The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

AT THE END OF THE DAY Steve Rasnic Tem

At the end of the day Sam has one final package to deliver, a perfect cube a foot on a side wrapped so tightly in its heavy brown paper that not even a stray microbe could get in, and thinking this increases his sense of urgency more even than the bright red envelope marked urgent affixed to the top of this package and containing the day’s final, imperative and unequivocal message.

For hours Sam has searched his maps of the metropolitan area—maps so complete, complex, and expensive they remain unavailable to the average commuter—but he is still unable to find the address. Earlier calls to the dispatcher have confirmed that the address is a true address although the dispatcher herself— a voice soft, yet utterly convincing—cannot help him with its exact location. A thorough perusal of the twelve volumes of executed and planned revisions to the city s constantly changing street nomenclature and arrangement—stacked in order within his delivery van’s oversized glove compartment—provides no significant clues, although there are sixteen similarly named streets, avenues, drives, places, courts, ways, and circles. Despite its apparent futility he has hunted down each one in the seemingly unlikely event that a mistake in address has been made.

By the end of the day all urgent packages and messages within the city limits (including extended suburbs) must be delivered. At the end of the day who can know what disaster might follow if such a delivery has failed to go through?

At the end of the day Sam wonders if there will ever be a time when his job ends at the end of the day. At the end of the day Sam is still driving his van up and down the same streets, endlessly circling the same routes where every day he delivers packages wrapped in plain brown paper to people who are rarely at home to accept them. Sam wonders, briefly, if any of these absent recipients might imagine that magic played a part in these timely, mysterious deliveries, but he admits to some difficulty crediting the average person with such imagination.

At the end of the day Sam tries to remember if his job has ever been any different than it was today. He began the job when he was eighteen, right out of high school, intent on earning a few dollars while he decided what his heart’s work might be. Delivering the packages had been a game, and an opportunity to learn the routes which might some day lead into his future. His father had once told him that sometimes what you like to do has little relation to what you can get paid to do. Sam discovered times had changed—now it had almost no relation.

At the end of the day Sam dreams about an early-morning ambition he once had to be a poet. Now the dispatcher’s soft but unerring patter is the poetry that fills him like alcohol: “Four thirty-two, four thirty-two, Park Avenue, Trader Bill’s, four forty-four, Wilmott Square, three-two, three-two.” But the dispatcher’s voice faded out hours ago, and he is lost with his delivery, packing his lost message through the late afternoon, the message itself no doubt a longed-for poem, and his quest fit subject matter for poetry.

At the end of the day fatigue is a shadow-self just beginning to separate from his skin, adhering stubbornly to his body, waiting for the dying sun to change its color. Sam wonders what a sun the blue-gray color of death would do to the shape and texture of the human shadow. He suspects that it would do nothing, for the combination of polluted air and skyscrapers filtering the sun has already resulted in many blue-gray sunny days. And he has simply become used to these shadows whose tone and color remind him of the face of his grandmother a few hours after her death.

Those shadows with legs stagger out of alleyways as if intent on stealing his package and plagiarizing his message, but he is highly skilled at the wheel, sailing around them so closely they spin so quickly that blood flies from their mouths like song.

At the end of the day shadows form with little resemblance to the objects casting them. Behind a street sign looms a giant, upraised fist. Bus benches front a broad torso broken in half. Corner streetlights hang below huge, shadowed eye sockets. The spaces between tall buildings are filled with gray, unfocused limbs attempting to crawl their way back into the roar of evening traffic. Now and then Sam vaguely recognizes a profile or a stance. Over the years he has known some of the men and women who built, formed, and poured these inhuman monuments. But as the pace of the day wears to its end, his sense of recognition fades, the transition into night making him an alien plying his vessel through the narrow lanes of fragmented landscape.

Out on the main streets there are few pedestrians, for this is rush hour and most have retreated to their cars for the long, anxious ride home. But he knows that there are those who cannot afford cars, who take to the sidewalks and the buses. There are those who cannot afford homes, who cannot afford even a shadow, and who look exactly the way their missing shadows would look. Gray and smudged as if they had struggled against erasure. These people live in the alleys and doorways and under the bridges, where countless shadows collect. There they blend together and blend with the night. Sometimes streetlights send them running, but few of the streetlights work downtown. The city does not pay its bills.

