The Philatelist

by Tito Perdue

  The time had moved to 4:02, and I had chosen a route considerably less traveled by. Another three hours and the bars would open, the whores come out, the neon come on, and the New Yorkers could resume sniffing one another’s crotches in this most fervent, most vibrant, most moneyed, did I say vibrant already?, most abject place on Earth. Suddenly, just then there came the sound of an ambulance rushing past outside, a noisy vehicle followed by two police cars and some two score of lawyers, journalists, and spectators. The tallest building in New York was on fire! No, not so. No, I was simply hallucinating once again.

  For two decades the city fathers had wanted to seize my ancient house in order to widen a street that really oughtn’t have come into existence in the first place. Here, long ago, alligators and swamp birds had enjoyed the right of way. Satisfied to find that my abode had not been taken from me during my absence, I opened both locks and went to check on my stamp collection. The dog was aggrieved, wherefore I hastened to take two desiccated waffles from the pantry and charge them to overflowing with bacon grease. In his place, I would have chosen to dine more slowly, enjoying the repast, even allowing the substance to sit on the tongue for a while. But not this creature.

  No one had disturbed my collection, neither my enemies nor my neighboring fellow philatelic collaborator identified here simply as “My Fellow Philatelic Collaborator.” He knows very well where I keep my albums and has remarked more than once on a certain Honduran airmail that he covets. And no wonder; a copy less perfect than mine has recently changed hands for almost ten thousand dollars. Or twenty-three hundred, rather, to be completely candid about it.

  The specimen was still there! I examined it under my glass, reminding myself of the least little flaw in the northwest corner that ought not seriously reduce its value on the Manhattan market. To lift the thing and peer more closely at it, I selected my favorite tweezers, a half-ounce implement that acuminates down to spade-like pincers of not much more than a molecule of thickness, atomically speaking. No one could claim the stamp was mint new of course. Judging from the mucilage, it had been used at least once, and had presumably brought the accompanying letter (now lost) to its intended recipient, dwelling God knows where. I would dearly have loved to own that letter and, while never actually reading it, return it to its original consignee.

  I again dined on waffles that night, using Vermont syrup and real butter in place of bacon grease, another area in which our tastes diverged, the dog’s and mine. While in the kitchen I took the time to roast another two dozen of the things against the future and laid them away in the pantry that also held a robust hoard of liquors and sweets. Someday great balls of fire would come tumbling down Priscilla Street, quarantining the two of us inside. With my radio, my books, my stamps of course, and stocks of food, I looked forward to it.

  I rested briefly, on this occasion choosing the upstairs bed. This might have been a good time to die, if only I were sure the West would go on without me. Instead I fell into a short, exhilarating dream in which the Confederacy had learned to produce nuclear weapons. It was dark when I awoke, and I had to hurry if I wanted to be brought up to date by one of the lovely blond women who nowadays gives the news. Today’s events had been ambiguous, though it did seem clear that a black person really had been offended rather seriously somewhere in Topeka. Having digested that information, I switched over to channel six where the in-house blond was describing the mess in Bolivia. There followed a panel discussion, a lively debate between professors from Harvard and/or Yale. I endured it. Channels nine, ten, eleven, and twelve had been given over respectively to baseball, tennis, bowling, and some of the more memorable football highlights of 1994. We marveled at that transcendent moment when the blue team had stopped the reds on the two-yard line. Finally, at shortly after midnight, I broke open a bottle of brandy with a unicorn on the label and initiated the long and tedious process of getting back to sleep again. I prefer to dream of prison breaks, especially when the screws get the worst of it. Other dreams of mine generally take place on trains and submarines.

  Seven

  As promised, I’ve explained a great many things already, and as time goes on, I expect to explain even more. Why, for example, have I chosen to continue with this account?

  There’s a woman who sits down the aisle, a late-middle-age Tiffany who appears to be even older than me. Having done two years’ duty on the front lines in Tajikistan, having lost her husband, having learnt the clownish language of that referenced country, and having now to earn a living, she’s been sitting here for the past several years mulling silently over her past life and sadness, in view of which no one dares disparage her or complain about her work. Truth is, she’s a self-effacing sort of type who takes directions without demur and who seems to understand my standing in the organization as owed to my longitude, or longevity I should have said, in service to national security. I mention as well that she has contributed no small number of rather scarce stamps to my collection, including one in particular. And in short I believe it is largely on account of her, and others like her, that I have gradually over the years learned to appreciate, even to love my fellow creatures, most of them doing about as well as their genetic inheritance allows. Not that I intend to wallow in this kind of sentimentality, this bathos, this “television approach” to humanity’s collective “excellence,” or that any of what I’ve said has to do with why I’ve chosen to continue with this report that you hold in your hand.

  Once, when I was ten, I saw the remains of a man cut in half from an airplane crash, permitting me to see what stuff humans are. Composed primarily of water and snot, of secretions and emanations, gas, saliva, excrement, enzymes, and everything nasty, it’s wonderful how this wise and generous race of people is working overtime to build machines to make themselves unneeded, a barefoot, or as I had intended rather to say, a bootless effort to be sure.

