This Book Does Not Exist (22 page)

I sit down in an adjacent pew and lower the kneeler. I consider praying. I should talk to someone. I could call my parents. I could talk to Tim. But I wouldn’t know what to tell them.

I kneel. Doing so in a church provides a sense of communion, especially with the lonely old man nearby. But before I can close my eyes and search through my mind for something, anything that resembles a prayer, the doors to the entrance boom open.

A priest walks in.

He heads down the aisle, carrying a Bible above his head as if he’s opening mass, except he’s not wearing a frock, and there is no procession behind him. He bows in front of the altar and migrates up its three steps to a podium, where he proceeds to give a sermon, the content and delivery of which are unremarkable. Its message, however, is notable: joy is the purpose of life.

The priest makes the sign of the cross. He closes the Bible, abandons the podium and shuffles back down the aisle. Passing
me and the old man,
he says, “Sorry men. Just giving a trial run. Christmas in July
.” Then he exits the church.

I lean over the
pew in front of me and try to pray, but I don’t know to whom I’m praying or how I can expect to find answers when I’m this confounded
. Joy can’t be created endlessly. It isn’t everlasting. I don’t understand how it can be the purpose of life.

I don’t make it through the prayer. I sit back and lift the kneeler. Getting ready to exit the pew, I notice a prayer card stuck in the bin that holds the hymnals. I take it. After glancing at the old man one final time, I leave St. Michael’s church, reading the prayer card as I go.

“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle;
Be
our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all other evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen.”

On the steps outside the church, I re-read the prayer to St. Michael. With repetition comes meaning and definition. Memories of my struggles with the other world inject themselves between stanzas. The image of the disfigured, dying Naomi punctuates the final line of the prayer each time I finish, as if I need to confront this fact before I can move on. In my head, she starts to move, like someone just hit play on a frame of video that was previously paused. Through memory, I experience the event all over again but process it differently. Not being there in the moment, obviously, has an effect, but so do the old man, the sermon, and the prayer, as well as my own reflections. Everything that took place after Naomi disappeared came with strife. But every incident was pivotal. I lost Naomi. I found
the Door
. The other world challenged me. It tried to devour me. It killed Naomi. I’ve suffered. But I am still alive, and I am not the same.

Starting at the beginning, I whisper the prayer out loud – this will be the last time – and my memory leaps to the point in The World Trade Center Incident before the rubble fell and took Naomi with it. I watch my hand reach for her. I almost touch her side, but I come up short, and Geppetto snatches me as she begins to slip away.

And then I realize something. Her side. If the woman actually
was
Naomi, she would have had a tattoo above her left hip – a bullet with her name on it.

Behind me, the doors to the church open. I turn around, expecting to see the lonely old man on his way out. Instead, I see a different old man, one who is always alone but perhaps never lonely.

“Don’t worry,” says Geppetto. “I’m only using my world to co-opt a very small part of yours, just for a moment, so I can personally deliver a message.”

Rather than wait to hear what else he has to say, I blurt out that Naomi is still alive. I look directly
into his eyes. If his expression
was
ever going to change, it would have to be now. This would be when he smiled, if he did that sort of thing. But
Geppetto
interprets everything the same, so there isn’t a smile, there are a few ticks of the clock and then a response.

“You realized about the tattoo. I noticed that earlier. I wanted to tell you, but it would’ve been against the rules. This job can be difficult at times. Then again, sometimes that’s the point. I figured it would come to you when you were prepared to deal with it.
And now, you look like you’ve gained some resolve. Good. I knew you would.” H
e adds, “I emailed my counterpart, the woman who’s been guiding Naomi – her name’s Toni – to check on things.”

“She’s been going through her own version of this?”

“Similar, but with different incidents. Sometimes they overlap, depending if it makes sense. But anyway, Naomi is alive, and she’s not inside
the Door
. That much I know. And the movie set is still by my office. The production is on schedule. I do think you may be better off waiting for them to leave.”

Geppetto
takes a few steps away from me, opens the doors to the church and says, “But what I really came here to tell you is that there’s one thing about the other world you haven’t discovered yet, outside of the memory and imagination shtick.”

He goes back inside the church.

When I go in after him, he’s gone.

And so is the lonely old man.

Before leaving St. Michael’s, I send a text to the number that may or may not belong to Naomi:

Naomi

Jul 28 6:31 PM

I know something’s wrong

but
the Door
is affecting

us
. I tried to find you at

WTC. Still trying. Won’t

give
up. I miss you.

I wait for a response. Two minutes pass. Without warning, my phone shuts down
.

The battery is dead.

I left the charger at the motel.

I’m on my way to the motel.
Geppetto
insinuated the one thing I have yet to discover about the other world is crucial to finding Naomi. At the motel, I can wrack my brain in solitude and charge my phone. Writing ideas out on my computer may help me organize my thoughts.

At 8:03 PM, I pull into the motel parking lot.

