The Philatelist

by Tito Perdue

  I climbed back to my punishment cell in the sky, and from that day never resorted to the window again. My machine had finished with the African translation and was showing an ad for a certain brand of beer in which a satisfied customer was seen lying face-up in a tiny rowboat while drifting at leisure on an ideal lake.

  Nineteen

  I was on the verge, or “cusp,” as moderns like to say, of bringing these considerations to an end when that moment I discerned the wee little philatelic boy waiting on the porch, along with the dog that previously was mine.

  “Hail to thee!” I recited. “What the hell you want now, for Christ’s sakes?” (I adore naïve people, of which the very last one was living just next door.)

  “Want to trade?”

  “I always want to trade. What do you have there in that real sloppy collection of yours?”

  He opened the album, exposing for the second time just how pitiful it was. The whelp had continued to affix his few dozen stamps with each stamp’s own mucilage, the first error of amateurs. Even so, I led them inside, where the dog went immediately to his ancient place beneath the gramophone. Next, I took some twenty-five of my own new-style celluloid stamp hinges, an effective product costing about 1.6 cents each, and passed them over to the boy without expecting recompense.

  “About two bits’ worth,” I said. “But I don’t ask to be paid.”

  “Thanks!”

  “So! No need even to talk about it, right? It’s only a small sum, after all.”

  “Yes, sir. Say, you don’t still have that triangle stamp, do you? The one with the snake on it?”

  “Two bits. Just think, Feenie, ten years from now inflation will have turned that into . . . what? A dollar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And when you’re rich and fat, Feenie, you can buy as many dogs and hinges as you want. Does that appeal to you?”

  “I guess so.”

  (Having used just three of the hinges, he now tried to return to me the ones left over, the final gesture that confirmed my determination to make him my beneficiary when I be dead.)

  “Never give up on it, Feenie, beautiful things, no matter what phase you’re in.”

  He promised.

  Twenty

  It was on the following day that I carried to work a highly illustrated book with a great many colored plates in it. Recently I have begun trying to identify some of the traits shared by all living thing, for example their presence in space and time and, more strangely still, the desire on the part of even the worst of them to go on living. As for the Polish woman just across the aisle, I wouldn’t ask her to see the really extraordinary resemblance she bore to the typical Anoplogaster cornuta, a deep-sea creature with a little “lantern” affixed to its snout. An even better comparison is to be seen on page 147, where an unhappy-looking Hairy Frogfish with a tripartite tongue and vestigial eyes appears to be suffering from the unimaginable pressures at that depth. Me, I’d move to higher levels. That was when she (the woman, I mean) turned to me, saying: “Won’t be long, Hugh, till you’re retired and all! I can just imagine how excited you must be.”

  I smiled, a successful effort that, like a good old wine, had a bit of the mischievous in it. I sustained it for perhaps six seconds before transitioning over to spoken speech, a less demanding modality.

  “Excited? Nothing very exciting about leaving one’s friends and colleagues behind. We might never even ever see each other again!”

  “Good!” said the bozo in his jocular manner. He was a dear friend of mine, he believed, and had threatened to visit me at some future time. I turned to page 82, settling upon a Fanfin Seadevil as his nearest analog. The thing had a goofy smile with all kinds of excrescences everywhere.

  I toiled, a fifteen-minute exercise interrupted by a forty-five-minute coffee break in the men’s facility on the nineteenth floor. It was my good luck the place was empty—it always was (none but female employees had been assigned to that floor)—and I could read aloud, sometimes even orating in the mirror, an unwise reflex that reflected back to me what I had become.

  And then came noon. Getting into my hat and trousers, I would sally out into the free-market realm of money, insincerity, and consensual contempt. (It was of course the sincere ones that presented the greatest danger.) Millions came up to meet me, all of them turning away at the last instant. I passed through a crowd of bored children, blasé before they were ten years old. Within just one block, I encountered no fewer than two hundred liberals, their discontented little faces shuddering with moral indignation. One, the most problematic of them, was wearing stormtrooper boots and had that bony look characteristic of British women. I moved past him without comment. Penis envy was almost extinct now, thanks to the magic of tissue engineering.