  She was toiling conscientiously when I came in, “eavesdropping” on a revolutionary poet in San Salvador, a naïve young man who hadn’t the least understanding that his lines even now were flooding into one of the federal databanks lying several hundred feet below ground somewhere in Colorado. I thanked her, Tiffany, for her good work, and then voyaged over to my own station where a warm éclair was waiting, marmalade on it. (I must at all times have sweet things in the morning.) Today the coffee had been prepared to the correct formulation, for which I gave unspoken thanks to the Tiffany in the back row who had proved highly knowledgeable in Serbo-Croatian speech.

  My computer was blushing like a 1950s jukebox, and right away I used it to tune in to the New York Stock Exchange. I was committed to the programmed purchase of a certain well-known index fund on Mondays when prices usually fell, and then to selling an analogous fund on Friday, when prices went higher about seven times out of twelve. I am almost ashamed to report the unconscionable profits I earned, or “acquired” rather, to use the right word, in this way. Starting with just $5,000, I had gradually earned a total I can’t bring myself to confess. I can say that it brought my retirement about two years closer while at the same time enhancing very importantly my collection of nineteenth-century Japanese issues.

  Today, equities were fluctuating within a narrow range. I had speculated disproportionately in Taiwanese shares, believing as I did that these would escalate the moment that country was folded into the mainland. You can imagine the effects of that.

  The organization no longer permitted online visitations to gossip sites. Nor were we allowed to buy merchandise, not on “company” time, or involve ourselves in international chess matches, or break into military sites, or inspect the private holdings of celebrities and business leaders. Or ask about our country’s gold reserves and how much continued to be there. Shrewd, our administrators, but not so shrewd as to have prohibited us from monitoring stamp auctions taking part continually in the greater American cities.

  In the eyes of my supervisor, a simpleton named Bozo, I was doing research. In fact I was looking for the si
xpence “Yellow Rhinoceros” issued in the place mistakenly called “Zambia” by modern people. Changing over to the auction in Denver, I was able to access many other African values, but nothing more about “The Rhino,” as we collectors call it. Prices are high, and I’d begun to worry that stamp inflation might actually stymie my retirement, set now for February, 2021. Despite all this I was able to narrow in on a commemorative issue that portrayed, not rhinoceri indeed, but the world’s last surviving ziggurat, a fragile structure brought hither to serve as a gambling palace in Las Vegas. He was a fine engraver, who had chiseled these scenes, and fine, too, the colorist who had made each stamp a slightly variant pastel running through the whole gamut of purples and greens and back again. Magnifying the thing, I imagined at first that I could discern a tiny little muezzin imprecating from the top of that tower, which is to say until I took up my magnifying glass and amended myself.

  I run to beauty. It relates to something, does beauty, that exists far more pronouncedly in other realms. And if I’ve been unfair to my employers in consequence of my aestheticism, yet I’ve always been able quickly to forgive myself. Next, I called up an exhaustive collection of European classics available at high price, and in the midst of that assortment discerned a variant of my favorite all-time stamp, a melancholy portrayal of old Saint Martin gazing down sadly over the ruined fields of Merovingian France. It’s evil of me, I suppose, to compare and contrast this with what’s on offer at The Museum of Modern Art.

  The West is dying, at which point I withdrew into the men’s facility and lit up a cigarette. The spy camera had been out of commission for the last several days, and a person could smoke here in freedom. The graffiti, I’ll admit it, was a bit more sophisticated than herebefore, and had been continued over to the ceiling itself. I detected a quotation from Guénon. Meantime my cigarette, fetched here by Somali smugglers in plain envelopes, was good.

  Actually the Somalis had come by boat, and not in the plain envelopes that literalistic readers, of which I have far too many, might have imagined. Compiled out of a dark brown weed, those readers might think my cigarette was another of those low-grade products made from ordinary deciduous leaves gathered randomly by the usual extra-legal tobacconists attempting to avoid taxes. Not so. I had looked at the stuff under my microscope back at “headquarters,” a slipshod word I use sometimes for “home.”

  No, my readers are not of course compiled out of a dark brown weed, and I shouldn’t have to say it. Normally I take lunch at about 2:30 in the afternoon, hoping in that way to evade anyone who might want to join me. Unfortunately, the bozo had puzzled out my schedule and was waiting. Far the most unintelligent man in the corporation, his eyes were like a rodent’s, and his nose had a supernumerary growth on it.

  “Join me, if you want to,” he said.

  (Oh, good!) “Actually,” said I, “I have to stop by the Post Office and . . .”

  “No, you don’t. Anyway I need a drink.”

  We strode briskly in the direction of Radeck’s Bar and Grill, both of us taking all precaution as not to tread on the high-heeled women who vitiated progress. The sidewalk accommodated twice as many hips as actual women, but as a fancier of both, I didn’t mind the walk. I observed a woman in tight pants who was also wearing panties, an aesthetic mistake. And a tall man who had no real chance of ever becoming a real collector, judging by him.

