Mac was in the post office. Mac was always the first to arrive, a few minutes before eight.
“Morning, Aaron,” Mac said, not deigning to look up at him.
“Morning,” Aaron replied. He hung his jacket on a hook on the back wall.
Mac was slowly putting away sheets of stamps in the broad flat drawers under the counter. He always took a long while putting away stamp sheets, holding them up first and scrutinizing them, especially if they were new stamps. But he apparently enjoyed just staring at the perforations in ordinary stamps, like the four-cent Lincolns and the one-cent Washingtons. The government should know, Aaron thought, just how much time their postmaster, their senior employee at the Copperville, New Jersey, post office, wasted in doing a dozen little jobs that any ordinary office boy could do.
On a large flat desk behind Mac stood a little card that said tension, so printed that one’s eyes wavered and began to hurt when one looked at it. This small torture was achieved by bands of gray printed alternately above and below the bold black letters, causing a fuzziness in the letters’ appearance. Aaron turned the card so that he would not see it while he sorted the morning mail. The office was too hot, already too hot and overheated, but Aaron was afraid this morning to go to the thermostat by the toilet and turn it down. Mac liked it hot and he liked to work in shirtsleeves, so the rest had to sweat it out all day. Aaron watched Mac slide a drawer shut, then walk over to the Muzak box and turn it on. The thing began to play, from the middle of the song “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”
He waits till I get here to turn it on, Aaron thought, just because he knows I don’t like it.
“Aaron—there’s mail to be sorted, you know.” Mac nodded toward the tied-together bundles of letters on the desk where Aaron had rearranged the tension sign.
“I’m getting at it,” Aaron said, but not very briskly. He took the first bundle and untied it. There were, Aaron could see at a glance, about eight hundred letters to be sorted for the carriers who took off on their rounds between nine and nine-thirty. He began dropping letters into different piles on the broad desk, according to the zones which Aaron knew from the street names. Copperville was too small to have postal zone numbers. Plop, plop, plop. Some letters, destined for the private boxes at the front of the post office inside the foyer, he put into certain cubbyholes above the desk, which were marked by groups of numbers. Bills, junk mail, junk mail, bills, bulb catalogs, mail-order-house catalogs, junk, junk, junk.
Roger Hoolihan came in. Aaron barely glanced at him, then bent over his work again, frowning. He heard Mac and Roger exchange, “Good morning.”
“Feeling any better?” Mac asked.
“Oh, yeah, thanks. Little bicarb did the trick, plus a nap,” Roger said.
Mac was leaning on the counter on one elbow, doing nothing. “What was it? Pie à la mode or something?” Mac chuckled.
“No, I had beef stew,” Roger said. “Ordinary beef stew and . . .”
Aaron was bored and wished he could stop listening. For a moment, he did stop listening, but then he heard the music: a straining baritone singing “This Almost Was Mine,” with a lot of violins playing the tune. Aaron remembered yesterday when Roger came back from lunch at two. He remembered Roger saying with a pained expression to Mac, “Gosh, I’m all doubled up with something I ate. I think I’d better take the afternoon off.” Aaron didn’t want to remember it. He concentrated on the names, the box numbers on the envelopes he was sorting. Mrs. Lily Foster, Lily Foster, Lily Foster. A divorcée. She had a hat shop in town, and she got more mail than anybody.
“Well, Aaron,” Roger said as he came back from hanging his jacket up, “how about oiling the monster this morning, eh?” He jerked his head in the direction of the four-foot-high black machine some six feet away from him in the middle of a clear space in the floor.
