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 the 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.