The Book

So, instead of working on my novel like I should be doing I wrote this little... thing. Allow me to present whatever it is courtesy of Phillip K. Dick and Jorge Luis Borges.

He didn't know where the book came from, or when it appeared, he knew no one that had read it, yet somehow it had over run his life.
The book was everywhere, in storefront windows and on best seller lists. It was the zeitgeist, the next great American novel, and the battle cry of the generation. It was “an anthem of overarching beauty” according to anonymous, and “the whisper in the dark, that changes the course of an era” to a person blogging as The Idiosyncratic Mentalist, three paragraphs before admitting that he had yet to read it.
It was advertised everywhere, yet for sale nowhere. It was always sold out, always on back order, yet no one purchased it and no one received it. When he ordered it from Amazon dot com he saw the transaction go through with satisfaction, only to have it refunded three weeks later by an automated system. The seller, apparently, had never existed.
It was a simple book, gold print on a red cover of faux leather. It was not a long book, when it appeared in television shows and, later, movies of the time it was never more than an inch or so thick, except for once, in The Last Great Play when it appeared to be nearly a thousand pages long, and again in Underling where it occupied the better part of a shelf with its several volumes.
The book was referenced again and again, in poetry, in songs, in other prose, and in shampoo commercials. He found it impossible despite, or perhaps because of its ubiquity, to deduce its contents. He thought, at first, that it must be a piece of genre fiction, due to its apparent popularity, until Oprah said that it changed her life. After that announcement it began to be seen with the sticker of her book club on the cover, and still no one, even the ones that burned their copies of A Million Little Pieces in the streets, would admit to having read it.
A whole subculture grew up around the book, not to analyze its contents or its character, but to speculate at it. This speculation was often so baseless as to be little more than random guesses, with the more creative proponents of their ideas publishing tomes that for a time rivaled the book itself in popularity.
One woman gained a great deal of notoriety, not to mention a small fortune, when she postulated that the author must be Chinese, and that the reason it was so hard to lay hands to was that it was being withheld by the Communist Party. The key point in her reasoning was that the author was given only by the word “You.”
This lack of evidence served only to fuel speculation, and in the absence of contradiction Internet denizens and overpaid talking heads decided that it was in fact a plot, by the communists or by some power even more shadowy, to bring down the western world. How this would be accomplished was never precisely laid out beyond some psycho-babble about the collapse of supply and demand.
Ten years after the book came out it still remained a popular conversation at the right sort of dinner parties and happy hours. That is, until the death of Sir Adam James Westhaus, a noted publisher and British expatriate. He was found dead in a field of southern Iowa, his throat cut. He had a blood alcohol level of point three one and there were sophisticated explosives wired to the starter motor of the car in which he was found. When these were triggered they would have engulfed the car in an inferno capable of wiping out all traces of evidence, and why they did not remains a mystery.
In Westhaus's pocket was found a napkin on which were scrawled a series of GPS coordinates. Upon arrival at the listed location officers of the law discovered a small scale printing shop ensconced in an ancient and crumbling warehouse. The presses were rusted with long disuse but stacked throughout the warehouse were box upon box of the book.
It was immediately recognizable by its red cover, embossed in gold, as always the author was “You” and the title remained A Blameless Life but the pages were all blank, save for a number in the upper right hand corner.
No one has yet come forth with any evidence that this was not the best known artistic work of his generation.