Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

I was privileged enough to receive a tour of the new suites by the University of Michigan’s Vice President of School Spirit, Charles Mellner. When the group meets Mellner, I ask him about the controversy over graduation—the fact that work on the new luxury skyboxes prevented it from being held in the Big House, its traditional venue.

Mellner, a big man with a big laugh, answers with a wide grin. “It was regrettable, but after all there’s a graduation every year. Each and every game is unique, and we’d do our fans a grave disservice if games were delayed.” One can understand why. Season tickets for the boxes start at the price of a fully-loaded luxury sedan.

The entryway is laid with Italian marble, with a grand staircase leading upwards. Mellner begins the tour asking if we recognize it; no one does. I mention that it looks like the staircase on the Titanic; at this, he claps delightedly. “It is! Either an exact replica or the original, raised from the ocean floor and refurbished at incredible expense.” Coyly, Mellner refuses to confirm which.

We’re then led into a standard box, with Second Empire carpeting, inlaid hardwood floors, and leather chairs. Each is equipped with a minibar—domestic and imported liquors are on tap—and a snack bar run by a major franchise—in this case, a Pizza Hut Express. “The boxes provide everything a Wolverine fan could want,” Mellner beams. “Access to the game from a superior viewpoint, and the staff is ready and able to provide a massage or salon treatment on demand.”

Mellner leads us to the front of the box, to a red switch under a lucite cover. “This signals to the field that the occupants want the last play repeated. It’s perfect for when a patron has to go to the bathroom; a comfort that the TiVo generation demands.”

This is trifling compared to the executive suite, which occupies a full floor. Designed to the standards of the Saudi royal family, the suite is pure six-star extravagance. Up the marble staircase and across the onyx flagstones set in a pool of vintage champagne, I ask Mellner about handicap accessibility. How can he justify the suite’s lavish layout when the university’s being sued by Wolverines in Wheelchairs?

“It’s actually not a problem,” Mellner says with an easy laugh. “There are only 16 people on Earth who can afford season tickets to the executive suite, and none are disabled.” I nod. “We think that’ll hold up in court,” he adds, grinning. After all, the people with tickets include the Chief Justice of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and 3 members of the House Judiciary Committee.

“Will students be allowed to use the boxes?” I ask.

“We recognize that students have an important role,” Mellner replies. “Namely, they serve to fill out the stands, which helps preserve the sense that one’s in the Big House. Naturally, we can’t allow students in the boxes; might cause our paying customers discomfort.”

Mellner directs me to a series of fire hoses in the stairwell, which are actually for crowd control, to prevent unruly students from storming the boxes, alongside the 50-man uniformed security contingent. In an emergency, all of the service personnel are armed and fully deputized by the city of Ann Arbor.

“That’s for undergraduates, of course,” Mellner smiles. “Most of our graduate students attended other schools before, so they might be spies for another Big Ten team. As such, they’ll be shot on sight—we have a first-class sniper post at the very top!” I beg and cajole, but we aren’t allowed to see it—it’s not done yet. The live fire trials, involving 120 rhesus monkeys over a 6-week period, don’t begin until next month.

“How much did this all cost?” I ask. Mellner regrets that he can’t tell me; the official figure is classified. Tthere’s a bit of mischievous maize and blue in him, though, and he gives me a candid estimate. The budget was drawn from the general fund, meaning that students’ tuition dollars were immediately transformed into building costs. Mellner estimates that around “30,000 to 40,000 students” gave their entire 4-year tuition to fund the construction—an impressive figure, as the university has only about 41,000 students enrolled at any one time.

And how much of the cost of a luxury skybox ticket goes back to academics? “That’s a different fund,” explains Mellner. “The money we make here is rolled back into the program—new uniforms, multimillion dollar coaching salaries, solid gold cleats for All-American players. Standard expenses.”

The average user would have thought a text transfer was ridiculous, since the bandwidth required was so tiny compared to visual or audio streaming. But that was also its great advantage; the amount of data was so tiny that it was easily lost–or hidden–among the exabytes streaming to personal terminals day in and day out.

