The Empty Chair (10 page)

I kept redialing Kelly's cell, secretly grateful each time she didn't answer. I finally left a message.
Something's happened to Ryder, call back right away.
From the front seat, senses acute, I smelled the pet shop we'd visited the week before, bad, sawdusty, wire terrier puppy smells wafting up—
why?
His shit was on my pants.

They “pronounced” him at the ER.
I now pronounce you boy and Death.
Death and wife . . . They let me in the room, the room with the clickety drapes and someone always moaning on the other side, they let me in to see him, a cop was there, he looked me up and down then hardly looked away, stayed there the whole time, probably protocol again, because of the weirdness of Ryder's initially undressed body, now covered by two flimsy hospital gowns. God knows what ghoulish things they thought the suspect might have done and was still capable of . . . They never took the tubes out, not even the one down his throat. Machine mind wondered why. It would have been so easy. Maybe it was someone else's first shift too, a new hire, an LVN who was supposed to do it but fucked up out of nerves.
Everybody too distraught
———

Or maybe just a bad RN.

I always obey my nurse.

[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—