Undeliverable

by Rebecca Demarest

  She colored a little but stood her ground. “What? It’s not like these activities are getting you anywhere, and sitting in front of that computer too long will make you go blind. And it makes you feel better for a very short while. Try and explain to me how this is not masturbatory?”

  Ben turned his back on her and idly straightened his shelf, trying to seem busy, trying to get her to leave. He hated that he was arguing with her, but he wasn’t going to apologize to her or back down. And she should know that. She was the one who needed to back off the subject and leave him to his search. “It’s not…I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Oh? You think not? How do you think I spent the time after my family died?”

  “Medicated.” He hated himself as soon as the word came out, but he couldn’t take it back.

  Sylvia didn’t say anything. She simply turned and left him alone at his desk.

  “Damn it!” That morning he had been worried about having to apologize to her over sex, but that paled in comparison to the apology he owed her now. He had crossed her one hard and fast line: don’t make fun of the crazy. He hadn’t meant to, it had just slipped out. But he knew if he went to try and find her now, he wouldn’t be able to; she would have slipped into whatever hidey hole she had around here when she was trying to avoid him, and she wouldn’t come out until she was good and ready.

  He decided instead to go back to his DMV search while he waited for her to calm down enough so that approaching to apologize for his crack wouldn’t get him beheaded. Apparently Leonard wasn’t supposed to be driving; the state had only issued him an ID card due to restrictions. “Restrictions, like what? Sight, hearing…” Ben scrolled through the screens before coming to a little box at the bottom. It read, Mental Impairment.

  Ben sat back in his chair, running his hand through his hair. “Mental impairment? What kind of mental impairment has you killing boys?” He emailed the entire file to himself to look over later and had just started scanning the program list for his next source of information when the door to the warehouse opened again to the sounds of bickering.

  “He didn’t sound at all well. I don’t think we should bother him.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I want to get paid, thank you very much.”

  Larry came around the corner of Ben’s cube and slapped a paper down on his desk. “Thanks for your help. Sign here.” He stabbed the paper and kept his finger there until Ben had found a pen and signed, but Ben wouldn’t let go of the paper until he at least tried to set things right with the two men.

  “Look, guys, I’m sorry, but this thing came up, and I just had to…go see.”

  Larry deflated a bit and turned to Steve, ignoring Ben. “Come on, let’s get out of here, leave him to his...thing.” The two left without saying goodbye.

  Aware of the departing couple and how angry they had seemed, Ben called after them, “Looking forward to next month!”

  “We’ll be here!” Steve called, then the door closed.

  Ben had just decided on searching the criminal database next when Sylvia came back in.

  He hurriedly stood, nearly knocking over his chair in the process. “Look, Syl, I’m sorry, okay? It just came out, and I didn’t mean it.”

  “Freud would beg to differ, but stuff it. The auditor just showed up.” She added under her breath, “Prick.”

  Ben’s anger flared again at the insult. “Look, I said I’m sorry!”

  Sylvia snorted and crossed her arms. “Not you. Him. You’re a dick. There’s a difference. He had the gall to ask me if it was take your daughter to work day.” She scowled and turned her back on Ben. “By the way, I’m officially pissed off at you and will refuse to communicate with you whenever possible. I will do my work, you do yours. Dick. But no one deserves to face this bigot without a warning.”

  “Grant!” The voice was a full tenor, and it echoed off the walls of the warehouse.

  Sylvia ducked around into the long-term storage bay, pretending to rearrange the journals so she could look through the shelves.

  Ben righted his chair and sat back down behind his desk. “Over here.”

  “Ah. Good. This is a nice location. Alright, up you get.” The man was a little under five and a half feet and could have passed for a Sean Connery stand-in.

  “Excuse me?” Ben exited out of all the search programs before the man could come around the side of the desk. He had a feeling the man wouldn’t approve of his use of government property.

  The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You. Up. This is my desk for the duration of the audit.”

  Ben remained where he was, unwilling to cede any territory to this intrusive older man until it was absolutely necessary. “I wasn’t informed of this.”

  The man fussed with his briefcase, setting it down on top of a pile of forms. “You should have been sent an email last week.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  The auditor propped his hands on his hips for a moment, one eyebrow raised. “No need to be difficult. We’ll get you a temporary desk to toss in here someplace.”

  Ben made one more attempt to hold his position, unwilling to give up all of the search programs installed directly to his machine, unlike the network-based logging system. “I need my computer.”

  “So do I, boyo. It’s what I’m here to do.”

  Ben finally stood and came around the desk, standing close to the man and forcing him to detour around Ben to actually reach the chair. If this man was determined to make his life difficult over the next few days, Ben would return the favor, and if he was fired, so be it. He had burned enough bridges today that he wasn’t sure how he was going to keep working there after this auction.

  The man settled in at the desk, changing the height of the chair and logging in to the administrator profile on Ben’s machine. “The name’s Reg, by the way. Since we’ll be sharing air and all in here for the next few days.”

  It was an awful name, Ben thought, appropriate for a somewhat prickish man. Sylvia had been right with that descriptor. The man invaded a room like he had something to compensate for. “Well, Reg, what am I supposed to do while you have my desk, my search programs, and my databases?”

