Dispatch (24 page)

"Love doesn't make the world go round. Letters do."

It was horrifying, what he was saying. Maniacally egotistical if untrue, terrifying in its implications if correct. Intellectually, I knew that. But emotionally, I felt like a true believer at a partisan political rally, and a part of me wanted to leap up with raised fist and scream,
"Yeah!"

Letter writing was like a religion to this guy. To all the people here, probably. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that they all attended a church where kneeling parishioners sang hymns to and worshipped a gigantic envelope.

And I would have been right there with them.

Henry downed his orange juice with one gulp and put a hand on my shoulder. "We are the lucky ones, the chosen ones. We've been recruited to carry on this noble tradition. We've been entrusted with the responsibility of writing tomorrow's letters."

"But
who
recruited us? Who do we work for?" I gestured at the building surrounding us. "Who owns all this?"

He looked lost for a moment, and I could tell this was a question that he'd asked himself more than once. "I don't know," he said. "No one knows."

"But someone has to—"

"No one knows," he repeated. The way he said it made me think that it was a question I was not supposed to be asking. I thought I heard fear in his voice.

"So who wrote those letters I got, the ones that described my dreams, the ones that led me here?"

He looked surprised. "So that's how you were recruited? Interesting."

"Why? How did
you
get hired?"

"I simply received a letter telling me that my work had been noticed and appreciated. I was asked if I wanted to work full-time writing letters and was instructed to appear at a certain office building at midnight." He smiled. "Midnight, right? I should have known something was up with that.

"Needless to say, there was no one there. The door was open, though, and when I stepped inside"—he gestured around—"here I was. Well, not
here
exactly. But.in the building, ready for my interview."

"Were you ... tortured?" I asked.

"No. Were you?"

"No. But I heard—"

He chuckled. "Don't trust everything you hear. Or see. Only trust what you read."

"I never trust what I read," I told him. "I lie all the time in my letters."

"But they're still true," he said.

I wanted to ask what he meant by that, but Henry was already walking out the door. "Come on!" I followed him across the corridor to a door in the wall on the opposite side. "Here's where you'll be working," he said, opening the door.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. We were standing on the edge of what appeared to be a bedroom from the 1950s. Lying on the bed, writing on a notebook, was a trim, attractive middle-aged woman. It was a cutaway room with only three walls, like the set for a movie or a television show. Henry and I stood on a linoleum walkway that passed by the open fourth wall. On the other side of the walkway, opposite the bedroom, was a high-tech office with large windows that appeared to overlook the New York skyline. A jowly older man sat at the desk, typing furiously on a computer keyboard.

"People write best in environments where they are comfortable," Henry said. He nodded to the man and woman, both of whom ignored him, and we continued down the winding walkway through a seemingly endless maze of dens and living rooms, offices and study carrels. I did not recognize anyone. Virginia and the people from the party no doubt worked on some other floor. This was where the other Letter Writers worked, the grunts, and Henry led me past ten, twenty, thirty of those individualized cutaway rooms where these lower-caste Letter Writers toiled.

I found myself thinking that there was no way this massive rabbit warren of writing spaces could fit on a single floor of the building I had entered, but I did not really question it. Not at the time. My mind was focused on other matters.

Letters.

Finally, we came to my work area. Henry stopped in front of that missing fourth wall. "Here we are!"

It was not a replica of my home office, was not even the bedroom of my teenage years. It was a room I'd never seen before, a cramped, oddly shaped area that looked to me like an office in the back of an independent record store. The walls were papered with overlapping posters from various groups and musicians, and the air smelled vaguely of old incense, which did not quite mask a subtle underlying odor of slightly mildewy cardboard: the scent of old records. I figured at first that a mistake had been made—
Aha!
I thought.
They can make mistakes!
—but I discovered almost instantly that I felt perfectly at home here, more at home than I had in my real house. The posters, I saw, were from my favorite artists, their best albums and best tours, and the ambience was one with which I was not quite familiar but desperately wanted to be.

They hadn't made a mistake.

They knew me better than I did myself.

I glanced back down the crooked winding linoleum walkway that led past all those other rooms. For some reason, I was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood's path through the forest. "I have to come all this way every day?" I asked.

Henry laughed. "Goodness, no! There's a door right here." He walked across the room and opened a door that I'd thought was a closet. It led back into the original corridor—straight across from his office. It was the same door through which we'd come in.

I felt a slight twinge of vertigo, but I didn't bother to ask how that was possible. I didn't care. I simply nodded.

"Bathroom's down the hall," he said. "Second door on your left."

I walked around the beat-up desk, saw an old manual Royal typewriter exactly like the first one I'd owned sandwiched between a pile of music magazines and a box of cartoon figurines. On a small adjacent table was a much newer PC with bubble jet printer. I sat down in the well-worn swivel chair. It bulged and sagged in all the right places and felt like it had been form fitted to my body.

Henry smiled. "Here's where the magic happens."

I looked up at him. "So what exactly am I supposed to do?"

He explained. At first, he said, I would be given assignments, specific letters to write to specific people. These instructions, of course, would be delivered to me by letter, and each day, I would come to my desk, open my mail and follow the directions I was given. After a brief probationary period, I would be let loose, set free to write about general subjects, with no minimums or maximums on the number of letters 1 produced and only the broadest guidelines to follow.

I nodded.

What if I fail?
I wondered.
What if I don't produce the required number of letters? What if my letters are of exceedingly poor quality?
I didn't ask these questions, but I thought them, and it occurred to me that if I screwed up a few assignments and flunked my probationary period, I could be fired.

Or tortured.

I'd
be the guy new recruits would hear screaming in the other room.

