Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

When the British captured the Libyan coast from Axis forces in 1943, the captured Germans and Italians were shipped to Camp Shelby in Mississippi, while the UK soldiers found themselves among the ancient Roman ruins of Leptis Magna. Trained archaeologists attached to the British as artillerymen did their best to keep the ruins from being damaged during the occupation.

In the course of their work trying to conserve the old ruins, the British came across a mummified corpse in one of the outbuildings, itself almost 2000 years old. They didn’t recognize the uniform the dead body wore, nor could they read the language on items it carried. Furthermore, there was no reliable way to tell how long it had been there.

Wild speculation set in, with some soldiers claiming that the body had been present for as long as the ruins had, and that it was proof of an ancient and advanced civilization. Other rumors had the chamber covered with dark symbols indicating a demonic origin.

The reality, as it often is, was more prosaic. Eventually, a British occupier with a talent for languages examined the body and declared the writing to be Russian. A little further detective work showed that the body was that of a Soviet POW, a pilot, who had been captured after bailing out over Bessarabia and shipped to North Africa as a forced laborer, working to maintain the engines and equipment of a Luftwaffe unit stationed nearby.

He’d fled as soon as he was able, only to die of thirst hiding in the ruins nearly a year before his body was discovered.

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And at one point the Azala began to collect, to catalog, to organize. Nothing that anyone would miss, for as near as can be ascertained the Azala only scavenged from refuse piles and debris fields.

It’s speculated that manufactured items appeal to the Azala more than natural ones, though why this might be so is unknown. Just as the Azala has never been observed, it has never been communicated with. Indeed, it may be that communication is impossible.

But it is clear that the items are collected, because they can be seen on display in what can only be described as the Azala’s home, a glen that can only be entered when the sun is at the right height on a fourth Tuesday. Sometimes it is an island and others it is seamlessly part of a surrounding landscape.

Trees fill it, but not the trees that exist in normal or ordered space-time. Rather they bear boughs of old and broken human invention: cameras, tape recorders, VHS tapes, hubcaps, wastebaskets. Serial number checks have confirmed that the items are of human origin, and their broken lenses or cracked cases indicate their cast-off origins.

But just as no one has been able to explain so much about the Azala, none can say how the trees’ branches become fused to the inorganic detritus.

Nor can anyone offer more than speculation about why every piece of human writing save numbers is mercilessly scratched out.

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Love…it’s not long for this world. A doomed word, one destined to fade away like the scent of flowers on a summer breeze. An endangered word.

Not because people are any colder than they’ve been. The indiscriminate slaughter of a thousand generations gives the lie to that idea.

Not because people are have any less capacity to love themselves or others. There are too many marriage certificates, too many babies, for that to be true.

No, people are more disconnected from one another than ever before, and that makes love at best a distant abstraction. Not disconnected in the sense of remoteness, in the sense that it’s hard to love someone 3,000 miles away, but disconnected in that many people don’t know their next-door neighbors. Disconnected in that without the mediation of a pad or screen no one really communicates anymore.

To love, you must know. And we seem to be forgetting.

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