She flopped down onto the stairs beside him, a little too close for comfort. “So, how’s Bunion treating you?”
She smelled of vanilla and warm paper, with just a hint of paint thinner. He wondered where that last scent came from, and then realized it would be impolite to lean forward for a better whiff like he wanted to, and shifted as far into the rail as he could. “There’s certainly a lot to remember. But there was one thing; she mentioned Hail Mary’s before an auction? I was wondering what sort of things we might be able to use to find an owner that the readers missed.”
“Well, if something seems particularly obvious, like the reader overlooked the address written on the tongue of a boot, then you get to double-check their research. Otherwise nothing, really, you just store and sell ‘em. It’s super rare to find something; they hardly ever miss anything.” The last comment had been a bit rueful, and Ben wondered what a reader found Sylvia doing to make her sound so bitter about their observational skills, but decided this wasn’t the time to ask.
“Have you ever heard of them selling something that someone tried to claim later?”
“Ha. No. After a year or so, no one is looking for anything. It just sits there. The only reason we hold onto journals is ‘cause we hope whatever titillating bits are in them are long out of date, and we hold onto expensive jewelry in case someone tries to file an insurance claim. That’s it.”
They sat in silence a moment, Ben acutely aware that their knees were touching. He hooked an arm around the railing above him and hauled his gangly form erect, not quite avoiding jostling Sylvia. “Well, thanks. That answers my most pressing question.” He peered into the hole leading to the shredder. “What were you shredding today, anyway?”
“Letters. Undeliverable and unreturnable; the ones without anything else in them, like photos. Just…letters that never make it anywhere.” She shivered, then pulled on his arm, hauling him away from the opening. “Leave ‘em be. You’ll go mad if you think about them too much.”
Sorting
You’ll rarely need to engage in this task. It’s really not your area of responsibility, but every once in a while, those idiots seem to get overwhelmed and need a hand. So here are the basic rules of sorting lost mail, should you ever need them.
~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
As Ben drove home, he noticed that the liquor store was still open. After a quick mental calculation involving his new paycheck and how much he needed to be setting aside for his search, he swerved into the parking lot. At the coolers, his first inclination was to reach for the cheap 6-pack of Budweiser, but his eye was drawn to the sale signs below the Peachtree Pale Ale. It had been his favorite beer since he left college. He normally felt guilty spending the money on a microbrew now, but with the sale price, he could allow himself to splurge on it.
When he got home, he stashed five of the beers in the fridge and took the sixth into the living room. The room was nearly empty except for a battered desk in the middle of the floor. The desk faced the one uninterrupted wall. On the left was a map of Georgia, a close-up of Savannah in one corner. The map was riddled with pushpins and these were wrapped in yarn and twine, connecting an aura of papers to the map. There were printouts and news articles, sticky notes and photographs. The map was ragged as though someone had torn it repeatedly from the wall and the perforations created by the constellation of pushpins gave it the look of old lace.
On the right-hand side of the wall was an enlarged map of Atlanta. A handful of pins had begun their march across the surface roads and a few of them were connected by strings. Centered above the two maps was a black and white photocopy of a poster. There were only two lines of text; the top line read Missing, and the bottom: Have you seen this boy? They framed a photograph of his son, taken from the same photo that Ben had put in his desk drawer at work.
This is where he knew his time was supposed to be spent, at this web of interconnecting data. The job at the warehouse was only a means to the end, a way to earn enough money to have someplace to put up these maps and spend every moment he could sifting through the mountains of data that the police ignored. Those men relied only on their computers to sift through all the tips that came in to tell them if something was related to a cold case. Ben hated that phrase—cold case. It made everything impersonal, like they couldn’t even be bothered to care about it anymore.
Ben popped open the beer on the corner of his desk and took a long pull while studying the maps. He was looking for holes and clusters. Tracing from one pushpin to the next, his fingers danced across the strands of the map, and he felt at peace, for a moment, seeing how much he’d accomplished already. After a few minutes, though, he started to feel restless again, so he put the beer down and picked up a large wooden box from his desk. The box had seen better days; it was cracked and there were slivers of wood missing, which made the intricate parquet of the lid uneven.
There was a small stutter in his heartbeat every time he picked up the box, an echo of guilt that he pushed down, hard; a constant reminder. Ben strode to the wall and opened the box, revealing more pushpins. He sorted through them until he found a clear one and placed it on the map where his new apartment was. A second clear pushpin went in for the location of the warehouse.
He turned back to his desk and set the box down, aligning it with the corner of the desk with a special reverence. He opened a thick file that sat in the middle of his desk. There were several strata of papers, each distinctly older than the next. Some were crumpled and stained, the ones on top newly printed. He emptied his beer and returned to the kitchen for another one before starting to go through the pile, his movements practiced and measured. This was his meditation and his prayer. The key was to let his mind drift, to not so much focus on the words as to let his subconscious take them in and start to make connections. He idly twirled a pen in his fingers as he studied the pages, occasionally making a note.
