Undeliverable (8 page)

Shaking out his hands, he rolled his shoulders to try and release the tension caught there, then turned to the forms on his screen. He dutifully entered the information it requested and then printed out the hard copies that got sent to the filing center of the USPS in Omaha, Nebraska. When Sylvia came back, she took the armadillo from his desk and settled it carefully into the paper nest she had created in the center of the box.

“There. He should be comfy on the ride now, don’t you think? Were there any notes or anything accompanying this that need to be retrieved from the files?”

Ben glanced back at the claim log and shook his head. “Just the ‘dillo.” In an effort to distract himself more than anything, he added, “I really want to know the joke behind this thing.”

“I just keep imagining some farmer being pestered by this thing rattling past outside his window all night and running out in his birthday suit, waving his gun around until he finally caught it, and then had it taxidermied in its final retreat as a trophy.”

“Ha. So why was it lost in the mail for so long, then?”

“Dunno. Maybe he was sending it to an old war buddy to prove there was actually something under his window all this time.”

The laugh that erupted out of Ben was genuine, much to his own surprise. “You think up the craziest things, you know that?”

Her shoulders hunched and she at scuffed the floor with her toe. “It’s not crazy.”

Ben grinned and leaned back in his chair. “Come on, they’re a little crazy, I mean, I’d never be able to think up a story like that.”

“You know what’s crazy? Let me tell you. Abandoned children, genocide, starving families, drug abuse, and broken homes. That’s crazy. And if I make up a few stories here and there to break the tension of the really crazy shit that’s out there, how is that crazy? What the hell gives you the right to call how I think crazy?” Her voice had increased in speed, but not volume, leaving her panting at the end of her tirade.

Ben raised his hands in surrender. He had no idea what landmine he had just stepped on, but it appeared to be a doozy. “I didn’t mean crazy per se, more unique? I think they’re fun. I meant crazy in the unique and fun way.”

Sylvia turned and stalked out of the warehouse, the boxed armadillo under her arm. Ben let out his breath in one long sigh and ruffled his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t fathom how what he said could have set her off like that, but he’d had the same problem with his wife from time to time, accidentally trodding all over her buttons. In an effort to see if he couldn’t find out what button it was he’d hit, he made his way across the way to the bullpen and wandered up to the reader, Mina, who was taking a break and stretching out her back.

“Hey, Mina, quick question for you?”

She bent over into a quick downward-facing-dog position and looked up at him. “Where’s your little sidekick to answer for you?”

“Um, that’s part of the question. I kind of made a comment about how a story she made up was crazy, in a good way, but she kind of—”

“Blew up?” Mina popped back up and clapped him on the shoulder. “She’s from a rather long line of crazies. All worked at one branch of the post office or another, I heard. She even claims to be related to the blind reader herself.” Here Mina gestured to the austere portrait of Patti Lyle Collins, which observed all the proceedings in the mail room with a critical eye. “Her grandmother had a stroke last year. Used to work the front desk at a branch, quickest sorter I ever saw, but man could she tell a whopper. Never knew what was truth and lie with her. Well, back to work for me. You, too. And best to lay off the word ‘crazy’ ‘round the little minx.”

“Thanks for the advice, Mina.”
If a bit late
, he thought. Back in the hall, he heard the distinctive sound of shredding coming from the sorting room and went to apologize to Sylvia, even though he felt her reaction was a bit over-the-top. He had learned a long time ago to just apologize first to a woman; things settled down a lot faster that way, even if he didn’t really understand what he had done wrong.

She was perched on the rail of the steps pitching letters in twos and threes so they sailed through the air like Frisbees before being munched by the machine. “Sylvia?” he called up. When she didn’t respond he raised his voice a little. “Sylvia!” She slipped off the rail, the box of shredding on her lap tumbling across the platform.

“Jesus! What?” She bent down and began scooping the letters back into the mail crate.

