This Book Does Not Exist Read online

  The longer this social vacancy existed, the more it wore on me. At night, not knowing what else to do, I prayed to God. I prayed to discover what it would be like to be held, to be kissed, to feel the warmth of a girl’s body next to mine, to fall asleep knowing I was loved. I prayed to find out what it would be like to wake up knowing at some point that day I would be the reason she smiled. I’d hold her hand and make her laugh and hopefully, when I went back to sleep, she’d still be with me in my dreams.

  Praying didn’t resolve the problem.

  I went away to college. Even then, there was no one. You could say I gave up. I concentrated on what I did best, attempting to fill the void with work. I excelled at school. On the weekends, I wandered the streets of Manhattan, looking for CD’s in the record shops on St. Mark’s, walking for hours at a time through crowds of people. I listened to sparse, haunting rap music from Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang and this kid from Detroit named Eminem who I heard had just been signed by Dr. Dre. A frigidity claimed my heart. Instead of building friendships or dating, I bonded with the city itself. It introduced me to another life where my work could be my salvation. People, I thought, shut me down and made me hurt. Academics and New York City did not.

  Still, as self-sufficient as I’d become, there were days when I could feel an amoeba of despair lingering underneath my skin. I felt it on the nights I’d eat alone and read The New York Times in a dining hall filled with circles of friends and young couples whose lives were unfamiliar to me. Whenever I called my parents on a Friday night while my roommate was out on a date, I felt it. I felt it when I read other people’s away messages on IM, notes left behind to lovers I’d never know, a pair of sentences like “i keep dreaming of you. i need a nap.”

  This is who I was before I met Naomi. That night, an etched-in belief that she couldn’t possibly fall for me, that I was meant to be alone, was what restricted me. I knew then, I know now, that my thinking was flawed. But oftentimes, when emotions are powerful enough, logic can’t make a difference.

  THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

  After Naomi responded to my message on MySpace, we moved on to communicating through IM. She was in New Jersey, staying with a friend of her parents, while she searched for a job in the city, preferably doing research for a cognitive psychologist. I was back to blog-writing out of my studio apartment in Hollywood, across the street from the “Rock ‘N Roll” Ralph’s, a grocery store that sold guitar strings during the 80’s Sunset Strip glam rock era.

  Naomi and I IM’d everyday for over two months. Because of the time difference, she’d sometimes stay up until 5 AM to chat. The idea of me flying out to see her came up frequently. She mentioned a weekend she’d have the house to herself.

  When I moved into my apartment, I couldn’t afford a bed and a couch, so I bought a couch and slept on that. By the time Naomi asked me to visit, I was getting enough traffic on my blog posts to think about buying a bed.

  I booked a flight to see her instead.

  THE TRIP TO NEW YORK CITY

  When I got off the New Jersey Transit in Camden, Naomi was waiting at the bottom of the elevated station in a red wool, knee-length coat. Her hair seemed darker than I remembered. It was definitely longer, whisked down beneath her shoulders. She was smiling in a way that convinced me she would never stop.

  As I bounded down the stairs, my exuberance for this moment, one I had imagined in so many permutations across countless conversations, distracted me from my carry-on. The wheels caught a chip in the concrete – I fumbled my grip – and the suitcase flipped. End over end it bounced, right at Naomi, who twisted a little bit and stopped it with her boot.

  “Don’t kill me already,” she said.

  It was only the second time I had seen her in person.

  What we did that weekend was irrelevant. Togetherness was our happiness. Even in the middle of the night, as we walked on the darkest stretch of Avenue C to Naomi’s favorite river, the East River, and vagrants caught us sharing our first kiss, every moment was indelible and pristine.

  My last night in New York we split the cost of a boutique hotel room in Midtown and had sex for the first time, tepidly, sorting through our emotions and how our bodies fit together as we went. Uncertainty, not about what we wanted but about what we could have, unbalanced our movements. When it was over, I struggled to find a comfortable sleeping position and didn’t close my eyes for hours.

  I couldn’t have said so at the time, but we were already falling in love.

  THE NEXT YEAR AND A HALF

  The next year and a half was turbulent. It was also beautiful.

  I’d like to believe it was more beautiful than it was turbulent.

  Without much hesitation, in the middle of Naomi’s first trip to California, we decided to officially become a couple. But since we lived 2789 miles apart we constructed a different kind of relationship, one that was defined largely by phone calls and texts and IM’s and emails and wall posts and pictures sent back and forth digitally, with an occasional handwritten letter channeled in for romantic effect. On her first day working at an inpatient mental hospital in Washington Heights, I sent flowers. For her birthday, a stuffed dog that beeped out a robotic “Happy Birthday” melody showed up on her doorstep. There was a card in my mailbox for Valentine’s Day… And then there were the red-eye flights from LAX to JFK, my blue Mazda Protégé 5 left in parking lot C for forty hours at a time, hundreds of dollars leaving my checking account every month, changing time zones twice over the course of a weekend, sleeping whenever and wherever I could, concocting blog posts to stay afloat financially, connecting flights in Atlanta and Cincinnati at 6 AM, blood rushing to my spirit every time I saw her face, weekends where we were able to playact like a normal couple, dates and dinner, drinks and live music, meeting each other’s friends, days where all we did was make love in her cramped studio apartment on the Upper East Side.

