Box Nine

Chapter Five

In her tiny office, Eva applies the last, slightest brushstroke of blush onto her cheek. She looks quickly at the smudged mirror, then closes the small black plastic case and slides it into her pocketbook inside the bottom drawer of her desk. She raises her hand to brush at her cheek and stops herself, thinking, Leave well enough alone. She doesn’t like the idea that anyone might notice that she wears makeup, but without it she thinks she has the face of a corpse, cold as ice, white as a sheet.

She can tell already that it’s going to be a beaut of a day. The Reader’s Digests are in and she’s got two carriers out sick. She’s already called for a couple of floats from down the main branch, but nobody’s promising anything. She’ll handle it. If she has to, she’ll call Gumm and ask him to forget about taking today off. And he’ll give.

She pulls her middle drawer open and takes out her eleven-inch clipboard and several preprinted forms which she inserts under the clip. Then she folds all the forms over the top of the board to reveal a blank yellow legal pad. She takes a just-sharpened pencil from her cup and holds it above the pad. She breathes slowly and quiets her whole body, lifts her head, and remains completely still, listening.

Eva’s office, which had once been a storage closet, borders the locker room. Eva takes notes on everything that is said in the locker room. The conversations are always the most banal, boring exchanges, but she notes them anyway. She thinks that it’s a general rule of life that no information is so small that it can’t, at some point, maybe in the far future, be put to good use. So she keeps this private record in her files at home, an ongoing transcription of the locker room small talk, the complaining and swearing and taunting. Poor Ike Thomas, the bruising he takes.

Eva smuggles her legal pad of shorthand notes home every night, then, after a supper that’s been planned a week in advance and is a nutritionist’s dream of balance and freshness, she indulges herself. Eva’s one great treat is music and last year, after making supervisor, she went out and blew a wad on a Bang & Olufsen stereo system that she’d fantasized about for months. It cost almost ten grand and she had to take a loan from the credit union, but each evening around six-thirty, when she slides in the CD of selections from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, which was the first piece of music she bought, she knows it was the absolutely correct decision. She sits in a corner, in a swivel secretary’s chair, and types up her notes on a heavy black Underwood manual that had belonged to her mother. At times she has to take a break and sit with her head down at her knees in an anti-faint position. She thinks this is because of the incongruity caused by the banality of the words she reads in relation to the majesty and power of the music that’s entering her ears simultaneously. She always has a tall glass of orange juice next to the typewriter, ready to revive her, put her back on course.

Eva read a biography of Wagner when she was an adolescent and for a time, during the heat of her mid-teen years, he was her fantasy lover, the guy she dreamed about at 4 A.M., bathed in a thick sweat.

Last week she dreamed about Ike Thomas. She’s sure there’s no meaning to this, but she can’t shake loose from the fact that it happened, that somehow this strange and silent man, the brunt of the locker room’s collective stupidity, invaded her subconscious and came to her dream-mind, trudged up her front walk with a bursting-full mailbag, every letter in it addressed to Eva Barnes, her name in an ornate, calligraphied script. And he spent all night pushing the letters into her mailbox, like some circus trick, like some magic act. The letters kept fitting in, dozens, thousands, there seemed to be boundless room inside.

She blocks out the memory, fine-tunes her hearing, waits for the first voice to come. As always, her timing is perfect. They start filing in, in the same order, every day: old Jacobi first with his ancient grey metal lunchbox that looks like it could house an entire breadloaf, then the new girl, Bromberg, in her fluorescent-red, oversized glasses and too-short skirt, then Ike Thomas, quiet, hunched over a little, his eyes on his own feet. Five minutes will go by, until the late-bell is just about to ring, and in will come Rourke and Wilson, both a mess, shirts untucked, hair sticking out everywhere, just about announcing to the whole post office that once again they’ve slept together. Eva thinks she should have bounced Wilson when she had the chance.

The first voice comes from the new girl, Bromberg:

BROMBERG: Hey, Thomas, I hear Stephenson is out today. Why don’t you take two routes and really kiss the bitch’s ass?

JACOBI: Leave the boy alone, Lisa. He just loves a woman in uniform. Isn’t that right, Ike? And all this time I thought you were gay …

BROMBERG: I think they’re both gay. The bitch and the schmuck. You should really ask her out, Thomas, you could be like fakes for each other.

