• • •
VIV AND ALF, in a dark back booth at Chianti.
They commune in relative silence and eat their comfort food: red wine, bread, and bouillabaisse.
Occasionally, Alf says something to cheer her — crazy gossip about some actor they know or the beggar he saw on the median with a cardboard sign that said, I LEFT HOME WITHOUT IT. She says she saw one on San Vicente with a sign that said, START AGAIN.
She takes his hand and traces on her cheek to show how things went with Kit.
Nothing sexual about it.
Just sorrow and fatigue.
As always, she begins to cry. He is helpless to comfort her.
• • •
KIT RAISES UP as the RN removes the bedpan.
An LVN enters and hands a little camera to the RN, who tells him to shut the door.
They wiggle him into a shirt before posing with the superstar.
They take turns.
The poses are wholesome, not scurrilous.
Mother and Child Reunion
LISANNE WAS BESIDE herself, thinking that any moment she would learn that Kit was dead. She couldn’t rely on the media for updates, and whatever leaked from Tiff Loewenstein was invariably grim. It was like a bad dream. She couldn’t sleep anymore and watched Lord of the Rings DVDs nonstop. She was afraid to take pills because of the baby.
She went back to the Bodhi Tree in desperation and bought the Bardo Guidebook, which delineated the Buddhist experience of dying and being dead. Much of it frightened and overwhelmed. The bardo was described as a kind of twilight zone or in-between state. (When Lisanne looked the word up on the Internet, she got cross-referenced to Robert Bardo, the stalker who murdered the television actress Rebecca Schaeffer. That creeped her out further.) There were actually five or six different bardos, but the easiest one to understand was called the “natural bardo of this life.” Apparently a human life span was merely an “in-between” to the states that came before and after. The guidebook said that what followed life was “the painful bardo of dying.” (Whoopee.) It said how, at the time of death, the white essence of the father descended from the head like a moon sinking in the sky, while at the same time the red essence of the mother ascended from below the navel like a rising sun. The essences merged in the middle of the heart.
What really interested Lisanne was the book’s assertion that, after death, those who had meditated a lot in life — people like Kit — still had a window of opportunity to be “realized” or liberated. The guidebook said that when consciousness left the body, a person became confused and disoriented. “Karmic winds” blew around and made a person wonder where his body was. At the coming of the winds, it was especially important to keep your wits and realize that whatever you saw or heard (say, the blinding of 100,000 suns or the clapping of 100,000 thunderclouds), no matter how wrathful, peaceful, or seductive, was the demons that befell you, it was essential to realize that all those things were just a manifestation of your ego. They represented the part of you still clinging to something called samsara. If you could just see that those visions, those hideous or beautiful sounds, feelings, and experiences were only projections of the self, then you could escape the cycle of rebirth, or the Wheel of Becoming. You would then be totally realized. That was the state they called enlightenment or nirvana.
If you got stuck on the wheel, the next bardo lasted forty-nine days and seemingly offered a little more time to achieve buddhahood. But even if you panicked and failed to “recognize the essence of your own mind,” you still had the chance to steer yourself toward a human rebirth, which the Buddhists said was a rare and privileged thing; that was why it was important not to squander one’s limited term in the so-called natural bardo of the living. Meditation and devotion to the path resulted in liberation. Animals couldn’t meditate — they were trapped in the animal bardo and could be liberated only by those who had escaped the Wheel of Becoming.
It was fascinating to her and a welcome distraction from the self-imposed deathwatch. Lisanne read pages of the guidebook aloud when she couldn’t sleep. She was amazed by something called phowa, an ancient technique in which a person literally shot his consciousness into space at the time of death, like an arrow. Mind mingled with prana (“life-wind”), ejecting itself through the central channel and out the top of one’s skull into infinity. Lisanne thought that was intriguing because supposedly an experienced phowa practitioner could actually liberate someone else’s consciousness upon that person’s death — meaning that if you weren’t the world’s greatest meditator (she’d bought some instructional tapes but wasn’t really into it), then fortunately a qualified guru or high lama or whatever could come along and give you that final shove.
There was something called the ground luminosity and the path luminosity. At death they merged — in Buddhism, there was lots of merging and lots of death—“like a child jumping onto his mother’s lap.” She thought it achingly beautiful, and her respect for Kit and his years of dedication “to the cause” grew. How admirable it was that in the midst of Hollywood shallowness he would have been drawn to such a world! But she wondered… Was the Buddhism of the guidebook the particular form that he practiced? So much of the teachings seemed morbid and impossibly esoteric. It was one thing to have a book lay everything out in concise, no-nonsense terms. But if a person meditated, did he, at least over time, become privy to all of the rules? Did he get rewired? Was the educational material sort of magically downloaded as a consequence of incredible discipline? Lisanne wondered if the experience would be like living among a foreign people then one day waking up to speak the language, or at least realize one was dreaming in it. How many years did that take — two, five, twenty, fifty? And if a person finally did understand, by some kind of osmosis, was his knowledge something he was allowed to share with others if he was even able? Lisanne was possessed by the thought that Kit was nearly liberated but hadn’t, say, fully mastered a way of ejecting his consciousness, and was terrified that he would be trapped in some miserable bardo. Did he apprise Viv Wembley of his progress or lack of, before he got hurt? If Lisanne could learn something from the actress that was pertinent, it might give her comfort. Though it could be that Buddhism was like Scientology and you weren’t allowed to tell anyone about anything. Or did that apply only to outsiders? (Which maybe Viv technically was, not being, as far as Lisanne knew, a practicing Buddhist.) Not that she knew anything about Scientology, but you never heard Tom Cruise or Jenna Elfman or Lisa Marie Presley sharing their personal experiences. Lisanne thought that if she wanted to find out anything about Kit’s proficiency in terms of his struggle to be liberated, she would probably have to approach other Buddhists who knew him well. But why should they tell her anything?
The guidebook said that near the end of the forty-nine days, if you were destined to take a human rebirth, you began looking around for couples who were engaged in intercourse. The rule of thumb was that swarms of lost souls were always hovering around the entrance of a woman’s womb as she made love, “like flies on a piece of meat.” The book was scandalous! Maybe Buddhism was just an elaborately kinky sham.