alike assailant (who’d consented to the meeting) seemed suddenly intimidated by circumstances.

Kit measured his own breaths, collecting himself.

“Thank you for seeing me. I–I have thought about you every day.” His diction was stilted. The slur came back from nervousness. He breathed through it, moving on. “I could not live with your hate — or… hate inside. It was kill me. Killing… always want — I always wanted to see you. To come to forgive. Forgive and to thank—you. I don’t know why! It is the godly thing. It is karma. My karma and yours. We are the same. You look like me. They pay you to be me! How could I not forgive? So: I forgive you as you forgive me! We do the same. We do the same thing. OK?” The look-alike appeared to nod subtly, dipping his head. “My father is in jail now,” said Kit. “I want to forgive him. I would like to forgive and would like to thank him too! If you see my father, please tell him that I am — that I forgive him. But don’t tell him thank you — not that I said ‘thank you.’… I will do that myself. One day. I hope I will love him enough to thank him. And forgive.” Eyes loose with tears, the trademark superstar smile eked out, in spite of himself. “But not today.”

Vanity Fair

FOR A MINUTE, it looked like David Gough and Dana Delany were breaking up.

Becca was floored when the actor phoned out of the blue, hinting they attend the Vanity Fair gala at Morton’s together. He never really asked—he just seemed to want solace on the rocky Dana front, nervously betraying there was a chance he’d be “solo” on Oscar night. It was the kind of confusing call a girl might get from her older sister’s drunken heartthrob boyfriend. A terrible idea anyway — Annie told her the last thing she needed was to foster bad vibes on the 1200 North set. Set yourself some boundaries, girl. David said he would call back to let her know what was happening but never did. The whole thing seemed like a setup, and she kicked herself for not having had the moral fiber either to express outrage or at least tell him he was a numbskull not to patch things up with Dana because she was amazing and he knew he’d never find another gal like her. Though it was juvenile, Becca realized that her heart had become set on going out with David on Academy Awards night.

At the last minute, instead of crashing an Oscar viewing party at the Mondrian, she decided to take Annie to the Dunsmores’. She no longer worried about them sabotaging her career and even felt a little sentimental toward the old days. Anyhow, she’d heard that the Cass and Grady Show had been “discovered.” Everyone who used to like to go to Robert Evans’s — Wes Anderson, Nick Nolte, Aaron Sorkin, Robert Downey Jr., Gina Gershon — now had a hard-on for the notorious biweekly bashes on Mulholland Drive.

• • •

CASSANDRA GREETED them like long-lost daughters. After standard issue nods to her newfound 1200 North fame, she was chastised for “being such a stranger.” Cass blathered on about how they’d supported and discovered her “when you were still Drew,” and then Grady stumbled in, bestowing hugs and sloppy kisses. He acted like Becca had never left the guesthouse. When he asked if she’d spoken to “Mr. Herky-Jerky,” she said, bemused, “Why would I?” Grady feigned being dumbstruck, before answering back, “Well, you, uh, used to fuck him, didn’t you? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong. You loved him, right?” He laughed, wheezing like a discount devil. “1200 North got you uppity.” He said he needed to go find “Miss Maryjane,” and excused himself.

Becca wanted everything to be copacetic. She asked where the bar was, but Cassandra said she first had to introduce them to Dr. J. Becca reminded their host that she and the doctor had already met.

“He’s doin scripts for us. We just sold a pilot to USA.”

“UPN,” chimed her gaunt ladylove (and QuestraWorld coprincipal).

“Whatever. He likes Dr. J, but I call him Dr. Doctor. Anyhoo, it was Dr. Doctor who had the bright idea we start filming our Tuesday and Friday fiestas. Now why haven’t you shown up for any of those?”

Thom Janowicz turned toward them as they hove into view. “Well, if it isn’t the all-seeing, all-knowing Dr. Doctor!” said Cassandra.

“Hey, I know who you are!” said Dr. J — Becca was in his coked-up sights and he grabbed her. Annie followed as he led Becca to the window overlooking the pool. Cassandra & Co. dropped back, waylaid by Alan Cumming and Dana Giacchetto.