Crisis was attracted to that kind of anonymity thanks to her innate paranoia. Her personal server space was hosted in Liberia, ostensibly in an inspection-free system, but it had dozens of security precautions linked up, designed to conceal or delete the bare few megabytes of text stored there. If a shareholder in Shanghai got too frisky about what was on their servers, they’d find an empty room.

Serial was online that night–well, given his location, it was actually morning–and they resumed their correspondence via text transfer.

serialCabal: Have you heard about Scuzzy? He was arrested last night.

existentialCrisis: He never was careful enough. What’d they get him for? Trafficking in classical music again?

serialCabal: No. They caught him with a 100-exabyte drive.

existentialCrisis: Well beyond the legal limit. They don’t even make them that large, do they?

serialCabal: Homebrew. And that’s not the half of it. He was trying to make a local copy.

existentialCrisis: I knew he was stupid, but…did he actually manage to download anything?

serialCabal: Everyone I ask gets really quiet really fast. Local copies are always asking for trouble, but this…this is something else entirely.

“Okay, I’ll tell you. But it’s probably going to sound crazy.”

Dr. Teller smiled. “I hear things that ‘sound crazy’ for a living,” he said. “Most of the time they’re nothing of the sort; I make it a point never to judge.”

“I’m…I’m walking down a long hallway. An infinite hallway. It’s made of beautiful, cold crystal, faceted like a diamond and colored by the blue sky above. I’ve been walking for hours–days–before I notice something.”

“And what’s that?” said Dr. Teller.

“The walls are made out of little cells, smooth and transparent and unfaceted. And suspended in each one…is me.”

Scratching on the notepad. “You?”

“Not me as I am now–I recognize that even in the dream–but me as I was. This hallway has every moment of my entire life preserved like a bug in amber. As I walk I see what I wear and my age and my position all change, one crystal cell at a time. Eventually, I get to cells filled with me as I am in the dream: confused, disheveled, and in my pajamas.”

“How does that make you feel?” Dr. Teller asked.

“I’m…well, I’m terrified. What happens if I keep walking? What will I see? And does the crystal corridor have an end? The idea scares me more than a hundred psychos in the back seat of my car. It…it chills me to my core, as if the hallway has become ice. But I keep walking. I can’t stop.”

They keep to themselves, the Callistans, and not without reason. The kind of work they’re hired to do is rarely pleasant; at the very least, the person they imitate or the place of business they infiltrate is in for a cash loss, if not a rapidly spreading rusty stain on the carpet. No one’s ever come forward to claim responsibility for engineering them; the Callistans themselves hold that they’re self-created and bred into existence over generations, or so they say to the sociologists who have managed to interview them.

But it’s obvious to everybody else that they’re engineered. Back in the day, before the bleeding hearts got all righteous about it, a number of Callistans that were iced during jobs were analyzed. Over 10,000 genes from outside what you’d traditionally think of as the human genome were floating around in there, including two kinds of chromatophores for natural camouflage (from the mimic octopus and chameleon respectively), jellyfish (to combat aging and free radical accumulation), salamanders (regeneration of injured parts), and many others.

All that means they have exceptional resilience and longevity, of course, but also no natural skin tone. Those same sociologists say the Callistans assume unnatural (for humans) colors to identify themselves to one another, with each lineage having its own distinct “normal” color and pattern. No hair of any kind, either–the better to blend in using creative wigs, since hair color can’t be changed on the fly. All that’s well and good, but what people reportedly find really repulsive about them is their lack of external ears and a nose; just slits there like you’d see on a burn victim (along with a lack of fingerprints). They substitute a variety of prostheses instead, the most elaborate of which can supposedly mimic the flesh tone around them.

In other words, somebody put an awful lot of loving care into engineering the Callistans for disguise and infiltration. That they don’t take credit for their work is probably a testament to the fact that their creations have long since surpassed and destroyed them.

“And here we have the non-circulating collection.”

