Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

I’ve noticed a condition I call “morning weakness,” and while some of my more macho acquaintances insist that there’s no such thing, others have confirmed to me that it is a very real medical condition. Now I’m not exactly Samson even at my prime, but it’s my experience that immediately upon waking, and for ten to fifteen minutes afterwards, I’m weak as a kitten (though an abnormally large kitten could probably overpower me too).

Ordinarily this is an annoyance more than anything. Let’s face it: the heaviest thing most people need to lift after getting out of bed is a toothbrush. But on occasion it’s put me at a severe disadvantage. My little brother, for example, had a habit when he was younger of jumping on me in bed and initiated a wrestling match that would invariable leave me pinned and helpless–a particular humiliation for someone four years older than him!

It’s also inconvenient when there’s an emergency. On the day in question, I was roused from my sleep by the whine of the fire alarm. Ordinarily there would be no problem; my room was right near the apartment’s central stairwell and safety.

No, the problem was my backpack, overloaded with books and my laptop computer. Morning weakness had set in and, try as I might, I couldn’t lift it or any of the items inside.

The Company had set Davis up in a hovel, a house on the very edge of Kariton that had been for rent by the day, fully furnished. The town didn’t have a hotel, or even a motel–too small–but the suits weren’t willing to pay for a car and gas to get to Heysley, a half-hour away and the closest polity resembling a city.

From what Davis had been able to tell, Kariton functioned much as it had before becoming a Company test market. People came and went all day using the mass-transit teleporters just like a city bus, resorting to their personal cars only for larger loads. A few luddites refused to use them at all, and kids under 18 were forced to walk thanks to the Company’s legal department–big surprise. As an outsider, Davis found himself treated coolly. People were polite to his face but never seemed to go out of their way to be so when he wasn’t looking. Still, there were plenty who’d cross the street to avoid an encounter, and even a few who furtively followed him about.

But nothing really disconcerting happened until Tuesday morning, when a harsh knock at the door brought Davis running. No one was there, but something had been laid on the welcome mat, wrapped in paper. It was a comic book he remembered from his youth, The Adventures of the Swamp Terror about a horrifying plant-man and a ragtag group of hunters who battled him.

A message was scrawled across the cover: “You are dead, and the Swamp Terror lives.”

The fortress in Mistra heard of the fall of Constantinople and the death of their Emperor in battle during the sixth month of the siege. The Turks gave them the news under a flag of truce, from the lips of a captured and bloodied Byzantine official dragged there for that purpose. No doubt they thought that the fortress would surrender honorably if this fact was known by the men at arm garrisoned there. Not a day later a message arrived by ship from the Venetians, saying that there would be no reinforcement and no rescue; the Turks allowed that messenger safe passage as well.

At a council of war, the commander asked his subordinates what should be done: with no emperor, he held their oaths absolved and was willing to surrender if they willed it. Not a single one advocated the position.

Instead, the surviving men at arms who could fight donned their armor and unfurled their flags. The relics were spread among the sick and injured for safekeeping. And, at dawn, the fortress gate was opened.

The commander and his men marched out resplendent, to the tune of a Greek march played by a few of the more able wounded on the ramparts. Weapons and armor glistening from a night of spit and polish, the defenders hurled themselves at the Turkish lines, ignoring the cannons and tens upon thousands of men arrayed against them.

They were slaughtered to a man, though the ferocious battle took many of the besiegers with it–far greater casualties than had been anticipated if the walls had been breached and the stronghold stormed. In retaliation, the men remaining within the fortress were slaughtered, with only the few women and children inside spared.

The icons were lost in the ensuing melee, and have never been recovered.

Maybe it was the way people walked, or the way their carts worked over the deeply rutted main street. Maybe it was the furtive glances from the children, or the long contemplative stared from the elderly. The general brownness of the place, perhaps, everything caked by dust and debris that would normally be brushed away in the course of daily life.

It could have been any one of those things, or even all of them; Reynald couldn’t be sure. But he felt one thing as clearly as if it were spelled out in stone on the local church.

