The Empty Chair (15 page)

Her eyes filled with tears—the metaphor had transported her back to that time of severe depression. We took a 20-minute break then resumed. She seemed much refreshed.

When I'm in a normal frame of mind (ho ho! normal!) I'm actually quite capable of reveling—or wallowing, anyway—in the serene dullness of a familiar domestic landscape. But in the condition I was in
then
, it was those very things—hum of vacuum, chiding position of sun in the sky, sound of Spanish soap opera on kitchen TV—that held my feet to the flames. The more routine the trappings of my life became, the more banal,
the more exquisite grew the pain. As the entry in my personal Devil's Dictionary says, the sensation of speeding toward the abyss—insanity—is the thing that gets you. That unstoppable velocity before hitting your head on the ceiling of the air pocket . . . I was reading about a method of torture the
narcos
use called “bone-tickling.” They shove an ice pick in then click-and-drag. That I tickled my bones in the sanctuary of my own home was truly the devil's work.

I was sitting there stewing about all this shit when my flip phone chirped. No one was on the line. I did that stupid thing we do and said “Hello?” over and over. Then:

“Queenie?”

I floated through shamanic dreamtime.

“Do you know who this is?”

It was almost 30 years since I heard that voice yet it was as familiar to me as any of my gargoyle friends. (The way I was feeling just then, I'd have been more than pleased to hear one of
them
speak.)

Knowing
exactly
, I still gave his name an interrogatory wisp.

“Kura?”

He laughed that laugh and my underground caves flooded.

I know it's kind of one of those clichés (I have the feeling I'll be using a
lot
of them during this story, apologies in advance), but
this man actually saved my life.
Back when I was oscillating between my own madness and another's—
oooh!
To even
think
of that time before I met him absolutely makes me shudder, and to think of the time
when
we met . . . well, the woebegone part of me, the part whose head had been stuck for weeks in its 14-inch airspace, couldn't help but wonder if the man behind the voice would save me. Again.

“Wowee zowee,” he said. (I hadn't heard
that
one in a while.) “Stanley meets Livingstone!”

I'd been thrust into the way-back machine—Kura's—where the cultural references were always a bit fusty.

“Though I have to say I didn't look for you quite as long as Stanley searched for the good doctor, which was less than a year, I believe. I found
you
in a week's time. Five business days to be exact.”

“This number is eight hours old! How in the world—”

“My
Queen
, you've been an endless presence in my thoughts. I was so happy to learn things turned out well for you.”

“They did? Someone forgot to tell me.”

“Ho ho! You've kept your wit.”

“While those about me were losing theirs.”

Ho ho, ha ha.

Okay, so we bantered. I always had a thing for
The Lady Eve.

“You outlived your parents, which for many years was an
iffy proposition
,
no? You
routed
the executors in court. All of the attempts to rob you of what was rightfully yours—and they were formidable—failed
dismally
.”

“True. But that's a matter of public record.”

I wasn't really in the mood for
This Is Your Life
, or the psychic TV routine either.

“Yes, it is. For the last few years, you've been depressed.”

“Tell me something I don't know.”

“How about if I tell you something you dare not utter, not even to
yourself
anymore?”

“Go for it.”

“A woman broke your heart.”

The wit and wind went out of me.

And I won't talk about any of that—not to you, or anyone. You just have to trust me when I tell you this is something
no one
could have known.

“Dear Queenie, I must tell you that ‘more die of heartbreak' is a phrase which only applies to myth and storybook. You, precious girl, are a
survivor.
”

I always hated that word.

I masked my emotions best as I could and said, “Well, that's comforting.”

Kura laughed again. His voice was a few registers lower since I'd last heard it, accompanied by an echo of phlegm that hovered just shy of unfriendly, blurring the border of good health. His accent seemed to have thickened too yet somehow had rendered his English simpler and more precise.

All at once I grew nervous about the motive behind the call.

“Queenie,” he said, “I don't have too much time.”

Though I took it to mean “at this moment,” I absorbed the poignancy of the remark. Then his speech took on a certain brusque, still delicate formality, as it always did when he got down to “brass tacks.” (Kura had a weakness for archaic American idiom.)

“I wish to make you a proposal. Do you have time to listen?”

Another thing came rushing back: whenever Kura had something “heavy” to
lay on me
, as they used to say, he asked his wild child (who'd grown into a louche woman) if she had the time to listen. I did then—or fancied so—and I did now. Though I have to admit, “proposal”
triggered an absurd millisecond fantasy he might ask for my hand.

“Tomorrow morning, at a little before 7:30 o'clock a.m., a Rolls-Royce Phantom will pull up to the kerb outside your building. A
black
Phantom, I may add.”

He sniggered over that small, deliberate touch; the black phantom's black Phantom, whisking away a white wraith.

(He was actually more of a mocha phantom.)

“I know it's a bit early for you, unless your sleeping habits have changed—I stopped my man short of delving further. If you agree to what I propose, I ask you to appear outside
no later than eight.
I grant you a half-hour's grace!” Came the laugh, again; no need to rub my nose any further into the epic, pathological tardiness of years gone by. “When the driver catches sight of you—most likely, he'll be having a morning smoke—he shall go briefly rigid in that timeless salutation of the servant class, then flick his fag to the street, gather up your things, and
whisk
you to Teterboro, depositing you on the tarmac beside a private plane.
My
plane, at least for this particular
hajj
.”

He pronounced the already sensual word as a lover would an intimate act, drawing it out like an exhalation of
hasheesh
—stratocumulus of perfumed smoke.