JACOBI: Fakes? What, fakes?

THOMAS: Beards. Okay. The word is beards, Bromberg. Jees.

JACOBI: What does she mean, fakes?

[7 a.m. bell]

THOMAS: She’s saying it wrong. You never heard of a beard? It’s like when someone pretends to be, you know, involved with someone else.

ROURKE: We got donuts. Lisa, you owe two bucks to the kitty.

BROMBERG: I paid this week. Ask Thomas, he saw me pay. I paid.

WILSON: Is Stephenson really out again? What an asshole, I swear, that guy never works …

BROMBERG: Stephenson and Ogden are both out. You two just made it. The bitch would’ve been on you …

JACOBI: Billy, you ever hear of a beard, the word beard, okay, but not, like, on your face? Like another meaning.

ROURKE: What are you fucking babbling about? Jesus, it’s early.

WILSON: Who had the cruller? Jacobi, was the cruller—

ROURKE: Shit! Goddammit, I spilled the—

THOMAS: I’m sorry, you should’ve—

ROURKE: You goddamn asshole, Thomas, you’re such a shithead—

WILSON: Here, Billy, let me …

BROMBERG: You know, for two people in the sack so much, you two still bitch a lot.

ROURKE: That’s gonna be five bucks to get the shirt dry-cleaned, shit-for-brains.

THOMAS: What cleaner’s do you go to? Five bucks?

ROURKE: Five bucks.

THOMAS: It’s like three bucks, Billy. Three-fifty, tops.

ROURKE: Aw, Christ, look at this, I’m a mess here. Jacobi, you got an extra shirt in your locker?

THOMAS: I’ve got a shirt, Billy.

JACOBI: Can’t help you.

ROURKE: I don’t want your freakin’ shirt, you doink.

WILSON: Here, honey, let me wipe it. It’ll be fine.

BROMBERG: Jacobi, you got the school today?

JACOBI: Haven’t seen the schedule. I think Stephenson was due.

BROMBERG: You ever notice how Thomas never gets the school? Never.

THOMAS: I’ve taken that route plenty of times. I used to get the school and the library. And the elderly towers on Sapir.

JACOBI: I hate those towers. You ever notice how every one of those old people gets TV Guide? Every goddamn one.

BROMBERG: What I’m saying is, Thomas never gets the school. I swear.

THOMAS: I get the school. God.

BROMBERG: I’m saying there’s got to be something between him and the bitch.

THOMAS: For God’s sake …

JACOBI: That right? Hey, Ike? You all over the woman or what?

[Locker door slams]

ROURKE: Shithead getting pissed?

THOMAS: Look, I’m sorry about the coffee, okay? Can we just get to work?

JACOBI: Every bone in me says this is going to be a mother of a day. Billy, you going to the Bach Room after?

WILSON: Oh yeah, let’s have a few, Billy, huh?

ROURKE: What’s the word, shithead, you going to the Bach Room? Maybe taking the bitch with you?

[Silence]

THOMAS: What’s she ever done to you, Rourke, huh?

ROURKE: Do you hear this? Did you hear this? This is unbelievable. I’m screwing around and he is all hot for the bitch. Do you believe this? Jacobi, did you hear this guy?

[Whistle, general catcalls]

THOMAS: No, I’m just asking, what did she ever do to you? Really, answer me. And while you’re at it, what did I ever do to you?

[Much laughter]

THOMAS: What’s wrong, Billy, can’t you speak? Is there something wrong with your goddamn mouth?

[Laughter ends]

ROURKE: What a ballsy little bastard, defending the bitch like this. Listen, schmuckhead, it’s nothing you or she did, okay? All right? It’s what you are. All right, what you are. You see the difference there. You are a shithead. She is a bitch.

