Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Many people pick up a pen because they hear the inscrutable call of the muse; they have a story that must be told, one which will haunt them until purged in the telling.

Mikey Kingston was not one of those people.

When he picked up his pencil in third period algebra or during lunch, it wasn’t because of some deep need to tell a story or write the Great American something or other. It wasn’t to write tales of high adventure of the sort alien to Howard J. Crittenden Junior High; it wasn’t to present as an offering to any of the Jennies, Katies, or Jessicas.

No.

Mikey Kingston wrote for revenge.

Not in the mean-spirited way, of course–he wasn’t making a hit list, which he was at pains to explain whenever the topic of literary revenge came up in the post-Columbine era.

Rather, Mikey had realized that, in real life, the savage Magma Men from Interion didn’t carry douches away to melt down for tallow in their Horrorariums deep below the great hollow rind of Mother Earth. In his fiction, sometimes that well-deserved fate was meted out.

At least that’s how it began, anyway.

God, there’s dirt everywhere you look. How did you let yourself become such a pig? Out comes the vacuum cleaner, the laughably small and shrill one that was Mom’s housewarming present. You lay into the carpet, vigorously dragging the unit back and forth, reveling in the tight lines it draws in the tight Berber fabric.

But it doesn’t seem to be picking anything up. Look there; you went over a fleck of granola three times, and yet that refugee of a hurried breakfast hasn’t budged. Cracking open the vacuum cleaner shows why: the bag’s full. When’s the last time you emptied it? Or is the floor so filthy that a few quick sweeps were grime enough to fill it? You shudder to think of her there, eying the floor askance, hesitating to kick off her boots for fear of getting black soles.

There’s the pile of dishes heaped in the sink, as well. Approaching, you remember why it’s been Chinese takeout and pizza for the last few days—every dish in the apartment is in there, from plates to scooped-out butter jars, all brimming with stagnant muck. You dip a finger in, withdrawing it a second later as if burned, flailing it in revulsion. Surely she has seen other messes like this; there’s no need to dive in and scrub when she probably has a sinkful just like it at home. Then comes the image of her on the couch, asking for a snack and having it come out on a napkin.

You run some water and break out the sponges, dry and hard from lack of use. Soapy water cascades to the floor, soaking into your socks and the rug. Another thing to clean, more time lost. You fill bag after bag with dripping paper towels; before long, mopping up the spill has turned into mopping the kitchen floor. Hair and crumbs and bits of dead leaves and dried noodles and more; your head starts to spin as the room takes on an antiseptic odor. The bathroom’s even worse; out with the Windex. Every surface has to shine.

Music, music. There’s got to be music to play. What’s in there now? Verde? What were you thinking? Who listens to Verde anymore but geeks and opera students? Disgusted, you drop the disc into its case. Isn’t there any popular music in this apartment? You paw through a stack of discs, cursing Mozart and Gershwin and Yo-Yo Ma as you go. Nothing that you think she might like, though come to think of it you have no idea what she listens to. A CD of James Bond theme songs is the hippest choice on hand; you jam it into the player, cursing.

In a dark and windswept place, the Lady and the Fighter met. A cool wind was blowing, making the Lady’s silvery cloak and the Fighter’s long black coat as things alive, writhing and twisting.

“What about…him?” the Fighter said. “If he returns, he’ll crush us. I can’t win against him–none of us can.”

‘”He is lost,” crowed the Lady, each word accentuated by a cloud of mist from her lips. “Swallowed by the darkness he created. There’s no more than an echo left, a pathetic little thing.”

“Let me kill him,” the Fighter said. “I’ll make it slow, so when I finally crush his skull, he’ll know…”

“No. You will leave the echo He is already broken. The echo is powerless to act, and is no threat to us. But, more than that, I want him to see our triumph. He sought to destroy us–now he will see us triumphant and simply fade away.” The Lady laughed, silver bells smothered in indigo velvet.

“I still think we’re making a mistake,” said the Fighter.

“Of course. Attacking, grappling, feeling the sour breath of your adversary in your face: that’s you. Far better to act with a subtler touch.” the Lady said. She made a sweeping gesture and rose off the ground, riding the wind like a gossamer thread. “Great things have been set in motion; go and do your part.” She wafted upward, and vanished among the clouds.

“And you do yours,” the Fighter muttered. The ground at his feet became tacky and malleable, and he sank into it. The precipice where the conspirators had met was left barren, as it had always been.

A small figure appeared at the edge, emerging from nothingness as a fuzzy outline before congealing into the form of a small child with dark hair. He stood for a moment, sadly regarding the desolate scene, and then vanished, fading away like a dream upon awakening.

You find yourself breaking away from the group, returning to Hoan Kiem in the center of town, gazing at passersby or the glass-smooth surface of the lake from a park bench.

The legends you hear from the locals speak of Emperor Lê Lợi, who the Golden Turtle God had given a magic sword to defeat the Chinese. After his victory, they say, a large turtle confronted the Emperor while he was boating and took the sword back until such time as it is needed again. That is why they call it Hoan Kiem, “Returned Sword Lake,” and descendants of that turtle supposedly still remain.

Like so many things, people said the turtles were only legend…at least until they made themselves known. One came ashore to die during the war, the year before Tet; you see it on display in the temple, a leathery giant over five feet long with no company in its gilded display case save a dehumidifier. People videotape other turtles when they appear, but none have been seen in years. You read an inset in your travel guide which claims that there may only be a single turtle left. Their kind lives to an advanced age; one may very well linger on, the last of its kind. Even if there were more, the lake’s edge is all hard cement, enveloped by the city of Hanoi.

