The Empty Chair

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[the next day] Thanks for your patience — that was very, very tough. I know it took me a while, I’m sorry. I’ve probably taken too much of your time. I think just sort of plunging in wouldn’t have — I don’t know, all the stuff leading up to it was the only way it would have worked. I’m pretty sure I’ll never talk about any of this again. I mean, in such detail. There’s still a bit more — can you listen? Have I made you late for any appointments? I know you wanted to leave today…

I was thinking some more about all this before I went to sleep, and this morning too, when I sat with the monks for prayers. For some reason there doesn’t seem to be a charge to the next few “items.” I think I can recount them in an almost clinical way. Maybe that’s just a defense mechanism. Probably I numbed myself up by going through it, you know, telling you about it, I haven’t really thought about any of that for years. In passing, yes, of course, images come to me every day, but not with that kind of… narrative detail. Not even close. I hope the anesthetic doesn’t wear off in the middle of this next little procedure!

Around five days after the event, a short article appeared in the paper. Not on the front page, somewhere toward the back. See, I’d had a few nagging concerns that Ryder would be taken up as the poster child for tween suicides, some sort of talking point for the usual bogus discussions on radio or television. I didn’t want our son to become, you know, the lead-in for a 60 Minutes segment either. I definitely stayed away from the Internet, which I considered — still do — to be nothing more than a Dantesque filing system for one’s worst fears. But nothing happened. Now I see those small worries for what they were, a distraction from the cruel reality of his absence.

I won’t bother to describe the details of my wife’s collapse when she learned what happened. Nothing I could possibly tell you could come close to delineating her sorrow. I wouldn’t even try, wouldn’t want to, some things aren’t ours to convey. A mother’s sorrows… that anguish is forever hers and hers alone. Do you know the Fourth Book of Esdras? There I go, the pedant again, with his GED in pedagogy. (One of the youngsters I met in my travels had one and called it the “Good Enough Diploma.”) In the Fourth Book of Esdras, it is written, “And it happened that my son went to his room, fell down, and died: and my neighbors came”—no, hold it — hold on — I think it’s “and my neighbors came and rose up to comfort me. Then took I my rest. It was the second night and all the neighbors rested so they could wake up and comfort me some more, and I rose up by night and fled and am come to this field — hither to this field—as you see—and will not go back, but will remain here… and neither eat nor drink, but rather to continually mourn and fast till I die.” Not bad for an old guy, huh? My memory’s always been good in terms of recitation. I’m just rusty. But I still get the Mensa gold star for today. I assume you carry them in your trunk.

Kelly was admitted to a psych ward for a week. A full week of heavy meds. They wouldn’t let me visit for the first few days and when I did, she was barely responsive. By the time she came home, the detectives had finished their grim interrogatories and I’d been cleared. They’d gone around asking the neighbors what my relationship with my son was like, you know, if they’d ever seen me smack him around or jerk him off, that kind of thing, but after a while their hearts weren’t in it. I think it became kind of apparent that it was an anomaly. His being nude. My wife alibi’d out, as they say on TV. She was 60 miles away at the time of the event, teaching. On television, you either alibi out or lawyer up.

She slept on a futon in the room where he died. The meditation room that used to be her room, her sacred yogini space. The irony being that now it was incomprehensibly sacred. Though maybe there’s no irony after all… She ignored the altar — she’d fussed for weeks over its installation — with its incense and brassy representations of Amitabha and Sanghamitta, color photos of her teacher, and black-and-white ones of sundry cantankerous diapered siddhas from the last century. You know, the usual suspects. She didn’t talk much and hardly ate the food prepared by a never-ending stream of friends and neighbors — yes, as in Esdras, they rested, so they would have the strength to come back and comfort her, though no comfort was possible. It seemed like the whole world was shaken by that boy’s death. Folks circled the wagons around us. They were protective and I appreciated that.

I understood why Kelly never left that room. In her emptied-out postlapsarian state, bitten by all manner of plumed serpents, her febrile obsession became to return to the Garden at all cost. She wanted to breathe the same air our son had. And who was to say his effluence wasn’t present, that some of his microbes weren’t still in the room? He’d napped on that futon and she wanted to nest in a bed of his skin flakes, her body caressed by the ethereal snowfall of subatomic particles and microscopic motes, she longed to breathe Ryder-rich oxygen saturated by sloughed-off cells and bacteria exhaled from his lungs and sinus. She would absorb through mucous membranes anything left of him. He had come from her and so he would return, in soluble, invisible, ingestible form. Pitiably, she prayed for something of him to imprint itself on her very eyes — what a blessing it would be to know for sure! — it would sustain her if she could look at the world through a cold case filter of his DNA. She’d close her eyes and never open them again if that’s what it took not to lose him, go blind if it meant being subsumed. She’d settle for anything, as long as it wasn’t his extinction.

