She went on like that, rewriting a back-to-the-future history that never happened. The horror was that this berserk exercise allowed rare moments of peace, affording brief sanctuary for us both because it gave me respite from the agony of watching her suffer. It conferred a time-out from the storm of the event—event horizon of our son’s death — and any kind of escape was welcome, any brass ring placed around the black hole of our hearts from which no light would escape again. During the grace time provided by these dramatic re-creations, his tiny, dense solar mass somehow lifted off of her, allowing her briefly to be free.
Charley made some tea, and ruminated. After a few minutes, he sat down again. Instead of a joint, he lit a cigarette.
But it was all horseshit. Truth be told, my wife wasn’t capable of a teachable moment, not even retroactively! No, no, no. What pisses me off is that she lied to herself (and to me), even in theory. Because if Kelly would have said anything to Ryder about Mr. Shoelace, it would have been closer to “He was ready to leave his body. Maybe he’ll come back as the mother of a prison warden!” She was too cowardly to own up to the hypothetical implications conjured by her worst fears. She would never have stopped at the prisoner making a “choice.” That’s a liberal sentiment but not a mad one. No — she would have been aggressive. Jesus, maybe I do think she’s responsible! Some little part of me, anyway.
Because truth be told, she was so far up Buddhism’s ass all you could see were her feet dangling! The paradox of it, the hypocrisy — and I swear I’m trying not to be a cunt, Bruce, but I’m still angry about a lot of this, angrier than I realized — which is why it’s good I’m rehashing everything, because it’s probably going to be more helpful to me than I know — the hypocrisy was that the deeper she got in her practice, the more kudos the roshis and sangha threw at her, the greater her instincts were to blindfold Ryder to the realities of everyday life. A kind of insanity, to do that to a kid. But I was blind too… I was—am—culpable. Allow me to elucidate how that teachable moment (another phrase on my Top Ten Hit List) would have gone down. And I fully understand that what I’m about to say makes me a co-conspirator, a participant anyway, in her neurotic theorizing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if given the chance, Kelly would have chosen to refract Mr. Shoelace through the lens of maya, that tiresome golden oldie. The ol’ dance of illusion. She was up to her hips in prison dharmaworld, the “Path of Freedom,” and whatever else her crafty Jewish rinpoches gave counsel. “Ryder, that prisoner has been liberated!” would have been more her style — a party line knee-jerk diluting of the depressing savagery of such a violent, hopeless act.
Her head was beginning to clear. A new voice — the voice of the quote-unquote “real”!—the voice of self-preservation — began to insist, demand, she cleave toward a revisionist Buddhist weltanschauung, that of permanence. Bald-faced, plain-dealing, square-shooting Permanence, a concept she once considered not just bourgeois but fascist. If she was going to find the antidote for the fatal damage caused by indoctrinating our little boy in the we-shed-our-bodies-like-old-garments shtick, she would need to dip more than just a toe in Permanence Lake. Like the time-traveler who changed the course of history by stepping on a butterfly, so did Kelly want to arrest Ryder’s death by substituting a triple-decker reality sandwich for the wheatgrass and tofu of passive-aggressive homicidal Zen platitudes. She had to flush out all the from-the-world-of-the-senses bullshit—“From the world of the senses comes heat and cold, pleasure and pain. They are transient. Rise above them, Grasshopper!” She no longer had the stomach for answering our son’s (imaginary) thorny but simple questions about death — by hanging — with the bloodless, casual koans of an entitled urban sun salutator who paused during walking meditation to pluck Dzogchen daisy petals—it’s permanent… it’s permanent not… it’s permanent… — until the whole random holocaust of the world was hushed up, tucked in, brushed under, sanitized and Shambhala’d away. My wife now needed to adamantly believe that her “teachable moment” had or would have conveyed the wisdom that life was precious and that she wanted him to live to a ripe old age… but knew that she hadn’t or wouldn’t have answered in such a way, and that gaping hole in his education could only mean she had killed him. So there was no alternative other than to alter everything that came before, tweaking her teachings, her memory, her very self, so at least she could draw comfort that she’d done no harm. Do no harm—that’s Eightfold Path 101. Kelly had to submit to an Extreme Makeover because if she didn’t, it would mean that Ryder, with his keen intelligence, would have embraced the corollary: Mr. Shoelace had rapturously shed his old garments and Gone Fishin’ with all the other liberated beings—not snapped his own neck on the night he was gang-raped and sold!
Kelly stepped up her pitiful attempt to derail a train already at rest at the uncrowded station of its destination. She became a high priestess of necromancy. She put on proleptic operettas, as if Ryder could be kept alive—was alive — by their stagings. Variation upon variation of impossible possible scenarios unfolded in the altered future of the past. She splintered amber and bid the fossils dance to a tense, grieving, bipolar shitstorm of tenses: past perfects were perverted, bare infinitives laid bare, conditionals unconditionally loved. So sad! In a Hail Mary, she staged a coup to restore democracy, backing the impoverished, exiled leader that was her old, has-been self: she would oust the ambitious, humorless, dharma-thumping, girl-fucking Ashtanga dictator, and restore to power the straight-up, samsara-loving woman of the people who got toppled in her mid-30s. She had a hunch she could be saved—he could be saved — we all would be saved by past-imperfect Kelly, she of the fine eye for antiques and other permanent things, she who believed in mortal sin and taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. She who had no truck with the Ganesha in the room with its prayer flags and banners of evanescence… the old Kelly had no compulsion to acknowledge or worship that tired old circus elephant, let alone sweep up its shit.
With sick, outlandish ferocity my wife composed a speech she never gave, fantasizing that it might have had the power to prevent him from stepping off the chair. As she began to lose her mind, she paced the rug while votive candles burned, reconstructing and reenacting, talking in articulate, disarticulated tongues.
“People kill themselves, Ryder, they do, but it’s a horrible thing! A taboo! They believe they’re escaping the world but the truth of it is that they’re actually going to Hell to be tortured by their enemies! Ryder, God punishes those who take their own lives or even try to! If I ever see you fooling around with a rope — listen: I know I gave you information that was challenging—‘sophisticated’—but it was supposed to be theoretical, it was Buddhist theory and wasn’t meant for everyday life! It was wrong of me, wrong, wrong, wrong! Now I’m going to give you another teaching, the teaching of all teachings! A powerful, secret transmission possessed by only the highest of Masters! Are you ready? Are you ready to hear? Because if you love your mother, this is the teaching you will follow — this is the teaching that is law! The secret teaching is that Permanence rocks! Ryder, do you understand? Permanence! Permanence is the right and natural cosmic law! Even impermanence is permanent! Do you understand? Permanence rocks! Say it, Ryder! Say it! Say it! Say it!”