The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  I think now that Eric saw coming the crash that would send him to rehab, was already working out his plans before that Oregon detour, considering heading to India to stay a week, a month, or a year. I was skeptical and impressed and envious that the brightest among us have all the options in the world, could undergo such radical transformation, and that those of us without such gifts, who would most benefit from a completely different existence, would never have such a chance.

  I could have said Eric was the black sheep and Kartar wouldn’t have known the difference. Instead, I answered honestly.

  “He’s not a black sheep, just functions very differently than the rest of us.”

  And I felt a slow heat forming within me, about Eric’s limitless choices and mine narrowed down to nothing.

  “You do as well, sir. Perhaps just more quietly,” Kartar said. “Sir, apologies, I am being summoned. I will see you within one hour, and I will pray that the rain has concluded by then. I look forward, sir.”

  I set out cash on the kitchen counter, flopped on the couch, stared at the ceiling, and thought again about Eric and the second life he was thinking of beginning, and about Simon Tabor and what he had done to create new lives for himself, and how, despite my moderate success at Think Inc., I couldn’t figure out how to get this first life of mine started much at all, a flickering flame already gone out. Then I slept until the doorbell rang.

  “Good late afternoon, sir,” Kartar said as he handed me my order. “Another long day of serious tumult.” We both looked to the windows where we could see the jackhammering rain.

  “Is it really raining as hard as I think it is?” I asked.

  “I cannot know how hard you think it is raining, sir. But yes is what I say to you. I say yes because when I stood inside Lucky Star, I thought it was raining a certain kind of hard. Yet, when my uncle Gupta and I ran to the car to bring this delicious food to you, it was raining much harder than I believed when I was still inside.”

  I liked his explanation and I smiled at him and said, “Thanks for braving the weather again.”

  “My pleasure, sir. It is an interesting puzzle, is it not? How something like rain can be different depending on where you are standing when you are considering it. Much like life, I think.”

  I wondered if this kid was some kind of prodigal sage. In silence, we exchanged the chicken-scratched receipt for cash, and a tip he accepted this time without protest.

  Then he said, “The principle applies to many things. I hope you do not find this strange, sir, but I have been meditating on your home since yesterday. To me, it is comforting, and yet when I paid you that compliment, I could see in your eyes that you were not sure if you agreed or disagreed. Sir, I will say it is like the rain. What matters is where one stands. From where I stand, this is a good home and you will do great things with your life in this place.”

  I stared at Kartar.

  “Ah,” he said, “I see you do not understand. My name, sir. Named as I am, I have the power to feel when I am in the presence of creation. Is that not what is going on here? You need not tell me, but I am certain that I am right. And I am sure you are wondering. Lord of Creation is what my name means, sir. Thank you for the generous tipping. I must go. Uncle Gupta curses a great deal when he is kept waiting too long.”

  Kartar ran down the hallway. At the elevator, he turned back and waved. “Call anytime, sir. I enjoy our in-person conversations.”

  Kartar with his powerful, bestowed name had talked, I had listened, and he left a prophecy in his wake. Could the kid be right in some way? I wanted to run after him, flag him down on the sidewalk, ask him to detail his prophecy under Uncle Gupta’s bright-red, all-encompassing umbrella. I stood rooted at the open door, my eyes sweeping around the great room, trying to sense the creation he felt in the space. Perhaps he was psychic or reincarnated, sensed vibrations or auras, saw colors specific to creativity, to artistic endeavor. Was my body surrounded by a field of light he had been able to read? I knew he was just a funny teenage boy who was good at delivery-door chat, but I couldn’t help wondering whether the tale Kartar’s mother had swirled around him might have left behind a residue of inexplicable special powers. It was hard to convince myself that it was all nonsense.

  Since that day, a year ago minus twenty-four hours, I have often thought about Kartar and his prophesying abilities. How he sensed only the positive. Or perhaps it was that he could not see all the way to the end of my story, to the last page, the final words.