  That old turpitudinous Leward Pefley, who claimed he could identify the likenesses of Confederate generals in the clouds? No doubt he could, whileas for me it were postage stamps hovering overhead, great ones and small, with a bias toward pre-war East European issues. I halted. Staring at the sky, I believed I could see a farmhouse (turfen roof and yellow pigs) on that one good day in history when love and beauty enveloped everything. Moving out of the traffic (human traffic scattering footprints in the snow), I caught momentary sight in the western sky of the 1930 2 c. yellow Pegasus from Uruguay, a lemon-colored job with a good engraving of my favorite size.

  We gathered that night around my kitchen table, me, myself, the two philatelists whom I call “Blue,” and “Green,” even though their real names were the other way around, and finally the little boy and dog. Unsurprisingly the best collection belonged to an Ashkenazi attorney who had taken control of a nine-album estate that only two days earlier had belonged to a gentile widow lying semi-conscious in a nursing home. He would open these albums and allow us quick glimpses of the riches therein, before then closing them up again and returning to his drink.

  “Why don’t you let us see the things, for God’s sakes?”

  “He wants I should let him see my things! Hey! A charity I am? One green American dollar bill—that ain’t so much to ask. Hey! And then you can see all you want!”

  “You can take it out of the ten dollars you owe me for the drink.”

  “Oi! I think you’re a safety hazard. What is this?”

  To say nothing of his face, his fingers were pudgy and short, and so was he. I experienced a desire that some might think wasn’t fully consonant with a compassionate human being. Moving quickly, I gathered up the little decorative ashtray that he must pass on his way to the door. In the interval, my friend Blue (I can call him by his right name now) was haggling with the child. We three, we huddled long and appraisingly over a very recherché imperforate of one of the expired colonies of French-speaking France.

  It was a pleasant evening spent in the proper way. New York still has one good radio station left over from the 1950s, and by monkeying with the dial, I was able to bring Mahler’s Eighth into focus, specifically the much-underrated Abravanel rendition. Of course, I had to dial back and forth frequently to prevent the usual trash music from breaking in upon us from more powerful stations. Yes, and someday there’ll be no good music and no good men left anywhere at all.

  “Now when you grow up . . .” I started to say.

  “Yes, sir, I’m going to study about art and history and stuff.”

  “And?”

  “And if they try to make me join the army, I’ll move to another country.”

  “Excellent! And?”

  “I’m going to keep away from all those counterfeit stamps.”

  “Perfect. You’re coming right along. Here, have another drink.”

  It was full dark by now, and from my place I could see the top stories and svelte steeples of the downtown city. Come the Deluge, the waters will be up to the fortieth stories, I trust, and the indwellers shall either have drowned or dispersed to Africa, Asia, or worse. The only question: Which of those floors higher than forty ought I appropriate for my stamps? />
  Twenty-One

  Here from the fortieth floor of The Empire State Building I stand looking down into the ruined fields of Brooklyn and/or Queens. One lone plowman I see, a sturdy sort of yeoman in a crimson blouse. Methinks I have seen that face before, somewhere in the art of Bruegel. No, it belongs, that face, on bust number nine in the catalog for Easter Island. But it’s just an illusion, of course, and great was my dismay when I came back to ground and found myself in the quotidian U.S.A. familiar to us all.

  From that elevation I had begun to imagine that the landscape down below was ninety percent Caucasian once again and that little boys were more interested in baseball than in anal intercourse. I enjoyed imagining that people were parts of families, that Hispanics had all been teleported back to Africa, that immigrants were under attack from gene-specific diseases, and as for your garden-variety feminists, that they were being utilized for target practice by our fifty million police. But if I can’t have that, let it at least be pleasing to Wotan that the country cease to exist.

