This Book Does Not Exist Read online

  I offered to fly to New York help with the move, but she maintained it wasn’t worth it. She could handle everything on her own. Of course she could… And she did. The move went as anticipated. I didn’t talk to her until she was on the road to Ohio, but when I did, she sounded excited about how close we were to the first day of our new life together.

  Over the next couple of weeks, we texted more than we talked because of how often she was with her parents, but I came away with the impression she was enjoying herself. No fights with mom and dad. No reason to complain.

  Two days ago, on July 19th, I woke up to a text that read, “Today’s the day :)”

  Her plane had already taken off so I didn’t text back. I did sit-ups while my coffee brewed and re-arranged a couple areas in the bedroom to create a extra space for her belongings. I still wasn’t sure where we would fit the boxes she mailed – although I didn’t understand why none of them had showed up yet. Naomi wasn’t concerned, and I stopped bringing it up because I know I have a tendency to over-worry.

  At 11:10 AM, I put on my sunglasses, walked out of the apartment, and locked the door. I hurried to my car with the attitude of the child I once was, a little kid on my way to the arcade.

  I made it to LAX at 11:30 AM. I parked and went to the United terminal. I watched as people with Cleveland Browns and Cavs T-shirts and hats came down the escalator into baggage claim. I had memorized what the experience of seeing Naomi’s face again, after so much time apart, was like from all the flights I’d taken to New York. I wondered if she would be different coming off a one-way flight, if her usual enthusiasm would be supercharged.

  As more and more people who were not Naomi descended the escalator, I grew anxious. Where was she? The parade of clothes with the logos of Cleveland sports teams had ended. Men stopped to drag baggage off the spinning carousel, interrupting fateful reunions. The escalator continued its cycle without feet to carry. The amount of unclaimed luggage dwindled. I scurried up and down the terminal, scanning everywhere. Maybe I was in the wrong place. Maybe I had mixed something up…

  But I hadn’t. This was where Naomi was supposed to be.

  She just wasn’t there.

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  I’ve been calling Naomi constantly for the past two days. Her phone rings. She doesn’t answer. I leave messages. She doesn’t respond.

  Last night, I checked Facebook and found she wasn’t on my friends list anymore. I searched the entire site. Her profile is gone.

  I have no idea where she is.

  Other people who might know something have been unable to help. They either don’t return my texts, or they say something vague like, “I thought she was going to med school.” Supposedly her parents took her to the airport. At least that’s what I’ve heard. I haven’t talked to her mom or dad directly. When I call their house, they don’t pick up.

  Her plane didn’t crash. I made sure. And if she had to delay her trip because she came down with some kind of terrible illness she would have told me. All it would have taken was a text.

  This is how she would disappear if she had been kidnapped. But she hasn’t been on TV. When young, photogenic women are abducted, that’s where they end up. Missing White Women Syndrome. Naomi fits the model of other lost girls like Natalee Holloway and Michelle Gardner-Quinn. If she has been taken, then no one knows it yet or the crime is being kept secret. The police would be trying to find me. They always talk to the boyfriend first.

  Of course, something far more realistic has plunged into my mind over the past 48 hours: what if Naomi got scared? Moving, applying to med school, possibly leaving again within a year… What if she suddenly decided it was too much to put herself through? She could be ducking me, avoiding confrontation until she’s sure what she wants. But I never picked up on any signs of hesitation or fear. She already quit her job and left New York. Naomi has never been shy. She would have said something if she were experiencing doubts. She brought up the issues with med school very deliberately, after all, knowing that would be a difficult conversation. None of her friends have even hinted that she doesn’t want me to know where she is. I think someone would have signaled as much if that were the case.

  I should be able to reach her. I don’t understand why I can’t.

  I’m lost. I’m frightened. I hurt.

  Naomi could be all of these things too. Or worse.

  I need us to be okay.

  This morning, in an attempt to work through the possibilities of what might have led to Naomi’s disappearance, I started chronicling my search in prose. The writing may not be any good, but at least something is coming out. What I haven’t admitted to anyone, including Naomi, is that whenever I try to write movies I can only construct individual scenes. The more I work at those scenes, the better they become, but I can’t put together an entire screenplay. All I have on my laptop are folders and folders of fragments. The last script I worked on was about a man who slept through the apocalypse and woke up to discover he was the only person left on the planet. I wrote a sequence in which he climbed out of bed in the morning, left his house, traversed a post-apocalyptic wasteland and failed to find anyone. Then I got blocked.

  Maybe the difference is that Naomi and I are real and the characters and the stories in my screenplays aren’t.

  I spend every second trying to figure out where Naomi is. I haven’t been sleeping. In the last twelve minutes, I sent out seven texts, posted on sixteen Facebook walls and attempted to call her again four separate times. Every call went straight to voice mail.

  On Facebook I change my status to:

  “…and there goes the love of my life.”

  Into my @onemikey Twitter feed, I type:

  “Naomi is a ghost.”

  I feel like I built a house and trapped myself inside.

  I’m going to pass out.

