Whatever.
Kelly blamed herself for putting the hanging idea in Ryder’s head. When she was going through her prison dharma phase, she loved having a glass of wine at dinner and sharing Big House scuttlebutt. There were a lot of suicides in the penitentiary and the most popular method by far was hanging. The inmates went about it with trademark resourcefulness. A guard told her that a child molester hanged himself with his shoelaces, while lying down! Some went kneeling, as in prayer; you only needed a few pounds of pressure to do the job. Kelly became obsessed by the notion that she’d inspired our son through an anecdote, sort of a copycat death with a peppermint twist of naisthika. That’s Sanskrit for nihilism. “That which denies the existence of objects and the laws of cause and effect.” I guess in Ryder’s case, the concept of cause and effect was certainly denied… naisthika also refers to the Great Vow of celibacy. One who never wastes his semen. I suppose Ryder spilled at the end, but didn’t actually waste. It’s just semantics.
Kelly hardly spoke a word in the beginning days of her sequestration, but one late afternoon started to murmur this very fear — the prison hanging anecdotes as virus fear — at first burbling the words under her breath, not really loud enough to hear, as if talking to herself, then eventually loud enough for me to understand. To be honest, it didn’t matter what she was saying, I was just glad to finally hear her speak. I’d become one of those schmaltzy figures at the bedside of a comatose spouse, waiting for a sign, any sign. There was only one flaw in the theory. Being the superbly protective mom she was, Kelly never spoke about violent penitentiary stuff in Ryder’s presence. To my knowledge, he didn’t even know about Little Ricky. She was fairly assiduous about that. When I pressed her on that point, she insisted that he must have overheard.
That was problematic. First off, my son wasn’t the eavesdropping type. He wasn’t a surreptitious character, not even remotely. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he had heard something not meant for his ears. Well, Ryder’s no dummy, he’s impish too, my educated guess is that he’d have made a big guileless splash right away and sidled up to his mom to shake it out of her. See, he didn’t have it in him to remain hidden, wasn’t his nature. Too extroverted. And as I said, Kelly was extremely mindful of his presence in the house, moreso than her remorseful theory makes room for. Now if he had come into the kitchen or wherever while we were gossiping about some death, some hanging death, he’d naturally have been curious to know if Mom actually knew the deceased or was she at least there for the “discovery.” Of the body. This is all a bit exasperating, Bruce, because I have to — I’m going to have to spend a little time talking about things that never happened! Theoretical things. Hopefully, you’ll see why it’s important that I do.
So I say it didn’t happen because if it had we’d have known. Let me go further. Even if it had unfolded that way — Ryder furtively in the hall, lapping up a morbid mommalogue — it still wouldn’t prove or mean a thing.
I knew what Kelly was doing. She was building castles of concrete instead of sand because sandcastles wouldn’t do her any good. She needed constructs that were oblivious to time or tide, she was conjuring durable fairy tales that on completion could be hurtled into the past to provide Ryder with shelter that was at least up to code. Wasn’t it sandcastles that had done him in? (Maybe.) Kelly’s new spin on that old bugaboo impermanence was… permanence itself.
In permanence, lay liberation!
Too late, of course—
Fresh from the nut house, she sat her butt cheeks down on permanence and waited for it to hatch. Actually, it was her theories she was incubating. (More about that later.) First, there were a few things she needed to get rid of. A little housecleaning. She needed to banish the past and the present: too 3-D. The only survivor would be the future. The past was a quagmire, the present a nightmarish fraud. Had to be. The future was the promised land — the land of Maitreya, the Fifth Buddha, “The Future Buddha”… To save herself from the unbearable anguish of the present — present imperfect tense—present impermanent—Kelly had to take up residence in the future: future perfect permanent. The present, once venerated while she was an ecstatic, card-carrying member of the notorious All-We-Have-Is-This-This-Moment! cult, had been stuffed in the recycle bin along with its jealous, immutable, implacable shadow, the past.
My wife pulled the plug on the Power of Now.
I knew what Kelly was doing, Bruce. See, the future was the only place we could breathe. It was the only timespace that hadn’t been compromised because it had never happened, never would, and we, its impassioned converts, became zealous phantom-footed soldiers in the world of what-will-but-never-will-be. The past needed to be erased, deleted, a heroic task that could only be accomplished by order of law — Ryder’s Law. (The legislation bore his name but it was Kelly who pushed it through the house.) There was a certain genius to the idea… because how could we be expected to live in the past, that time in which our son would always live and always die? The past itself was always dead or dying and being reborn, it lived to be regurgitated by those unfortunates who were addicted to nostalgia — or worse, who chased after it in a castrated misery of rage, grief and hysteria, driven mad by the idea there was healing to be found if one could just pick through its vomit for a mirage of diamonds. The past was a bully-god, it thrilled to watch us fools throw fits onshore as it receded, dragging our sandcastles and unbreathing sons with it. The past put on an air of regal indifference yet was secretly boastful of its getaways, its cowardice… the past was haughty and demented. And yet, the past was tormented too. The past was lustful and desirous, and had ambitions… the cross it bore was that it waited in futility to become the present, or at least marry it, each time getting infinitesimally close, unable to accept what it already knew: that its fate was of a bride doomed to be eternally jilted. The past was the angel fallen from the perceived paradise of Now. (The real heaven — haven — was the future. But the past was blinded by its yearnings for the present.) Scorned, insulted, inconsolable, its monolithic, frozen-in-amber humility inexorably turned to hubris, its acquiescence and sorrow to vengeful, perverted sadism. Its greatest strength — storehouse of all that ever was, seen and unseen — was its greatest weakness. For the past was vain. Kelly was of the opinion that the only way to annihilate it was by subterfuge. The past must be tricked into forgetting itself.
The present was defined solely by our son’s searing absence. It felt like being on fire. A crush injury. You looked for him and he wasn’t there. You’d hear him, smell him, taste him, but he wasn’t there. You’d absolutely know he was but he wasn’t. You saw children, children, children everywhere! An exquisite torture. Outside the window or on TV, being rude in the mall. Laughing and telling secrets to each other. (I always imagined they were talking about Ryder.) But my son wasn’t there. You wanted to end the pain any way you could; always in the back of your head was that you could hang yourself too. For my wife and I, each second of every minute of every hour of Now was like a cold slap, a pinch to the cheeks of an unconscious prisoner who awakens only to realize he’s about to be executed. Apparently, the human animal is poorly designed for mourning…