But I didn't care. I loved writing letters. Writing was my drug of choice, and like any other addiction, it consumed me to the extent that everything else was made irrelevant. Even if I
wanted
to turn down this opportunity, I wouldn't be able to do so. The lure was too strong. And I was too weak. When it was all placed in front of me like this, offered up on a silver platter, I had to cave in.

"It's all very informal," Henry reassured me. "As I'm sure you can tell, this is not regular work. And we are certainly not regular employees." He chuckled. "When I first got here, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

"And now?" I looked at him.

He smiled, turned away, but not before I saw an expression that could only be called conflicted pass over his features. "We do important work here," was all he said, and once again I understood that the topic was closed for discussion.

I stood. "So ... when do I start?"

"Now if you want."

"What are the hours?"

"It's up to you. Morning to midafternoon for most people, but that's not set in stone. At the beginning, you work for however long it takes you to complete your assignments. After that..." He shrugged.

"What do I do when I'm not working?"

"Whatever you want." He put a hand on my shoulder, and once again I felt that connection between us. "We're calling this a job, but it's not, really. It's a life, a new life, the life people like us have always dreamed about." Smiling, he handed me an envelope. He must have been holding it the entire time, but I hadn't noticed it and it was as if he'd magically pulled it out of the air. "Here," he said. "Why don't you see what this says?"

I ripped open the envelope, pulling out a piece of typewritten paper and a clipped newspaper article.

My first assignment was to write a letter on behalf of neighbors living next to a recently renovated racetrack. The track had been shut down for the better part of a decade because of lawsuits over night races and noise pollution. The track owners and the homeowners had recently reached a settlement. According to the article, though, not all of the homeowners had agreed to the settlement, particularly the ones whose houses were closest to the track, and they were complaining bitterly that they'd been screwed over by their other neighbors.

"Should I do this now?" I asked.

"Sure. I'll be in my office across the hall. Come over when you've finished."

I read the article again, read the instructions. I liked the fact that I was given free rein, not told what to write or how to approach the problem, and I sat back down in my chair, trying to decide whether to use the typewriter or the computer. Both were ready and raring to go. I finally decided on the typewriter. It's what I started my career with, and it was only fitting that I use it to kick off this new chapter in my life.

I addressed my letter to the owner of the track:

Dear Mr. Muldoon,

There is nothing more pointless than watching men drive around in a circle for hours. The numskulls who find this entertaining live sad and meaningless lives, and are just putting in their time while they wait to die. The cynicism of a man like yourself who takes advantage of these morons is disgraceful. Even more so when you use those ill-gotten gains to harass and intimidate the fine upstanding law-abiding citizens who are your neighbors.

I laid it on thick, accusing the old fuck of everything short of molesting his mama. By the time I was done, not only was he guilty of the most venal and mendacious behavior, but I'd implied that I knew several dirty secrets about him and was not above releasing such information to the public—unless of course he agreed to sell this racetrack and use the proceeds from the sale to build another one elsewhere.

I cranked out the letter in five minutes, then read it over. It wouldn't change the guy's mind, but it would give him pause. It was the first salvo in what I planned as a quick and nasty war. While he might not move his racetrack, by the time I was through with him, he'd at least agree to build a soundproofing wall between his property and the neighborhood, and he'd pay for some customized acoustic solutions to the neighbors' problems.

Standing up and opening my door, I walked across the corridor to Henry's office. He called out, "Come in!" at first knock, and I stepped inside.

"I'm done," I said.

"Wonderful!"

I held out the sheet of paper. "Do you want to read it, look it over?"

He waved me away. "No. You're a Letter Writer. You know what you're doing. Just send it off."

I went back and looked through my desk until I found a pen, an envelope and a roll of stamps. I signed the letter with a fake name, addressed the envelope, sealed it and affixed a stamp. Henry was waiting for me in the corridor. I looked around. "Is there a mailbox somewhere?"

He grinned, and there seemed to be a twinkle in his eye. "Out the door, at the end of the hall. Come on, I'll show you." We walked down the wide corridor. "Bathroom," he pointed out as we passed it. At the end of the hallway, he stopped. I hadn't noticed before because I hadn't been paying that close attention, but the wall in front of us looked like nothing so much as a church altarpiece. Though they were the same color as the surrounding walls and ceiling and thus invisible from afar, carvings of quills and scrolls, pens and papers, typewriters and printers adorned the facade before us, forming a virtual arch in the squared space. A trail of carved envelopes led to an opening in the center of the wall, a mail slot rimmed with what appeared to be pure gold.

"Here is where we mail our letters," Henry said reverently. He touched the mail slot with his finger.

I knew exactly how he felt. Oftentimes I, too, had gazed upon a mailbox with awe, either the rounded freestanding blue boxes that stood sentry on street corners, or the small rectangular openings in the wall of the post office that led directly to the sorting bins. These were talismans to our kind, the magic portals through which our handiwork passed on the way to its destination.

I took my envelope, dropped it in the slot. It made no noise when it fell. There wasn't that harsh, inappropriately loud
plunk
that occurred when a piece of mail was the first of the day and landed alone at the bottom of the box. No, my letter had touched down softly on a pillow of previous correspondence.

Henry patted me reassuringly on the shoulder, obviously understanding my feelings. Again, I felt all warm and fuzzy knowing we were kin.

"You're going to like it here," he said. "You'll fit right in."
 

I made new friends.

It took a while, because for the first few weeks I didn't really get a chance to meet anyone else. I'd pass by people in the lobby or in the parking lot, then ride up with them in the elevator, and I always made the effort to smile, nod and say hello, but for the most part I went straight to my office, wrote my letters and then went straight home after work. I liked Henry Schwartz, we had a good rapport, and we were both Letter Writers. I understood that in many ways he was in the same position I was, the same position we all were. But we were not, could not be, friends. He was my supervisor, and there would always be the question as to where his loyalties lay.