I cleaned the living room, the kitchen, my bedroom, my den, the bathroom. I made macaroni and cheese. I washed the dishes.
I waited.
I watched TV.
I waited.
It was after eleven when the doorbell finally rang. I unlocked the door and opened it, and there they stood, Virginia and all of the people from my welcome party. I bade them come in, and for the first time, I thought that most of the men and women looked familiar. Not because I’d seen them on the tenth floor or I’d met them at my welcome party, but because I’d seen them… somewhere else. Before.
Ernest clasped my hand, shook it heartily as he walked in. He looked especially familiar. He looked like… Ernest Hemingway.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t noticed that before.
I peered more closely at the other Letter Writers filing in. Some of them I couldn’t place, but I’d been an English major in college, and quite a few of them resembled famous literary figures. With his long thick beard, Leo didn’t look like an old hippie; he looked like… Leo Tolstoy. Alexander, the short humpbacked man? Alexander Pope. James? James Baldwin. Bill? William Burroughs.
I turned to Virginia. “You’re Virginia Woolf,” I said.
She nodded in acknowledgment.
“You didn’t know?” Burroughs chuckled at my obvious astonishment. “Not as quick as we thought.”
“Shut up,” Virginia told him.
“Bitch.”
My head was reeling. Was there a tactful way to ask what I wanted to ask? I couldn’t think of one, so I just blurted it out. “What are you?” I faced Virginia. “You’re dead. All of you died. Are you… ghosts?”
They started laughing.
“No one dies,” Tolstoy said in his thickly accented English.
“Not here,” Ambrose Bierce added.
“You disappeared,” I told him. “Around 1914. No one knows what happened to you.”
He spread his arms. “Now you do.”
I faced Virginia. “You committed suicide.” I pointed at Hemingway. “You, too.”
“I answered a letter,” Virginia said softly.
“I tracked down the bastard who’d been hounding me for twenty years,” Hemingway said. “What you’d call a stalker today. But when I tried to meet him face-to-face”—he grimaced—“I ended up here.”
“Here?” I repeated stupidly. I was beginning to realize that the city surrounding me might not be the city I thought it was. Maybe the company controlled not just the building where I worked or the gated community where I had my condo. I thought of the way the streets of Brea had started seeming unusually empty after I began working for the company. I remembered my feeling that the houses in my old neighborhood had been empty shells, that I’d been the only living person on the street.
“None of us died,” John Cheever explained. “We came here like you, tricked or lured or hired. We read about how we supposedly died, or saw it on television, some of us, but it wasn’t true. We don’t know who those bodies were or how those deaths were arranged, or how our loved ones were fooled. But the truth is, we’re alive and well and living in this… place. Someone else, for some reason, concocted the circumstances of our demises.”
“But—”
“We’re still alive?” Cheever’s eyes twinkled. “That’s the silver lining. We never age, never change. We remain the same age we were when we entered. As will you. Many of us put pen to paper and wrote our stories with the hope of gaining a piece of immortality. The ironic thing is that now we do seem to be immortal. Because of our writing.”
“Letter writing,” Tolstoy said disdainfully. “The most ephemeral writing of all.”
I tried to wrap my mind around this.
Virginia put a hand on my arm. “We’re taking a chance just being here,” she said. “They know we’ve come to see you. They’ll be watching us even more closely now. They’ll be watching you. I wanted to come by myself but—” She shook her head.
“We wanted to be here, too,” Ernest said.
“You are very powerful.” It was the same thing James Baldwin had said that first day, and he repeated it again.
“You’re the only one who can help us,” Virginia said. “You’re the only one who can put a stop to all this. I thought that the first time I met you, especially after reading your work and seeing all the havoc it caused. They know it, too. That’s why they have you doing busywork, why they’re not giving you the big assignments.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
“The Old Ones,” Thomas Mann said.
“And maybe the one behind them.”
Stan’s Ultimate Letter Writer.
“Fog’s rolling in.” Jane Austen had been stationed by the open door, and the second she spoke those words, a hush fell over the gathering. I thought of Shamus and shivered, chilled to the bone. The others had a similar reaction. Quietly but quickly, they reversed course and started toward the front door, each stopping for a moment to say hello, say good-bye, say thank you, wish me well, touch me. They’d been here only a few minutes, but I’d learned more in those few minutes than I had in the past year. The implications of what I’d discovered were staggering.
“It’s not safe,” Virginia said on her way out. “Not here. Not tonight. I’ll contact you when I can. We need to set something up. We need to talk.”
They disappeared into the darkness before the gathering fog. None of them had driven here, so all of them probably lived within the gates of the neighborhood. I wondered why I’d never seen any of them around before.
I closed the door, locked it.
Where were we? I wondered. What was this place? How long had it been here? Who or what was behind it?
There was too much to think about. My mind was overloaded. I wanted to call Stan, but tonight I was probably even more paranoid than he was. Even if my phone wasn’t tapped in the traditional Nixonian sense, someone—
or something
—would be listening.
