This Book Does Not Exist

by Schneider, Mike

  Naomi screams. The bombs in the sky resemble a flock of dying birds. Near us, two doors are set in the ground, presumably protecting the entrance to a fruit cellar. They are red like the Door. I grab a hold of them anyway. Naomi wails. I yank open the doors and drag her inside. She stumbles down the stairs but maintains her balance, reaching the cement floor. I wrap my arms around the box with the bomb, a gesture that looks like love, and drop down after her, pulling the doors closed behind me. My foot slips. I miss the next step. I fall straight down. My foot jabs into the cement sideways, and I topple into darkness. Outside, it sounds like Call of Duty or Saving Private Ryan. I try to get up, but my leg is crooked. My arm is scraped open. I brush my face. My fingers come away with blood. My heart is beating way too fast. Naomi is looking at me. I wonder if she can hear it. I sense I’m dropping out.

  I let go of my mind and it falls.

  THE CELLAR

  My eyes peel open.

  The haze is like a hangover. My body is recalcitrant. When I finally pull through the cobwebs, I see Naomi lying awake beside me. Not with me, but next to me.

  “Your ankle is swollen,” she says. “I think it’s sprained.”

  “How much… How long have I been out for?”

  “Forever. I’ve just been lying here, shaking. I’m so cold.”

  “Thanks for staying with me…”

  “Well, you’re the one with the bomb.”

  She isn’t wrong. I’m still clutching the jewelry box. The joints in my fingers ache from gripping it so tightly. I set it down on the concrete. Outside, it sounds like the bombing has stopped, but it’s difficult for me to think straight. I’m playing catch up with the demands of being conscious.

  I wrestle my phone out of my jeans and look at Naomi. The way she’s acting worries me.

  Based on what I find online, the bloodshed has increased. The messages on Twitter and Facebook indicate a growing death toll. In response to what I wrote about the bomb, I received a number of @replies and comments. People are wondering how I got it. A few ask if I can use it to help them. No one questions whether I actually have a bomb or not.

  I hand the phone to Naomi. While she scrolls through the messages to see what people are saying, I open up the jewelry box.

  A small package of plastic explosives attached to a stringy wick is inside.

  With the bomb decisively in my hands, I turn my imagination to the Door. I visualize coming out of the cellar, walking to Geppetto’s unmolested, planting the bomb in front of the Door, lighting it and running away. Naomi waits for me outside. When I reach her, we put our arms around each other’s waists, and we watch as the building blows apart, the wood combusts, and the entrance to the other world burns.

  I ask Naomi for my phone back. She fumbles it, appearing distressed. I place my hand on her thigh. I want to calm her, but she slides away.

  “Mike. Don’t. It’s too confusing for me.” She moves into the corner of the basement and turns her back on me. I think I hear her crying.

  If we can just get through this, then things will be better.

  “We can make it,” I tell her. “This will work.”

  Swaying slightly she says, “The war’s still going on. We won’t survive all the way to East Cleveland.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it’s right outside anymore. Do you hear anything?”

  It takes a moment for her to shake her head no.

  “I’ll go up and check. But just believe it’s safe. Believe we’ll be better off when we get to the other side of this.”

  She doesn’t acknowledge me.

  Standing isn’t simple. Pain stretches throughout my body. Naomi was right about my ankle being sprained. Whenever I put too much pressure on it I want to yell, but I hold it in and try to embrace it instead. I think about the future, when I’ll be healed, when the war will be over, when the Door will be gone… I reach the top of the stairs and shove open the cellar doors.

  DAYLIGHT

  Based on the height of the sun, I would bet it’s just past dawn. I don’t bother checking the time. The copycat Hollywood production that had been blocking the Door will have left by now, I think, laughing, as if a neurotic PA and a hulking security guard have anything on World War 3.

  Climbing all the way out of the fruit cellar, it becomes clear that the set wouldn’t have been a problem anyway.

  Cleveland is gone.

  Everything, as far as I’m able to see, has been destroyed.

  The entire city has become the post-apocalyptic wasteland the filmmakers were attempting to portray.

  Visibility is extremely high. The sky is free of planes, and the ground is devoid of tanks. The opposition militaries have ostensibly moved on to conquer another city. Far off in the distance, however, I am able to see a brilliant white light, emanating from inside of a lone, surviving building.

  I yell back down into the cellar. “Naomi! I can see the Door from here! Come up, it’s safe!”

  I hear her shuffle across the concrete and up the stairs. When she nears the top, I reach out my hand to help her up. She accepts it, but as soon as she’s outside the cellar she lets go.

  “Oh my god it’s all gone.”

  “Let’s start walking.”

  “You go,” she says. “I don’t have the bomb.”

  “I need you with me. It may not be big enough.”

  She looks like she might kill me.

  “The bomb isn’t big enough?! Then what are you doing?! How am I going to change that?!”

  “We can alter the other world with our thoughts. If both of us imagine the bomb is big enough, then it will be.”

  “You can imagine that on your own.”

  “I can, but together we can make it stronger.”

