Dispatch (31 page)

There was no answer, of course.

I glanced up and down the street, saw no pedestrians, no moving cars. "Hello?" I called again, and tried the door.

It was unlocked.

I slipped inside quickly. The entryway was spotless, no sign of any struggle, no shit, no piss, no puke. No body. I walked through the house, checking each and every room, but the house was clean, empty. What's more, there was no indication that anyone lived here, no food in the cupboards, no clothes in the closets, no toiletries in the bathroom.

It was over.

And I'd gotten away with it.

I should've been whistling a happy tune. From my point of view, all was right with the world.

But I felt odd and ill at ease, and I hurried out of the house quickly.

I drove home, troubled.
 

Kyoko was gone and there was no sign of the witch. I was free to hang out with my friends, read magazines, watch TV and write letters to my heart's content. I lived in a world designed for me.

But I was still not entirely happy.

When I'd first arrived, my job had seemed like a gift. But the reality of the situation was that the rhythms of my life had become repetitious. Every day, with minor exceptions, was the same. At least Kyoko and the witch had spiced things up. This new lack of adversity had drained the excitement from existence, and the knowledge that ten, twenty, thirty years from now I would be doing exactly the same thing removed any sense of urgency.

Of course, there was always the Ultimate Letter Writer, or "the Ultimate" as we'd begun to refer to him.

Thoughts of our unseen overlord kept us from going completely stir-crazy, and Stan's endless fount of paranoid theories saved us from complacency.

I must admit that even my friends did not seem quite as dissatisfied as I did. And
they
were the malcontents. The vast majority of Letter Writers we met were overjoyed with their lives, excited and happy to be working here no matter how long ago they'd started the real world. As far as I was concerned, though, those people were just cogs in the machine, unthinking drones who had found their niche.

You are very powerful.

I was different.

Stan had recently revised his theories about our work. Our letters
were
reaching their destinations, he said now, even his long dissertations to the president about the space program. We were, he'd decided, distractions. We were white noise. We kept members of the public focused on trivial matters so they would not notice the profound changes that were shaking society and bringing civilization close to the point of utter chaos. This was true not just in the United States but the world over. Within the company, we'd met Letter Writers from Hungary and the Sudan, from China and Iran, and we could read in the papers, see on the news, what was happening in their countries.

Sure, important points were made through our letters. Political statements ran in the press, reached the eyes of officials, influenced election outcomes and resulted in revisions to policy. But they were lost in the sea of chatter, the tide of ephemera, that we produced, the praising and razing of celebrities, the elevation of culinary fads, the extension of musical trends. Our strongest and most talented were not put to work addressing the myriad problems of the world's societies. They were instead diverted to trifling, inconsequential subjects. I was reduced to complaining about racetrack noise. Bill was moving the
Penthouse Forum
away from anal sex and into fetishism.

"I believe," Stan said, "that there are layers of Letter Writers. We're the top layer, the ones who get the most press, who talk about the ordinary events of daily life. We're the ones who complain about New Coke or sexual innuendo on television, or suggest that video games and record albums should have ratings. But there's a whole other substratum who we never get to see, never get to meet, and they're doing the real work, carrying out the Ultimate's agenda. They're toppling governments and making sure genocide doesn't get reported and food doesn't reach famine victims. They're rearranging the world one country at a time, playing chess with armies and kings and presidents and religions.

"And they're able to do it unimpeded because we're fanning the public's outrage over radio hosts and drawing attention to political candidates' sex lives."

Virginia, I thought, and her coworkers on the upper floors, the floors to which I had no access.

The idea made a lot of sense, and as I sat in my record shop office and listened to the radio, as I watched the latest movies, as I checked out HBO's newest provocative television show, as I got my daily fix of four newspapers, my weekly fix of six magazines, I found myself getting angry over what little effect I really had on the state of things, how small was my vision.

I thought of quitting. I wanted to go back home. My
real
home. Most of all, I wanted to see Vicki and Eric. Even if I couldn't be with them, even if Vicki would never take me back, I wanted to see them.

I even tried praying. I was a Letter Writer, and what were prayers if not verbal letters to God? "Dear Lord," I would always begin, as though I were writing a letter. But my entreaties fell on deaf ears. I still didn't know if there
was
a God, but I did know that if I had his address and could write to him rather than talk to him, I'd have a much better chance of getting results.
 

The days went by.

The weeks.

On the one-year anniversary of my hiring, the bureaucrat who'd quizzed me in that empty office after my capture and who'd busted up my welcome party visited me at work. He seemed as boring, functionary and subtly threatening as ever. "Mr. Hanford," he said, and his voice brought flashback memories, sent a chill down my spine. "Long time no see. "I realized as I looked at him that there was something not quite right about his appearance. He wore those same strange clothes that looked like both a uniform and a business suit yet were actually neither, but that wasn't the aspect of him that seemed slightly off. No, it was his physical features. Although he had no facial hair, an ordinary haircut, a purposefully neutral expression, there was something about his face that did not look modern.

I looked at him, trying to imagine him in a toga, in primitive skins, and it was far too easy to do.

Why the hell was I even
thinking
that?

"I have here some letters," he said cheerfully. "Anniversary greetings from well-wishers on the tenth floor. Your old friends!" He passed over a bundle of envelopes.

"Thanks," I said, and threw them on the cluttered desk.

"Aren't you going to open them?" He seemed disappointed.

I was glad. "No," I said. "I'm busy. I'll read them later."

"Very well." He suddenly adopted a more formal tone. "I just wanted to see how you were coming along and to wish you well on your anniversary." He smiled. "There will be many more to come."

