The elevator was going up.
It was what he’d been hoping. The man was either collecting mail from the floors above or joining members of his team that were doing the same. Stan watched the number eight light up. And stay lit.
He waited there, alert for any sound, ready at any second to sprint back to his own office and hide, but the number did not change.
Three minutes.
Five minutes.
Seven minutes.
Ten.
Did it really take that long to collect the letters from the eighth floor… or was that the location of the mail room?
He took a chance and pressed the call button.
The elevator descended.
Stan remembered that I’d told him the only other floor I could go to was the fifth, but he pressed button number eight anyway.
And the doors closed.
He wished he’d been more prepared, wished he at least had a makeshift weapon of some sort, but of course that wouldn’t do any good here.
The doors slid open, and he was looking into a massive open room that resembled nothing so much as a nineteenth-century industrial-age factory. Everything was black and dusty, smelling of burning coal and oil; even the hot, humid air seemed pregnant with soot. Exposed pipes, metal support beams and clanking chains hung from the filthy ceiling, attached at various points to a web of interconnected machines that were running full steam.
In the center of all this chaos, two rows of conveyor belts moved endlessly toward the far end of the factory, each piled high with envelopes. This was where the mailman had dumped his load, and indeed a bin nearby was full of empty canvas sacks. There was no sign of the faceless fuck Stan had followed here, or indeed any other bureaucrat, but the conveyor belts were lined on opposite sides with pale skeletal figures who seemed to be sorting rapidly through the envelopes as they passed; they threw some into large open chutes and put postage stamps on the ones that remained.
Just as in my dream.
Stan saw all this in a matter of seconds, and he ducked back into the right front corner of the elevator, furiously pushing the button for the fourth floor, certain that at any moment he would be seen. The elevator did not respond, though, and after several moments of this, he realized he would have to find another way off this floor, another way out, or risk being caught.
He dashed out of the elevator, ducking behind a pillar, realizing too late that he was in full view of a dozen or so drones at the end of the conveyor belt line.
It didn’t matter. They saw him, but they didn’t care. They might as well have been machines themselves; so single-minded was their focus.
Stan relaxed a little, experimentally stepped out from behind the pillar, moving slowly into full view of all of the skeletal figures. No one rushed out to grab him or stop him, and he strode carefully around the edge of the factory, ready at any moment to run for his life. He found a door marked exit, and he opened it, walking through.
Stan paused in his narration. By this time, the car had reached its destination. We were on a street at the edge of Brea that appeared to be only half formed. There was no fog here, but there might as well have been, for we could see nothing clearly. The buildings were but silhouettes, featureless shapes of houses and stores and offices. The road was solid beneath the car but had no color, no texture. The sky was formless, gray.
Stan parked on the side of what should have been the street.
Where were we? Was this even part of the real world? I thought of Virginia, Ernest and the others, what they’d told me, what they’d said. I remembered when I applied for my job how I’d stepped through the door to apartment number 3—
Shangri-La
—and then awakened in an office in the building. I’d been living all this time in some sort of alternate universe.
Or I was going crazy.
Stan stepped out of the car. I followed. Like the city surrounding us, the air was thin, barely there.
He pointed toward what looked like the outline of a convenience store. “It’s in there.”
“What?”
“The mail factory… everything else.”
“I thought you said it was inside the company.”
“It is. At least, that’s how I got in. But geography’s not really geography here. When I came out, this is where I found myself. It’s a back door. And I went in and out a few times to make sure I could get in and out anytime I wanted, make sure it worked every time. It’s real, it’s legit.”
An alternate world.
“So what’s your plan?”
“I want to show you something. It’s going to blow your fucking mind.”
I was starting to get scared. He seemed a little too secretive, and I didn’t like that. I wanted him to tell me where we were going and what I was going to see before we went there, before I saw it. The thought occurred to me that this wasn’t really Stan, that I was being led to my slaughter by a simulacrum.
But this was Stan. I knew it, deep down I knew it, and if he wanted to show me instead of tell me, he must have had a good reason.
I followed him over the unformed ground to that indistinct building. In the center of that gray space was a fully detailed door, a real door, and Stan reached for the vertical-bar handle and pulled it open.
We walked inside.
We were in a marble passageway that could have come straight from the set of some old sword and sandal epic. At the far end was a shadowed vestibule, and Stan strode purposefully toward it, his shoes clicking on the polished floor. We passed into the vestibule, and Stan stopped in front of a large stone door. He pulled it open very slightly until there was a crack through which we could peek, and he motioned me over with a silent swing of his arm.
“Look,” he whispered when I was next to him.
I looked. It was a roomful of men and women that, at first glance, looked like an old-fashioned secretarial pool, the kind I’d recently seen on TV in the movie How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Only I could see right away that there was something wrong with these people. They sat in front of computer screens, typing ceaselessly, automatically shifting fonts on their individual printers to disguise their identities. But their faces looked strange, slow, almost retarded. I frowned, not certain what to make of them.
