Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

What’s the thing with guns? Where did it come from? There was never a gun in the house where they grew up. Dad wasn’t a hunter, didn’t believe in it. If he was in front of the TV on the weekend and some hunting segment came on the sports program, he’d get up and turn to anything else. Bowling, cartoons, a cooking show, whatever. As long as he didn’t have to watch guys in forests up in Michigan or swamps down in Louisiana, big guys who spit phlegm a lot and kept their rifles broken open, hinge on the arm, barrels hanging limp to the ground until they spotted duck or deer or moose. Ike remembers his father saying they had “little brains and less heart.” Now the man’s daughter keeps things like an AK-47 and an Uzi in her bedroom closet. Something’s gone wrong in the family.

What would Eva make of Lenore? They’re both professionals, very conscientious in their respective jobs, proud of their competence, confident in their abilities. Is that grounds for mutual admiration or competition? Would they recognize each other’s proficiency? Would they miraculously fall into this ardent conversation about slacking standards and the general decrease in the intelligence of the population? Or would a terrible hazard take over the room, Ike’s kitchen maybe, as they summed each other up and felt unconsciously threatened? Would insults be mouthed, slanders shouted, push degenerate into shove? And Ike has to admit that he’s interested enough to wonder, if the worst happened, who would win the war. Clearly, Lenore has the superior weaponry and the training to use it at maximum efficiency. But there’s something in Eva. He’d have to give Eva big points for control, more control than Lenore, a genuine coolness in the face of anything, a type of dispassionate reasoning you can’t learn, a fierce ability to calculate that has to come through the genes, through generation after generation of cold, often brutal logic, winning out over emotion, primal sentiment, and bloodlust. Ike suspects Eva’s got it. And realizing that makes him startled to think she’s hesitating, debating what to do about Rourke and the gang. Ike should be the one hesitating, weighing options, stalling for time. Eva should have it straight from the start. It’s one more thing that adds to this constant feeling of displacement, this general sense that rules are melting and order fading away.

He’d like to stop, go home, spend the day in his bathroom throwing cold water in his face. But he knows this would be the worst thing he could do. When this feeling blankets him, the only solution is to find the most common, routine, instinctual activities and walk through them. And right now that would be to continue sorting, continue with the repetition, the hand-to-slot motion, the pattern of reading an address and filing a letter. What could be more mechanical than this? More rote and mindless?

He hears the customer bell ring at the front counter. Has Eva opened the doors already? He checks the wall clock and sees that it’s after eight. The station is officially open. He puts his handful of letters back in their tray and walks to the counter, but there’s no one waiting. He looks beyond the waiting area, out the window to the parking lot, but there’s no sign of anyone. There’s only a small box wrapped in dull brown mailing paper and tied with twine. It’s about the size of an average donut box and he doesn’t want to touch it, doesn’t want to go anywhere near it. His stomach goes into a spastic knot and he wishes he could just radio for some official men in space suits, bomb squad guys with huge bulky gloves, boots twice the size of their feet, special metal boxes hooked up to obscure canisters full of disarming, defusing chemicals.

But he can’t do anything like that. He has to reel in his panicking imagination and act normal. He has to approach the package, hold it in his hands, read the address off the front. He has to do this or admit to being well on his way to lost, out of touch, inconsistent with the majority’s view of reality.

He steps up to the counter, puts a hand flat against either side of the package, turns it around. The smell starts to hit him. It’s not the same as the stink from the first package, but it’s just as bad in its own way, if not worse. He brings his head forward slightly until it’s hovering above the top of the package. He knows before he even reads:

Box 9

Sapir Street Station

Quinsigamond

He can’t well up any fluid in his mouth. It’s as if all saliva has evaporated in an instant. There’s an odd burning ache that flashes through his groin and then disappears. His ears start to throb as if he’s been out in a winter cold for hours without a hat. He can taste a disgusting, acidic bile in the back of his throat. His breath becomes so labored, he thinks his lungs are in the process of a slow-motion collapse.

He bites on his bottom lip, hard enough to break skin and draw a run of blood to the surface. And then he moves past all these horrible symptoms, these oppressions from his own body. He freezes them, steps out of them, wills them past perception, and reaches beneath the counter for the cool handle of the grey X-acto knife.

He knows he should call for Eva and turn the box over to her, but something makes him push the edge of the blade into the package and before he can stop himself, he’s cutting. He goes to work on the twine like a surgeon at his peak, one slice and the string is limp on the counter. He runs the blade through the skin of the wrapping paper, finds a lip at the edge of the box, and slices Scotch tape. Then he sets the knife to the side and cautiously begins to lift the top off.

Inside is stuffed with crumpled newspaper — some edition of The Spy. He removes all the newsprint and drops it to the floor near his feet. He comes to a single sheet of white typing paper. In calligraphied lettering, like some enlarged strip from a fortune cookie, it reads:

You are a man in need of a warning

Something moist is blotting the typing paper from underneath. Ike reaches in and lifts it by a corner, has to seemingly peel it away from the box’s contents. He lets the paper loose and it floats downward toward the small pool of crumpled newspaper.

He looks in.

In the first second, it’s hard to tell. It looks like a platter of those small cocktail hot dogs that are served as hors d’oeuvres, basted with a thick tomato sauce.

And then the realization grabs him and there’s no mistaking the truth: they’re fingers. Human fingers. Dozens of severed human fingers bathed in the residue of their own shed blood. The nails, still attached, are black on maybe half of them. There are all sizes, adult and child, and types, pinky to index. There are no thumbs.

Ike knows what should follow is a scream, a siege of vomiting, a faint. Instead, he’s hit with a violent trembling, instant Parkinson’s. It starts with his hands but shoots out to all extremities almost instantly. His head becomes a bobbing, brainless clown head.

He steps back from the counter and lets his body do a slow fall backward until he finds himself in an awkward, still-vibrating, sitting position. An image takes over. A picture of his deceased parents, wrapped in the rags of their best clothes, looking like decaying movie zombies, pale blue mailbags draped over both their withered, bone-visible shoulders, pounding on his front door at the green duplex, driven to deliver something unknown.

And then, thankfully, he blacks out.

The new office park next to the old abandoned airport is a small ghost town. Rows of cookie-cutter office condos reveal white-washed windows as the headlights of Peirce’s Honda move across them. She expects to see plasticized sagebrush blow across the parking lot as she pulls up to the boxy guard shack where the rent-a-cop is watching the Celtics on a portable black-and-white TV.