Loe raamatut: «The Great and Secret Show»

I

Homer opened the door.

‘Come on in, Randolph.’

Jaffe hated the way he said Randolph, with the faintest trace of contempt in the word, as though he knew every damn crime Jaffe had ever committed, right from the first, the littlest.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Homer said, seeing Jaffe linger. ‘You’ve got work to do. Sooner started, sooner I can find you more.’

Randolph stepped into the room. It was large, painted the same bilious yellow and battleship grey as every other office and corridor in the Omaha Central Post Office. Not that much of the walls was visible. Piled higher than head-height on every side was mail. Sacks, satchels, boxes and carts of it, spilling out onto the cold concrete floor.

‘Dead letters,’ Homer said. ‘Stuff even the good ol’ US Mail can’t deliver. Quite a sight, huh?’

Jaffe was agog, but he made sure not to show it. He made sure to show nothing, especially to wise guys like Homer.

‘This is all yours, Randolph,’ his superior said. ‘Your little corner of heaven.’

‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ Jaffe said.

‘Sort it. Open it, look for any important stuff so we don’t end up putting good money in the furnace.’

‘There’s money in them?’

‘Some of ’em,’ Homer said with a smirk. ‘Maybe. But most of it’s just junk-mail. Stuff people don’t want and just put back in the system. Some of it’s had the wrong address put on and it’s been flying backwards and forwards till it ends up in Nebraska. Don’t ask me why, but whenever they don’t know what to do with this shit they send it to Omaha.’

‘It’s the middle of the country,’ Jaffe observed. ‘Gateway to the West. Or East. Depending on which way you’re facing.’

‘Ain’t the dead centre,’ Homer countered. ‘But we still end up with all the crap. And it’s all got to get sorted. By hand. By you.’

‘All of it?’ Jaffe said. What was in front of him was two weeks’, three weeks’, four weeks’ work.

‘All of it,’ said Homer, and didn’t make any attempt to conceal his satisfaction. ‘All yours. You’ll soon get the hang of it. If the envelope’s got some kind of government marking, put it in the burn pile. Don’t even bother to open it. Fuck ’em, right? But the rest, open. You never know what we’re going to find.’ He grinned conspiratorially. ‘And what we find, we share,’ he said.

Jaffe had been working for the US Mail only nine days, but that was long enough, easily long enough, to know that a lot of mail was intercepted by its hired deliverers. Packets were razored open and their contents filched, checks were cashed, love-letters were laughed over.

‘I’m going to be coming back in here on a regular basis,’ Homer warned. ‘So don’t you try hiding anything from me. I got a nose for stuff. I know when there’s bills in an envelope, and I know when there’s a thief on the team. Hear me? I got a sixth sense. So don’t you try anything clever, bud, ’cause me and the boys don’t take kindly to that. And you want to be one of the team, don’t you?’ He put a wide, heavy hand on Jaffe’s shoulder. ‘Share and share alike, right?’

‘I hear,’ Jaffe said.

‘Good,’ Homer replied. ‘So –’ He opened his arms to the spectacle of piled sacks. ‘It’s all yours.’ He sniffed, grinned and took his leave.

One of the team, Jaffe thought as the door clicked closed, was what he’d never be. Not that he was about to tell Homer that. He’d let the man patronize him; play the willing slave. But in his heart? In his heart, he had other plans, other ambitions. Problem was, he wasn’t any closer to realizing those ambitions than he’d been at twenty. Now he was thirty-seven, going on thirty-eight. Not the kind of man women looked at more than once. Not the kind of character folks found exactly charismatic. Losing his hair the way his father had. Bald at forty, most likely. Bald, and wifeless, and not more than beer-change in his pocket because he’d never been able to hold down a job for more than a year, eighteen months at the outside, so he’d never risen higher than private in the ranks.

He tried not to think about it too hard, because when he did he began to get really itchy to do some harm, and a lot of the time it was harm done to himself. It would be so easy. A gun in the mouth, tickling the back of his throat. Over and done with. No note. No explanation. What would he write anyway? I’m killing myself because I didn’t get to be King of the World? Ridiculous.

