This Book Does Not Exist Page 5

  We walk through the large-scale aeronautical murder scene, up to the remnants of Naomi’s parents’ house. Geppetto navigates around the smoldering aircraft. He waves me over and enters through the breach in the home. Lagging behind, I slip inside after he is out of sight.

  “Over here.”

  I trail the sound of Geppetto’s voice through the den, into the family room. I’ve spent hours with Naomi inside this house, mainly during holidays, but the proverbial smell of nostalgia I anticipate is wiped out by the literal stench of death.

  Geppetto is leaning over a group of bodies covered by wreckage. I can’t determine their identities through the debris, but the clothing indicates two men and two women, couples of different ages – one old and one young. All four are holding hands, as if they knew the plane was coming and they chose to die in communion. My thoughts flash to the plane crash in Phoenix, where Naomi’s brother and sister-in-law live, and my inability to get her parents on the phone. I look away. Geppetto talks.

  “I can’t tell you what will happen from here on out other than to say you clearly need to resolve your separation from Naomi. The incidents my world provides are designed to be illuminating in this regard. Usually, they help people like you and her. Depending on how everything goes. Either way, they formulate a journey. And this is what you both need.”

  “What kind of journey? What do I need to learn?”

  “The rest is for you to figure out, one way or another. This is your first experience with loss, correct?”

  “My- My grandpa when I was little, but I can’t remember…”

  “You haven’t dealt with death.”

  I shake my head no.

  “People die, Mike. Every person does. And before they do they live. Like you, this man grew up, and he fell in love with a woman. Sure, he didn’t go to college and he worked at the steel mill while you have a degree and ‘ambition’ – however you want to define that word – but generally speaking, we all follow this same kind of trajectory in life. You start as part of a family, you grow out of it, you form your own family… This man married the first woman he really, truly loved. He fathered two children, both of whom grew up to love other people’s children. The boy chose to marry the first young woman he fell in love with. These two men did things differently than you have so far – or at least more quickly.

  “Those are the headlines. But in between are smaller peaks and valleys, some obstacles overcome and some hurdles that can’t be cleared. The parents were almost separated after the father started drinking heavily to deal with his ailing back. The boy and his wife had been trying to conceive a child for months. It wasn’t working. There was coldness. There was stress.

  “And now this plane crash.

  “Both men had to see their wives, whom they loved very much, die. But not just die. They had to see them killed, with the knowledge that they could do nothing to save them. Even worse – and it is even worse, you don’t know this, but it is – the parents had to see their child killed in the very same manner.

  “Sometimes things end badly. This is life.

  “You could be lying in much the same position they are, except on your parents’ porch,” he continues, “but you chose to kill the pilot. Even given the state you’re in, with the dark thoughts you’ve circled throughout your life, you did what it took to keep yourself alive. This should not be lost on you.

  “You did well killing the pilot,” he adds. “Killing isn’t good per se, but ‘good’ isn’t what this is always about.”

  Geppetto looks at me, and I look back at him. “How do you know so much about me?” I ask.

  “Oh, I could deduce most of it from what I found online. But come on, let’s get you out of here. You have things to consider, people to find.”

  He walks out of the house.

  I go with him, chased by a tornado of questions.

  By the time I get outside, Geppetto is already at the bottom of the driveway. He pulls a set of keys from his pocket. He selects one and carefully inserts it into the air, as if into an invisible keyhole. He turns the key and mimes the opening of a door. Incredibly, an actual door appears as he does. He opens it all the way. On the other side of the threshold, I can see the inside of the building in East Cleveland.

  Geppetto has re-opened the Door. He has given me a passageway back to where I came from.

  I approach the Door but stop in front of him. My lips quiver as I say, “I need to find Naomi.”

  “She’s here,” he says. “We’ll help you.”

  And with that Geppetto ushers me back through the Door. I pivot to ask him questions, but there isn’t time – I’m already back inside the building, and the Door has been shut behind me.

  I grab the handle and twist. Nothing. I fight. The Door refuses to come unhinged.

  I let go and stand still while my mind runs.

  PURSUIT OF AN EXPLANATION

  In time, I make my way outside.

  My car is where I left it. As when I arrived, the sun has not quite set. According to the clock on my phone, time stopped after I went through the Door, as if wherever it took me wasn’t only separate from East Cleveland but also disconnected from the chronology of the universe. Does a place like that exist? In books and movies and paintings and music it does. But that’s art. There’s no science behind it. Theories in quantum mechanics concerning parallel universes are speculative. Nothing has been proven.

  I walk to the rear of the building, looking for the other side of the Door. All I find is the weathered wooden siding of the exterior, which doesn’t make any sense. Why would it? Neither does anything else.

