Postcards from a Dead Girl (15 page)

The monotony of everything about this place is driving me crazy. Gerald was right. The damn mail keeps coming and coming and coming and no way will it ever stop. Stacks of it, hordes and hordes of it. Endless.

Being a temp guy, I have a different-colored shirt. I'm the one in red instead of gray, which makes me think they've dressed me up in a warning. Watch out for the red guy, he's new. He might not be able to take it.

I do the math in my head: how many people inhabit the earth, how many letters they might send on a daily average, how many of those people live in my city, and how many of their letters might come down my conveyor belt. It's too many. It's never-ending. The people will keep writing letters and paying bills and then sending them and the envelopes will keep coming, and there will never be a break on my conveyor or any other for that matter. I am completely hopeless against such a force. I've only been here for two hours.

I can't take it. I need a break. I need to stop looking at zip codes and addresses. I need to stop hearing that droning, pul
sating, trance-inducing hum, need to let my eyes rest from the flurry of corners and edges and stamps and plastic windows.

My neck itches. The mail keeps coming. I arch my sore back for relief. And the mail keeps coming. I stomp my feet a few times to get them to wake up. I scratch my neck. The rollers roll. The envelopes whiz by. Finally, I make a dam with one arm across the conveyor, and the mail floods over the top, like logs in a river.

“Sid,” Gerald says from somewhere.

“What?” I pull my arm off the line.

“Come here,” he says. He's standing right behind me, dressed in his uniform, clean and serious like I remember him. It helps me relax a little. He waves me toward him, a few feet away from my station. I stand up and leave the mail to its own devices. We face each other. His gray eyes are calm, his demeanor still that cool professional level I admire, especially today. But as he studies me, I consider that maybe he's left his soul at home, and that's how he manages so well here. He sips his coffee. “Sid, why don't you take a coffee break?” He nods up to a small room on the second level, and immediately I feel better; it looks soundproof.

I follow the yellow tape on the floor as Gerald instructed, and upon my arrival, plunk a few coins in the coffee machine. It winds up and makes a few knocking sounds, which is nice because I know it's working. It's trying, at least. A cardboard cup drops onto the slotted platform and the coffee begins to brew. The silence and the smell are exactly what I need.

At first it was fun, working in the sort room. The spectacle of all those conveyors and slots and bags and rollers was really quite something, how the packages move from place to place, how they're sorted and carried from here to a complicated system of hubs and drop points, trucks and planes, jeeps and snowmobiles.
I realized early on though—probably in my first twenty minutes—that I'm not cut out for postal sorting.

“I'm sorry, I should leave,” I tell Gerald as soon as he steps inside the safety of the coffee room. I can't hear the belts churning downstairs, but I can see the repetitive movements of the machines, and it's enough for my imagination to fill in the blanks.
Nyhuh nyhuh
, go the machines,
nyhuh nyhuh nyhuh
.

“Forget about your little episode downstairs. Everybody goes through that. Really. I want you to stay.” He chucks me on the shoulder.

“It's good to want things,” I say, and stare at my coffee.

After my break, Gerald sends me over to the truck-loading wing. He says there's much need for help over there. So I help. I build walls by forming
T'
s with packages. A stream of boxes slide down a long chute into the semitrailer: long, brown packages that weigh nothing and tiny gift boxes filled with lead. What is in all these boxes? Where are they all going? More and more boxes arrive, like a maddening game of life-size Tetris, only with no cool theme music, and no escape. I'm sure by now that this probably won't make me enough money to pay for my bills
and
cover the psych meds I'll need to survive here.

One motivated jock has a bright attitude, though. He's a meaty guy, someone who does a lot of pushups. I never catch his name, but whenever we're both at the end of our respective trailers, he waves to me and says, “It's just like getting paid to work out, huh?” and then he rolls down the trailer door, bangs it twice, and waves at the truck as it pulls away—a job well done.

It's just like getting paid to be mentally tortured, I want to say, but I keep my mouth shut and smile at him just enough so he can't tell if I'm smiling or not. Gerald has warned me in his own
way to stay cool, and I'm determined to make good after my late-night visit. Somehow I finish my day and tell Gerald thanks and make my way back home.