“Now I know you had a boyfriend who got into trouble. I’ve talked with Grady and Cass about it, that’s one helluva story and you’re one helluva lady to have been on that ride. And I’d like you to share your experience at a future date, now is not the time. But I think that is something we could definitely turn into a beautiful, beautiful screenplay and I want to talk with you about that but now is of course not the time. I’m sensitive to time and place. You had a bad egg experience and soon it’ll be time to make an omelet. There are bad eggs, as you well know. Like that beanpole there — see him, over by the Lava lamp? — I’m working on a script about him. I’m five weeks in. He lied to a lady, corresponded with a widow for two years saying he was John Lithgow’s brother. There’s a slight resemblance, but mostly, he’s tall. She was starstruck and he stole her money. End of case. Wound up giving that cad right over there about $96,000. He’s awaiting conviction. Not a bad guy. Smart kid. Knows he did a bad thing. He’s turned to Jesus and that’s his prerogative. Who am I to judge? You get in trouble when you start to judge. Big time. But you know that. And there’s a woman down by the pool. You can see her talking to — who is that, David Spade?”—he gestured through the window—“Hey, who’s that way over there? Andy Dick? Anyhow, see that lady? Well, that lady was a dear friend of the late great Dorothy McGuire. Now you’re too young to know about Dorothy McGuire. Go on IMDb and you’ll learn all her movie credits. Go on Google or the AMC Web site. Well, Dorothy McGuire died a few years back and the Academy Awards failed to mention her passing during their much-touted annual memorial montage. And now this dear woman — the one by the pool — is waging a letter campaign to right a wrong because the Academy failed to acknowledge. Can you blame her? There’s a whole group of people here tonight with similar beefs: there’s Peggy Lee’s people and Troy Donahue’s too. The Academy didn’t acknowledge either one! And it’s a travesty. A few years ago, Peggy Lee got bumped for some little girl named Aaliyah. Now I never even heard of this little girl Aaliyah. She was black and she was in a plane wreck and maybe all that had something to do with why they put her on. You know, the tragedy of it, a life cut short. And she was a hottie — a hottentottie! But what about a life long lived, and lived well? I never heard of Aaliyah but I can tell you I sure heard of Peggy Lee! Gave lots of people lots of pleasure. Hell, even the young kids worship her now. And the Dunsmores freely give of their time and their counsel because they’re for the underdog — the Dunsmores feel a wrong should be righted and they are currently engaged I believe in putting up a Web site — they’re giving the money to put up a Web site for anyone of note who died but was not subsequently honored or acknowledged throughout the many many years of televised Academy Award memorial segment history. Cass and Grady are lobbying to have a special segment air with all those who were never acknowledged. These are not bad people — the Friends of Dorothy McGuire, the Friends of Troy Donahue, the Friends of Peggy Lee (my folks always called her Miss Peggy Lee) — and I don’t believe the folks at the Academy are bad guys either. I’ve spoken to them. Oh yes. I’ve spoken to all parties as a mediator. That is sometimes my role. Role and raison d’être. I spoke to that woman — the McGuire friend or relative or whatever. Spoke to her many times. I’ve had counsel with her the way I would with anyone. And she’s a wounded person but not a bad person — hell, we’re all wounded. Jesus Christ our savior was wounded. We wouldn’t be human beings if we weren’t wounded. Would we? Would we? What are your names?” The girls offered them. “What’s my point, Becca and Annie? My point is that we’re all people and the Dunsmores just go right to the heart of that, they are fearless, they take everyone in, they are for the underdog, they do not pass judgment, they do not have lofty opinions, they do not—”

Trans World

SHE SAT AT Lavendar House with perspicacious George, who lay dying. It was George who actually wanted to watch the Barbara Walters interview with Kit Lightfoot after the Academy Awards. Lisanne thought how funny the world was because she hadn’t even been aware of it. She’d tuned all that Hollywood stuff out.

She turned on the set — there he was before her, so handsome! Still the rumpled élan, rapscallion glint in the eye. But the Kit Lightfoot who had ruled her life and her energies was dead to the hospice-worker of the present moment. This Kit was a movie star and just that, a fallen idol risen again in the popular imagination. He was a human being who’d been through a great ordeal, just as she had, but the commonality ended there. He was not her lover nor was he the father of her child. He was not the Buddha; light and nectar did not pour from his crown. He was a man, plain and simple.

The segment began with Barbara showing clips from his films followed by a medley of breaking-news edits, both local and international, related to the assault. They strolled through Kit’s new house and garden (how lovely the zendo was, thought Lisanne) and spoke about what he had been able to mentally reconstruct — with gentle, yet somehow obscene inelegance, Barbara probed the arduous process of rehabilitation and what returning to Riverside was like, especially to stay in the room he’d occupied as a boy (“So you can go home again,” she said, eliciting oddly genteel laughter from the interviewee). She wanted to know just how it felt to live with a man he’d been estranged from since the death of his beloved mother, a man of questionable character and motive who was abusive to him even when he was a child. She did not refer to the father’s incarceration nor to his crime; Lisanne couldn’t decipher if that would come later or if it was simply off-limits.

“Kit,” said Barbara, all hard-nosed metta. “Can you talk about Viv — Viv Wembley? Can you share with us why you’re not together?”

He smiled, and Lisanne saw him take deep, yoga breaths — she knew he was doing ujjayi, yet the knowing was of itself free from obsession. She felt sane and at ease. A magisterial compassion for his being washed over her.

“Barbara… I wouldn’t wish that on anyone — not just what happened to me but… I wouldn’t wish it on the partner, of whoever becomes ill or debilitated. It’s a terrible, terrible burden.”

“And a great test, isn’t it?” she said, sowing seeds of doubt and betrayal with that copyrighted wince of scurrilous sympathy. (Viv Wembley had failed out.) Kit smiled ambiguously. “And yet,” she went on, “couples do survive a catastrophic occurrence. Christopher and Dana Reeve are one example that comes to mind.”

“I think every situation is different,” he said generously. “People move on — or through — what happens to them, in different ways. Everyone has a path, Barbara.”

“You certainly do. And that path is called Buddhism. And I’d very much like to talk about that in a moment. But have you spoken? Have you spoken to Viv?”

“Oh yes—”

“You have?”

“We’re good friends.”

“Really?” she asked. Copyright honeyed skepticism.

“Yes, really!” He laughed. “I was at her beach house. You know, Barbara, we’ve been through a lot together and we respect that. We honor that. Have to! But Viv’s moved on with her life — as I have with mine. We both know that we’re there for each other when we need to be.”

