Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Rich looked up, his mouth full of pizza and grease dribbling down his chin.

“Whouf vherr?” he said. There was no answer, just another knock on the apartment door.

Swallowing and wiping his mouth, Rich ran to the peephole and peeked through. He saw a shock of disheveled black hair, a flash of pale skin, and a hand coming up to knock again.

Throwing open the door, Rich was startled when the knocker tumbled into his apartment, out of breath and visibly distressed. It was Marie Cullen, the girl from STAT 321. Rich had never said more then “hello” to her in the six weeks that the class had been in session, though he’d often found himself tuning out of the lecture to admire the shapely curves of her legs.

“You’ve got to help me,” she gasped, practically falling into Rich’s arms.

Rich’s mouth had already formed the words before he could think: “But I don’t even know you.”

“Y-you can’t bribe me!” Taylor cried. “You’re trading illegal items, stolen items, and something has to be done!

“And you think that you are being a big man, by refusing my money? Let me tell you something, Mr. Taylor. You are a very small man. You run a small facility far away from anywhere important, and your superiors do not give a shit what happens here, as long as they get their money and the customers are satisfied.”

Taylor simmered, arms stiff at his sides.

“Do you wish to do something about this? Then take my money, Mr. Taylor. Look the other way. Use it to buy yourself something to down your sorrows in, or perhaps use it to escape from this place. It is of no consequence to me. Do not, however, presume to interfere with me. I will not hesitate to defend my business, Mr. Taylor, and that is something you most assuredly do not want.”

The white sands at White Sands weren’t typical beach fare. If you grabbed a handful, you’d be surprised at its consistency—almost like fine sugar. From an air-conditioned car, the sands look like snow. Outside, the 112 degree heat quickly dispels that illusion.

“Hey,” Ronnie said as we lifted the carpet roll out of his trunk. “They got a black sands anywhere?”

“What do you care?” I asked. “You’re more red than anything except under that beater where your farmer tan ends!”

“I don’t wanna match the sand,” Ronnie said, dropping his end of the roll and reaching for a spade. “Just curious.”

“There’s black sand near volcanoes, I think. Grandpa always talked about black sand in the war.”

“What about blue sand? Or purple?”

I glared at Ronnie. “Just dig, will ya? Joey’s not getting any fresher.”

A name is a curious thing. You could know someone named Geoffrey in third grade who beat you up and stole your lunch money, and forever after you’d think of him whenever you heard that name, and never consider naming any of your children after a bully. The word Geoffrey would be forever ruined for you, even though some would consider it a beautiful name.

Case in point: I once knew a Ramona—this was years ago—who scarred that name for me so badly that even seeing Beverly Cleary books would make me shudder a little. I’d give the odd Ramona that I saw a wide berth just to be safe.

That system worked well enough until I met my second Ramona six months ago.

The day after Reuben stumbled into my office, I was scheduled to give his class a particularly hard test; naturally, I assumed he’d come by to weasel out of it.

I called my hardest tests “Grannykillers” because I noticed there seemed to be a severe uptick in students’ grandmothers dying whenever I gave one. Sometimes as many as three or four grandmothers would die in a single week; I’d often suppose aloud that they must have been on the same bus. From my colleagues I knew that some students went through five or more grandmothers a semester. To my irritation, no one ever claimed that their grandfather had died—Karen’s kids wouldn’t even get that much use out of me.

It only took me a moment to see that Thursday’s Grannykiller was the least of Reuben’s problems.

Who hasn’t had a nifty idea for a scene or a dialogue in a story and been put off by having to surround it with context? In a lot of ways the story is better when it’s locked up in your head, perfect and unspoiled by the need to put everything in a neat and tidy order.

That’s the idea here, to take an old writing exercise of mine and put it to work. Each entry is a short excerpt from a book that doesn’t exist, just enough to give a sense of the larger work lurking in the shadows. I used to fill notebooks with these things, and the best ones always developed into something else, either by inspiring me or the people who read them to fill in the gaps.

I can’t claim the idea is mine; it was partially inspired by The Catalog of Lost Books by Tad Tuleja, an annotated list of great books that all have the notable handicap of nonexistence. The title is similarly lifted from the name of Danny Elfman’s concert piece Overture to a Nonexistent Musical. And, although I hadn’t read any of his work when I started this project, Jorge Luis Borges and his “summaries of books that do not exist” is apparently a kindred spirit in this endeavor.