Kelly sat on a cushion in front of the broken, empty chair as if kneeling abjectly before a new altar, a sacrificial one honoring impossibly infinite, impossibly malevolent forces. She courted it, for her life… sitting with such helplessness, futilely waiting, not praying, for she knew that prayers were pointless, that such a thing would never respond to prayer, no, just waiting, abiding, for whatever it was that swallowed him to spit him out. Sometimes I positioned myself so I could watch her undetected through the open door (it was a house rule that it never be closed again). She was having a dialogue with that chair, with body and soul, maybe even her sex. Once I saw her sit in it stock-still — on the plank, rather — feet on the floor, back upright, eyes half-shut. Other times, she’d sit before it and lay her head on that infernal plank like an exhausted child in the lap of its mother… or a lover who betrayed her. Then she’d pace and circle, raging, an interrogator outgunned—

And one day, she was done.

She only asked one thing of me: to burn the chair.

Kelly used to love that chair, isn’t it funny? She actually stole it — but I suppose that isn’t fair. Let’s say she borrowed it and never gave it back. She found it by chance, in a storage room at school. See, my wife’s family owned an antiques shop and she worked there every summer until she was 18. Her dad had an amazing eye that he passed on to Kelly. They were very close. By the time her apprenticeship was done, she could have gotten a job at Sotheby’s. So there it was, shoved in with a lot of other chairs in a forgotten storage room, only it was different. Very different. Not because it was bruised and battered — the canework seat was broken through — or because it was anachronous, out of time. All Kelly needed was one look to know what she had, she’d come across these types of chairs at her father’s shop before. I remember when she brought it home. She sat it in the middle of the living room, poured us some Chablis and commenced a frothy little Antiques Roadshow routine, with yours truly playing the excited rube. “Sir, this is a very fine elbow chair, Edwardian, circa 1900, and as you can see it is made from mahogany. That’s Cuban mahogany.” With an appraiser’s flourish, she informed that if put on the market it might fetch around $800. When I told her she was no better than a common thief (all in good fun), she assured me that no one would miss it. Besides, she said, it would cost a few hundred to do a halfway decent repair and the district certainly wasn’t going to shell that out. Shit, she did them a favor. Kelly couldn’t for the life of her deconstruct how it had come to be nestled among all those crampy, banged-up desks from the ’60s, the ones with the tiny, graffiti-carved tables attached. So she stuck it in the Volvo and drove on home. She never got around to fixing it; as a temporary measure, she laid a short piece of wood across the busted seat. That was what Ryder jumped from.

I had very careful pre-incineration instructions: it was to be broken apart until its pieces were unrecognizable. The order wasn’t given so it would fit into our fireplace, though that certainly helped. She just didn’t want it to look like a chair when it burned. I knew what she was doing. She wanted to strip it of its identity, to humiliate it. She wanted it tortured — she wanted to hear it scream.

You ask how I was doing? Well, you may as well ask how I’m doing now, because it’s kind of the same. I dissociate. Space out. I run from pain — to food, sex, drugs. The one thing I don’t do is overspend. There isn’t a shopaholic bone in me. I do bury myself in books pretty well… You know, talking about all this, Bruce, makes me wonder if I haven’t even come close to the point of grieving. Or if I’m even capable. See, those wonderful experiences with the Catholic Church helped me learn to compartmentalize. Don’t you hate that word? Did you ever hear of something called Compartment Syndrome? A friend of mine had it after an automobile accident. They wound up cutting off his arm, on Thanksgiving no less. Compartment Syndrome can happen after a fracture. A closed space gets created in your arm or leg — a little compartment — and for some reason the doctors can miss it. The pressure gets so bad in there that all the nerves and tissue and muscle die, it can get to where they can’t do anything but amputate. I guess you could say that psychologically, emotionally anyway, I’ve found a way to create closed spaces that don’t result in amputation. Though maybe I’ve lost more limbs than I think! When Ryder died, I busied myself with tending to my wife. I’m muy codependent, if you know anything about that. Then, wham! — the settlement came in. A million and change after the lawyers took their piece. (When I told Kelly, it didn’t seem to register. Since celebration wasn’t an option, there wasn’t anything for her to do with the information.) The windfall became one more compartment for me to chill in. Another room, and a well-decorated one at that.

I haven’t told you about the note. It wasn’t a suicide note per se — though the authorities referred to it as such.

Kelly’s meditation room was her holy of holies. Unless we were invited, Ryder and I were instructed to stay the fuck out. The door had a kitschy Gone Fishin’ sign on it at all times — now where the hell’d we pick that up? I want to say a yard sale in San Rafael. O, that little sign really tickled her! She said her dad used to hang one just like it on the door of Ballendine’s Second Penny whenever they were closed. The man hadn’t been near a fishing pole in his life.

Ryder took the sign and pasted over a handwritten edit:

GONE TO BOODAFIELD!!!!!!!

You can imagine how many ways I’ve looked at this.

