Memorial Read online

  Also by Bruce Wagner

  The Chrysanthemum Palace

  Still Holding

  I’ll Let You Go

  I’m Losing You

  Force Majeure

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This is a work of fiction. Although, for the sake of verisimilitude, the names of certain real people are used in the book, their use is fictional and their interactions with the characters the author has invented are wholly the author’s creation and are not intended to be understood as descriptions of real or actual events, or to reflect in any way upon the actual conduct or character of these real people.

  Copyright © 2006 by Bruce Wagner

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Rabindranath Tagore, excerpts from The Lover of God, translated by Tony K. Stewart and Chase Twichell. Translation copyright © 2003 by Tony K. Stewart and Chase Twichell. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

  Designed by Karolina Harris

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wagner, Bruce, 1954–

  Memorial : a novel / Bruce Wagner.

  p. cm.

  1. Family—Fiction. 2. Self-realization—Fiction. 3. Tsunamis—South Asia—Fiction. 4. Hurricane Katrina, 2005—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.A3693M46 2006

  813′.54—dc22 2006044397

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4103-5

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-4103-9

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  to Gavin de Becker

  Margaret, are you grieving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  Leaves, like the things of man, you

  With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

  Ah! as the heart grows older

  It will come to such sights colder

  By and by, nor spare a sigh

  Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

  And yet you will weep and know why.

  Now no matter, child, the name:

  Sorrow’s springs are the same.

  Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

  What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

  It is the blight man was born for,

  It is Margaret you mourn for.

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Passage to India!

  Lo, soul! Seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

  The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

  The people to become brothers and sisters,

  The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

  The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

  The lands to be welded together.

  (A worship new, I sing;

  You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours!

  You engineers! You architects, machinists, yours!

  You, not for trade or transportation only,

  But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.)

  —Walt Whitman

  I.

  Joan

  37 now but thinks of herself as 40, to soften the coming blow. “Then,” the litany goes, “I’ll be 50—a woman in her 50s.” “Then I’ll be 63.” “Then 70. Then 76, 77.” “Then I will be 81—83.” She doesn’t go so far as to muse upon a future place of residence or quality of caretakers, shuddering when she passes assisted living homes, extended care America, thinking of her mom, but is certain of one thing, that she will be alone: all the while feeling those ages to be just round the corner, come in a blink, knowing intellectually re the fleetingness of time that there were many celebrated men and women, avatars, essayists, and intellects who could back her subjective notions with hard text or admirably glib spiritual pronouncement. Easy to evoke, even during mundane daytime chores, those philosophical flights of grad school days gone by, wild and romantically jagged cerebral nights. Stanford semiotics, string theory and such, rhapsodically sprayed like Halloween gunk on the trees and bushes of verbiage, space and time—collapse of reason and rationale like so many symphonies pounded to the size of the head of a pin, Gödel, Escher, Bach, so be it. Wasn’t that the dream of this life?

  She’d been having a specific dream-within-the-dream for over a year now, as if her mind, that great computer, were searching for a lost j-peg: the Perfect Memorial file. In a nocturnal reverie she called the Castle of Perseverance, details of the catastrophe were vague and illegible, as 10-minute-old skywriting on a still summer’s day or the half-erased chalkmarks of simple equations upon green slate. Joan floated there too, billowy charcoal housecoat open like the commodious wings of that tree-flying squirrel she saw on a Discovery Channel doc, or a whimsical matron’s smock in a children’s book, and she could always just about make out the smokily verdant terrain below. The locus of the Event—“mound zero” is what one of her wittier lover-confidants called it—for which, in nondreaming life, her firm, ARK, had been hired to commemorate, the REM/Rem locus, as it turned out, was neither domestic nor international but hovered somewhere above, in a cottonball Canadian Christo-wrapped airspace 5 full skycrapers above. Sometimes a superstructure the firm had bid for and lost—there were a number of them, more than Barbet wanted to count—but one in particular, in China, seemed persistently to shanghai her nightworld, grafting failed CG skinsketch onto gauzy somnambulist constructions. In the dream, millions were to be memorialized, when the truth is ARK (10 years ago aptly, chicly named) had been hired by a billionaire whose brother and sister-in-law died near Chennai in the Christmas tsunami. The monument in Napa was to represent just the 2 of them, swept into a full-moon lake of mangroves, left hanging in trees like ornaments, though of course the design would have to be something beyond, as if representing all swampy, swami’d souls, because while the Northern California tribute was to sit on 400 obscenely private acres, it would become a well-known thing, famously endowed, famously elegiac. It had already been written about in the architectural trade and popular press, as if there was a difference between them anymore, and, if secured, would inevitably lead to other commissions. No doubt.