  THE FRIEND REQUEST

  I wake up in the middle of the night. I immediately check my iPhone and see a new notification from Facebook, a friend request from someone named “Geppetto W.” He doesn’t have a profile picture, no mutual friends are listed, and his page is private. To see his entire profile I have to be his friend.

  Figuring there’s little danger in accepting Geppetto’s request since I can always defriend him later, I do so and then examine his profile. I am his only friend. His profile is almost completely empty. No network is listed, no hometown. There’s nothing in the personal or contact information boxes. His “About Me,” “Interests,” “Likes,” and “Activities” sections aren’t even visible because he’s left them blank. The “Education and Work” field is the only part that’s semi-filled out:

  Employer: “Geppetto’s”

  Location: “East Cleveland”

  No further specifics are given.

  Stumped, I notice a message has appeared in my inbox.

  It’s from Geppetto.

  The message has no subject, one picture, and a single sentence.

  The picture is of Naomi’s parents’ house.

  The sentence says, “I can help you find Naomi, but not unless you come to Ohio.”

  THE MESSAGE

  Is it a hoax? Is someone I reached out to for help being cruel? Are they taking advantage of my desperate state? I don’t know, but this is the closest I’ve come to actual information on Naomi’s whereabouts.

  I write the stranger back: “What do you mean by help? Do you actually know where she is?”

  After pressing reply, I Google “geppetto w.” All that comes up are links to Pinocchio-related merchandise. On the web, the “w.” is interpreted as “with,” which makes me think the name “Geppetto W.” is either made-up or incomplete, abridged to conceal his identity. I almost write back again to ask if he kidnapped her, but a response shows up first:

  “Just come to Ohio. You’ve already lost the girl. What else is there for you to lose?”

  I debate calling the police. I don’t want to overreact. I seem to be the only one who’s reached this level
of concern about Naomi. Could it be because I’m the only one who doesn’t know where she is?

  I know I’m paranoid. Sometimes I think I’m crazy.

  I go to Kayak.com and plug “LAX” and “CLE” into the search fields, setting the departure date to today. I could leave in the morning and rent a car in Cleveland, but when would I come back? I suppose I could buy a one-way ticket, although that might be more expensive than driving cross country, depending on how long I need to stay.

  I leave my desk and enter the bathroom. Although I’m alone, I close the door, embarrassed. While deliberating what to do about Ohio, I pull up my T-shirt and pick at the skin on my chest. It’s a bad habit and much of my skin is broken and scarred as a result. The abuse forces me to concentrate my thoughts. It helps me with decisions and ideas. There has to be a better way. I don’t want to inflict this pain on myself anymore. I want it to stop. I hate being in the same position I was in as an overweight teenager, afraid to take my shirt off at a public pool or during a shirts and skins basketball game. Sometimes I won’t let Naomi feel the flesh of my upper body against her naked chest.

  I take a pair of scissors off the bathroom counter and snip the scruff on my cheeks. My hair seems long on the sides. I consider trimming it. I would need somewhere to stay in Ohio. Having received so little help since Naomi disappeared, I’ve lost faith in everyone. I start to cut the uneven pieces of hair around my ears. The combination of my actions and the size of my face in the mirror reminds me of a sequence from The Royal Tenenbaums where Richie Tenenbaum attempts to commit suicide. The sound of Richie saying, “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow,” and the image of him taking out a razor blade and slitting his wrists enters me. I badly want to talk to Naomi. I picture us living together, her coming home from work, opening the door to our apartment. We smile and say hello and then we kiss before she goes into the bedroom to change. The fantasy is disrupted before she comes back out. I return to The Royal Tenenbaums and Dudley walking into the bathroom, finding Richie lying on the bathroom floor amidst splatters and smears of his own blood. I wonder why Richie said he was going to kill himself tomorrow and then attempted to kill himself today.

  In this moment I decide I have to do whatever it takes to find Naomi.

  I don’t have much money. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to subsist. I can’t say if the message from the stranger is a clue or a hoax, but it has become an act of provocation.

  I walk back to my computer, and I email Tim, asking him to check-in on my place while I’m gone. I might need him to sell my belongings and vacate the apartment if it takes too long for me to find answers, and I run out of cash.

  Driving is the best option. I take a shower, pack some things, walk downstairs into the garage, and get in my car.

  ON THE WAY

  In Texas, I stop at a Coffee Bean with a flat screen TV on the wall. The news, the weather, sports scores, and some other tidbits not worth mentioning are playing on the TV, different pieces of colorful text rotating on and off the screen without the accompaniment of sound. This is the new newspaper, I think. But the thought doesn’t last for long because the next thing I notice on the crawl is that a F-18 fighter jet has crashed in a residential portion of Phoenix, where Naomi’s brother and sister-in-law live.

  For the first time, I wonder if she went to visit them. Why I hadn’t thought of this before I don’t know. It upsets me that I missed one possible destination. Who knows how many other mistakes I’ve made?