The strongest theory was the one that hit Kelly the hardest: that for all the arcane knowledge he’d absorbed, for all her “Little Buddha” projections of our son’s scholarship, for all the tutelage in phowa—transference of consciousness — for all the cozying up to Maitreya’s merry band of bodhisattvas, for all the instructions in the Great Embodiment of Impermanence and the Tathagata (“One Who Has Thus Gone”) plus the Four Immeasurable Aspirations, the Eight Worldly Concerns, the 19 Root Downfalls and the 46 Transgressions, for all the rides thumbed on Greater and Lesser Vehicles, for all the picnicking with Vajra brothers and sisters, for all the comforts of the Six Mantras, Six Perfections, Six Gestures, Six Pristine Cognitions and Six Types of Bone Ornaments Worn by Wrathful Deities, for all the “mother and child aspects of reality,” for all the protections promised by the thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, for all manner of Nyingma masters, lovingkindnesses, dream bardos and intermediate states of rebirth, for all the inherent existences, inner radiances, illusory bodies and causally conditioned phenomena, for all the songs of dualism and dream yoga, the burnt offerings and calm abidings, the apparent and actual realities — for all that, well, Ryder was just going to impress Mom (especially) and Dad with an unthinkably bold act of tantric precocity, a supercalifragilistic Peter Pan leap into the Void from which he could boomerang back to the welcoming arms of that dimensional continuum he called home—

… 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.

That’s the legend of the Fifth Buddha…

… the salmon-catcher Maitreya.

But Kelly wasn’t at peace. She kept noodling back to ground zero, obsessed that Ryder had to have overheard one of our Merlot-fueled, sardonically tabloid conversations about a San Quentin hanging, our death gossip mixing with his esoteric anicca/impermanence training like a bad drug combo — potentiating it — until it pushed him over the edge (of the chair). No point in trying to dissuade… I understood this was her process. Hate that word! I think that what she really needed was communion. See, in the weeks that followed our son’s death, she’d wished him too far into the future, banished him too thoroughly. Whenever the anesthetic of grief temporarily wore off, she missed him desperately, unutterably, brutally, needed to see him again at any cost, even if that meant enduring the sumptuous torture of parsing her “involvement” in his death through the forensics of mental masturbation. It was totally nuts — like doing a crime lab spatter analysis of a Pollock painting.

So she walked and talked us through. We sat on the floor of the living room, lights low, as in a séance. As she began to speak, Kelly set the scene, placing us in the kitchen like figures in a diorama. Laying out the bogus scenarios…

“Okay, let’s say we were in the kitchen talking about one of the hangings. And I’ve had a few glasses and I’m telling you how amazing these prisoners are, how resourceful they are — about the one who did it with an itty-bitty shoelace. Maybe Ryder was on his way to ask us something. And he hears something provocative and just stands there listening where we can’t see him. Who knows for how long. And maybe it sounds like I was complimenting the suicide on his ingenuity. Let’s say it happened, for argument’s sake, that one of us saw Ryder out of the corner of our eye but didn’t really pay attention. Saw him standing there but we’re blocking it out. That’s possible, isn’t it? That something like that might have happened and we’re blocking it out? That’s why I’m saying we really need to concentrate, like those people they hypnotize who suddenly remember all the details of a crime. You know, what the suspect was wearing or the license plate of a car… You have to admit it’s possible, Charley, isn’t it? [I agreed that it was. What’s a husband to do?] Let’s say he maybe even walked in and asked about it and we’re blocking that out too. Or maybe the phone rang and you went to answer and that’s when Ryder walked in and I got distracted too, maybe poured myself another glass of wine… [She closed her eyes as if she was being hypnotized] And when I’m trying to picture — I can see him in my mind and I’m wondering how much he heard — but I’m still distracted… maybe he asks about — about that shoelace thing — and if he did, if he did ask, Charley, what do you think I would have said? What would I have told him? I’ve been thinking about this and I believe I know. I know what I would have said. I would have seen it as a teachable moment. I’d probably say something like — maybe I actually did say it — I’d have said something ‘real,’ you know, like, ‘Honey, sometimes people are in so much pain in their lives that they make a choice. It’s not a good choice, but it’s their choice, and we need to respect that.’ I might even have used ‘honor’ instead of respect. Honoring the choice to hang yourself! Charley, doesn’t that sound like something I would have said? Or might have, if the situation came up? What a stupid, stupid thing! Why would I say something like that? Because I think I would have.”

She went on like that, rewriting a back-to-the-future history that never happened. The horror was that this berserk exercise allowed rare moments of peace, affording brief sanctuary for us both because it gave me respite from the agony of watching her suffer. It conferred a time-out from the storm of the event—event horizon of our son’s death — and any kind of escape was welcome, any brass ring placed around the black hole of our hearts from which no light would escape again. During the grace time provided by these dramatic re-creations, his tiny, dense solar mass somehow lifted off of her, allowing her briefly to be free.

Charley made some tea, and ruminated. After a few minutes, he sat down again. Instead of a joint, he lit a cigarette.