But … that was what he wanted to be. He’d never known how, he’d never even had a sniff of the way, but that was the ambition that had nagged him from the first. Other men rose from nothing, didn’t they? Messiahs, presidents, movie stars. They pulled themselves up out of the mud the way the fishes had when they’d decided to go walkabout. Grown legs, breathed air, become more than what they’d been. If fucking fishes could do it, why couldn’t he? But it had to be soon. Before he was forty. Before he was bald. Before he was dead, and gone, and no one to even remember him, except maybe as a nameless asshole who’d spent three weeks in the winter of 1969 in a room full of dead letters, opening orphaned mail looking for dollar bills. Some epitaph.

He sat down and looked at the task heaped before him.

‘Fuck you,’ he said. Meaning Homer. Meaning the sheer volume of crap in front of him. But most of all, meaning himself.

At first, it was drudgery. Pure hell, day on day, going through the sacks.

The piles didn’t seem to diminish. Indeed they were several times fed by a leering Homer, who led a trail of peons in with further satchels to swell the number.

First Jaffe sorted the interesting envelopes (bulky; rattling; perfumed) from dull; then the private correspondence from official, and the scrawl from the copperplate. Those decisions made, he began opening the envelopes, in the first week with his fingers, till his fingers became calloused, thereafter with a short-bladed knife he bought especially for the purpose, digging out the contents like a pearl-fisher in search of a pearl, most of the time finding nothing, sometimes, as Homer had promised, finding money or a check, which he dutifully declared to his boss.

‘You’re good at this,’ Homer said after the second week. ‘You’re really good. Maybe I should put you on this full time.’

Randolph wanted to say fuck you, but he’d said that too many times to bosses who’d fired him the minute after, and he couldn’t afford to lose this job: not with the rent to pay and heating his one-room apartment costing a damn fortune while the snow continued to fall. Besides, something was happening to him while he passed the solitary hours in the Dead Letter Room, something it took him to the end of the third week to begin to enjoy, and the end of the fifth to comprehend.

He was sitting at the crossroads of America.

Homer had been right. Omaha, Nebraska wasn’t the geographical centre of the USA, but as far as the Post Office was concerned, it may as well have been.

The lines of communication crossed, and re-crossed, and finally dropped their orphans here, because nobody in any other state wanted them. These letters had been sent from coast to coast looking for someone to open them, and had found no takers. Finally they’d ended with him: with Randolph Ernest Jaffe, a balding nobody with ambitions never spoken and rage not expressed, whose little knife slit them, and little eyes scanned them, and who – sitting at his crossroads – began to see the private face of the nation.

There were love-letters, hate-letters, ransom notes, pleadings, sheets on which men had drawn round their hard-ons, Valentines of pubic hair, blackmail by wives, journalists, hustlers, lawyers and senators, junk-mail and suicide notes, lost novels, chain letters, résumés, undelivered gifts, rejected gifts, letters sent out into the wilderness like bottles from an island, in the hope of finding help, poems, threats and recipes. So much. But these many were the least of it. Though sometimes the love-letters got him sweaty, and the ransom notes made him wonder if, having gone unanswered, their senders had murdered their hostages, the stories of love and death they told touched him only fleetingly. Far more persuasive, far more moving, was another story, which could not be articulated so easily.

Sitting at the crossroads he began to understand that America had a secret life; one which he’d never even glimpsed before. Love and death he knew about. Love and death were the great clichés; the twin obsessions of songs and soap operas. But there was another life, which every fortieth letter, or fiftieth, or hundredth, hinted at, and every thousandth stated with a lunatic plainness. When they said it plain, it was not the whole truth, but it was a beginning, and each of the writers had their own mad way of stating something close to unstateable.

