Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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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Chenelle had laid out all the food we’d brought end to end, open. It was all discolored and putrid, with worms visible writhing through the ripest bits and fungus on the rest.

“It’s rotten,” she said. “It’s all rotten, even the stuff that was sealed airtight when we came through.”

“Figures,” I said. One look at the dark and color-leeched surroundings, all rust and corrugated iron was enough to tell me that the warehouse we were in wasn’t normal in any sense of the word. And that was without the snatches of angry red sky visible through the chinks.

“Damn it, I knew it was going to be unforgiving on this side of the portal, but this…this is madness,” Chenelle continued. “How are we supposed to survive with no food?”

“We’re not.” It was Enola’s soft voice. She had seated herself on a pile of rotting lumber and was slowly, numbly, removing pieces of the mountaineering kit that all three of us were wearing for survival’s sake.

“Enola, stop that,” I said.

She ignored me, and tugged off one of her boots. “It’s all going to end in pain and darkness for us,” she continued. “Even before we came through.”

“Enola,” I said again, approaching her.

“It doesn’t matter what we wear or what we eat…pain and darkness…”

“Enola Bock,” I said firmly, taking her by the shoulders. “Stop that. We are not getting anywhere with that attitude.”

She looked up at me and Chenelle with her wide eyes misty with tears. “Don’t you think I know that?” she sobbed, weakly hurling a glove at us. “But I can’t help it. The vision haunts my every waking hour.”

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“And I’d like to remind you that this is all brought to you by the Macroware Zoom!,” cried Blake. “Live the share!”

The assembled crowd–mostly girls–roared, and the MC doused them with water as music blared.

Satisfied, Blake walked backstage on the converted semi-trailer that unfolded into the Zoom Share Tour 2013. He found Mitch, the salesperson in charge, smoking a cigarette and looking over information on a tablet.

“You hear them out there?” Blake said with his marketer’s grin–it was hard to turn it off. “They love it.”

“They love the free swag and the music and the impromptu wet t-shirt contest,” Mitch grumbled back.

“And you’re going to tell me that’s not going to translate into enthusiasm for Macroware Zoom and Portal OS phones in general?” said Blake.

“Mark my words, kid,” said Mitch. “When this tour’s over, you and I are both going to get our walking papers no matter how much those party-hungry kids slut it up out there.”

“What?”

Mitch took off his glasses and laid them on the fake carton of Macroware Zooms serving him as a desk. “Beyond the fact that we’re peddling what’s basically a stripped down iPhone or Android years after the real things came in and ate our lunch? Above the fact that there’s a $50-a-month data plan in the fine print for stuff that other phones are doing for free?”

“Even Disneyland had problems its first day,” Blake said. “It survived melting pavement sucking off celebrities’ shoes.”

“Be blind if you want, then,” Mitch said. “But I’m looking at the sales figures for the last month. We’ve sold 500.”

“Thousand?”

“Five hundred period.” Mitch said. “2-3 per store, tops. Macroware’s sunk over a billion dollars in the project, and if every single oversexed sorority girl out there grabbing our free merch and running bought a Zoom, it would almost double our total sales.”

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