  Twenty-Two

  I have elected to continue with these pages, a project very like retreating off into a dark closet where alone certain truths may be said. Another truth: I had rather been born into the fourteenth century instead of this.

  My day of retirement draws nigher! How may I make best use of that long-wished-for moment when I shall toss away my clock, my comb and razor and subway map. I shall vote no more! I will need no longer to participate in smiles and courtesies with two-legged fauna perched behind desks with computers on them. I shall live in the woods with my stamps and the dog that was returned to me on Wednesday. As to that once-promising youth next door, he has gone into another phase and nowadays watches television all day long. I shall amend my will. The stamps I gave him have either been stowed in the attic or thrown out with the garbage, and his mother has kindly asked that I hold no further communication with him.

  But meanwhile I continue to report to work, never mind that my fellow commuters have voted me from the group. Today, my bus was late, retarded by some four or five stowaways riding on the roof. Inside, surrounded by somnambulists powered by pills, I again came near to asking the one question most dreaded by our leaders—is this what life is for?

  I passed a little old woman, America’s waste material, pushing a wheelbarrow holding mops and brooms. Came next a pornographic theater, a suntan salon, a food bank, a video rental, a leather shop, and then a specialty boutique offering Romanian cheeses. I passed a line of parked limousines containing hedge fund operators in need of the guillotine. I bypassed a recumbent tramp spitting up a substance of some sort into the discolored snow. Pushing my mind into the far future, I succeeded in looking upon this as objectively as a Venusian would.

  My smiles were wearing ever thinner; even so, I entered my place of work with tremendous cheer, even passing back to Tiffany the magazine I had borrowed all those years ago my first day at work. An ignoramus of the highest water, she loved to see photos of the interiors of the homes of the rich. Some kindly person, the Bozo probably, had left the morning paper on my chair. I gathered it up and commenced to get ready to begin to start my day.

  The newspaper: A movie star was getting a divorce. A black child had been offended, and the government was rushing a therapist to the scene. Having refused foreign investment, the bombing of Bolivia had been resumed. Page two revealed that some Americans were continuing to marry inside their own races. Therapists were on their way.

  Twenty-Three

  It was the evening of that same day that I arrived home to find my abominable son blocking the door. Spawned by my worst wife, he had abandoned us nineteen years ago, carrying nothing but a few CDs of bad music and both my credit cards.

  “Hark!” said I, putting on an expansive smile. (I had thought he might be dead by now.) “Well! And so we meet again!”

  He grinned, an unsightly business. “Good to have seen you,” I said. “Where’re you headed?”

  “Whoa. I figured I’d crash here for a few days. Like, you know, hey, till I get it all together, right?”

  “To be sure. Then you’ll probably want to come inside.” (Truly, my son is a modern man, which is to say a six-foot hulk of twenty-four-karat shit. On his forearm he has a flawlessly rendered tattoo of an eviscerated woman who must have been beautiful before her mishap. The organs themselves, the kidneys, the spleen, etc., were inscribed on his other arm.)

  “I was fired.”

  “Fired! They must be insane.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where were you working?”

  “Aw, this old place in Baltimore. Know what I mean? Dumb sons-of-bitches.”

  “However will they replace you, I wonder?”

  “They can’t! Shit, I can sell more shit in an hour than those other sons-of-bitches can sell in a day!”

  “Not to mention the quality.”

  “Yeah, right. Say, I was just thinking maybe you’d want to hand over some of my inheritance now, since I’m kind of short these days. My heritage—see what I’m saying? I could pay you back later, if that’s what you want.”

  I thought long and deeply over his offer, even taking out a cigarette and plucking thoughtfully at my chin.

  “I see what you mean,” I reported. “But I’ve got my heritage all locked up at good interest rates. If I take it out now, you won’t get nearly as much later on! I’m not going to leave any money to my other children, you understand.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  He smiled. His teeth were worse that I had imagined, one of them comprising nothing more than an adventitious prong with a barb on it.

