Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

When Peter returned to his home office, he found Sedena there. She was at his desk, wearing reading glasses and scratching with a blood red gel pen.

“What’s that you’re doing?” he asked amicably.

“Paperwork,” said Sedena.

“Paperwork for murdering somebody?” Peter said. “Isn’t that a little counterintuitive for assassination?”

“Not really, no.” Sedena removed her glasses and tossed them to the desk. “Littleton & Associates expects a full report for every job. It’s not all that different from corporate finance, really.”

“I find it hard to believe that anything could be as convoluted as corporate finance, least of all a transaction with so few steps,” said Peter.

“Try me.”

Peter rummaged through the stack of documents from his last day telecommuting. “See this? This is Form 943-X: Adjusted Employer’s Annual Federal Tax Return for Agricultural Employees or Claim for Refund. My firm has to fill it out because of our minuscule agribusiness holdings, and it is tedious to the point of brain failure. I take care of it so that junior employees won’t have to bear its terrible brunt.”

Sedena pulled a sheaf from her own stack. “Form B3-7: Certification of Lifesign Termination. I have to fill this out, in triplicate, on demand so the suits can be sure the target wasn’t resuscitated in the hospital. Very tedious when a job was done from a mile away with a wildcatted Barrett M82A2.”

“Meet my friend Form W-8EXP: Certificate of Foreign Government or Other Foreign Organization for United States Tax Withholding,” Peter said, winnowing a sheet from his pile. “It is a tidal wave of red ink and nightmares, and I have to spend hours on the phone with people for whom English is a fourth language in order to collect the relevant information.”

“Try Form L8D-12: Collection of Organ or Organs as Proof of Contract Fulfillment. Rarely invoked in the past, very popular since the dawn of the DNA era,” replied Sedena. “That one comes with its own plastic baggie; I have to supply the bonesaw.”

Undaunted, Peter dipped back into his stash. “Uncle Sam is worried that, when you die, you will give all of your money to family members. To prevent this literally grave injustice from occurring, I have to handle Form 706: United States Estate (and Generation-Skipping Transfer) Tax Return. It involves collecting information from helpless, grieving family members like some kind of hideous beancounting ghoul. Every time I have to fill one out, I die a little inside.”

“Speaking of dying,” Sedena said, “here’s Form X2X-99: Notice of Circumstances Requiring Escalation. That one’s a little vague, so let me clear it up for you: witnesses are bad, and sometimes Littleton & Associates needs to take them on as ‘clients.’ It’s like a cascade of paperwork, since every X2X-99 means filling out another complete set. Worse, we don’t get paid for X2X-99’s; they come out of my own pocket. And that’s without the feeling that you’re just ruining someone’s day.”

“I was in a park at sunset, and…it was amazing. This pillar of clouds, towering over everything…lit in orange, purple, and red with the waxing moon above. It was like something from the cover of a fantasy novel, only I was really seeing it,” said Koay. “The clouds moved and shifted as I watched–I think they might have been thunderheads for a far-off rainstorm–so that by the time the last rays of light were fading it looked like an enormous art deco locomotive, steaming on a celestial track. I was breathless, speechless.”

“Very moving,” said Detective Haines. “But I don’t follow.”

“Do you know what? No one else noticed. They were all absorbed in their little worlds, looking down at the path or listening to their clamshells–insulated from the reality around them.”

“Now that I can believe,” said Haines.

“Yes!” Koay continued. She’d grown flushed while speaking. “It made me realize that we’ve stopped seeing things, stopped noticing–if I hadn’t been there, looking up when I was supposed to be looking down, that glorious display might have gone unseen!”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Haines wasn’t quite sure what Koay was getting at, but the light in her eyes gave him pause.

“I guess that’s when I decided that I need to make people wake up. To make them notice.”

“At any cost?” Haines said warily.

“Maybe so…maybe so.”

“Knock it off with the potty mouth, Cassidy,” she said. “I believe that, whenever we speak, we bring worlds and concepts into existence, somewhere, somehow.”

“So?” said Cassidy.

“The reverse is also true. Every time you drop an f-bomb, somewhere, somehow, it annihilates a civilization of puppies and rainbows. Every time you hyphenate a body part with another word, someone has their very own model infected with a flesh eating virus. And every time you say ‘that’s what she said,’ some she does in fact say it, bringing brutal recrimination down upon her and hers.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m saying, Cassidy, that you’re destroying the universe with your coarse and loutish tongue. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

The victim was splayed out in the short grass next to the cornfield, just short of a grove of trees. The scene buzzed with activity as half a dozen people swarmed around the body, taking photographs, making notes, occasionally looking away as the view became too graphic.

Dr. Theodore Danna was onsite, moving slowly through the tumult and dispensing observations and advice. The group was raw, no doubt about that, but they went about their work with a wet-behind-the-ears enthusiasm that brought a thin smile to Danna’s face.