Someone else is unable to return home at the end of the day, he knows, someone trapped in an office positioned awkwardly between dead streetlights, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the urgent package Sam has been ferrying through every section of the city. His client is late. Sam is even later. But far later still, he suspects, is the city itself, changing its names and hiding from its tired messengers.

At the end of the day he thinks about his children, and how they must anticipate his arrival. How the three of them will line up at the base of the stairs as he enters the front door, each with a question, a request, or the gift of today’s story. It is the stories he likes best, and he will devote the most time to these, the daily retellings of how the world is both the same and constantly changing, perspectives he misses on his repetitive routes delivering messages and packages across the city. The questions are sometimes almost as interesting, inquiries as to the nature of life, the world, and the end of the day. He seldom has answers—his life as deliveryman having limited his insights—but the questions make all of them think, and it is his children thinking that he prizes above all else. The requests are seldom true requests but merely excuses for talking; having been filled by the endless chatter of hot exhaust expanding and contracting metal all day, he is more than happy to listen to his children’s aimless talk.

Awaiting a change of light he stares down at the package also waiting, resting solidly across his right front seat. At the end of the day he again wonders why he never looks inside the packages he delivers, why he never reads the messages. There is always ample time for such surreptitious activity. With the current volume of traffic no one really expects him to deliver either packages or messages on time. And yet so many are marked urgent. So many, he is told, must be delivered by the end of the day.

In fact, he has long suspected that the messages he delivers are never very urgent, for if they were his clients would use the telephone or the fax machine. He has wondered if, rather, what he delivers are scattered moments of contact, simple statements of existence from random citizens to other random citizens, with the unpredictability of his delivery times an essential part of the message. During holiday seasons there are always many more such messages to deliver. He sometimes considers inserting his own messages into his deliveries for random distribution, but thus far has not had the courage.

But at the end of the day the particular package in question seems much more than this. At the end of the day his final message seems an essential delivery. At the end of the day it seems the job he took on after high school has all come down to this. He can feel his van deteriorating, bolts and washers and scattered bits of metal dropping off from the stress of his final delivery.

At the end of end of at the end of the rat a tat tat tat . . .

At the end of the day he wonders what his wife is cooking for dinner. The traditional role she has taken in their lives has always made him feel guilty, but although he has attempted to convince her many times to continue her career, she has adamantly declined, preferring the company of their children with their endless supplies of questions, requests, and stories. In recent years his attempts to get her out of the house have been rare. At the end of the day he envies her place in their home.

He suspects his wife could have done his job better. He suspects his wife would have delivered this package by the end of the day. She has always been far more controlled than he, far more organized.

He maneuvers his van through city divisions which seem to vary greatly in climate. The poorer sections of the urban sprawl always seem colder. At times he switches on his heater. After a few blocks a quick change to the air conditioner engenders a whine of stress in the engine compartment behind the thin metal wall in front of his knees.

At the end of the day various city walls are coming down, some at the express instructions of the city fathers, instructions he himself had delivered on earlier days when he managed to get all messages and packages out before the end of the day. But there are always those which crumble unexpectedly, leaving piles of rubble with which his van must dance.

At the end of the day the various models of automobile seem to regress, as if the day’s passage has taken years off the streetscape. The foreign cars are the first to disappear. Ancient Fords and Studebakers fill the poorly paved roads. The bordering buildings warp their architectures in the twilight, as if shifting in earthquake trauma or melting beneath the last rays of a thermonuclear sun. A rain of darkness pours down across his windows. A layer of memory disappears each time the blades wipe across the windshield. Half-forgotten faces fold and gather in the gutter line. The streets along the edge of darkness become a litany of all that has been lost and that he is likely to lose.

At the end of the day the pavement begins releasing its heat and the air loses its color a small portion at a time. Darkness fills all empty spaces and someone remembers to turn the stars on. He sometimes wonders if that someone can go home now, his or her job completed. For himself, he still has this one more delivery, one more package and message he cannot make himself forget, perched patiently on the front seat of his van.

