This Book Does Not Exist (15 page)

“Maybe she knows about Dave, the pilot? Or, you remember the scenario I presented to you in The
JFK
Incident, don’t you? I suppose she could have just been trying to send you a message, figuring you wouldn’t bother going in after her. That’s possible. But frankly she should have known you would.”

“Are you positive it was really her?”

He nods. “I saw her leaving with the other world. She went back inside
the Door
.”

“She wants to stay in your world?”

“Hey, some people like it there. In fact, this little pocket I found is about to scuttle off, and I don’t want to be stranded. I better get going.”

He pats me on the back and disappears down an open manhole.

The
rest of the Warehouse District looks how it usually does after last call but before dawn, when the patrons have gone back to the suburbs and the workers are beginning to lock up, while the waste of the night clings to the street and begs to be cleansed. Behind me, Spy Bar is untouched, as if it never was on fire.

Naomi doesn’t want to be with me anymore.

I don’t understand what went wrong, but the possibility I have lost the only girl that ever loved me is very real.

I text the new number that allegedly belongs to her:

Naomi

Jul 27 7:35 PM

Why are you doing this
to

me
? Why did you set the

club
on fire?

I walk to the parking lot and retrieve my car.

I am driving over the Detroit-Superior Bridge. Underneath it, the Cuyahoga River – which was once so littered with sludge and trash that it caught on fire – looks black.
Too black.
I realize I’m checking my mirrors more than I’m watching the road. I
can’t predict when or where the other world will manufacture another incident. I perceive abnormalities in everything.

I am heading to East Cleveland to close
the Door
.

After what happened in the Warehouse District, I can’t take any more chances.

I didn’t expect to hear from Naomi, and I haven’t.

I hate this. I hate the other world. I hate what it’s putting me through.

I turn off Superior and onto West 25
^th
Street, plotting a circuitous route east. I don’t know why. I curse myself.
I need to make it to
Geppetto’s
before
the Door
unleashes something else.

The speed limit here is twenty-five. I get up to fifty.

I recognize these dilapidated storefronts belonging to now out-of-business Verizon, Starbucks, and Blockbuster franchises. I’m within a couple minutes of
Geppetto’s
. The stores were probably once mom and pop places, colorful, albeit decaying, homegrown check cashing and secondhand clothing shops. The presence of the newly abandoned corporate storefronts gives me the impression someone tried to rebuild East Cleveland and failed. I never made this connection before. I thought the city was simply abandoned while money and jobs and innovation chased the Information Age to other states and countries. In actuality, there was a breath of progress before death. Advancement then decay, or solely
decay
, I wonder – which is better or worse – when the light at the intersection turns green, and I let off the brake.

A minute passes. I think I’m less than a mile away from
Geppetto’s
when a sudden outburst of noise pulls my eyes away from the junkyard of homes on the side of the road and straight ahead, where I see precisely what I thought I was hearing – a massive construction site.

Five hundred feet in front of me the road is blocked off and peppered with construction equipment – a bulldozer, a giant crane, a flatbed truck loaded with wood paneling. The loudest noise comes from the crane as it aches to re-position itself. The entire site is flanked with skyscraper tall, alien-looking lights. A large consortium of people scuttle amidst the machinery. Some move frantically, others loiter. The workers aren’t exemplary of a typical construction crew – there are far too many women for one thing, and they’re dressed too fashionably – but otherwise the site reminds me of a project that had been going on across the street from my apartment in LA.

I slow down. I have to cross this roadblock in order to get to
Geppetto’s
and close
the Door
.

The crane stops.
Someone yells something I can’t make out. A preternatural quiet follows.

I speed back up, searching for a path or a side street that will allow me to circumvent the construction site, as a kid with a walkie-talkie runs out in front of my car and throws up both his hands. I stomp on the brake, jerk the wheel. The car screeches sideways and stops without hitting him.

The kid hurries to my window. As I examine him – his cargo shorts, his
walkie
,
a
badge hanging from a cord around his neck – I realize what he wants to protect.

This is a movie set.

I’ve already started to lower my window when the Production Assistant knocks on it.

“Sorry, sir, you have to turn around.”

The kid looks like he may still be in
high school, or at the oldest, his first or second year of college. Aside from being nervous, he is acting normally, unlike anyone I’ve encountered in the other world. My first thought was that the movie set was the centerpiece of another incident. Now I’m not so sure.
The Avengers
shot in Cleveland; this could just be piss poor luck on my part.

“Actually,” I tell the PA, “I need to get somewhere on the other side.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We’re shooting a feature film in this area. We can’t let anyone through.”

“I’m not going to drive across the set with the cameras rolling.”

“What I mean is that it’s impossible for you to pass, sir.
Physically impossible.
The set covers the entire road. We built a crater.”

