Stephen Dixon: Letters to Kevin

“I’m sorry. I of course meant to say hello.” “Oh, that’s wrong. I forgot you’re a Translibipian. Then hello,” and he shook my earlobe, waved for me to come to him and went into the hospital. I stood outside and thought I’d already tried taking a cab, bus, hitching and getting to the airport, so maybe the best way would be by train. I walked to the train station and looked around for a ticket window. I saw one open, ducked around it and ran down the ramp to the platform and got on the baggage car of a train going to San Francisco. I thought I’d squat down like a suitcase, with one hand hidden in my jacket and the other curled up on top of my head to resemble a handle. But the baggage car was already filled with lots of children and adults pretending to be trunks and overnight bags, and whole families bunched together to look like large crates. I went to the mail car. Nothing was inside it but bags of letters and bundles of magazines and ads. I squatted on the floor pretending to be a package of books going by fourth-class mail to Palo Alto. I woke up when the door of the mail car was slammed open. Some men dumped all the mail and me into a waiting truck and drove us to the main post office in Columbus, Ohio. One of the men sorting the mail in the post office picked me up and said “This package just off the train has no address on it, Sid. What do I do?” “You’re new here,” Sid said, “right?” “Yeah, new,” the man said. “I can tell. I never saw you before and you asked mo a question when you didn’t know what to do. Well, you first drop the package on the floor like this. No, don’t worry, it’s only books. They can’t break except for the spines a little. Now you do this to see if the package is wrapped right and the books don’t fall out.” “And they didn’t,” the man said. “Right. So we’re getting somewhere with this package. What you next want to find out is the address. To do that, you kick the package around the floor a little. You know — a little boot here and a solid kick there. Just like I’m doing. But no harder, unless you want to be buying a new pair of shoes every month. This time it’s not to find out if the package is wrapped right that we’re kicking it. Or even to make the package torn and useless like sore postal workers say we should do to packages that give us a hard time. No, it’s to see if maybe the address sticker will fall out of the creases in the wrapping.” “But none did.” “Right again,” Sid said. “You got sharp eyes. Like you saw right away there was no address on the package. And then that it didn’t fall apart when I dropped it. That’s good. Keep thinking like that and you’ll be going places in this office.” “What do we do next?” “Look at you. All hot to go. I like that. Means you just don’t want to sit around doing nothing all day like the rest of the gang here. Well, next you hold the package over a low flame. You do this to see if the address was written in invisible ink that only comes out under a flame. But you never let the flame get too close to the wrapping, or what do you think will happen?” “The flame will get snuffed out?” “The package will burn.” “Oh yeah. Because there are books inside.” “Because the wrapping is made of paper.” “Of course. I forgot. Did the address come out from the flame?” “I thought I said you got sharp eyes. Because nothing came out on the package wrapping but a lot of red marks all around. That means the address wasn’t written in any kind of invisible ink that we know how to make appear. So next you toss the package in the air a few times and catch it like this. Well, I dropped it. So if the package turns out to be too heavy to catch, you get another worker to help you toss it up and catch it like I want you to do with me. Now it’s important you throw it higher and higher each time. But after the fourth toss and catch, you toss it high as you can and try to get it to land flat on this table in front of the mail chute. We got it to land on the table, but not flat. So we have to keep tossing it just as high till it does land the right way in front of the chute. Now the reason we’re doing this is to see if the address that couldn’t be kicked out of the wrapping before will come out this way.” “And it didn’t.” “That’s right, it didn’t. So now you got to give up on ever finding where this package is going. As there’s a post-office rule that you’re only allowed to do so much in trying to find the address on a package, before you just have to stamp it and shove it down the chute with the other unaddressed mail. Break this rule once — just once — and I swear I’ll see that you never work in a post office again. Because we don’t keep anyone on here who horses around and doesn’t stick to the rules and moves the mail right, understand?” “Gotya,” the man said. He stamped on my forehead RETURN TO NEW YORK: NO ADDRESS GIVEN, and pushed me down the chute into the basement. I was put in a mail bag there with a lot of other unaddressed packages. The bag was locked at the top and flung into a truck, which drove to the train station. Then my bag was dumped into the mail car and the train soon began moving. I’ve been writing this letter from inside the mail bag. A few packages from some of the other bags in the car just yelled for me

to pipe down with my typing as it’s keeping them awake. Maybe these packages have a lot of room in their bags and can stretch out and fall asleep with ease. But my bag is filled to the top and very uncomfortable, so I know I’ll be twisting and tossing around inside it all night.

Anyway, the right thing to do is to stop typing so these other packages can get some sleep. I wish you well and hope to see you soon.

Dear Kevin: The mail bag I was in landed in New York, was brought to the main post office on 33rd Street, and with the rest of the bags I came in on the train with, left in a room for two days. Then I got the brainstorm to feel inside the other packages in my bag. If something sharp was in one of them, I’d use it to cut my way out. Someone, I discovered, was sending a jackknife through the mail. I hope the person expecting the knife didn’t know he was getting one, because that’s the something sharp I used to slice open my bag. I climbed out and said to the 200 or so other bags piled on top of one another with my bag being a few from the top, “Hey? Any package in one of the bags want to be let out?” “I kind of like it in here,” a voice said from one of the bottom bags. “I don’t,” another voice said from the same bag. “You two want to be let out or not?” I said. “No.” “Yes.” “Look,” the first voice said to the other. “I promise no more arguing. And that I’ll stop smoking in here and won’t hog most of the room when we sleep. And lastly, that I won’t fool around with any other package in the bag but you.” “Okay then,” the second voice said. “We stay.” Well, I didn’t want to hang around and get involved in any more arguments between two packages in a bag and maybe get caught by a post-office worker. And then stored away in the Address Unknown section here till I was either claimed by the person who mailed me or auctioned off as a package of books in the post office’s annual sale of unclaimed mail. So I climbed down the pile to the grunts and groans of the bags I was stepping on, and slipped past the working part of the post office into the customer’s section. Then to avoid any suspicion that I was a package escaping from the post office, I quickly pretended to be a customer on the stamp line. This was much easier to pretend to be, as I look more like a stamp customer than a package of books. Though as a package of books I didn’t need to have money on me, which is probably why I wasn’t recognized as a person by so many postal workers for the past few days. While on line I needed money for whatever it is a person pretending to be a stamp customer might have to buy. “Next,” the clerk said behind the stamp counter. “Um, let’s see,” I said. “I’d like one of something. Two of another thing. Three of anything else I might want. And maybe one more thing besides.” “Will you hurry it up?” a customer said behind me. “There