She watches the Dhauladhars use their power to shuck off the hovering clouds, and the early faint stars are up there, lives and deaths charted in the sky. She inhales, sips, touches the button that brings Daniel back into her life.
In my childhood, when I marched around my bedroom with a new story in my hand, a pencil stuck between my lips, imagining myself a famous writer, I was too young to understand that if I followed through, if I truly had talent, and luck, my stories might be read by others, beyond mother and father, and baby brother, if I promised him lollipops after. And then, suddenly, millions of people were reading Paradise of Artists and The Blissed-Out Retreat, to which I had appended my name, or rather J. D. Henry’s name. And yet who was I, and what had I actually achieved? A pseudonymous personage, a burglar of the glorious words put together by another—
*
Joan listens to the story of a reader’s spellbound weekend during which childhood hurts are revisited, the small hurts looming enormous when endured by a child, the way they slithered deep inside and fed off the warmth of tissue and blood and a child’s flawed desperation, the need that time never abates, to become that hero the child imagined he was, to make himself known and worthy of recognition. What’s missing, Joan thinks, is any awareness by Daniel that the seeds for such elevation were within him the whole time.
She is saddened, horrified, flattered, unwillingly fascinated by how articulate he is in analyzing her work, describing the ways he was moved, the application of her stories to his own life. And the beautiful modulation of his voice holds her when he reads excerpts of her work in the way she intended her stories to be absorbed. There are so many revelations in his artistic confession—what she did wrong, what he did wrong—all underscored by the low tone of arrogance, the artfulness she realizes is not new, she heard it every time they spoke from the moment that must date from his theft of her work.
My tremulous defense today might be that I confused who was the reader and who was the writer when I submerged myself in Ashby’s published words, tasted her unpublished words on my tongue, inhaled it all until I floated on a sea of infinite creation. In important ways, it’s true, but such a defense would not hold up in a court of law, and I won’t condescend by arguing I was in some mental state that diminished my capacity to know right from wrong, or caused me to be unaware of what I was doing, the actions I was taking. I am not minimizing what I did, but I feel it important to explain that my actions were based in hard truths, at least in my own truths, in my own reality.
It might be easy to deem me a fraud, a consummate con man, a thief of the work I thought abandoned, and that I believed I was bringing into the light. I think such facile labeling underestimates critical points, points I determined when I stood at my wall of windows and thought how the harms from the past inform the present; how old wishes are nailed to a person’s endoskeleton, no matter that the bones have lengthened, solidified over the years; about the confluence of events in a life; the power of the written word.
This suffering with which Daniel has so closely aligned himself, he will have to let it go, leap into the depth of the world, stop playing it safe, take risks that belong to him alone. He wanted the Devata she created in Words, the one she has found here in Dharamshala, but he must make his own, in a terrain that suits him. Paradise belongs only to the creator. Joan lifts herself out of the pine armchair, feeling older than she ever has, and pours herself a third glass of wine.
I have been narrating my story all of this Columbus Day weekend. Three days so different than last year, no biblical storm and rains, just a blue sky and white clouds. It has been difficult hearing myself explain my actions, but at least I have done something. An attempt to rectify the wrong. Whether you have listened to my entire story, and will find a way to forgive, I have no way of knowing.
I admit to some mild satisfaction as well. A narrative structure has evolved from my wrongdoing. By virtue of my reprehensible actions, the attempted assumption of an unearned life, the theft of words written by another, I have created a substantive piece of work all my own.
The sun is slipping away on this third and final day of the holiday weekend. I’ve been watching its path, noting its weakening light, and it strikes me for the first time that recording my story is not at all the same thing as writing fiction from scratch. Again, I have reined myself in, failed to take that great leap into the life I once wanted, and who knows, despite all that has happened, maybe I still do.
No doubt I have time until you send me some sign regarding my fate as your son. Perhaps I ought to use the coming days, weeks, or months judiciously, start at the beginning again, and write this—my story—for real.
Then there is silence. The recording is finished.
He’s right, Joan thinks—there is a manifest talent in the framing of his tale, the cohesions that bind it together. It might even be a story she would write, as fiction, call it Words of New Beginnings; that good title still belongs to her, waiting only to be unpacked.
Did Daniel say he was sorry?
Her head is filled up with hours of his words, but Joan is certain that particular one was missing.
She looks up into the Indian sky, at the faraway stars dressed up in their prehistoric white, the past informing the present.
She will write a fourth letter to the Dalai Lama, have Kartar deliver it to His Holiness’s secretary in the morning. There on her nightstand is the basket filled with Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise stationery, and she places a stack on her desk. She will use the full force of her own words, include the new depths of her story, the additional facts she has gleaned from her son’s tale. She must set everything out as accurately as she can, as honestly as she is able, by hand. He hasn’t responded to her three previous letters, but perhaps he will, to this one.
Joan pauses. She realizes it is not to the Dalai Lama she needs to write, but to Daniel. She never tested Martin’s love, but she will test his. She opens her laptop and begins:
Daniel—
If my lessons to you during all your formative years failed to take, I can’t teach you anything at this late date, and I should not expect to hear you say the word “sorry,” but your recorded voice, the excuses you have made for yourself, will not do. You tried to eat me up, but you must find another way to assuage this hunger of yours, a different form of satiation. The books are mine, a wedge between us that must be removed, so that you can begin to find the life meant for you.