Bernwald was a melancholy place.

Borne down by some weight, the heavy sadness was evident in every man, woman, and child Reynald could see.

Solveig delighted in being unconventional, to the point that even her unconventionality defied convention. All the other unconventionalists on the Telthusbakken (and there were many that held themselves to be so) tended to behave in similar ways. They’d attend rallies for the same unpopular causes, wear the same unpopular clothing, indulge in the same trite ‘scandalous’ behavior. Solveig saw this as a roundabout way of the other girls calling attention to themselves and seeking to interest boys (and for more than one of the Telthusbakken girls it was probably an accurate impression).

But underneath it all they still conformed to the same rules and conventions that everyone else did. Solveig took particular delight in uncovering those mundane conventions and flouting them in subtle yet meaningful ways. Nothing ostentatious–to get too carried away was to become one of the others–but always very deliberate.

People drove on the right, and so tended to walk on the right. Solveig walked on the left, and forced people to detour around her.

People faced forward in elevators. Solveig faced the back to the great consternation of all persons boarding, riding, or disembarking.

People paid with debit cards, credit, or large bills. Solveig paid with 50 øre coins.

I found Julian right where I thought he’d be: at the heart of the facility.

He’d couldn’t’ve been there a few moments, but the bastard had set up a small mirror to watch his back, in case Castiglio and Kearns failed. I didn’t see the thing until it was almost too late; two rounds from Julian’s pistol shattered the concrete where my head had been moments ago.

Luckily I’d drawn back. I’ve learned to be cautious when things seem too easy.

“Is that all you’ve got for me, Julian?” I shouted around the corner. “Not even a hello?”

“I gave you two of them,” he retorted. “You always were too self-centered, Max. It’s all about you. What did you expect me to do, give a speech?”

I eased my way toward a side hall, painfully aware of how unarmed and vulnerable I was. “I thought after all we’d been through you’d at least want to put a proper ending to it.”

“You’ve got guts, Max. I could’ve used somebody like you. Herringbone, he never saw the potential, but I did. If you’d been a little smarter we could have avoided all this.”

I silently unhooked a fire extinguisher from the wall. “Maybe we still can. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“I think things are pretty well set on their course by now,” Julian said. “And I sure as hell am not going to listen to you when you try to get me reminiscing for tactical advantage. You leave now, maybe there’s still a chance, but if we come face to face the last thing you’re gonna see is me smiling.”

“He’s through here, Comrade General.”

The adjutant led Santos through the Ministry of State Security annex toward the interrogation rooms. The demanding affairs of state precluded the general’s direct participation in most security affairs, of course, but he enjoyed keeping his hand in the game. After all, he’d made his bones working state security for the late President Barranca before transferring to a combat command, and during his tenure he’d maintained some of the best numbers of the MSS interrogators.

The gentleman–Santos refused to be told the prisoner’s name until it was voluntarily given up–was in Annex C, designated for the most severe offenders. Unlike his predecessor, who had favored mossy ex-monastic cells in the Punto de los Delfines, Santos insisted on a clean, almost clinical atmosphere; the air of civilization such a place projected helped undermine foreigners’ perception of the general’s beloved country as a place of savages.

“Let me tell you something,” Santos said, walking a slow circle around the prisoner, who was bound to a chair and visibly bruised. “Every man is the hero of his own story. Every man, when he is met with adversity, expects a fairytale ending as in the movies.”

The man made no reply, staring at the floor.

“But this is real life, my friend, and there is no last-minute reprieve. There is no cavalry. One way or another, your story ends here, with me. It is up to you to write this ending.”

Santos gestured to his adjutant, who handed the general his pistol–a Beretta he’d received upon commissioning, now loaded with blanks. “Will the ending relate that you were killed, unloved and unmourned, in Annex C of the Ministry for State Security? Or, perhaps, will it record that you aided a noble cause in your final moments?”

The general held the pistol a foot from the prisoner’s head–not close enough to kill, but enough to cause severe pain and burning from the force of the blank. “The time is now.”