There is nowhere for a mother turtle to bury her eggs.

“Things have changed since you left,” Mel spat. “Time was, we’d have all followed you wherever you led. Now everyone has their own skins to think about; even if we didn’t hate your guts for what you did, what makes you think we’d drop everything just for you?”

“Do you think it was easy? That it was something I wanted to do?” said Brown.

“God, what arrogance,” said Mel. She drained the last of the beer from her bottle and tossed it in the trash. “All because you suffered a little bit of mental anguish, we’re supposed to think you have any inkling of what we’ve been through?”

Brown stared at the rude wooden floorboards, trying to avert Mel’s piercing gaze. “Would you mind at least telling me what’s happened to the old team?”

“I guess not,” Mel said. “Maybe knowing where they’ve ended up will being a little much-needed shame to what passes for your conscience. Halstrom’s running supplies up the river. Delacroix’s working for the government doing something that’ll probably be officially denied. Turner’s profiteering on the black market. And of course Aronsky and Greens are both dead.”

Despite this, I continued reading the message:

The result of this is that people are distancing themselves from reality, from the glaring gap between what society tells them and what they know to be true. Thanks to digital information, people can choose which truths they’d like to believe and filter their input accordingly. A blog, a biased news source, message boards–people are creating their own truths out of whole cloth, based not on how things are but how they should be.

We’ve got to stop this decline and bring things back into equilibrium. People that can use computers and manipulate information are increasingly powerful in this new digital age, and it’s our responsibility to act. Garbage information has to be weeded out in favor of what’s truly useful to society and future generations. That’s what our new system is capable of, if we take it to its logical conclusion.

It was signed, simply, “The Firewall.”

“Greetings, Captain Lebedev,” the man said, without standing. “I am Colonel Grigoriy Sergeyevich Berenty, of the Second Chief Directorate. I trust that, as a military man, you know what that means.”

“I am in MORFLOT now,” Lebedev said, sitting behind his desk. “Naval affairs do not concern the merchant marine, nor do the activities of the KGB. They did once, but no longer. Please tell me why you’re here; I am a busy man. The Marshal Nedelin is to depart in one month’s time.”

“Yes, I know,” said Berenty. “Officially the vessel is to conduct oceanographic research on currents and the like. But you and I both know that is not the case; this is only a front for Project Narodnaya Volya.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Lebedev. He uncorked a bottle from the left drawer of the desk and poured himself a glass. “Now, as I said, I am very busy. Thirty days is hardly sufficient time for my assignment.”

“New orders have been issued,” said Berenty. “You are to depart immediately.”

83.

The number, along with its cousins 183, 283, 383, and so forth, have regularly occurred in your life, across time and circumstance too vast to be coincidental.

83 miles to your grandparents’ house. 183 inches around the outside of your childhood bedroom. 283 applications for the position your firm offered. Flight 383 from San Francisco to Newark.

You asked a mathematician about it once; she responded with jargon about frequency and primes. Your co-worker said the pattern was based on obsessive compulsion on your part, a mind for minute details that came in handy during working hours but played strange tricks outside them. Friends came to groan when you pointed out fresh examples of 83, or things that boiled down to 83. One of your lovers even left you after a tiff brought on by an “inspected by 83” tag.

However, when a promotion led you to an inspection tour of number 8383 Industrial Way South, you knew that something more than mere coincidence was behind it.

She always signed the name Bir Tawil when one was required, since the term had meaningful, if esoteric, relationship to her perception of reality.

When the Brits had been busily carving up Africa like a choice turkey, they’d drawn a border between Egypt and Sudan–ruler-straight, as such externally imposed lines tended to be. A few years later, they’d gone back and, with uncharacteristic attention to native concerns, adjusted it to give Egypt a little plot of land south of the line and Sudan a little plot north of it since local tribal shepherds used the land to graze. Egypt and Sudan had fallen to fighting over the larger part, called Hala’ib, but the border was such that whoever claimed Hala’ib had to deny ownership of the smaller part at the same time. Called Bir Tawil, the patch of land was unclaimed by either one in favor of something they valued more.

So when Bir signed something with her name of choice, she was symbolically casting in her lot with that wretched 800 square miles of desert that nobody wanted. There had even been a time she’d harbored a dream of moving there–an act of solidarity with something as abandoned as she.

Jimmy and his fellow club members used to troll the Omnipedia looking for righteous battle–wrongs that needed righting. The fact that none of them possessed more than a layman’s knowledge of history, sociology, or other popular topics was utterly beside the point.

There was always grammar and spelling.

Cam, for instance, went into a rage whenever he saw the word ’till’ used instead of ‘until.’ Which was a lot. “Tilling is something you do with farm dirt, not time!”

Then there was Remy, who’d taken it upon himself to add the rapidly-fading word ‘whom’ back into popular parlance, liberally sprinkling it across user-edited entries as esoteric as ‘Carcinogens’ or ‘The Panic of 1837.’

They all were united in an opposition to the sinister incursion of British spellings like ‘programme’ and ‘colour.’ “Just because the damn Brits conquered the world they think they can shove their unnecessary letters down our throats!” Jimmy had been heard to remark. The fact that there were equally active groups actively seeking to promulgate British wordiness only served to incite furious edit wars that seesawed back and forth for weeks.

And then things started getting out of hand.