Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Lady Milvy vanced with flowers crowned
And trighted through the dale
No harlop nor gumsy spilky sound
Did johten with a wail

And when to a punzley lock she came
No lyr was she to nace
She slorried two times and with no blame
Did she holvoo that place

Harvard lowered the paper and glanced at his tired and broken comrades, caked with the grime of a fortnight’s march through garden and stream.

“That’s supposed to set us free?”

“They were desperate. No shipyard still in their hands had the ability to lay down a vessel to Clarnaird’s design, and there was no ironworks or machine shop to tool the necessary parts. Overseas construction was the only choice.”

Paula removed another logbook from its shelf and added it to the cart. “So you’re looking for details about the ship, then,” she said. “It would really help me gather materials from the archive if you were more forthcoming, Mr. Hayes.”

“I have all the details about the ship that I need, right down to the original blueprints,” Hayes snapped. “Found in a Virginia barn. No, I need information on the shipyard, specifically when the ironclad CSS Clarnaird was launched and when it departed for the States.”

“They surely would have given that information when they arrived,” said Paula.

“That’s just the thing, Ms. Weatherby–it didn’t.”

“Ah, lacrosse,” said Greg “The favored sport of the common unadulterated douchebag.”

“Hey, man,” Mike said. “Just because they’re playing lacrosse doesn’t make them douchebags.”

“Look at the sunglasses on a cloudy day, the untucked shirts, the askance ballcaps barely concealing duck’s ass haircuts,” Greg said, observing the ball as it moved fluidly between stick-nets. “If those aren’t douchebags they do a good impression.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean that all lacrosse players are douches,” Mike countered through a mouthful of sandwich.

“Think about it: when have you even known a lacrosse player who wasn’t a douche? The motion’s enough like paddling that the skill transfers right over to the Phi Qoppa Jackass initiation,” said Greg. “I bet they use the sticks when the Initiation Paddle breaks.”

“I used to play lacrosse.”

“See? There’s your proof right there.”

Edith had what I like to call a “rising presence.” Her involvement in any meeting or debate followed a predictable pattern:

Stage 1: Listen and observe. Edith would carefully absorb what she could about the information in play, the personalities behind it, and the opinions of her fellows.

Stage 2: Asking questions. Edith would ease her way into the discussion by asking questions. Innocent ones at first, then more probing.

Stage 3: Wading in. Having formed, or reinforced, an opinion, Edith would charge into the debate, scoring critical hits with well-placed rhetorical blows informed by all the information she’d gathered.

Few opponents could withstand the last phase, and those that did were usually driven into ossified and ultimately untenable positions. So when Edith slipped in five minutes after the meeting began and started scribbling notes, my heart sank. She might have been a nonentity then, and for the next several rounds of discussion, but her “rising presence” would make itself known soon enough.

Long days with the sun at just the right angle to cast stark shadows yet bright enough to fade the world around the edges like an old photograph…the sort of thing you think of in moments of peril. And yet you usually can’t name a date, or a time, or a place. Only impressions remain, the gestalt of a hundred school’s-out summer hours. Most numerous when we’re young, they fade into obscurity and oblivion as responsibility and adulthood arrive hand-in-hand.

I have taken it upon myself to locate those lost days, in whatever form they now reside, and to bring them back to the world. Don’t bother telling me why I shouldn’t–people with far too much common sense have laid every reason from madness to tilting at windmills by my feet. Instead, ask me how you can know my progress and my state.

Look for a day which starts out with a warm glow of anticipation, and then stretches out impossibly long in love, laughter, and light. Look for a day when the years roll off your back, no matter how many have accrued. Look for a day when once again every atom of the fields trembles with sweet possibility.

That’s how you’ll know I’m still out there.

That’s how you’ll know I’ve succeeded.

“Why do you have all the panels drawn backwards?” Rich said, examining Sadie’s artwork.

“You’re supposed to read it right to left,” she said.

Rich wrinkled his nose. “Why? That’s really confusing, not to mention counterintuitive.”

“Because it’s manga!” Sadie cried as if she’d been waiting for the question and the chance to educate its boorish originator. “Manga is written and read right to left!”

“But isn’t that because manga is Japanese and they read right to left?” Rich said, squinting as he tried to follow the flamethrower-toting faerie through the correct sequence of her adventures.

“Look at the translated ones in the library, they’re right to left too.”

“Of course not. They only translated the word bubbles and stuff,” Rich said, flipping a page and carefully examining a panel where the flamethrower faerie was suddenly tiny with stub limbs and wildly swinging a mallet. “If the whole comic was flipped it would create all kinds of problems. But you wrote in English and drew from scratch–very nicely, might I add–so it should be left to right.”