  As I walk back outside, I stare at my phone. I’ve called and texted Naomi so many times by now that the thought of trying her again makes me feel helpless. There’s no power in dialing phone numbers and leaving messages, but I press send anyway. When it goes to voice mail, I hang up without leaving a message.

  I start back towards the coffee shop, but I can’t shake my uneasiness about the situation in Phoenix. I stop and try Naomi’s parents. I need to eliminate all sources of worry.

  The phone at their house rings three times before someone picks up. I can’t hear exactly what they say because of a loud banging in the background, like a whole slew of heavy things are repeatedly being dropped. I try talking over it, but the noise keeps coming. It’s useless. I end the call and re-dial.

  It rings five times and then the answering machine crackles on. Unexpectedly, Naomi is the voice on the machine. This is new. Her tone is happy, “We can’t come to the phone right now but leave a message!” She sounds younger to me, as if this is an old recording being re-used. In the background, her mom and dad laugh before the beep cuts them off.

  “Hello?” I say. “If you’re there, it’s Mike. I just tried calling a second ago…”

  No one answers.

  I head back inside Coffee Bean. I gaze at the TV until the plane crash comes up again on the crawl. There is no new news. I order a large coffee and leave, with a film clip of the fighter jet obliterating Shawn and Emily’s house playing in my mind.

  I hope the movie I’m imagining doesn’t turn out to be a documentary.

  I hope Naomi wasn’t in Phoenix.

  I hope the archival answering machine recording wasn’t a tribute to her memory.

  DAVENTRY

  It took me 37 hours to drive all the way from California to Ohio, from Los Angeles to Daventry. To make it without spending the night at a motel, I consumed Vivarin like peanut butter M&M’s. I still had to stop three times, twice at rest stops in Oklahoma and once on the side of the road in Texas. I slept in each place for an hour at a time. A giant vanilla milkshake from McDonald’s helped carry me through St. Louis and Indianapolis and into Ohio. When I reached the turnpike in Toledo, it was night (again), and I started to hallucinate. The brake lights on the semi trucks in front of me transformed into devil-like monsters, as my mental and physical selves seemed to separate. I had an out of body experience, and I no longer believed I could control my car. Thankfully, it passed. I caught my second wind once dawn began to break.

  Now, I pay the toll for the turnpike at the toll booth in Daventry and drive onto the exit ramp, which manages to be long without being winding. Both sides of the road are lined with trees, and the leaves seem to be falling off prematurely. The trees themselves are more ashen than I remember, and I wonder if they’re dying. The day itself is blisteringly grey, like someone flipped a switch on the sun to change the color of its light from golden to cement. I would expect this from Daventry in the winter, not in the summertime.

  At the conclusion of the exit ramp, I should find Route 58, a four-lane state highway that runs north-south through Daventry, straight into Lake Erie. I don’t. Instead, I discover a city. An advertisement for the paint company Sherwin-Williams, which famously replaced the LeBron James “Witness” banner, hangs from a middling-sized skyscraper. A baseball stadium with the lights wastefully on despite the time of day grabs my attention. I see a sign for East 9th Street. Somehow I got off at the wrong exit. I’m in Cleveland, on the near west side Innerbelt, heading east. I can’t figure out how I ended up here, but I suppose this is the sort of thing that happens when you haven’t slept for a day and a half.

  In front of me, the road bends sharply underneath a tall bridge, coming up on a high accident area nicknamed “Dead Man’s Curve.” The next exit is for Carnegie, so I take it, planning to use the corresponding entrance ramp to loop onto the westbound side of the highway and head back towards Daventry.

  My plan fails, however, when the entrance ramp I need to get on is closed in order for city workers to replace a mangled crosswalk sign.

  Heading east down Carnegie, away from downtown Cleveland, I try to see if my surroundings match anything from my memory of previous drives to the East Side and the campus of Case Western Reserve, where a friend went to college. I think I can remember how to get back to Daventry from there. Some things do, like the warning signs for electronic speed traps, the frequent stoplights, the new construction interspersed with broken down homes and gas stations with bars over the windows. Other things
don’t. I’m unsure about many of the structures that belong to the Cleveland Clinic. Is this how they used to look? Were they even here before? I can’t say for sure whether this is the right way or not, so I decide to keep pressing onward until I can.

  Eventually, I spot the name of a street I definitely recognize – Cedar Road – and it clicks for me that this is a route I’ve taken in the past. I’m supposed to turn right onto Cedar, I remember, so I do.

  Cedar Road is filled with potholes that would look at home amongst craters on the moon. I am the only traffic. Cliché-like, small groups of men stand on the corners of adjacent streets, either to do business or to escape dilapidated homes. The number of houses that have been abandoned altogether multiplies the further I look off the main drag. It would be easy to assume these houses are victims of the foreclosure crisis, but I suspect they may just be products of moribund prosperity in the Industrial Midwest.

  I pass an ancient strip mall with only one open store, a barbershop. The rest of the spaces are up for rent. If the people living here, in what I guess are the East 80’s, weren’t already haunted by reality, the mall could be turned into a haunted house for Halloween, I think, as I check the street signs to confirm exactly where I am.