Postcards from a Dead Girl (2 page)

Gerald the Post Office Guy is an affable man. He's patient and articulate and well-groomed, and has no interest in anything about anyone's life other than package type and rate of delivery. In short, he's a professional. A postmaster who doesn't have time for dithering. That's why I'm huddled outside in my car, memorizing every detail of each postcard, preparing myself with a matched professionalism for his inevitable questions. I don't want to be like the rest of the nervous customers. I brought the whole stack with me today to get a reasonable explanation.

Through the post office's plate-glass windows I see that traffic is finally waning; I will now have a captive audience in Gerald. I make my way up the steps, through the revolving doors, and line my toes up on the red line.

Gerald sorts envelopes with purposeful hands, stamps at them with a large square block. Then he tosses them into a bin and nods curtly to himself. Finally, he looks up at me. “How can I help you today?” So nice and orderly. So perfect.

I pour the postcards out on the counter. I forget everything I'd rehearsed. My mouth falls open a little and I stare straight
through Gerald's ashen face, his pale blue eyes, his silver hair. He looks dead.

“Sir?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, and come back to the living. “I received these in the mail recently and I was wondering if you could explain something to me.” I hand him the one from Spain that reads “Fun in the Sun.”

Gerald looks the mail over with a careful eye, intrigued by the mystery I've laid out before him. “You say you received these recently?”

“Right,” I say, and spread the cards out like a tarot deck. Tulips from Amsterdam. Bier Gartens from Germany. The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. The Roman Coliseum.

Gerald picks one up, checks my address, then looks at me carefully, like he recognizes me from somewhere else.

“What?” I ask.

“These are all postmarked a year ago,” he says.

“Exactly.”

“Did you get them all at once?”

“No, they come every few days.”

Gerald's face broadens with amusement, like he's found a caterpillar crawling across his desk. “There must have been a glitch in the European system that stopped the mail. Maybe they got lost and found again. It's not uncommon for postcards to get the least amount of attention.”

“Do you think it would happen in all these different countries?”

Gerald purses his lips. “That is awfully strange. All I know is the USPS wouldn't be responsible for this. We have strict laws on changing postal dates. Some folks try to send things twice with
the same postage. We call it ‘skip.'” He makes direct eye contact with me. “Skip is illegal,” he says.

“Is there any way to find out where these are coming from?”

“You could check the international codes where they originated.” He points at the numbers in the stamp marks. “But chances are you won't find an individual responsible.”

I gather up the cards.

“Sorry I couldn't be of more help,” he says.

I nod.

“You don't have any packages to send?”

I give my head a solemn shake. Gerald appears genuinely disappointed.

“Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.”

“Thanks,” I say and start to walk out, ready to throw something.

“You know,” Gerald calls after me, “there's one more option.”

I freeze, and turn.

“Maybe the sender is playing a trick on you. It's not uncommon for mail fraud activity to be of a juvenile nature, as serious as it is.” Gerald points up to the FBI posters on the wall, to the faces of serious men with serious facial hair, rough pencil sketches of hardened mail-fraud criminals.

“Thanks,” I yell back, “but they're from a woman.”

“Well—”

“And she's dead, I think.”

Gerald leans his head back and looks around the room. “That's a pretty good trick.”

“Yeah,” I say, and push the glass door open, wishing I could throw it a thousand yards.

Zoe was needy. She needed to be entertained and she needed to be the center of attention all at once. She liked verbal descriptions of my love for her. She wanted to hear them every day, and preferred them to be wildly original. Not “I love you this much,” or “I love you tons.” It had to be unique, and she wanted specifics. At first I was unskilled at this. I would say things like “I have oceans of love for you.”

“Really?” she would ask, and act surprised and flattered, then follow it immediately with “How much do you
really
love me, Sid?” This was my cue to get more creative. I eventually found myself getting quite crafty, and soon I realized this game was not so much about her need to be told she was loved as it was her personal test to measure her mate's spontaneity and intelligence. We'd been inseparable for weeks, Zoe and I, making love several times a day, which was always so intense and blinding and followed by that deep blue bliss. Such a drug, Zoe was.

“If I ever owned my own pharmaceutical company,” I told her once, as we stared at the ceiling in her bedroom, “I would put this feeling into a turquoise capsule and call it Blue Zoe Bliss. It would be more popular than aspirin and would soon be followed
by world peace. That's how much love I'm feeling right now.” She was impressed with that one, and I realized that my metaphors for love had little to do with my spontaneity and intelligence and more to do with the deep love I was feeling for this girl. I was addicted to her. Addicted to Zoe.

Once we took a trip to New York City. Every morning we would walk hand in hand through Chinatown. Zoe liked to listen to the different Asian dialects barking back and forth through the market. We'd make our way to Little Italy and have an espresso at a café, and inevitably Zoe would stare into the black liquid of her cup and try to imitate the Chinatown market workers. “Ning maa,” she said, quietly and with great contemplation, both of us knowing she can't speak a word of Mandarin or Cantonese. “Bee naw noo.”