[Laughter

[Door swings open, closed. I assume Thomas leaves]

Eva puts her pencil back into her cup. Without reviewing her shorthand, she pulls all the forms back down over the yellow sheet. She pushes back from her desk and stares up at a glossy poster of a recent stamp issue, the William Faulkner stamp. She stares at the face depicted in a green line drawing. The man looks so wise, distinguished, the small features, the pipe in the mouth. Eva wishes she could consult with him, ask some advice on what he’d do about the infighting among her people. When the stamp was issued, she’d looked Faulkner up in her old Britannica at home and was pleased and surprised to see he’d worked in a post office in Mississippi. Now she wishes he worked here and was out in the front lobby, reloading the self-serve stamp machines, or maybe tacking up new Wanted posters. She’d ask him what to do about all the hostility in the locker room. And she’d ask him what he thought about Ike Thomas, and if he was really defending the bitch, hot for the bitch.

Eva gets up out of her chair and straightens her skirt. She’s wearing her navy-blue suit with a white blouse, and she wishes she’d worn something else, something a little less plain. It’s difficult. When she went from carrier to supervisor she had to stop wearing a uniform. She liked the uniform. It identified her. Anywhere in the country, people just taking a quick look at her would know she worked for the U.S. Postal Service. But there’s a statute that says supervisors aren’t to wear the uniform. Eva guesses they want the supervisors set apart, differentiated from the carriers and clerks so that they’re seen clearly as the boss, the authority figure. But there are other ways of signifying their increased status without sacrificing the uniform. There are always other options. Now every morning means a decision about what to wear, about how to look professional and serious without looking boring or dowdy or masculine.

She hears a last locker slam shut next door and knows they’re all at their cages. She starts to write quickly on her scheduling forms and walks out into the workroom. Jacobi is the only one talking, and he’s just muttering to no one in particular. She walks into the center of the room, equidistant from each of them seated atop their metal stools, stacks of banded mail in their hands.

“Okay,” she says, trying instantly to find the right modulation for her voice. “As you probably guessed by now, Stephenson and Ogden are both out sick …”

“Yeah, right,” says Rourke. He didn’t shave the past two days and Eva thinks she’s going to have to mention it. He looks more like a Bangkok derelict than a carrier.

“I’m waiting for the word from the main office on my request for two subs. I think we can only count on one, and I’m not giving the towers to a sub. They’ll never finish and we’ll hear about it all day tomorrow.”

She sees them all tense up, waiting to see who’ll get hung with Stephenson’s awful route.

She hugs the clipboard up to her chest and drums on the back of it with her fingers.

“Thomas,” she says, “you do Stephenson’s. Wilson and Jacobi, you split up Ike’s route between you.”

She pauses, looks around, then says, “Okay, let’s hit it,” and turns to head back to her office. She hears Rourke say something under his breath that sounds like “heartbreaker,” and she surprises herself by stopping and wheeling back around to face them.

It’s like a vacuum has rushed into the space between all the cages and sucked the air and noise away. Eva fills it with the question, “What was that, Rourke?”

He hesitates, then says, “Nothing, I was talking to Ike …”

She cuts him off, saying, “Did we lose our razor, Rourke?”

He starts to say, “What, you mean …”

And she cuts him off again, saying, “Okay, there’s a change in scheduling. You’ve got Stephenson’s route, Rourke. Thomas, you’re here for the day. At the window and sorting. I’ll get the second sub from downtown.”

Rourke is stunned, shaking his head, stammering, saying, “Oh, c’mon, what the hell, I didn’t say a thing …”

But Eva has already started walking back to her office. When her door closes, everyone stays still, like a jumpy terrorist has a gun swaying over their heads. Finally Rourke turns to Wilson and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”

No one answers.

• • •

If someone were to ask Ike which he liked better, being out on the route, delivering, or being inside at the cage, sorting, he’d have trouble giving a definitive answer. The truth is he enjoys both activities and he’d have a real problem trying to elevate one above the other. They’re different. On the route, you’re outside, meeting people, saying hello, getting some exercise. Inside, sorting the mail, you don’t move or talk, your brain listens to the radio and kind of goes on remote control, sliding envelopes into the appropriate slots, tossing packages into the right baskets. But both activities have a definite procedure to follow, an order, a schedule, a continuous line of behavior. And though Ike wouldn’t admit it to anyone, that’s really what he likes about his job. So either way he can’t lose. Inside or out, it’s all the same to him.