Gus examined the nondescript-looking cabinet, notable only for the heavy padlock which secured it. “What can we possibly have that’s worth putting behind a lock that beefy?” he asked Sally.

She shrugged. “Rarities, mostly. A lot of Oscar promos. One of the DVD’s is signed by Martin Scorsese. Another’s a rare blooper made from the raw workprint instead of a matted and cropped version.”

“So why keep them here?”

“Lots of reasons,” Sally sighed. “Coruthers up in Archives doesn’t think movies are art so he won’t touch ’em. Profs in Film Studies sometimes take ’em out to flash around. But most of all…” She lowered her voice. “It makes it look like we’ve got something to hide back there.”

Gus blinked. “But we do!”

“Exactly. When–not if, when–people break in, they go straight for the lockbox. A smash n’ grab could make off with a thousand dollars of DVD’s if they wanted, but every minute they spend trying to cut that beast open is one more minute we have to catch ’em.

This post is part of the September Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s theme is seasons as a metaphor for an aspect of one’s writing.

A little late-season drizzle trickled onto Peter’s car as it crawled through the morass of city traffic during rush hour, just enough to get the wipers moving.

“Another lovely fall day,” said Sedena from the passenger seat. “I do wish Littleton & Associates would find somewhere tropical to send me during this time of year.”

“Sure it’s a little rainy now,” Peter said. “But in a day or two it’ll be all blue and crisp out, and all the park trees will be lit up like Chinese New Year. People sometimes drive up north to get a good gander at fall, but we’ve got all the fall you could want right here. I love it.”

Sedena sighed. “I can’t stand autumn,” she said. “I don’t want to seem needlessly contrary, but I hate it and spring. They tear at me, cloud things, make them difficult.”

A car ahead tried to exploit a gap in the traffic; rather then ruthlessly cut them off, Peter waved them ahead. “What’s to hate? Fall is about beautiful colors, mild temperatures, and that hearty bite to the air before things get too cold. And spring’s a marvelous season of flowers and rebirth after a long winter. I don’t want to seem needlessly contrary either, but I don’t see how anyone couldn’t appreciate that.”

“Not appreciate the highly variable weather patterns that make them a nightmare for people in my line of work?” Sedena said. The driver ahead repaid Peter’s kindness with an obscene gesture, which Sedena returned with gusto. “Autumn is all about death, everything growing gray and cold and the streets choked with photosynthetic corpses. I don’t like to be reminded of that. And spring…granted, there’s new life, but you also get to see the world at its most dead uncovered by snow. Spring for me is soot-choked piles of lingering snow and barren branches with nothing to beautify them.”

Peter’s knuckles whitened around the wheel. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to stir up any bad memories.”

Sedena shrugged. “Forget about it. More than a little of that is my father talking, anyway. The part of me that’d criticize an artist into giving up his craft and then berate him for quitting.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post an entry of their own about a seasons as metaphors for aspects of writing:

Ralph_Pines (direct link to the relevant post)
Aheïla (direct link to the relevant post)
DavidZahir (direct link to the relevant post)
LadyMage (direct link to the relevant post)
semmie (direct link to the relevant post)
llalah (direct link to the relevant post)
hillaryjacques (direct link to the relevant post)
AuburnAssassin (direct link to the relevant post)
laffarsmith (direct link to the relevant post)
sbclark (direct link to the relevant post)
FreshHell (direct link to the relevant post)
PASeasholtz (direct link to the relevant post)
IrishAnnie (direct link to the relevant post)
SF4-EVER (direct link to the relevant post)
T.N. Tobias (direct link to the relevant post)
Proach (direct link to the relevant post)
Regypsy (direct link to the relevant post)
WildScribe (direct link to the relevant post)

You shrug, not really knowing how to respond.

“I’ll take that as a maybe, then,” the man says. “An unfairly maligned response, in my estimation. In today’s world it’s all about the hard and fast, the polar opposites, the dichotomies. There’s no room for ‘maybe’ in a world of ‘yes’ and ‘no.'”

“I…I guess so,” you stammer, still not sure of what the man speaks or what he wants.

