Dispatch (19 page)

But I didn't care.

And I was going to enjoy the ride for as long as possible.

In the evenings, the three of us would go for walks around our neighborhood. We'd smile and wave at our other neighbors on their porches, stopping to chat with those we met on the way who were strolling with their babies or their dogs. One night, we walked farther than usual, past the edge of gentrification that bordered our neighborhood, onto a street where the houses had peeling paint, the yards were enclosed with chain link fences and overgrown with weeds.

T-shirted teenagers with shaved heads congregated around low-riding cars, and every square inch of available wall space was covered with stylized spray-painted messages. Amid the jumble of gang tags, I saw on one wall a graffitied rendering of Bart Simpson. I felt vaguely reassured by the fact that gang members watched the same TV shows I did, and realized just how tenuous were my ties with the real world. It was Vicki and Eric who kept me tethered to society.

If left alone to my own devices, I'd probably spend all day every day sitting in my room, typing letters and sending them out, communicating with the world only through the mail.

I realized how lucky I was to have my family and was almost overcome by a powerful sense of emotion, filled with gratitude for the life I had and didn't deserve.

We arrived home, and after playing with Eric for a while and changing him into his pajamas, Vicki said that she was going to take a long leisurely bath and wash off the dust of a tired day. She asked if I'd put him to bed. She gave me a quick kiss, promised in hushed tones that she'd reward me later and went into the bedroom to get some clean underwear and the oversized T-shirt she used as a nightie.

"Come on, little buddy." I rubbed Eric's head. "Go to the bathroom. Brush your teeth. Do what you're supposed to do."

"Okay, Dad," he promised me in a tone of utmost seriousness.

The feeling was still with me, and I had to smile. "I love you," I told him.

"Me, too!" he called out on his way down the hall.

After he was done, I read my son a book, patted his head, gave him a kiss and tucked him in bed. I checked to make sure Vicki was still taking a bath.

Then I went into my office and, as I did once each week, sat down and wrote an anonymous letter to my mom.
Dear Mrs. Hanford
, I began.
You fucking bitch...
 

I received her first letter on June 6, 1996.

I knew who it was from before I even opened it. I recognized the paper, recognized the stamp, recognized the writing. My hand trembled as I tore open the envelope. How was it possible, though? How had she tracked me down? I'd been very careful to make sure I was not listed in any phone book or directory. I unfolded the letter, checked the address at the top, the signature at the bottom.

Yes. It was her.

Kyoko.

I read the letter, my heart pounding. I'm not sure why I was so nervous, but I was. I felt guilty just reading her words, though there was no reason. It was a casual, generic "Hello, how are you? What are you doing?" letter, the attempt by one old pen pal to find out what had become of another. Her English had gotten better over the years, but there were still some quaint misspellings and odd grammar usages that made me smile. I sensed, though, that there was more to this reconnection than that, that Kyoko didn't want to just say hello, that she had some ulterior motive.

Sure enough, I got another letter exactly a week later.

I realized that she was sending them so that they would arrive on Saturdays—just as I'd instructed her when we were children.

I was lucky enough to have checked the mail before Vicki, and I took the envelope into my office, closing and locking the door before reading the letter inside. It was a good thing I did:

Dear Jason,

Hello again! I do not tell you last time because I am too embarrassed, but I never stop thinking of you all these years. Do you remember my photo where I am naked? I do! I will send you one now if you want. Could you send me one, too? I think of that all the time. I am still not married. I am saving myself for you. Do you miss me? Do you still love me? Do you still want me? Write me back and let me know.

Love always and forever,
Kyoko

I had not written her back after the first letter and I didn't this time, either. But a week later, another missive arrived, this one even more explicit. In it, she said that her fantasy was to have me tie her up and rape her. Hard. In the ass. She also said that she was planning to move to the United States. She had a job lined up with a multinational corporation, and maybe we could get together?

This time, I did write back. I told her in no uncertain terms that I was married, that I had a son, that I loved my wife and would never cheat on her. We might have been pen pals when we were kids, I said, but we did not know each other now, we both had separate lives, and we should not write to each other anymore. It would be better if our correspondence remained a pleasant memory from childhood.

I sent off the envelope the next day, feeling virtuous, feeling strong, feeling good.

But I saved the letters.

And the ones that came after. I don't know why.
 

It was summer, and Eric was spending the week at Vicki's parents' house in Phoenix. Due to our busy schedules, we didn't get a chance to visit them as often as Vicki would have liked, and she made sure that each summer he spent at least some time alone with his grandparents. We took the opportunity to reinvigorate our own relationship, to have the sort of free-form spontaneous sex we used to have before our son was born.

And the sex was great.

I missed Eric, though. I was the one who worked at home, I was the one who took care of him all day, who watched him while Vicki went to her office, and it seemed strange not having him around. I'd vowed that I would be a better husband and father than my father had been—and I was. Not only did I spend more time with Eric than my dad had spent with me, but I
liked
being with him.

Although I occasionally wrote letters in longhand while he ran around, or typed letters on my computer while he took a nap, I did most of my work at night and spent my days with Eric, reading to him, playing with him, taking him for walks. We got to be a familiar sight in the used-record stores and thrift shops of Orange County, and he grew up listening not to Walt Disney or
Sesame Street
albums but the Beatles and the Pogues and Miles Davis and Meredith Monk and, of course, Daniel Lentz. We also listened to Hank Williams Jr. together. Yes, Hank Junior. I had, belatedly, caught Robert's country-western bug, and was rapidly filling in those gaps in my record collection by picking up Charlie Daniels, Dolly Parton and Moe and Joe albums from Salvation Army and Goodwill stores.