For instance, in the manual they even have illustrations for how you should position yourself on the sorting stool. Ike follows the official example. Your feet, in regulation steel-toed work boots, are flat on the work floor, taking sixty percent of the weight of your body. Your buttocks are to rest not more than two inches on the edge or lip of the work stool, so that you’re actually in more of a modified-leaning, rather than sitting, position. Though it isn’t explained in the manual, Ike has guessed that some engineer may have figured out the most efficient way of going through an average-sized sorting load, coming up with the illustrated position that probably finds a perfect balance between speed and conservation of energy.

A day inside, like this, is a nice break every now and then. Ike thinks of it like the sick days he’d sometimes take in grammar school, a rare treat, a change of pace. He knows he’ll appreciate the route even more tomorrow, approach it with renewed effort. Besides, there are no pit bulls inside the Sapir Street Station. He’s never been attacked by Mrs. Vachek’s pet, but there have been a couple of close calls. Last November, he was sliding her Social Security check through the slot in her front door and Milos, silent, waiting, cocked, tore the check from his hand in an explosion of noise and saliva and snapping fangs. Ike actually felt the wet, rubbery flap of the dog’s mouth as he wrenched back and pulled his hand to safety. There was a pain in his chest for the balance of the day.

Then six months later, the Vachek door was left just slightly open, the slip bolt pressed against the jamb, just an eighth of an inch from its slot. When Ike began to push some pulpy religious monthly through the brass-rimmed mail slot, the door swung open enough to reveal Milos witnessing the opportunity of a lifetime. He lunged and Ike fell backward in the doorway, just managing to shield his throat with the mailbag. Milos caught an incisor on Ike’s sleeve and shredded the whole arm, but missed any skin. By the grace of God, Mrs. Vachek appeared out of nowhere with some silent whisde in her mouth, her cheeks puffed out to bursting, blowing an inaudible command that Milos grudgingly obeyed.

It was Ike’s only dog incident in eight years with the service, twelve years if you counted the summers he worked while squeaking through Jones University as a day student. If any of his current co-workers ever found out that he had a degree, it would be all over. They’d manage to be as blindly vicious as Milos Vachek and no whistle in the world could call them from his throat.

Now Ike wonders why nothing in college came as easily to him as everything here at the station. Like the zip codes, for instance. Ike knows every zip code in the state, and most of them in the bordering states. You could line him up on some quiz program and just start zinging them his way and he wouldn’t flinch. They’d flow out of his mouth as automatically as meter stickers from the dispenser. He doesn’t think about it. It’s like there’s a direct path from some pure center of his memory straight to his mouth, and no thinking is ever involved. A location is stated and a zip code is kicked out.

This is one of the reasons that Ike is probably the fastest sorter in the place. He can empty a full tray in half the time it takes Rourke. There’s no contest. And if someone were to do a check on accuracy, Ike is confident he’d win that category as well. He doesn’t see any reason for mistakes in this area. To him, a mistake in sorting means only one thing: you were talking to someone instead of looking at the envelope. Not that he’s got anything against socializing. It’s just there’s a time for it. Can’t they wait until the end of their shift and take it over to that stupid bar they all love so much? What the hell is so special about that place?

Does Ike regret not being a part of the gang? Never being asked to go along when they change back into their street clothes? Never heading across the street and filing into the bar, all loose and ready for some fun? Not really. Not usually. There have been some rare occasions — he could probably number them on his fingers — when he found himself longing for this vague idea of friendship that he labels “camaraderie.” He’s imagined, at those times, what it might be like inside the back room at the Bach Room, seated in a chair at a fat, well-worn round table, pouring beer from a pitcher into the half-filled mugs around him, actually laughing at something Rourke has said, whispering into Bromberg’s small ear.

But most of the time he has no desire to be part of their group. He feels set apart from his co-workers, and he swears to himself that this gap has nothing to do with a sense of superiority. It’s just a separateness, pure and simple. If he worked at the main post office downtown, instead of here at a much smaller neighborhood branch, the separateness wouldn’t be as noticeable. He could get lost in the crowd. There are hundreds of people who work at the main station. But here there are usually just six or eight people and there’s just no way to disappear. So his separateness has to be glaringly apparent day in and day out.

