Amputation, p.1
Amputation, page 1
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Also by Bruce Wagner
Force Majeure
I’m Losing You
Wild Palms (graphic novel)
I’ll Let You Go
Still Holding
The Chrysanthemum Palace
Memorial
Dead Stars
The Empty Chair: Two Novellas
I Met Someone
A Guide For Murdered Children
The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories
ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr
The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers
iii
iv
Copyright © 2025 by Bruce Wagner
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i thank You God for most this amazingday:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again todayand this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeingbreathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake andnow the eyes of my eyes are opened)
—E. E. Cummings
vii
who shall live and who shall die,who in good time,
and who by an untimely death,
who by water and who by fire,
who by sword and who by wild beast,
who by famine and who by thirst,
who by earthquake and who by plague,
who by strangulation and who by stoning,
who shall have rest and who wander,
who shall be at peace and who pursued,
who shall be serene and who tormented,
who shall become impoverished and who wealthy,
who shall be debased,
and who exalted.
—Unetanah Tokef
ix
—Another child grows up to beSomebody you’d just love to burn
—Sly and the Family Stone
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The night before, Trooper the Surfer was way up in the Highlands fooling around with the trans bros—most of them still had pussies—he wasn’t a chaser but met one at the beach (Rory) who said he ‘cracked the egg about a year ago and had top surgery.’ Trooper grinned his stock Pete Davidson/Chad ‘Okay! Cool,’ and Rory, smiling with a degree of seriousness, said, ‘I’m making my own decisions. I’m my own legal guardian and people don’t understand that.’ He invited the surfer over and whoa the manse was a fuckin motherlode. His uncle couldn’t believe all the rings and watches and shit that Trooper stole—trans bros were so rich they didn’t notice or care. Uncle said, ‘Hell, I’m comin with you next time,’ but he was baked and never got it together. The fires were coming though and the unbreasted coven comatose from G—all of them AirPodded except Rory, who loved his cheap Dóttir Freedoms headphones, and Jank, who loved his (Dad’s) $8,000 Hifiman Susvara Planar Magnetics—so no one heard the cold, cyclonic 80 mph Santa Anas—Didion and Ray Chandler wouldn’t know a cold Santa Ana if it super-scooped them from the grave, but that’s what it was—cold, cold, cold—all were oblivious to the embers ghost gust-riding the winds to dance with the detonated nitrous tanks in the guesthouse stocked for the Armin van Buuren DJ’d dumbly titled ‘Fyre Too!’ house party fest set for tomorrow. Nor did they watch the roof/walls blow out and marry the oven storm—nor see the cathedral-size canyon overlook/living room window explode, instantly severing the Neo Rauch Die Herrin canvas (and Jank’s left subclavian). Nor could they witness the on-fire cougar studded with fatal shrapnel quills that cannonballed into the tableau like some animatronic loser fleeing di Cosimo’s great painting of a forest inferno; nor hear its sick-making stereophonic scream or smell the febrile anal bloodstink of its extirpation at the foot of the melted Basquiat black crowned king (a gift from Mom to Dad) and the melty Kara Walker and smelting steel-titted Louise Bourgeois’s The Good Mother (gift from Dad to Mom). Eerily, their cadavers were preserved (mostly) by a timely windblown plash of xiipink pony retardant, enough for an astute fireman to note in the aftermath that each had the same horizontal sub-aureole scar, i.e. what was believed to be a rich boys’ sleepover was amended by the coroner to a gaggle of FTM twinks.
Forensics revealed that only one, Dommy, had bottom surgery, which became an annoying fount of chronic infection in his short life; the consequences of the newfangled penis’s charred erasure left the seventeen-year-old’s gender uncontroversially unassigned at death—
Contents
Who by Fire
Who by Water
One Year Later
1
Who
3
By
5
Fire
7
Stephen
The comedian didn’t know if he was crushed or just pinned.
The tree was wet.
It was a tall pine and he knew that meant its roots went horizontal, making it prone to toppling; a useless piece of trivia that did him no good just now.
What would do him any good?
The winds were otherworldly—might they lift this thing? Then what?—he was unable to move.
How am I not dead?
He could move his arms at the elbows, painfully jostling them into shrugged-up surrender like a beaten-down cormorant making a futile pass at drying its wings. There were fires on the mountain and in patches nearby, yet he barely felt the heat.
No, the flames will not consume me. This I know. This, I feel.
Sometimes there came prolonged fury—crazed battalions of embers scattered and divebombed, hot ash scouts reconnoitered, a damned murmuration of lost soul starlings, a violent, epileptic shimmering here, there, everywhere—and he heard himself shout in awkward, perverse jubilation like the tween supernerd he once was while white knuckling a roller coaster’s steely bar.