  Recording #4

  I watched the rain thrashing down from the breached heavens while I ate my Lucky Star hamburger and fries. The clouds in the sky were huge, as black and massive as rock formations. Across the way, the buildings were flat, one-dimensional. Despite the physicality of the rain, its vibrational force, there was a captured quality to everything. Underlying my thoughts was Kartar’s prophecy. Rising toward the ceiling at the top of the bookshelves was my enormous stack of ninety-nine Henry the Squirrel books. I wondered whether my childhood stories were the reason Kartar sensed creation in my environs. I considered taking them down, looking through them for the first time since I abandoned the squirrel, but Kartar had said he felt he was in the presence of creativity, a creativity that was presently occurring, and those books were of the past.

  Then I was standing in my bedroom, at my bureau, opening the top drawer, hurling to the floor balled-up socks and underwear, until I had emptied everything out.

  There it was, at the back, in its shabby resting place. Ashby’s secret manuscript, the copy I had made and stolen away. The reason for my penance.

  But that penance was now complete: I had read her collections, and because of them, I had gained some greater self-knowledge and a potential guide to my future. There I stood, holding her huge secret in my hands, and I thought a novel named Words of New Beginnings surely contained additional truths about what I ought to do with my life.

  Cash sang, If I could start again, and I wanted to be Howard after he made his decision to walk away from Esme. I wanted to be Simon Tabor finding ways to fly. I understood Peck Traynor now and wanted to live the outlaw life she had chosen.

  I took Ashby’s novel out into the great room, put it on the coffee table, straightened all of its edges. Then a thin book on the bottom of the bookshelves caught my eye. I walked over and freed it. Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain. I had no recollection of purchasing that book, or of having read it. The tagline on its cover: “The Inspirational Best Seller That Has Led Thousands to the Fulfillment of Their Desires Through the Art of Mental Energy and Affirmation.” I opened to a random page and there was a grocery list in my handwriting: OJ, TP, PT, milk, bread, PB&J, condoms. I turned the list over. It was written on a receipt for a deli sandwich dated from the month and year I moved in here. The intervening years had not altered my trite needs. I felt utterly predictable, and then my breath dropped away. There was a wizened grief inside of me, and when an image came clear—a little boy at his white desk writing about a small gray squirrel’s clever abilities in the face of trouble, stories that had made me feel I was unique—I understood I had been living with that grief for a very long time.

  I wanted again to be that hopeful boy who did not yet know he lacked his own genius. I thought of Simon Tabor’s directive in Fictional Family Life and felt again the strength I had experienced the whole of the day reading about him and the boys he created, a strength I had not felt in years, and I hung on to it right then, and forced it within me, sensed the way it altered the tide of my blood. I left Creative Visualization on my desk, poured myself a large vodka, sat down on the couch, and picked up the manuscript. I turned to the first page.

  We were young, and some of us were beautiful, and others of us were brilliant, and a few of us were both—

  I finished reading at five in the morning. For another hour I listened to the incessant rain and contemplated the book. It was sophisticated and complex, its skein of themes elegantly knitted together—about t
he nature of creation, hope, faith, community, the mandate to follow one’s dreams, because to do otherwise meant certain death, an actual explosion of one’s heart, or, and perhaps worse, the figurative explosion of one’s being. I thought it was a huge book. Taut and tied together.

  Why had she kept us all in the dark about what she was doing? Once she finished the book, why had she put it away? I looked again at the title page, at Final Draft: August 10, 2007, and tried to recall what was happening right then—I was off to college a few weeks later, Eric would drop out of school. But even those events, I thought, could not have prevented her from ushering her work out into the world. Nothing else I considered, like dissatisfaction with her creation, rang true. I was missing critical information, but I could not call to ask what had happened to her writing, to her career, to the book I had robbed.

  And though I would have denied it then, I think what I thought was this: How dare she. She did not deserve her talent, barely utilized all of these last years. She did not deserve to have written this book that she had stowed away.