There have been a lot of moments, most often at night, like three or four in the morning, when Ike couldn’t sleep, but stayed in bed and stared straight up into the darkness and admitted to himself, filled up with a vague sense of guilt, that he cherished his separateness. He doesn’t think this is normal or wholesome. He has an unspoken theory that most animals, and he stubbornly includes humans in that category, have a primal need for community, a deep well of yearning to be part of a larger social group. He thinks that even outcasts, abnormals, discontents, rebels, nonconformists, whether they admit it or not, secretly long for other outcasts. He thinks that a true hermit is a tremendously rare entity. And that he has all the makings of a true hermit.

He enjoys being alone with his own mind and running it through a series of weird systems. He likes filling up on what would be considered the most trivial of information, because he thinks that there can be no standard for measurement of informational importance, that it’s absolutely subjective. That it’s entirely possible that for him, knowing the zip code of the smallest hamlet in the state is every bit as important as the President knowing the correct code sequence for unleashing a nuclear barrage.

Ike has a hunch that this trait has emerged straight from the Thomas genes, that it’s a shared family legacy. He’d bet that Lenore is engulfed in separateness down at the police station and that she puts a very high value on it. He thinks both of their parents thought of themselves as cut apart from the groupings they moved within, in the neighborhood, at work, at church. He’s decided this based on a collection of memories that he analyzes over and over again while walking the route, or eating a silent lunch, or giving in to the insomnia that plagues him every now and then. He imagines he knows how his parents felt, as if they were living an illusion, bringing off a ridiculously elaborate deception — the deception that people are connected, that they share history, biology, a common tongue.

One of the systems that Ike has spent a lot of time investigating is the post office. His interest began simply as a by-product of his daily routine, his urge to know a little more about an environment he spent most of his time in. But the irony of where he works soon hit him full force. The very idea of a post office is stunning to him. It’s like this national, no, international, planetwide, series of shrines dedicated to an idea of connection, to the notion of real communication. Now Ike sees every post office he passes as a temple, a concrete symbol of insistence that we are not alone, that we can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time, all for the price of a stamp.

A few years ago, Ike began delving into any and all aspects of the postal service. He’d done a hell of a lot of research, read most of the texts out there on the subject — the classic William Smith volume, the Walter Lang, the Ormsby and the Fallopian. What he loves most, though, is the fact that no one, not his co-workers, not the people on his route, not even Lenore knows about his interest or his knowledge. It’s locked up, hermetically sealed within the vault of his skull. He values all this knowledge, oddly because he knows how useless it is, what a vain display the history of mail service is, what an exhibition of pointless ego. He can’t understand why no one else he’s aware of sees it in this manner. In every book he’s ever read, the mail is a story of progress and practicality.

Just once, Ike would like to come across a book, maybe an old, dilapidated volume, crusted with dust, forgotten, wedged unseen on a rarely visited library shelf, the stamped date on the return card pasted in the back of it showing a day that went by decades ago. He’d like to open that book and find the one shunned author who was willing to tell the truth, like in the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He’d like to find the voice brave enough to say: I’m sorry, people, you can make the mail system as efficient and elaborate and well connected as you want, but it won’t change a thing. It won’t make you any less isolated, any less separate, any less alone. You can mail an unlimited number of bulging envelopes, filled to bursting with words of every meaning and message, but that can’t change the nature of things. We are alone. And all our post offices are but temples of illusion, intricate attempts to tell ourselves otherwise.

• • •

Ike becomes aware of a presence and looks up startled and there’s Supervisor Barnes, right next to him, smiling at his surprise.

“I’m sorry, Ike,” she says. “I didn’t mean to startle you like that. You’ve got quite the powers of concentration.”

“I enjoy sorting,” Ike says.

Eva shakes her head. “See now, I never liked sorting. Sorting for me was like torture. Loved to be out on the route. Walking the route.”

“I like the route too. I like them both. Sorting and the route.”

“Renaissance man,” Eva says. “I was wondering if you’d like a coffee. It’s break time. I wouldn’t want to be reported to the union for denying you your break time.”

“I’d never do something like that,” Ike says.

“Lighten up, Ike,” Eva says. “I was joking. The float from the main station came in and I’ve got her on the counter. So how ’bout the coffee?”