What it came down to was this: the world was not as it seemed. Not remotely as it seemed. Forces conspired (governmental, religious, medical) to conceal and silence those who had more than a passing grasp of that fact, but they couldn’t gag or incarcerate every one of them. There were men and women who slipped the nets, however widely flung; who found back-roads to travel where their pursuers got lost, and safe houses along the way where they’d be fed and watered by like visionaries, ready to misdirect the dogs when they came sniffing. These people didn’t trust Ma Bell, so they didn’t use telephones. They didn’t dare assemble in groups of more than two for fear of attracting attention to themselves. But they wrote. Sometimes it was as if they had to, as if the secrets they kept sealed up were too hot, and burned their way out. Sometimes it was because they knew the hunters were on their heels and they’d have no other chance to describe the world to itself before they were caught, drugged and locked up. Sometimes there was even a subversive glee in the scrawlings, sent out with deliberately indistinct addresses in the hope that the letter would blow the mind of some innocent who’d received it by chance. Some of the missives were stream-of-consciousness rantings, others precise, even clinical, descriptions of how to turn the world inside out by sex-magick or mushroom-eating. Some used the nonsense imagery of National Enquirer stories to veil another message. They spoke of UFO sightings and zombie cults; news from Venusian evangelists and psychics who tuned into the dead on the TV. But after a few weeks of studying these letters (and study it was; he was like a man locked in the ultimate library) Jaffe began to see beyond the nonsenses to the hidden story. He broke the code; or enough of it to be tantalized. Instead of being irritated each day when Homer opened the door and had another half dozen satchels of letters brought in, he welcomed the addition. The more letters, the more clues; the more clues the more hope he had of a solution to the mystery. It was, he became more certain as the weeks turned into months and the winter mellowed, not several mysteries but one. The writers whose letters were about the Veil, and how to draw it aside, were finding their own way forward towards revelation; each had his own particular method and metaphor; but somewhere in the cacophony a single hymn was striving to be sung.

It was not about love. At least not as the sentimentalists knew it. Nor about death, as a literalist would have understood the term. It was – in no particular order – something to do with fishes, and the sea (sometimes the Sea of Seas); and three ways to swim there; and dreams (a lot about dreams); and an island which Plato had called Atlantis, but had known all along was some other place. It was about the end of the World, which was in turn about its beginning. And it was about Art.

Or rather, the Art.

That, of all the codes, was the one he beat his head hardest against, and broke only his brow. The Art was talked about in many ways. As The Final Great Work. As The Forbidden Fruit. As da Vinci’s Despair or The Finger in the Pie or The Butt-Digger’s Glee. There were many ways to describe it, but only one Art. And (here was a mystery) no Artist.

‘So, are you happy here?’ Homer said to him one May day.

Jaffe looked up from his work. There were letters strewn all around him. His skin, which had never been too healthy, was as pale and etched upon as the pages in his hand.

‘Sure,’ he said to Homer, scarcely bothering to focus on the man. ‘Have you got some more for me?’

Homer didn’t answer at first. Then he said: ‘What are you hiding, Jaffe?’

‘Hiding? I’m not hiding anything.’

‘You’re stashing stuff away you should be sharing with the rest of us.’

‘No I’m not,’ Jaffe said. He’d been meticulous in obeying Homer’s first edict, that anything found amongst the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap jewellery he’d come across once in a while; it all went to Homer, to be divided up. ‘You get everything,’ he said. ‘I swear.’

Homer looked at him with plain disbelief. ‘You spend every fucking hour of the day down here,’ he said. ‘You don’t talk with the other guys. You don’t drink with ’em. Don’t you like the smell of us, Randolph? Is that it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Or are you just a thief?’

‘I’m no thief,’ Jaffe said. ‘You can look for yourself.’ He stood up, raising his hands, a letter in each. ‘Search me.’

‘I don’t want to fucking touch you,’ came Homer’s response. ‘What do you think I am, a fucking fag?’ He kept staring at Jaffe. After a pause he said: ‘I’m going to have somebody else come down here and take over. You’ve done five months. It’s long enough. I’m going to move you.’

‘I don’t want –’

‘What?’