But it was all horseshit. Truth be told, my wife wasn’t capable of a teachable moment, not even retroactively! No, no, no. What pisses me off is that she lied to herself (and to me), even in theory. Because if Kelly would have said anything to Ryder about Mr. Shoelace, it would have been closer to “He was ready to leave his body. Maybe he’ll come back as the mother of a prison warden!” She was too cowardly to own up to the hypothetical implications conjured by her worst fears. She would never have stopped at the prisoner making a “choice.” That’s a liberal sentiment but not a mad one. No — she would have been aggressive. Jesus, maybe I do think she’s responsible! Some little part of me, anyway.

Because truth be told, she was so far up Buddhism’s ass all you could see were her feet dangling! The paradox of it, the hypocrisy — and I swear I’m trying not to be a cunt, Bruce, but I’m still angry about a lot of this, angrier than I realized — which is why it’s good I’m rehashing everything, because it’s probably going to be more helpful to me than I know — the hypocrisy was that the deeper she got in her practice, the more kudos the roshis and sangha threw at her, the greater her instincts were to blindfold Ryder to the realities of everyday life. A kind of insanity, to do that to a kid. But I was blind too… I was—am—culpable. Allow me to elucidate how that teachable moment (another phrase on my Top Ten Hit List) would have gone down. And I fully understand that what I’m about to say makes me a co-conspirator, a participant anyway, in her neurotic theorizing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if given the chance, Kelly would have chosen to refract Mr. Shoelace through the lens of maya, that tiresome golden oldie. The ol’ dance of illusion. She was up to her hips in prison dharmaworld, the “Path of Freedom,” and whatever else her crafty Jewish rinpoches gave counsel. “Ryder, that prisoner has been liberated!” would have been more her style — a party line knee-jerk diluting of the depressing savagery of such a violent, hopeless act.

Her head was beginning to clear. A new voice — the voice of the quote-unquote “real”!—the voice of self-preservation — began to insist, demand, she cleave toward a revisionist Buddhist weltanschauung, that of permanence. Bald-faced, plain-dealing, square-shooting Permanence, a concept she once considered not just bourgeois but fascist. If she was going to find the antidote for the fatal damage caused by indoctrinating our little boy in the we-shed-our-bodies-like-old-garments shtick, she would need to dip more than just a toe in Permanence Lake. Like the time-traveler who changed the course of history by stepping on a butterfly, so did Kelly want to arrest Ryder’s death by substituting a triple-decker reality sandwich for the wheatgrass and tofu of passive-aggressive homicidal Zen platitudes. She had to flush out all the from-the-world-of-the-senses bullshit—“From the world of the senses comes heat and cold, pleasure and pain. They are transient. Rise above them, Grasshopper!” She no longer had the stomach for answering our son’s (imaginary) thorny but simple questions about death — by hanging — with the bloodless, casual koans of an entitled urban sun salutator who paused during walking meditation to pluck Dzogchen daisy petals—it’s permanent… it’s permanent not… it’s permanent… — until the whole random holocaust of the world was hushed up, tucked in, brushed under, sanitized and Shambhala’d away. My wife now needed to adamantly believe that her “teachable moment” had or would have conveyed the wisdom that life was precious and that she wanted him to live to a ripe old age… but knew that she hadn’t or wouldn’t have answered in such a way, and that gaping hole in his education could only mean she had killed him. So there was no alternative other than to alter everything that came before, tweaking her teachings, her memory, her very self, so at least she could draw comfort that she’d done no harm. Do no harm—that’s Eightfold Path 101. Kelly had to submit to an Extreme Makeover because if she didn’t, it would mean that Ryder, with his keen intelligence, would have embraced the corollary: Mr. Shoelace had rapturously shed his old garments and Gone Fishin’ with all the other liberated beings—not snapped his own neck on the night he was gang-raped and sold!

Kelly stepped up her pitiful attempt to derail a train already at rest at the uncrowded station of its destination. She became a high priestess of necromancy. She put on proleptic operettas, as if Ryder could be kept alive—was alive — by their stagings. Variation upon variation of impossible possible scenarios unfolded in the altered future of the past. She splintered amber and bid the fossils dance to a tense, grieving, bipolar shitstorm of tenses: past perfects were perverted, bare infinitives laid bare, conditionals unconditionally loved. So sad! In a Hail Mary, she staged a coup to restore democracy, backing the impoverished, exiled leader that was her old, has-been self: she would oust the ambitious, humorless, dharma-thumping, girl-fucking Ashtanga dictator, and restore to power the straight-up, samsara-loving woman of the people who got toppled in her mid-30s. She had a hunch she could be saved—he could be saved — we all would be saved by past-imperfect Kelly, she of the fine eye for antiques and other permanent things, she who believed in mortal sin and taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. She who had no truck with the Ganesha in the room with its prayer flags and banners of evanescence… the old Kelly had no compulsion to acknowledge or worship that tired old circus elephant, let alone sweep up its shit.

With sick, outlandish ferocity my wife composed a speech she never gave, fantasizing that it might have had the power to prevent him from stepping off the chair. As she began to lose her mind, she paced the rug while votive candles burned, reconstructing and reenacting, talking in articulate, disarticulated tongues.

