Box Nine

Chapter Twenty

Ike feels as if he’s in a high school play, maybe a drama club production of Twelve Angry Men, done in the gym, a hundred parents trying to get comfortable on the wooden bleachers. He feels like he’s missed every rehearsal since the play was cast, but they’ve kept him in the role anyway. Now it’s opening night and he doesn’t know a line. He can’t even seem to find a script.

Eva knows her role. She’s a born actress. She walked into the locker room like it was any other day. She read routes and names off her clipboard. She told Rourke if he had a problem to spit it out. She stared Wilson down in seconds and walked back to her office like her mind was already on requisition forms for a new bulletin board in the rental box area.

Ike’s having more trouble being convincing. When Bromberg tossed him the first insult of the day — something about dogs on his route running from him — he just froze and stammered until he felt like he would choke. Wilson got a real kick out of this, spitting out a laugh and slapping Rourke’s shoulder, but Rourke just stared at Ike without a word, then squatted down to retie his boots.

When Eva assigned Ike to sorting again, Rourke said, in a quiet voice, that his foot still wasn’t completely healed and he’d go to the union if she refused to give him indoor work. Eva said that was his right and she’d wait for the call. Rourke organized his trays like a mute, sulky, but hyperactive child and was out on route before any of the other carriers.

There’s no float available today and Ike is thankful for this. It means he’ll have to sort and handle the customers at the counter, but he’ll be alone with Eva and he needs to talk. He waits a few minutes after the last carrier, Jacobi, leaves, then moves to Eva’s office.

“What do you think?” he blurts. “You think they know we know? You think we’re in trouble here? You decide who we should talk to?”

Eva smiles and raises her eyebrows. “Number one. You calm down. I don’t care how. Find a way.”

“Okay, all right. You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m not good under pressure. I’ve got a terrible gag reflex.”

“Deep breaths. Over and over.”

“Takes a lot of concentration.”

“Did you sleep?”

“No way. Not five minutes. Terrible. My sister was working all night. Never got home. I watched Johnny Belinda on cable, then about an hour of rap videos till I was going nuts, then I put in a tape and watched The Frozen Dead.”

“You should’ve come over. I drank a dozen cups of tea and watched Orson Welles in The Stranger.”

“So what have you decided?”

“I’m not sure who—”

“We’ve got to talk to someone—”

“What I’m saying is we’ve got very little information.”

“What are you talking about? You told me, remember? You said they’re selling some weird drug—”

“We don’t know what they’re selling. It could be some pathetic gimmick Rourke dreamed up. The Mailman’s Miracle Diet Program. Starch blockers and vitamins.”

“This isn’t what you told me. This is not what you said.”

“The other thing is, you tell someone on this, you’re an informer.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Tell me you’re not. It makes you an informer, Ike, you’ve finked on co-workers.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I’m just saying. I’m playing devil’s advocate. You want to review all the information before you make a crucial move.”

“They’re criminals, for God’s sake, Eva.”

“You don’t know that, Ike. You don’t know anything. You’re going on what I told you.”

“Exactly. What you told me. Listen, I still think the thing to do is to call my sister in. We call Lenore. We say, ‘Lenore, this is what we know.’ We let her decide what’s what. She’s a professional. She’s my sister. She’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll be honest with you. This surprises me. I’m pretty surprised here.”

“What do you mean?”

“To be honest, nothing personal, but I always thought you were like the picture of good judgment, clear thought. You knew what to do. Take-charge person. Responsible—”

“I think I’m being responsible. We wait and we see. I think this is the responsible route.”

“I’m as scared as you are, Eva.”

“This has nothing to do with fear.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“I’m asking for a little time.”

“How much?”

“Things just don’t seem as black and white to me.”

“C’mon. Please.”

“That’s the truth. Sorry, but it is. Give me today. I’ll work it out today. Tonight I’ll come by your place. We’ll talk with your sister.”

“Tonight?”

“Let’s just get through the day. Let’s just act like it’s a normal day. Like any other day.”

Ike pauses, breathes, nods, starts to walk backward. “I’ll be at the cage. Sorting.”

Eva nods back, looks down at her desk blotter, and says, “Thanks, Ike. Will you close the door going out?”

He walks to the cage and turns on the fluorescents mounted over the sorting boxes. He thinks that with the lights on, the cage looks like a miniature baseball stadium during a night game — the main wall of slots and its two hinged and angled wings are the bleachers. Sometimes he thinks of each letter that he sails into the correct slot as a home run. But he never thinks of himself as the batter, more like some unknown contest winner, called upon to croak out the national anthem.

He knows it’s going to be a long day. He doesn’t understand Eva’s hesitation. Sometimes things are black and white. If what she says she saw at the Bach Room is true, then Rourke and the others have gone into the drug-dealing business. And it’s probably pretty likely they’re even using the post office in some way. What’s there to debate about? Ike doesn’t consider himself some hard-line law-and-order dork, but wrong is wrong. Illegal is illegal. The proper people should be contacted and talked to. Like Lenore. Lenore’s job is to deal with this situation. It’s what the city pays her to do and she knows how to do it well. What the hell could be going through Eva’s brain? Is there some subtlety that Ike’s missing? Is there information he hasn’t been given?

He suddenly feels more like an outsider than ever, like someone who, no matter what time they leave to go to the theater, walks in ten minutes after the movie has started. And every question whispered to the person in the next seat is met with an avalanche of the shushing noise.

