The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner Read Free Book Online Page A

guys who was a part of my settlement who loves to follow this stuff said that Ramón’s been suing the Church, acting as his own counsel. He said they were going to nail him on vexatious litigation, but Ramón doesn’t give a shit. I have to admit, the kid’s got heart. The diocese in Covington eventually forked over $200,000 per plaintiff. It ain’t the lottery but it’s better than whatever Ramón got. But he seems to land on his feet. I won’t start worrying until I get a postcard from Club Med.

    Can you hear the rain?
    There—hear it now?
    A big storm’s coming.
    How grateful I am to God for making Big Sur!
    Big Sur took me back, you know. Spit me out once, and broke me too. But took me back . . .
    It’s really the strangest place. You can
not
come here to be healed. That’s the mistake most people make. Big Sur does
not
feel your pain; it doesn’t even notice your awe. It’s easy to leave here worse than you came. Those who do best are the ones who allow themselves to be erased.
    The waves were tall as buildings today, did you see them? Before we met, I parked the van on a turn-out near Bixby Canyon, a half-mile from one of the dizzying, drizzled bridges, towering and hallowed, jaundiced and strange—forgive my poor poetry, but the topic always gets me talking like a fool—their stony span and scope otherworldly, like something from a Piranesi etching. I sat and meditated on the place—Big Sur—and had the revelation that something about it was
wrong
, which I suppose is the normal human reaction to the unknowable. The sea
distorted
everything, and set off a chain reaction that charged and changed the very molecules of the air itself, the landscape too, until nothing resembled anything ever seen before . . . you couldn’t put your finger on it except to say it was
wrong.
Those waves: at times they rolled north to south, contrary to God’s order, like mischievous ghosts running alongside the shore instead of crashing into it—rats through a witch’s wet hair! And there I was stuck staring, like a child hidden in the shadows watching the forbidden rites of some malevolent cultus supervised by the impetuous, unforgiving, predatory chorus of those waves, the whole scene so majestically wrong, a sacred, supererogatory mess, and
me
, struck dumb by an unnamable, eons- old sorrow . . . the permanent impermanence of water engaged—enraged—in ancient, secret activity. The waves took the shape of hunchbacked buffaloes, bristle-foamed brides and grooms in tumbling betrothal, spewing and spuming their vows, exchanged in a cauldron of blackness, each driven in succession by the taskmaster moon to spawn upon the shore then freeze upon reaching it—sudden death upon sand and rock. If that membrane of water could speak it would plash
“I go no further no further I go,”
slipping back to primordial jellyfish’d infancy, hibernating in Silence before rearing up again, slowly then speedily, all gaudy and cocky, imperious, thundering its bouillabaisse of white noise! Then: all business again—always, again and again and again all business—the business of predatory indifference—in poised, crashing lunge, snatching what it can of my comfort. Endlessly watchable, I watch,
we
watch, so easily mesmerized by artful anarchy, the mindless, mindful in-and-outness of it, for what else is there but in-and-outness, anarchy, death and indifference? But Jack already said it all, didn’t he? In the “ocean sounds” poem at the end of
Big Sur.
“One day, I will find the words, and they will be simple.” That’s Jack too, from one of his letters . . .
    I looked up at the Heavens, supreme and resplendent with dark latticed clouds and found nothing truthful in Dr. Williams’ neatly turned phrase “an excrement of some sky.” For the smallest part of this one, the