“What about on foot? There are people walking all over the place.”

“It’s a closed set, sir. It covers an entire half-mile radius. Again, I’m sorry.”

He’s getting antsy because I haven’t agreed to turn around yet. I attempt to soften him by asking what they’re filming.

“A post-apocalyptic drama,” he says like a consumer products pitchman. “This part of the city is the perfect location for it. Other than the crater, it’s
all natural
. It looks amazing.”

I ask the kid about the director and the actors. He says, “I’m sorry, sir” – his precursor to everything apparently – “I’m not at liberty to say.”

 
The
PA’s
walkie-talkie crackles. He puts a finger to his mouth –
shhh
– and then through his
radio I hear the sort of chatter that precedes the rolling of cameras, followed clearly by “action!”

The giant crane tilts. I hear gunshots, a violent mangled argument, more bullet blasts, and an explosion. A sheet of blinding multicolored light leaps into the sky above where I assume the manmade crater is located. Red and blue and white and green and yellow and orange all messily compound, transforming the night into a kaleidoscope.

I hear a loud “cut!” over the radio, followed by slow, appreciative clapping
that soundtracks
the gradual evaporation of the colors in the sky. The PA
harbors a look of astonishment, so enamored is
he by the effects of movie magic. He becomes agitated, however, when we make eye contact.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he says.

I lie and say I’m going to leave.

“Is there a detour? Some other way for me to get around the set?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry. There isn’t. Our producers determined a detour wasn’t necessary because no one lives behind the set. Can I ask where you’re trying to go?”

“How long are you shooting here for?”

“We strike the set tomorrow morning, sir. Twenty-four hours after we arrived. Do you think you can turn around before the director does another take, please?”

I could drive past this kid, dump the car and run across the set. Someone else will try to stop me, but…

“Sir, really. Please. It would make my job so much easier.”

He doesn’t grasp that this isn’t about making anything easier.

I throw open my door.

My door clips the PA, jolting him sideways, and I’m already out of the car and racing towards the heart of the set when he raises his
voice, saying “sir” and “stop” over and over and over
without taking any additional action. A
group of people lingering in front of a row of black cargo vans looks at me stunned. The kid shouts at them to grab me. Instead of listening to him they just yell, passing his instructions on to the rest of the crew deeper on set.

I ignore them, continuing to charge ahead as the idea that maybe no one is stopping me because they are all from the other world and the other world doesn’t want them to stop me because it has something lethal planned enters my mind. If this is true, I tell myself, you cannot be afraid. The other world hasn’t beaten you yet – and it won’t beat you now. If you can just get to the other side of the set, you should have a clear pathway to
the Door
.

I cut in front of monitors, producers, assistants, and hanger-
ons
. I hear chatter about “the guy
running”
and “the man who broke onto the set,” but nobody comes after me – they just prattle on through walkie-talkies and bullhorns as I face down the crater that’s as big as a house. I push my legs harder, ignoring exhaustion and the lingering tendrils of one traumatic experience after another while I race around the crater and break past the camera, where the actors and the director are preparing for the next take.

I sense I’ve gone unencumbered for too long. I anticipate something awful happening as I close in on the talent. And this is when an ex-football player type wearing the uniform of a security guard drifts out in front of me.

I see him too late to dodge.

He drives me into the ground. My face smashes to the side, scraping across the dirt. He pins all his weight on top of me. I can’t breathe.

“What the hell are you trying to do?”

I can’t answer. I need air. I battle to speak. The actors watch me. I think I recognize Kevin Costner in tattered clothing and dirt-like make-up. The man across from him could be Gene
Hackman
. A young actress sitting cross-legged looks familiar, but I can’t pinpoint her name. And the director choreographing the scene looks too much like Sofia Coppola to not be her.

I am on an actual movie set – not a fabrication of the other world.

I wheeze out broken phrases. I communicate that I need to see someone who lives on the other side of the set.

“There are no houses there,” he says. “It’s a wasteland.”

“Just let me go.” My wind is coming back to me. “It’s important. I won’t talk about the movie. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Do you have a phone? Did you take pictures?” He asks the PA, “Did you see him taking any pictures?” The kid shakes his head no.

The security guard lifts me off the ground. He must be a foot taller and 150 pounds heavier than me. I have no chance to take him out. With one hand gripped around the back of my neck, he drags me all the way off the set and slams me on top of the hood of my car.

“Now get out of here and don’t come back.”

Finally, the security guard lets go of me. The PA poses next to him, miscast in the role of co-enforcer. Aggravated, I say, “He told me you were done shooting tomorrow morning.”

“Joe, give him the brochure so he’ll go away.”

The PA hands me a dark red brochure from out of his cargo pocket. I read the front. It says the production finishes shooting tomorrow at 5 AM.