“Of course, it can also mean indecision, wishy-washiness, flip-floppery. A reasoned ‘maybe’ has its place in a complicat’d world, but a yearning to please all, to avoid notice, to make unrealistic promises, to overlook…well, that’s no good either. So what is yours, a reasoned and cautious ‘maybe,’ or a cowardly one?”

You take a breath, reasoning to yourself that perhaps playing at the man’s game will make him finish and leave you be. “A cautious one,” you say. “It’s always better to be cautious when you don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Maybe so,” the man says, chuckling softly. “Maybe so.”

Jenny had seen an old movie on TV–she could barely remember what it was called anymore–about a young patient who chillingly finds her childish doodles coming true in real life. The film had held her rapt attention for an hour while the sitter made some long distance calls.

In the end, though, it hadn’t been a terribly good movie, with the heroine using her powers for the mundane purpose of exposing a nefarious doctor who had been stealing and selling medicinal supplies on the mean streets. Granted, Jenny’s parents never would have let her watch the movie if they’d been home, but she still felt cheated that the film had squandered all its potential.

She sat down to rectify that the next day.

Using the same character names and first thirty minutes or so of the film (what she remembered of it anyhow), Jenny wrote out a script for a far more interesting adventure, where the doodles became increasingly sophisticated, eventually blurring the line between reality and fantasy and ending on a very uncertain note as the young girl found herself home safe…but also noticed a drawing of herself at home on the fridge.

The story was only ten pages long–hardly epic length–but Jenny felt immensely satisfied in what she’d done. In the years that followed, she often found herself doing the same thing mentally to films, TV shows, and even games she felt had turned out poorly: re-imagining and “improving” them. These improvements were never written down; the first attempt had been proof enough to Jenny that she didn’t have the muse in her.

That is, until she caught the same film on TV many years later. Basking in nostalgia, she put on some popcorn and waited for the picture to implode in on itself as the fabulous premise deteriorated.

Only it didn’t.

The movie ended not with the disappointment Jenny remembered, but with the treatment she’d sketched out on notebook looseleaf as a nine-year-old.

Now, I’d never been much of a believer in Freud, or lucid dreaming, or any of that stuff. New age hippie crap, I thought, like energy crystals or pet rocks or George McGovern.

But that was before I got sick.

It’s the stress that did it, most likely. I worry too much; plus unemployment and barely $6k of padding between me and destitution sure didn’t help. There wasn’t any money for the doctor, but then again the last time I’d gone they’d given me antibiotics for what was clearly the flu and told me to rest and drink fluids. I could do all that on my own and–as a bonus–not contribute to the creation of superbugs.

So that’s how I found myself on the couch, feverish, and too sensitive to light and sound to so much as turn on the TV. Things started kind of subtle; I’d been talking to an old girlfriend from high school for twenty minutes before I realized that she wasn’t there. After that, I decided I’d go for a swim, and turned off the gravity to float about the apartment.

It wasn’t the safest place, or the warmest, or the one that stirred the most memories. Those were all spoken for.

But, nonetheless, it was my place.

I sat in the gazebo swing, watching tiny clouds of rust thrown up as the long-still chains moved–as silently as when they were new and freshly oiled. The early autumn sun came in streamers through the trees above and the gaps in the old wooden roof, illuminating a ballet of dust motes that swirled around me.

As a youngster, I’d never been able to understand Dad’s fascination with the gazebo–the long summer afternoons he spent building it, painting it, lovingly planting the trees that now dwarfed it. It had been many things for me growing up: a rocket ship, a fortress, a pirate schooner. But never just a gazebo in the furthest corner of our yard.

It wasn’t until he was gone that I got a better sense of the place. When the time came to clean out his things, Mom had let me do it–too many memories, she said–and I’d found a picture of Dad with his parents. He couldn’t have been more than four or five, and they were posing together on an old gazebo, the very twin of the one I now sat in.

They’d had to sell that house when things had gotten rough after the war, but Dad had seen to it that I had the chance for the same lazy summer memories that he did.