While Reggie knew that Lisanne was where she should be, at least in the short term, he didn’t feel the same about little Siddhama. He had a gut aversion toward Philip Muskingham and, for all his money, felt him to be of questionable parenting skills. Moreover, he didn’t think it practical or even appropriate to lean on the sister or the Loewensteins to fill that role. As an attorney and longtime friend of Lisanne, he was mandated to protect the welfare of Siddhama at all costs and, though it was unlikely, to block any potential efforts of the DCFS to gain custody of the child. (Philip had shown no inclination to petition for an even temporary guardianship.) That was why he decided to take a flier and, through the aunt, contact the blood father, for whom, during a rare conversation about the gentleman, Lisanne had evinced a historical, more than glancing affection. His initial idea was to suggest that he come to Los Angeles — if amenable — and stay awhile on Reggie’s dime. Mr. Sarsgaard listened and immediately acceded, but said he would pay his own way.
He was joined by his elderly spouse. Reggie and the Muskinghams took the couple for dinner at the Grill, the sanguine result being that Philip had them relocated from the Embassy Suites to a spacious Fairfax District duplex where they might live with the baby (an arrangement happily promoted by the Sarsgaards that would, perforce, be perfunctorily reassessed upon what turned out to be the first of Lisanne’s many releases and readmits). Robbie said neither he nor his wife had anything to tie them to Albany and were free to stay “for the duration.” The Rustic Canyon nannies were retained. Philip felt unburdened, and gratified in doing right by Siddhama and those concerned. Further, his good deed assuaged the of late morbid fear that, in her madness, Lisanne might confess their sexual secrets — more to the point, his own aberrations — to the hospital staff. (Though he sneakily comforted himself with the notion that her claims would most likely be dismissed.) At any rate, this particular chapter’s end had been considered a fortuitous one, not least because there was great relief that it was the pug and not the precious child who’d been harmed. That Lisanne had somehow stopped herself from committing such an unthinkably atrocious act allowed a measure of optimism about her future and the future in general to creep in.
• • •
SHE SPENT SO MUCH time in the hospital, first at Cedars, then in private facilities that Roslynn and Mattie found by research and word of mouth.
H.H. the Vulnerable Lisanne McCadden — that’s how she always signed in, on admission.
Between stints, she would be released to Rustic Canyon, then, after only a short while home, returned to lockdown. For months and months she vanished to the world and to herself. She felt like the ghost of a burnt-out barge floating on a wide, dark river.
On bright construction paper, a bardo-diorama of dementia, she pasted a mandala montage of the Materialized Realm of the Paradise of the Medicine Buddha. For who was the Buddha if not the Great Physician, Great Healer, the Lord and Scientist who held the vaseless vase of ambrosia in his hands? He would cleanse her of toxins and set her free. Look what he kept in his beggar’s bowclass="underline" the Three Nectars that cured disease, reversed aging, and propagated Ultimate Awareness. Honey that broke the chains shackling all sentient beings to the Wheel of Deluded Existence…
OM AH HAM
She knew she needed to say it over and over while spinning Kalachakra — the great Wheel of Time. Everything was Great. Great OM,
seed sound for the two-petaled sixth chakra, was fixed at the brow, the area of Kit’s injuries, its vibration heard whenever male and female energies merged. HAM
emanated from the throat chakra while preparing the gullet channel for devotional receipt of nectar.
Yet only
OM AH HAM
could rally the Three Ambrosias to vanquish the Three Poisons — aggression, greed, ignorance — the very same fires that stoked the conflagration called samsara.
Snake! Rooster! Pig!
Lisanne had long since memorized the Wheel of Becoming — the laminated poster she’d picked up that day at the Bodhi when she ran into Phil not yet Philip, pervert and — no, that wasn’t fair — sweet-souled benefactor and godfather to her son not of him, and she rotated its twelve radiating rungs in her mind each moment of every hour of the nuthouse day until they became swift second nature. For what was a mandala but a visual mantra, so said the guidebook of guidebooks, her mantra through its turning was “Kitlightfoot/Clearlightfoot/Kitlightfoot/Clearlightfoot,” and like the blur of spokes in a carriage wheel, they soon became one. As she hummed, she began (as was proper), with the miniature painting that depicted Ignorance — rendering of a blind man with a cane. “That’s me,” said Lisanne. “For I am but a cripple surrounded by fields of brilliant jewels, a cripple who has chosen not to see.” She wanted to help him, but he just went on, tap-tap-tapping, alone. Who was she to think she could help? She could smell his stubborn breath, stagnant and ketotic, like her own. Right beside the crooked man, moving clockwise, came Actions, bearded thrower of clay pots, busily making karma. (The Wheel said that even thoughts and intentions bore the burden of consequence. Every time one had a bad thought it was like putting another pot in the kiln, a pot that would need to be shattered if one was ever to be free.) The hairy, red-faced golem was born of mud, and now here she was in this wreck room bardo because she had worshiped gods with clay feet. How could the humble workshop of a wise old pot thrower be a place of such misery? So: there was no solace, not even in the touch of wet earth. Then came the restless monkey of Consciousness, swinging compulsively from tree to tree, harbinger of the talking ape — it had taken all this, Lisanne thought with a smile, doped up, locked in bedlam, to at last understand what the sangha meant by “monkey mind.” The fourth spoke, a scene of passengers in a boat, reminded Lisanne of the time her parents brought her to Disneyland and she sat in a theme-ride canoe (like the passenger section of an airplane with its wings detached), methodically ratcheted by track and chain through still then rushing waters… This part of the Wheel was called Name and Form, and she watched as the boat of her pale, heavy body drifted down the great polluted river of samsara. Kitclearlightfoot Clearlightfoot Kitclearlightfoot Clearlightfoot Kitclear — others in the dugout being simply Forms and Aspects, luminescent phantoms of her own personality and nonphysical self. Leaving the river behind, Lisanne shook herself dry and approached an empty house with six windows that always reminded her of the cover of a Nancy Drew mystery. The bodhisattvas said the windows were the Six Senses through which we perceived the world.
She continued her clockwise march.
There: a couple, tangled in erotic embrace.
Whenever she saw them, they rekindled emotions of that historic day in Riverside. If only she knew then what she now knew to be so simple — that by copulating, the star-crossed pair hadn’t merged but instead created a duality, a space between them, as Joshu Sasaki Roshi presciently foretold in his story of Monk, Novice, and Dog. Unwittingly, monk and student had carved a divide in which something could arise then fall away, be it thought, mood, or sentient being. (Lisanne felt she must instinctively have known that. For the pug, though pure, was an obstacle to their merging.)