Box Nine

Chapter Thirty-One

Ike sits in the darkness of his bedroom closet, door closed, huddled up among a rough pile of shoes, sneakers, and work boots. He cradles the radio in his lap, the volume low enough, he judges, so that no one on the other side of the door could hear anything. He presses the mesh grid that covers the speaker to his ear. It has a cold metal feeling, not unpleasant, sort of refreshing.

After Lenore ran out, he’d run to the bathroom and vomited up his whole breakfast until he was racked with dry heaves. Then he’d filled the sink with ice-cold water and plunged his head in several times. He dried himself and retreated to the closet and tried to sleep. When this proved impossible, he grabbed the radio and tuned in WQSG.

An ad for a funeral home goes over, violins fade out, and the voice of the talk-show host speaks again.

TALK-SHOW HOST: Hoo, boy, it’s going to be one of those nights again. Is there a full moon out there tonight, Gus? Gus Z, of course, my engineer and righthand man. Gus is shaking his head no, but you couldn’t tell it by the phone calls tonight. Loon city, if you know what I’m saying. Lock the doors and windows, people, it’s going to be a long haul till the light of dawn. Hello, Joyce J, from the west side. Talk to Ray, you’re on the air.

JOYCE: Yes Ray, I’m just calling, I just want to say, you’ve got me completely terrified now and I can’t sleep a wink, I keep going to the window, you really shouldn’t say such things—

RAY: Sorry, Joyce, my friend, but the truth will sometimes do that to you. Our lovely little city has gone out-and-out bonkers this week.

JOYCE: Did you find out any more on all that commotion down at the Canal?

RAY: We are still waiting for a callback from Chief Bendix, but I’ll tell you, Gus has had the police scanner on since we came into the studio tonight and it’s a madhouse out there.

JOYCE: I’ve locked all the doors.

RAY: And well you might. Our city is in the midst of a real breakdown if the police radio here tells the truth. What is going on out there? I’ll give my theory if anyone’s interested.

JOYCE: Tell us, Ray, we all need—

The woman’s voice is gone with a high-pitched bleep.

RAY: Oops, we seem to have lost Joyce from the west side. Listen, Joyce, keep the dead bolts secure. And you might want to push some heavy furniture, if you can manage it, in front of all the doorways. So the question gets asked, how did we arrive at this juncture? People, you don’t have to be some anal-retentive, think-tank intellectual to find an answer. There is a pervading weakness that’s crept into our society. It’s our own fault and now we have to pay the price. Painful, I know. But perhaps we should have thought of that when we slackened our immigration standards and eliminated the death penalty and tossed unsafe fluoride chemicals into our reservoirs. A little foresight is what I’m speaking about. A need for people unafraid to open their mouths and move their tongues and speak the truth.

Ike turns off the radio. The telephone is ringing in the kitchen. He opens the door, crawls out of the closet, stumbles to his feet, and manages a run by the hallway. He grabs the phone on its fifth ring. A voice is already speaking as he brings the receiver to his ear and says, “Hello.”

Eva says, “Just do it. Meet me at the station. Eight now.”

Then the call clicks dead and Ike holds the receiver and, though he knows she’s already hung up, he says, “I can’t. I can’t go out.”

He stands like this for a few minutes, finally replaces the phone in its cradle, then immediately takes the receiver off the hook again and leaves it on the counter.

He moves back to the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed, hugs his arms around himself, and starts to rock slightly back and forth.

“Lenore, where are you?” he says out loud in a singsong voice. He plants his heels into the carpet and begins a nervous tapping with the balls of his feet. He wants to go back into the closet and listen to the reports of doom from Ray the talk-show host. He wishes Ray would put Gus the engineer right on the air, live, get a new slant, a fresh perspective. He wishes he were with Joyce from the west side, pushing some heavy buffet-piece from an old cherry dining room set down a pantry corridor, toward a rickety kitchen door.

It takes him twenty minutes of self-prodding and abuse to dress and move outside. For reasons of confusion as much as convenience, he’s wearing his postal uniform, grey-blue trousers with navy service stripe down the sides, powder-blue shirt with arm patch, the winter jacket, a nice nylon blend, and black Knapp boots with reinforced toes. He also has a can of Mace in his back pocket.

He walks the three blocks to Sapir Street at a fast and jumpy pace. Despite what Ray and Gus have said, the neighborhood is quiet, normal. A single car rolls past him, a woman, alone in an old Chevy, hunched in over the wheel. He sees two dogs, mongrels, jog across the street and disappear up a driveway. At the corner of Breton he passes Alfred K’s Quick Mart, and looks in to see an Oriental woman watching a portable TV on the counter as she sells cigarettes to a teenage boy with long, stringy, black hair.