Rusty brakes squealed behind him as an official-looking vehicle move up the farm’s long, winding drive. Danna quickly pulled one of his crew aside, wanting to look busy. Whenever the higher-ups could bring themselves to visit (it did take a strong stomach), it was always best to be talking to someone, using plenty of scientific terms, so the interloper would be quite sure Dr. Danna was on the job instead of kicking back to watch corpses decompose with a tall drink at his elbow. After all, somebody who worked with them had to enjoy the gore on some level, right? Nevermind that TNT showed worse on its movie-of-the-night.

“So, Paula,” Danna said to a young woman hovering near the head of the victim. “What’ve you observed so far?”

Paula was always uncomfortable in the field; she’d come in with visions of sexy adventure right out of TV’s CSI, and the mundane yet alien quality of corpses seemed to shake her. “Well, I’ve noted quite a few Sarcophagidae, a few Staphylinidae, and Calliphoridae on the clothing. Flesh flies, rover beetles, and blowflies, if you want layman’s terms.”

“Always better to keep the two together,” Danna said. “It helps you sound smart without losing people. What would you estimate for the post-mortem interval? How long since the little guy bit it?”

Pamela squirmed, and Danna saw an approaching figure in a uniform from the corner of his eye. “I’d give a PDI of sixteen to eighteen hours.”

Danna was about to reply when he heard someone clear their throat behind him. Turning, he saw a thin, pasty-looking man in a Department of Natural Resources uniform a few paces away.

“Dr. Danna?”

“That’s me. And you are…?”

“Shapiro, Nate Shapiro, Tecumseh County DNR. I’m…not interrupting anything, am I?”

“No, no, of course not. Just letting the kids have a go at a murder victim.”

Shapiro glanced at the figure on the ground. “It’s a monkey in a track suit.”

A biting, bitter cold consumes me.

Colder than darkest space or the gaze of a forsaken love, it tears at my windbreaker and whistles through my hair. It is as if all the frigid indifferences and icy words of the world have coalesced into a crystal-clear diamond-hard point and rammed themselves deep into my chest. It’s hard to breath; the air steals every breath I take, scattering across the snow as a thin gray vapor. I can see others out here too, struggling through ankle-deep powder towards destinations long forgotten or unknown.

I smile as we pass, but the cold stiffness of my mouth makes more of a grimace, though my amicable wave still shows my intent. No reply; the other figures, stark against the snow, are either too frozen or too absorbed in their own worlds to touch another across the gaps that separate us all.

Perhaps, in their worlds, this is a better circumstance.

A place of business closed, with an entire sun cycle to waste. Or exposure to climes colder still, making the tundra I see no more than a powdered-sugar frost. I eventually get where I’m going, and so do they. The ice in the air will eventually coalesce into the pattering of April raindrops. But for now, frozen in time as well as being, we simply pass each other by and vanish into the mists from whence we came.

The “Nature’s Bounty” feast, put on by the Callahan Country Students for a Happy Earth, had generated a lot of leftovers, which they had promptly abandoned to biodegrade. Gaines Park maintenance volunteers had been called in to deal with the issue; Isaac cannily observed that the CCSHE’s reasoning had been sound, and that a biodegredation site away from picnic tabletops was the only missing piece.

Gabe confronted Isaac as he was packing away his gear. “There’s a pile of miscellaneous nuts sitting on top of that flagstone,” he said. “We were supposed to clean them up.”

“It’s a shrine to Aquerna, the Norse goddess of squirrels. She’ll take them if she wants them.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?” Gabe said.

“Believe what you want. I’m not cleaning it up.”

Defeated, Gabe left Isaac to rake leaves in the vicinity of the “shrine,” which he went about with characteristic sloth and lack of attention to detail. Returning from a long, leisurely stroll to deposit a bunch of leaves in a bag, Isaac noticed that the pile of nuts had disappeared from the flagstone. He also noticed a short brunette girl in the bushes nearby who seemed to be wearing nothing but her birthday suit.

As much as Isaac appreciated the aesthetics of the human form, Callahan County and Gaines Park had strict statutes in place to keep nude sunbathers from the nearby college at bay, and volunteers were often put upon to summon the authorities or chase them down.

“Hey, earth child!” Isaac yelled. “It’s too early, and you’re too pasty, for sunbathing to do anything! Get lost!”

She turned and regarded him with wide eyes.”Hello. I am the Avatar of Aquerna.”

“W-what?” Isaac felt his heart stutter; no one should have known about that save Gabe. “I made that up! It was just empty snarkiness!”

“By invoking the name and attaching it to a site, you designated a site,” the girl said. “By refusing to recant when confronted, you expressed a belief. Ethereal beings need human belief to exist, and a site to manifest. You have provided Aquerna with the first of each in over one thousand years, and her avatar is before you now in gratitude.”

Trish’s train of through was broken as movement in the underbrush gave way to a frightened dash across the path. A doe emerged from the lightly wooded ravine, and glanced around. Upon seeing the threatening form of a biped approaching, the doe gingerly stepped back into the forest’s edge.