  “How much is it? Naw, I’m just asking. My heritage, I mean.”

  “Well! Let me just say that you’re going to be surprised. Deeply surprised.”

  “Yeah? Hey, ‘preciate it, dad. No, really. Can I come in now?”

  He entered anyway, and after stalking through the downstairs rooms, found the refrigerator.

  Twenty-Four

  He lives there still, on the second story just above my kennel where no amount of threats or discussion makes any impression on his edgy, innovative, and boundary-pushing personality. He snores when I leave home and snores when I come back, saving up the nighttime hours for disappearing into this large and dying city now populated mostly by jigaboos and worse.

  The rain that night proved a great consolation, but I slept poorly anyway. Having left the bed three times but urinating only once, I finally got into my Saturday clothes and migrated to the next room with its table, its low-hanging lamp, and philatelic equipment. I could have retired ten years ago, could have I, had only I invested in all those biotechnology start-ups or, heck, just plain simple income-producing utility shares. But then I wouldn’t possess these stamps and albums that I see spread out here before me. Suddenly I threw open my Czechoslovak collection and gathered my seventeen-inch magnifying glass.

  I could see much, sometimes too much, even unto the miniscule messages often left behind by mischievous engravers with nothing better to do. And then, too, I had greatly expanded my knowledge of the boundary conflicts between Hungary and Romania. Not that ever I was able to penetrate the language employed by the former country, a tremendous mess with all sorts of some really screwed-up declensions that lie well outside my rather good knowledge of human tongues and writing systems.

  Next I opened on southern South America, and after passing hurriedly over the exiguous postage of Patagonia, arrived at perhaps the most unacknowledged item in that whole volume, a hand-drawn airmail issued more or less as a joke by the members of a weather station positioned on the shelf of Antarctica. Either it was worth a great deal or, some said, had no value at all. It showed a naked woman lap-dancing around the South Pole.

  I have seen the art gallery of the Vatican, but my collection, albeit in miniature, is richer than theirs. I keened in upon an Argentine stamp that showed the capitol city and some of the public officials of which th
e people presumably were proudest. I ought have burnt this stamp right away, except that I needed it to fill the page.

  Meantime I had put on the Tristan of Melchior, hoping in that way to overcome the noises from upstairs. Congruent with Argentina’s so-called “heroic” series, the music formed a backdrop to a set of some dozen stamps picturing some of the noblest figures in Caucasian myth. I bent down close over a medieval boat with colored sails wending its way to Brittany over a vermillion sea.

  I viewed insects and waterfalls, portraits of good and evil men, here an escutcheon and there a flower, Spanish buildings, indeed all manner of creatures and products and other matters important to philatelists and normal people alike.

  Twenty-Five

  My house has been seen by two different realtors, each more cunning than the other. I settled at last on the bald one, who promises me, thanks to the contingencies of zoning laws, an extraordinary price. My current plan is to sell my son along with the building, presuming I can get out of town whilst he lies sleeping. And meantime, day by day, the time of my retirement draws ever nearer.

  On Tuesday, I visited the woman next door and insisted on the return of the three stamps I had sold her odious son at bargain rates. This of course led to a rancorous debate in which the woman finally gave expression to the underlying vulgarity, not to mention sheer philistinism, domiciled all these years ago about fifty-three feet from myself, depending upon which part of our two houses we each were occupying at the time.

  And then on Tuesday I visited New York’s third-best coin, stamp, and antique weapons outlet, where I invested recklessly in a long-time desideratum of mine that I shan’t be able to afford unless the house really does fetch the price I’ve been promised. It hurts me to attend these places, mysterious endoits full of superb materials that I, certainly, never shall possess. We grinned at each other, the proprietor and I. His face is long, very long and very narrow, and one of his eyes has been transformed into a “yellow agate,” as it were, the aftereffect of an antibiotic allergy.