Stan filled me in. “Their tongues have been cut out,” he said in a voice of hushed horror. “They can’t talk. They can only communicate by writing.”
In a sick way, it made perfect sense. These were the ideal Letter Writers.
I suddenly realized something else. All of these people were familiar. At least most of them were. Some had been dead for years, others were only recently deceased, and a few of them I was sure were still alive.
They were world leaders.
I recognized George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Tse-tung, Winston Churchill. Presidents, kings, prime ministers, czars, emperors. Their faces were distorted because their tongues had been cut out, but I could tell who they were, and knowing now what I was looking at, I recognized dozens more: Napoleon Bonaparte, Madame Mao, Dwight Eisenhower, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Thomas Jefferson… Not every president was there, not every dictator or foreign ruler, either. But, like Ronald Reagan, political men, men of power, were often inveterate diarists and letter writers. Some of them, obviously, had been real Letter Writers, and those were the ones who were kept here, who now powered the machine that, as Henry said, made the world go round. They created the deep black undercurrent atop which we frivolous Letter Writers floated our fluff. Stan had been right. We were just distractions, and I realized how brilliant the Ultimate had been in his structuring of this world and his recruitment throughout history.
Throughout history.
How could we ever hope to go against something that powerful?
You are very powerful, James Baldwin had told me.
You’re the only one who can help us, Virginia said. You’re the only one who can put a stop to all this.
&nbs
p; Had the Ultimate made a mistake with me? Had I been misassigned?
Virginia and her literary compatriots had obviously believed that to be the case, and I had the feeling Stan did, as well. All I knew was that when I had been free, in the real world, out in the open, I had inadvertently blocked some of the letters from here; I had managed to subvert the Ultimate’s intentions. I was capable of far more than I was doing. My talents and abilities were not being properly used.
The only question was whether that was on purpose.
“I want to show you what else I found.” Stan carefully closed the door, then led me down the marble passageway, stopping halfway before what looked like a discolored section of wall. He placed his hand on it—
And the wall slid open.
We were in a library. Only it wasn’t a library of books but a library of letters. Stacked floor to ceiling on dark wood shelves were piles of stationery, masses of typing paper, sheets of notebook pages, all arranged alphabetically by the first letters of what I assumed were the authors’ last names, which were stenciled onto the end caps of the bookcases. The library was enormous but well laid out, and Stan strode up one aisle and across another, easily finding what he was looking for. He sorted through a stack near the bottom of the bookcase and withdrew a handwritten letter. “The first one I ever wrote,” he said.
I looked at the childish scrawl, glanced down at the signature: Stan Shapiro.
“Every letter I’ve ever written is here.” He gestured toward the papers on the shelf. “Even the ones that were torn up or thrown away.” He took the letter, put it back. “Every letter anyone has ever written is here.”
The two of us looked around at the endless gargantuan stacks.
I walked up to the nearest cross aisle, then turned right, looking at the call letters. After I’d passed literally dozens of rows of bookcases, I finally found the Hs and quickly sprinted between the shelves until I saw my own name. My output seemed pretty paltry when arranged this way, but I quickly flipped through the top half of my first stack and discovered that Stan was right. In the stack were all of my secret letters to Vicki and Eric, even a letter I’d started to write to Virginia Woolf but discarded before finishing. Everything I’d ever written had been archived here.
I grabbed a letter at random from the shelf above mine, written to a woman named Eileen from a man named Frank Hanes: I’m going to slit you snatch to gullet, then pull out your innards and let the crows eat them… I threw the letter down on the floor, reached for another by an author named Gillian Handweiler: I am quite upset by the tone you used to speak with me on the phone when I called to ask a simple question. I am not a petty or vindictive person, but I believe you should be fired for your poor attitude and communication skills, and I will be telling the doctor to do exactly that…
My head was spinning. What was the point of all this? Who was keeping these letters and why? How had they gotten here?
I moved up the aisle, took another letter at random, read it:
Dear Sir,
I received your memo and agree completely. We do need more. To that end, I have decided to create another.
Stan Shapiro is a forty-something Brooklynite with paranoid tendencies who loves conspiracy theories and whose sole focus is the space program. He is about five ten, balding, and despite his obsessions is fairly social and interacts easily with others—
I stopped, looked over at Stan, heading toward me. My mouth was suddenly dry.
“What is it?” he asked, seeing the look on my face.
I couldn’t say anything, simply handed him the letter. He read it over, staring at me with stricken eyes. “What do you think it means?” he asked. His voice was little more than a whisper.
“I… don’t know,” I said. But I was afraid that I did. I glanced at the signature on the letter, then looked up at the return address at the top: Rhys Hannegan. The name meant nothing to me. Grabbing a handful of this guy’s letters, I started quickly sorting through them. In one, Rhys wrote about creating a woman named Dolores Hernandez. Dolores was a Letter Writer who loved Mexican soap operas and was a passionate opponent of free trade.
