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 I 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 rectangula
r 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.”
2
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.
I had him pegged for a company man through and through.
And I was not.
Don’t get me wrong. Professionally, I was happier than I’d ever been, and if I’d had Vicki and Eric back, I would have considered my life to be perfect.
But my job was too good, if that made any sense. And as much as I loved it, as much as I needed it, I had the sense deep down that it was not right. It made me feel the way I used to feel as a child on the day after Halloween. All day on November first, I’d eat candy, the trick-or-treat candy I’d collected the night before. Mars bars for breakfast, Milky Ways for lunch, Snickers for dinner, Butterfingers for snack. I was in hog heaven, but a sober, responsible part of me was always thinking that I should be eating some bread or fruit or meat or vegetables—normal food—to balance out all the sugar.
And months later, at my next dental checkup, I would inevitably find that I had at least one new cavity.
This reminded me of that.
It was great. I loved it.
But I knew it was wrong.
And others did, too.
Gradually, the malcontents shook themselves out, made themselves known. There was, I discovered, something of an employee lunchroom on the third floor, a restaurant, more haute cuisine than cafeteria, that catered exclusively to those of us who worked in the building. It was there that I first met Stan Shapiro. Stan was older than me and had been here since the Reagan years, writing crank letters to each successive president. They were all letters about the space program. He enjoyed what he did and believed in what he wrote, but somewhere along the line had developed an unshakable belief that his letters were not reaching their intended destination, that he was made to think he was writing letters to the president in order to placate him and keep him from really writing letters to the president.
I learned all this a half hour after meeting him, and by the end of our lunch nearly an hour later, I felt as though I’d known him forever. He was cranky, cynical, angry—and I liked him a lot.
A few days later, Stan introduced me to Ellen Dickerson and Fischer Cox. Again, we met in the lunchroom. Both Ellen and Fischer were relatively new here, having come to work at the company only a few years prior. The two of them were “involved,” had lived together for the past six months, but before starting their jobs here had been married to other people. Letter writing had taken its toll on those relationships. They were together now out of sadness, convenience and desperation but readily admitted that they’d instantly trade what they had with each other if they could reunite with their spouses again.
I thought of Vicki, thought of Eric.
“It’s weird,” Fischer said. “This company was built for us, created for us, and it’s great. It’s as though we designed it ourselves. Everything here revolves around letter writing, which of course is the focus of our lives. But…” He shook his head. “Sometimes it’s not enough, you know?”
I knew exactly what he meant. We all did. And that night we got together at Stan’s for an all-night bull session. We ended up drinking too much and talking too much, but we grew closer much faster than we otherwise would have.
Despite our reservations, though, despite our spoken worries and unspoken fears, we loved our jobs. How could we help it? We had TV and movies from all over the world, and access to every periodical on the planet. We were as plugged-in to the currents of contemporary life as it was possible to get. And from within the company we dictated fashions, trends in music, literature, architecture, art. The scales of the political seesaw were tipped one way and then the other by us, and often we worked at cross-purposes as our letters of instruction told us to write contradictory complaints or suggestions. My friends and I discussed what we wrote, the notes we penned on our own and the messages we were directed to write, but we had no idea what others were doing, certainly not the “free-formers,” as Stan called them. I had not seen a person from that initial welcoming party, but I knew they were around somewhere, and often I wondered what they were writing, or if their work conflicted or contradicted my own.
You were public enemy number one around here, Ernest had said.
You are very powerful, James had told me.
I felt that when I wrote. And I liked it.
I spent more and more time at work, less and less time at home. What was there for me outside of the company anyway? My calls to Eric had become first occasional, then, at the behest of the lawyers, both mine and Vicki’s, nonexistent. My contact with Vicki was thirdhand: she spoke to her lawyers, who spoke to my lawyers, who spoke to me. I had no life, I had no family, and reality seemed less real to me each day. I preferred looking at the world through a television screen or reading about it through a reporter’s eyes.
And writing letters about it.
In an odd way, I grew to appreciate how hard it was to be an artist, to make a living at a creative endeavor. Most people exercised their creativity by recording humorous messages on their answering machines, or providing amusing commentary on family videotapes, or redecorating their houses. But to be forced to produce day in and day out, week after week, was grueling and took much of the fun out of it. Writing letters not because I wanted to, not because I was inspired to, but because it was my job made me appreciate those prolific authors who throughout history had continuously churned out pages of consistently brilliant material regardless of the harsh and complicated circumstances of their lives.
But still, I did it, too, running on that treadmill. I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t help myself. Wasn’t there some lower-form animal, some hamster or rat that, unless halted by an outside force, would endlessly repeat the same action until it died from exhaustion? I was like that. On a conscious level, I might be wearying of the grind, but on an instinctive level, I had to write. More than a Pavlovian reaction, it was an instinct that was hardwired into me—and into all of the others.
And we kept on keeping on.
3
Aside from the office building in which we worked, Brea seemed to have become a strangely depopulated city. We never went shopping—food was simply delivered to our houses when we were not there, our refrigerators restocked like those of a hotel minibar—and sometimes I had the unsettling feeling that if I ever stopped at one of the grocery stores along my work route, no one would be there, that the stores were simply false fronts like those in a movie.
The same went for my neighborhood. I saw cars in driveways, lights in houses at night—I even heard the sound of televisions, stereos and radios from other homes, of lawn mowers and leaf blowers from the next street over—but I never saw another person, and more than once I found myself thin
king that there weren’t any, that this entire neighborhood was fake, created for my benefit, and mine was the only occupied house in this tract. But I was too afraid to knock on one of my neighbors’ doors and find out. Sometimes, I convinced myself that everything was real, everything was normal, but at other times I could not help seeing the skull beneath the skin, and I closed my doors and windows, pulled my drapes and focused on the TV, afraid to look at the houses around me.
The fog I’d seen through the window at the party had never returned, but I wondered if it was still there, surrounding everything at a point far enough away that it could not be seen.
Or maybe I was just going crazy.
The oddest thing was how everyone lived in Orange County in a replica of the neighborhood in which they’d lived before. Stan was from Brooklyn, and his house and street were identical to the community from which he’d come. Ellen and Fischer were from Cleveland and Atlanta, respectively, and though they now lived in Fischer’s house together, their original residences were copies of those disparate locales. I’d lived here all my life and never seen anything like it. Orange County seemed to have become an impossible amalgam of dozens of different geographies and from the sky must have looked like the play set of a small child who put pieces together at random.
I actually asked Henry about this one time, and though talking to him always cheered me up and did so this time, as well, he didn’t answer any of my questions. Once again, I had the impression that he didn’t know the answers.
And even if he did, he would be afraid to give them.
I missed my records.
My collection had disappeared, and though I knew the company was behind it, I did not know why. I knew only that in the room where I kept my albums, there were extra couches and pieces of furniture against the walls where shelves were supposed to be. In place of my stereo was another television set. I had always listened to records. I’d used my CD player, frequently, but I’d also enjoyed my turntable on a daily basis, and not a week had gone by that I did not dig into my backlog and pick out some gems from the past.
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