He was able to slowly wrap his arms around the tree, dark with water and retardant, ‘That’s a good thing,’ he said aloud. Then, to himself, ‘Not paralyzed.’
A defunct optimist, smote by the Immensity …
He thought of The Lord of the Rings, its pages made from trees such as this. The books that saved him after the jet crash deaths of his beloved 8father and brothers. He closed his eyes and willed Treebeard to lift him in its arms, just as it had the hobbits Merry and Pippin.
Evie will be worried I haven’t called …
His beautiful bride of forty-two years.
How many times had he spoken of the night they first met?
He’d rhapsodized over it during Late Show audience warm-ups, mythologized the moment during interviews with obsequious starstruck priests, and shared his precious memories with devout Paley Center grovelers who gathered to honor him. At the time he met his wife-to-be, the comedian was still (sort of) with his girlfriend Anne, who was pressing to get hitched. She told him, ‘Fish or cut bait, Stephen.’ He went back home to mull it over (or maybe cut bait). Charleston was his Shire, the fruitful land that gave him strength and power. When he told his mother about his dilemma, she asked if he loved Anne. He said that he did. ‘Do you want to marry her?’ He said he didn’t know. ‘Well,’ said Mom, ‘that isn’t good enough.’ So he cleared his head at the Spoleto festival that night and watched some opera—music by Philip Glass, with poems by Allen Ginsberg. After the divertissement, he went to a party and saw Evie across a room and storybook-thought, ‘That’s who I’m going to marry.’
The fateful meeting was a grab bag of epiphanies and small ecstasies—they talked for hours before realizing they knew each other when they were kids. (‘God was chasing me all along,’ he told Diane Sawyer on Sixty Minutes, ‘in the form of Evie.’) As their conversation meandered, Stephen spoke of a poet from Charleston whose work he was having trouble finding when suddenly a voice behind them shouted, ‘That poet is my father!’ Rehashing the couple’s origin story to enthralled acolytes and supersmart groupies, the comedian always said, ‘That was the sign. You see, the poet’s son sneezed a blessing upon the specialness of meeting Evie’—then thoughtfully helped listeners to understand the term. ‘It’s from the Robert Fagles translation of t he Nausicaa chapter in The Odyssey, which hearkens to an old superstition: When someone sneezes during 9the telling of a fantastical story, it’s a blessing and means the story must be true.’
When the heinous hothead winds receded, he spoke out loud again, reciting a line from his favorite E. E. Cummings—i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees—then cursed himself for losing the thread because he couldn’t remember what came next. Was pain scrambling his memory? Was he feeling pain? He wasn’t even sure. There was some … but really more of a numbness, a primordial ache. The observation was replaced by an inkling, one that he needed to push away pronto:
The pain will come. And when it does, it will be intolerable.
He glid to an old favorite, Matthew 6:27, as a reset. He mustered the energy to declaim, ‘Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers … wildfires!’—pleased with his improvisation—‘that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?’
He began another recitation—Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven (‘What a sight I must be!’ thought Stephen, watching himself from above like a rescue drone. ‘It’s like bad Beckett.’)—that stunning ode to God’s fierce, love-soaked pursuit of errant, fleeing souls. As if to prove to himself and the cosmos that he was of profoundly sound mind, if not of body, he didn’t stop until the final, 182nd line:
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’
Ha! Hahaha—
See? Ya still got it, baby …
He’d always had the knack to vomit up a long poem.
But each time he gave in to the flourish, something gnawed, because Stephen knew it was just a revolting party trick (like Cavett and his 10self- beloved anagrams), a braggadocio deceit, a peacock’s artifice—nothing more than a tool of seduction honed on college girls back in the day. Still, there he’d find himself, again and again, bewitched by his own bullshit, preening his Lay Theologian Laureate shtick at ecumenical conferences, strutting his stuff while accepting the Laetare Medal at the University of Notre Dame. He even marathon-versified with Fallon, Conan, Whoopi, and Chris Rock when they pilgrimaged to Italy to meet ‘Papa’ Francis. On the streets of Rome or à table in La Pergola, he couldn’t help burning through the Pilgrim’s Prayer—or Aquinas—or Yeats—for the wow factor. For the fix. Like jumping out of a cake nude but instead of his tits, he knocked em dead with his brain.
All was vanity … the fundamental sin.
Now, he was cornered; he couldn’t dravest away, let alone stand up.
The winds kicked and slapped, their fiendish firefly parasites swarming in superheated abandon. He howled and winced and thought of Evie and their kids and finally wept. The crying caused pain. With the outburst came fear and release.
