This Book Does Not Exist (14 page)

He removes a folded up piece of paper from his back pocket.

Geppetto asks if I want to know the identity of the person Virginia told me about, the “guy” she thought might be able to locate Naomi. Before I can answer, he unfolds the piece of paper and holds it out in front of me.

It’s a printout of a digital photograph, a picture of a guy and a girl.

The man is the pilot from The Plane Crash Incident.

He is framed from the chest up, standing against a sun-drenched horizon, smiling. The source of his joy appears to be the girl next to him. A girl wearing traditional Ray Bans that looks very much like Naomi.

She is leaning in towards the pilot’s face with her lips pursed, ready to touch them to the side of his cheek. And the kiss happened – I can envision it – moments after the image was captured.

I lose my composure. In an attempt to stabilize, I focus on the chance this is just a girl that resembles Naomi – the sunglasses are hiding her eyes – or that the picture is fabricated, maybe
Photoshopped
.

“You know that’s her?”

“I wasn’t there,” says Geppetto. “A colleague sent the file to me, and I printed it out.”

“Was it manipulated?”

He shrugs. “How can I know?”

“When was it taken? It could have been from before we met.”

“I assume it went like this: Naomi walked through
the Door
and met the pilot and then some time after that he tried to kill you, and you killed him instead. Obviously, her experiences in my world have been more pleasant than yours – or at least they had been.”

This hurts. Every word hurts.

“Who knows if she knows what you did, but I’m guessing she reached out to you because she’s lonely and depressed now that Dave – that was his name by the way – is gone. People are prone to regress in those types of situations.”

I’m rattled.
Geppetto
is willing to be brutally honest. But he isn’t telling me what he knows. He’s telling me what he suspects. And even that is only meaningful if I trust him.

“You don’t know any of this for sure. It’s all guesswork.”

“That’s accurate. I’m asking around. But really it’s up to you to discover the truth.”

I had a feeling he’d say something like that.

“Resolution is key. Of course, there are many ways for resolution to occur.”

“
The Door
keeps getting in the way,” I tell him.

“Think of it as a conduit.”

Until the confusion ends, my thoughts are daggers, inflicting wounds infected with emotion. I need clarity. I need Naomi. I close my eyes and visualize the word “hope,” but the war inside my grey matter escalates. I can no longer be rational. I’m plunging into the middle of the battle with faltering instincts.

Somehow I still hear my phone ring.

I look at the screen to see who’s calling.

Shaking, I slide my finger across the green answer button and put the phone to my ear. After hearing enough background noise to know the call is connected, I say, “Naomi.”

“Hey,” she says back.

The sound of her voice brings everything into focus for me. She is all I want.

“Hey. Naomi. Hey… Where are you?”

“I couldn’t find you so I set the club on fire.”

Click.

She hung up.

She’s gone.

Geppetto
walks out of the alley. Going after him and approaching the sidewalk, I see flames raging out of the top of Spy Bar.

The catalyst for Naomi and I nearly breaking up forever is burning to the ground. The flames are lilting and billowing, leaping onto the roofs of adjacent clubs and bars.

 
“Destructive way for her to let you know where she is,” says Geppetto, before noting, “I understand the need to search for something, but you should know it’s okay to search for something else.”

He leaves me after that.

I am on my own, Spy is on fire, and all of the Warehouse District is next.

I sprint towards the club, barging through group after group of people. Heat confronts me at a frightening number of angles, from inside Spy, from the top of the roof, from the facades of the neighboring structures… The temperature rises as I get closer to the club, and the flames grow more monstrous by the moment.

Nearing the entrance, I pull up and reassess the environment. What I see reminds me of the movie
Backdraft
– minus the firefighters because there aren’t any. There are no trucks. There are no sirens. In the blaze, I cannot detect a single person trying to escape. They are either content with the devastation, ignorant of it, or apathetic, as if their behavior is predicated on the normalcy of chaos.

The doorman at the bar next to Spy stands still, as if nothing is wrong, chewing gum while the fire and the heat bear down on him. That he isn’t moving is an almost more amazing display of fortitude than if he were running in and out of the bar, saving person after person, and I can’t understand what he’s doing
at all.

I yell at him to get
out of the way, to run, to do something, anything, when a tall flame whooshes across the gap between buildings and bathes over his flesh. The doorman doesn’t flinch. His hair and his clothes ignite. The historic photo of the Buddhist monk self-immolating on a street in Saigon to protest the Vietnam War spears into my mind. The flames lick onto the doorman’s flesh. I swear I see his skin melt, and I don’t have time to be in shock but I am.

Naomi should be like me, not like these people in the other world who still aren’t evacuating and probably never will. She should be running. I should see her.

Unless she’s trapped inside.

Around the entrance to the club, there is a tiny, desperate opening in the flames.

I think I can make it.

I hit the pocket of open air running and burst inside the club.

