Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The voice at the other end of the line was pleasant, but with a faint far-eastern accent. “Mr. Sanderson, we’ve had quite the time tracking you down.”

“That’s why I wrote under a pseudonym,” Sanderson said. “It’s kind of the point.” He thought about hanging up, but if someone had gone to such great lengths to track him down, he might as well hear them out.

“Of course, of course,” the voice said. “My name is Nokin Kobayashi, and I’m with the San Francisco branch of Sunstar Games.”

Sanderson could already feel a headache building up. “Let me guess: it’s about the High Score series.”

“Well, yes,” said Kobayashi sounding both relieved and a little embarrassed. “I’m sure you know how successful the series was–and frankly, I have to congratulate you on such a marvelous idea. Selling novel adaptations of video games to young readers? A masterstroke for the educational market.”

“So I told myself at the time,” Sanderson grumbled. The residuals had certainly made it easy enough to work on other projects, but those books were never intended to be his sole scrap of notoriety. That’s what the pseudonym was for, dammit.

“The reason I’m calling, Mr. Sanderson, is that we’d like to use aspects that you introduced in your novelization of Blaster Squad Attack for the upcoming next-gen sequel. We’ll give you full credit and compensation, of course.”

“Not in a million years.”

I used to think like Descartes, that there was a real world out there to be perceived and that it could be perceived correctly. People who suggested otherwise were whiners and dreamers and gadflies seeking some nefarious purpose.

Do you know what shook that certainty to its very core?

Colors.

I did a fair bit of studying abroad in my day, since students with skills applicable to agriculture are always in high demand. As such, I’ve spent time working with irrigation and pest management projects among the Tswana in South Africa and the highlands of Vietnam near Dalat. Tswana and Vietnamese are both very different language, one more straightforward and guttural and the other mellifluous and tonal. Both lovely languages, cruelly overlooked by linguists stumbling over themselves to study Basque or Trobriandese.

But you know what they have in common?

Both use the same word for blue and green.

That’s right. They, and many languages like them, don’t make that distinction. If a precise hue is called for they might specify “like the sky” or “like a leaf” but as far as perception goes, the two might as well be one.

That idea, that simple idea, shook me to my very core.

Sean Ross had been born in a missionary family that had fled China during the communist revolution when he was only six years old. Since then, though decades of life in the United Kingdom and the United States, through the rejection of his parents’ faith and his embrace of Marxism, China had exercised a strong and romantic hold on Sean’s mind.

When the mainland opened up to foreigners during the Deng Xiaoping era, it was natural that he’d seek to travel there. As a geologist, albeit one who had formulated some radical notions, the Chinese made eager use of his talents both in the field and training students. He spent part of nearly every year there, despite a disillusionment evident in his writings as China liberalized economically.

As Sean’s specialization was endorheic basins and desert topography, he often did work in and around the Lop Nur salt pans in Xinjiang–a marsh in the final stages of drying into a desert and fed by a dying river. The topography, alternately wet and dry with vast and mutable sand formations, fascinated him, and the distance from Shanghai and Beijing seemed to appeal to his Maoist sensibilities.

All in all, he was an undeniable asset to the Chinese, and a powerful advocate for them abroad. This made his sudden and inexplicable disappearance from a survey team campsite all the more troubling. It was something of a mark of respect, albeit one tinged with a propagandistic need to save face, that led to an entire battalion of troops and an air wing being lent to the search.

The Chinese even arranged, at great expense, to bring in Sean’s ex-wife and a group of former students to consult with the search parties.

This post is part of the July 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is a bad opening sentence in the Bulwer-Lytton tradition.

The steam’d and sultry city immemorial was suffused with oppressive heat, the level of phlogiston in the aether reaching such levels that the guttering flames of the carriage-lamps threatened to burst forth and consume the tinder and kindling set forth by the slumbering metropole even as it moistened the brow of one Cecil Coulmore, the contusions and contours of whose skull made phrenologically clear his profession as gentleman detective and amateur pugilist.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
AuburnAssassin
dolores haze
xcomplex
Proach
BigWords
jkellerford
Ralph Pines
Euclid
Diana Rajchel
pezie
Guardian

Much has been written, told, whispered, and muttered about the lives of children’s toys. It may all be true. But what many people fail to realize is the bond between a baby and its toys. For an older child, one for whom the magic has begun to leech slowly but perceptibly out of the world, a toy has a life all its own, separate from parents and classmates and all the mundane cares of a larger world.

But for an infant, just beginning to explore their world, the grinning and beloved stuffed animal or the brightly-colored blocks are just as real as the large figures with the comforting voices, and just as alive. It’s a seamless continuum. Older children take the role of director, of stage manager, of God. For the younger ones, it’s more like a partnership–a different kind of bond altogether. They have no truck and trade with the older things, being thrown out or passed on as their wards age. Some would call this a cruel fate, but to anyone who has ever beheld a discarded baby toy, it’s not so. They have an energy, a life-force, about them. And they are only cast aside once it has flickered out.

Ah, but what of those bound to a sick child, whose life threatens to gutter our before their own sparks have left it? Their playthings are left with a choice: to sit and wait, or to venture out into the world of secret dreams and hidden fears that only the youngest of children can see, even as the very old still feel it tickle up against their lives every so often.