The only poem still standing was a prayer he dare not give voice: Yes, Father. Let God’s love descend upon me like holy embers.
* * *
Esther
A week before, in her palatial home in the Highlands, she hosted Ta-Nehisi Coates at a fundraiser for Gaza children (and talked with him about a film project too). Her bakery, Esthergen, with its tiresomely non-binary celeb-whoring waitstaff, catered the festivities. Rocky wasn’t there because a few weeks ago, she accused him of having an affair. Of course, he denied it. Under sheepish protest, he agreed to check into Shutters but only after his wife, with the usual cutting largesse, slipped her Black 11Card into his hand. She had him on a tight leash. What was one more degradation?
Among the guests—like-minded influencers she called the Pacific Palestiners—were Hunter Schafer, Angelina Jolie, Quannah Chasinghorse, Kehlani, and her new pretend-bestie, Debra Winger. Esther loved Debra for tweaking Netanyahu on Insta and got horned up by her savage playfulness (the actress spelled out ‘zi0ni$t’ and ‘Isr*l’). She loved how she nonstop celebrated the martyred Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, slaughtered in an airstrike along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children. A few months ago, the ladies started DMing. She was the first to reach out and when Debra wrote back three hearts on fire, she knew they’d be sisters for life.
Esther nicknamed her TD—Truth Diva.
In her twenties, she wanted to be Debra Winger, a sexy, vibrant, radically independent Jewess—Esther used that word every chance she could get just to fuck with people—who rolled over for no one. Apart from spending months on kibbutzim in their teens, there were all kinds of parallels. (They’d independently done the Hoffman Process!) For one, TD’s husband, Arliss Howard, was kind of a nerdy submissive, like Rocky. For another, they were born on the same day of the same month of the same year. The weirdest thing, though, was that Esther’s shrink and Debra’s mom had the same fucking name: Ruth Felder. Another cosmic bond was that when the actress was eighteen and returned to the States from visiting Jerusalem, she was in a car accident that blinded and paralyzed her for almost a year. While recovering, TD decided to move to LA and become a movie star. Talk about genius prophetic chutzpah! At around the same age—a freshman in college—Esther caught Guillain-Barré and got paralyzed herself, but only for three weeks. During her own time of immobility, she vowed to move to LA and open a kosher bakery with the monies her father had provided in a trust.
After Ta-Nehisi read a section from his latest book about a visit to Palestine, there was a lively, gemütlich Q&A. The crazy-gorgeous, 12divine AF Quannah Chasinghorse eloquently compared the genocide to what had happened to the people of Turtle Island. When it was time for the hostess to say a few words, she had a spontaneous, amazing idea. She said that most of her customers—‘the lobbyists,’ as she called them—had been leaving in droves. They’d come in and denounce her while parading those ‘urine-colored ribbons’ that stood for Israeli hostages and their families. ‘I cannot tell you,’ she said passionately, ‘how many righteous Jews joined me to tear down the pictures of the colonizers when I was in New York last month. Did you know you can be arrested for doing that?’ She paused dramatically and told the group, ‘You know what? I think we should have black ribbons! A sea of black—for heart-and conscience-holders like Mansour Shreim, Mar’i Abu Sa’ida, and Murad Nazmi Al-Ajloun. All of whom, among thousands of others, are still imprisoned in Israel. They’re not even allowed family visits. And they’re being effing tortured. I’ll hand out the ribbons at the bakery—with the chocolate rugelachs! Or bury them in challah like a Cracker Jack surprise!’ Most were too young to get the Cracker Jack reference but everyone laughed.
When the Pacific Palestiners were thanking her and saying goodbyes, Debra squeezed Esther’s arm and whispered, ‘The black ribbons are genius.’
‘I’m getting death threats, TD—always anonymous! That’s when you know you’re on the right side of fucking history.’ She leaned in closer. ‘Those ribboned cowards think they’re the real Jews. But the real Jews know.’ When she added ‘Shalom’ at the door, Debra smiled a dark, loving look of solidarity, squeezed her arm again, and was gone.
That night, Esther lay in bed scrolling through her texts.
you sic cunt mengele is getting his pliers ready to tear your sagging tits off and stuff them up your HAM-ASS-ified shithole///the dead babies yr besties use as shields at their hospital bunkers will be suckling on those jewhating teats/// christopher hitchens is already being raped in hell iin his cancerthroat by the martyrs he was so in love with teehee! & mother teresa’s gonna peg him
13 Then another—
With all due respect, you clearly know so very little about the history of the Middle East. I say that as a Jew and a historian living in Israel who has seen firsthand—
Then—
you are killing your father! I ran into him at the Brisket and he has lost so much weight