  And I knew I had gotten it all wrong in Silicon Valley when I was forced to read “An Outlaw Life” and decided that learning Ashby had not wanted me somehow set me free. That knowledge had not set me free, not for a single day. I was still playing by the expected rules of behavior, still heeding the honorable code, permitting myself to be slotted in where others thought I belonged. It took reading all of Ashby’s work to understand what true freedom could mean, what breaking through all the boundaries could do for a human being.

  It took another thirty minutes for exhaustion to catch up with me, to stretch out on the couch, to reach the cliff of sleep. A last thought floated through my brain: Words of New Beginnings was the perfect title and I would not be able to use it.

  I dreamt about the butterfly farm I went to when I was eight, a school field trip in a yellow school bus that left the parking lot in the predawn dark because the butterflies broke free of their prisons early in the day, if they broke free at all. My dream unfolded as it had in real life: at the farm, I covered my eyes after sighting the tightly wound pods—chrysalides, we had been taught—hanging from the rafters. My teacher said, “Look, look everyone, it’s marvelous,” as the guide pointed out the pods, until that moment immobile and defenseless, starting to move, a subtle crusade of pupae searching for a way out. I pressed my small fists into my eyes, deliberately missed the change on the rafted tier, the metamorphosis from pupa to imago—in class we had also learned those words—as the hatching butterflies fought for freedom and air and light. I refused to watch because I believed the butterflies were undergoing a sacred transformation that belonged to them alone, their secret. When I heard my classmates’ excitement, I peered through my fingers, caught the butterflies just rising into the air, their wings working for the very first time. That transformation, from larvae to pupae to evanescent winged insects, was part of the natural cycle, and even so I had refused to be a witness as a child. In the dream, I was suddenly grown up and making a speech, though I saw no audience, just an endless expanse of blue water, clear as glass. My voice was strong and sure as I said, “Human transformation is something else entirely, mandating revolutionary activity that would wither under the eyes of an audience. We must take this step, use the keys handed over to alter our lives. I have my key, do you have yours?” Then a string of words flew across my eyes as if they were being typed on a screen—morality, intention, responsibility, goodness, identity, desire, theft.

  When at last the dream fell away that Monday morning of the Columbus Day weekend, I felt a muted pain on my left side, inside of my ribs, close to my heart, that organ I once thought of as pure, or nearly so. I had done few things in my life that altered its original state, but making an illicit copy of Ashby’s hidden book was the biggest one by far, then. I rubbed at the ache and found myself quietly repeating, You will do what you need to do, and then the pain subsided because I knew what that was.

  Reading Ashby’s work had clarified what I was too young to understand when my mother’s fame stymied me completely, made me doubt myself, forced me to abandon Henry, the ramifications of that act, a slaughtering of my own passion, and the anger I had carried for too long. I needed to reignite myself. And there was Simon Tabor’s advice for me to follow, precepts Ashby herself espoused in Fictional Family Life. I repeated the words by heart: Take what you need from everyone. Just do right by those stolen gifts. Exhaust all to ashes. If you are brave, you too may experience what I, Simon Tabor, have experienced: a transformed life turned extraordinary, miraculous, and singular.

  I thought of those chrysalides I was supposed to have watched on that field trip. The tightly wrapped pupae struggling free from their homemade prisons, genetically prepared for the abbreviated life of a butterfly. The guide told us that the lucky ones who managed to avoid the predators inhabiting their fragile world would have a month to sip nectar, rest on the underside of a rock, effect their solitary goal, the laying of their eggs. Motivated creation. That is what I wanted for my life, and Kartar had prophesied that such would occur.

  It seemed to me that Ashby’s manuscript had remained hidden until I could find it, that my discovering it was intentional in a cosmic sort of way, the universe talking to me directly. Just as reading Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life made me feel those stories belonged to me, that somehow I had written them, or could have written them, my reading of Ashby’s unseen novel rendered it visible, made it my own. The novel represented a chance for me to recapture my immense childhood dream, to make it arrant and real. The book, unused and clearly discarded, was what I wanted from the genius lost-and-found box.