It was in these pages that he knew he would find the key to his loss, find the way to bring his son back to him. Every evening, weekend, holiday, “sick” day, he sat this way and had for almost a year, skimming through the pages of tips and police reports. And as soon as he figured out how to use all the new search programs at work, he would add even more pages to the pile: people who had moved directly after Benny’s disappearance, John and Jane Does who might have lived in that area. Any new scrap of data that he could add to the pile of information in front of him that would finally make everything clear.
He sat this way for a while, skimming through the printouts, until he tried to take a drink of his second beer and found it empty. He returned to the kitchen for another and found leftover Chinese when he opened the refrigerator door. He brought the cold lo mein and a third beer back to his desk.
The takeout box was empty when he let out a small exclamation and pulled one of the newer printouts out of the stack. There had been a report of a woman who had forced a blonde little boy who was just his son’s age into her car all while the boy screamed about wanting to go home. That could be his son, crying for him. He ripped off a portion of the page with the information and fumbled with the box to pull out two red push pins. At the map of Atlanta, he stuck a push pin into the zoo and pinned the printout to the wall nearby. On his way back to his desk to grab a length of string, he brushed the poster of his son, the caress gentle.
“I’ll find you, just wait. I promise.”
Cataloging
There is a certain Zen to properly cataloging items. A pattern, a patter, almost mesmerizing. It’s soothing, this repetition, but it can also lull you into a false sense of security. And that’s the way you misplace things.
~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
Ben arrived at the Center the next morning, bleary-eyed but on time, and made his way to his office, intent on figuring out the cataloging system for the property room. The section of the manual dealing with th
e computer and physical filing system appeared to take up a large portion of the pages and he had skipped it yesterday. But he’d do anything for a distraction today to take his mind off the dismal failure the rest of his night had been. After he’d found that one promising item, there hadn’t been a single other tip, or even anything to correlate with that report of the boy at the zoo.
He unlocked the door to the warehouse and sank into the chair in his cubicle, rubbed his face briskly, and then pulled the manual down from the shelf behind his desk. Opening it to the beginning of the Cataloging section on page 19, he waded into the dense handwriting.
It is important to be entirely accurate in the labeling and cataloging of all pieces that enter your domain. There should always be tags in the middle drawer, and if you run out, ask for more from those ninnies at the front desk; they know where the supply closet is. Heaven forbid you forget to order more when the closet gets low. Those women at the front desk think they run this place. It’s only because all communication with the high muckety-mucks goes through their fat fingers, but don’t you pay their grandstanding any attention.
You should never, NEVER allow your work to back up.
As for the cataloging process itself, each item is labeled with a unique identifying number. It is four two-digit numbers and is structured as follows: Year-Month-Day-Item Number on that day. Or YY-MM-DD-IN. Rarely will you get more than one hundred items a day, and if you do, it is then permissible to allow the Item Number to exceed two numbers.
Ben followed that well enough, but he wondered what would happen when the dual digit year numbers caught up with themselves century-wise in the long-term storage bay. He was sure that things must be sold off long before the century mark, regardless of what they were, but then he remembered Uncle Shem. Something like that couldn’t be sold. Not just for the fact that it was human remains, which he was pretty sure was illegal, but regardless of whether his family wanted him back, the people here seemed to be rather attached to him now. It is a welcoming final resting place, though it might do the old man a service to put him someplace people stopped nattering at him.
After a half hour of reading and note taking, Ben stood and stretched his neck, picking up the pad of paper he had attempted to take notes on, with a myriad of crossings out, cross-hatchings, and diagrams. He thought he had the organization of the shelves down, but he was not at all sure about the computer system. Bunion’s instructions had been equal parts curse and divination, including such treasures as: When the entry disappears, it has become part of the microchip mass, and to access it again, it is sometimes needful to restart the machine. He wondered just how old the woman had been and what state the system was actually in. If it was in as bad a shape as Bunion suggested, then it would be of little use for his personal project.
He went out onto the main floor of the warehouse and over to the 2006 shelves to make sure he had the organizational scheme down. The three towering shelf walls that formed the bay were starting to look sparse as there had already been seven auctions that year. Starting at his right and going around the bay, the shelves contained books, figurines, toys, cloth items, various implements from the garden, kitchen, and household, contraband, artwork, and finally, on his left, the “other” category. In the center of the bay stood a large wooden jewelry case and a file cabinet that contained the photographs and smaller art and prints lost to their recipients.
Each section of the bay was further segregated by month with each month’s gleanings carefully separated to help with the search when preparing for the auctions. Ben was grateful for this as he did not want to waste time by diving through the piles of detritus to find the one toy, or fork, or whatever that had gone missing over the interim time.
The clatter of a cart announced Sylvia’s presence, and she drifted into sight on her way to the current bay. Her hair was still in the spunky pigtails, but she had a different vest hanging open over a low-cut cotton tee. “Morning, Ben!” she called cheerfully and sailed out of sight on the back of the cart. Ben put down the wooden flute that had been lost en route from Argentina and followed her down the concrete to find her shelving a boxed set of Shakespeare.