Ike smiles, slides his behind off the lip of the work stool, and follows Eva to the small room at the back of the station. It’s the regulation break room and it’s filled with three uncomfortable, bright orange, molded-plastic chairs, and a shaky wooden table covered with an ancient coffee machine, two jars of Cremora, a Styrofoam cup filled with Sweet ’N Low packets, and a cardboard box in which everyone stores their own coffee mug. There’s also a poster of the moon landing commemorative tacked to the wall. Ike has always found it an unusually depressing place. And he doesn’t think there’s any need for it to be that way. A little effort could do wonders, a little paint on the walls, some new chairs you could sit in without a backache, replace the moon landing with something a little more recent. But there’s no money in the budget for anything as unnecessary as redoing a branch break room, and when Ike suggested to his co-workers that they take it upon themselves, he didn’t hear the end of it for three weeks.

Eva picks up her mug. It’s basic black, with no pictures or funny slogans or institutional logos. Normally she keeps it in her office and carries it into the break room when she wants some coffee. Ike has always thought this was because she was afraid Rourke or Wilson would put something in it if she left it with the other mugs. Spit in the bottom or something. She must have left the black mug in the room yesterday. Maybe it was an accident. But, more likely to Ike’s mind, she’s just gaining confidence. She knows they know who’s the boss.

Ike’s work mug is identical to the home mug that Lenore gave him, the Neither Wind, Nor Sleet mug. He liked the one from Lenore so much that he searched around until he found the second one at one of those strobe and incense teen boutiques in the mall. Sometimes he wonders if this purchase shows a lack of imagination or independence on his part, but usually he thinks it’s just a tribute to Lenore’s taste and intuitiveness.

Like Lenore, Eva drinks her coffee straight and black. He’s always amazed that people can do this, straight from the pot, without burning their tongue and throat. Ike fills his mug a good forty percent with tap water and Cremora before he adds a drop of coffee. Otherwise his stomach is shot for the rest of the day. He stopped using sugar back in college and thinks it might be wise to cut out coffee altogether. He can imagine the problems caffeine can cause.

“How long have you been with the post office?” Eva asks, settling into a chair, her mug held out oddly in one hand as if it were the control stick of an old airplane.

“Eight years,” Ike says with just a trace of pride sliding out with his words. “And four summers before I started full-time.”

“Oh, you were a sub,” Eva says, sounding genuinely interested.

Ike nods, sips at his mug. “Uh-huh. My father put in forty years. He had my summer job lined up every May. I swear, that guy knew every route in the city.”

“One of those veterans,” Eva says. “Saw all the changes. Was carrying before the first zip codes …”

“Oh, God,” Ike says. “He was out there in those days when people would, you know, write a name on the envelope, and ‘City’ underneath it, and the letter would get delivered, no problem.”

“Lot of ingenuity in the office back in those days,” Eva says.

“Don’t tell me,” Ike says. “Was your dad in the service too?”

Eva shakes her head no and crosses her legs. Ike tries to stay focused on her eyes.

“No, though he did work for the government. And he was a special courier for a time. State Department. We lived all over the place when I was growing up. Spent a lot of time in South America. Brazil and Paraguay. I speak Spanish fluently.”

Ike is impressed. In an instant, he can picture Eva as a young girl, dressed in slightly foreign clothes, rattling off answers, in Spanish, to some old, dark teacher.

“You’re kidding,” he says.

“Not at all,” Eva says matter-of-factly. “We were south of the border from the time I was five until I turned seventeen.”

“Jees,” Ike says, intrigued and excited by the story. “Then what happened? Your father get transferred back or something?”

Eva shakes her head again in that slightly clipped way. “My father died. Massive coronary. Forty-eight years old.”

“Oh, God,” Ike says. “I’m sorry.”

“A long time ago,” Eva says. “I’ve never understood it. The man was the picture of health. Not a pound overweight. Good eating habits. Plenty of exercise. And to the best of my knowledge there was no history of it in his family.”

There’s a pause that they both fill by sipping their coffee.

Ike says, “So how’d you end up in Quinsigamond?”

Eva smiles and Ike looks down to the floor.