As he walks, Ike keeps looking for signs of something out of the ordinary, abnormal, alarming. But everything on the street looks as it always looks, calm and boring. Uneventful. Status quo. He expects disaster, and the fact that there’s no sign of its approach is in some ways disturbing and frightening. He starts a mild jog down the last block to Sapir and starts to wonder what he’ll say to Eva. He’s decided that no matter what kind of decisions she’s reached about the events of the past week, he’s going to spell everything out for Lenore. He’s going to put it all in her lap and tell her to make the hard choices. He’s out. He will not participate for another day in this weirdness. He’s handing it to his sister whether Eva likes it or not.

He comes to the corner, turns onto Sapir, and heads for the station. The main streelight in front of the station entrance is burned out, but in the employee parking lot, he can see Eva’s Volkswagen. The interior lights are on, but the car is empty. Ike runs over to it and finds the driver’s door slightly ajar. He looks inside, checks out the front and back seats, sees nothing. He leans into the door with his hip, closing it and shutting out the lights.

He doesn’t want to get inside the car and wait, though he thinks it’s possible that this was Eva’s intention. He turns his back to the car and leans his behind against the side, folds his arms across his chest, and looks around the lot. Someone’s thrown a newspaper, it looks like The Spy, on the ground and pages have separated and are blowing across the lot, until they get stuck up against the station’s walls. Every time the wind blows, the newspaper pages make a riffling sound, louder than Ike would expect. He hates the noise, but not enough to go gather the papers together.

He checks his wrist and remembers he didn’t wear his watch. He brings his arms down from his chest and pushes his hands into his jacket pockets. Then he looks to the employee entrance next to the bay doors where the trucks load and unload. A light is on inside.

He walks over to the cement ledge where the mail trucks back up to the dock. He climbs up and looks in the small window covered with a wire grid. He pulls on the knob and the door comes open.

First, he sticks just his head into the corridor. He calls, “Eva,” softly. There’s no answer. He wants to let the door swing closed and run back home, worry about what Eva might have to say tomorrow. But he steps inside, closes the door behind him, and calls her name again. He starts to walk down the short corridor. It leads to a set of swinging, round-edged, double doors that always remind him of submarine doorways from the movies. The swinging doors lead into the main workroom, the sorting area, and the cages.

He pushes through and steps into the main body of the station. Patches of light from the moon make it through the front windows and cast shadows off the jutting arms of the cages. Ike stands still until he’s convinced that each shadow is just a trick of light blocked by unanimated metal. Then he moves toward the front of the building.

Eva’s office door is open. Ike steps inside and looks on her desk. There’s no note, no sign that she’s been there and left by foot, abandoned her stalled Volks, called away by an emergency or new information. He moves into the main foyer of the station and looks out the window. The streetlight flickers for a moment, but fails to ignite. He wishes it would either stay dead and dark or snap on for good. None of this in-between crap.

Someone left the back entrance open, he tells himself, and Eva’s the only one with the keys. He steps back from the window, starts to head for the main doors to take another look at the car. Then he notices something on the floor. Something spilled. A line of liquid. A trail of something dripped, leading to the front entrance.

He keeps himself from bending and touching it, from bringing a sample dab up near his nose for a smell. Instead, he follows the runny line. It breaks here and there, leaves small gaps, then disappears completely in the small vestibule to the right of the entranceway, the small antechamber of post office boxes. Three walls lined with rented cubbyholes with brass faces and individual combination locks.

There are two hundred rental boxes. They come in three sizes — the small letter drawers, the slightly larger “flats” drawers, and the big, deep boxes, usually used by businesses. Only one of the two hundred is ajar. It’s a deep box, positioned at floor level. Ike starts to shake his head as soon as he sees it is open just a half an inch.

And then the smell hits him. Like biology lab in high school. Like a dentist’s office. That chemical smell, formaldehyde-like, something like a mask for the odor of decay. Only it doesn’t mask, it blends, so that a new smell is formed.

His feet pull him to the wall of boxes and his stomach starts to tighten. He squats down, takes the weight of his body in his knees and thighs. He’s sweating everywhere. The back of his throat has taken on a deep burn, an ache. His eyes squint and there’s a pain in both his lungs and his temples that seems to alternate perfectly, one asserting as the other recedes.

His hand extends, fingers come up into the underside groove of the box handle. He draws it out, pulls it to him, and at the same time looks at the label on the face. Of course. It’s box nine.

The smell hits him full now and he gags. He brings his head forward, makes himself look.

It’s Eva’s head, independent of the neck, shoulders, the rest of the body. It’s severed clean. The eyes slightly open. The eyes are almost squinting at him and he has a slightly subconscious, instantaneous idea that, like some novelty pictures of dogs and clowns that he’s seen for sale on roadsides, the eyes might follow him if he moved, changed position. But they’re still Eva’s eyes, the taut lids he brought his tongue to just hours ago.

It is Eva’s head. He’s looking down at Eva’s head. The hair is matted down to the skull with blood. It’s sitting in a round pan, a cooking pan, lined with aluminum foil. The pan is filled, filling, with a mixture of blood and a syrupy green liquid, like a heavy shampoo. Some of the green syrup has splashed onto the inside walls of the box.

It’s Eva’s head.

And then there’s the sound of the double doors swinging open and closed.