  It’s good for my reputation sometimes to be seen in company with other employees, wherefore once again I had agreed to expose myself to the conversation of an American. The weather was poor (by my standards), and yet we ventured all the way to a new establishment that by other standards of mine was much too far away and too-well lighted. A much-frequented place, the actual patrons looked as if they’d been designed by a retired scientist with a well-equipped downstairs laboratory. I saw no pair of shoes that could have cost under $200.

  We settled at Bozo’s favorite table, where our backs were necessarily exposed to anyone in possession of a knife or fork. I knew that we had come to one of the better restaurants when I saw how small the portions were. Myself, I ordered a daiquiri in which the little daiquiris were few and far between, and then followed that up with a white wine that tasted as it should, very like the wine it was. To me, it distinguished itself only by the little shards of cork resting on the bottom of the beaker. Slumbering there, unperturbed by the miniature tides and motions that must surely exist in even so small an ocean as that, the bits of cork reminded me of something I had seen before in other goblets with other wines and corks. Of food, I wanted nothing to do with it. The cook was a fat man in an undershirt. Just then I realized that my host was and had been speaking for quite some time now. It was not that he was absolutely ignorant, as I have perhaps unfairly suggested, but rather that nothing of his had aught to do with any of me and my somewhat more elevated interests. And besides, the man was married and full of household concerns: his wife’s complaints, two worthless sons, and crabgrass problems. He suffered from gastric stones, and in short his worries were so pedestrian and so predictable that I began to wish for him the sort of experiences that might yet turn him into something more like me.

  We laughed merrily. I never spoke about my work, save only when among other bozos who believed we shared the same attitude toward life and things. And, of course, a few stamp collectors.

  By hap, we were positioned near to some undesirable types speaking excitedly of weather reports, gasoline mileage, and football scores. I could pick up other phrases from other regions of the room, but not even that could force me out of the pleasant smile I had selected for this occasion. Really, could anything on Earth be more repellant, more lacking in dignity than a crowd of mediocrities enjoying each other’s presence?

  “I’ve been thinking,” I admitted to my tablemate.

  “Oh, shit.” (He had finished his vegetables and come at last to the dessert, a complicated assemblage worth somewhat more than fifteen dollars, to believe the menu.)

  “It’s the speed of light, don’t you see; we can’t visit other planets because we’d need to go faster than the speed of light.”

  “Please, Hugh.”

  “So all we have to do is load one of these new ‘printers,’ deceptively so-called, with biologic material instead of ink, and instruct them to print out a human being once they’ve landed in another galaxy.”

  “That’s real good, Hugh.”

  “And then that person could ‘semaphore’ back to us what he’s learned!”

  “You’d still need to go faster than light, if you want that ‘printer’ to ever get there. Those stars and whatnot are a far way off, Hugh. Far.” (The food had gotten amongst his teeth and he stood in serious need of flossing material.)

  “But it would still get there. Eventually.”

  “Yeah, except we’ll both be old men by then.”

  He was right. The protuberance on his nose had in the meantime touched the gravy, and had picked up a small brown stain about the size of a dot.

  “Alright,” I persisted, “how about this—we all know that time is an illusion, yes? And that in fact everything that has happened, happened all at once in one fell moment. And so time, so-called, is but a psychological utility that puts experience into order, and allows us to cope with it one item at a time.”

  “Brilliant, Hugh, just brilliant. Are you completely insane?”

  Another ten minutes and I could be back at my desk again; instead I used the interval to glance about at my fellow Americans, a pitiable crowd of guilty-looking types resigned to the theory of equality, a murderous code favored especially by bad persons. Neither half-full nor half-empty, those skulls contained on average perhaps a half-gallon of liquid excrement that could be heard sloshing about in there. It’s difficult in circumstances such as these to maintain a placid expression, wherefore I drowned my cigarette in the grinds of my daiquiri, and after leaving a tip, or rather a down payment on one, abandoned the place. There were at least two persons in that post-modern r
efectory who had looked like Pinkertons to me. I could say more on this topic.

  But not just now.

  Eight

  Today I come to you from this remote city where for the past week I’ve been watching from my attic window as a thirty-foot (some say thirty-five), thirty-five-foot wall is being put up along the boundary that will divide the Turks from the belligerent Greeks on that side. Built at enormous cost, the legislature sitting in Herkimer had temporarily allowed tobacco products back into use, hoping by that expedient to raise the needed revenue.

  I live in the interstices of work and sleep, those few blessed moments between boredom and nightmares when I imagine that I am back at work again. No, wait, I am back at work again, as I can verify by the number and the nature of the people on all sides. Just now my attention is fixed upon a bozo in the next aisle, a portly individual rotting from both ends at the same time. He turns and smiles at me, apparently in the belief that we are friends. Caught unprepared, I force myself to reciprocate, which is to say until I let the exercise continue for too long and ended up with an absurd and no doubt unconvincing expression affixed to my face. A sweet human being, generous to all, I was terrified that he, like everyone else in that organization, might offer to have lunch with me, another of the many perils of being a popular person. It was precisely on account of such people that I have begun taking my midday meals in the upstairs toilet, where I’m at liberty to eat my apple, smoke my cigarette, and drink my liquor from a slender flask of aluminum alloy. Which is to say until the custodian spotted my album lying open on the floor. We fought for it, the man surrendering to me at last.