It was time to go for the jugular. Barbara segued with kill-shot celerity to Cela. Lisanne wasn’t sure if she wanted to see this part. She looked over at George, who was asleep. She shut it off. Kit would be all right. She didn’t need to protect him anymore. She never had, never could. All she wanted was to wish him well.

• • •

HE WAS A SWEET old man without much time left. Anyone could tell by looking at him how handsome he must once have been. He lost his wife in 1970. Their only son died five years ago in a car crash. George had never remarried.

She’d spent the last month or so sitting with him. He was often chatty, but lately his strength had waned. Lisanne sat through the blank spots, night sweats, and myriad terrors. Some afternoons, she gave him sponge baths which he stoically endured, too polite to tell her the pain of being touched was excruciating. As the end approached, she closed her eyes and drifted with him to this moment, to unconsciousness and beyond. Sometimes she rubbed baby oil over the corroded tattoos of his jaundiced skin or blotted water onto colorless lips. He stank, but it wasn’t hard to transform death smells into balm. She thought of her dad a lot and how narcissistic fear had banished her from the very moment of his death. Now she understood that sitting with George was a gift from God, any god, pick a god. She had come serenely, she had not rushed to this room at Lavendar House as she had rushed to her father’s deathbed from the platform of that train, like a fool. She was already here — one of his hands pressed between hers. Already here, to comfort to the end. She was present, and accounted for.

As she sat with him, she meditated on her father’s library. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night and restlessly communing with the forest of volumes, some with their backs turned as if to snub her late arrival. Lisanne’s finger had strummed against the spine of Milarepa’s The Hundred Thousand Songs. What was it doing there? She’d since had time to puzzle over that. Dad was a learned man, but how had the book been acquired? Was he simpatico to Buddhism, or was he indifferent? Was he a cognoscente? And what, after all, did he actually know about the great saint Milarepa? Maybe not a damn thing. Maybe the book had been absorbed rather than acquired, had belonged to a hippie lover, one of his students, say, from back in the day — someone he took a fancy to while her mother was shut in the guest room with migraines. There was so much she’d never know about Dad — or Milarepa or her mother or Philip, and George too. She was OK with that.

As she emptied the bedpan, she thought about cleaning the Riverside toilets and how crazy she’d gotten. It was hard to believe — she would have laughed if it wasn’t so gut-wrenching. Lisanne thought about the claustrophobic Amtrak water closet too, then shuddered at her shaming and violation by that horrible man, now behind bars, reaping the karmic whirlwind. Burke Lightfoot had orchestrated and overseen the rape, not just of her, but of his own son, and Lisanne wondered if Kit would ever try to contact her to make amends. She hoped he wouldn’t, but if he did, she’d tell him that there was no one really to blame, that she had allowed it to happen, that she had been in a bad place but now was well. The pills that Dr. Calliope’s colleague prescribed had stabilized her, but mysterious forces were at work, forces that conspired to provide a healing, an occult glissade of grace and nonresistance, and love unperverted. Now her life was filled with the light of Siddhama and nonsectarian prayer, a humble dyad between Lisanne and her faith. Each day, she and God created a simple space, wherein hope and regret, splendor and sorrow — and love — could be born.

When Lisanne came from the bathroom, she lit a scented candle. She was drawn to a photo of George and his wife and son that hung upon a wall. He wore a gleaming smile and captain’s hat: suspended in time, like one of those fallen astronauts. He’d been a pilot for TWA in the fifties and sixties. She took the photo in hand.

It was time for her to shed the last of her fears, and fly.

With Rob Reiner in the Patio of the Ivy on Robertson

“HOW DO YOU memorize?”

“Jorgia taught me some tricks.”

“Jorgia Wilding.”

“Yeah. And I do some — neurolinguistic stuff. With therapists. I’m just a dog who jumps through hoops.”

“Well I think you’re being a little modest. I really did want to tell you that your performance in True West was… pretty damn seamless.”

“Thank you. I try to go with — the feelings. Behind the words.”

“There were so many levels there. Will you do more theater?”

“I want to do Beckett.”

“That’s funny.”

“Hopefully,” he said, smiling.

The director laughed. “Beckett can be very funny, it’s true. But it’s also funny because I’ve been talking to the Geffen about putting up Krapp’s Last Tape.”

“Whoa! That’s a trip. I love that play.”

A youngish man in a suit approached the table. “Gentlemen,” he said respectfully, “forgive me for interrupting.” He turned to Kit. “Sir, I just wanted to say that I am honored to even be sitting in the same restaurant.”

“Thank you,” said Kit.

“No — thank you,” he said, and left.

“Lou Petroff. Do you know him?”

“I don’t.”

“Sweet man,” said the director. “And a good agent.”

“Mr. Reiner — my managers said you had a script.”

The director leaned in, his hand cupping a bread roll like it was a healing stone. A peculiar but effectively intimate gesture.

“It’s all very weird. You know, originally — and I’m sure they told you this — Ed was going to be doing it. Ed Norton.”

“Ed’s great.”

“But there was a conflict.”

“Ah!” said Kit. “I love ‘conflict’! Creative differences.”