I knew her; I’d met her.
“I’m… a character,” Stan said, dazed. He sat down hard. There was no chair to catch him and he landed painfully on the floor, though he didn’t seem to notice. “Another Letter Writer wrote about me and I… became.”
“Not necessarily—” I began.
“Stop it.”
“Just because it’s in writing doesn’t mean it’s true. You should know that.”
“But it feels true,” he said, and he was right. As much as I hated to admit it, it did feel true.
“In the beginning was the word,” he said.
“Maybe… maybe…” I trailed off, unable to think of anything comforting to say.
I looked at the letters in my hand. Who was this Rhys Hannegan? One of the Old Ones Thomas Mann had mentioned? The letters were all addressed Dear Sir, as though Rhys was an underling reporting to his superior. Had he been writing to the Ultimate Letter Writer?
Stan laughed shortly. “I was created in a letter. Someone wrote about me, and here I am. How’s that for irony?”
I was stunned, still having a hard time taking this all in. “What if I’m not real?”
“What if?”
“Maybe someone wrote about me and made me up—”
“Maybe they did. So fucking what?” Stan stood, and suddenly he was back to his feisty old self. I admired the way he had adjusted so fast, had so quickly regained his equilibrium, but a part of my brain could not help thinking, Because he was written that way. “Look, I’m not going to stop writing, stop fighting, stop being who I am, just because I was brought to life by a Letter Writer. I didn’t ask to be born, but now that I’m alive, I’m going to make the best of it.”
I didn’t ask to be born.
I used to say that to my parents.
“However I got here, I’m real enough now. I have a heart, I have a brain, and I have a will independent enough to let me do whatever I damn well please.”
That’s good, I almost said, but I realized it sounded patronizing.
“The thing is,” Stan continued, “I think you’re one of the real ones. A true Letter Writer. Writers like you come along once in a generation. And whether the Ultimate realizes it or not, you’re the real deal.
“You’re our ticket out of here.”
I shook my head.
“I’m serious.”
“How? You think I can get us back? Get myself back?”
“Like the Good Witch said in The Wizard of Oz, you’ve always had the power. And there’s no place like home.”
I suddenly thought of something. “But is there a ‘back’ for you? If you really were created by letter, can you return to… my world?”
“It’s my world, too. Maybe I was created by a Letter Writer. But I don’t think I was created here. I was brought here, like you, but I was born in the real world. My memories of it are too vivid. There would be no reason to give me these memories, no reason to recreate my old neighborhood if I hadn’t had an old neighborhood, no reason to recall my initial hiring if I’d never been hired.”
I wasn’t sure I bought that logic. Hell, he and the others could have been created the day I arrived for the sole purpose of keeping me company. But there was no way to tell. These letters didn’t have dates on them.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“You tell me. You’re the one who’s real.”
I didn’t like this. It felt weird, and I wished I hadn’t learned about Stan—or, at the very least, didn’t believe it. But I had learned it, I did believe it, and now talking to him felt almost like talking to myself. I saw him as more of a cartoon character than a person now, a figment of my imagination rather than a flesh-and-blood human being.
I felt as though I’d been abandoned by the one person I could truly count on.
Virginia and the other authors, I
wondered, were they real? Or were they characters created by Letter Writers to populate this place and give themselves an air of legitimacy?
Was anything real?
Was I real?
Stan said yes, but he was a made-up character.
Maybe all of this was taking place in the correspondence of an author plotting out a novel and discussing it with a colleague. Maybe I’d never been married, never had a son.
My head hurt. I felt dizzy and wanted to sit down.
What would happen if we torched this library? I wondered. Were all of these letters backed up somewhere, ready to be regenerated if destroyed? Or would this world come tumbling down, wink out of existence, while societies all over the earth were thrown into chaos as their underpinnings collapsed, the letters used to determine their courses disappearing?
I looked at Stan. I know he wanted me to just sit down and write a letter that would solve all of our problems, but I had my doubts as to whether that would work. I’d written letters about a lot of things that hadn’t been true and hadn’t come to pass, and there was no guarantee that anything would be different this time. I still liked the idea of returning to the factory and following the letters out. That was the one physical, concrete truth in all this: we wrote letters and they were delivered in the real world. If we could just find out how they got through, we could do the same.
We discussed this, the two of us, standing there in the middle of the library, speaking softly, our voices echoing and disappearing in the vast room, but the truth was that it was hard for me to take him seriously. I’d deferred to him before because he was older, but the respect I had for him was gone. I felt like a human adult trying to find a way to make Pinocchio into a real boy. The excitement I’d felt earlier, on the way in, that I’d caught from Stan, had dissolved into something like sadness. Yes, I had a shot at finding a way out of here, but as far as I was concerned, it was still a long shot, and at the moment I felt more alone than I had at any time since arriving.
“You need to start writing,” Stan urged.
“We’re going to follow the mail,” I told him. I’d made my decision.
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