‘I mean … what I mean to say is, I’m quite happy down here. Really. It’s work I like doing.’

‘Yeah,’ said Homer, clearly still suspicious. ‘Well from Monday you’re out.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I say so! If you don’t like it find yourself another job.’

‘I’m doing good work aren’t I?’ Jaffe said.

Homer was already turning his back.

‘It smells in here,’ he said as he exited. ‘Smells real bad.’

There was a word Randolph had learned from his reading which he’d never known before: synchronicity. He’d had to go buy a dictionary to look it up, and found it meant that sometimes events coincided. The way the letter writers used the word it usually meant that there was something significant, mysterious, maybe even miraculous in the way one circumstance collided with another, as though a pattern existed that was just out of human sight.

Such a collision occurred the day Homer dropped his bombshell, an intersecting of events that would change everything. No more than an hour after Homer had left, Jaffe took his short-bladed knife, which was getting blunt, to an envelope that felt heavier than most. He slit it open, and out fell a small medallion. It hit the concrete floor: a sweet ringing sound. He picked it up, with fingers that had been trembling since Homer’s exit. There was no chain attached to the medallion, nor did it have a loop for that purpose. Indeed it wasn’t attractive enough to be hung around a woman’s neck as a piece of jewellery, and though it was in the form of a cross closer inspection proved it not to be of Christian design. Its four arms were of equal length, the full span no more than an inch and a half. At the intersection was a human figure, neither male nor female, arms outstretched as in a crucifixion, but not nailed. Spreading out along the four routes were abstract designs, each of which ended in a circle. The face was very simply rendered. It bore, he thought, the subtlest of smiles.

He was no expert on metallurgy, but it was apparent the thing was not gold or silver. Even if the dirt had been cleaned from it he doubted it would ever gleam. But there was something deeply attractive about it nevertheless. Looking at it he had the sense he’d sometimes had waking in the morning from an intense dream but unable to remember the details. This was a significant object, but he didn’t know why. Were the sigils spreading from the figure vaguely familiar from one of the letters he’d read, perhaps? He’d scanned thousand upon thousand in the last twenty weeks, and many of them had carried little sketches, obscene sometimes, often indecipherable. Those he’d judged the most interesting he’d smuggled out of the Post Office, to study at night. They were bundled up beneath the bed in his room. Perhaps he’d break the dream-code on the medallion by careful examination of those.

He decided to take lunch that day with the rest of the workers, figuring it’d be best to do as little as possible to irritate Homer any further. It was a mistake. In the company of the good ol’ boys talking about news he’d not listened to in months, and the quality of last night’s steak, and the fuck they’d had, or failed to have, after the steak, and what the summer was going to bring, he felt himself a total stranger. They knew it too. They talked with their backs half-turned to him, dropping their voices at times to whisper about his weird look, his wild eyes. The more they shunned him the more he felt happy to be shunned, because they knew, even fuckwits like these knew, he was different from them. Maybe they were even a little afraid.

He couldn’t bring himself to go back to the Dead Letter Room at one-thirty. The medallion and its mysterious signs was burning a hole in his pocket. He had to go back to his lodgings and start the search through his private library of letters now. Without even wasting breath telling Homer, he did just that.

It was a brilliant, sunny day. He drew the curtains against the invasion of light, turned on the lamp with the yellow shade, and there, in a jaundiced fever, began his study, taping the letters with any trace of illustration to the bare walls, and when the walls were full spreading them on the table, bed, chair and floor. Then he went from sheet to sheet, sign to sign, looking for anything that even faintly resembled the medallion in his hand. And as he went, the same thought kept creeping back into his head: that he knew there was an Art, but no Artist, a practice but no practitioner, and that maybe he was that man.

