That night, on the train back to DC, with her purloined secret and her published collections packed in my duffel, I imagined I was transporting explosives.
I walked into my stifling, airless apartment a few hours later, but I didn’t throw open the windows until her secret manuscript was tucked away deep in a drawer, her collections on my nightstand. I didn’t actually want them in my sight, but it seemed I owed her that—a display that would explicitly remind me of the wrong I had done.
While the summer lingered on, those two books sat like an overwhelming dare I did not want to face. I forced myself to take their stock each morning, and their voracious strength, so close to my head when I slept, spun a nightmare that made me leap from my bed like clockwork at three a.m., the metronome of ashbyashbyashby in my ears, my body slick, my heart thrashing, my mind flailing. I would turn on the light and sew together the images, each remembered fragment moving the narrative forward. Then I would retrace it all from the start, as if I could revise my subconscious. A boy, a mother, a two-by-four, a bloody head wound, a cover-up, and a grave. The same dream over and over again.
With autumn came the awful news that in the first quarter of the coming year, Think Inc. would be eliminating their traditional monthly print format and transitioning into new media. They wanted me to stay, to succeed in the new environment, but I had to be able to winnow my twenty thousand–word articles down to a few succinct Web-friendly paragraphs. The full text of my articles would be in the semiannual print versions of the magazine available to subscribers who paid for the golden upgrade, but it was mandatory I truncate my work for the new site. I tried desperately to cut and trim my articles, both published and pending, and considered new angles by which I could come at my subjects in an organic way that would work for the Web site, but I wrote long-form and detailed and my attempts at cogent compression were futile.
When I realized I would be remaindered, with some kind of severance, I carefully considered how I could capitalize on the small name I had made for myself, my own mark on the world, even though that mark disappeared when people trashed an issue of the magazine that contained one of my articles.
I grappled with what to do and decided to write a book investigating the effects the global economy was having on worldwide entrepreneurship. I drafted a seventy-page proposal with clever chapter summaries and polished entertaining briefs about the people I would highlight. I thought: Who wouldn’t want to read a book that detailed how the most unlikely among us discovered the idea that made them rich, the steps taken, the sacrifices made, the preposterous results obtained which changed their lives and sometimes the lives of the population at large? I was confident that with such a book under way, I would leave the magazine with a signed publishing contract, become a pundit regularly sought out for Sunday-morning talk shows. I imagined receiving the advance, working from home on the book, traveling to small towns to interview people, eventually being sent out on a book tour, giving speeches at business schools and universities, commanding high rates for my insights.
My editors, enthusiastic about my proposal, championed it to their publishing connections. Although the publishers liked my proposal, and could see a book like mine on their lists, I lacked, they said, brand recognition, notwithstanding that I worked for a national magazine, had a good reputation, and my pieces had won two commendations for journalistic excellence. The advice was to submit the proposal again when I had a larger social media platform that demonstrated I commanded an audience in the millions.
With my proposed future dead in my hands, I was overwhelmed by confusion, unable to figure things out, saw no clear next phase. I wondered then whether my bewilderment stemmed directly from my failure to absolve myself of my sin, not making good on my self-imposed penance to read those damn books.
I decided to spend the whole of the Columbus Day weekend inside, foregoing the moderate fall weather, reading those extolled Ashby collections from cover to cover, whose mere existence I had long despised. I tried convincing myself I would be setting out on a voyage like that undertaken by Christopher Columbus and his crew, but when I woke at dawn on Saturday of his holiday weekend, I felt nothing remotely akin to the Spaniard’s yearning to discover the unknown world, his pride in sailing for honor and queen, his elation when the three ships were freed from their moorings. Instead, I felt violently ill, as if I had been seasick for days, and the open ocean ahead of me was no docile thing, but a mad navy sea with gargantuan whitecaps churning in a circle around the globe.
I picked up Ashby’s debut collection, Other Small Spaces, and I remembered its heft of serious intention, how it felt in my hands when I was eleven. I had not paid any attention to the cover back then, but now I did.
It showed a large keyhole through which one could see a book-lined room. A person of uncertain gender sat in a high-backed chair, hands folded in supplication, face lifted. Its eyes were black dots that suddenly lengthened into rays that bore through the keyhole into mine. It was a daunting cover, and I thought that might be the point: that reading Ashby’s work required fearlessness and readers ought to be ready.
I was too wound up to engage the book as I would otherwise normally do—author photo, dedication, acknowledgments, table of contents, if there was one. I felt twitchy paging forward to the first story. Then I was there, opening the door to my own nightmare, to the fears I thought I had put to rest. The title of the first story was “Killing Close Friends,” and I was shaken completely. It took enormous will to continue on, to force myself to drop into my mother’s world.
Slice the carotid arteries of the self-pleased, so certain their literary pursuits are bound for success; gut the recipients of fellowships and stipends and prizes and contracts; poison those with imitative talent, for they decimate the genuine; smash those who presume that inherited blood fates their work valuable: they are all cockroaches skittering across the shower tiles in the dead of night and ought to be smacked flat with a manuscript that sputtered at liftoff, the match meant for igniting, wet from tears.