I didn't give him the satisfaction of reacting. I waited until he left, then picked up the bundle of letters.
Anniversary greetings?
That was odd. I was tempted not to open any of them, to throw them away sight unseen. They'd obviously been solicited. The authors who worked on the tenth floor had been put up to this, and it was more than possible that there was a not so benign intent behind it. Perhaps the messages within were not strictly congratulatory but were infused with a deeper, sneakier, more malevolent purpose.

Still, at this point, I'd be grateful for anything out of the ordinary, anything that would disrupt the inertia that had taken over my life.

I sorted through the bundle, opened Virginia's letter:

My Dear Jason,

Has it been a year already? It seems much shorter than that to me though undoubtedly must feel far longer to you. Here's wishing that your letter writing brings you as much joy and secret excitement as those letters you wrote with your friend Paul all those years ago.

Secret.

It was a message! I realized. Virginia was sending me a secret message! I suddenly remembered that Paul and I had once tried to write secret messages to each other in disappearing ink—lemon juice that would be invisible until heated, whereupon it would emerge as a brownish, burned-looking series of lines on the page. It had been hard and ultimately unrewarding, and we'd never done it again.

Was Virginia now trying to send me messages the same way? I recalled the slice of lemon in her iced tea.

Maybe I was being watched and monitored at all times; maybe I wasn't. But I was willing to take the chance, and I held the paper over a lightbulb, heating it, watching as first lines, then letters, then words appeared:
STOP WRITING. IT IS DANGEROUS.

My heart was thumping, and I looked over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being spied upon. On impulse, I picked out another letter, this one from John. I held it over the lightbulb.

Nothing.

I did this to all of the letters in the bundle, and it was not until I came to Ernest's letter that those familiar brown lines reappeared:
RESIST. DO NOT HELP HIM.

Him.

Now my heart really was pumping wildly. They were talking about the Ultimate. They'd learned something, and were desperately trying to impart that message to me.

You are very powerful.

Stan was right, I thought. We were being used to reshape the world in a different image.
Correspondence is the bedrock upon which societies are built
, Henry had told me my first day.
And we have a stranglehold on that. Letters are our business, our industry, our raison d'etre. And because of that, we can make history; we can change history; we can determine the course of human events.

We were evil. I'd known that for some time now. There was a quote from Aristophanes that I'd read once in a novel by Phillip Emmons and that I'd never forgotten: "Evil deeds from evil causes spring."
We
were the evil causes, and we were spreading evil deeds all across the land. There was nothing good here, and nothing good could come of what we did. Writing letters made us happy, kept us amused, kept us busy. It was what we did, what we lived for. But it was an evil addiction and it led only to disaster and destruction. No matter what we told ourselves, no matter how light we tried to keep it, the darkness always came through; it always won out.

The Ultimate knew this. He had harnessed us for his own secret mysterious purposes, was using us to impose his will and carry out his plans, and like unwitting pawns, we played along because we were lemmings and it was in our nature.

But it was wrong.

I had no real moral compass. None of us did. But we could discern the truth if we tried. We could perhaps puzzle our way through to determine what was right and good.

Virginia had.

Ernest had.

Did that mean the others had not? There was no way to know, and it was always better to be safe than sorry. "Assume everyone is your enemy until they prove otherwise," Stan told me once, and though it was advice he himself seldom followed, it was a good suggestion nevertheless.

I looked at the two pieces of paper with their burned brown writing. What to do next? The first step was to tear up the letters and dispose of the pieces to leave no evidence. I did so, flushing everything down the toilet in the bathroom. But I wasn't sure what to do after that. I wanted to talk to Virginia and get some more information, but obviously to do so was dangerous or she would have come in person to tell me about it. Should I write her a letter? Probably not. She and Ernest had written their notes in invisible ink beneath banal congratulation messages. They clearly didn't trust the sanctity of the mail.

Could I talk to my friends? Should I? I wasn't sure yet. I had to know more.

I sat back down at my desk, looking at the paper rolled up in my typewriter, the blank screen beckoning me from my monitor. In my pencil holder, new pens of various colors tempted me.

I couldn't stop writing cold turkey. That would be too suspicious. Besides, I didn't think I would personally be able to see that through. Like an overeater confronted with a mountain of chocolate, I lacked the willpower. But I would make sure that my letters were as benign and inconsequential as I could possibly make them. And I'd write as few of them as possible today.

Hell, maybe I'd just take the day off and go to a movie. I'd done that before. It wouldn't arouse much suspicion, and I could avoid having to write anything until I had more information. I checked the movie schedule. There was a mindless Jerry Bruckheimer action movie playing at the multiplex. Just the thing I needed to take my mind off what was happening.

I walked out of my office and headed down the corridor to the elevator.

The theater was nearly full when I arrived. I took the first empty seat I found, and surprisingly, it was next to Shamus. He was playing hooky, too. I hadn't seen him in a few days and I said hello. He nodded distractedly at me, but did not speak. He seemed nervous, ill at ease, as weighted down by hidden burdens as I was. I wanted to ask if anything was wrong, but I didn't get the chance because just then the movie started.

I found myself looking surreptitiously around during the film's daytime scenes, not watching the action onscreen but scanning the heads of the crowd around me to see if I could spot anyone else I knew, irrationally hoping that perhaps Virginia had tried to arrange a meeting here with me.

No such luck.

I left my seat in the middle of the movie to take a piss. Shamus followed me out of the theater auditorium and into the bathroom, where he stood nervously with his back against the door, keeping everyone out, while he waited for me to finish. I flushed, zipped up, frowned, turned around. "What is it, dude?"