  “She’s here,” said Geppetto, a peculiar old man who seems to know more about me than any stranger should, paradoxically making him difficult to trust. He claimed Naomi found the Door because she is either “falling into or out of love.” He said the other world inside the Door – the world he lives in – would help resolve things between us. But I don’t understand what needs to be resolved. Naomi was coming to LA. Her flight was booked. Everything was resolved. How could a plane crash and a homicidal pilot fit into that? Geppetto described the events as an “incident.” He talked about them like challenges I needed to confront and learn from in order to find Naomi.

  All of this sounds insane.

  I leave the backyard for the street. After my experience inside the Door, the bombed out neighborhood barely rattles me.

  I unlock my car. It’s not until I’m inside and the engine is running that I remember however many minutes ago it wouldn’t work at all.

  On Carnegie, my phone recovers service. I thumb out a message to Geppetto via Facebook asking how I’m supposed to find Naomi if I can’t get the Door open.

  Twenty minutes later, idling near the entrance to the highway, I’m still waiting for a response.

  Too riddled with anxiety to sit still, I get on the highway and head west.

  I’ll go to my parents’ neighborhood, to the actual site of “The Plane Crash Incident” and investigate its reality.

  THE SCENE OF DEATH

  I head south off the highway, down a generic two-lane road. The sprawling cornfield to my right has been here as long as I’ve been alive. The modernly designed police station on the opposite side of the road has not. The headquarters for Daventry’s Finest is imposingly positioned next to a forest and a creek that were made into a state park some time within the past year. When I was in college, I told people Daventry was the last suburb west of Cleveland. This road marks the edge of town, the crease between suburban and rural. How much longer that will be the case is impossible to predict. Even in the economically starved environment of Northeast Ohio, some modicum of development, in one form or another, persists.

  Coming up on the driveway to the police station, I tweak my speed to make sure I’m going exactly thirty-five. I become paranoid that a cop will pull out after me anyway.

  None do.

  I jab the gas and then let off it. I have to stop soon. The allotme
nt where my parents live is just ahead. At the next intersection, I’ll be one right turn and a half mile away from the site of the plane crash.

  I brake at the stop sign. I flip on my blinker. I am the only car at the four-way intersection. I listen to my blinker tick. Finally, on the fifth tick, I pull through the intersection and into the allotment, shutting my eyes for a moment before opening them all the way.

  The street isn’t a crime scene.

  There are no bodies, mangled cars, or drying smears of blood on the beige concrete. Naomi’s parents’ house is untouched. I allow my car to drift towards it, onto the wrong side of the road. Straining to catch a glimpse inside, I see nothing – the curtains are drawn – but I do notice a young married couple pulling weeds in the backyard next door. Were they inside the Door? I think I might have watched them die when the plane crashed. But here they are, definitively alive and seemingly undisturbed, as if nothing ever happened.

  And to them maybe it didn’t.

  I drive to the cul-de-sac where my mom and dad live, to where I killed the pilot, needing to be sure it’s clear as well.

  It is.

  Relieved, I continue around the circle. Rolling past my parents’ driveway, I question whether I should stop to see them or not. I think I should – but how could I begin to explain what’s gone on? I can assume Tim has told them I’m in Ohio. For now, that will have to be good enough.

  That there is no evidence of the incident here in Daventry eliminates the possibility that the Door is a fantastical teleportation device. But then what could it be? A nightmare? A hallucination?

  Apprehensive that I may be writing to a figment of my imagination, I message Geppetto again, demanding answers. I don’t seem to have any other choice. I can’t make sense of the situation on my own. I’m desperate. I haven’t slept. I’ve taken too much Vivarin, and it has to be catching up to me.

  I look at my arms. The wounds from the pilot’s knife are there. I touch the blood that has hardened on my skin.

  I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.

  I drive out of the cul-de-sac. Now is absolutely not the right time to talk to my parents – or to try again to reach Naomi’s.

  As I leave the allotment, a cartoon pitter-patter springs out of my phone, startling me and signaling an alert from Facebook, which turns out to be a response from Geppetto. He has added a profile picture – an image of himself at the site of the plane crash, cleaning up debris with a broom and a dust trap. In the body of the message, he has ignored all of my questions and written the following:

  “If you go to the Door, I have a read on Naomi’s location.”

  JFK

  At night, driving down Cedar Road resembles driving into a cavern. The potholes are harder to see and easier to hit. I turn the volume of my car stereo up louder than I ever have before. The music from “Street Lights” crushes the speakers, and Kanye West sings:

  “I know my destination, but I’m not just there”

  When I reach Geppetto’s, I park on the road and get out of my car.

  The neighborhood is silent. As far as I can tell, no one else is around. Surprisingly, my phone has coverage. Only one bar, however, and it’s wavering.

  I pace towards the building. There is a certain amount of madness, I admit, to my being here. If Naomi really is behind the Door and inside what appears to be an extra-hazardous version of our world, what will I have to go through to find her? More scenarios like The Plane Crash Incident? How many?

  What am I willing to risk?