“There's this building on 50th and Sixth Avenue,” I responded, “and if it were a completely empty husk with airtight walls, it could hold 7,400,000 cubic feet of fluid. If my love were water, this building would be overflowing. The flood damage would result in forty million dollars of repairs.”

“Ning maa,” she cooed and smiled at me. “Ning maa-aah.”

“How would you like to be making double what you're making now?”

This is the voice embedded in my ear. It's my boss, Steve. Steve has omniscient control over the headsets. He can click in at any time to monitor sales conversations, and often delights in offering us dazzling motivation—like asking us if we want to double our income. At times his voice is unexpected and it seems as though it's coming from God, if God were an arrogant salesman drowning in self-delusion.

“I'm telling you, Sid, you could easily be making fifty, sixty grand right now if you were more committed.” He claps as he talks, to emphasize the immediacy of my potential income. “Do you want that? Do you really want it? Because it's time to take names and bring in the beaucoup bucks, buddy.”

“Sounds great, Steve,” I mutter to myself. The reality is that nobody in this entire room of cramped cubicles makes anywhere close to Steve's ambitions, and everybody knows it. I think Steve knows it too, but sometimes I wonder. He's been promising us bonuses for months now and they always seem to be just around the corner.

To keep up hope, my cubicle walls are plastered with vacation
posters: couples walking on sandy beaches in exotic locations, families frolicking in theme parks, adventure travelers parachuting and kayaking and snowboarding. The coverage is so complete it's like wallpaper. Everywhere I look, people are having amazing times, living large on my five-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle walls.

The work week goes by in order of the packages we sell. Mondays and Tuesdays are standard vacation packages, #1–15. Europe mostly, escorted group tours through countries like England, France, and Germany. Nothing terribly original. These are the bulk packages sold to the masses: families, retirees, empty-nesters, senior citizens—people who need more guidance through foreign lands. Eight days and seven nights to Rome and Florence. Five nights in beautiful, romantic Paris. Ride a double-decker bus through London and see the queen. Shit like that.

The hardest calls come in the beginning of the week. Mondays are always full of people conferring with their spouses or live-in parents while I wait on the phone. A lot of people refer to me as The Man on the Phone. As in, The Man on the Phone says we should see the canals of Venice. Or, The Man on the Phone says we can't call back, it's a one-time offer. And in the background, grumpy old men who are wondering how their Social Security checks will cover it all say: Tell him to stop calling. Tell The Man on the Phone to fuck off. But I'm used to it. To them, I'm not really a man in the human sense. I'm just a sound wave traveling through lines of fiber-optic cable.

Wednesdays and Thursdays we sell Caribbean cruises and last-minute getaways. These are easier days because people of all ages like cruises, although I don't know why anyone would want to be trapped on a giant boat with three thousand other people for days on end. These customers, though, are nicer, maybe because they're thinking of sun and sea and surf, and anyone offering
this potential can't be all bad. Maybe that's what they're thinking. Generally their pause for consideration is longer, and I get to chatting up the package, which is a little more work, but I like the idea of putting pictures in people's heads—creating false realities that they're surely embellishing more than I ever could. Plus, like I said, they're nicer. Sometimes they even sincerely apologize that they can't take me up on my offer. Often on these days I'm not referred to as The Man on the Phone interrupting dinner, but the invisible Bringer of Gifts. And when the inevitable conference with the spouse happens, it's like this: There's
package available
for a cruise to the Bahamas, or,
there's a deal going
. It's about the deal, not the man bringing the deal. These are the days I wish they could call me back because I bet they would. But that's against company policy, and there's really no way to call back, due to the phone system. The Randomizer, we call it.

Friday is the wild-card day. A hundred percent commission. Eco-trips, Galapagos Islands, Kenyan safaris, you name it. We work with other vendors and sell as big as we want. Fire and Ice trips to Iceland, Bananas and Botflies in Belize. It's sort of like being a Kia salesman who's allowed to sell Porsches for a day. It can feel like a Mexican market; people actually haggle for better prices. Occasionally I take them up on it. And some days, like today, I stare at the posters in my cubicle and imagine myself somewhere else.

This afternoon, I do something I haven't done in a long time. I call Zoe's old number. I override The Randomizer and do a direct-dial, which is strictly forbidden. The pattern of her number makes an incomplete circle. It rings once. I hang up immediately.

The next day is like the day before. Phones ring. Numbers flash on my monitor. I'm tempted to bypass The Randomizer again, but Steve is roaming through the cubicle farm today, lurking around corners, waiting to pounce with his infusion of motivation. It's unsettling.

As crazy as Steve is, he has one redeeming quality: he allows us to work our own hours. We can come in at noon if we want. Or skip a day. As long as we hit our sales mark, he's not worried about how long it takes. He prides himself on being a sort of guerrilla sales manager that way. I don't often hit my weekly minimum, but I get as close as some other losers here. He also gives us employee discounts on vacation packages. So he's not a bad guy.