The thought didn’t have to creep for long. Within an hour of perusing the letters it had pride of place in his skull. The medallion hadn’t fallen into his hands by accident. It had come to him as a reward for his patient study, and as a way to draw together the threads of his investigation and finally begin to make some sense of it. Most of the symbols and sketches on the pages were irrelevant, but there were many, too many to be a coincidence, that echoed images on the cross. No more than two ever appeared on the same sheet, and most of these were crude renderings, because none of the writers had the complete solution in their hands the way he did, but they’d all comprehended some part of the jigsaw, and their observations about the part they had, whether haiku, dirty talk or alchemical formulae, gave him a better grasp of the system behind the symbols.

A term that had cropped up regularly in the most perceptive of the letters was the Shoal. He’d passed over it several times in his reading, and never thought much about it. There was a good deal of evolutionary talk in the letters, and he’d assumed the term to be a part of that. Now he understood his error. The Shoal was a cult, or a church of some kind, and its symbol was the object he held in the palm of his hand. What it and the Art had to do with each other was by no means clear, but his long-held suspicion that this was one mystery, one journey, was here confirmed, and he knew that with the medallion as a map he’d find his way from Shoal to Art eventually.

In the meanwhile there was a more urgent concern. When he thought back to the tribe of co-workers, with Homer at its head, he shuddered to think that any of them might ever share the secret he’d uncovered. Not that they had any chance of making any real progress decoding it: they were too witless. But Homer was suspicious enough to at least sniff along the trail a little way, and the idea of anybody – but especially the boor-slob Homer – tainting this sacred ground was unbearable. There was only one way to prevent such a disaster. He had to act quickly to destroy any evidence that might put Homer on the right track. The medallion he’d keep, of course: he’d been entrusted with it by higher powers, whose faces he’d one day get to see. He’d also keep the twenty or thirty letters that had proffered the best information on the Shoal; the rest (three hundred or so) had to be burned. As to the collection in the Dead Letter Room, they had to go into the furnace too. All of them. It would take time, but it had to be done, and the sooner the better. He made a selection of the letters in his room, parcelled up those he didn’t need to keep, and headed off back to the Sorting Office.

It was late afternoon now, and he travelled against the flow of human traffic, entering the Office by the back door to avoid Homer, though he knew the man’s routine well enough to suspect he’d clocked off at five-thirty to the second, and was already guzzling beer somewhere. The furnace was a sweaty rattling antique, tended by another sweaty rattling antique, called Miller, with whom Jaffe had never exchanged a single word, Miller being stone-deaf. It took some time for Jaffe to explain that he was going to be feeding the furnace for an hour or two, beginning with the parcel he’d brought from home, which he immediately tossed into the flames. Then he went up to the Dead Letter Room.

Homer had not gone guzzling beer. He was waiting, sitting in Jaffe’s chair under a bare bulb, going through the piles around him.

‘So what’s the scam?’ he said as soon as Jaffe stepped through the door.

It was useless trying to pretend innocence, Jaffe knew. His months of study had carved knowledge into his face. He couldn’t pass for a naif any longer. Nor – now it came to it – did he want to.

‘No scam,’ he said to Homer, making his contempt for the man’s puerile suspicions plain. ‘I’m not taking anything you’d want. Or could use.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, asshole,’ Homer said, throwing the letters he was examining down amongst the rest of the litter. ‘I want to know what you’ve been up to down here. ’Sides jerking off.’

Jaffe closed the door. He’d never realized it before, but the reverberations of the furnace carried through the walls into the room. Everything here trembled minutely. The sacks, the envelopes, the words on the pages tucked inside. And the chair on which Homer was sitting. And the knife, the short-bladed knife, lying on the floor beside the chair on which Homer was sitting. The whole place was moving, ever so slightly, like there was a rumble in the ground. Like the world was about to be flipped.

Maybe it was. Why not? No use pretending the status was still quo. He was a man on his way to some throne or other. He didn’t know which and he didn’t know where, but he needed to silence any pretender quickly. Nobody was going to find him. Nobody was going to blame him, or judge him, or put him on Death Row. He was his own law now.

‘I should explain …’ he said to Homer, finding a tone that was almost flippant, ‘… what the scam really is.’

‘Yeah,’ Homer said, his lip curling. ‘Why don’t you do that?’