The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner Page A

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