Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Virginia MacNeil, daughter of Marshals Vincent and Patricia MacNeil and soon-to-be Prosperity Ranger, crept through the tall grass at the outskirts of the Prosperity Falls settlement. She wore her full gear–her mother’s full gear–of duster and boots despite the hot and heavy air of the place, even close to midnight.

By the moonlight, she could see Jeanette Rhodes creeping into position on her left and Dale Ward quietly parting the stalks on her right. She signaled for them to move ahead, taking care to keep tree and grass in between them and the firelight in the distance. Their quarry loitered about ahead of them, unaware without so much as a sentry posted.

Virginia’s ambush was coming off without a hitch.

Their first target was dead ahead, apparently totally unaware of the three youngsters sneaking up on it. Jeanette and Dale flanked it with Virginia taking the center position. At the prearranged signal, a snap of Virginia’s fingers, they charged.

The cow grunted quietly as Virginia, Jeanette, and Dale leaned into it.

“It’s not tipping!” Dale grunted. “You said it would tip!”

“I thought were were going to push on it and then step back!” Jeanette cried. “Then it’ll fall when we move away cuz it’s asleep!”

“Does it look asleep to you?” Virginia cried. “Push harder!”

As they redoubled their efforts, the cow decided that it didn’t much care for the squabbling, yowling creatures pushing it as hard as they could. It mooed–or brayed, it was hard to tell–loudly in response, an alarm cry that was taken up by its fieldmates.

A moment later, a lantern appeared at the farmhouse door. “Who’s out there?”

“It’s Morrison!” Virginia cried, all thoughts of tipping the whole field suddenly forgotten. “Scatter!”

She and her confederates split up and dashed for the fences. Behind them came the roar of a rock-salt shotgun charge. “You goddamn kids! Get out of my field!”

In retrospect, Virgina thought sullenly, it wasn’t quite as heroic an episode the great Prosperity Ride of 1866 or even the legendary Cowpie Prank the junior rangers had carried out in 1870.

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Deerton had never exactly been a hotbed of crime. The city police mostly did traffic stops in town and busted the occasional minor in possession (or major in possession). Since the town had both the Tecumseh County Sheriff Department and Michigan State Police Post #381, there was an embarrassment of officers, and the City Police were redundant due to jurisdiction issues half the time.

So when it came time to retire, Officer John Daniels was looking forward to doing some real police work on his own time. The other officers sometimes called him “Jack” as a dig at how straitlaced he was, the exact opposite of the wild image a man nicknamed after a potent whiskey evoked. Tired of playing supporting second fiddle to the other police agencies and the Deerton Volunteer Fire Department.

But John’s amateur detective aspirations soon ran into a roadblock: even without the jurisdictional straitjacket, there was very little crime in Deerton. There was quite simply nothing to detect. John found a novel way around this: he contacted local institutions like the public library and the high school with an offer to hunt down people whose property had turned up in their lost and found. Using his police training and notes cribbed from cable TV, John was soon in the business of reuniting people with their lost effects.

And that’s how he came to be at the old farm off US 313 carrying a ratty old umbrella.

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Every space in the parking lot of Fitzgerald Stadium was numbered, 1 to 400, to allow campus police to easily identify anyone who wasn’t a member of the athletic dept or a VIP to be quickly and efficiently towed. Even on game days, the general public had to park elsewhere; the only way to get a space was to be a member of the football team or to rise up through the ranks on the managerial side.

One space, which would otherwise be #297, is not numbered. No one is quite sure why this is; the earliest mention of such a space is from the 1970s, shortly after the lot was constructed, so it may have been a simple oversight. But from that quirk of fate, a sinister and elaborate legend has grown up around that space.

A player who parks in that unnumbered space, it holds, curses the team to lose the next game.

Painting a number wouldn’t change the essential nature of the curse, the players hold, and as such it is left unmarked as a warning. Obviously not all the players believe the legend, but the pivotal 1986 game is always held up as a counterexample. Edward Mack, who would go on to win three Super Bowls as a professional player and found the influential father-son “Mack dynasty,” was nearly late for the game (due to a tryst, the tale has it). Forgetting the legend, he parked in the only available spot…and the Fighting Pottawatomie (later the Grizzlies) were defeated 12 to 40.

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I sat down at his invitation, surprised as I was to find an old white man with a British accent in such a remote ashram.

“I saw you looking at this earlier,” he said. He held out an exquisitely carved lotus flower, its white surface veined with intricate carvings. For a moment I thought it might be made from flakes of marble, but I was startled to realize that the material was actually chicken eggshells interlocked together without joints or glue. The slightest mishap could crush the entire beautiful object in an instant.

“Isn’t it dangerous, carrying around something so fragile?” I said. “Couldn’t you keep it inside?”

“It only took five years to make,” the old man laughed. “Not worth losing any sleep over. I use it for my meditation, to help with balance and coordination. It’s a powerful tool for self-control.”

It seemed like a powerful tool for frustration to me, but I maintained a respectful silence.