“It will be a long flight but I believe you'll find it
quite comfortable.
I know how important superior comfort is to my Queenie!”

And by the way, I couldn't remember the last time anyone called me that. I'd gone back to my birth name, Cassiopeia, in my mid-20s—she of the constellatory skies—and, as Kura once enlightened, the namesake of the legendary black queen that hailed from a region called Ethiopia.

“There shall be three pilots and two stewards looking after you, and a doctor onboard as well, though I'm certain he will remain well-hidden—unless of course you get lonesome and wish to chat him up, for he is at your service. The gentleman walks softly but carries a big syringe. Actually, he's bringing me some medicine; a
godawfully
expensive courier. I strongly doubt that you'll require his ministrations . . . not to worry! He's
very
good at tending to that once in a blue moon in-flight heart attack. O, he's absolutely
keen
on it. You might say it's his specialty!” The honeyed laugh, then avuncular advice: “My Queen, if you accept your old friend's mysterious invitation, I encourage you to pack a
very small bag
 . . .” No need to rub my nose any further into the epic, pathological over-packing that was—still is—my predilection.
Je ne regrette rien.
“Anything you may possibly need shall be provided upon arrival. Bring nothing formal, as there shan't be any galas or social fêtes on
this
end. Why don't you come in your pj's? Isn't that a fine idea?”

I've lived too long not to know the human animal's universal default is a humbling insecurity. Fearless and resolute as he was by nature, Kura was unaccustomed to initiating a game whose results were uncertain. Ringing me up as he did after so many years was a risk outside of his comfort zone. He was wily enough to know that to presume I would say “yes” was an excellent way to court major disappointment. There were just too many variables. He could Sherlock around all he wanted but to suddenly be face-to-face—voice-to-voice—with the flesh and blood of a thing—
me
—fudged any predictable conclusions. I imagined that in weaker moments, parsing the rainbow of potential responses before he called (or even while we spoke), he must have shrugged his shoulders, conceding that the only leverage he had was
la
nostalgie.

He had reached out in desperation (and not a little madness, knowing what I now know) and leapt into the void. Though a good part of him must have been certain that he had me, as the dreaded phrase goes, “from hello,” I still felt him take my temperature during his pitch; but perhaps the tremulous bravado, the quaver in his voice, was indicative of ill health. I was in the dark in that regard, having in that moment no idea what the man had endured in the decades we'd been apart—what transformations had occurred on the physical, psychic and spiritual planes. When I didn't push back, he was palpably relieved that his fall had been arrested.

“Throw a talisman in your Goyard duffle, Queenie! Something for luck—a mysterious
truffle
—we'll need it. Yes, we shall
need
a bit of luck. And, ah! I should add that there will be no danger in our errand.”

He was being courtly, for he must have known he was the single person on Earth that I trusted most. Maybe courtly is the wrong word—our bond had been forged under the most savage, nearly fatal circumstances.

“I wouldn't want you to be dissuaded for fear an old flame might catch you on fire.”

“I could think of worse ways to go.”

In my mind, I was already on the tarmac. It gave me great pleasure to know that in just a few moments, he would hear my
assent
to flight
.
I was suffused by the overwhelming feeling that so much had been hard for Kura of late and dearly wanted him—wanted us both—to believe that with this one call, everything would now go his way. He'd saved
me
once—maybe now, I could return the favor.

We could all use a little Hormone Replacement Therapy, no?

“Do you mind if I ask where this plane is landing?”

I didn't care. But like a teenager with a crush, I suddenly wanted to keep him on the phone. Besides, there was nothing to lose by asking a few questions; we were officially going steady again.

“Of course, I don't mind. That much you deserve! But first you must say
yes.
It is important—
energetically.
”

I Molly Bloom'd a breathless “Yes I said yes I will Yes” and the most glorious thunderclap of a laugh shook the Heavens, and my heart.

“You'll be arriving in
Delhi
,
late afternoon. But we shall only be there overnight. The next morning, we leave for points north—the second leg of your journey.”

“How many legs are there?”

“As many as a scarab's.”

“How many is that?”

“For this, you must tell the computer to
Ask Jeeves
.”

“And you won't say anything more until we meet. Correct?”

A dead quiet: it sounded like we lost our connection. In the split seconds that followed, I panicked, wondering if he'd call back . . . and if not, whether the velocity of madness would return with speedier vengeance. Might it begin with a rumor the call was a black phantom of my imagination? No doubt the result of striking my head against the roof of that underground grave . . .

Perhaps when I opened my eyes I'd be balancing atop a ledge watched over by my beloved gargoyles, a crowd of people below urging me on—

I heard him inhale.

He said, “I've found him.”

“Found who?”

“The American, Queenie! I found the
American
.”

Kura
means “guide” in Swahili, and my friend was aptly named.

His parents were Muslim—
Kura
is close to
Qur'an
, no?—but he renounced Islam, just as he renounced most things. His father was a diplomat, a Francophile who uprooted his family from a small African country (an act not without controversy in its day) to settle in a working class Parisian neighborhood. After the move, Kura was inexplicably given a ludicrous new name: Pierre. “Lucky Pierre” is what they called him. By the time we met, in 1968, he was Kura again, the alias and its sobriquet long since relegated to the bits-and-bobs bin of dislocated childhood. (I should add that it was oddly retained as an occasional nickname, but mercy to those who added
Lucky
,
because he thought that a jinx.) In truth, he was never comfortable with either appellation. At heart he was a refugee, a traveler in the shadowlands. The classic man without a country.