This Book Does Not Exist Read online

  THIS BOOK DOES NOT EXIST

  M i k e S c h n e i d e r

  Copyright © 2010 Michael J. Schneider

  2nd Edition Copyright © 2012 Michael J. Schneider

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  FOREWORD

  The exact origins of the following document are unknown. It was discovered online, circulating as an email with the subject: “This Book Does Not Exist.” Although many of the events described within are unbelievable – specifically those involving the Door to the other world – the majority of the text can be verified and therefore should be read as a story of truth.

  “This be the realest shit I ever wrote.”

  Tupac Shakur, “Against All Odds”

  FOR L.

  I MISS YOU.

  “…and let’s also say that change is neither good nor bad; it simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy. A tantrum that says, ‘I want it the way it was’ or a dance that says, ‘look, it’s something new.’”

  Don Draper in Mad Men “Love Among the Ruins” (Season 3)

  “I was born for the storm, and a calm does not suit me.”

  Andrew Jackson

  “I’m in love with you, but the vibe is wrong / And that haunted me, all the way home”

  Kanye West, “Love Lockdown”

  PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN

  I live inside my head.

  Right now it’s 11:22 PM in Los Angeles. That’s where I am, in my apartment, while my girlfriend Naomi is in New Jersey for her cousin’s funeral. He was found dead two weeks ago, locked inside an empty house, asphyxiated. No one knows what happened.

  On the East Coast it’s 2:22 AM. The funeral is early in the morning so Naomi is most likely tucked away for the night. That would be the reasonable thing to think at least.

  But then there are all the things I can imagine.

  Yes, Naomi might be at her aunt’s house, lying on a sofa bed with her head on a pillow and her eyes closed, lightly snoring. She could be sitting at the kitchen table drinking red wine, reminiscing with the rest of her family. But it’s impossible to know for sure. She hasn’t called or texted me, and her best friend is visiting New York this weekend. She might be out with her instead. They both went to college at Columbia, and they miss hanging out in the city together. It’s possible then that Naomi is actually at one of her favorite bars on the Lower East Side, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin, contemplating whether or not she still loves me and how invigorating it might be to have sex with the guy who’s hitting on her, as she tries to make out the specifics of the tattoo scribbled on the inside of his forearm.

  To try to stave off these thoughts before they consume me, I am typing into the body of an unaddressed email, stopping to save it as a draft every time I turn and look at my phone with the hope that somehow I missed hearing it, that nothing has changed, that Naomi still loves me, and that I am not alone.

  Maybe I’m being irrational. Chances are I am. I know. I hate it too. I’m sorry.

  But if you walked inside my head you would see it’s not that simple.

  MIKE + NAOMI

  Some time ago, during what I call “the bad period,” it didn’t seem like Naomi and I were going to make it. That was before we fixed things.

  That was before she disappeared.

  Two and a half years ago, we met.

  For my 28th birthday, I went back home.

  I flew out of LAX and landed at Hopkins International Airport in Cleveland. My parents picked me up and drove me to Daventry, the small town in which they built a grey house with a brick chimney, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life.

  Dangling on the precipice between suburban and rural, Daventry is about forty miles west of Cleveland. According to Wikipedia, 11,724 people lived there when the government did the census in 2008, an expansion of 9% from the time I was born. If you were driving the 62.3 miles from Cleveland to Sandusky – say you were going to the world famous roller coaster park Cedar Point – you’d pass by Daventry. The most prominent landmark you’d see would be a Target. But, if you got off the highway to search for a gas station, you’d drive past a cornfield and multiple housing allotments before ending up at a quaint five-pointed intersection residing in front of a town hall made of sandstone. A gas station with three circumspect pumps (one full serve and two self serve) would be adjacent to that. It would be your source of fuel, if not your inspiration to make your stay in town a brief one.