  And then eventually we would have to say goodbye.

  There were tears. Always tears. While I held on to her in the subway and the airport, until against every wish I’d turn away, I’d go, with barely enough time to make it through security. I’d walk through the metal detector with tears smeared on my shirt. I’d leave, I’d fly away, I’d try to keep her face and her touch and her smell in my mind until the next time they would be real.

  As time went on, the situation became volatile. The stress of affording plane tickets and managing schedules was one thing; getting upset with each other because we wanted the other person to be there when they couldn’t be was another. Naomi was a voice on the phone, a series of characters in a text message, an emoticon in an IM, a profile picture on Facebook next to a comment left on my status. She was all of these things to me far more regularly than she was a living, breathing human being. If we encountered a cold spell or had an argument, we couldn’t simply look into each other’s eyes, cuddle on the couch, and feel that everything would be okay. We hung up the phone and got dead space followed by nothing. We were separated even further by time zones. She went to sleep. I stayed up to debate our future with the night. Even when we were together, fights would often materialize as the crush of the departing flight drew near.

  There was also the paranoia.

  Nights Naomi went out until 4 AM I knew she could cheat on me and I would never know. I assume she had similar thoughts about me, but we never discussed it. Relationships need implicit trust. Usually she would call me no matter what time she got home, but some nights she wouldn’t. I spent a few of those nights without sleep, thinking she was with someone else. When I talked to her in the morning she’d invariably tell me she passed out before she had the chance to call. I wanted to believe her, but it was difficult. My imagination was an expanding universe of possibilities – and perception is never far from reality.

  I debated sometimes, and I suspect Naomi did too, if it would be better for both of us if we broke up. But I loved her more than I ever thought I could love someone, and she loved me just the same. And that�
�s how we lasted to the day she called and said she wanted to move to LA.

  LOS ANGELES

  At first I thought she was joking. I must have said “really?” at least ten times. She responded “yes” over and over until she finally told me to stop saying “really?” or she was going to change her mind and not come. I was overjoyed. Living together would alleviate the issues. The problems created by distance would die.

  When I asked what happened to suddenly make her want to move to LA, she simply said it “felt right.” Her lease was about to be up. Her job was becoming less and less interesting by the day. If we wanted to try to have a future with one another, now was the best time.

  Over the next few weeks, we worked out her moving plans. She’d fly – she didn’t own a car – and she wouldn’t bring a lot with her. She’d ship some things she needed, but largely we would start anew. Together. We’d look for an apartment near UCLA, where she had a lead on a job doing PTSD research. Everything was thought out.

  Then one morning Naomi called me before dawn to talk about med school.

  THE BAD PERIOD

  She began by telling me most of her applications were due sooner than she had thought. She needed to start working on them now, before she got to LA. I wasn’t sure why this mattered. She had already taken the MCAT. I knew she did well and that she wouldn’t have to wait to retake it. But then she went on to tell me what I didn’t know – that she wasn’t sure she could go to any of the med schools in Southern California.

  In other words, Naomi called to say there was a chance she’d have to leave LA within the year.

  I tried to understand. She knew her field. I didn’t. But I was confused. Why couldn’t she go to USC or UCLA? According to her, neither had the perfect program. She insisted this didn’t change anything for us. She still wanted to move. She wanted to be with me. She said so repeatedly. She just needed to let me know something difficult could happen and, if it did, she asked me to make her a promise – that I’d go with her, wherever she went to med school, no matter the city or state.

  This was a promise I wanted to make. I really did.

  But I didn’t know if I could.

  I was earning enough money to survive by writing the blog, but my screenwriting career – my real dream and the whole purpose for me being in LA – was a work in progress. I had come to Hollywood to make contacts, to get my scripts read, to take meetings, to be at the epicenter of the industry, where I needed to be in order to break through, and that hadn’t happened yet. Nor could I predict when it would.

  Still, I made the promise.

  I told Naomi I would leave with her if it came to that. I said so with the hope that things would work out. So much could change in a year. I refused to let us break apart. Not now. We had come so far. Projecting certainty was for the best, I told myself. And I was right. By doing so, I allowed us to avoid a major crisis. Everything remained on track.

  A few days later, I took my 23-year-old brother Tim – who had just moved to LA to be an assistant at an art gallery – to a house party.

