Barker, Clive - The Great and Secret Show

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committed, right from the first, the littlest.

"What are you waiting for?" Homer said, seeing Jaffe linger. "You've got

work to do. The sooner it's started, the sooner I can find you more. "

Randolph stepped into the room. It was large, painted the same bilious

yellow and battleship gray as every other office and corridor in the

Omaha

Central Post Office. Not that much of the walls was visible. Piled higher

than head-height on every side was mail. Sacks, satchels, boxes and

carts

of it, spilling out onto the cold concrete floor.

"Dead letters, " Homer said. "Stuff even the good ol' U.S. Post Office

can't

deliver. Quite a sight, huh?"

Jaffe was agog, but he made sure not to show it. He made sure to show

nothing, especially to wise guys like Homer.

"This is all yours, Randolph, " his superior said. "Your little corner of

heaven. "

"What am I supposed to do with it?" Jaffe said.

"Sort it. Open it, look for any important stuff so we don't end up putting

good money in the furnace. "

"There's money in them?"

"It's the middle of the country," Jaffe observed. "Gateway to the West.

East. Depending on which way you're facing."

"Ain't the dead center," Homer countered. "But we still end up with all

the

crap. And it's all got to get sorted. By band. By you."

"All of it?" Jaffe said. What was in front of him was two weeks', three

weeks', four weeks' work.

"ALL of it," said Homer, and didn't make any attempt to conceal his

satisfaction. "All yours. You'll soon get the hang of it. If the envelope's

got

some kind of government marking, put it in the burn pile. Don't even

bother

to open it. Fuck 'em, right? But the rest, open. You never know what

we're

going to find." He grinned conspiratorially. "And what we find, we share,"

he.said.

Jaffe had been working for the U.S. Post Office only nine days, but that

was long enough, easily long enough, to know that a lot of mail was

intercepted by its hired deliverers. Packets were razored open and their

contents filched, checks were cashed, love-letters were laughed over.

the team, don't you?" He put a wide, heavy hand on Jaffe's shoulder.

"Share and share alike, right?"

"I hear," Jaffe said.

"Good," Homer replied. "So—" He opened his arms to the spectacle of

piled sacks. "It's all yours." He sniffed, grinned and took his leave.

One of the team, Jaffe thought as the door clicked closed, was what

he'd

never be. Not that he was about to tell Homer that. He'd let the man

patronize him; play the willing slave. But in his heart? In his heart, he

had

other plans, other ambitions. Problem was, he wasn't any closer to re-

alizing

those ambitions than he'd been at twenty. Now he was thirty-seven,

going

on thirty-eight. Not the kind of man women looked at more than once.

Not

the kind of character folks found exactly charismatic. Losing his hair the

way his father had. Bald at forty, most likely. Bald, and wifeless, and not

more than beer-change in his pocket because he'd never been able to

hold

write

anyway? I'm killing myself because I didn't get to be King of the World?

Ridiculous.

But...that was what he wanted to be. He'd never known how, he'd never

even had a sniff of the way, but that was the ambition that had nagged

him

from the first. Other men rose from nothing, didn't they? Messiahs,

presidents, movie stars. They pulled themselves up out of the mud the

way

the fishes had when they'd decided to go for a walk. Grown legs,

breathed

air, become more than what they'd been. If fucking fishes could do it,

why

couldn't he? But it had to be soon. Before he was forty. Before he was

bald.

Before he was dead, and gone, and no one to even remember him, ex-

cept

maybe as a nameless asshole who'd spent three weeks in the winter of

1969 in a room full of dead letters, opening orphaned mail looking for

dollar.bills. Some epitaph.

He sat down and looked at the task heaped before him.

the

number.

First Jaffe sorted the interesting envelopes (bulky; rattling; perfumed)

from

dull; then the private correspondence from official, and the scrawl from

the

Palmer method. Those decisions made, he began opening the enve-

lopes,

in the first week with his fingers, till his fingers became calloused, there-

after

with a short-bladed knife he bought especially for the purpose, digging

out

the contents like a pearl-fisher in search of a pearl, most of the time

finding

nothing, sometimes, as Homer had promised, finding money or a check,

which he dutifully declared to his boss.

"You're good at this," Homer said after the second week. "You're really

good. Maybe I should put you on this full time."

Randolph wanted to say fuck you, but he'd said that too many times to

bosses who'd fired him the minute after, and he couldn't afford to lose

this

Homer had been right. Omaha, Nebraska, wasn't the geographical

center

of the USA, but as far as the Post Office was concerned, it may as well

have been.