  Daventry is where Naomi grew up, too. Her parents still live about an eighth of a mile away from my parents, in a two decades old housing development. My mom and dad built their home when I was twelve. I lived with them and my younger brother Tim until I left Ohio to go to college at the unimaginatively named New York University in New York City, New York.

  “Downtown” Daventry, where I was hanging out either a night or two after turning twenty-eight, only consists of four blocks: two that run north-south and two that go east-west. Included on these four blocks is a second-run movie theater, the optometrist who told me I needed glasses when I was in third grade, a shop that sells candy, aquariums, and exotic pets, an antique dealer, a lawyer, and Daventry’s main attraction, a seven-bar thoroughfare.

  On the night I saw Naomi’s face for the first time, I was walking to my car after leaving one of the bars when some guy I didn’t know but had heard of brought us together.

  JOEY DANKO

  It was after last call, so somewhere between 2 AM and 3 AM. Twenty or so boisterous guys and girls had congregated around the movie theater. They seemed to be fixated on something that was happening on top of the roof. Slowing down to try and figure out what it was, I realized that Joey Danko was up there, and he was preparing to jump.

  It looked to me like Joey wasn’t intent on hurting himself – he just had a straightforward drunken desire to leap off a two-story building. I didn’t want to stick around. I was about a quarter of the way through the bodies collected on the sidewalk when I spotted a girl unlike any I had seen that night.

  She was lilting at the edge of the crowd in high heels, dark jeans, and a black tank top, smoking a cigarette like a silent film actress who had wandered into a poorly made 21st century teen sex comedy. She was above the fray, outside of it, almost analytical. She was distinctive. She was edgy. She was beautiful. There was no doubt about that.

  I shook my head, admitting that I was either too shy or too sober to stop and talk to her. At the same time, with a dry sense of sarcasm, I said to myself, “That guy’s gonna kill himself.”

  I thought I said it under my breath, but the girl, who wasn’t laughing or whooping like the other people in the crowd – she wasn’t even smiling – must have heard me. We made eye contact. She quipped, “He’s a fucking idiot.”

  I chuckled. I appreciated her cynicism. I liked the speed of her voice, the beige tint of her shoulder-length hair, the small diamond stud I could see in the left side of her nose. Most important, I liked the way she continued looking at me even as I got further and further away, which gave me the confidence to stop walking and to turn around so I could curl back towards her…

  And then Joey Danko jumped. He stepped up and off the roof and dropped through the air until the air became the blacktop and the blacktop broke his skull.

  On impact, the crowd froze. The girl turned her body into mine and hid her face against my shoulder. Surprised, I lightly touched my hand against her back. For the crowd, the moment of disbelief broke. People rushed Joey. He was conscious. I could se
e him moving, could hear him moaning. To the girl I said, “I’m getting out of here.”

  She came with me.

  As we stepped in tandem, she told me her name was Naomi and that we went to high school together. She remembered me. I graduated two grades ahead of her, she said. She explained where her mom and dad lived, almost as if she knew it was only a block and a half away from my parents. I learned that for six years – more if you count multiple winter and summer breaks from college – Naomi and I were practically neighbors. Yet, somehow I never saw her. We never interacted. I didn’t even know there was a girl about my age living in the all-red-brick house I passed everyday on my way to school. Naomi, at the very least, seemed to know of me. I had no recollection of her.

  That I happened to meet her then, almost ten years after I had moved away from Daventry, when she had been right around the corner the entire time, felt a lot like that thing people call fate.

  BLUE SKY

  Naomi and I took separate cars to a 24-hour-restaurant called Blue Sky, so named because of its most alluring feature – a large mural of very blue skies and giant cumulus clouds splayed across multiple walls. Oddly, although we walked in around 3:00 AM, we still found ourselves amongst people of all ages. Drunken twenty-somethings and renegade teenagers mixed with grandparents, parents, children, and babies. In industrial Northeast Ohio, people stuck with second shift jobs at dying factories got together when they could.

