This Book Does Not Exist (17 page)

It was stupid of me to ignore the inside of the brochure this long. I was wrong about the movie set. I fucked up.
 

My phone vibrates. A text:

Kirsten

Jul 28 11:32 AM

I’m on united. Coming

through
security to meet u!

Meaning I have to walk to the
United
terminal, and I don’t know where it is. But the bigger question, obviously, is whether or not I can trust Kirsten since her name is in the brochure.

I start walking, thinking I can watch
for her to come out of the departures area and gauge the situation then. Turning, I spot the signs for United a few
hundred feet from where I am now. I head in their direction, putting the brochure away as I do.

Up ahead, the sliding glass doors to the terminal carom open, seemingly on their own. When I arrive at the entrance, they’re still open. I stop. I lean sideways and peer inside the airlock style space that bridges the terminal and the outdoors.

Standing there, staring at me, is a girl that looks uncannily like Kirsten
Dunst
, even more so than I remembered. She sends me a smile I don’t return, and I can’t stop myself from asking, “Do you know anything about
the Door
?”

The last two words destroy everything. For a moment I think she’s going to run away. But then her mood stiffens, and she says, “Where can we go?”

Since there are no restaurants outside security, Kirsten and I head to the closest place we can find on Yelp. Of all places, it happens to be an Olive Garden I stopped at once before with Naomi while we were on our way to the airport at the end of Thanksgiving break. I was flying to LA. She was traveling to New York. Throughout dinner, neither of us spoke.

An equal amount of conversation takes place between
me and Kirsten
on the way to the restaurant now
. At the airport, she told me she needed time to gather herself. In the meantime, my trepidation has soared into outright fear.

When we reach the parking lot, I back into an empty spot so it’s easier to pull out when something goes wrong.

Inside the restaurant, the hostess greets Kirsten and leads us to a table for two at the center of the moderately filled dining area. After she leaves us with menus, Kirsten breaks the silence.

“It’s nice to see you. I just wish... That the circumstances were different.” Sensing that I’m about to apologize, she adds, “It’s
not your fault. I know as well as anyone. If it was your fault, or I had some reason to be upset with you, I wouldn’t be here.”

“The look on your face when I brought it up...”

“Mike…”

“Can I show you something?”

Right as I lay
the brochure on the table, our waiter shows up. Abruptly, I cover the paper with my hands. Kirsten talks to him. She orders the cheapest bottle of red wine on the menu, and he goes away.

“Let me see,” she says.

I slide the brochure over to her. She examines the front cover. I tell her about the movie set. She opens it and reads. By watching her face, I can identify the moment she uncovers her name.

Starkly, she looks up at me and asks, “Can I trust you?”

“Absolutely. Of course you can.”

“How do I know you’re not part of this?”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“I thought I ended this when I said I would never be that scared again.”

Before I can ask any questions, the waiter returns. I watch Kirsten as he opens the bottle of wine. I want her to believe everything will be fine. I can be stronger if I know she’s counting on me.

After she samples the wine, our eyes meet. Something like trust passes between us. Still holding each other’s gaze, we order our food so the waiter will leave us alone. Once he does, Kirsten asks me a question.

“Does it have something to do with a girl?”

Disquieted, I answer that it does.

Kirsten takes a long drink of wine and then sets down the glass. She sinks into her chair. I wait for her to speak.

“Let’s agree to trust each other, okay?”

I nod.

“Okay. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

“You remember the night we met I mentioned my boyfriend. You had your girlfriend. It was similar. We discussed all that. About a week afterward…
I’m sorry
,
this is hard for me
… He flew out to LA to visit. We’d been in Silver Lake, at El Cid for dinner and then we were on our way to the Troubadour for a show – Lost On Purpose were playing – and I don’t know why this happened when it did, but he decided to launch into this, this tirade about everything that was wrong with me. ‘Wrong,’ that was the word he used, like I was sick or fucked up, I don’t know, permanently.

“He said I…
That my face was a wreck.
He said that because of this tiny scar I have along my cheek that I got when I was a little girl helping scrape the paint off my dad’s house and his scraper clipped me. Anyway, my boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend now, said my hair was ratty and that I needed to lose five
pounds, that
he wouldn’t sleep with me again until I did, and he bitched about the way I dressed… All of these just really horrible things to say to someone you supposedly love.

“I didn’t understand where any of it was coming from but obviously I was hurt – really bad – and I started crying, and I couldn’t stop, and he kept, like, berating me, and I tried yelling at him to shut up, and I asked how he could say all of this if he loved me, and he said – this may be the worst thing – he said it was to ‘make me better.’

“And to think, I thought this whole time I was pretty good, right? I mean, we talked – I told you I was working on my career, on my writing, going to grad school… No one’s perfect, but this was all just – it was vicious.

“I screamed at him to stop the car, and he wouldn’t, and I don’t love that I did this, but I smacked him on the shoulder and arms mainly, but maybe I got him on the face a couple times, until he finally stopped in the middle of an intersection. I got out without looking and ran to the curb and then just ran away to somewhere he couldn’t see me. This was in Hollywood on Fountain, I think. It was like I was a criminal running from the cops except he didn’t bother to come after me.