“Exactly. We had lots of those. And what happened was — your agents probably already told you this — what happened was, I literally woke up in the middle of the night — because I’d seen your play a few weeks before so you were already bouncing around my subconscious — and I’ll never forget. I sat bolt upright in bed and thought, BAM! Kit Lightfoot.”

“Eureka. I found it.”

“My Eureka moment. And I called Ellen — Ellen Chenoweth…”

“I know Ellen. You called her in the middle of the night?”

“I had the sense to wait until morning. And I said: Ellie, does he wanna do movies? Is everybody asking him? Or is nobody asking him?”

“That’s closer!”

“And I said that out of total respect. Because right now you’re like the pretty girl who everyone’s afraid to ask out — that’s what I was hoping, anyway. The bottom line is, this project is something I’ve been wanting to do for about five years.” He pivoted the bread roll, wheeling it this way and that. “It’s about a man who suffered an injury not dissimilar to yours. He was a law student when the accident happened—”

“True story?”

“Yes. A true story. In fact, I had lunch with him two weeks ago, in Boston.”

“What’s his name?”

“Stan Jiminy.”

“Jiminy Cricket!”

“Jiminy Cricket was his nickname,” intoned the director, as if all — especially Kit’s involvement — had been predestined. “A brilliant guy. The injuries he sustained left him damaged but with ‘a beautiful mind,’ if you will. And after years, many years of incredible discipline and hard work — something you’re certainly not unfamiliar with — Stan became an attorney. Now of course I’m making a very long story short, which is the challenge we’ll have with the film.”

“He became an attorney—”

“Right. And along the way, this amazing woman was his mentor and kind of guardian angel, who hired him to assist with pro bono work. She was a criminal lawyer. Rhoda — that was her name, Rhoda Horowitz — had a sister who the family kind of shunted off to a state home. The sister was retarded, and Rhoda always felt that was kind of the skeleton in the family closet. Which it was.”

“Like Michelle in I Am Sam.”

“I wouldn’t say Rhoda Horowitz was quite in the Michelle Pfeiffer mold,” he said, wryly.

“Who plays the mentor?”

“Susan Sarandon’s going to do that for us. And Dusty’s the dad — Stan’s father.”

“Ah—”

“Do you know Susan and Tim?”

“Yeah! I like them!”

“And of course, you’ve worked with Dusty.”

“She’s a real angel?”

(He had spaced on that part of the pitch. Nerves.)

“No, no. Not a real one — a guardian. Not that I’m above using the device of an angel, if I need to!” The wry smile again. “Anyway, one day in the middle of a very important trial, she dies.”

“Susan?”

The director nodded.

“How?”

“Embolism.”

“True?”

“All true.”

“Did you know Susan?”

“You mean, Rhoda?”

“Rhoda! Yes.”

“I didn’t have the pleasure.”

Kit sipped at his water. “Mr. Reiner, does it seem— I don’t want to knock your project! But—”

“No, please…”

“With me in the role, does it seem, maybe, a gimmick? You know — stunt casting?”

“No. No, I don’t think so, Kit, not if we do it right. I completely understand the question — and it’s a good question — but I don’t think so. By the way, I read the Aronofsky script. Very intriguing — as Darren always is. And I think Darren is absolutely brilliant, a visionary. But it was a bit ‘postmodern’ for me. I guess it’s all about sensibilities but I found it hard to get under the characters’ skin, emotionally. And there was another thing. I really strongly feel that for these kinds of movies — if one can say we’re doing a ‘kind’ of movie without instantly losing integrity! — that you really need to be in the courtroom.”

“I loved A Few Good Men.”

“Thank you. Which is what the Aronofsky script lacked. Because that script you were going to do was essentially a courtroom drama— without a courtroom. And that’s something the audience demands, the kind of classic catharsis a courtroom setting provides. Otherwise, it’s Gladiator without the Colosseum. Of course, there’s a romance too, but we haven’t cast your ‘lady’ yet.”

Dark Horse

BECCA GOT THE CALL while she was at Whole Foods.

The Rob Reiner film was back on track — with Kit Lightfoot in the Ed Norton part. Her agent said that casting the recovering actor was a brilliant stroke (“No pun intended”) and amazing coup. He told Becca the director was anxious for her to read with his new leading man. Rob liked her original audition so much that he had phoned personally.

She was ecstatic. But the moment she hung up, Becca knew she was doomed. Her agent didn’t even get it. She examined the impasse from every angle — the problem being, it was only a matter of time before someone connected to the movie snapped to the fact that Becca Mondrain used to sleep with the daddy-killer whose buddy had whacked Kit Lightfoot in the head. It was an insane predicament, a tragically ridiculous checkmate, and the more she thought about it the more surprised she was that the Reiner camp had been caught unawares. What should she do? The oblivious agent would probably just say she was paranoid, but she knew that wasn’t the case. Even Annie agreed.