The lines of communication crossed, and recrossed, and finally dropped

their orphans here, because nobody in any other state wanted them.

These

letters had been sent from coast to coast looking for someone to open

them, and had found no takers. Finally they'd ended with him: with

Randolph Ernest Jaffe, a balding nobody with ambitions never spoken

and

rage not expressed, whose little knife slit them, and little eyes scanned

them, and who—sitting at his crossroads—began to see the private face

the nation.

There were love-letters, hate-letters, ransom notes, pleadings, sheets

which men had drawn round their hard-ons, valentines of pubic hair,

blackmail by wives, journalists, hustlers, lawyers and senators, junk-mail

love and death they told touched him only fleetingly. Far more persua-

sive,

far more moving, was another story, which could not be articulated so

easily.

Sitting at the crossroads he began to understand that America had a

secret life; one which he'd never even glimpsed before. Love and death

knew about. Love and death were the great clichés; the twin obsessions

songs and soap operas. But there was another life, which every fortieth

letter, or fiftieth, or hundredth, hinted at, and every thousandth stated

with a

lunatic plainness. When they said it plain, it was not the whole truth, but

was a beginning, and each of the writers had their own mad way of

stating

something close to un-stateable.

What it came down to was this: the world was not as it seemed. Not

remotely as it seemed. Forces conspired (governmental, religious,

medical)

to conceal and silence those who had more than a passing grasp of that

more than two for fear of attracting attention to themselves. But they

wrote.

Sometimes it was as if they had to, as if the secrets they kept sealed up

were too hot, and burned their way out. Sometimes it was because they

knew the hunters were on their heels and they'd have no other chance

describe the world to itself before they were caught, drugged and locked

up. Sometimes there was even a subversive glee in the scrawlings, sent

out with deliberately indistinct addresses in the hope that the letter

would

blow the mind of some innocent who'd received it by chance. Some of

the

missives were stream-of-consciousness rantings, others precise, even

clinical, descriptions of how to turn the world inside out by sex-magic or

mushroom-eating. Some used the nonsense imagery of National En-

quirer

stories to veil another message. They spoke of UFO sightings and zom-

bie

cults; news from Venusian evangelists and psychics who tuned in to the

welcomed the addition. The more letters, the more clues; the more clues

the more hope he had of a solution to the mystery. It was, he became

certain as the weeks turned into months and the winter mellowed, not

several mysteries but one. The writers whose letters were about the

Veil,

and how to draw it aside, were finding their own way forward towards

revelation; each had his own particular method and metaphor; but

somewhere in the cacophony a single hymn was striving to be sung.

It was not about love. At least not as the sentimentalists knew it. Nor

about

death, as a literalist would have understood the term. It was—in no

particular order—something to do with fishes, and the sea (sometimes

the

Sea of Seas); and three ways to swim there; and dreams (a lot about

dreams); and an island which Plato had called Atlantis, but had known

all

along was some other place. It was about the end of the World, which

was

in turn about its beginning. And it was about Art.

but

only one Art. And (here was a mystery) no Artist.

"So, are you happy here?" Homer said to him one May day.

Jaffe looked up from his work. There were letters strewn all around him.

His skin, which had never been too healthy, was as pale and etched

upon

as the pages in his hand.

"Sure," he said to Homer, scarcely bothering to focus on the man. "Have

you got some more for me?"

Homer didn't answer at first. Then he said: "What are you hiding, Jaffe?"

"Hiding? I'm not hiding anything."

"You're stashing stuff away you should be sharing with the rest of us."

"No I'm not," Jaffe said. He'd been meticulous in obeying Homer's first

edict, that anything found among the dead letters be shared. The

money,

the skin magazines, the cheap jewelry he'd come across once in a

while; it

all went to Homer, to be divided up. "You get everything," he said. "I

swear."

Homer looked at him with plain disbelief. "You spend every fucking hour

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committed,rightfromthefirst,thelittlest."Whatareyouwaitingfor?"Homersaid,seeingJaffelinger."You'vegotworktodo.Thesoonerit'sstarted,thesoonerIcanfindyoumore."Randolphsteppedintotheroom.Itwaslarge,paintedthesamebiliousyellowandbattleshipgrayaseveryotherofficeandcorridorintheOmahaCentralPostOffice.Nott...

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