Justine called back three days later, sounding truly distraught. She feared the chair was aboard a ship, on its way to America! She added to my confusion by saying, “It was in the closet… and that fact alone should have made it exempt. It should never have been touched. O, it’s my fault, Cassiopeia, all my fault!” When I asked what the hell she was talking about, I got pitched into a primer on Kura’s recycled goods empire, one of whose entities shipped donated clothes and furniture to needy countries that paid by the pound. (Yawn.) Apparently, back when it was politically unpopular, Kura had a brainstorm that the U.S. would eventually be a bigger importer than exporter. As usual, he was ahead of the curve; by the time his theory bore out he had already laid the groundwork. He’d cultivated high-level relationships in Washington for years, delivering full containers to the States at no cost (to his great tax advantage)… which was more than I cared to know. But what could I do? Justine was like the proverbial dog on the pant leg. She ended the conversation by swearing that she would not rest until she learned the exact whereabouts of that freakin’, fucking chair.
Cut to: TEN WEEKS LATER.
There she was on the phone again, unbearably chipper, unconscionably French. (It was starting to feel like we’d once had a fling that ended badly.) She began by telling me that she’d at last been able to read the diaries straight through. “There was so much about religion that was hard for a layperson to understand, but it was such a moving experience! Incroyable.” Her voice cracked. I’m not sure what it was about her that made me want to shoot myself in the head. “It just brought him right back… in such an amazing way. Like he was in the very room …” She told me the diaries should be published one day, “though of course this cannot happen, for obvious reasons.” Then, almost as an afterthought, Justine said she’d managed to track down the chair. “As it turns out, Cassie, there is an amazing symmetry to what happened.” By way of explaining her jubilance, she recapped the last part of the diary — his wish to return the chair to the village school, its destination before being wrested from the boy. While she knew the chair had belonged to Kura’s guru, she still couldn’t seem to grasp the significance of that final gesture. What she did know was that the chair had ended up in a school after all, albeit one in America. Hence, her pleasure that her boss’s decree had been fulfilled “in a roundabout way.”
Justine declared that she would never have learned of the chair’s Stateside migration without the “creative investigations” of “a very interesting man called Quasimodo.” (It was as though she’d forgotten I’d accompanied Kura to Delhi and most likely would have been privy to the name.) She wound up flying him to California, where he reported that the item was indeed part of a shipment of five containers to arrive at the Port of Oakland. Four left the harbor on trains, but the fifth — the only one that held furniture — languished outside a warehouse for six weeks before its contents were trucked to a sorting facility. Records indicated the items remained there another month and were then dispersed to needy schools in the Bay Area. The resourceful Monsieur Q had diligently visited every institution on the list, to no avail. He’d even come armed with a Polaroid — Justine found the Land Camera mugshot tucked in the pages of The Book of Satsang—but never had the opportunity to compare and contrast. In the end, there wasn’t any real proof the chair had been adopted by any school at all, but it was close enough to ease Justine’s guilt. For that, I was genuinely glad. Sometime later I received an envelope with a final, eerie souvenir. Justine had thoughtfully framed Kura’s photo of the chair, believing it would make a nice memento.
I’d only seen it from a relative distance, swaddled in the darkness of Dashir Cave, but in Paris, Kura had taken a picture under harsh fluorescent lights. Now that I had a closer look, I was surprised by what I saw. Justine was right, it was an odd little chair. Its shabby state couldn’t hide its provenance — turn-of-the-century Edwardian. (I happen to know a bit about these things.) The armrests were high; they call them elbow chairs. I used to see them on weekend treks with the love that I lost. (She adored antiquing.) I wondered how a chair like that would have found its way to the foothills of the Himalayas, though I’m sure they’re not uncommon in India… probably belonged to some Brit, a bureaucrat who sold it or gave it away, then wound up at a flea market or something — oh look, I’m already coming up with a backstory! Still, it’s likely that the explanation was pretty prosaic. But isn’t it always — don’t you find, Bruce, that just when you think it’s simple, the truth reveals itself to be so crazy-complicated? Somewhat of a riddle, I suppose… though not exactly Hemingway’s snow leopard, is it? I’ll bet somebody has that story. Good luck finding him.
There are mysteries upon mysteries, no?
I never asked if I could examine any of her artifacts, including Kura’s diaries, but for some reason I did inquire about the “mugshot” of the chair. She excitedly summoned a helper to fetch a 19th-century Japanese puzzle box made of exotic wood. She moved a series of slats until the top slid open. There were papers inside; underneath them, a photo framed in mother-of-pearl. Actually, three photos: a large “portrait” of the chair, flanked on both sides by smaller, detailed images. The first was that of its cabriole-style leg, ending in a finely ornamented foot; the second, of an engraved copper identifier affixed to the undercarriage.
The letters were well-worn but you could just make them out — the name of a shop, with a phone number: “Ballendine’s Second Penny.” With a shock that hasn’t diminished an iota to this day, I came to realize the American guru’s chair was the very same that Ryder used to hang himself.