“That’s just not how manga works!” Sadie fumed.

“And your English text is left to right inside the bubbles on your right to left pages! If you really want to be authentic, shouldn’t you write the words right to left too? Or is that tfel ot thgir?” Rich could barely contain a smile at Sadie’s reaction so far.

“Give me that,” Sadie grumbled, snatching the comic back with an expression not unlike the flamethrower faerie. “Philistine.”

Early in the Ashikaga shogunate, a samurai known as Sōtan who had performed exceptionally well in the recent civil wars was summoned from his daimyo’s side to the Imperial court at Kyoto. Sōtan had fought furiously against Emperor Daigo’s forces during the Kemmu Restoration, and personally thought it odd that he would be summoned by that same emperor’s son, now a powerless young figurehead under the rule of the shogun. But, bound by duty, he went anyway.

Sōtan was not allowed to view the Chrysanthemum Throne, but was instead received in an antechamber and given a letter with the Imperial seal, along with a small lacquered box sealed with pitch. The Emperor wrote that, shortly before his father Emperor Daigo’s death, he had given the box to his son with the warning that it contained a “wayze,” a word which neither the new Emperor nor Sōtan knew. Whatever the “wayze” was, it had been found by the Hōjō clan during their rule and reclaimed by Daigo when he attempted to return power to the Emperor.

Sōtan found himself cleverly retained by Daigo’s son: having been commanded by his daimyo, who must have thought the mission a trifling one, to do as the Emperor bid, he was duty-bound to carry out the mission. The Emperor had turned one of his father’s fiercest adversaries into an ally.

His mission? Destroy the “wayze” by any means necessary–short of opening it.

“Hey, I stand for things,” I said. “I feel ways about stuff. Look at my columns! I’m not writing controversial stuff like that for the fun of it.”

“I don’t think that’s you standing for anything,” Karen replied. “I think it’s you being deliberately contrary to stir up a hornet’s nest so you can feel smug and superior.”

“That’s…definitely an unusual thing to say when being deliberately contrary’s paying for the meal.”

“See?” said Karen. “Someone with a pulse talks back, you’re caught in person, and you immediately backpedal. If you really cared about that shit, Eric, you’d be meeting me blow for blow over it.”

“And what about you?” I finally had to say. “Reaming me out like this? If you feel so strongly, why aren’t you writing a column? If you think I’m such a cynic, why’d you even come?”

It meant sitting between Tarkovsky and Miller, and life offers few choices more dismal than that.

Now, one naturally assumes people who work in bookstores to have a natural love of learning and language, much the same as one expects this of librarians or professors. While there were numerous counterexamples littering the store (gum-popping Sherry or chain-clad Günther, for instance), Tarkovsky and Miller fit the assumption to a tee. Both were intelligent and articulate and made no secret of how delighted they were to inflict both on an unsuspecting world.

How, then, was the word ‘dismal’ to be associated with them?

Tarkovsky (not his real name, but nevertheless what everybody called him) was a pedantic formalist, delighting in the rules, structure, and grammar that suffuse written and spoken communications. He savored pointing out and bitterly mocking any perceived infractions, from split infinitives to dangling participles to unnecessary vowels (a passionate follower of Noah Webster, he disdained foreign spellings). Miller, for his part, was a linguistic freethinker, fascinated by finding convoluted and unusual ways to express himself. He verbed nouns, dangled participles, and engaged in Spoonerism as a parlor game. If a sentence couldn’t be twisted into an avant-garde puzzle for a listener to riddle out, he wasn’t interested in it.

So, needless to say, fierce battle would soon be joined.

Volved Sagenned was the writer in residence, and considered quite a coup at the time he’d been retained. A Nobel prize winner, his books had sold millions of copies in translation and he was considered to be at the forefront of the “new wave” of former Warsaw Pact writers reflecting on the losing side of the Cold War.

He was also an irritable, self-absorbed old man with an impenetrably thick accent and absolutely no idea how to teach a class.

“He isn’t even required to teach, you know,” Kelly hissed. “He just does it for the stipend. His contract gives him six figures for three credit hours.”

“But he’s already making seven figures just by lending us his name,” whispered Harry. “Can’t he accept a little less in return for not making our lives hell!”

“Enough!” Sagenned roared. “The talkings ends now. Yes, ziz van iz not zo deaf ahz to naht heer shew hizzing like nezt of serpent!”

The students quickly fell into line even if they didn’t quite understand what he was saying.

“Paparz on desk, at vunze!” the author barked. “Tventy pagaz on ze meaning ov Krishnakov’s charakter! Let uz be determine who haz properly grazped!”