  The jewel box site and predictably pending dumbass dustup over elitist venue mandated things be done just right. While Joan slept, ghosts of the battered, float-bloated dead wafted and moaned, debris-spun like dirty shredded cardboard Niagaran barrels, the hundreds of thousands never to be seen again deviously commingled with intransigent Katrina-killed old folks in attics (again she thought of Mother), wet silvery heads jammed into memorabilia-choked roofs with their rictus mouths, Pontchartrain floaters and bloaters and jokey FEMA hieroglyphs on sodden walls of Sumatran mud and Gentilly lace. Upon awakening, Joan became uneasy, as if somehow her ARK’s desire and egoistic need to win said competition was unclean. It was the kind of dream, scrim of hallucinatory blowback, that sent her out for mocha latte in a daze, bypassing the stainless steel Impressa, wondering with embarrassment when she gave the barista her order if she’d actually forgotten to brush her teeth.

  II.

  Ray

  RAY lives in City of Industry with his roommate, Ghulpa, and fluffy terrier mix Friar. Friar’s full name is Friar Tuck. Ray sometimes calls him Nip/Tuck (after Ghulpa’s favorite show) or just the Friar.

  Near midnight they came busting down the door, a whole crew of LAPD and sheriffs, to cuff the crusty 76 year old diabetic. They threw in a stun gun that started a small carpet fire. He had a heart attack. Ghulpa hollered and the Friar got shot in the hip when one of
the officers’ pistols went off. All a mistake con brio, police had the wrong address, admitted as much, and there was Ray, Raymond Rausch with his yellow ribbons for the soldiers in the front window, on his stomach like a roped calf and shocked at how calm he’d remained through the home invasion calamity. Even the paramedics took note.

  He befouled himself but limned the story sans trousershit for weeks to whoever would listen, how cool and collected he was, mostly he told the writer from the Times who was working up one of those nakedly Pulitzer-aspiring series about wrong-door break-ins, and recounted for the ACLU folks as well. Kept saying the whole time he was only worried for his doggie. All gave kindly props and thankfully never learned about the pants crapola, conversationally trying to relate Ray’s bravado to the vague idea formulated that he was some kind of war vet, but the amicable old Republican said no, never been in a war, though not for tryin, born a cool customer, not one to be ruffled by a well-intentioned batter-ram entry. He’d seen enough Dallas SWATs and Law & Orders to know that snitches weren’t the most reliable folks on the planet.

  Ghulpa usually chimed in during interlocution, subtly sardonic, that Ray was too busy having “a hot attack” to get worked up, true enough, small infarct as it turned out, not much damage incurred. But that was Ghulpa. She liked taking the wind from his sails. She was from Calcutta and nothing rattled her, for real. Plus she was modest, happy her musty-smelling old man inexorably steered journalistic attentions to dear shot-up Nip/Tuck. It wouldn’t have been right for him to be mouthy about how he had been on the futon, spooning his Indian galfriend at commencement of the doorshatter, small fire, pistolshot, dog yelp, and pain-seizured beshitting. (To bed boast wasn’t Ray’s way.) They weren’t intimate like that but still she was grateful, and he was proud how wet-hen feisty she got at the cops for busting in. He wasn’t even sure she was legal but BG put herself out there, got in everyone’s face, Ray never saw that side of her before (not really), not in spades anyway as they say. They’d only been together 11 months, longest ride he’d hitched in 30 years, since Marjorie, never thought of her as wife material for chrissake done with all that. So proud of BG, cataract’d eye twinkled when she spoke with such righteousness to the Times or ACLU or whomever; Ghulpa’s accent danced, lit, and lilted around strings of rational invective, articulate as hell and logical in that adjunctive bobbleheaded Hindu way. Might have to make an honest woman of her yet.