  JOE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

  The party was in Santa Monica, at a two-story apartment leased by the writer of a then yet-to-be-produced indie romantic comedy based on his own failed relationship. It was crowded and lively so Tim and I looked for empty space. We navigated upstairs, where we ran into my acquaintance Joe and briefly wished him happy birthday before grabbing cans of PBR and walking out onto the empty balcony.

  Gradually, as the apartment continued to fill up, people trickled outside with us. Most of them happened to be women. Tim was single. Naturally, little bits of interaction ensued. People don’t always believe we’re brothers because I look like our mom, and he looks like our dad, so we riffed off of that, sometimes lying and saying we weren’t brothers because it was easier that way. At one point, primarily because of how congested the balcony became, I ended up talking with a girl who resembled a brunette version of Kirsten Dunst. She was next to me with nowhere else to go. We exchanged hellos. It would’ve been awkward not to.

  That initial exchange of pleasantries evolved into a conversation about shared experiences. She was a grad student in the Media Studies program at USC. We talked about our ambitions, about how I wanted to be a screenwriter, and about how her thesis was progressing. Coincidentally, she wanted to be a writer after she got out of school, too. What kind of writer? Every kind of writer, she said. She wanted to do it all.

  While we were talking, it came up that “Kirsten” (she never gave me her name) had a boyfriend in DC. They were having problems. I told her what Naomi and I had been through over the past year and a half and that in a few weeks we were finally going to be living in the same place. We survived, I said. You can too. I thought it would help her to hear that.

  Eventually, I excused myself. Inside, I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I remember being upset with my hair and trying to fix it until someone knocked on the door. When I made it back to the balcony, Kirsten was gone. She left with her friend Jessica, a tall blonde snowboarder Tim had been talking to. They told him we should meet them at a bar two blocks away from the Third Street Promenade.

  A few minutes later, Tim and I left the party without saying goodbye to Joe. Tim plugged his iPod into my car stereo, and we listened to Eraser while driving drunk, deeper into Santa Monica, towards the ocean.

  RENEE’S AND THE VERY SMALL APARTMENT

  Renee’s was a blur of sequences and images. The bar was crammed full of people. I unexpectedly ran into my friend Matthew while knocking against bodies to get to the back room, where I found Kirsten bathed in red lighting next to a bookcase outfitted with strange hand painted dolls. I don’t know where Tim and Jessica went. One way or another, we all ended up outside the bar after last call with some guy named Curtis, who was trying to ingratiate himself with Jessica, and then before I think I really realized it, we were all walking back to her apartment.

  Jessica’s apartment was a miniscule studio, maybe 100 square feet total. The only places to sit were the floor and the bed. There were six of us. Jessica must have been drunker than I realized if she actually believed it was a good idea to bring all of us inside. Expectedly, she took the bed. Curtis planted himself next to her. I sat on the floor and slumped against the wall. A few feet away, Kirsten slipped down to the carpeting and moved close to me. The space between us was taken up by a presence, that imaginary thing that can be tactile when it’s meaningful. She was quiet, confidently pensive. If I had to guess, I would say she was wondering if I was thinking about her.

  Tim was sitting in a chair at Jessica’s desk a couple strides away from where I was on the floor. He called Jessica over to show her something on his Facebook profile. When I turned to see what it was, I made eye contact with Kirsten. I kept looking at her and she kept looking back, and neither of us looked away, and at that moment I knew I could have her if I wanted her.

  Almost unconsciously, I turned away.

  Time passed, and Tim came down to the floor. I leaned in and said, “My girlfriend’s going to wake up in New York in like an hour. We need to go home.”

  So we did.

  Back at my apartment, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When the temperature was one notch away from scalding, I stepped inside. I let the water pour down on me, and I thought about what this moment would be like if I had slept with Kirsten and about what would come next, if Naomi would be able to tell something was different when we talked, if I would make excuses for what I did, or if I would hate myself. Would I have told Naomi the truth, or would I have said nothing and tried to hide it? Did Kirsten want to have an affair with me? A one night stand? Would we start dating if Naomi and I ever broke up?

  Done with the shower, I toweled off and climbed into bed. Sleep came before I could answer the questions.

  Neither Tim nor I ever saw Kirsten or Jessica again. Tim gave up on Jessica when she didn’t accept his friend request.

  THE FLIGHT

&
nbsp; Naomi booked her flight on June 22nd, the same day she gave two weeks notice at work. She forwarded me the itinerary: United flight 64 leaving CLE on July 19th at 8:54 AM and arriving at LAX at 11:35 AM. She decided to fly out of Ohio so she could move her furniture back to her parents’ house after her lease ended on the 16th. She would spend the eleven days between exiting NYC and entering LA with them in Daventry. She was never very close with her mom and dad, but she had recently been making an effort to shorten that gap. The distance between them was as an effect of resentment – Naomi believed their marriage had been broken since she was born. In her mind, she would have been better off if they had gotten a divorce.