Aaron managed a smile at Roger’s feeble quip, and also gave him a nod. Be more polite than he is, Aaron told himself, because you’re better than he is. But he did not glance at the monstrous machine. He hated it. He once knew what it was for, but somehow he had obliterated that knowledge from his mind. He simply didn’t know what it was for now, he honestly didn’t. It looked like a compressed guillotine, as if some giant hand had pressed down on a guillotine and mashed it almost beyond recognition. Yes, what was it? A weighing device? A machine to press letters from a three-foot-square mass into a ten-inch-square? A machine for crushing people’s hands? Feet? Heads? I don’t want to have anything to do with that! Aaron could still hear his own voice shouting at Mac—a month ago? six months ago?—whan Mac had asked him to do something on it. Aaron’s mind went blank again, and he smiled with satisfaction. No, he didn’t know what the black machine did, and he didn’t care to know and he never would know. They couldn’t fire him for not knowing, either. They couldn’t fire him. He was a civil servant who had passed his examinations.
But the music all day long was driving him crazy, and he might quit. Music to die by, Aaron often thought. He remembered going up in an elevator somewhere in New York to some appointment he had dreaded—a dentist, a doctor?—and such sick-making music had been coming from the ceiling of the elevator, dulcet strains of violins, calculated to soothe, maybe, but which hadn’t soothed, any more than it would have soothed the mind of a man walking to an execution chamber, music that any fool knew was being played to smooth over something, or to conceal something so horrible that the human mind could not face it.
The carriers were coming in. Aaron nodded and grunted in reply to their “Morning, Aaron” or just “Morning.” Bobby came over to help him with the sorting. By then it was a quarter past nine. Bobby was quick. Aaron made himself work more quickly, not that he wanted to but because he wouldn’t be outdone by the likes of Bobby MacAllister. Bobby was chubby and still had pimples like an adolescent. He’d be heavy to drag anywhere, Aaron realized.
But he began to plan the extinction of Bobby that afternoon. This so absorbed him, that for a few minutes that afternoon, he simply stood at the counter doing nothing, even though several people were waiting with packages to be weighed, and letters for which they had to buy stamps. Roger came up to Aaron and said:
“Snap out of it, Aaron. People’re waiting in line!”
Aaron looked at him and thought, You’re dead, Roger. You don’t bother me. You’re dead, and you don’t even seem to know it. After that, Aaron smiled, and went to work quite cheerfully.
That evening, mostly in his diary because he thought better on paper, Aaron planned the murder of Bobby MacAllister. Midway in his plans, Bobby’s father Mac seemed a more appropriate victim for his scheme, or rather his scheme more appropriate for Mac. It involved a knife. Mac was thinner than Bobby. It wouldn’t take such a deep thrust. Aaron took his carving knife to work one morning and stabbed Mac just after five P.M., when the two of them were the only ones in the post office. He stabbed Mac just as Mac was lifting an arm to get his jacket down from a hook. Mac had time only to turn around with a bewildered expression on his face, and then he slowly slumped to the floor. Aaron left him there, stepped over his body, and walked out.
He described this in detail in his diary. He filled a whole page with closely written words.
The next day, he did not speak to Roger or to Mac. They were both dead. Of course, he had to nod to them once or twice, not in greeting, but just by way of replying to something they said or asked him, but that wasn’t the same as communicating with them, speaking to them. Ten days or so went by, and the strange looks that Mac and Roger and Bobby and even some of the carriers gave Aaron did not bother him at all. They couldn’t do anything to a man for not speaking, could they? He wrote in his diary:
It is strange, the walking dead in the post office. It is strange to think I’ll soon be the only one alive in it. I’ll walk out one day and leave it empty and lock the door on it myself—after I turn off that Muzak. I’ll b
e the sole survivor. Bobby is next and then the carriers, maybe Vincent first, because I am tired of the smell of his chewing gum and tired of his hand slapping me on the shoulder every morning if I’m near enough to him.
Aaron wrote some in his diary every evening, and he usually wrote at least half a page every noon when he came home for lunch. Once in a while, he made an entry that was not on the subject of the post office or of his own life, such as:
What is the matter with President Kennedy? How can he talk about disarmament and peace out of one side of his mouth and out of the other side talk about how many more billions of dollars we are going to need for armament, for nuclear missiles and so forth? Does this make any sense? Who is crazy?