“My mother’s family was originally from here. So it was the only place to come, really. We moved in with this bachelor uncle of mine, my mother’s brother Kurt. Now, he was a character. But Mother, she was never the same after Father died. I kept telling myself that she’d come together with each passing year. Isn’t that what you’d think? That the pain and the confusion would sort of ease away slowly, a little bit at a time?”

Eva shakes her head no for a while, staring at Ike until he’s so nervous and uncomfortable he’s ready to run from the room.

Finally, she continues. “Mother drank. She had a problem. Quite a problem. I mean, this was twenty-some-odd years ago and you didn’t confront this type of thing in the way people do today. I’m saying help just wasn’t as available back then. This was something you kept hidden from the rest of the world. It took place inside, deep in your house.”

Ike wishes she’d stop telling him this. He didn’t expect it of her and he doesn’t want to have to change his image of her, the picture he’s imagined of what she would be like if they ever sat down alone somewhere and had a conversation. He wonders how much longer the break can last.

When Eva speaks again, it’s like her voice has come back to earth, regained a lot of strength and composure on reentry.

“It’s funny, Ike,” she says. “I don’t know you well. I mean, I’m not sure if we’ve ever sat and spoken like this. But I’ve noticed you. Your routine, your work habits. I’m a very good supervisor, Ike. I know how all my people operate. You’re on the ball. You’re probably the best in here as far as taking the job seriously goes. You know, supervisor is not a position a lot of people would want. It’ll cost you friends. I don’t care who you are. You take off the uniform and put on the suit, they look at you differently. And that’s fine with me, because first of all, I’ve never been very close to anyone at work, and secondly, the job comes first. The job is number one.”

“I’d agree with that,” Ike says, his voice a little higher than usual.

“So I was saying it’s funny because, though I don’t know you, I always thought it was funny that you weren’t this family man. Married and a dozen kids and co-managing the Little League and all. You just seemed very, well, I don’t know”—she smiles, raises her eyebrows—“sort of purposeful and clean-cut …”

“Clean-cut,” Ike says, surprised, unsure of her meaning.

“Sure. True-blue. You know what I’m saying.”

“Yeah,” Ike says, “I guess so,” though he has no clue as to what she’s talking about.

“God knows,” Eva says, draining the last of her mug, “not like the rest of the crew we’ve got in here.”

Ike thinks he might be on shaky ground. He wants to watch what he says here.

“I think everyone works to the best of their abilities.”

Eva lets out a deprecating laugh that’s little more than a gust of air.

“You do?” she says, and it’s less a genuine question than a mocking disagreement.

“Yeah,” Ike says, “I think so.”

“Ike, please,” Eva says. “Wilson? Rourke?”

“I’m just saying I’m not sure everyone has the same capacity.”

“Oh, I get it. ‘If you can’t say something nice …’”

“No,” Ike says, “not at all. It’s just, how do I know their situations?”

“And how do they know yours? Their ‘situations’ have nothing to do with it. Here’s a job. How are you going to perform it? That’s it. That’s the only question to be debated. I’ll tell you what I think is going on here, Ike. I’m management and they’re labor and no matter how awful they treat you, you feel this loyalty to them just because they’re on your side of the fence. Right? Does this come down from your father?”

Ike doesn’t know what to say. He feels like he’s been hauled out of bed in the middle of the night and questioned by some police force.

“Oh no,” he says. “No, no, not at all. That’s just not true, Ms. Barnes …”

Before he can bite his tongue, Eva bursts out with a single laugh and chokes out, “Ms. Barnes? Ms. Barnes? For God sake, Ike.”

“What?” is all he can come up with.

Eva collects herself, puts her hand up to her forehead for a second, like it will help her think, then lets it fall into her lap and says, “How old are you, Ike?”

He hesitates, then answers, “Thirty.”

“All right, then. I’m thirty-seven, Ike. I’m not exactly your grade school teacher. All right?”

“So, what,” Ike stammers, “I should call you Eva?”

She smiles, seems pleased. “Yes, Ike. Call me Eva.”

“Okay,” he says, forced cheerful, starting to move to get up out of the chair. Eva stays in place and says, “So why do you put up with it?”

Ike freezes and repeats, “Put up with it?”

“The rest of them. Your co-workers. I’m telling you, I’ve worked at different branches, and I’ve worked down the main station. There are always a couple of people, okay, but this group. They’re the worst bunch of bastards I’ve come across.”