She was about to call Sharon Belzmerz for advice when it came to her: she would go in and audition for the sheer incredible experience of it — she owed herself that much — and if fate decreed he hire her, she’d bite the bullet, and come clean. Look, Mr. Reiner, there’s something that I think you don’t know but that you probably should because it’s kind of a big deal. And maybe you know already but I don’t think so. See, I used to pretty seriously date Herke Lamar Goodson, the guy who was on trial in Virginia last year? We went out for a few months before he was arrested for a… for homicide. He was the one who killed his dad? Everyone — including me! — was totally shocked when that happened. I had no idea he had anything like that in his past or was even capable of such a thing. Anyway, it turned out — as you probably or might already even know — that he also happened to be friends with the crazy person who did that awful thing to Kit. The man who hit him in the head with the bottle? When I found all of this out, it became totally one of the worst periods of my life. Because I’m from Waynesboro, Virginia, and we just don’t live life in the so-called fast lane there. Mr. Reiner, I cried my eyes out on the phone to my mama every night. And I know I probably should have made my agency “tell all” before I came in to audition — I didn’t conceal any of it from him, but to tell the truth I don’t even think he — my agent — was thinking straight — but I was just so amazingly honored to even be asked or considered by you for your film and that you remembered me and were gracious enough to totally ask me back was just almost too much! It’s almost like I didn’t want to let you down or disappoint you. Aside from “Rusty”—that’s what Herke Goodson called himself — he lied to me and everyone else about so many things, even his name — aside from the crazy coincidence of me auditioning with Kit, and my ex-boyfriend knowing the man who struck him on top of the head, I just wanted you to know, wanted to be sure that you understood that I so totally did not know at the time that Rusty, or Herke, had this terrible double life! It was beyond the worst thing that ever happened to me, worse than when my closest friend was hit by a car on prom night! And I am so sorry if I caused you any hassle or wasted your time but you have been so nice to me and I wanted to say all this because I thought that if things went any further it would potentially be embarrassing for all parties down the line, notwithstanding the studio. From a public relations standpoint. And I would never want to embarrass you or Kit. I know that you know that. And I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity — it is something I will never forget. And that I would love to work with you one day in any capacity and just feel that my best chance of doing that is to open up to you in the way that I have today. So thank you, Mr. Reiner, thank you, thank you, thank you for even listening and hearing me out!

• • •

THEY SAT face to face.

A camera taped them as they read.

Kit seemed shy, but maybe she was just projecting. It was difficult for her to be in the moment. She knew Mr. Reiner was looking for chemistry more than anything else; she was a long shot but didn’t care, because as far as Becca was concerned, she’d already won. If I have to pack my bags and go home tomorrow, she thought, by God’s grace it would be all right. Here she was, all the way from Waynesboro, Virginia, where she’d slaved in a store just like the one Jennifer Aniston did in The Good Girl. She thought of how hard it had been for others before her — especially Drew, who, at thirteen, spent a year in lockdown. Her own mother had put her there yet she still had JAID tattooed on her back, with angels. Every night from the hospital, Drew looked up at the moon and cried her heart out to her dead Grandpa John.

Here she was, after all the hard, hard times. She’d finagled her way onto a classy cable show and even been some kind of cult figure on the Web, and now she was in a room with Rob Reiner and Kit Lightfoot, cohorts and fellow artist-travelers…

No regrets!

• • •

OUTSIDE THE Coffee Bean, two teenage girls breezed by. One of them made a little gasp, then excitedly turned to her friend. A familiar reflex foretold the actress had again been mistaken for Drew.

But the whispering girl said, “That’s Becca Mondrain.”

Graduation

LISANNE SIGNED UP for a Fearless Fliers clinic at LAX. The woman said there would be around twenty-five in the group. Enrollment in classes for “aviophobics” had diminished in the months following 9/11 but over time had rebounded to previous levels. In fact, the woman said sunnily, because of the war in Iraq people were confronting their fears with newfound confidence.

The three-weekend course began with an informal overview. The counselor, a retired airline pilot, said the most important thing the group would learn was that their phobia emanated not from the fear of death but from the fear of losing control. They couldn’t really grasp the distinction, but he reassured them they had come to the right place. Everyone seemed to exhale at once when he quoted a statistical study from MIT that said if you took a commercial flight every day for the next 29,000 years, the odds were you’d be involved in just one crash.

The enrollees formed a circle and introduced themselves. They gave their names and occupations before delivering what Lisanne imagined to be AA-style confessionals of how each had found his or her way to Fearless Fliers. One woman, a pediatrician, said that years ago on a stormy night in Minnesota she’d boarded with a syringe of Demerol and given herself a shot in the ass, only to awaken hours later to find they were still on the runway. (Lisanne thought that was someone who probably should be in AA.) Everyone had their own special niche, like the generic panic freaks, for whom fear of flying was a midsize subsidiary of a much larger corporation — or the seasoned claustrophobes, who equated entering a plane with being sealed into a coffin. Lisanne enjoyed the eccentrics the most: the ones who thought that the plane would run out of gas or that God might snatch whichever aircraft happened past Him at whatever arbitrary moment in time. (God was superpremenstrual.) Some in the circle worried about pilots having psychotic breaks or passengers having psychotic breaks or air traffic controllers having psychotic breaks or terrorist passengers simply being themselves. One or two self-proclaimed divas admitted to having been escorted from flights due to pretakeoff “arias”—groans, moans, and high-pitched wails that erupted from seemingly bottomless depths as runways were taxied toward. A man in his sixties was possessed by wind shear and “sudden rollover,” a phrase he invoked and muttered, both prayer and imprecation, with near-comic insistency. (The common denominator of horror being turbulence, hands down.) A sardonic librarian said that whenever she booked a flight, she couldn’t help imagining an AP wire photo of some Middle American farmer’s field strewn with the debris of metal and body parts, being picked over by an FAA crash team. Torsos in tree branches and whatnot. Everyone laughed when the same woman — Lisanne thought she was funny enough to do stand-up — said she’d even attended multiple showings of a theater piece at UCLA that was basically actors re-creating dialogue from black box transcripts of fatal air crashes. Lisanne could relate, though it’d been a while since she’d lulled herself to sleep with the dog-eared paperback. She didn’t share that with the group. Still, when it came her turn, Lisanne found herself saying aloud what she’d never told anyone, let alone strangers — that because of her phobia, she took a train to her father’s deathbed, and missed his passing. Her story opened a floodgate; astonishingly, she wasn’t the only one. The classmates became emboldened. Together, they stared into the face of cowardice and did not like what they saw.