Aaron was going to kill Bobby with a hammer. The first blow would knock him out, which was essential considering the size and strength of Bobby, and the blows after that would finish him. Aaron sawed off five inches of the wooden handle of his hammer, so that he could carry it unseen in the pocket of his overcoat. It was November tenth, a Friday, that he took the hammer to work with him. He was going to follow Bobby when Bobby left the post office, which Aaron knew would be slightly before five, as Bobby always had an early date with Helen on Fridays.
Bobby kept glancing at Aaron all that day. Bobby’s heavy black brows looked puzzled. Every time Aaron noticed Bobby, he found Bobby looking at him, or his own glance attracted Bobby’s eyes at once. Aaron decided that that day was not the day to do it. By five o’clock, Bobby had not yet left the post office, and Aaron got his coat to leave. To Aaron’s great annoyance, Bobby got his own coat and came out with him.
“Say, Aaron—”
“I’m going this way,” Aaron interrupted. He lived in a different direction from Bobby and Mac.
“That’s okay, I’ll walk with you. Say, Aaron, what’s the matter? What’s the matter lately?” Bobby swung along beside him, though Aaron was walking quickly now.
“Lately?” Aaron said, with a nervous chuckle. “Nothing.”
“I don’t mean it’s any of my business, Aaron, I’m not trying to butt in, but if you’ve got some . . . kick against any of us, it’s better to tell us about it, isn’t it?”
The “us” annoyed Aaron, implying that the lot of them were ganged up against him. “I don’t care to talk about it,” Aaron said.
“Oh.” Bobby looked more confused than he had all that day. “You mean, there is something, but you don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s right,” Aaron said emphatically and with finality.
“Oh.—Well, Dad and I were wondering if you’d like to pitch horseshoes with us tomorrow afternoon around two. We don’t work tomorrow—tomorrow morning, you know. Veterans Day.”
“I know.” Did Bobby think he was crazy? Not knowing tomorrow was a holiday? “They haven’t the nerve to call it Armistice Day anymore, have they? It’s Veterans Day.”
Bobby forced a chuckle. He was slowing his pace. “Well, do we see you tomorrow? Vince is coming, too. The weather’s supposed to be good, we’ll have a couple of beers—”
Aaron stopped and stood up taller. “Sorry. No, thanks. I’ve got a few letters to write.” He saw Bobby’s expression change to one of surprise and disbelief. Did Bobby think there were no people in his life to whom he had to write letters? “Thank you, anyway, Bobby. Good night.” Aaron walked away quickly before Bobby could say another word.
The evening was hellish for Aaron. He felt he had failed himself, that he had been unforgivably cowardly in not killing Bobby that day—or this evening, walking along the dark sidewalks with him. He could not face his diary, or face writing the disgraceful entry that he had achieved nothing after promising himself and the diary that he would achieve something. He was so angry with himself that he could not sleep. It was a wretched weekend.
On Monday, when Roger called him over to help with a lot of packages that were piling up on the counter, Aaron replied by saying very firmly and clearly, “You’re dead.”
Roger’s mouth opened.
Bobby stared at him.
A couple of people on the other side of the counter who had heard it looked blankly surprised. One of them smiled.
Aaron looked at Roger. That’ll fix Roger, he thought, and in fact Roger looked quite scared.
“’S matter with him?” Roger asked Bobby.
Bobby went over to Aaron. “What’s the matter, Aaron? You feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling fine, thank you,” Aaron said defiantly, though he knew his eyes were bloodshot from not sleeping.
They persuaded Aaron to go home. They told him he looked very tired. He started to defy them, then quickly gave in. Why not go home? What was pleasant about staying in this overheated musical hellhole? Aaron went home and recorded in his diary that he had informed Roger Hoolihan that he was dead, and that he had upset the entire post office by this fact. Take a few days off, Mac had said at the last. What an insult! A few days off. Were they giving him orders?