I often wondered what had happened to Robert and Edson. Frank, too. And Paul. I thought about searching the Internet for their wherabouts, then sending them e-mails, but something kept me from it. My past was past, and it was easier somehow to remain in the present.

There is a point, I think, where life starts to seem sad, when a person adopts one of those live-in-the-moment philosophies because looking back on all of the missed opportunities is too painful, and looking forward, there does not seem to be the time to create a new future with a different outcome. I wasn't there yet, but I missed my twenties, missed the sense of freedom and possibility. I loved my family and was happy with my life, but I could see where it was going, the road was mapped out ahead of me, and I didn't like that. Things seemed better when I had no idea what the future had in store. Maybe that's why I continued to read Kyoko's letters.

And then...

I got caught.

And it all blew up in my face.

I had to meet in person with a programmer from the software company for one of my infrequent face-to-face demos. So I drove to the corporate office in L.A. and spent the day trying to decipher the techno-jargon that was thrown at me as I made my way through the various screens of the new package. As luck would have it, Vicki was scheduled to work only a half day. Our original plan was to have lunch together at a Cuban restaurant near the Orange antique circle. She'd go to antiques stores; I'd check out the used-record and thrift shops. But when—the day before—I found out about my meeting, I told her to go on without me; I'd meet her there if I could, see her back at home if I couldn't.

The damn demo didn't end until after three, and by then the flextime traffic had created gridlock all the way back to Orange County. So it was nearly six by the time I pulled into the driveway.

Something was wrong.

I could feel it, though there were no visible indications that anything was amiss. I was reminded, for some reason, of the time when Vicki had discovered my stash of old letters back in our little apartment in college, and heart pounding, I hurried into the house.

As before, Vicki was on the floor, surrounded by my letters, reading. I could not tell if she had found my secret compartment and taken them from there or if she had found my special diskette and printed them out herself on the PC. But there was a look of revulsion on her face this time. Something about the letters disgusted her. It might have been the content—at least in some cases—but I had the feeling that this ran deeper. She was objecting not to the subjects of the letters but to the letters themselves, to their very existence. I felt like an exposed Dorian Gray, my terrible secrets on view.

Vicki looked up, saw me and reconfigured her face, involuntary revulsion changing to righteous anger. She stood to confront me. "What is this?" she demanded, shaking the sheaf of papers in her hand. "What are all these?"

"Letters," I said glibly, trying to make a joke out of it.

"What about all this right-wing bullshit, all these anti-Clinton diatribes, all these Gingrich apologies?"

"It's not political," I said.

"Not political?" she yelled. "What you've done here is the exact opposite of everything you've ever said, everything we've fought for!" She threw the papers at me. "I don't even know you!"

She was right. She didn't know me, although I wasn't sure whose fault that was. I felt obligated to defend myself, and I was desperate for her to understand, to know that I didn't really mean any of it. But how could I explain to her that it wasn't the specific policies I cared about. Hell, I didn't even consider them when writing my letters. It was the power, the fact that I could change and influence the nation's movers and shakers, the idea that others were dancing to my tune. It was the act of writing, creating the letters themselves, that got me off.

"I'm still the same person I always was," I told her.

"Who is that?" she shot back.

"Remember my nuclear-freeze letters? My disarmament letters?"

"Then what are these?" She gestured to the scattered pages.

Who the fuck was I kidding? I had no real political convictions. My only loyalty was to my letters, my only obligation to my art. I had started on this path with a single altruistic step, wanting to save Acacia's Eastside from redevelopment, but that was the first and last time that my motives had been pure. For me, letter writing was like a drug, and once I was hooked, I needed a fix—and didn't care how I got one.

"You're a liar. You told me you weren't going to write letters anymore," she said accusingly. "You lied to me."

"How do you think you got those promotions?" I said quietly.

She stared at me.

I looked away, immediately sorry I'd said it.

"No," she whispered.

I wanted to deny it, but I knew it was too late for that, and I shut my mouth before I said something else and made things even worse.

That wasn't possible.

She stormed out of the room, stomping on my letters as she did so, grinding papers beneath her heel, kicking others out of the way. My instinctive reaction was to save them, to push her aside and gather my babies to me. But I restrained myself and stood there, trying to come up with an apology or entreaty that would make her stay and make everything okay.

Down the hall, the bedroom door slammed shut.

As I gathered up my papers, I reflected on my letter writing. I'd used it for both good and evil. I was responsible for Principal Poole's losing his job, for the deaths of my father and the witch of Acacia. But I'd also helped my wife and son, used my talent to create a better life for them. Didn't that balance out the harm I had caused?

No. Because just as I had no real political convictions, I had no moral compass, either. I cared only about the letters. It didn't matter to me what the result of my words was—only that there
was
a result. It was the thrill of the conquest that I lived for, the adrenaline rush I got when one of my letters was published or received a defensive response or caused a panicked change of heart in its recipient.

Was that more important to me than Vicki?

Than our marriage?

Than our son?

Of course not. And there was no reason for me to even be considering such a drastic scenario. I didn't have to choose one or the other. Vicki might be upset right now, but she'd be all right by morning, and then we'd talk it out the way we always did.

I heard loud noises from the other end of the hall: doors and cupboards slamming. She was mad and wanted me to know that she was mad, but there was something more than that in it. I had the feeling that she was going through her dresser and closet, packing.

Her reaction was all out of proportion to the objective content of the letters. It wasn't the politics that bothered her so much. Not really. It wasn't even my lying and sneakiness. It was ... something else. Could it be the letters themselves? On some gut level, did she understand what they really were? Did she sense the dark power that surged behind them? Or—

I looked down at the letter in my hands.

It was from Kyoko.

—I dream that you mount me from behind. You hurt me when you shove it in, but I like the way it hurts. You grab my breasts with your hands and pinch nipples. I scream and you—