They were encouraged to write essays on worst-case fantasy flying scenarios and were shown how to “stack positive imagery,” slowly replacing bad thoughts and images with good ones. The counselors guided the class through breathing meditations — Lisanne was glad to be reminded of something so familiar. She had done a lot of “sits” at the hospice, but it was well over a year since she’d meditated on her own, as she used to.

On the last weekend, everyone trooped into a hangar and boarded a 727. They talked to pilots and stewards, mechanics, air traffic controllers, and engineers. They revolved through the cockpit for comprehensive demonstrations and Q & A. They sat in coach seats (seat belts on) while the counselors played a tape reproducing all the sounds one might hear in the course of a normal flight. The tape was constantly stopped and started, each sound discussed and overexplained.

• • •

THE GRADUATION FLIGHT to San Francisco was optional, but nearly everyone signed up. The airline gave them a special rate.

At the suggestion of the counselors, some Fearless Fliers wore rubber bands around their wrists to snap away negative thoughts and feelings. The librarian offered Lisanne herbs and essential oils that she picked up at a health food store. The blue “Fear of Flying” package read, “This box contains enough remedies for one flight.”

All of them sat together. Lisanne took her place by the window — hardly anyone wanted a window seat, and besides, she didn’t need to be bothered by the bathroom comings and goings of someone in the midst of a preflight freak-out — and quickly got into meditative posture. She focused on her nostrils, following the breath as it filled up her lungs. Sounds of the cabin — the bustle and stowing of bags by unneurotic passengers not in their group, the little suck-rush of air through vents, the buckling and unbuckling, the coughs, sneezes, and throat clearings, the sporadic groaning gallows humor of fellow graduates along with the soothing running commentary of Fearless Fliers counselors — floated in and out of her awareness. (She wondered if anyone had cheated and taken a tranquilizer.) Whenever a bad thought intruded, say, the jackscrewed Alaska Airlines Flight 261 plunging into the Pacific — they would soon be flying over the very place it had gone down — or the documentary she’d watched a few months ago on the Discovery Channel about the famous golfer and his buddies who died on a Lear — the plane broke contact and inexplicably drifted off course, fighter jets were scrambled and got right up close to see the windows frosted over, meaning the cabin had lost pressurization — or the time she had a drink with a temp Reggie hired and the gal said she was supposed to have been on the PSA flight to San Francisco that crashed because a vengeful employee went berserk. The temp said that at that time of her life she was commuting a lot and always took that particular morning flight and this one time she was late: she remembered being at the gate begging them to let her on but they said the flight was already closed. That reminded Lisanne of the English movie she saw when she was a girl, about the supernatural. A woman in a hospital kept dreaming that each night she awakened to ride the elevator down to the morgue, where a man stood and said, “Room for one more.” When the woman was finally discharged, she was about to board an airplane, and the attendant at the gate said the same thing—“Room for one more”—and because she’d had the premonition, the woman didn’t board and of course the plane crashed. Whenever Lisanne was jolted by a morbid train of thought, she used one of the relaxation techniques the counselors had walked them through. She was able to get back in touch with the core of her zazen practice and found that its reawakening served her well.

There came that iffy time when taxiing was over and things got serious because there was now no turning back and the engines roared and the plane and all its guts began a sprint to the void. Lisanne’s eyes remained closed, but she noticed her section was quiet — that animal-fear quiet, before slaughter. Poor things. They’ll be all right. She was doing OK and suddenly felt maternal. She would meditate on their behalf, to help them through. She actually didn’t mind this part too much because you could really feel the power of the machine, the aircraft flexing its muscles, strutting its stuff, and it was so mightily definitive that it was a comfort — a hint of the kind of majestic strength the machine could summon if called on. (Besides, it was common knowledge that most crashes occurred during descent.) A jet like this one could take a lot of roughing up. That made Lisanne think of another documentary she’d seen about a research plane that flew into the eyes of hurricanes. (It even had propellors.) She remembered being shocked to watch it pierce the “wall” of a thunderstorm system, amazed that could even aerodynamically be done.