That being said, I really shouldn't manipulate the phone system. This upsets him greatly, and he can get excitable. He's not all together, I think. He has a tendency to get overzealous. He wears his shirt collar too tight, which seems to cut off the blood supply to his head, often resulting in a beet-colored face, which is the opposite of what you think would happen. And then there's all that clapping.

The best example of Steve's nature is simply the name he
created for the company: Wanderlust Incorporated. It's a clever name, but if customers aren't familiar with the term and they hear me say, “Hi, this is Sid from Wanderlust, calling to tell you about an exciting offer,” they hear
lust
and
exciting
together and hang up. Either that, or they talk dirty, and we've been instructed to keep the sell “hot,” or keep it going, even through the dirty talk. This was something Steve found ingenious about the name, its supposed subliminal effect on customers. He's sure it has a psychological impact on sales. This is another reason I don't think he's all together.

I was finishing a call last week, wrapping up the credit card information with a quiet older woman who'd just bought a seven-day Ireland bus tour for her and her husband of fifty years. And Steve piped into my ear, whispering, almost seductively, about the beauty of the moment. “You got her, man,” he said softly. “She is yours. You own her. This is the beginning, buddy. Start taking names.”

The trick is not talking back to the voice. On more than one occasion I've almost talked to the Great Steve in the Sky. More than once I wanted to say: stop talking already about the massive increase of incomes and dreams coming true, and quit it with the promise of bonuses and getting a fat slice of the pie. It's pathetic, this sales rhetoric, and I pity you for having such passion for selling. They're vacation packages, for God's sake.

Perhaps even more pathetic is how I secretly wish all of his bullshit would come true, even though I know all the loud clapping in the world can't do that kind of magic.

“The Randomizer is down, everybody,” Steve's voice says in my head, and dozens of other heads behind dozens of other cubicle walls. “Read the numbers off the monitors and go manual!” He claps and it feeds back in my ear. “Hey Sid,” Steve says a little quieter, and chucks me in the shoulder. I didn't realize he was
that close by. And I don't think he knows his own strength. “You get your blog done yet?”

“Blog?” I ask carefully, and turn to see Steve standing right next to me, his face twisted up in confusion, as if I'd just spoken Swahili. It seems the postcards have been mutating my insides and affecting my ability to interact with other humans. People are slow to understand me, and I'm having more and more difficulty making sense of their conversations, or, more correctly, why they are even having them in the first place.

“I sent the e-mail a week ago,” he says. “Everybody writes a monthly travel blog.”

“What are we supposed to write about?”

“Anything that will induce sales, help customers feel better about travel in another country. Why don't you write…” He spreads his hands out, like he's showing off a marquee. “Pain in the Summer Sun,” he says.

I scribble notes. “How many words?”

“Two or three hundred is plenty. It's a blog. Keep it short.”

“Do you think that's a good idea?”

“Excuse me?”

“Writing about pain? Is that really going to induce sales?”

Steve frowns at me. “Come on, Sid. What's the matter with you? Sss-pain,” he hisses. He walks away, then yells back over the cubicle walls, “Spain, Sid, Spain!”

I wait until he's out of sight, and then I do it again, dial the incomplete circle. It rings, and rings. My heart jumps. Another ring. I realize I'm holding my breath. I wonder if this phone might never be answered. It goes on ringing. I stare at the list of numbers on the monitor.

The phone ringing becomes a mantra, a background noise. My heart plays a clave beat over the bass line repetition. My eyes
glaze over. The cubicle goes blurry. I stare through the blue of the monitor and see a perfect, vacation-poster ocean. I am swimming through pure blue, flying through it, weightless, free. Polaroid pictures float past me, the ones Zoe took and then knife-scraped sunrays beaming from our heads. She appears now and tosses more pictures, laughing, shaking her head at me. She's got a phone trapped in the crook of her neck, her shoulder pushing into her ear. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Don't you want this?”

I'm spellbound, dizzy, waiting for the answer.

“Do you really want this?” she asks again, and holds up the altered photograph of the two of us, cheek to cheek: two little suns about to collide, one destined to steal the energy away from the other.

The photos fall. The blue vanishes. The ringing rhythm goes dead, and there's a hand on my shoulder. Steve. He cuts my call and even though I can feel him right behind me, his voice is inside my head, split seconds behind his just-behind-me voice.

“Sid-Sid. Don't-don't you want this-this?” He pats my shoulder. “You-you really got to want this, man-man.” He flips up his mic and squats down next to me. “You okay? You're spacing out on me, brother.”

“Sorry, Steve. I was waiting for The Randomizer to kick in.”

“It's down.”

“Right.”

“That's why the numbers are up on your monitor.”

“Gotcha.”

“Where they've been for the past ten minutes.”

“Sorry.”

He stands up and chucks my shoulder again. Hard.

“Don't be sorry, Sid,” he says, and clicks his omniscient control back on. The squawk of the feedback makes me jump. “Just dial the numbers.”