The drive home feels surreal, as if I floated all the way. I make it inside and stretch out on the floor with Zero. I stare at the blank white ceiling for a while, but every time I blink I see packages. If I close my eyes, the boxes descend upon me and then I'm trapped, stuck behind my own eyes. Eventually I get so tired I fall asleep without realizing it, only to have a nightmare about mail being shoved under my door. It's Mary Jo from across the street doing the shoving, and she's cackling hysterically. “You've got mail!” she screams. “You'd better do something!”

When the soil slides between your toes, when you feel the earth seeping into your ears, blocking out the sounds of the living world, when it's covering your eyes so all the light is shut out and you're totally surrounded by serene darkness—that's when you know you're fully committed to the mud bath.

Some folks fear commitment because they fear their loss of freedom. But when you totally commit yourself to something, you free yourself from the burden of wasting your energy on other, less worthy things. Right now I'm completely unencumbered by forty-five pounds of backyard soil. It may not be mineral-rich like the spa's Moor peat mud, but it seems to be doing the trick.

“What the fuck are you doing?” a muffled voice asks from the top of the hole. Her acrid tone is easy to recognize, even through my plugged ears. It's Candyce. “Why is there a hole in your backyard? And why are you in it?”

I drag my hands out of the thick mud, and a loud sucking sound tells me I finally got the consistency right. I scrape the mud off my eyes and open them. They must look like two eggs in the bottom of a giant frying pan, from her perspective. This makes me smile. She stands with her arms crossed, one hip cocked hard
to the right. If I do look like two eggs at the bottom of a pan, she doesn't find it amusing.

“Hello? Can you even hear me?”

“Mm-hmm,” I say, the humming quite loud in
my
ears.

She huffs, appalled, I think, that I'm not explaining myself, that I'm not jumping up to meet her. She tosses a piece of paper down at me as hard as she can. It floats down, against her intentions, and gently lands near my right hand. “Dr. Singh's results on your CAT scan. I thought you'd want to see them.”

I delicately pinch the paper between muddy thumb and index finger, pinky extended as if I'm about to sip tea. Candyce shakes her head and stomps away from the hole's edge. A series of scratches and dots make up Dr. Singh's handwriting, and next to that, more studied, deeply slanted letters. The legible handwriting says: “Normal.” Candyce's translation. My CAT scan is normal.

I sit up to celebrate. The mud slides down my chest and back, cold and heavy. My nose is at ground level. I look across the yard, and there is Candyce, walking back to her car. “I'm normal,” I say. She gets in her car and slams the door. “I'm normal!” I say again, louder this time, but she can't hear me. I carefully stand up and step out of the hole, back on solid ground, waving madly at her, my body black and melting, my hair matted and wet. “I'm normal!” I yell at her, “I'm normal!” But she drives away.

Across the street, Mary Jo stands by her mailbox. I wave the paper at her, my egg-eyes wide. “Look,” I say, and smile broadly at her, but my elation is misconstrued as something sinister.

“I don't swim!” she yells, and runs back in her house.

I am in a celebratory mood. My clean CAT-scan results have had a galvanizing effect on my life outlook. I need to get away from this house, out among people and activity, even if they're strangers, maybe especially so. I take a long, cleansing shower, get dressed, and head over to The Basement on Longley Street.

The Basement has jazz playing 24–7 and unwritten menus—you order what you want and they improvise. Most important, people come here to relax, read, and get juiced up on caffeine. I order a double espresso, and find the darkest corner available. I've decided to bring the postcards. I plan on meticulously studying them until I find the one elusive detail that explains everything. A lot can be learned from the details. I stack them in a neat pile and begin.

It's only after holding the third one up to the light that I realize Jane from yoga class is here too, and she's stealing glances in my direction. I can't tell if she recognizes me right off, or if she just thinks it's odd that I'm reading a stack of postcards, but here we are, two semi-strangers, aware of each other's presence.

Jane is plain. That's why I like her. That's what makes her
beautiful. I don't really know much about her, not even her real name. I like to think she spends a good amount of her time sipping warm coffee drinks here, alone, and meditating on mountain tops. Well, hill tops.

Jane has a few contradictions about her, like how she sits near the front window but then covers her face from the sun. She could easily move away. I imagine she sits in the window because she likes to drink her coffee while she drinks in the life of the city street. A quiet, curious type. Habitual in her habits, reclusive, yet seeks the company of others, though not necessarily directly. She would be a mountain gorilla in the Great Apes documentary I watched last week: fiercely intelligent, mostly solitary, but could die of loneliness if she doesn't have the occasional company of a mate. That's Jane, sipping on her latte, thinking deep thoughts, vaguely dissatisfied, searching for something deeper, something real. But for all I really know, she could be a rabid baboon, subject to impulsively flashing her sex flower for all the other baboons to see. It's a vulgar thought. I opt for mountain gorilla: pensive, reflective, mysterious.