“How did you manage to get out here?” Trish whispered. The wooded area was a tiny oasis in an urban sprawl, cut off from the nearest state forest by a dozen ribbons of highway.

She waved at it, which seemed silly in retrospect–how is an animal supposed to interpret a gesture like that?–but made perfect sense at the time. The doe bobbed its head; Trish knew better than to interpret the gesture as a response, but couldn’t help herself.

The creature remained there, peering out of the brush, until abruptly melting into the forest once more, without leaving so much as a sign of its passing.

I woke up the other day, and realized that I was here. I’m a college student. Living in a dorm. Eating pizza with a vigor and frequency I would never have dreamt possible. I have a car, a tiny little thing that’s essentially a go-cart with doors.

But yesterday, I was in Mr. Fitzpatrick’s math class, sophomore year of high school. I was chauffeured around by my mother, who dropped me off at class in that huge old Crown Victoria of hers. Pizza meant either cafeteria cardboard or a treat for special occasions or unsupervised nights.

Men are supposed to wake up screaming one night in their forties, feeling the growing wrinkles on their face and crying out “I’m old!” “Where’s the time gone?” “I was twenty-five just a few months ago!” College students don’t suffer mid-life crises.

I’m not going through a mid-life crisis, unless my life is to be exceptionally short. I flipped through an old yearbook awhile ago, and found my picture. The beaming innocent staring back at me could have taken my spot in communications class without
incident. No, what’s preoccupied me recently is the way time, itself, is speeding up.

When I was nine, and the family took a summer trip to Disney World in July, I can remember ages of activity on either side of that great line through the vacation. Three months was 3% of my life back then…if I live to be a hundred, that’s three years. Each summer vignette–from wandering downtown dressed like a pirate to that bee sting at my aunt’s cabin–is a week, a month unto itself. Last year, a week was a barely perceptible blip on the radar screen. Class followed class, assignment followed assignment, and weekend followed all, as surely as ducklings totter along after their mother.

I tell people about this feeling. “Time’s speeding up!” I’ll say. “Look at how fast last year went! At this rate, tomorrow it’ll be next week, and next week it’ll be time to retire and in a month tops I’m worm food.” They laugh sometimes, a little nervously, at the sheer weirdness of what I’m saying. For most people, the process of looking back doesn’t begin until 25 or 30–everything until then is eager anticipation. I’ve got a head start because I’m addressing the problem now.

“Nothing personal,” Luchari said, aiming the pistol. “Just business.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” said Da Silva.

Luchari lowered his gun. “How do you mean?”

“Would this being personal really make that much of a difference?” Da Silva shrugged as much as his restraints would allow. “I mean, after all, I’m dead either way.”

“I suppose so,” Luchari said, stroking his chin. “Never thought of it that way before.

“It being personal might even be a good thing. Me, I’ve done some bad stuff in my time. I can see a guy taking something like that, making it personal, and going out of his way to settle accounts. It’s what I’d do. I can respect that in a way.”

“You know,” Luchari said thoughtfully, “I think it’s really more for me, than for you. Makes me feel like I’m somehow not killing you in cold blood, that everything’s okay.”

“Hey, I know exactly where you’re coming from,” said Da Silva. “Whatever it takes to get you to sleep at night.”

“This has been very illuminating. Thank you.” Luchari smiled, then squeezed off two shots from the hip. Da Silva slumped forward, the back of his skull gone.

“I love it when someone comes up with something a little more creative than ‘please don’t kill me,'” Luchari said to his men. “Having a little stimulating conversation for a change makes this job that much easier.”

We’ve been good friends for years, he and I. I would’ve followed him anywhere. To Hell and back, as it were.

Well, he hasn’t been the same since the accident. I really can’t blame him, but…

When I he came here, I followed him. “Here” is out in the middle of nowhere. Hardly anything for me or he to do.

He doesn’t mind.

It’s what he asked for.

For all our talking, I don’t even think my old friend knows I’m here. His mind’s elsewhere.

I’m not unhappy here…it’s quiet, relaxing. But I can’t help feeling that I’m needed elsewhere. I’m a healer of men, and I don’t play golf. Always hit the sod farther than the ball. And somewhere out there, there must be people in pain.

Injured, suffering, or worse.

If I weren’t out here, could I be helping them? I don’t really have much of a chance to help people anymore. Healing is God’s work, and it’s just not needed much here.

Are my gifts going to waste?

I wonder, should I leave? Abandon my friends here, my old friend, and go? Try to seek out those of greater need, and help them? See my family, my children more often, perhaps? I don’t hate it here, and occasionally my skills are needed. A lot of people depend on me–psychologically. I don’t have the training, but I know how to listen. I know how to coax out a smile with a little joke. And I have enough years under my belt to have advice to spare.

So should I leave, and try to use my God-given gifts to help as many as I can?

Perhaps I should, but not right now, not yet.