“I’ll go ahead and answer the question that you’re too polite to ask,” the man said. “I came here with my wife, a Dravidian who was born and raised in Australia. We met in Switzerland, at an avant-garde drama festival of all places. It was an international festival, and people kept on coming up to me speaking French or German or approaching her speaking Hindi or Bengali. We had never spoken those languages in our life, and gave very little thought to how we presented ourselves; as a result, people made assumptions, cast us in roles just like those wretched plays.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said.

“That’s all right,” the old man said. “We didn’t understand what we’d learned either, at first. After we married, we decided to try and find a place without assumptions, roles, or masks. We quickly learned that this was impossible. Rather, we sought out a place of peaceful seclusion where we could attempt to divest ourselves of the assumptions, roles, or masks we thrust upon ourselves. It’s been nearly fifty years now, and I think this isolated little ashram is as good a place as any for introspection, don’t you?”

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All that the old stories record is that Minh woke up in an unfamiliar world with only the vaguest notion of where–or who–he had been before. Confronted with a vast and untamed wilderness, he sought not only to shelter himself but to seek out others. His first act was to build a rudimentary shelter; his second was to light and tend a hilltop bonfire.

Some time afterwards (perhaps a year; perhaps a day) Cyrene awoke in the same manner: alone, confused, in a haze. It was only through the beacon on Lighthouse Hill that she was able to locate Minh, who despite his foresight had despaired of ever seeing another such as himself. Together, they were able to build the fire to a stronger, more confident glow.

In time, others awoke and only through seeking out the lighthouse were they able to find one another.

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Every city has its own beat, if you know to listen for it.

I came from a place where the beat was slow and languid, peaceful and traditional. Like an old hymn or a fiddle band at a county fair. It’s a fine beat for some people: fine for my parents, fine for my sister.

But not for me.

I wanted a beat that was bold and fresh, vibrant and always in motion, ever-changing and rent with variation.

I wanted the city.

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It may not have been as informative as other tours, and certainly didn’t contain the standard boilerplate about “where your success begins” and other consultant-generated slogans. It was mostly the kind of salacious gossip that only 100 plus years of academia could generate.

It also kept people asking for Kay’s tours by name.

“This is the university library. It’s the place where, in the fourth floor men’s restroom, Dr. Hulmann was discovered in a compromising position with a grad student. It got them both fired and divorced, and now they run an organic food store in town.”

“That’s the graduate college. There are study carrels there and every semester or two a student tries to move in. The last one caused a fire by plugging sixteen appliances in the one outlet provided.”

“The plans called for Bickerman Tower to be twice as large as it is, but they shrank it to match the budget. That’s why the restrooms only fit one person and the offices would be condemned for human habitation if the building inspector wasn’t an alumni.”

This post is part of the September 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “the number seven”.

1. The Colossus
“Well,” said Chares of Lindia, looking at his gigantic statue snapped at the knees after a massive earthquake, “maybe Helios wasn’t so crazy about the monument we built for him.”

2. The Gardens
“Our ancestors planted these rooftop gardens for a queen that was homesick for a place with plants instead of just a lot of sand,” said Arsaces II, King of Parthia. “I wonder if she was also nostalgic for the giant earthquakes of home. If so, we’ve just done her proud.”

3. The Temple
Respa, Veduc and Thuruar, leaders of the Goth raiders, roasted meat on spits over the temple they’d just set on fire after plundering. “The last time someone burned this place down, he did it so everyone would remember him despite being a nobody,” they said. “Wonder if that’ll work for us, too?”

4. The Statue
“In retrospect,” said Zonaras and Cedrenus, watching the flames, “maybe it wasn’t the best idea to disassemble all the greatest works of art from the Roman world and put them all together in one wooden palace.”

5. The Mausoleum
“What a coincidence,” said Sir Ronald of the Knights of St John of Rhodes. “Here this giant such-and-such has weakened and partly knocked over by centuries of earthquakes, and we just happen to need stone in a hurry to castle the place up.”

6. The Lighthouse
“The two greatest enemies of big stone things around here are earthquakes and people with castles to build,” said Al-Ashraf Sayf al-Din Qaitbay, Sultan of Egypt. “But it’s not like anyone had lit the thing in the last thousand years or so, and my cannons need a safe place to blast the Turks.

7. The Pyramid
“So,” said one Egyptian farmer-laborer in 2550 BC, “how long do you think this ‘Khufu’s Horizon’ tomb we’re building will last?”

“Sure, it might be the tallest thing in the world now, but how long will that last? Plus there’s earthquakes, fire, hostile people on our borders who don’t much care for us,” said his friend. “I give it fifty years, tops, before someone else decides they want to use all this stone for something else.”