  Her bottom jaw juts forward. It’s one of her quirks, a funny one that shows up whenever she deliberates something that makes her angry.

  “What? Why are you laughing?”

  “Look, there’s nothing out there. Just come with me”

  “But there could be,” she says.

  I take my eyes off her. I’m worried her disbelief will alter the other world and create another attack. I hobble away with the bomb. My ankle is a wreck. I can feel every step.

  “You need help.”

  When I look back, I see her coming towards me. I wait until she catches up and then we walk together. She helps brace me when I need it.

  Once again Naomi is with me. For however long who knows.

  WALKING WITH THE BOMB

  Naomi and I have been walking for hours. The vacant landscape tricked us into thinking the Door was closer than it is. Now, the broken terrain is wearing on us, especially on me and my ankle, although the pain seems to be on the verge of crossing over into abject numbness, which I view as beneficial.

  Naomi hasn’t said much. I’ve been agonizing over whether to ask if that really was her in the photo with the pilot. If so, did she care for him? Maybe I don’t want to know. The past is the past. We’re here now. I’m not leaving her. I told her that.

  “After we get through this,” I say, “We’ll have all the time in the world together.”

  “We will?”

  My foot scrapes across a piece of metal, a street sign with the word “Cedar” on it. We are on the once diabolically potholed road. Ironically, its utility has actually improved as a result of it being abolished.

  Up ahead, the area where the movie set was is now a mess of broken equipment and shattered lives. Past these vestiges, I can see Geppetto’s. The blue wooden siding has been smeared with ash and chipped away at. The slogan – “Come to Geppetto’s today because tomorrow may be too late” – remains in perfect condition. As in the photos Geppetto posted to my Facebook page, the Door is missing. White light spews out of the rectangular opening like a persistent nuclear blast.

  Naomi and I look at one another. She asks me if I think the other world can pull us back inside.

  “The Door itself is gone,” I tell her. “It doesn’t have t
o take us anywhere. It’s already here.”

  “I guess,” she says, her favorite response for when she knows I’m probably right but doesn’t want to admit it.

  I open Twitter and start typing. Once I’m finished, I hold the screen out for her to see:

  “I’m with Naomi and we blew up the Door with our bomb.”

  She looks back at me. I say what I wrote out loud and send the tweet.

  “Concentrate,” I tell her. “Don’t think about anything besides the end of the Door and everything going back…” I hesitate mid-sentence. She has to prompt me to finish my thought. “I was going to say, ‘back to the way it was,’ but I don’t think that’s possible.

  “So think about the building blowing up and the other world never coming back. Think about that.”

  She nods.

  “Okay,” I say, before heading towards Geppetto’s.

  SKY MIGHT FALL

  Inside the building, the light from the doorway all but blinds me, making it difficult to concentrate on the correct things. I can’t stop thinking something terrible is about to happen, that the other world will make one last stand. It’s a mistake to entertain these thoughts – I know it is – and I press to ward them off as I turn my back on the doorway without the Door, shielding myself from the light.

  I set down the bomb.

  “How are we going to light the wick?” Naomi asks the question, but unwittingly she also provided me with the answer the last time I was standing in this room.

  “You lost your lighter.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your lighter. I found it here, lying on the floor.”

  I pull it out of my back pocket. “I love that lighter,” she says.

  I smile.

  But my happiness doesn’t last because the fears I carried into Geppetto’s have already beaten me.

  Suddenly, I hear the war. What sounds like a whole brigade storming towards us. Naomi becomes manic. “Think they’re far away,” I tell her. “Think they’re really far away.”

  I use my left hand as an awning for my eyes so I can look down at the bomb and examine the wick.

  It’s longish, but not that long. I can’t predict how quickly it’ll burn. I hear the blades of a helicopter chopping above the clatter of soldiers’ gear, shifting and shaking as they stomp. They’re not that close, I say to myself. They’re not that close…

  “Mike, Mike. Oh shit, how long do we have…”

  “Long enough.”

  Gunfire punctuates my sentence. I hear multiple radios, the thump of a mortar being launched, English-speaking voices. Someone screams. Naomi dives to the floor, and I imagine the Americans whisking us away to safety. I imagine me and Naomi watching a baseball game at Dodgers Stadium. I imagine us sitting on a stoop in Manhattan, underneath the stars, listening to sirens and lovers arguing in the street, and I reach down with the lighter, place my thumb on the wheel and shout to Naomi, “Focus on the Door being destroyed.”

  She’s crying hysterically.

  “Naomi!”

  “We’re just going to die out there!”

  “It’ll disappear when the building blows up. Okay? Naomi…”

  “Okay okay!”

  As the battle outside closes in on us, I flick the lighter. On my third try the wheel grinds properly and the spark hits the fluid and the flame jumps and grabs the wick and Naomi’s running and I’m running on a sprained ankle, almost falling, but I’m outside, we’re outside, and we’re fleeing, dreaming about a safe place, and there they are, two armies, marching at one another from opposite sides of East Cleveland, on course to meet exactly where we are.

  Bullets zing past. I peek back over my shoulder. The bomb should have exploded by now, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t…

  “Did you see how fast the wick was burning?!”