The graduates broke into huzzahs as they leveled off from the ascent. Soon, the drone would become that all-encompassing vibratory OM, filling ears and senses, the collected, collective hum of airspace within and airspace without. They were now over the Pacific. She pushed Alaska Airlines from her mind and tried to think of the water as a good thing, but again, it was common knowledge that crashing in water is actually worse than crashing on land, experts said the impact was somehow more devastating — even putting aside the likelihood of drowning if by some insane miracle one had managed to survive the collision. (It was one thing for Tom Hanks to endure his ocean crash in Cast Away, she thought, but would be quite another for Lisanne McCadden.) Still, this wasn’t a long flight, they weren’t even going all that high, nowhere near the altitude of a plane on its way to New York. Or maybe they were. If something went wrong, they could probably just glide down and land on the 5 or the 101. Regardless, she didn’t want to break meditation or pseudomeditation to ask one of the counselors about altitude because somehow she thought that might trigger something bad, some kind of small mechanical failure — when she caught herself having that nonsensical, superstitious notion, she laughed — and breathed — and suddenly felt normal again — then remembered something she hadn’t thought of in a long time. When she was nineteen, a friend asked her to fly with another couple in a Beechcraft to Catalina. Even though the trip was relatively smooth, she had been so unexpectedly terrified that she hadn’t flown again until the shit-filled jaunt with Philip et alia. Years later the friend who’d invited her to Catalina had crashed in the very same plane, and though he didn’t die, he had his jaw clamped shut for six months and everywhere he went carried wire cutters in case he choked on something or got sick and vomited. It was eerie that she had actually ridden in the same machine that had subsequently gone down and been damaged beyond repair. Room for one more… The soothing 29,000-year MIT statistic floated back to her and then the OM drone came and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light went off and there was more jubilation from the grads. She thought of Philip, poor Philip and his unseemly death, death by hanging, what would that be like, and what a strange personage he was in her life, what a marvel it was that he’d come along to protect her, taken her in, her and the boy, and his perversions didn’t matter because he never touched Sidd or made him bear witness, and Lisanne thought how glad she was that she’d never judged him, Philip had enough pain, and her judgments would have hastened his death. Imagine your mother being cut from her own mother like that. She knew that children of Holocaust survivors were damaged by their parents’ mind-sets just the way people’s lungs were damaged by secondhand smoke. It is so common for the child of a suicide to commit the same act, she imagined the suicide of a parent like a magnet or dare, an enticement to join the dark fun. He’d written Lisanne a final note that had disturbed her. He said she had given him a book on rebirth that spoke of the Buddhist realm of the gods. In that they died, the gods were actually mortal yet because their lives were of such incomprehensible length and because they had lived them in unfathomable luxury it was particularly agonizing when they realized the end was upon them. He rambled in his letter and said that he had lived like a god and America had lived the same way and now the end had come, for both him and America, and what a fantastic shock it was for him and the Republic but that it was her duty, hers and Siddama’s, to carry on — he said he would make sure to think of them at the end because the Buddha said how important was one’s final thought, that if one had lived one’s life raging then one would rage at the end or if one had lived one’s life lusting one would lust at the end and Philip said he wished he could be like Gandhi was at death’s door and call out for Krishna or whatever the equivalent but was afraid he would shout something fearful or profane not devotional though he would do his best to think of her and the boy and even if he wasn’t sure that he could or would he joked he would die trying. She never showed those last words to anyone, not even Mattie — he was not in his right mind and no one would benefit. Philip bequeathed her the Rustic Canyon house and what he poignantly called a “dowry” so she would never have to work again in her life. To put it mildly. She asked Robbie and Maxine to move in and they did, but they kept the Fairfax duplex, and sometimes she and Robbie even slept in the same bed, without sexing. It was a comfort to have a body to curl up into. And he was a decent man. She didn’t understand his relationship with Maxine, but why should she? What business was it of hers, or anyone’s? She was a firm believer in “whatever gets you through the night.” No one understood anything anyway. All she knew was that Robbie was kind to Max and loving to Siddhama. What more could one ask for than loving-kindness?