“People kill themselves, Ryder, they do, but it’s a horrible thing! A taboo! They believe they’re escaping the world but the truth of it is that they’re actually going to Hell to be tortured by their enemies! Ryder, God punishes those who take their own lives or even try to! If I ever see you fooling around with a rope — listen: I know I gave you information that was challenging—‘sophisticated’—but it was supposed to be theoretical, it was Buddhist theory and wasn’t meant for everyday life! It was wrong of me, wrong, wrong, wrong! Now I’m going to give you another teaching, the teaching of all teachings! A powerful, secret transmission possessed by only the highest of Masters! Are you ready? Are you ready to hear? Because if you love your mother, this is the teaching you will follow — this is the teaching that is law! The secret teaching is that Permanence rocks! Ryder, do you understand? Permanence! Permanence is the right and natural cosmic law! Even impermanence is permanent! Do you understand? Permanence rocks! Say it, Ryder! Say it! Say it! Say it!”

Within her euphoric derangement — Dr. Bravo came to the house and gave her something for sleep, we were just about to commit her but she was a little better the next day and he said another stay in the hospital might not be such a great idea, he didn’t like the idea of her getting acclimated to institutions and said we should try to put it off and I was actually glad we did, even though it was scary touch-and-go — in this fugue state Kelly thought that if she could only be stern, forceful, parental, if she could rewrite the indelible, just maybe there’d be a chance Ryder might be granted a stay, and allowed to be something other than dead. Even in diminished capacity — she’d take him anyway she could—

Please, Lord Buddha… I have failed the Fourth Noble Truth, for I suffer! I suffer so! I am attached… But Lord Buddha! Cessation of suffering is only attainable if my son should live!

She was moonstruck. A hair away from a 5150—that’s a 72-hour hold. She told us that if Ryder was unpersuaded then at least maybe he could tell her — or me, or the doctor — someone—anyone! — just what it was that he wanted, what maybe he knew but no one else did… whatever the thing is that would allow him to live. To be alive in some way. She was determined to get resolution if it killed her. Which it already had. Would. Will?

Had…

O Bruce, how sad! How sad and unjust! In the day and the night she looped back to the living room to resume her hopeless, abstract disinterment: back to the future and forward to the past — I am telling you, it broke my heart. It was like watching a wildlife documentary of an elephant trying to nudge its stillborn calf to life with her trunk. Before she finally collapsed, the whacked-out musings came in a torrent as she fumbled and burrowed and downshifted, tenderly redacting her teachable moment… Ryder, sometimes when people are in lots of pain, they — well, sometimes — if a person had cancer and was in a hospice — the Dalai Lama said that if the pain of a cancer or someone burned in a fire, then — then it’s the choice of that person. But this is something very extreme. And irreversible! If Mommy or Daddy ever got sick, or even if you got very sick, this is not a path we would choose, darling! Because we have each other, and our love would see us through. And I know we’ve talked a lot about impermanence and rebirth but what is meant by that, what the Buddhists mean is that even a rock is considered impermanent, though a rock can live for thousands of years! I want you to know that life is precious and the main teachings of the Buddha are that birth in a human body — not animal, preta, Hell — is a rarity and a great privilege, and each of us have the sacred responsibility to live our lives joyously, to the end! — suddenly stammering in recognition that she’d already been over this ground, feeling the weight of Ryder kicking at her stomach, not from inside, but from out, trying to climb back in so his rebirth could begin — again — wincing as she heard those imaginary words escape her doomed mouth—no! The contortions of her logic were already losing their power to distract and to numb, like heroin that’d been stepped on too many times. Everything was too much and too soon, death and life, wasn’t there something between the two? (A bardo?) Wasn’t there supposed to be? Because she wanted nothing to do with either of them. Only in deep sleep came the solace of pure, untrammeled consciousness… the house that gave shelter now sheltered no more, the food that gave sustenance no longer sustained, the glass of water once celebrated for its elegance and life-giving beauty was now a draught of poison. The crisp chimney-smoked air, redolent of winter, manna for breath meditation, had become sulphurous and mocking as the last gasp of her fanciful, phoney TMs—teachable moments—came crashing down around her without warning.

She was overwhelmed by nameless dread.

Words!

— the words of friends’ and neighbors’ condolences left her on the floor with multiple stab wounds, only made worse by words of my own, when I consoled with some random anodyne assholism, cool rag of banalities pressed against her mutilated forehead to help her through a rough patch. My poor, poor wife.

It was true. HRH 14—the Dalai Lama—had said that in certain instances self-murder was A-OK. So Kelly, engines failing, overthrew the notion of reckless playfulness ending in tragic accident and gave suicide a shot. Reluctantly embracing the monster rally factoid of it, she tried to accept sponsorship of the idea that the highest of Buddhist authorities had ultimately condoned the act. Only trouble being, Ryder hadn’t been sick. Hadn’t even been in any observable pain, psychic or physical. Nope. Ryder was boyish, seraphic, rambunctious, enthralled…

Gone Fishin’!

