Kartar has told her that although Dharamshala is not dry, alcohol is hard to come by.
Willem fills their glasses, lifts his, and Joan lifts hers, and they touch, a small ting that rings out in the restaurant that has emptied of everyone but the two of them. He sets down his glass, and from his wallet he slides out a wrinkled, well-creased piece of paper, which he unfolds, and unfolds, and unfolds, and then smooths out, his palm running across a paragraph of typed words.
“May I read something to you?”
Joan nods. “Of course,” she says, and sips again at her wine.
Willem shifts his chair back, switches his crossed knee, drinks from his glass, clears his throat, and begins to read.
The birds wing about noisily in the trees outside of my window, settle themselves down on branches. One flock is feathered in green and yellow bands, another reminds me of sailors on leave or of boys in varsity sweaters, their wings navy blue and wrapped in white stripes. A lone bird with a bright white face and a red tufted cap slaps the glass where I stand and finds a thick branch to his liking midway up the maple. I wonder how birds agree on changing course when they swoop and turn, if they mate for life or are fickle, if some avian species mate permanently and others are Lotharios, as I would be in a heartbeat. I wonder what happens to a sick or injured baby bird, or to a baby bird that falls from its nest and is not easily found in the sinuous, vined tangle of jungle, or forest, or park. Do his parents send out a rescue party, or leave him be, to live out an abridged life, to die a natural death? So much of what I have learned from life, I have learned from birds. I love them so much. Their freedom, their songs, their clucking and cleaning, the way they own the sky. Sometimes I want to pop them all off, take a BB gun and shoot holes through their wings, see then how well they can fly. It seems unfair how life can be, stuck pining for what—for guts, for the soaring nature of bravery, for everything.
Willem looks at her when he finishes. She has not moved since he read the first sentence.
“That piece of writing spoke to me so intensely the first time I read it, and the thousands of times since. Of course, you recognize it.”
Joan nods.
“When I found you in the bookstore, I knew who you were. Darpan knew who you were the moment you walked in. Darpan called me and said, ‘Come now, immediately. You won’t believe who is in the store browsing through books, sitting down with a whole bunch.’ And when he told me, I came running.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life over the years. Darpan is also a huge fan. Your books are in his store, or rather in his father’s store.”
It never crossed Joan’s mind to check whether a small bookstore in Dharamshala carried her work.
Willem leans down to the photographer’s bag under his chair and comes up holding the book he dropped into Joan’s hands hours ago.
“Kalpit Parvarik Jivan is Hindi for Fictional Family Life. I knew you were Joan Ashby when I asked you to join me for lunch. You have been my most favorite writer of short stories for a very long time. I’ve taken both your collections with me when I hike up the Dhauladhars and spend nights in a tent on a rock ledge. Your words keep me company until the birds take again to the sky with the sun. Your stories have been all over India, and have spent huge chunks of time with me in the Pong Wetland.
“Considering I photograph birds as both my passion and my profession, you would think I couldn’t imagine shooting a BB gun at any of those gorgeous creatures. But as free as I am, certainly compared to most people, I know I’ll never experience what they do. The first time I read that paragraph, I felt I was Simon Tabor, a screwed-up teenager pretending to be a hemophiliac just for some relief from himself. I could see myself as him, trying to kill myself by flying off a roof, and failing, and sticking myself into a coma just to buy time, and dreaming about watching those birds giving me such tantalizing hope, then throwing me into utter despair.
“And hopefully this will not insult you, but you are more beautiful now, and trust me when I say that I know the young you. I used to stare at your pictures on the backs of your books, in articles I found about you, so much so that my wife, who was never a jealous woman, used to make fun of me, poke me in the chest when I picked up one of your books to reread. ‘Oh,’ she would say, ‘you are nestling up to my competition again.’”
Joan feels faint, not because of a potential for romance, or sex, with Willem Ackerman, although she had been thinking about both before he pulled out that piece of paper, but because he sees her so vividly. Because to him she is still a vital writer, whose work he has returned to many times since her books were first published, because he has read her stories as a married man, father, widower, grandfather, birder, and photographer.
“I’ve always known you’d be fantastic, tremendous, and you are. And I always pictured you working at some great desk, putting such weird and wonderful stories together.”
She wishes he were completely right, that not one day had passed in her life without setting down her own words, and not a single line since putting down the shallowest of roots in Dharamshala. There is a rapid pulsing at the base of her throat, and even as Joan thinks it, she knows what she believes is ridiculous, that her splintered soul is sewing itself back together, one loop of thread through the skin at a time, because Willem, and Darpan, have been profoundly touched by the truest part of herself.
It has been so long since anyone has viewed her through the correct lens, properly calibrated to her singular nature. The husband who says how much he loves her, completely unaware that she had written Words for nine years. The son who took her seriously as a writer, look at his actions, how that played out.
The Nirvanic feelings evaporate when her lungs viciously deflate, her fingers twisting into dying flowers, then turning to stone. She hopes the pain presages something good, that when it fades away, it will leave behind a hollowed-out Ashby, ready to be filled up by new words and work.
Willem’s face is transforming into painterly cubist components. Despite the distortion, his eyes radiate. She sees kindness there, and a sort of love, love for the mind that strung together sentences that affected him so deeply. A strong arm is slung around her back, another strong arm wraps around her waist, and she is lifted down to the floor of the café, laid flat on her back, and Willem is yelling, “Yashvir, get water,” and Willem pulls something out of his bag, and then plunges it into her thigh. The pain is outrageous and she screams.
“It’s an EpiPen,” he yells. “You’re seriously allergic to something I fed you.”