Ike doesn’t like her talking like this. He especially doesn’t like being the one to hear it. He stays silent and Eva pushes.

“Do you disagree with me?”

“I guess there’s a lot of hostility,” he says.

“You have a way with understatement.”

“If you’re looking for a reason why …”

She cuts him off. “I’m the supervisor. They’d hate any supervisor they got over here. On top of that, I’m a woman and that doesn’t go down very well with Jacobi or Rourke. So I know why they hate me and I don’t lose any sleep over it, believe me. But I don’t understand what it is about you …”

“That makes two of us,” he says quickly.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I’ve never been this popular guy, okay? I’ve never been Mr. Popularity.”

“This isn’t about being popular, Ike.”

“I don’t know.” He pauses, looks up at the clock. “It’s getting to be that time.”

She ignores his comment. “What I think we should do,” she says, “is have dinner together sometime and discuss it. What do you think about that?”

Ike looks down at his knees. “You want to have dinner with me?”

“That’s right,” Eva says, not backing down at all.

“You think that’s a good idea, us working together and all?”

Eva smiles. “It’s just dinner, Ike. Sometimes you don’t know if something’s a good idea until you give it a try.”

Ike concedes this point. “I guess.”

“Besides,” Eva adds, standing, “we outcasts have to stay together. It’s a lonely world out there, Ike.”

They both laugh at her last comment and it takes away some of the edge Ike’s feeling. “I guess we could have some dinner,” he says.

She nods to him and leaves the break room without another word, holding her black mug cradled at her chest.

Ike gets up and pushes the chairs back against the wall in a row. He puts his mug in the cardboard box and makes a mental note to wash it out in the men’s room sink later on. He walks back to his cage feeling a little light-headed and hyper.

He sinks back into the perfect position on the edge of his stool reflexively and takes a minute to ball up his hands into fists and rub at his eyes. A chill moves up his back and he shudders slightly and takes a deep breath. It’s going to be that kind of a week, he thinks to himself.

He looks down at the small metal lip that juts out from the wall of slots in front of him. The pile of mail he left off with is still sitting there. But next to it is a small brown cardboard box, the type of box the bank mails new checks in. It measures about five by three inches and is maybe an inch tall. It should have been put with the parcels. Ike doesn’t remember seeing it when he left the cage.

The package is taped closed at both ends with several pieces of that thick, wide brown mailing tape. Ike leans over it and reads the simple, hand-printed address:

Box 9

Sapir Street Station

Quinsigamond

He reaches down and picks it up and immediately puts it back on the lip. His fingers are wet with something thick and oily, something seeping from the bottom of the package. He sees now a small puddle forming under the carton. And then he notices the smell — an awful, rotting-type smell. His coffee rises up halfway toward his throat.

Ike pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and holds it up to his mouth and nose. Then without thinking, he picks up the package, dabs away at it, then mops up the puddle on the cage lip.

He throws the soiled handkerchief into a nearby wastebasket. Then he does something he has never done in his career. In his whole life. He uses his fingers to tear open the package. He breaks open the tape at each end and runs his finger along the inside edge of the package, touching something moist inside. His heart starts into a rapid and painful pump, like rubber bullets being fired at the inside of his chest.

He rips the entire top of the package open and tosses it on the floor. He looks inside. And he looks away for a second, unsure, then brings his eyes back again.

It looks like the chopped-up remains of a small fish. There’s a tiny section of the face left, one eyeball still visible. The smell is horrible. And then he sees the parasites — tiny mites and worms crawling through the terrible remains.

A sweat breaks instantly over most of Ike’s body. He makes himself move slowly, to create the illusion of control. He makes himself walk, not run, to the men’s room. He steps inside and bolts the door and turns on both faucets in the sink. He takes a breath to keep himself from vomiting.

Then he cups his hands, lets a pool of water fill up, and begins to splash his face, repeating the procedure over and over, trying to steady himself, wash away the sweat, clear away the smell, obliterate the image of decay and cruelty that’s just smacked him like a hit-and-run car on a familiar street.

He knows already that he can use all the water in the city’s reservoir, but he’ll never be successful. It’s too late. The image is there to stay.