“I just wanted to apologize for earlier. I didn’t realize my words were, well, offensive to you. Peace?”

She squinted down at him for a moment, arms akimbo. “Ok, who said what?”

“Well, Mina in the bullpen said—”

“Bet she left out the part where my family had me committed.” She dumped what was left in her basket into the shredder and then shut it down.

The situation was making Ben more and more uncomfortable. He was completely unprepared to get drawn into anyone else’s emotional mires. There was more than enough for him to be worried about as it was without adding Sylvia’s drama to it too. “Frankly, I don’t see how that’s any of her business anyway. Everyone needs a break now and then.”

Sylvia snorted and crossed her arms, leaning back against the shredder. “A break. I had a break alright. I was fourteen and when I came back to school, when the kids found out where I’d been for two weeks, well...suffice it to say, I don’t like being called crazy.”

“Point taken. Apology extended most sincerely.” He didn’t want to get involved, but couldn’t help wondering what had happened at fourteen that caused her to spend two full weeks in a mental hospital.

Sylvia leapt off the stairs and stuck the landing right in front of him. “Well, now that my deepest, darkest secrets are out of the closet, may we continue with our jobs?”

“Of course. Were there any other claims that came in?”

Sylvia walked past him, barely brushing his shoulder as she went. “No. By the time the readers give up on them and pass them to us, it’s unlikely that anyone is actually looking for the stuff. Instead, I got a lot of shelving to do today. How about I bring you a cart and you do the entry, and when you’re done I’ll bring you another cart and then shelve the one you entered?”

“Sounds like a plan that has me chained to the desk all day and likely to give me a headache.” Ben followed her down the hallway to the warehouse.

“Exactly. Once your punishment is done, I’ll forgive you the crack about me being crazy.” Her shoulders were still stiff with ire, and she didn’t look back as she talked to him.

“That doesn’t exactly seem fair. I didn’t even know it was a sensitive subject!” He stopped rebelliously in front of his desk.

“I didn’t say what they said wasn’t true, just that I don’t like hearing it.” She finally flashed him a smile and went scampering across to the bullpen for his first load of the day.

Ben was forcibly reminded of a quote from an old Melville novella he read in his intro level English class. It was about the insanity-inducing burden of working with the lost letters, something about those who died unhoping. He had thought at the time that it was just more old-fashioned melodrama, but after being here for a few days, he could almost see the truth in the passage.

They managed to get through the backlog of carts fairly quickly, which left their afternoon free to catalog items for the auction once more. Focusing on books, they managed to prep sixty items for the next sale.

“I just still can’t believe the magnitude of stuff that gets lost.” Ben tossed the dual-language copy of Chekov into the box labeled “Lot 34 – Fiction” before logging out of the shared auction document.

“It just seems like a lot because you have to move it not once, but something like four or five times around the warehouse. It’s really not all that much. I mean, how many books are in that lot?”

“So far? Twenty. And I’ve only scanned about half the shelf looking for the appropriate items.”

“I think the estimate last year of books mailed through the postal service was in the neighborhood of twenty million. So your twenty? Nothing.”

“I guess if you look at it that way.” Ben stood to stretch and then picked up the box to take it to the auction preparation section.

“Grains of sand on a beach, that’s all this is.” Sylvia picked up the armload of stuffed animals that they had also entered. A teddy bear with a worn nose and a missing eye escaped her grasp and fell to the floor with a muffled clatter.

“Did you hear that?” She dumped her armload into Ben’s arms and stooped to pick up the ragged bear.

He struggled to maintain a grip on the box that was now piled high with fake fur. “Heard you drop something. What was I supposed to hear?”

“It didn’t sound like a stuffed animal. There’s something in here.” Sylvia shook the bear, but nothing rattled, and it didn’t look like there was anything inside but stuffing. She poked its body and arms, trying to determine what it was.

Ben stifled the urge to mutter a curse and started to make his way back to the auction bay, struggling to see over the pile of stuffed animals. “It probably just fell on its eye or something.”