I assumed I’d be up all night, trying to puzzle out the mysterious history and alternate reality of the Letter Writers, but I fell asleep on the couch in the midst of thinking about what I was going to be thinking about, and I didn’t wake up until morning.
I went to work as usual, pretending that everything was normal, nothing was going on, my insides roiling, my stomach cramping from the excess acid. Virginia was waiting for me in my office. She seemed nervous and sleep deprived, she looked the way I felt, and she stood when I entered. “We need to talk,” she said again.
“Is it safe?” I asked, looking around.
“No. Your place. I’ll be over tonight,” she promised. “Alone.”
She never showed.
I went home and waited for her, stayed up until after one o’clock, and then finally I fell asleep, too exhausted to maintain my vigil. I hoped I’d be awakened by the ring of the doorbell or a loud knock, hoped at least I’d get a phone call or a letter, but I awoke extremely late, well after nine the next morning, and found no indication that she’d made any effort to contact me.
Something must have happened to her, I thought, and I went to work, checking in with Henry first to see if he had any news, keeping my ears open at lunch and break hoping to hear gossip, but if anything unusual had occurred, no one knew anything about it.
Stan remained in his office, so I ate lunch alone. I saw Ellen and Fischer on the other side of the lunchroom, they waved at me and I nodded back, but we made no attempt to eat together. How well did I really know them? I reasoned. They could be spies.
Everyone was a potential enemy. The walls had ears and eyes.
I stayed in my office, worried, willing myself not to write.
The day was interminable.
I was about to leave when Henry dropped by and asked me to stop by his office before I went home. My anxiety had not lessened during the day—I was still as nervous and agitated as ever, worrying about Virginia—but I told Henry I’d be there and a few moments later k
nocked on the frosted-glass door. “Come in!” he called.
The bureaucrat was seated in a chair waiting for me.
I looked over at Henry, feeling betrayed, though I knew I shouldn’t. He did not meet my eyes.
“Hello, Mr. Hanford,” the bureaucrat said cheerfully. “I trust you’ve had a productive day.”
I decided to be cagey. “Can’t complain.”
“Are you happy here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“There’s been talk of moving you to the tenth floor. We think perhaps you’re being underutilized.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Besides, a couple of vacancies have opened up.”
“I don’t like the cubicles,” I said. “I like my office better.”
“Arrangements can be made.”
This fake conversation went on for some time. Too long. I was tired of it as soon as it started, but there was no way to extricate myself and I had no choice but to play along. The talk was circular, ending back at where it had started, with nothing being decided, nothing being changed, nothing being learned. The entire point seemed to be to waste my time, and when I was finally allowed to leave, I found that it was dark out and the parking lot was practically empty.
I drove home.
Where I found Virginia Woolf drowned in my overflowing bathtub, weighted down with rocks.
Ernest Hemingway was in the kitchen, his brains blown out with the shotgun still gripped in his hands.
I panicked. I didn’t know what to do and ran out of my condo to my next-door neighbor’s, ringing the bell, banging on the door, yelling for help. But there was no answer, just the glow of cold lights and the muted sound of a television. Where was everyone? Dashing into the middle of the street, I stood there, face to the sky, screaming at the top of my lungs.
There was no one to hear my cries, however. My screams of anguish and horror dissipated in the cool evening air. After several frightened chaotic minutes, my throat began to hurt, and I stopped, my screams devolving into a fit of coughing. I heard no sirens coming, no neighbors talking, only the generic babble of interior television sets. I looked back at my house and the door I’d left open. In my mind’s eye, I saw Hemingway’s blood, Virginia’s watery stare, but I knew that I would have to go back in there and call someone if I was going to find anybody to take care of the bodies.
What about James Baldwin? I wondered. Was he still on the loose, was he on the run somewhere in the city… or was he lying dead in another part of my house?
The front of my condo suddenly looked like a face to me, the open door a yawning maw, the twin porch lights above it demented eyes. I didn’t want to go in there. I was afraid to go in there. I had no choice, though. Out of habit, I’d dropped my car keys on the coffee table when I’d first walked in. Even if I wanted to drive elsewhere, to the police station, to Stan’s, I’d have to go inside and get the keys. Or else try to walk to my destination.
And I didn’t feel comfortable walking anywhere in this made-up city.
My throat hurt from screaming, my breath was coming in short sharp gasps, my heart was like a jackhammer inside my rib cage, but I steeled myself and forced my feet to walk back across the asphalt of the road, up the concrete incline of my driveway and through the front door. There were no bodies in the living room, but there was a telephone, and I quickly sorted through the cards stacked next to the phone that served as my address book.
I called Henry.
Why I don’t know. I should have dialed 911. But I was not even sure there was a 911. Or a police station. Or a hospital. For all I knew, everything about me was an illusion.
Besides, if anyone would know what to do, I figured, Henry would. He answered on the second ring. I told him what I’d found in my condo, told him about Virginia and Ernest Hemingway. I couldn’t tell if he was surprised by my call or not, couldn’t tell if he’d already known what had happened and was expecting me to call or if my news came to him out of the blue. I didn’t care.