How do you remove that feeling? How do you inject yourself into the ordinary track of life? How do you become common, a typical part of a greater whole, just one more guy who belongs to dozens of groupings without any thought to the process, immersed so mindlessly into roles like husband, father, son, neighbor, alumnus, local barroom crony, civic committee chairman, church member, Elk, Rotarian, Knight of Columbus, Red Sox fan, Red Cross volunteer, poker team member, Tuesday’s car-pool driver, citizens’ crime-watch associate, Big Brother, one of the block’s nightly eleven o’clock dog-walkers …

Ike stops, a long manila envelope in hand, hovering before a slot. He can’t think of one thing, one role, one activity, that defines him as a member of something. As belonging to anything. Then he remembers brother, but it’s an empty, uncomfortable word. His closeness to Lenore has diminished every day since adolescence. And he’s helpless to stop the erosion. It’s like an ugly side of nature, not pleasant to talk about or think of, but truthful, provable, a fact of life. He’s sure that some of this growing distance is Lenore’s fault. Her behavior and attitude and general personality have grown harsher and tougher since they turned teenagers; they took on something like a barbed-wire coating after Mom and Dad died. But Ike knows probably more than half of their distance is his responsibility. It’s only logical. It follows the same pattern as his relationships at work, in the city, walking through the supermarket, pumping gas at the self-serve station. Ike knows he makes people feel hostile and aggressive. Maybe there’s a doctor somewhere in Quinsigamond who could take on the case, study the facts, and make a few basic determinations. But Lenore is his sister. His twin. It shouldn’t have to come to that, help from some cold outsider. That’s why he’s thought of the police novels they could write together. The idea was a tool, a possible device for pulling them back toward a feeling, a surety, a blanket called family or bloodlove.

What would he do when he finally told her the cop-novel idea and she smashed it without a trial, without even an exploratory breakfast discussion? Ike’s given the idea more than a month of thought. He’s sure it has some genuine merit, and in more than one area. Ike’s big wish in life is that Lenore was still someone you could talk to. But it’s as if she’s starting to give up on the concept of dialogue, to become an apostate to the idea of exchange, slowly being converted to the church of the monologue. At least as far as Ike is concerned. He wonders if this is what she’s like with the other cops. In a lot of the mysteries he reads, cops are famous for their short tempers and misguided self-righteousness. But Lenore’s perpetual anger, this heated, seething, ongoing outrage, seems like a mile beyond the day-to-day petty nastiness found in those novels. It feels like it comes from a more dangerous place and like the enormity of the possible damage it could cause is too large to measure. At night, lying in bed, sleepless, while his sister lurks in alleys around Bangkok Park, Ike says unfocused, nondenominational prayers, not that Lenore will change, but simply that her wrath is universal, not meant for him alone.

He’s tried to make vague suggestions that might or might not change her. He’s mentioned news articles that prove the connection between loud music and hearing loss. He’s spoken of talk shows that detail the results of long periods of time without vacation. He’s mentioned casually the fact that he might switch to decaffeinated coffee. But he knows he’s probably just too close to the problem to be able to identify it. And Lenore’s response to all the seeming small talk is the same cutting sarcasm and annoyed interruption.

Ike thinks back, pictures his mother. She’s like an opposite image of Lenore, cell for cell. Like Lenore was formed out of some negative mold of her mother, received all the counterqualities that Ike remembers in the woman. She was soft-spoken, contented, serene, endlessly compassionate, at times joyful, with a deep vein of humor and a love of the quiet. Now it’s as if someone stole her away, inverted all of those traits, and placed her back in his presence in the form of Lenore.

But Lenore wasn’t always this way. That’s the thing. That’s the killer. He’s not deceiving himself. She was always tougher, capable of being more cutting, always a little quick, in motion. But it was a strength, and it was only part of the total package. She was also the funniest person Ike had ever met. No question. And way back it had seemed like, in her own way, she’d had her own well of mercy. And if she was always capable of violence, Ike thought it could be triggered only by an assault on the people she loved, that the two sides of her were absolutely connected, and rage could only be tapped by an aggression against himself or Ma or Dad. In first grade, when Dennis Lamont bloodied Ike’s nose at recess, Lenore waited for the end of the school day, then went after the kid with a vengeance. She blackened both his eyes and left lumps all over his head. Ike felt more than a little ashamed, but he both acknowledged and appreciated Lenore’s motivation. A Thomas had been harmed. Retribution was like a simple reflex. The next day she had noticeable contempt for the principal’s lack of understanding. It was one of the first of her many childhood disputes with authority.

Although he can’t be certain about the chronology, Ike thinks it was a decade later that Lenore began to change. It was as if in entering puberty, some natural biological event kicked in, and Lenore’s tendency toward aggression took leave of its natural trigger. One day it was just not necessary for a family member to be affronted. Lenore’s hostility had a life of its own. But it seemed within the boundaries of normalcy until their parents died. From that point on Ike started to fear her a little. There was something about Lenore that was not there before. There was an irrational menace; an unhealthy predatory feeling surrounded her. When she came to his side of the duplex now, Ike expected her to be wearing a black hood and carrying a sickle.

Ike despises the fact that she collects weapons. He’s sure it’s not something the other cops do. He’s aware that narcotics is one of the most dangerous jobs in the department. Especially lately. If he has to, he can understand the Magnum, rather than the standard-issue.38. But Lenore has something like an armory on the other side of Ike’s walls. It just isn’t necessary, and it’s a sign of something wrong. She also seems to love the weapons, to dwell on them inordinately, take them out and clean them incessantly. She keeps small cans of oil on her end tables the way other people keep candy dishes. Ike knows there are tubes of graphite and bristle reamers in the slots of her silverware drawer. She spends more time in the depths of the shooting bunker than most women her age spend at the latest downtown clubs. Ike thinks he’d be shocked if he just knew the percentage of her salary that went to bullets.

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.