Something jolted the plane and she opened her eyes. A counselor smiled vacantly, patting the arm of a frightened Fearless Flier, and then it happened again and the plane rolled over, plunging downward. Oxygen masks popped out, uselessly entangling themselves, and people in the aisles slammed into each other, concussed by flying debris. The jet righted itself with as little warning, and she noted there wasn’t even a scream because what happened had been so shocking and dreamlike. The librarian clutched onto Lisanne, who watched the scene in front of her with great stillness as a child would a snow globe he had shaken and stood on its end. A dazed and bloodied steward threaded the aisle. A loud whooping alarm went off with a robotic male voice attached, but she couldn’t understand what it was saying. Lights flashed too, then came the rhythmic bloodcurdling screams of a passenger, contrapuntal to the lights and alarm, and a baby choked and bawled, maybe it was more than one baby, and whimpering rose up from somewhere — from mindstream, mindground, or buddha-field, she couldn’t tell, and when it seemed as if all was not lost or at least that small deathless moment arrived when things seemed to settle, relatively, because nothing had or really could settle at all, just then the plane lurched and thudded and the metal itself shrieked and came a primal chorus of Ohs! — more screaming — this time of those who knew whatever impossible hint of a sliver of chance they were absurdly thinking they might have had was now irrevocably gone and Lisanne saw a counselor screaming too and the plane was nose-diving. She watched all this with her strange stillness, wondering why it was so and wondering why she was unruffled, knowing of course that planes rarely pull out of such dives. Bodies and everyday flotsam rained down past, a true rain because there was coffee and water and even blood, and the librarian nearly got her head chopped off by a PowerBook and everything slowed down: anatomies careening or flopping or weirdly edging their way under dictates of velocity and g-force through clouded, ruined aisles, and Lisanne went deaf but her eyes and heart opened and oddly she thought, Should I have known this, did I know this, was this meant to be, everything so still, she even had time to think of the guidebook that said if on the first day of the month the pinpricks of light and color that normally appear whenever one closes one’s eyes, if those pinpricks should on the first of the month appear no more, then soon death is coming. That when one no longer hears a subtle ringing in the ears, that ever-present subtle sound-presence that all of us, even children, are so familiar with, then soon death is coming. She closed her eyes and saw only blackness, and in her ears heard only blackness. The guidebook said that if one should have a recurring dream of donning dark robes and descending or if one recurrently dreams of the sun and moon descending in the sky, then soon death is coming. Amidst everything, she thought about it but could not remember her most recent dreams. She could not remember ever having a recurring dream in her life, except the one about the snake after Philip died. The librarian was dead, but her hand was still in Lisanne’s. Now everything sped up again to faster than real time, if there could be such a thing, because of the brutal velocity and dreamlike movement, and Lisanne tried reaching to the librarian, whose disfigured face kept getting slammed torn pummeled rivened by debris, tried grabbing the head with her free hand to cradle it from harm’s way, and during those epic librarian labors fittingly all she could think of were books, the black box book whose nearly biblical concordance they once both laughingly shared, and that Lisanne had carried with her on the train to Albany: a chapter that now came to mind with eerie, still, cool remembering was of the plane that crashed because the maintenance crew forgot, after scrubbing down the fuselage, to take a piece of masking tape off a certain hole that in flight always needed to be left uncovered, in order that all kinds of vital gauges and readings could be taken. She recalled puzzling over that account again and again, never understanding how such an essential indicator could be a simple hole and not an actual piece of attached equipment, or why such a hole wouldn’t at least have had some kind of protective grate around it the way meters or pipes do, and if the hole didn’t, which it didn’t seem to, why hadn’t this sort of tragic thing happened before, or if it had she’d never heard about it or read about it, not in all the time Lisanne ever spent reading about crashes. And that seemed strange. In the case of the covered hole, the heroic pilots had flown the plane blind, in the darkness of night, without idea of direction or altitude, for well over an hour before it finally came down. She remembered thinking how cruel that was because the transcripts revealed them to be so noble and meticulous under the circumstances, pilot and copilots continuously alternating glimmers of hope, adroitly skillful, drawing on their collective expertise, natural born problem solvers, yet they were never to know what went wrong or how hopeless their situation was, all because of a masked-over hole, and Lisanne thought with great empathy about the pilots of her own plane just now, what they must be going through, the terrible sorrow of an unflappable captain and his sinking ship, the transcripts sometimes revealed that pilots shouted out the names of wives or girlfriends at the very end or simply said “Mother” or “Mama” (she remembered that the Alaska Airlines pilot had said, “Here we go”), and part of her was grateful everyone was going to die soon, less cruel than flying on and on in delusion, righting the plane then rolling over again then righting it and so forth, postponing the inevitable. She remembered covering her own holes that terrible time she stabbed Philip’s pug. She contrived to cover every orifice as did the careless maintenance crew but in Lisanne’s case it was mindfulness not negligence because the guidebook said one made such coverings during phowa, taping over the apertures of the dead, all but the crown, in order to force ejection of consciousness through the fontanel or top of the head now

a

voice

told her there wasn’t much time. A lama wrote somewhere that even the riders of horses may have a moment to rest during a race but not mankind who from birth with each breath gallops toward the arms of the Lord of Death.

Lisanne was twisted by g-force to lay on her right side. Something so strange popped into her head. She once saw a TV show about a woman who trained orangutans to talk. The university lost their funding and the orangutan that she used to have conversations with was now encaged, awaiting transport to a zoo. He hadn’t seen her in a long time and became excited when she left her car and walked over. He began to “sign,” and the woman translated for the camera crew. Clinging to the bars of the cage, the orangutan said, “Where’s the key?” Then, “Where’s the car?” and

I want to go home

A great force stole the air from her and Lisanne didn’t know if she saw or had merely imagined the moon dip and the sun rise, real and imagined were as one, dreamed and nondreamed, expansion and contraction, guest and host, and she tried to merge the white and red mustard seeds in her heart as darkness came and thunder returned to her ears with utter determination she prayed for the winds of prana to blow the pearly droplet from the central channel straight out the top of the librarian’s head even though the audiotapes said only trained masters should attempt such a thing let alone effect it — but how could any of that matter because Lisanne’s heart was so pure — pure as her Intent — and she rammed the librarian’s consciousness through the dead woman’s thousand-petaled lotus into the heart of space then did the same for herself just as she’d practiced, did her very best to send her own awareness like an arrow into the heart of space, the heart of love, she conjured no Buddha above, the tapes said imagine something beloved suspended there but she envisioned no deity, no Kit, no Philip or dead father with borrowed Milarepa, not even her boy, the love-child whom she of late had taken to calling Rob Jr., not Siddhama anymore, please forgive, forgive me that jejune demotion, nothing above for that arrow to pierce except light, the pure light that was everything, clear light and blissful heart of space, that’s where she sent whatever she had, nectar, nectar everlasting, for herself and librarian, for all beings alive, dead, and yet to be born, and that her final thoug—