I hung up, grabbed my keys and went outside.
Moments later, an ambulance came. At least I assumed it was an ambulance. It was a vehicle that could have been a hearse, could have been a big station wagon, could have been anything. The four men who manned it wore the same nondescript clothes, half suit and half uniform, as my guards, the ones who had escorted me down that initial corridor to the empty office where I was imprisoned, and they walked with the same militaristic step. All four nodded but did not speak to me as they rolled gurneys into my condo to collect the bodies.
I wondered where the bodies were going, but I was too stunned to ask. The witch… Kyoko… these suicides… It was one thing after another.
But were they really suicides?
Who the fuck was I kidding? I knew they weren’t.
I guess I expected Henry to show up since I’d called him, but he didn’t. No one did. Only the four men from the ambulance, and they were wheeling out unidentifiable lumps on the twin gurneys minutes after they’d gone in. I looked but could not tell who was who under the plastic wrap. I saw no body parts, no blood.
They rolled the gurneys into the vehicle, got in themselves, thanked me and were gone.
I was supposed to clean up the mess myself?
Somehow even the fear had fled. Maybe I was in shock. Numb, I walked into my condo to assess the damage, particularly in the kitchen, and—
It was no longer my condo.
I stood in the open doorway looking around, confused. Instinctively, I backed up, stepped off the porch and looked up at the building’s facade. It was two stories instead of one and in a completely different style. But…
But there was something familiar about this place.
I stepped onto the porch, went inside. I knew this house. I’d never been here before, but I recognized the stone fireplace, the hardwood floors, the built-in bookcases. Without going into the other rooms, I knew what they looked like, knew what kind of furniture they had and where that furniture had been placed.
How was that possible?
I looked at a framed family photograph above the mantle—Vicki, Eric and myself—and I suddenly understood.
This was our dream house. This was the home Vicki and I had talked about, planned for, saved for, hoped for. This was where we’d wanted to spend our golden years together.
I sat down on the sofa with the fabric Vicki would have picked out, and burst into tears. None of it was ever going to happen; none of it would ever come to pass. There was no one to see me, but I covered my face in my hands anyway, sobbing uncontrollably, and I was still sobbing an hour, two hours, three hours later, my throat scratchy, my eyes stinging, my stomach and lungs in pain. I didn’t know my body had such a reserve of tears, and I thought the crying might never end, thought it might go on forever, stopping only when my heart gave out and killed me.
But it did stop sometime in the early morning, and though I was tired and could barely see through my blurry eyes and swollen lids, I did not fall asleep. I remained awake until dawn, when I went into my new kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee and had a pair of store-bought blueberry muffins for breakfast. I took a shower, changed my clothes and, on automatic pilot, drove to work.
Where Stan was waiting for me in the parking lot in front of the building.
“You look like shit,” he said. “What the hell happened?”
I shook my head and tried to move away from him, tried to blow him off, my mind comforted by the idea that I would soon be in my office, ensconced behind my crowded desk amid my music memorabilia. I could rest there. I could nap there.
He grabbed my arm.
“Hey!” I said.
But he pulled me toward his car. “Come on,” he said. “We’re not going in today. I have something to show you.” His voice was filled with an excitement I had never heard before, a fervor that made him sound reinvigorated, at once younger and more optimistic.
His passion was infectious, and against my will, I found myself
catching some of his eagerness. “What is it?” I asked.
He lowered his voice. “I found something. Get in the car quick. We’ll talk on the way.”
And talk we did.
Actually, he did all the talking. I had just as much to tell him—if not more—but I was too worn and tired and beaten to even start, and by the time he got into it, I realized that his story and mine were interconnected, were both parts of the same whole.
Stan had gone to town. Adversity didn’t beat him down. It energized him, and he’d been playing Hardy Boys since our meeting with the witch, making a concerted effort to discover the truths behind the lies we lived, to finally find and meet the Ultimate. Last night, he’d remained in his office, waiting, after everyone had left. He’d tried this tactic before, but he’d been found and kicked out by a team of two men whose job it was to search the building for stragglers. This time, however, he moved around, ducking and weaving down that crooked on-again, off-again path that Henry had taken me down and that led between our various writing environments. If he thought he heard a noise or imagined he heard a person coming, he ducked behind someone’s desk or couch and waited it out. Finally, at midnight according to his watch, Stan had exited the door at the foot of the path and found himself in the usual spot in the corridor, in front of Henry’s door.
And he’d seen a mailman.
It was one of those generic bureaucrats, “faceless fucks,” he called them, and the man was walking briskly down the corridor away from him, a full canvas sack slung over his shoulder like Santa. He’d just emptied the mailbox at the opposite end of the hall and was clearly taking it to a company mailroom, where it would be sorted for delivery.
Stan knew that if he tried to follow the mailman, he would be spotted instantly, so he ducked back inside the doorway, waited until he heard the bell for the elevator ding and the elevator doors open and shut, then watched the numbers on the panel above.
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