  Lawyers circled everywhere since what Ray called the Mishap. (BG called it the Tragedy. He called her BG for Big Gulp.) All manner of folk held forth about the city settling with Ray for unholy amounts; listening to them, pantshit was a good thing—the docs must have ratted—adding a few zeroes to the actuarial tally of infarct infractions. Plus the shot dog. Even the police chief was upset about that and rang to express himself personally. But Ray didn’t feel like suing, anyone, anyhow. He liked cops, always had, was a Cold Case File fanatic. Didn’t want to shake nobody down. Not his style. Shit happens, ain’t that right (pantshit anyway), and it was a shock more didn’t. Sure the money’d help, always did, but he wasn’t wild about the way that felt. In his taxonomized, infarcted heart. That’s just how he was built, even though Ray Rausch didn’t have a pension. Had about $22,000 socked away—what was left from the 60 he’d got when he sold his share in the shop—and Social Security after Medicare deductions was about 780 a month. Rent 565, without utilities, went up about $35 a year but he got by. The city gave seniors a break on gas and electric. Hell, breakfast at Denny’s was $3.40 and he couldn’t even finish what was on his plate, thank God the merry old Friar liked pancakes and wet toast. Paying for Rx was a little tough (Kaiser was $50 a month but seeing the medicos still cost money and there wasn’t any dental coverage). That’s why he never did anything about his dentures and skipped the blood pressure pills, the Zetia and Lipitor most of the time (the only med he can’t do without is his Lunesta), and even the one that made him pee less, until Big Gulp got on him about it. (She kept promising to “hook” him up with a Canadian pharmacy, and blushingly joked about “scoring” Viagra off the Internet. Like her cousins, she was computer savvy.) She was a good woman and seemed to have a little nest egg, those cousins in Artesia saw she never went begging. BG pitched in with the rent and the groceries; he didn’t like that too much, I’m old school, but she got mad if Ray didn’t let her contribute. Helluva gal. So: if the city or someone wanted to drop 20 or 30 thou on him, fine, wouldn’t turn it down. They’d play poker at Morongo, he’d show his old lady how the real Injuns do it, Native American style. He always had pretty good luck at the tables but it was a long time since he’d been. Oh it would be great fun to “pick the pockets” of those turquoise-jeweled reservation drunks, brown trash he called them, Geronimos with Jet Skis, ponytails, and Lexus SUVs. If the City of Industry wanted to give him a little stake to play 21, well, happy days.

  The legal beagles (Ray’s quaint sobriquet) said he could get millions but it still didn’t set right, not his idea of the American Dream—that would be someone else’s. Why on Earth should he loot the City of Industry? (He always called it that, like the song: I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans.) The stalwartly named senior-friendly municipality had a program to replace old kitchen appliances and once even fixed a broken window in the rent-controlled dining room: why would he want to gouge them? As long as he had tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit he’d be fine. At least I got the shoes and the shitter. Heh heh. Long as they paid Friar Tuck’s medical bills—which were gonna be hefty—and there was enough to buy the Gulper a dress or 2, long as he had his trusty Circuit City Trinitron to watch Cold Cases and old Twilight Zones, he’d be just fine. Hated the whole notion of needy sadsack dementia trainees. Like the woman downstairs who took the bus to the airport on Sundays, to watch the planes. Called it her “holiday.”

  No, he didn’t need that. Raymond Rausch could look after himself and his own. Skip the fantasies.

  III.

  Chester

  LOCATION scout, turned 41 in May. A Taurus who drives a Taurus. 283,000 miles on them both.