In nine hours, the film production is scheduled to wrap, and the route to
the Door
will be clear. I can shut out the other world then.

Given its track record, I’m hard-pressed to believe it won’t try to get me at least one more time before then.

I’ll be ready when it does.

I’m exploring new ideas and transcribing old details about the incidents on my laptop, searching for clues to the final discovery. Betting that the other world won’t repeat incidents, I find a stream of
The Deer Hunter
online. If I’m right, indulging memories
the Door
has already manipulated may be a way to fend it off completely.

Before starting the movie, I update my
Facebook
status:

“Watching ‘The Deer Hunter’ for the first time since I was 5 months old.”

The first section of
The Deer Hunter
is set in a small town near Pittsburgh. Christopher
Walken
, Meryl
Streep
, and Robert De
Niro
perform in scenes designed to resemble un-choreographed slices of life. As the movie builds at a snail’s pace to a wedding and a reception where the men say “
nostrovia
!” during toasts, just like my grandpa, I recall having heard that portions of the film were shot in Cleveland, with Cleveland obviously doubling for Pittsburgh. Especially in the late 60’s and early 70’s, the two cities – with their cold, working class neighborhoods and prominent factories – were brothers in style. In fact, many of the locations in the movie remind me of the area around St. Michael’s, which I learned after looking online is in the neighborhood of Tremont, on the West Side of Cleveland.

Pausing the movie, I search on Google for “
The Deer Hunter
” and “Cleveland.” A page of links comes up.
I remembered correctly.
Both the reception and the wedding sequences were filmed in Tremont at
Lemko
Hall and St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral, respectively.

Something about the name of the church sounds familiar.

I switch over to
Facebook
. Scrolling through my profile page, I hit upon what I was looking for. Lauren, the girl who
friended
me after she went on a single date with Tim, mentioned it in an earlier comment on my status:

Lauren XXXXX: well, I drank way more vodka cranberries than I thought was possible last night!
now
on my way to church at
st
. Theodosius
lol

SAT AT 6:02 PM

I never talked to her after I accepted her friend request. I don’t think Tim did either.
And now this comment?

On a whim, I check the chat function to see if she’s online.

Me
: did you write to me about
st
theodosius
before for any specific reason?

Lauren
:
omg
, your watching deer hunter?
coincdennnnnnce
lol

Me
: do you always go there or was that like a one time thing?

Lauren
: it’s a good movie
its
sad what happened to the director but I think id like to get married in that church someday, m

Me
: why?

Lauren
: u should get married there
toooo
!
lolol

Me
: what the hell are you talking about?

Lauren
: ok m
gotta
go appt at the doctors, getting a cat scan,
yay
!

[Lauren is offline.]

The conversation ends there, with me finding it impossible to believe Tim ever went out with Lauren at all. Was she sent by the other world? If so, the implications are severe
since she entered his life before I found
the Door
.

Thinking, I restart the movie. T
he first Russian roulette sequence begins, the same one my 26-year-old father held my 5-month-old self in front of almost thirty years ago. As it must have, innately, when I watched the movie as a baby, the tension in the scene is transferred to me, adding to the strain I already feel from the other world and the pressure from the vacuum that exists between
myself and Naomi
. These are the issues I’m confronting now, but I have always had issues… My weight, my loneliness, my stalled career… I have lived with an awareness of struggle from a very early age, from at least the point my dad placed me in front of this movie, and I absorbed the conflict it dramatized. Even being born was a quest, a battle to come out of the womb – prematurely by three weeks in my case – one fight just to get to the next fight faster. If I had stayed inside as long as I was supposed to how would my life have timed out? How many struggles might I have avoided? But
no, I wanted out and into the world. I wanted
my life to begin. And then my parents named me after St. Michael and this is the person I have become
.

I’ve seen all I need to see of the movie. I close my laptop. The hard drive falls asleep, and I open the
Pinterest
app on my phone.

7.29.98

deer
hunter.
what
is war?
war
is selfish.
war
is life.
war
is death.
war
is a million moments, a million pulls of the trigger, a million bullets flying, a million combined hits and misses, everyone stretching or taking life.
war
is like a walk in the streets, the new
york
city mentality amped up a million times, but instead of harsh words and stubborn, hateful, (or worse) apathetic glances there’re weapons and live ammo and it's flying.
war
is terror.
war
is survival.
war
is apathy for everything except your own life – it's beyond selfishness.
war
is ultimately kill or be killed.
what
deer hunter did was show me what war is....war is a fuck you delivered to the world with the most powerful weapon you can handle.
it's
amazing that something so individual is at the same time so much a part of a larger, massive situation.
i
anticipated war itself as this huge mess of moments of decision and action, the human mental process pushed somewhere near if not to its extreme, this ball of life at the end, not the individual struggles.
they
didn't become clear to me until
i
saw them and then
i
felt like
i
was war.
where
my life hangs above all other things.