“I missed the show. His flight was supposed to leave the next morning. I called Jessica to pick me up and then I turned off my phone. I didn’t see him before he left. When I turned it back on there were all these messages from him, apologizing, saying he didn’t know what got into him, why he said everything he did… It was all bullshit, I thought, but I also didn’t understand what he did either. We had problems, you know, but… He was a loving person. Generally speaking.

“I figured it was over. I wanted it to be, I guess. But he kept calling from DC and eventually I talked to him. I listened mostly. He apologized profusely. But none of what he said really made any sense – his excuses were like, ‘I had a bad day.’ Really? That’s not a ‘bad day.’ That’s something deeper, scarier, all together worse. He wanted to stay together or get back together, however you want to look at it, but I was strong. I said no. After a few days he stopped calling.

“But then as time went on – and this is awful to some extent – I
started
 
to
miss him. Even though I hated him, I missed him. Okay, I didn’t hate him, but I wanted to hate him. To be honest, at the time, I would have liked to talk to you about it because we had such an instantaneous connection, and I felt like, I don’t know, we had similarities and we got each other, but I didn’t have your number, and I knew you had a girlfriend and how was I going to find you anyway? Which is why it was so weird when I found you on
Facebook
through that random Geppetto person… But now I’m beginning to understand why.

“Later, I don’t know, a couple weeks, I was supposed to go to DC for a wedding. And it was for a really good friend of mine, so I had– Or I mean I wanted to go
. So I’m heading
back to DC and the whole time before I leave LA I tell myself no matter what happens I will not under any circumstances call him when I’m there. Then, of course, I’m on the plane and the movie is
(500) Days of
Summer
… And my ex and I – do you like how I keep refusing to use his name? –
we
had tried making plans to see it on literally five different occasions, and every
f’ing
time they fell through.

“But on the plane I watch the movie, and it’s all about people breaking up and moving on, and c’mon, it’s not fair, right, but at the same time it just made me think about all the things I wanted to do with him that now I’d never be able to do… All of that was just crushed.

“I guess, you know, I could’ve or should’ve been angry about this. That he ruined it. It could have turned me against him even more… But instead it made me sad. It made me miss him, terribly. To the point that when the plane landed, I did exactly what I said I would not do – I called him.”
 

“He didn’t answer his phone, so I left a message saying something like, ‘
You
know I’m in town for the wedding. I miss you. I know I’m being stupid, but I’d like to see you.’

“The wedding itself was the following day – I got to DC on Friday morning – so the whole time I’m getting off the plane I’m checking my phone, waiting to see if he’s going to call, and I do the same thing while I’m waiting for my bags, and I’m clearly distracted when my sister comes to pick me up. She asks me what’s wrong, but I’m not going to tell her because I’ve already gone on and on complaining and crying about him, everyone in my family hates him now… I’ve been trying to hate him... But now all I want to do is see him. And I realize this all sounds insane, but when it comes to love and relationships… I remember what you said that night about how often people, really smart people, want what’s bad for them… And the point – I believe there is a point, but…

“I spend all of Friday trying not to think about him and why he isn’t calling while I see my family, my friend who’s getting married, her friends, her fiancé’s friends, and he never calls me. No text, nothing. And all these different ideas as to why just barrage my brain – is he seeing someone else? Has he been seeing someone else? Is that why he flipped out on me?
Because, really, there still wasn’t an explanation for that.
And my whole day – all these interactions with people I care about – is just screwed up by this pain and this paranoia, which makes me even madder.

“That night we’re supposed to meet up at a bar – all my friends, not him obviously – and I convince myself I have to stop letting this bother me. I make him out to be an even worse person than he really is. And on the way to this bar, I’m using my parents’ car, blaring
The Grey Album
as loud as humanly possible, and everything is looking up until I get lost in this really bad section of town. My car breaks down outside of some abandoned building. There’s a sign on it that says ‘Amelia’s’ and then underneath that are the words, ‘Come to Amelia’s today because tomorrow may be too late.’

“Inside the building I found a door, and you already know what happened after that.”

“I’m not going to talk about what I went through after I found
the Door
. I don’t want to relive it. I know it happened, I remember it, but I don’t want to think about it because that’s too close to experiencing it all over again.

“It doesn’t comfort me to know there are more entrances to the other world. Am I better off because I went through it and I survived? Yeah, I thought so. I think so. Unless finding you online and us being here together is some sign that the other world is coming back to get me… No, there haven’t been any signs, it’s just- You telling me this, it’s like- I guess if I had had cancer, and the doctor said there was a chance it could come back, but maybe I didn’t really believe her until someone I met told me it happened to them… Now the possibility seems real.

“How did I get rid of
the Door
?

“Eventually, I realized what the other world was, what all the god awful incidents were comprised of, what was dictating them. They were all things I had experienced. It was all from my memory. Everything was just distorted. And I could never be sure, not totally, but I felt like the distortions were all creations of my overactive imagination.