The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner

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