  By the look Naomi gave me as we crossed paths with a rambunctious two-year-old wandering alone across the restaurant carpeting, I could tell she was trying to reconcile the strange environment, too. The hostess leading us to our table ignored the little boy, as did a waitress ambling past. The child’s mother and/or father were either invisible or uninterested.

  “I kinda feel out of place,” Naomi said.

  “I always feel out of place,” I countered.

  “That’s what I was just going to say,” she added, as we took our seats at a table in the center of the crowded dining area. “I’m okay with it.”

  We ordered coffee and started talking, not about the places where our pasts intersected, but of what we wanted from the future. Naomi was in Daventry for the summer, in between graduating from Columbia with a degree in psychology and heading back to New York to look for a job (that she went to college in Manhattan like I did was another surprise). She wanted to work for a little while before applying to med school to become a psychiatrist.

  At the time, I was making a living blogging for a website out of LA while hoping to break into the movie business as a screenwriter. The blog was about being single in Hollywood, and I had written a few posts chronicling a string of dates I went on with a girl who had been a cast member on a reality TV show. Things hadn’t gone particularly well, to say the least. It took me five dates to conjure up the nerve to kiss her, and when I finally did, it was just a single kiss – a nice kiss, but a lonely one – followed by a call a few days later, her telling me she was getting back together with an ex-boyfriend. I shouldn’t be upset, she said, because she was cutting things off with the other guys she had been dating, too. What was funny, I guess, was that I had no idea she was dating anybody else. This made for a better story on the website but a worse feeling for me personally.

  When I initially got hired, I publicized the blog by emailing everyone I knew and posting about it on Facebook and MySpace (before it became virtually extinct). Naomi must have heard about the blog through a friend of a friend of a friend because after she took her first sip of coffee at Blue Sky, much to my chagrin, she started asking me about the incident with the girl from the reality TV show.

  Why did I believe what she told me? Why was I so confident she was actually reconciling with her old boyfriend? How could I really be sure she was dating other people? After all, this was someone who played a version of herself on TV, watched how she was portrayed when the episodes aired, and then, given what the research on reality show personalities indicated, incorporated what she saw on TV into her own self-perception, and therefore, her actions. Did I wonder what the other people involved in the situation were like? The supposed ex-boyfriend, the other guys she may or may not have been dating, the girl’s friends – almost all fellow reality show cast members – most of whom I’d formed some sort of opinion on while flipping through channels before we ever met.

  The ease that we had with one another during the back and forth that ensued helped to erase time. The clock approached 5 AM. We were at a restaurant called Blue Sky, surrounded by food we weren’t eating and people we’d forgotten were even there. We’d only met three hours ago, but it seemed as if we had done this all before.

  When the waitress grew tired of us not ordering, she suggested we pay the check upfront, “whenever you’re finally ready.” Naomi convinced me to stay another ten minutes out of spite, something I never would have done on my own. Eventually, we left. I walked out of the restaurant and held the door open for her. I headed to my car. She went to hers. We hugged goodbye.

  Later, as I drove past Naomi’s parents’ house on the way back to my mom and dad’s, I watched her turn into the driveway. I slowed down while she pulled all the way into the garage. I hoped that something else, something wrought by an unseen magician, would happen. But then the garage door started going down, and she was gone before she even got out of the car.

  The following night I flew back to LA.

  A couple of weeks passed. I found Naomi on MySpace and sent her a link to a new blog post I’d written.

  She replied by telling me she wished we had gone home together that night.

  ME IN THE PAST

  The night I met Naomi ended like it did because I was misshapen by events in my past.

  I had been lonely for a very long time.