  I truly believed that had I not been forced to learn at such a young age that she held my treasured spot in our family, that she was famous, had won big awards, was still well known, sometimes recognized by strangers decades later, though she had only ever published those two books, a handful of other stories in magazines that made it into various Best American Short Stories, all of Ashby’s words might have been mine. The very fact of her had usurped whatever talent I might have possessed, had blown me apart.

  She had noticed when I stopped writing my Henry stories, but when she asked, What new adventure is he going to have? I shrugged and refused to answer, and rather than interrogate me gently, a skill she had always used well and wisely until that very moment, she nodded and left me alone. Years later, when I intellectually understood she had not deliberately maimed me, it no longer mattered, the damage had been inflicted, and she was accountable.

  But now I held in my hand a brilliant nine-hundred-page secret that could recast my entire life, serve as my own redemption.

  I left a message with my editor at Think Inc. that I would be out for the week, finishing up interviews for my third-to-last article, though I had already written it.

  I sat at my desk, under a pool of lamplight, the rain a rush and a roar against the windows, the world far in the distance, unrecalled beyond the thick curtain of clouds. For a while, I did nothing. Then I began to type Ashby’s novel into my laptop, feeling all the while like the serious writer I had wanted to be.

  On a whim, I altered the sex of a character, turned a man into a woman by adding an i to a name, making a he a she, a Bash into a Bashi, with all the attendant changes, because I could, and because I wanted to exert my own power over the work.

  I typed past midnight, fell into bed, and when I woke a few hours later, I dropped to the floor for push-ups, made coffee, and picked up the phone to call Lucky Star with my breakfast order. Then I put the phone down.

  What would Kartar notice if he was again standing at my door? I imagined him warning me, that fluted voice saying that this was not what he had meant at all, that my creative impulses were stolen and dark, already ransacking my soul, and there was little time for me to abandon my ways, scrub myself clean. I knew the diabolical truth, what I was intending to do, but I did not need someone else knowing it too.

  I
drank my coffee and toasted the heel of brown bread still in my fridge, and returned to my desk, to the manuscript that was already transforming into something else, regardless that I was typing her words.

  It is hard to accurately explain how I managed to ambush the compunction with which I had been raised, my knowledge of right and wrong, the admonitions to never lie, cheat, or steal, how easily I threw my own morality aside. I wanted to usurp what belonged to her, felt that I had the right; she herself had lied to me all of my life. And although I knew, of course, who Joan Ashby was, that she was real, that I called her Mom in my regular life, not once did I consider her humanity, how my actions might affect her, did not once think back to Karen Sweet murdering Evan. I felt liberated from all normal constraints.

  During the four days and nights it took me to type the whole novel, there were times I felt I was slogging up a muddy hill, carrying a loaded pack on my back, fighting a war of my own invention, a battle that featured revolutionary conversion and a desire for revenge, and very little guilt. It was not a no-man’s-land, but I pretended otherwise, ducking and weaving, and marching relentlessly forward until I reached the last sentence, the last word, the last period, and typed The End.

  When I finished, I sat there wondering how best to mask its origins. The psychological construct of Words of New Beginnings shared little with the various emotional psychologies the characters in her collections experienced; the nature of her work had altered and was no longer as instantly recognizable. I considered how she was famous for her short stories, was known as a writer married to the short narrative form, and she had never published a novel.

  I went back to what I thought was a natural breakpoint in the book, and that’s where I cut. I knew I might be doubling my risk of exposure, but I was making something new, companion books meant to be read sequentially. I named the first Paradise of Artists, the second The Blissed-Out Retreat, titles that came to me easily. It was impossible for them to bear my name, though I wished they could. I came up with a pseudonym that pleased me. I titled them and typed “by J. D. Henry” on each, and right then, the air pressure lifted. The rain had not ceased since I began reading Ashby’s work, and now, seven days later, as I put the finishing touches on the books, the black clouds blew away.