“I swear there was something else in here. Ah ha!” She had the bear by the nose and was squeezing. “Something in here all right.” She gave it a tweak and nearly dropped it again when an artificial voice box coughed into action.

“I love youuuuu…” It trailed off into silence with a gargled moan.

Sylvia handed the bear to Ben as though it were a child, turned, and walked out of the warehouse. Ben juggled to keep the bear aloft along with the other eight animals in his arms as he turned to take them to their new shelf. He knew how she felt; the decaying recording had sounded so melancholy and despairing, an unrequited love lost in the mail center. As he put them down, he adjusted them carefully so that they were sitting upright and facing each other in a circle. He straightened the bear’s head and ran a hand over its ears before heading back to his desk. He cleared his throat a couple of times before continuing the paperwork.

The rest of the week passed in a similar fashion. It seemed the bear incident had cut through the last of Sylvia’s ire and she was interacting normally with him again. Or, at least, normal for her. They dropped easily into a habit of cataloging and organizing the incoming objects and then spending their extra time prepping items for the auction. They had one more claim during the week, a painting that appeared to be done by a fourth or fifth grader. It had apparently been addressed by the child as well because the address had been entirely illegible. It was forwarded on to the appropriate grandparent. Sylvia also kept up with her shredding, and those few times she was out of the warehouse, Ben turned on a radio to help cut the silence. As soon as the clock struck five, or sooner if he could manage it, he was out of the office and away home, carefully constructing the new web of data surrounding the map of Atlanta.

On Friday Ben decided to stay after work and explore the resources that were inherent to his job. Not only did they have the DMV database, which was proving a bit too massive to be of help at the moment, but they also had all sorts of other databases at their fingertips. There was photo recognition software, data-mining software, and subscriptions to all the major online databases for news and scholarly pursuits. On a whim, Ben brought up one of the news databases and entered his son’s name.

Your search for “Benjamin +Grant” has returned 400+ entries. Display All. Refine Search.

Ben stared at the screen. More than four hundred entries? That didn’t seem possible. The Georgian papers hadn’t even run maybe twenty articles. He selected Display All and started scrolling through the results. The first ten or so were about his son’s disappearance, but after that, the relevance seemed to start trailing off. Apparently there was a little known writer/singer/songwriter from Australia whose name was Benjamin Grant Mitchell. Ben returned to his original search screen and selected
Refine Search
. He entered Missing into the search terms and hit the search button.

Your search for “Benjamin +Grant +Missing” has returned 47 entries.

Well, he’d been surprised at the four hundred search results, but forty-seven was equally unsettling. So few articles about the time in his life where everything fell apart. It seemed obscene that so few newspapers could have cared enough to run any articles at all. Besides, it wasn’t like he expected to find anything new, but he didn’t know if some little known, possibly connected news article might spur a new connection in the facts on his wall. But with only 47 articles ever written about the disappearance, it didn’t seem likely.

He started scrolling down the page, scanning the titles of the articles.

Ben quickly exited the search engine, fighting to breath normally. A statistic. After one year Benny was reduced to a statistical summary. Doing the search had been a mistake; it always was, looking at the media response. All they cared about were ratings. They would pretend they wanted to help find your child, but then they would lose interest, just like everyone else. If he had his way, he’d start his own organization where all they did was help with the search for missing people —especially children.

He rubbed his hands roughly over his face and leaned back in his chair until his breathing moderated, then shut down his computer and left. He needed to get more flyers out, get more data points. That was the only way he was going to help his son, not by brooding over journalistic sensationalism. As he drove home, he started to plot his papering route for the next day.

Ben planned to spend Saturday afternoon handing out flyers in front of the Six Flags park, which wasn’t more than ten minutes from his office, a whole twenty from his apartment on Cascade Road. Wanting to be polite, Ben first spoke with the manager of the park, asking for permission to talk with the day’s guests.