  As a child and as a teenager, I was always short. I was also obese. I spent many hours alone in my room, wanting my life to be different. By the time I was fifteen, I weighed 199 pounds and stood 5 feet 4 inches tall. Other kids called me fat to my face, as if I didn’t already know. I became discouragingly attracted to girls. I remember being twelve, in sixth grade English class, sitting behind a girl named Adrienne, wondering what it would be like to kiss her, believing I would never have a chance to find out. Other boys told me they’d kissed girls. I wanted to be like them. I wanted Adrienne to be the first girl I kissed. But all I could think about was the flab on my stomach and how I looked without a shirt. No girl could possibly want to touch me or be close to me.

  Trying to fall asleep at night was the hardest. It was the only time I didn’t have homework, video games, comic books, or sports to distract me from my loneliness. Most nights I cried. I talked to my mom about Heaven and what it would be like to live forever. To never die, to eternally feel the way I did… That scared me the most.

  This went on for years. I badly wanted to lose weight. I failed to do so just as badly. I played baseball. I played football. I got cut from the basketball team. I did make a few friends, but the girlfriend I wished for never materialized.

  Eventually, because of a tremendous effort, some things began to change.

  When I was fifteen and a half, I stopped eating in between meals and started working out on a Nordic Track five times a week for thirty minutes a session. I took up skateboarding after school and on the weekends. I never missed a work out. I never stepped outside of the diet. After unsuccessfully trying to lose weight for so long, it was this regimen that finally led me to lose nearly 60 pounds in five months.

  I was a good student before I got in shape, but I became a better one afterwards. Having climbed out of the muck and tasted achievement, I began to aspire. I decided to leave Ohio for college so I could experience another part of the country and expand my perspective. I concluded that I wanted to do something creative with my life. I saw Pulp Fiction and chose making movies on a whim. My middleclass parents unequivocally supported me despite not having a background in the arts. I finished sixth in my senior class. I fell in love w
ith New York City while visiting NYU and made it my first choice without taking a formal tour of the college. Contradicting the outcome predicted by my high school guidance counselor, I got in.

  In truth, I was proud of myself. But I wasn’t at peace with what tends to matter most to teenagers, namely experimenting with the opposite sex. I weighed myself everyday, monitoring the 140-pound mark obsessively. Any transgression ruined my mood. I’d eat less. I’d work out more. Some days I’d just feel fat and believe I was even though I probably wasn’t. A new struggle ensued – trying to maintain.

  More notably, my social life hadn’t adjusted, and it hurt deeply. What I didn’t anticipate when I set out to lose weight was that simply changing my appearance wasn’t enough. Mentally, I still had to catch up. All of the scars associated with being an overweight child and teenager – name-calling, rejection, feeling abnormal and out of place – weren’t suddenly lasered away. I could take my shirt off at the public pool now, sure, but I wasn’t emotionally secure enough to feel any differently when I did.

  There were three me’s – the physical me, the intellectual me, and the emotional me. The emotional me was out of sync with the others. I couldn’t correct that overnight. I had spent too much time with those emotions. They wouldn’t leave. I fought to upgrade them, to bring them into the future. To this day, it’s something I still wrestle with. When I was a teenager, however, I couldn’t comprehend what was wrong. I thought finding a girl was the ultimate answer. I thought that would make me better. But it seemed impossible. This was before IM and social networking and every kid having a cell phone, so I had nothing to rely on besides how I looked and acted in person. I wasn’t bad looking. I had good moments. I styled my clothing after that of other skateboarders, who at that time wore baggy jeans and the logo T-shirts of their sponsors. I could be funny when I made an effort, thanks to my dad, who imparted upon me his sense of humor. I learned how to play the guitar, but I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid they’d want me to perform. I buzzed my hair. It made me feel less cluttered. I was intelligent enough. Socially, I didn’t know how to put any of this to use. Maybe if I could have experimented in a Facebook profile, learned what people liked and what they didn’t, and then gradually crafted a focus-grouped persona, it would have helped. Obscuring or redefining my uncertainties and deficiencies online, where life is liquid, would have been comforting. If today’s version of the Internet had been around when I was in high school, a lot of things might have been different.