  Naomi wants to know, but I didn’t see, and we can’t freak out. That’s what the other world wants. It wants our minds on other things besides the Door being destroyed. A helicopter hovers in our direction and a soldier with an assault rifle leans out the side, and I think – I try to concentrate, sifting through anxieties about the bomb not blowing up, not being powerful enough, and us being shot to reach my desire for the other world not to exist.

  I can get there. I can, I can, I can.

  I remember the song Kirsten posted on Facebook. I give one of my ear buds to Naomi.

  “What is this? What are you doing?”

  “Concentrate on the lyrics.”

  The soldier in the helicopter starts to shoot and Naomi screams and drops, and I go down with her, blocking out the image of the sniper and the oncoming clash between armies. I replace them with an image of me and Naomi on the dock at the South Street Seaport in October, the first weekend I ever flew to see her in New York. My jacket isn’t warm enough, and we’re drinking beer out of cans and watching fisherman launch lines with hooks into the water.

  I press play. I clasp Naomi’s hand.

  “The sky might fall /

  “But I’m not worried at all”

  And I say to her, “I’ll always love you.” I hope she hears me over the music and the war, and my next thought is of the future, and before she can say she loves me back or anything at all, the bomb explodes.

  I hold her hand while Geppetto’s crumbles, and we are consumed by-

  RECONSTRUCTION

  In an instant the world around me is rebuilt. Piles of scrap become homes. Shredded metal reconstitutes into mailboxes and streetlights. Broken trees forge back together and grow. The carbon-poisoned air becomes blue sky I can breathe again.

  There is no guarantee there will never be another war here, but for now it is over. The world has been born anew, as if World War 3 did not take place.

  But for me and Naomi it did.

  Except I realize there is a gap of empty space between my fingers and my palm. I can no longer feel her hand in mine. When I look to my right, she isn’t at my side. The ear bud I gave her is swinging in the humidity, dangling millimeters away from the blacktop.

  Naomi has vanished.

  I swirl around in a full circle. I’m not in East Cleveland anymore. I’m standing alone in the motel parking lot, back in the general vicinity of where I was before the war began.

  I call her, but it rings through to voice mail. I hang up without leaving a message. She’ll see the missed call. I can text her in a little bit to make sure she’s okay. I can only assume she’s been taken back to wherever she was when World War 3 started, as well. Her phone still works. That counts for something.

  Previously, I would have been more worried than I am. A wide range of possibilities for why Naomi didn’t answer would have amassed. Paranoia would have set in. Now, I simply look towards the empty spot in the parking lot where my car once was, think about where I left it and decide to allow whatever is going to happen next happen.

  There has to be a bus stop I can walk to.

  Testing my damaged ankle, I type out a text.

  THE BUS RIDE

  I’m on a deserted county bus to Cleveland Heights. Looking at my reflection in the window, I notice an abrasion on my right cheek and a gash in my forehead, right below where the brim from a baseball cap would fall. My beard has thickened since the last time I saw my face, which makes me wish I had a razor because I’d rather not be a minor cliché.

  I texted Naomi to see if she wanted to meet me for a 9:30 PM showing of Milk. After a long delay, she replied “Ok.” That happened a few seconds ago. I’m thinking through how to respond to her while nervousness burrows into my heart. We aren’t right. I pull my hand down across my face and close my eyelids. Once I open them, I write back that I’ll wait for her outside the theater.

  The frame of the bus bobs as its tires roll along the bumpy road. Another text comes in from Naomi – a second “Ok” – and I tap the Plexiglas window, knowing I will do so until I reach my destination.

  MILK

  I walk through the entrance to the Cedar
Lee Theatre. The movie starts in sixteen minutes. A husband and wife in their mid-50’s, about the same age as my parents, stand in front of me in the line to get tickets. Their daughter is with them. She’s my age probably, and effortlessly stylish, wearing high-heeled boots, a crisp fitting pair of pink jeans, and a bright yellow summer jacket, left open, that ends slightly higher than her waist. Her brunette hair is neatly pulled back, accenting her unassuming yet angelic face.

  Her dad takes forever at the ticket booth, going through membership plans and advance screening purchases with the clerk. Amused instead of frustrated, he turns around and jokes with me about how complicated it is to buy tickets at this theater. His daughter smiles either to be cordial or to silently apologize for her father in the way adult children sometimes do. I smile back, self-conscious of the wounds on my face and the crooked way I’m standing as a result of my bad ankle. If she asks how I got hurt I’ll have to invent some kind of story, I think, as the father finally finishes buying the tickets, and he and his family move aside.

  I step up to the booth and ask for one ticket to Milk. The ticket seller, who is holding onto a copy of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, ogles me while the ticket prints. I make a mental note to visit my parents tomorrow.

  Ticket in hand, I veer towards the ticket taker, who proceeds to rip my ticket in half. I limp into the concession area, where mostly middle-aged, professorial, white and black men and women mill about, buying snacks and drinks and disappearing into the restrooms. Four wooden benches with slats rest up against the walls. I choose the closest one and wait to see if Naomi will show up.