The Wonders
Colossus of Rhodes – Toppled in an earthquake, 226 BC (only 64 years after construction)

Hanging Gardens of Babylon – Destroyed by earthquakes ca. 1st century BC

Statue of Zeus at Olympia – Disassembled and moved to Constantinople; destroyed by fire ca. 5th century AD

Temple of Artemis at Ephesus – Burned by Herostratus in 356 BC, plundered and burned again and more thoroughly by the Goths in 262 AD

Mausoleum at Halicarnassus – Heavily damaged or destroyed by earthquakes before 1494 AD; used to build castles afterwards

Lighthouse of Alexandria – Heavily damaged by earthquakes, 1303–1480 AD; used to build castles afterwards

Great Pyramid of Giza – Still in existence; first wonder built, last to survive, tallest building in the world for 3800 years

Ralph Pines
CatherineHall
bmadsen
writingismypassion
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randi.lee
BBBurke
BigWords
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SuzanneSeese

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Borges once wrote of a secret society dedicated to bring about the replacement of our world by another by methodically documenting every facet of the new world in an encyclopedia; the facts about the new world would gradually replace those of the old through substitution, forgery, and dissemination of altered or completely fictional books. After all, if books (and their successors) can be altered, and they form the only record of the world beyond what people have seen with their own eyes, to change them is to change all.

I believe that someone may have taken that tale to heart.

In my role as a regional coordinator for a major consortium of libraries, I hear a lot of scuttlebutt about books and such; in my previous life I worked for Merchant & Field Booksellers and still maintain some contacts there. Lately my librarians on the one hand and my booksellers on the other have been bringing me texts that, quite frankly, don’t make any sense.

They run the gamut from leather-bound to cheap pulp and bear realistic-sounding but totally false publishers. Real love went into their creation, unlike some of the publish-on-demand crap that bubbles up. Yet the world they describe so blithely and without elaboration is an alien one, like the place I live but in many ways completely different.

The publication dates, for one. Who would create a fake book with a date fifty or a hundred years in the future, or one using a date system (PC) that seems to have begun counting three or four years ago? I’ve read many of the titles, and they are rife with descriptions of kingdoms and empires alongside cell phones and sports cars–the sort of thing many cheap and terrible books aspire to, it’s true. I think they describe a world like ours in which most nation-states have collapsed and in which technology has largely stagnated among the ruins of a fragmented USA. Stagnation and fragmentation, or stagmentation, or fragnation if you prefer.

The kind of internal consistency I’ve seen seems to belie the theory that it’s a single kook slipping these onto shelves. It’s almost enough to make me believe that these crazyquilt places, these Beral Lands, Vativia, Eastern and Outland Empires, or the Rift actually exist somewhere.

That’s crazy of course. But is a Borgesian attempt to alter the fabric of our reality any less so, or an elaborate and expensive literary prank so obtuse that only a handful of booksellers and archivists worldwide could get the joke? Next to that, sometimes I’m willing to allow that these books, these tawdry novels and single volumes of larger works, have simply slipped through some crack from one place to another.

After all, as Borges said, what would someone in another world make of one of our encyclopedias? What would the advanced but fragmented, stagnant but vibrant places I read in these mystery books think if this writing wound up on their own computer screen?

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ArtCity One was the ultimate extension of the expensive, popular, and uncharacteristically honestly-titled Let’s Put Stuff In Space To See What Happens program. The United States Aeronautics and Space Administration constructed, at taxpayer expense, a huge titanium sphere designed to rotate in such a way as to provide gravity in some areas and none in others and filled it with 10,000 artists. Every shape and form of art was represented, from writing to sculpture to bizarre outsiders who worked in mediums like spider pee and bat earwax.

A committee of USASA bigwigs chose the artists from a stack of applications. They were accused of stuffing ArtCity One with weirdoes and gadflies the government would prefer to have on the other side of a few million miles of hard vacuum, but in fact the only thing the artists had in common was that their best work was apparently ahead of them. No established or high-profile figures were included, though a few did try to bully themselves onboard.

With great fanfare, ArtCity One was launched ten years to the day after construction began, borne skyward by 1500 surplus Saturn V rockets. As part of the agreed-upon plan, there was no communication between USASA mission control and ArtCity; the artists were left to do as they would while USASA monitored the sphere’s automatic systems. They planned for numerous contingencies, keeping a rocket with a rescue crew on 24/7 standby.

The only thing USASA didn’t plan on was a budget cut.

After an election, the new president made the controversial decision to divert the Let’s Put Stuff In Space To See What Happens program’s $200 trillion budget into a new program. Its reputation, they claimed, had been inevitably tarnished by such fiascoes as Operation Pork Lift, the Mucus Orbiter, and of course the notorious Unstable Radioactive Isotopes In Rapidly Decaying Orbits initiative. The president transferred the funds to the new Let’s Give Money to Various Voting Blocs program, and ArtCity One was left to its own devices after a message asking the crew if they would like to be retrieved received no response.

Eight years afterward, the president left office and $100,000 was allocated by their successor to the Let’s See What Happened to ArtCity One So Their Relatives Will Leave Us Alone initiative. The two-man crew, made up of astronauts previously dismissed from the program for substance abuse problems or trying to murder their ex, rendezvoused with ArtCity One in a secondhand Soyuz capsule that the Russians had put on the “free” table at their national garage sale.

The first transmission was garbled; the USASA Relief Mission Control Team (normally assigned to supervise space junk in near earth orbit) could barely understand any of it. The only clear words were “massive,” “gazebo,” decoupage,” and “hive-mind.”

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