  I check on my car. Something is blowing in the wind near the front tire. I watch as the object bounces down the street before being swallowed by a pothole. Curious, I chase it down.

  Within the broken piece of pavement lies a sealed red envelope from Netflix. After looking around for a mailman who doesn’t exist, I pick it up. The address on the mailing label has worn off. Seeing no harm in doing so, I tear the paper along its perforated edge.

  Inside is a copy of the Oliver Stone directed JFK, the first R-rated movie my parents ever allowed me to see. My dad and I watched it in Downtown Cleveland at the Tower City mall, which at the time was the pinnacle of shopping as we knew it.

  I was thirteen then. Almost no one had the Internet and perceptions were dictated by smaller, contained reams of information. My thoughts about Tower City were derived from what my friends and their parents told me and my parents, not from how it actually compared to other malls in the region and around the country. I wasn’t aware of those places. Back then, I had little control over what I learned. Everything was pushed to me at the speed of conversations and morning newspapers and the evening news. Today, Tower City is castigated and avoided. But I’m not sure if it has gotten markedly worse, or if I merely have a greater base of information to draw comparisons from.

  As for JFK, I was completely taken with the movie. Afterwards, I learned everything I could about the assassination and (in my newly teenaged eyes) the probable conspiracy. I read books and asked questions of the people around me who were alive when both JFK and Oswald were killed. I remember lending Jim Garrison’s autobiography to a girl I had a crush on in 7th grade. She never offered to return the book, and I was too shy to follow-up with her in person. Since that was my only option, I let it go.

  Now, years later, with my fixation on the conspiracy to assassinate JFK having left me long ago, much like the Garrison book, albeit without the quiet rejection, I find myself standing in East Cleveland, in a position I never imagined being in, reminded of my past through the odd discovery of a wind blown DVD.

  Removing the disc from the sleeve and spinning it on my finger, I wonder if I would still enjoy the movie, or if my adoration was just a product of naïveté, of me being thirteen, of it being my first R-rated experience.

  I return the DVD to the sleeve and the sleeve to the envelope. Not sure what else to do, I set it back down in the pothole and turn towards the building and its slogan.

  “Come to Geppetto’s today because tomorrow may be too late”

  I should already be in the other world. I can’t delay it any longer.

  I start for the entrance to Geppetto’s again.

  Once inside, everything appears the same. The room is empty but ominous. The Door looks harmless, but my memories of it aren’t, and I can’t shake the feeling I’m being reckless, that coming back here is a deadly mistake.

  I approach the Door. I grasp and turn the handle.

  The Door opens.

  —the white light—

  Suddenly, I don’t know if I can do this.

  It’s too late.

  I try to concentrate on seeing Naomi.

  My concentration breaks.

  I am in the other world.

  THE SECOND INCIDENT

  I’m not standing on a street in the neighborhood I grew up in.

  I’m somewhere I’ve never been before. Somewhere unknown.

  The sunlight is obnoxious, and people I don’t recognize are everywhere. Their style is old-fashioned, from another era. My guess would be the 60’s.

  When I raise my hands to push a dull ache out of my temples I realize I have on a different shirt, a white button down. Before I walked through the Door, I was wearing a white T-shirt. I look down at my chest. A skinny black tie is hanging from my neck. My pants are new, too. Dark denim has been replaced with black wool.

  This incident is nothing like the last one.

  As I turn to survey the area behind me, a pair of glasses slides down my nose. When I take off the square black frames and thick lenses, my vision immediately deteriorates into a mess of a blur. I’ve lost my contacts, and my eyesight is awful. Too much near work. Too much time spent staring at screens. Quickly, I put the glasses back on so I can see more than a foot in front of me.

  I stare through the crowd and down the road, which is cordoned off. Excited people line up behind barricades while security-types in suits patrol the edges of the street.

  I grasp that this is some sort of p
arade route.

  Looking past the barricades, I see a grassy knoll.

  A girl about my age cuts me off to get closer to the parade route. I ask her where I am, if this is Dallas, and she either doesn’t hear me or ignores the question.

  Then I spot a building.

  I think it’s the book depository.

  No. Given the DVD, the parade route, and the grassy knoll, I’m positive it’s the book depository.

  The Door has taken me to Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

  Geppetto said to come to the Door because he had a read on Naomi’s location.

  Why the hell would she be here?

  At least I have a place to start. I have reason to believe Naomi is nearby, and I have experience within an incident already, not to mention expectations for what will occur in this environment.

  Someone is going to shoot the President.

  I’m operating within a set of parameters.

  Theoretically.

  I look from the book depository to the grassy knoll and back again.

  There is a glint of something in the window.

  A gun.

  I flashback to the pilot attacking me during the last incident.

  The shooter could be aiming for me.

  Geppetto said this other world would help.

  What if he lied?

  What if the Door actually wants to prevent me from finding Naomi?

  That would mean I can only reach her if I beat the Door.