“Morning, Sylvia. I have some more questions for you. Mrs. Biun wasn’t always the clearest in the manual.” More like she was cranky, way behind the times, and a bit batty, but Ben tried to be charitable in his attitudes toward the elderly.
“I’d bet every Cabbage Patch doll in here that you’re confused about the computer stuff, right?” She laughed and gave up trying to find a spot for the Shakespeare books on the literature shelf and dropped them in the Rubbish instead. “That’s what they used to think of him anyways,” she muttered half to herself.
He let out a rueful laugh. “Well yes, she seemed to think the computer was a device designed by the devil to test her very soul.” He traced the embossing on the Shakespeare box, flicking off a lingering bit of packing peanut.
“It’s not. She got some viruses at some point and she wouldn’t let me take care of them, but I wiped the computer before you got here, a fresh start. The database system is super easy, very self-explanatory. Just stay out of the porn and it should work fine.”
Ben colored and steadfastly ignored her comment by opening the collection to a colored print in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. “I have to ask though—since when was Shakespeare rubbish? All my teachers seemed to idolize him. I certainly think he’s a damn fine playwright.” A rather well-endowed Pan was entertaining naked fairies, and Ben flipped back to the front in disbelief, wondering what edition this was.
Sylvia pulled the book from his hands and turned back to the plate. “Not since he died. He was a writer for the masses— strictly low-brow. I didn’t have much else to do after…for much of my kiddie years. I read a lot.” She turned the cart around and leaped on the back headed toward the bullpen.
Ben stepped out of her way, just managing to avoid the wheels of the cart. “Got it. Watch your speed there, tiger.” Her slip had him wondering what it was that had laid her up as a child long enough for her to reach for histories about Shakespeare. She seemed more the type for swashbuckling romances than dusty non-fiction, but then what did he know about what women actually liked reading.
“Watch yourself. If I get all of this shelved I can stop early for lunch. I didn’t have time for breakfast this morning. I could eat a cow. A whole one, tail and all.” Her stomach echoed her opinions and Ben couldn’t help but crack a smile.
“Well, before you hurt yourself, stop by my desk on the way out. The bottom drawer is full of snacks. I can’t stand an empty stomach, so help yourself.” He turned and started toward long-term storage to try to open the safe for the first time.
“Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.” She rattled away and Ben heard the bottom drawer open as he knelt in front of the enormous cast-iron safe that looked like it might be as old as the post service itself. He spun the ancient dial around, treating it just like his old locker, and on the second try he got it unlocked.
But before he could open it, he heard Sylvia walk back up behind him. “Ben, who are these people? Is this your wife and kid?”
He cursed himself for forgetting that the photo was in the bottom drawer and paused a moment to arrange his face into as neutral an expression as he could manage before turning to his nosy assistant. He was tired of pity, he was tired of nosy, and he was tired of the constant checking in on how he was or whether he’d made any progress. The hope that he might be able to keep his trouble from his coworkers was fading fast, but he was still going to do all he could to keep them from butting in.
“Yes. We’re separated, though, right now.” He held his hand out for the frame she was studying closely, twisting it this way and that.
“She’s pretty, in a freckly-girl-next-door sort of way. The boy lucked out though; he’s got your bone structure. He’s going to grow up to be as big as you, I’d guess.�
�� She finally looked up from the picture to see Ben’s hands clenched around the handle of the safe, his face pale and contorted. He was trying hard not to snatch the picture from her hands and hurl it away from them. He hadn’t realized how much it would hurt to hear someone talk about him like he wasn’t gone. Just for a moment he had let himself believe her vision of the present, with a growing young boy once more eating him out of house and home, but he couldn’t keep reality back for more than a second before the fear that he would never see whether his son would out-grow him crashed back in.
“Ben, I’m sorry, I…” She tried to hand the picture back to him, but he shook his head, not trusting his hands to stop shaking enough to not drop the picture.
“Don’t. Just keep out of it, okay?” He turned back to the safe and waited until he heard her walk away before he spun the dial to clear the combination.
His hands shook, and he rubbed them on his knees before standing and leaving the warehouse. He made his way out the front door, waving a negligent hand to the receptionist Judy’s greeting and continued around the side of the building until he reached the back of the facility. He wished momentarily that he’d brought his flask with him, regardless of how it would seem on his first week on the job. Alcohol helped him stop shaking, kept him a little bit more numb to the things he couldn’t think about. For now, a brief walk would have to do.
A dual set of defunct railway tracks stretched between the rows of warehouses, snaking their way through the industrial complex until they disappeared in the heat haze. The shimmer was worse than normal today, the air quality index screeching off the end of the scale, and Ben coughed at the emissions and soot that immediately invaded his lungs. There had been humidity in Savannah, but not this all-devouring smut that filled the air here. He felt that he’d never get used to its heaviness. A pile of railroad ties was partially obscured by the choking kudzu vines to one side of the tracks and he sat, idly picking at the splinters that threatened his pants leg.
Undeliverable Page 3