In the darkness, familiar directions become untrustworthy dreams. New street signs appear, providing a fresh supply of obstacles. Shadows spread and ignore their loyalties. He sticks his head out the driver’s-side window and attempts to find his way by smell. In the past he has been good at smelling despair and hunger and the locations of those waiting long hours to receive a delivery.

When the light dims at the end of the day it always seems a sudden event, even though the sun may have been sinking or the clouds rolling in for hours. But beyond his consideration the day is suddenly gray or amber, depending upon the time of the year, and he feels a strain in his eyes as they attempt to see all the details they are used to seeing. He feels dangerous driving a vehicle at such times, and is surprised at the end of the day to find that he has failed to run over any of the shadows.

The deepening night is like black snowfall, a mass of dark flakes carved from the giant ball waiting at the end of the day, the flakes gathering first in the corners and hiding places of the world, finally filling up the very air he breathes. Every morning he has breathed it out again, but a sooty residue of the previous night always remains inside him, in his heart and blood, in his thoughts and the words he uses.

He does not believe anyone would mind his peeking inside the package. He cannot believe anyone would deny him his right to know the final message. But he must hurry, he thinks, and decide what he must do, for the address scrawled on the bright red envelope might suddenly appear at any time.

But at the end of the day time passes slowly. Each block is longer and the intervals between lights stretch out lazily. He remembers all the dead ones, the ones who were former lovers, family members, even the dead strangers named by the newspapers. He can almost see them fleeing the headlights. At the end of the day he speculates about what their lives have become. At the end of the day he can feel the shadow of their fatigue in his hands clutching the steering wheel.

At the end of the day the lines of the streets disappear and he follows the final sparks of head- and tail-lights into the night. Static fills all positions on his radio. He drives through a landscape of black birds, thousands of birds gathered under his wheels, no light to reflect their colors or everyday shapes, wings overlapping until they are one solid, mobile mass rocking his van with their movements. He drives through a landscape of broken trees, their ragged ends scratching at the night. He drives through a landscape of window frames and door frames, their buildings transparent and filled with black.

At the end of the day he imagines that somewhere else, beyond the limited vision his windshield provides, events of terrible beauty are taking place. Faces are melting and hair is burning. Somewhere beyond his vision his children’s lives are turning to smoke. In his undelivered package he believes there must be revelations about the causes of such events. In his unopened message there may be instructions concerning what to do at the end of the day. At the end of the day he will have no one to tell him stories, no one to make requests, no one to speak the orders.

Sam opens a window to feel the dark air, and his fingers come away so raw and blistered at the end of the day that he can barely grasp the steering wheel.

And yet there is still this one more delivery to make, one more service to perform. As his route stretches out into darkness the lights in the houses dim to amber, then fade to black. Body heat escapes through open windows and chimneys, causing the neon signs to burn noticeably brighter. At the end of the day the city burns its citizens for the fuel that keeps the buildings tall, the concrete rigid, that prevents the asphalt melting into a viscous sea. Sometimes there are power failures. Sometimes the tires on his van adhere to the road, making this final delivery more difficult at the end of the day.

At the end of the day all the customers have forgotten their orders. At the end of the day there is no one left to receive his package. His message is written in a forgotten language. There are no more tongues wrapped around difficult communications. In the empty streets there are no more tongues. The windows of the stores are grimed. Abandoned cars join together into metallic reefs to block his passage. At the end of the day all the vessels lie empty. At the end of the day torn scraps of paper, discarded messages, litter the plazas and lawns. At the end of the day everything sleeps. There is nothing else to do at the end of the day.

In the dark faraway he hears his wife and children calling him. His shift should be over by now, they tell him. He should be coming home. But at the end of the day there are very few roads fit for travel. At the end of the day he has lost his name. At the end of the day he cannot find his way home.

But at least he knows he still has his unopened package. At least at the end of the day he can imagine its contents. He can recite the poetry of its unopened message. Because it is urgent. Because it is essential. And because it is all that he has.