Dispatch (25 page)

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 unshakabie 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 arid 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.
 

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 thinking 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.

Suddenly, though, I was forced to remain continuously in the here and now, denied the history and musical depth that my records provided. There were plenty of books around the house, so I could easily read what had come before, but the only music I listened to was what came over the radio or what was played on the MTV or VH1 stations. 1 asked Henry about this, too, but he feigned ignorance and outrage and suggested I contact the police and tell them I had been robbed. I was tempted to do just that ... only I never seemed to be able to find the time. Just as I no longer had time to hit my favorite thift stores and used-record shops the way I used to.

It was part of a plan to keep me focused, I rationalized. Letter Writers needed to be laser sharp at all times, concentrated on the here and now, and if this crossed over the line, if breaking into my house and stealing my belongings constituted a criminal act rather than a helpful assist, well, it was still well-intentioned.

Only something told me that this was more than that. Something told me my records had been taken because they meant so much to me, were so important to me. If getting to write letters was the carrot, this was the stick. And it was clear that I was meant to be aware that I was at the mercy of the company.

I missed my records, and I found myself humming a lot, singing to myself when I was home alone, trying to keep the music alive like those book people at the end of
Fahrenheit 451
.

But more than my records, I missed Vicki; I missed Eric.

I wrote them letters. Every day I wrote them letters, telling them what I was doing, how much I missed them, how much I loved them. I poured my heart and soul into the words I wrote, the sentences I crafted for them, knowing that if they received my messages, they would understand.

If—

For I had no idea whether my lettters were getting to them. I slipped the envelopes addressed to Vicki into the mailbox with my daily workload, but the truth was that I did not, could not, know.

So I simply hoped and wrote.

And received no replies.
 

My best friend, I suppose, was Stan. Our group had gradually grown, and there was a Letter Writer from San Francisco named Shamus who was really into music and was actually closer to my age, but Stan and I had forged a bond based not on similarities of age or background or the things we had in common but rather on the indefinable connection of kindred spirits.

One afternoon, we were in the lunchroom, still drinking and talking after the rest of our "coven," as we'd jokingly begun calling ourselves, had returned to writing. The night before, I'd dreamed of the circus tent again, with the crucified Christ, and this time it had seemed more real than ever. All morning, I'd been thinking about it.

"Are you religious?" I asked Stan.

"I don't know. I guess I'm spiritual to a certain extent. Or was. I was raised Jewish, but as I grew up I dabbled in Buddhism, Christianity, went to Paramahansa Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship Temple, tried on a whole bunch of different religions, trying to find one that fit."

"Did any of the Christian stuff stick with you? Deep down, do you still believe?"

"Why?"

"I had a dream last night where I saw Christ's body," I told him. "Crucified. Rotting. In a circus tent in the desert. I've had it before; it's a recurring dream. Only this time two old men were in bleachers to either side of him, writing letters. And..." I shook my head. "It doesn't matter. The point is, I knew who he was when I saw him. I believed he was the Son of God. And I knew that he was dead. I could smell the horrible stench of his corpse." I took a swig of beer. "I could still smell it after I woke up. What do you think that means?"

"I don't know," Stan admitted. He looked at me. "Are you Christian?"

"No, not really. At least, I didn't think I was. But ... it's kind of freaked me out, I have to admit."

"I had a dream like that, too."

We both looked to our right. A white-bearded old man at the next table over had obviously been eavesdropping on our conversation, and he scooted his chair closer to us. "Socrates was tied to a stone slab, and he'd been picked apart by animals."

"How do you know it was Socrates?" Stan asked.

The old man nodded toward me. "How did
he
know it was Jesus? I just knew. Besides, I'm an antiquities scholar. Was," he corrected himself.

"What does all this mean?" I wondered.

"They didn't write," the old man said.

I glanced over at him.

"It's true. Their work lived on through the writings of others, but they themselves were not writers and certainly not Letter Writers." He paused. "I think they were punished for it."

We were all silent for a moment, letting this sink in.

"It makes sense," Stan agreed. "In a sick fucking way it makes perfect sense."

It did. Letter writing was everything; letter writing was all. We might object to that idea intellectually, but still we bought it, believed it.

I asked the question I'd been wondering since dreaming of that hellish tent: "Is there a God?"

The old man laughed harshly. "If there is, he'd better be a Letter Writer or he's going to end up with his balls in a vise."