As I said, the shrink sedated her. She slept for 36 hours and seemed much better. A postmortem honeymoon period ensued. For a week or so, we couldn’t stop talking, but in a good way. Real chatterboxes. A freaky, hypomanic phase, like being back in college taking speed to cram for exams. O, we had mourning sickness (with a “u”) for sure! We vomited, metaphorically and not, and when that was done, like after peyote — ever eat peyote? — that’s when the magic began. Being in our bodies, being in the world, was some kind of insane kick. It was almost like we were discovering them for the first time, no, maybe more like interlopers, those old Hollywood movies where angels come to Earth and are amazed to have bodies again. Or with psilocybin, when you get that insight that the mushroom has taken you so it can see the world through human eyes… It was funny. Even taking shits had us in stitches! It was a way of being with Ryder too, as if the three of us were already in the bodiless regions and Kelly and I just came down temporarily, to revisit what a hoot and a comedy — what a divine travesty it was to have a body, we were on spring break but would return to our boy after a long carnal weekend. Good times! I think we had entered this weird labile stage of loss where everything was so surreal it felt antic: we had crossword puzzle showdowns, we painted little masterpieces, we polished silver crap we didn’t even know we had, cooked dinner at 4 a.m. in formal dress… told forgotten, complicated jokes and recited the first and last names of ancient homeroom geeks. We tried on distractions, competitive channel-surfed with dueling remotes, indulged in klieg-lit nighttime gardening, built ingenious Rube Goldberg devices. It felt zany and erotic—overheated teenagers in a seizure of shoplifting. In fact, it got erotic. We fucked again, just once. And that was… sad. For a while anyway and then it got funny again. Really funny. We were in a frenzy that we had no desire to name or explain. Couldn’t explain. Just we happy two. And we had these — we experienced these moments of supreme, supernatural, grief-free giddiness! It was so awesome. In those fucked-up days, without knowing, my wife and I probably got pretty close to getting it — the formless form/gateless gate scam, the whole bullshitless bullshit, “non-returning” Pure Abode — dwelling anagami rap—’cause something way outside of ourselves was forcing our hand. Talk about your unsolicited crash course in enlightenment! (And boy, did we crash. But that wasn’t till a week later.) We got out there, like those airplanes that almost make it to space. Where the pilot sees the stars and the blackness just beyond the atmosphere?

The Theory of Relativity proved you would come back younger from a voyage to the stars, right? I think even when you come back from New York on JetBlue, you’re technically younger. Infinitesimally so — but hell, I’ll take it. Have to. It’s like that old line about pregnancy — you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either come back younger or you don’t. So we went through this phase, got our degrees in the jitterbug-ology of Death. We blew through verbiage, waving words like the man who waved his whisk before God, as the Sufi wiseguy once said. Danced our jive asses off to Motown… how it can dance! Had Ryder dancing with us too, we each held one of his little absent hands though that was tough because, see, the three of us actually used to do that, had our sweaty, popcorn’d Soul Train — American Bandstand Saturday nights. But Kelly and me danced through it, pretended Ryder was there, full-on boogie’d with and acknowledged him. I was the coach, Ryder the quarterback, and Kelly the head cheerleader for Team Zombie. O yes — the walking and dancing dead.

Dead man meditating…

Then one day it was over. Guess you had to have been there. You know, I learned a lot from Kelly. She was magnificent. I don’t think that’s been adequately conveyed in the few hours we’ve spent. Kelly was simply magnificent.

About a week after Ryder died, I spoke to a friend who lost his kid two decades back. He said the hard part came after the wake, when friends stopped bringing food and folks stopped calling, to give you your space. Or because they didn’t know what to say or whatever. “These are the good times,” he said. “Savor it.”

The irony is that the death of our son was his teachable moment to her. But I think she’s going to have to wait a long time to learn its lesson. Hopefully, she’ll get it, at the TM of her own death: the lesson of Impermanence.

There’s a marvelous little story that Sir Richard Burton recounts in his Anatomy of Melancholy. That book didn’t leave my side for three years after we lost our son.

A young man, disconsolate over his debts, saw no way out. He went into an abandoned shack to hang himself. He’d already tied the rope on a rafter when something caught his eye. He went over to a caved-in closet to investigate and found a trove of gold coins. It was meant to be hidden but a rotting beam had broken under its weight. He couldn’t believe his reversal of fortune. He crept away with the treasure chest under his arm. A while later, another young man entered the shack. When he saw that the treasure that he’d hidden was gone, he used the rope left behind to hang himself. Isn’t that lovely? Like something from Boccaccio.

I hope you don’t think it too strange, my telling that. I’ll tell you why I did. Have you ever had a bad breakup? Or unrequited love? And when it’s over, you keep thinking you see their car? You see it everywhere: on the freeway, in parking lots, in front of you, behind. You see it in your dreams… I did that for years once. I even knew it wasn’t his car anymore, someone told me he’d bought a new one but there I was, trapped in time, still on the lookout for a yellow Corolla with a dent on the passenger door. Couldn’t help myself. It’s like that for me and hangings now. Whenever I read about one in the paper… I’ve got a book of clippings. Maybe that’s carrying it too far. I don’t do the tarot anymore. For some reason, I shy away from the Hanged Man, though I’m a real fan of upside-down crucifixions. St. Peter and all. Go figure.

