Erasing the present was a tall order because Kelly had been indoctrinated for years to believe in its power and relevance. She’d come to believe the New-Age Now was all there is, was, could be. This fresh idea of invalidating the present was antithetical to the thinking of her people, the Buddhists. It was heretical! Their whole raison d’être, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the wisdom brought by living in the moment.
Obliterating the past was one thing — the numbness of serotonin depletion would help take care of that — but knocking the present out of the box required a bit of fancy footwork. For Kelly, the past wasn’t really a problem anymore. She had bludgeoned it into amnesia and made it drink its own poison. Not only had the past forgotten itself, it had forgotten what forgetting was. Besides, Ryder hadn’t died in the past, he was continuously dying in the present. And so, next on the agenda was to assassinate the Now. My wife did a little visualization. (Whatever works.) She saw salmon going upstream… the stream being the past and the salmon being the present, but only while they were in the water—are you following me? — the minute the salmon jumped into the sky, they were out of the Now and living in the future. Frolicking. Though that isn’t really accurate… bear with me. What I meant was — what Kelly meant — is that when the salmon leave the water, they aren’t just in the future, they are the future. Okay? Does that make it clearer? Try visualizing one of those Eschers with the braided flying fishes. As long as Kelly saw the fish suspended in air, as long as she held the visual of them arcing from the water, that was the future. If she could hold that image in her head then she could be in the future with them. She could stay in the future. I’m trying to let you — to convey what it was like to be in our heads. In her head, because I knew what was going on in there. Want a baseball analogy? Think of the future pinch-hitting for the past and the present. What we did was put the future up to bat — then froze the game. Called a permanent time-out. That’s what we were going for… and the batter up was Ryder. Just do what Kelly did and picture a 12-year-old boy leaping from the water into the air toward whatever, toward us. He’s on his way to us. Picture him in the air—[mordantly] not hanging, though, don’t you dare! — picture him in the air, all goofy and sweet, and think: that little boy isn’t in the future, he is the future. He’s no longer a prisoner of past or present… he’s a child of Maitreya. Maitreya, the Future Buddha, up there in a cloud of unknowing, awaiting his moment to migrate to Earth, that unforeseen yet imminent time when the oceans shall shrink so that he may walk from continent to continent. You see, Maitreya’s next in line after Gautama and is prophesied to arrive in a time of great darkness — and boy, had that time come! It could not have been any darker, not for us — Maitreya is due when the teachings of the dharma have been forgotten and Gautama’s lost his mojo. Legend has it that Maitreya will bring the promise of Oneness. When Maitreya comes, there shall be no more fathers, mothers and daughters and sons. When Maitreya comes, there can be no loss of parents or children.
That’s the legend of the Fifth Buddha…
… the salmon-catcher Maitreya.
But Kelly wasn’t at peace. She kept noodling back to ground zero, obsessed that Ryder had to have overheard one of our Merlot-fueled, sardonically tabloid conversations about a San Quentin hanging, our death gossip mixing with his esoteric anicca/impermanence training like a bad drug combo — potentiating it — until it pushed him over the edge (of the chair). No point in trying to dissuade… I understood this was her process. Hate that word! I think that what she really needed was communion. See, in the weeks that followed our son’s death, she’d wished him too far into the future, banished him too thoroughly. Whenever the anesthetic of grief temporarily wore off, she missed him desperately, unutterably, brutally, needed to see him again at any cost, even if that meant enduring the sumptuous torture of parsing her “involvement” in his death through the forensics of mental masturbation. It was totally nuts — like doing a crime lab spatter analysis of a Pollock painting.
So she walked and talked us through. We sat on the floor of the living room, lights low, as in a séance. As she began to speak, Kelly set the scene, placing us in the kitchen like figures in a diorama. Laying out the bogus scenarios…
“Okay, let’s say we were in the kitchen talking about one of the hangings. And I’ve had a few glasses and I’m telling you how amazing these prisoners are, how resourceful they are — about the one who did it with an itty-bitty shoelace. Maybe Ryder was on his way to ask us something. And he hears something provocative and just stands there listening where we can’t see him. Who knows for how long. And maybe it sounds like I was complimenting the suicide on his ingenuity. Let’s say it happened, for argument’s sake, that one of us saw Ryder out of the corner of our eye but didn’t really pay attention. Saw him standing there but we’re blocking it out. That’s possible, isn’t it? That something like that might have happened and we’re blocking it out? That’s why I’m saying we really need to concentrate, like those people they hypnotize who suddenly remember all the details of a crime. You know, what the suspect was wearing or the license plate of a car… You have to admit it’s possible, Charley, isn’t it? [I agreed that it was. What’s a husband to do?] Let’s say he maybe even walked in and asked about it and we’re blocking that out too. Or maybe the phone rang and you went to answer and that’s when Ryder walked in and I got distracted too, maybe poured myself another glass of wine… [She closed her eyes as if she was being hypnotized] And when I’m trying to picture — I can see him in my mind and I’m wondering how much he heard — but I’m still distracted… maybe he asks about — about that shoelace thing — and if he did, if he did ask, Charley, what do you think I would have said? What would I have told him? I’ve been thinking about this and I believe I know. I know what I would have said. I would have seen it as a teachable moment. I’d probably say something like — maybe I actually did say it — I’d have said something ‘real,’ you know, like, ‘Honey, sometimes people are in so much pain in their lives that they make a choice. It’s not a good choice, but it’s their choice, and we need to respect that.’ I might even have used ‘honor’ instead of respect. Honoring the choice to hang yourself! Charley, doesn’t that sound like something I would have said? Or might have, if the situation came up? What a stupid, stupid thing! Why would I say something like that? Because I think I would have.”