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.