What can I say? There’s perverse comfort in it. I don’t know the psychology. There’s a hidden fraternity, you’d be surprised, of people whose loved ones hanged themselves. And folks like me, who found them. Thank God for the Internet.

He laughed, smiled to himself, then placed his hands together in his lap and closed his eyes like a guru who was done for the day. I took the liberty of boiling water for tea but in a few minutes he broke free of his thoughts and leapt beside me. “No no, don’t fuss with that. You’ve listened so patiently that a parting cup of tea is the least I could do.” We drank in relative silence, with Charley resuming the lotus position. A pleasant smile of what I took for catharsis suffused his features. He asked me a few questions about where I was going next, when I thought the anthology would be published, and so forth.

I was in my car and halfway down the winding hill when he appeared, out of breath. He looked not so much anguished as startled. I asked what was wrong. He said he’d left something out—“a rather crucial last piece of business. I’d kick myself if I never told you, whether you decide to include it or not.” I told him I would turn around but he said the afternoon’s talk had exhausted him. He apologized again for any inconvenience, offering two choices: tomorrow — here at lunchtime — or later on at 2 a.m. when the baths at Esalen open. It appealed to me to end our encounter at the place it had begun.

The superb night was cold and crystalline, and made me think about his comment of the pilots who get so close to the stars and the blackness — and about Big Sur being a place where one cannot expect to be healed. Only one other person was in the tub; she got out and nodded to us in leavetaking, a cue to begin. Then she was gone.

I told you I wouldn’t hold back and I meant it. What I’m about to tell you may sound egregious or vulgar — TMI alert!

Here goes.

I think pretty much everyone knows that a hanged man gets a hard-on. Most of us have heard it before, somewhere or other. Wikipedia calls it “angel lust” but you never really know what’s a bullshit Wiki entry and what isn’t. Someone could have heard “angel lust” on Grey’s Anatomy, which means it may or may not have been made up by smartass Hollywood writers. So pretty soon you’ve got fake entries in there that look real and maybe even become real if they catch on. Somebody could have put “angel lust” in there and it’s bogus but the wikitectives haven’t caught it yet or maybe never will until it’s actually entered the vernacular. In which case, it’d stay on Wiki anyway. At any rate, it was true with my son. He got a hard-on. Or had one when I found him. The death erection, what they call a “terminal” erection. I’ve studied up on this a little — I mean, since. When a man is hanged, he gets hard and sometimes climaxes. Of course as his dad I saw his penis in every way, shape and form — you change the diapers and see an adorable stiffie, a confection, you want to take a bite! A terminal confection. Kelly and I would joke about it, I think that’s probably something most parents do, you could see the purple vein, he’d pee straight up, oh do all kinds of things. It seems to me that in the delirium of the moment, my son hanging from the rope and me lifting him, hefting the weight of him, that infernal dance of ours frozen in time, tadpole thickened to anemone-sized tentacle by the hanging trauma, its familiar now very unfamiliar purple vein not a rebuke but a wild reminder of God, that now Ryder wildly belonged to God—I wasn’t aroused, Lord no, never, more like a frightened boy myself, making up for my shyness by clutching a tall girl at a cotillion dance, holding on too tight — what a simple heartbreak scene drawn in my head forevermore! His little balls made a horizontal 8, the Infinity sign, I saw myself as a boy just his age, see myself now as we talk, skittish child-victim of the clergy cotillion — there’s my son, dead, hard — helplessly, incognizantly aroused by his yanked, roughshod transition to boodafield…

I’ve never told anyone that.

He wrapped himself in a towel and retrieved a cassette recorder from the backpack on a nearby bench. Back in the tub, taking care to hold it out of harm’s way, he played a tape of his wife reading a Ravidas poem to their son. Her voice was lovely, carefree.

It’s just a clay puppet, but how it can dance!

It looks here, looks there, listens and talks,

races off this way and that;

It comes on something and it swells with pride,

but if fortune fades it starts to cry.

It gets tangled in its lusts, in tastes

of mind, word, and deed,

and then it meets its end and takes some other form.

Brother, says Ravidas, the world’s a game, a magic show,

and I’m in love with the gamester,

the magician who makes it go.

He swathed the tape recorder in a towel and without getting up from the tub, set it on the ground. Then he resumed, with an enigmatic smile.

