Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

They’re forwarding me on to Versailles now. At least I think it’s Versailles. I watched the postman’s lips as he readdressed me, concentrated on the stammering pressure of the pen as it darted across my face—the a’s and e’s, unaccountably, in small capitals, the rest properly in lower case—and tried to ignore, to block out, faire taire, the dragging accompaniment from the side of his hand. And I think the word he printed, with his felt-tip pen, was Versailles. I felt the four strokes of the V and l’ s quite distinctly; they were rapid, hard. That I am being forwarded is certain, for I saw the stamp descending like a dark sky and was able to read quickly, and backwards through the smear of ink before it moved away, leaving my eyes blotched with black, the words prière de faire. And if the next were renvoyer, there would have been no need for the postman’s pen, for the additional letters among which I was able to discern only (I think) the single word Versailles ; a simple circling, an arrow, should have been sufficient to send me on my way back to 1, Petherton Court, Tiverton Road. It must have been, then, suivre. So at least, for another day, another few weeks, perhaps my abiding fear—that I bear no return address and will end among the dead letters—this fear is allayed.

I am dropped from a box into a hot canvas bag. The smell of paste and ink, of dry saliva and, somewhere deep inside us, perfume. Apparently, while sleeping I have gone astray and been returned—to travel to some scrawled new address, to be set aside for inspection and at least referred back—to the post office collection box. It was the shock of falling through the slot onto hard edges and sharp corners, no doubt, which awakened me. The other letters will have nothing to do with me; they sense difference. And their language is unfamiliar now. Something guttural, that might be German. My questions go unanswered. Deep in the canvas (the perfume?) I can hear a British accent, a soft weeping, but am unable to make out the words.

I wait in a cold hall, propped against the frosted mirror of an ancient oak wardrobe near the door, for a week before someone finally scribbles Not at this address in a cramped, small hand, afterwards retracing several of the letters and scoring beneath them, four heavy lines which feel at first like rips then like deep bruises, and drops me in the corner mailbox on his way somewhere. The mailbox is round. British.

Why do they move about so much? How are they able; where does she get the money? And is there the faintest remain of a familiar perfume in this box. . . .

I am being forwarded again. I have no idea where.

It is Christmas, I think, and I am lost in the deluge of mail. Crushed with parcels, shuffled like a card but never dealt. High in my solitary forgotten pigeonhole now, I observe the functioning of our postal service. It never before occurred to me how astounding, what an efficient, essential instrument of society, this service is. Or the complex problems dealt with each day as little more, actually, than part of the routine. I watch with fascination. Perhaps this is the work I was meant for.

I was a writer. More and more, my attention centered about the mail: my correspondence, the possible arrival of checks or hopeful word from my agents, rejected manuscripts that must be sent back out at once, copies of my books or magazines containing some small piece of mine, perhaps a foreign translation of something I’d done long ago and almost forgotten, packets of books about which publishers hoped I would be inclined to say something complimentary, a note of praise from some editor of a non-paying quarterly. The post was delivered twice daily, nine in the morning and just after noon. I would sit on the steps in the hall with a cup of tea, or the worst times, days I was definitely expecting something, with a drink, waiting. My wife and I got into shameful screaming fights over this, and once I struck one of the children who raced out of the flat before me and grabbed the mail from the postman’s hands. (I always waited, looking away, until he had deposited it in the box and left the building; then forced myself to walk slowly to it, whistling, and to every appearance completely uninterested. I believed that somehow this outward display of unconcern would influence what was there.) After we left the States and came to live in London, things became much worse; my expectations more desperate. And while my wife was conscientious about collecting it from the box, that having done, mail lost all importance to her, as though for some reason she could not accept it as a real thing, part of the daily discourse of our lives. Forced to be away from the flat during the time of delivery, I would return to look hopelessly into the empty box, and then to spend untold minutes searching the flat—for she could never remember just what she had done with it. Often I would find an important letter leaning against a dirty cup among stacked lunch dishes, forgotten. Others would finally appear in my oldest son’s wastebasket, the stamps having just been torn away for his collection. Generally, considerable portions of the message were torn away as well.

Faces bend down and leer at me where I lean in the boxes. Shade light from the small window with their hands so they can see my diagonal cutting through the stream of fluorescent light from behind. Breath frosts the glass. Finally I’m removed between two fingers, crushed with others in a gloved hand. The thumb of the glove is empty and flops against us.

Later a man stands over me. All the others have been opened. They are lying, torn and empty, at one side of this table, and he is turning me over and over again in one hand, mumbling to himself, a pink plastic letter opener in the other hand that I see periodically, rising jerkily toward me as though by its own will, then retreating again from sight. Minutes pass, and the next time the hand appears, the letter opener has been replaced by a pen; then a rapid scribbling. He puts me down, goes away. From beside me, among torn bodies, comes the scent of familiar perfume. It is fading.

It would seem that I am in Poland. Or perhaps Yugoslavia.

I always wanted to travel. Jane and I would lie for hours in bed with carlights sliding in sheets across the walls and ceiling and talk of all the places we should go—making plan after plan and abandoning each in turn, as some consideration of my work intervened. Departures were postponed time and again, applications for visas were canceled, passports expired. Jane collected a sizable library of travel guides, two cardboard boxes full of travel folders. She became well known in the lounges of airports, ticket agents, foreign consuls. Soon she read nothing else, thought of nothing else.

“How were the children today?”

“They were in Hawaii.”

Other places.

They’re forwarding me on to Rhodes now. Ailleurs. Gdzieś. I have no idea where. And my sole, my only consolation, is that somewhere, at the end of all this, somewhere my wife and family wait to receive me. I imagine how they will discover me one morning on the floor by the door, beneath the mail slot—perhaps they will have heard the outside door, the brass lid swing shut as I’m pushed through, even the sound I make striking and sliding out onto tile or wood, a few inches—and how then they will prop me up lovingly on the table between them; between, perhaps, the cornflakes and Billy’s strained fruit.