She came to a man with an arrow in his eye. She thought it the most haunting of her encounters, because he offered both eternal chastisement and eternal hope. Neither sadistic nor morbid, the message was so clear — she was saddened the whole world couldn’t instantaneously understand — ALL SENSATION IN SAMSARA IS PAIN BECAUSE ALL SENSATION REINFORCES THE DELUDED SELF. If only we could awaken, we would see: even cancerlike pain could be turned to bliss!
She dreaded the adjacent image-form: a woman drinking wine. This was Craving. Remorsefully, Lisanne hovered o’er. She knew she had thirsted too much — for Kit’s love and his child, his approval and energy, his amazing, oversized world. Standing next to the wino was a slut reaching out to a tree that burgeoned with fruit — she was the one they called Grasping — then came a third termagant, flat-footed and smoky-haired, heavy with child. (The bodhisattvas had given her the name of Existence.) The trio taunted, and Lisanne’s womb panged for the Panchen boy she no longer knew.
Resurfacing in the hospital’s rec room, the last few thangkas came in a blur. Exhausted by her centrifugal self-reflection, she tearfully blotted out Siddhama’s face, closing ears to his cries, nose to his smells, letting herself be jostled by the watery turbulence of Birth, Aging, and Death. In the last scene-spoke, a man was carrying a corpse on his back: the corpse was that of Lisanne. The carrier was Lisanne too, trudging to sky burial grounds, where her white, cotton-clad load would be unraveled by itinerant monks, its flesh-and-bone cargo feasted upon by turkey buzzards. Perforce, Lisanne would move on — was this not the legacy of all sentient beings? As a unit nurse called out her name, she felt her vision clouding over; the tip of the blind man’s cane hardened in her hand. Reborn on the Wheel, she feebly made her way forward, blind, crippled. Soon she would come to the pottery shed of the bearded thrower of Karma…
I must escape the Wheel or I’ll be crushed. On the ward, the only thing she could do was accelerated phowa practice, not 21 but 2,100 times a day, for Lisanne knew that was the only way to overtake karma accrued from past lives. She prayed to outrun the Wheel held by Yama in his tall white teeth. Yama, Lord of Death.
“For I have no choice and cannot endure the pain any longer.”
• • •
HE WOULD GO and sit with her. Mattie never did. Reggie and Tiff came, during that first month at Thalians. Roslynn too. Mrs. Loewenstein usually visited once or twice for each admission, as long as the hospital was in California. But Philip sat three times during the week and every Sunday, no matter where.
They did not learn the circumstances of their mother’s birth until after her suicide. (The death of their father by heart disease had come a year later.) Their mother’s mother had been abducted by a middle-class, overweight white girl who was unable to bear her black boyfriend a child. Later in court she said she was afraid the boyfriend would leave her. The white girl went to trade school to study vocational nursing. This was in Chicago. She was especially rapt by the class in which cesarean technique was discussed. She feigned pregnancy (with the same enthusiasm as Lisanne concealing her own), disappearing in her alleged fifth month owing to the alleged infant’s premature entry into the world. She lay in wait. She struck Philip’s grandmother on the head, shoving her into the open trunk in a dark suburban parking lot. (She’d been following her for a week.) She drove to her parents’, who were in Milwaukee, and with whom she had been living since things got rocky between her and the boyfriend, whom they had actually met and urged her not to see. In the basement — her father was a woodworker — she cut the baby from his grandmother’s womb with a car key and her father’s cooper’s adze. It was nearly to term. By some miracle — the lord smiles at drunk, dogs, and eviscerated fetuses — Phil and Mattie’s mom survived. The coroner said (it came out at trial) that their grandmother was most likely alive during the procedure and may even have lived to see the girl holding the baby in her arms, trying to make it suckle.
Philip sat with Lisanne’s pale, troubled form. They sat outdoors, and at partially-roofed-over picnic tables and in sundry rec rooms. She didn’t say much. Sometimes they held hands. His mother, after many bramblescratched wanderings, had killed herself with barbiturates and a plastic bag, just the way the “Final Exit” book said you should. The old newspaper articles Philip’s father had left in the bank box with his will told the story of how the overweight white girl hanged herself with a bedsheet during the trial and how it took her ten days to die. Now here he was with Lisanne, and sometimes it felt like sitting with the Chicago girl, the sick marooned white whale who delivered his mom, sitting beside her mournful ICU deadweight, and an indomitable pity overtook him, for all God’s lacerated children. Here he was with Lisanne, who he thought had (comparatively) been shown great mercy, and who he tenderly prayed would one day see that and come back to the world, not for his sake but for her own and for that of their beautiful Siddhama.
An Actor Prepares II
HE MET WITH Jorgia three days a week, hours at a time. She imposed diction, rhythm, and presence, forcing him to project until hoarse and lung-numb. All the nonsense sounds, guttural, chirpy, and ludicrous, the Sid Caesared ornithological speaking tongues, brought him back to Viola Spolin and Del Close and the exhilaration of his improv glory days. She forced characters, broken accents, unbroken focus. They sang false soprano, belched and drummed, hiccuped and fizzed, coughed, vaudeville-sneezed, then howled at the rafters — Jorgia was one wily coyote. Cackled, wheezed, farted, and masticated, rolled on the floor like bellowing spastics, ejaculating hot breath, arses upright on sore kneecaps, shitting vowels into space. Set about to righteously erase the Self. He plunged and soared, banking on thin hot air — wailed, hooted and yippeeed, dowsed for water and delved — into all realms of senses: common-, horse-, -memory.
Did sits together too. (Jorgia, the old yogini.)
• • •
AFTER A FEW months, he had the notion to put up a Sam Shepard play. The timing would have to be right. So much had been wrong; he was changing all that.
• • •
THEY MOVED to a house on Stone Canyon Road.
The private cops were gladdened — hotels were harder to secure than houses, and the Bel-Air was a bitch.
A restraining order against the dad, but so far, no problems. Hadn’t proved inflammatory, as sometimes happens.
• • •
“I DON’T WANT you driving my car,” said Kit.
“What?”
“My G-wagen. I — don’t want anyone driving it.”
“This a joke?”
“This is no joke!”
Cela, conciliatory: “Then we won’t drive it, Kit.”
Burke biliously mocked. “Then we won’t drive it, Kit.” Mad-dogged her. “Who the fuck died and made you CEO?” To Kit: “I know what this is about. This is about your little meeting with the attorneys last week, ain’ it?”
Kit vociferously shook his head.
“I knew you were having that meeting. You didn’t think I knew you were having that meeting? News flash! That meeting would not have happened if I didn’t approve it. Cause I approve your shit.”