We offer kindness and care to people with debilitating physical injuries, and often the mental problems that accompany them. What people who have never been deeply injured cannot realize is that, while physical wounds may heal and people may learn to adapt to a missing limb, the mental scars often persevere. It’s incumbent upon us not only as physicians but as human beings to treat the whole patient, not only their missing leg or sulfur mustard burns.

That is the credo that the Hinison Institute is founded upon, put forth by Dr. Samuel Hinison in 1909 and adhered to in the decade and a half since. Many have challenged it, just as many have embraced it. But we hope to offer patients and their families something that other treatments cannot: serenity and peace of mind.

“I can still remember every line in that brochure,” Ashton croaked. “Who’d have thought we’d wind up like this after such a start?”

She suddenly looked very weary, very old. “I keep having the same dream, you know. Every night.”

Max studied her for a moment. “What’s it about?” he said, smoothly humoring her until the conversation could be turned back to the matters at hand.

“I dream of this little alcove in my cellar. It used to hold wine racks, I think, but in my dreamer’s eye it conceals a door in the stones, one that leads to an ancient staircase.”

“The staircase to another sub-basement, maybe?” said Max, probing for an opening to take control of their talk. “Or maybe a cave?”

“That’s just the thing,” Isabelle said. “Every night I lift myself out of this old shell and wander downstairs as a young woman. I find the secret to opening that door–it’s different every time–and start to climb down. Every now and then there’s a chink in the wall, but I can’t see through. Whatever’s lighting the stairs–I haven’t a flashlight or candle–doesn’t let me see anything beyond. I just get this…impression…of a vast space beyond. Something dark, inconceivable, even menacing. But even so I’m desperate to see it for myself.”

Max fiddled with his watch under the desk, bored. “What is it?”

“That’s the thing, Mr. Maxwell…I never reach the bottom. Each time I get a little further, but I never see what it is that the steps lead to. Maybe they’re endless. But I’m starting to feel that the steps lead somewhere, and I only hope I live long enough to find out.”

“It’s…complex,” Dr. Wiesenbaum said. “There were studies of starfish, salamanders, newts, axolotl…tests on genetic chimerae…dozens of clinical trials and a limited test release in Portland before we had to pull it.”

“Pull it?” Sandy tightened her grip in the revolver. “Not the sort of terminology you want to use with triggers, doc. Now tell me what you mean by pulling it.”

“We marketed it for about a week in high-end pharmacies under the name ‘RegenKit,'” Wiesenbaum said. “It looked like we were on the fast track to FDA approval, when the results from a last batch of tests came in. the board of directors ordered us to destroy all units and seal the research files rather than deal with the legal ramifications we’d uncovered.”

“You mean your ‘RegenKits’ were killing people,” Sandy hissed.

“Oh no, quite the opposite,” Wiesenbaum stammered. “We’d intended it for healing cuts, scrapes, bruises…but people were beginning to heal missing fingers and perhaps even limbs!”

“That sounds like a lie,” said Sandy. “If it were true, you’d have a line  of amputees a mile long out the door.”

“That’s what I thought. But the last test…there was an accident, and one of the subjects lost a fingertip in an industrial press. And then that call…that horrible call, from the board asking why we’d had a set of identical twins in the same experimental group.”

“Why did you?”

“That’s just it: we didn’t!”

“Every planet plays a distinct kind of song,” Aimee read. “Jupiter a ballet, Neptune a waltz. Earth is all discordant and chaos, of course, but some would argue that’s the most beautiful music of all. By listening skyward, I am privy to the secrets of the most ancient in a language that needs no translation, no interpretation.”

Aimee paused, and bit her lip. Calvin’s writings sounded more like nascant schizophrenia than anything.

She continued: “Some music is harder to hear than others. Mercury is very faint, of course, and I long knew that Pluto was one of a larger family because I heard it as a chorus. But there has always been one thing that in turns puzzled and disturbed me.”

“Certainly not the fact that you were hearing music through a billion miles of vacuum,” muttered Aimee.

Calvin went on at length: “It’s a long and low tone, sustained but definitely mutable, distant, sonorous, strong. I thought for a time that it was the background, the great song of the universe. But it was moving, drawing nearer slowly but perceptibly. I fear a time will come, not long hence, when this song will fill the night sky. Our discordant musique concrete will first be subsumed, then annihilated.”

“The name on the check is Lena Lehmann, but everyone around here knows her as Lorraine Lothringen. Well, to her back at least.”

Lorraine Lothringen? The name sounded familiar. “Didn’t she do some pin-ups in the 40’s and 50’s?”

“Yup,” the electrician said. “My dad had a stack of ’em from the war. He had me bring one by to sign the first time I got called out here. She wouldn’t, though. Locked herself in the bathroom and screamed about how it wasn’t anybody’s right to remember all that stuff from all those years ago.”

“Pretty sure me and my dad have a right to remember whatever we damn well please,” Hansen said. “Why’d you come back?”

“Because the money’s good. Ms. Lothringen pays well and tips better. I heard she socked away all the money from her modeling years and is living on the interest. You play your cards right, she’ll put you on the list and give you a call anytime her drains clog.”

Hansen raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” the electrician laughed. “For one thing, she’s about 85. And for another, she quit modeling to marry a rabbi.”