However, Aaron discovered that he did not at all mind a few days off, so he took them. On the third day, a letter arrived from Mac saying that he (Mac) and also Roger thought it would be a good idea for Aaron to see a doctor. They said they thought he had been working too hard, was under a strain, and that a doctor might prescribe just the right tonic, or a short vacation somewhere. It sounded exactly like Vera. Mac had even tried to make it funny, which Aaron did not appreciate. Mac said he would have called him, if he had had a telephone, and he would have come by to see him, but he did not want to intrude. The letter itself seemed to Aaron an intrusion, and in fact it was the last straw. He gave the two weeks’ notice which his landlord had requested (Aaron paid his rent twice a month), and by December Aaron was in a town called Tippstone, Pennsylvania, seventy-five or eighty miles from Copperville, New Jersey. He found another furnished house with a fifty-dollar-a-month rent, more than ten dollars a month cheaper than his Copperville house had been. He intended to do nothing for two or three weeks except think and plan his next move, which he supposed would be to take a similar job in the local post office. Meanwhile, he had sufficient funds, and could afford not to work until after the New Year without going seriously into his savings or precluding a vacation for himself in the following summer.
Four days before Christmas, a bomb exploded in the Copperville post office, killing Mac, Roger, and three people who had been standing on the other side of the counter. Bobby, several feet behind them at the big desk, was wounded in the right arm and in his face. The package that had contained the bomb was hopelessly unidentifiable, as every shred of it went up in bits and pieces, and if Mac or Roger had noticed the return address, they were not alive to tell it. One of the Copperville citizens who had been killed was a teenager named Kenny Hall, who worked as errand boy for a local gift shop, and the newspaper said it was conceivable that someone had handed Kenny the package containing the bomb to mail. Kenny had been the first on the line and Mac had been weighing his packages when the bomb exploded, according to Bobby.
Aaron read the news with some pleasure. He was glad to know that Mac and Roger were no longer. He wished that he had thought of the same means of getting rid of them—even though he admitted to himself he would have been hard-pressed to acquire or create a bomb that would have gone off at just the right moment. Still, he dreamt about it, and they were dreams of glory and success that filled Aaron’s mind. The bomber had set his bomb, it had gone off at the right time, and he had gotten away with it. Aaron burnt his diary. The bomb was better. He cut the newspaper stories out of the paper and put them into his billfold.
On December 27, Aaron presented himself at the Copperville police station and admitted having sent the bomb to the Copperville post office. The two rugged policemen to whom he spoke, both blond and young, seemed slightly doubtful.
“Can I see Bobby MacAllister?” Aaron asked.
“He’s still in the hospital,” said one of the police officers.
But Aaron persuaded them to take him there. Bobby’s arm was in a heavy bandage. He had some dark red cuts above his right eyebrow. Aaron told his story to Bobby, about making the bomb at home, setting the time device, coming to Copperville and sending the packaged bomb via Kenny to the post office. When he had finished his confession, he stood erect, justified, not ashamed of what he had done, but quite willing to take any punishment the law chose to mete out to him.
Bobby’s dark, empty eyes looked frightened.
“Well, Bobby?” one of the policemen asked. “You know this man, you said. He worked in the post office—three years?”
“About three years. You remember him in the post office, don’t you?”
The policemen acknowledged that they did remember Aaron in the post office.
“I’m sure he’s telling the truth,” Bobby said. “He used to go around saying, ‘You’re dead,’ to Roger and even to Dad, if he—” Bobby choked up.
Aaron watched him patiently.
“I’m sure he’s telling the truth,” Bobby said. “He’s cracked, that’s all.”
So the police took Aaron away. It was one more case solved on their books. Aaron was not (and neither were the victims) of such importance that a psychiatrist would examine him to make sure he was telling the truth. Aaron was put into the state prison, where he chose to work in the laundry. The prison had one psychiatrist, who held a group therapy session once a week, and Aaron was made to attend it, but Aaron was not inclined to talk. His existence was boring, he admitted to himself, but he felt he had achieved something few men can or do achieve, the annihilation of people they despise. He was therefore a good prisoner.
Nothing That Meets the Eye Page 28