I was at a flea market in Sebastopol and came across an unusual item, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. There’s a lot of volumes and the three I laid my hands on now make their home in the van. There was a story in there of a young student the police detained. I can’t remember why he was arrested, but I doubt if the punishment — injection of chemicals into his feet — fit the crime. After a few days, he was stripped naked and fitted with a hood so he couldn’t see. Imagine his fear as they began pouring liquid onto his body! It was only milk and the policemen tried not to laugh… they brought in a calf that sucked the milk on his penis. One of the priests used to do that to me with honey, sans blindfolds. And I’d do it to him. On camping trips, he’d smear honey on himself and ask me to lick it off. (For some reason, he was in the habit of asking politely. Being polite probably turned him on.) Do you know what the sonofabitch used to say? That I should imagine his bunghole as Christ’s wedding ring and the deeper I got my finger and tongue, the stronger was my marriage to the Savior. O, he was a great wit. He used to say, most impolitely, “It is easier for a little faggot to pass through the hole of a man of God than it is for a girl to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” When he went down on me, that hot mouth felt like the guts of some dying animal. Felt great. Awful to admit, but true. You could smell his dirty breath when he talked, right through his nostrils… hygiene was never a strong suit with the prelates. I have come to believe — no pun intended! — that the more flagrant the sacrilege, the greater the orgasm all around. I never let him know I was horny, always acted like he was hurting me. He knew I was putting on an act. He knew that I knew that he knew, which became our covenant. And that it felt good, his mouth, my mouth, our whatever, became a covenant between me and God, for how could there not be godliness in such a feeling? I remember so clearly the sound of the birds singing their indifferent song while he worked on me, I heard the scratchings of the leafless branches of courtyard trees as if the Lord Himself was at the door, impatiently waiting to be let in.

Now, my lust is wanderlust—I visit rocky coast and chaparral, hermitage and open road, to reacquaint myself with all things beautiful that they tried to destroy.

You know the story of Saturn, don’t you? Saturn castrated his father, oh yes, then married his sister. Talk about your dysfunctional family. It was foretold he’d be dethroned by one of his sons. So what did he do? What any self-respecting God would: ate ’em all up at birth, like bonbons. Eventually, Rhea — his sister-wife — got a little tired of the drama. When it came time to feed him Baby Boy No. 6—that would be Jupiter — she swaddled a rock in blankets and he swallowed that instead. I guess gods know pretty much everything but still have trouble when it comes to spotting the difference between newborns and wrapped-up rocks. So the sister hid Jupiter away. You know, those oracles never made bum predictions. The gods were really dumb that way too. They never seemed to catch on that the oracles were always right.

There’s a painting by Goya, part of what they call the “black paintings.” They were done directly on the walls of his house, kind of in secret. None were commissioned or even meant to be seen. The most famous is Saturn Devouring His Son. Goya didn’t name it that, someone else did. All the black paintings were untitled because they weren’t meant for the public, they were for his eyes only. Well, it’s an absolutely fiendish painting. He’s just laying into this — Saturn’s delightedly laying into this little man—taking big bites out of this — this torso with legs—the eyes are bulging in Daddy Dearest’s head, I am telling you, Bruce, it will make you shiver! Go online when you have a chance and take a look. By the time he did the black paintings, Goya was old and deaf. See, in the privacy of his own home he could just let it rip, God bless him. But here’s why I brought it up, this is what most people don’t know. You see, there were photographs taken before those paintings were transferred to canvas. Now remember, these murals were painted on plaster, on the plaster walls of his house and the experts took pictures before they moved them to the Prado. No one knows where the photographs are now, of course, but it’s fairly common knowledge the government destroyed them. The thing is, there’s still a few people living who wrote about what they saw — in the photos — and they say Saturn had an erection—Goya painted Saturn fully aroused as he ate his kid! Which makes perfect sense, at least to me. Which was totally suppressed, you know, for the “greater” good. Whitewashed. Literally. God knows how many hands those photos passed through. How many busybody committees, how many bourgeois arbiters of taste who ruled that such a thing would be too scandalous. Mustn’t threaten tourism with a scandale!

By the time it got to the museum, the hard-on was painted over.

Ryder died in December, on a Saturday. That’s a double Saturn. He was born in December too. Not favorable. Gloomy — bitter— cold — saturnine. None of which of course describes my son. Sometimes Ouroboros, the serpent that devours its tail, is a symbol used for Saturn. Ouroboros: the “O” sign. Remember that? The snakehead — or tail — even makes a little bulge in the “O,” changing it to a “Q”—tongue lolling from mouth. Funny, huh? So Saturn devours his son, deflowers his son; Saturn eats his own tail… eats the thing he made, the thing-at-its-beginning, the thing-he-once-was. Everything comes full circle. Or so we like to think.

But wouldn’t it be funny if everything didn’t?

In the months after he died, I dreamt of waves, tall as buildings. Big Sur waves. I was drowning in them, with sick priests floating all around like goblins, or stuck to me like leeches, gobble-gobbling me up, licking my flat tits—

[recites]

And God did not make death

He did not make pain

But the little blind fire

that leaps from one wound into another

knitting the broken bones

and fixing the broken bones

and fixing sins so they cannot be forgotten.

I will obey my nurse who keeps this fire

deep in her wounded breast

for God did not make death—

As I said, Kelly’s living on the edge of her sister’s land, in Calgary.

A cabin; she lives in a cabin.

Her sister worries about her incessantly.

There is a field there, and I’m told she sometimes wanders in it.

But my wife never strays too far from the cabin.