I wonder if she somehow psychically shared my crashing zeppelin dream, and now she's looking over to me to give thanks for my rescuing her, to celebrate our survival together. I wonder if she's had any similar nocturnal visions about me. Of course, I'll never ask her. Suddenly I'm tired. I don't have the energy to go introduce myself. Something is drawing me to do so, but even if I did, what would I say? “Hello, mysterious gorilla. I know I look tired and disheveled, but I've been working weird hours at a new job and obsessing over the postcards my vanished girlfriend has been sending me. Don't worry, we're not together anymore. Would you like another latte?” It's better if I sit here, quiet. Nothing bad can happen if I just sit in my dark corner and sulk.

“Sid?” a voice pleads from the darkness. “Are you freaking serious?”

I shut my eyes tight in hopes of becoming invisible.

“Well?” the voice implores. It's Candyce. She has spotted me, and there is no mistake on her part. Footsteps clop loudly toward my quiet, gloomy little corner. She's got two hissy-fit friends in tow, both of them dressed in black, with tri-colored streaky hair cut in a shoulder-length bob fashion. “Jesus Christ, Sid. Are you following me now?” she asks. “Is that your new tactic?” She gains strength from her cloned disciples. Their necks bob and weave, their eyes agog, puffs of air pushed through pursed lips. It's like a bad nature show, these three warning the others in the herd about me. “Well?” she asks.

I sip my coffee.

“Is the mud hole not working out anymore?” Her friends snicker and sneak glances at each other.

I add more creamer, watch the little white swirls lighten the entire cup to a paler shade of brown.

“What, are you mute now too?”

Yes, I am. I am mute now.

She hisses through her teeth. Something caustic builds inside her, the final alarm that will let everyone in hearing distance know to stay clear of me, the dangerous predator.

It comes like this: “
Freak
.”

It's a whisper, but said with such clarity and conviction that it's more effective than a screech monkey's scream. She has caught the attention of everyone. I am a freak. A stalker freak, with something about a mud hole left undefined, which leaves room for dangerous thoughts in the public's imagination.

The triple threat walks defiantly away. I close my eyes again, this time to reverse a slowly rising headache. Flashes of light
relent beneath my lids in a quiet, staccato surge. When I open them, Candyce and her girls have rounded the corner into the main room. I look over to see if Jane witnessed this scene, but she is gone too. This makes me sad, like I've lost something else. Something important.

It's to my great relief when I leave The Basement that Jane is outside on the sidewalk. I start to walk in the opposite direction so she won't think I'm a stalker freak, and she coughs. I turn back, and she's looking at me.

“Did you say something?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“Sorry,” I say and turn away.

“You like to travel, huh?” she asks.

“I'm looking for someone,” I mumble, then turn around to look at her.

“I didn't hear you.”

“Yes, I like to travel,” I say.

“Me too.”

We both nod at the sidewalk.

“You've been around?” she asks, motioning toward my postcards.

I have them clutched in my right hand like a child holds a balloon. I stuff them in my back pocket. “A few places. Different countries.”

“I've been to Dublin,” she says.

“Really? How did you like it?”

“It was rainy. But I loved it. Great people.”

More nodding.

“I've been to Barcelona,” I offer, but can't think of anything to add.

“How was that?”

I look up at the sky to search for an answer. A jet plane flies just outside the proximity of its sound. “It was bright,” I say.

“I bet.”

“Look, those girls back there—”

She waves them off. “I know.”

“You know them?”

“I know their type,” she says, and wrinkles her nose.

Then she does this amazing thing. She smiles at me, real, simple. I try to smile back but I'm afraid it's more like a wince.

We both study the ground again. Words come out of me that I don't expect, and then she says words too, and then she writes something and hands me a piece of paper and I do the same, and she waves and walks away.

I look down at what she wrote: Melanie. My Jane is named Melanie.

And somehow we've exchanged phone numbers and I'm left standing on the sidewalk wondering what got me to this new place that only moments before was abject humiliation. I hold her number tightly between my finger and thumb like it's a winning lottery ticket. But nobody knows I've won, and even I don't know how much is in the jackpot, which makes me happy and nervous and thrilled and sad all at once.