I discover a typically crowded Saturday night club scene – adults talking, dancing, drinking, laughing, shouting to be heard over the music – with one devastating exception: they are encased in fire.

“Everything is Broken” by Mr. Hudson plays over the sound system:

“I was just your token, token, token /

“Everything is broken, broken, broken”

Dancers dance alongside flames
. Fireballs boom out of the ceiling in rhythm with the drum claps. Drinkers sip alcohol at a rate appropriate for a picnic in July. Everyone burns. It is so hot, so terrifying, and so horrific to me, but to them it just is. I am the outsider wailing at the border to hell as all the people on the other side embrace the catastrophe that is their world.

I can’t see Naomi from here.

Evading flames, I push past a pack of
people that isn’t
yet on fire and doesn’t seem to care that it will be at any moment. On the dance floor in front of me, brown hair the color of Naomi’s shows, but the sight breaks when the ceiling ruptures, releasing cement, plaster, and wood coated
in
 
flames
down into the center of the club.

I turn and run.

I’m forty feet away from the shower of fire and debris when it hits like an exploding bomb. Burning shrapnel impales flesh and bone and crashes to a stop on the hard black flooring. The entire building quakes. I am knocked to the ground. I roll up, struggling to reposition myself amidst so many oblivious bodies, when a dragon-sized fireball shoots across the club and blows out the entrance, careening all the way across the width of the street and eradicating a stretch of parked cars. Like the impact of an exit wound, the front of the club is now engulfed in flames. Even the people who are burning continue to drink and sway to the sound of Ben Hudson’s voice. The speakers don’t liquefy. The intensifying crackle of the fire adds a new dimension to the song, an evil layer of light percussion that does not, unfortunately, signal a method to escape.

There is no way out.

We are all going to die.

“Everything is broken, broken, broken”

The floor acts as kindling. Flames crawl in every direction. The vacant space in the club is being compacted. I try to pivot around the obstacles but can’t. Everyone boils into each other, the people who are burning and those who aren’t. The men and women on fire spread the flames to others, and amidst this anthill of people and vice grip of heat, I either recklessly or idiotically fight to find Naomi. I touch people hoping that maybe, if nothing else, I can feel her one last time. I pay for this when my arm catches on fire. I swing it, trying to shake off the flames, and all I do is hit more people who aren’t Naomi and catch myself on fire in more places – my other arm, my leg, my torso – and oh my god the hair on my head is on fire and my skull is cooking, and I haven’t seen or touched Naomi, and there is no way I am not going to die and the pain is somehow worse than I ever imagined it would be.

It feels like

I am burning to death.

I can feel my parts t
urning to ash, but my mind is still processing, and worst of all, my heart is still beating. It beats for Naomi, and my longing counteracts my wish to succumb to the pain, which is all consuming, like I’m swimming in it, and it is the Pacific Ocean, and I am somewhere in the middle with only one arm and one leg, trying to flail my way to the surface. But I am sinking, deeper and deeper, until the hurt almost, but not quite, feels normal. I am becoming calm. I am nearly numb. I hear one sound – my beating, yearning heart.

I ran into a fire that Naomi set, to try to see her, to try to save her, to try to reach her and get her back, and I failed. Blinded by desire, I made a tragic mistake. This will be the last thing I think of when I die.

I am in more agony than ever before and what hurts most is that I am certain I will never see her again.

It feels like I’m starting to melt.

I don’t regret going after her. I convince myself of this while I still have time. There was pain before
the Door
. Not like this. Different, slower and less intense, but it also felt as if it would never end. This, I know, will end. And it will end without Naomi.

My ear drips off the side of my head. It is hard for me to think. My brain must be burning up.

Something nearly pulls the shirt off my back. My
thigh, my knee, both elbows, scrape
against the ground. I’m dropped. My jaw cracks the pavement. I open my eyes and start to put the story of my life back together.

It’s gloomy and grey but not dark. This looks like Cleveland. I’m on a sidewalk. I think this is West 6
^th
, but it’s vacant.

I thought I was dead.

Is this how the after-life begins, in an alternate version of wherever you were when your heart stopped?

“I saved you.”

I chase the words off the sidewalk to the street, where
Geppetto
is standing up against the curb.

“I heard you screaming that you made a mistake, that you shouldn’t have gone in after her. That’s how I managed to find you in time to get you out.”

I stand and put my hands over my face. I don’t remember yelling that. My skin is warm, but the texture is smooth. It doesn’t seem to be burned. I grab for my hair – it’s still there. Somehow I’m okay even though I felt myself burning to death.

I tell this to Geppetto.

“Your imagination was a little bit ahead of you,” he says.

I ask what happened to Naomi.

“I doubt she was in the club for long. You came to the same conclusion, I thought. She set a trap. She wasn’t going to wait around and let it kill her, too.”

“You think she wants me dead?” I exclaim, raising my voice, incredulous. “I don’t believe that.”