It had started simply enough, with a lesson plan and discussion in Howard Stoake’s Sunday School class. The first sign of trouble ahead was when the class ran long, causing the assembled Sunday Schoolers to miss both the 9:00 and 11:00 services at Deerton Methodist. From there, the flames spread to each household, carried as embers in the heads of every member of Stoake’s class. Before the week was out, Stoakes had been dismissed from his position and an account of his violent quarrel with Reverend Millener had made the rounds throughout town.

Soon Deerton Methodist was as two armed camps, one united behind the ousted Stoake and the other behind Millener. The seeds planted in that Sunday School session had led many in there to embrace the doctrine of election, while those who stuck to the church’s tradition were united in their support of free will. Simply put, it was no less than a battle between predestination and free will–the same argument that has brought low theologians and churches since Augustine’s time.

In the end, there was nothing for it: Deerton Methodist was forced to split. One congregation kept the name but departed for the old Lutheran church on 6th street; the other kept the building and renamed itself Deerton Free Methodist. But the grim details of the schism would remain for years to come.

Jane shrugged. “Hypocrisy is unavoidable in modern life.”

“That’s a rather dim view to take, don’t you think?” said Paul.

“It’s a sensible one,” Jane said. “All but the most careful people will eventually contradict themselves, and nearly everyone holds others to higher standards than they hold themselves–it’s just human nature.”

“Don’t you think it would just be easier for everyone if we said what we felt?” said Paul, pushing a little.

“I don’t necessarily believe that the disguising of one’s feelings is hypocrisy. If everyone openly displayed their feelings and was completely, brutally honest, I hate to think of what the world would be like.”

“Oh come on,” Paul said. “I don’t know that it would be so bad.”

“Tell me, if you thought a woman was ugly as a warthog, would you tell her when she asked?” Jane pressed. “If you were in a lousy mood, would you make sure everyone knew? ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Lousy, you piece of crap! Piss off and leave me alone.'”

“Well, no,” Paul said sheepishly.

“See? That’s not hypocrisy. Hiding one’s feelings isn’t always best, but it does serve a purpose, and more importantly, it’s not a contradiction that others can see. I could be smiling on the outside and sullen on the inside, but who could tell? People could guess, but I would rarely, if ever, state my true feelings if I was hiding them.”

Our neighborhood was in the oldest part of our town, with houses nearing or over the century mark. We’d been the first new family to move in for years, and once we kids arrived, we found a willing audience in the many elderly widows next door. They tended to enjoy our antics, and kept large dishes bright with gumdrops on their tables for when we visited.

One by one, as the years went by, they all passed away. New families moved in and the old houses were painted and refinished. The house on one corner had its beautiful stand of pine trees cut down while a bevy of modern garages went up in backyards previously left fallow.

In the end, there was only one home left with its original coat of paint and owner, on the far corner of the block.

The end came suddenly, without the lengthy buildup of an illness. While my mother was out of town, the old lady died peacefully, napping in the chair in her living room. The housekeeper found her the next day.

There was no way for my mother to make it home in time to see her friend off, so it fell to our family to go in her stead. It was the first funeral we had attended in years, perhaps the first since I’d gained a more mature understanding of death. The waxy figure barely resembled the woman I’d known.

We met—for the first time, at least that I could remember—her son and daughter, and their children. The son is an overweight man with a tussled comb-over who mumbles a few words before taking a seat. The daughter was much more vibrant, dark-haired and slim.

“We’re really sorry our mother couldn’t come,” I said. “They’d been spending a lot of time together.”

“Oh really?” the daughter said. “What did they do?”

“Just talked, mostly,” I said. “They visited a lot, sometimes did a little cooking together. I think she saw your mother as sort a maternal figure.” I see that as the greatest compliment someone can give; surrogate or not, those relationships are worth a lot.

It makes the daughter uncomfortable. “No, I just think they were friends. Very good friends,” she said, shortly before excusing herself. It’s clear she was uncomfortable with the idea of her mother seeing anyone but her as a daughter figure.

Maybe it was telling that the first time they’d visited in years was to attend the funeral.