  Wants to be a producer, all he needs is a stake, like the men who put together a mill for the Saw movies. Did it all on their own and now they’re gazillionaires except for the guy who dropped dead out of the blue, 42 years old, the one who cooked up the whole torture idea in the 1st place, telling the Times in a big write-up the week before he croaked that it felt like he’d “won the lottery”—he won all right. That was hubris for you, karma, whatever the My Name Is Earl guy would call it. Sometimes a person should keep certain thoughts to himself.

  Chester scours this longitudinal utilitarian Thomas Bros. dream with wondrous, hazelnut eyes, a city divided into sunshot grids, seeing things no one else could, can, did, ever would, a gypsy-seer that way, a wizardly douser. But LA, like everything else, was being digitized, devoured, and decoded, memorialized like some newfangled karma/chimera/camera chameleon, converted to numbers by a new breed of men yielding images for film and television the way high-tech farmers got the most from crops, square by square mile. Chess couldn’t quite keep up—like an old silents star trying to get a grip on the talkies. Out of breath on Sunset Blvd. Scouting used to be an art, now hardly needing the human touch let alone eye which afterall had been and still was Chester’s strength, what he was actually semiknown and respected for, his uniquely vintage prepostmodern unstereotyped timeless gaze, a quirkily monopolychromatic horizontal 6th sense. The vets of the game, middling aestheticians who went by their gut, still call (enough were around because of the union, guys like Chess who, before graduating to location managers, used to take those same incremental ankle-swiveling panoramic shots, painstakingly pasted into manila folders at the end of each exhausted day, flatfooted but effective Hockney montages), compensating him richly enough for the trouble, sometimes $800 a day on the proverbial Big Feature, but more often half that now. Commercials and videos his daily or weekly or sometimes monthly bread. Chess was younger than
most of the managers and 20 years older than the new breed of digitizers, a generation more like paparazzi than scouts. Depending on luck and size of production, he could still draw down enough to go to Jar or the Porterhouse Bistro or whatever new steakhouse with a lady on his arm, like a proper man. Though lately indies and MTV paid pisspoor and every time he turns around he sinks 2 grand into the car, doesn’t even take it on desert or Angeles Crest scouts anymore for fear of breaking down and dying out there, so, on top of everything, he is renting cars and praying that someone steals the Taurus from his garage like they’ve done twice before in the last 10 years.

  To keep his health insurance he is forced to pay dues, and finally, miracle of miracles, even get a digital camera (the amiable location managers laughing when they heard that one), sweating while he figures out how to scan images into the old Mac that Maurie gave him. Learning how to do this shit is pure, unadulterated hell. No one even looks at those beautiful manila Fotomat dioramas anymore. They’re stacked in his closet like archival antiquities.

  His best friend is Maurie Levin, a scripter who does procedurals and episodics. Maurie sold a spec a hundred years ago to Walker, Texas Ranger. Maurie knew Brad Grey back in the day. Maurie has a ton of ideas for reality shows. Maurie has a hippie girlfriend called Laxmi, pronounced Lakshmi, supposedly the name of an Indian goddess, and she’s always talking about karma and that’s why Chester’s always talking about it (he has a crush). Maurie’s one of those locomotively funny Jews who gets shitloads of pussy. Maurie says he likes em young but if they’re older you better be sure they’re “certified preowned.” They haven’t spoken for a few weeks when Maurie calls to say that A&E is going to shoot a reality pilot he created and he needs “that eye of yours” to find a location for the presentation reel. That’s what he calls it: a presentation reel. (Maurie says it’s low-budge.) They are paying $650 with the promise of multiple days—not bad, especially as Chess is currently rent-challenged, living in West Hollywood in a converted garage. His landlord is Don Knotts’s daughter. Maurie says he needs to find a hospital for the shoot. Easy. Off the top of his head, Chess knows a bunch. Hospitals in LA are always going under and every single one is for rent, even those half occupied by religious groups or Meals on Wheels–type foundations, homeless dot-org whatnots. There was a finite number and it was just a matter of getting the shoot dates, then making a few calls.