  Reg waved a hand dismissively, his attention already on the monitor. “Go organize something. I hear the long-term storage is in disarray; maybe you can do something with that.”

  The last thing Ben wanted to do was give in to orders from this punctilious man. He was the kind of man that if you gave him an inch, you’d end up getting his coffee for the rest of your time together. “I actually believe my assistant is already working on it.”

  Reg looked up, exasperated at the fact that Ben wouldn’t leave him be. “I don’t know what needs doing today; you do. I’ll know in two days. Until then, just get out of my hair and let me work.”

  Ben made his way out of the warehouse and down to Judy at the front desk.

  “Judy, there is a…a…well I hesitate to call him a gentleman, in my warehouse, at my desk.”

  “For the next week or so, yes.”

  Ben paused, deflated. “No one told me.” He had hoped she’d tell him it was a mistake and he could kick the man out of the warehouse.

  Judy started shuffling papers on her desk, looking for her message pad. “I could have sworn I sent you a message.”

  Ben rubbed one hand over his face, trying to let go of some of his foul mood. “I never got it. At least, I don’t think I did, but it’s been crazy back there the last week, what with all the people in and out.”

  “It’s shit like this that’s gotta be fixed!” the auditor boomed from behind Ben.

  Ben whipped around and then took a step back to put a more comfortable distance between himself and the auditor. He was thwarted by coming up against Judy’s desk, hard. “Jesus Christ! Don’t you know yo
u shouldn’t sneak up on somebody like that? You’ll give them a heart attack.”

  Reg leaned in to the neutral space Ben had tried to create. “Are you always this jumpy, Benny-boy?”

  “Drop the Benny-boy, won’t you? It’s Ben. And I’m only this jumpy when people are sneaking around behind me.”

  Reg smiled and wagged a finger in the diminished space between them. “Careful, someone might think you’re paranoid.”

  Ben slid to the side to get the finger out of his face and retorted, “Only because we have someone like you nosing about in our business.”

  Judy interrupted with a prim, “Ahem.” Both men turned to her, Ben seething, Reg bemused.

  “Ben, your temporary workstation will get here tomorrow. Reg needs access to our databases, which are only accessible by hardline, for a while. I’m sure he’ll be done with that part of his review shortly.”

  The auditor grinned and slung his arm around Ben’s shoulders. “See, my boy, this fine specimen here has things all under control. Bet she has her husband similarly pinned under that pert little thumb of hers, just like us.”

  Judy lost what little amusement was left in her face. “I wouldn’t know, considering I don’t have one.”

  “Well, don’t worry, dear, your man catching days aren’t entirely gone yet; you’re still plenty fetching.” Reg turned Ben away from the front desk as Judy, furious, opened her mouth to inform the auditor exactly how she felt about her man-catching days. “Now, Ben, I need you to walk me through your intake process, show me how the things are cataloged, etc. I know you’re new here, so I don’t really expect you to know everything.”

  “I’ve been here a month already.” Ben tried to shrug off the older man’s arm but couldn’t quite manage.

  “Yes, but the U.S. Postal Service is a large and complex beast. Someone who hasn’t been with us for more than a year can’t possibly be expected to understand all the little nuances.” Reg continued to tow Ben down the hallway.

  “I think that is an unfair assessment of my abilities, thank you very much.” He finally succeeded in stripping off the older man’s arm and continued down the hallway to the warehouse under his own power.

  Reg hurried to catch up to Ben. “Stop your griping. I will only need your space for a few days. Besides, this is all for your own good. How can you know what you’re doing wrong if someone doesn’t tell you?”

  “By making my own damn mistakes and having access to my computer to do so.” Ben hated the man’s condescending tone. From the sounds of it, the man believed he was the be all and end all authority of the post office, rules and regs memorized and obeyed to the letter.

  Sylvia popped out from around one of the shelving units and turned to the auditor. “You know, he does have a point.”

  Reg patted her on the head, dislodging her cap. “He’ll be able to continue just fine with his work on a secondary computer. And what exactly is it that you do? I don’t remember seeing you on the staff list.”

  “As I told you before, my name is Sylvia, and I should damn well be on that list considering I have been working here for five years.” Sylvia turned and stalked deeper into the warehouse to get away from the older gentleman, and Ben didn’t blame her retreating for one moment. He wished he had a valid excuse to get away from the man himself, but he had nowhere to go except home. And without a computer, there was no way to get any work done for the Center or his search.

  “Wow, you are really good at making new friends, you know that?” Ben went over to his desk to get a few of his things out of Reg’s hands, like his snacks and the photo of Jeannie and his son from the bottom drawer. The sounds of a folding table being set up echoed back to them through the warehouse. “In fact, I don’t really think you need me at all anymore today, do you?”

  “What, nothing to catalog today?” Reg started settling himself in behind Ben’s desk.

  Ben shook his head as he tried to get all of the papers out from under the auditor’s briefcase, juggling everything and mentally cursing the man blithely sitting there with his hands behind his head. “We had the auction this morning, and everyone was pretty well tied up with that.”

  Reg finally took his case from Ben and set it on the floor beside the desk. “Well, it looks like you were working on something when I came in.”

  “Nothing much, just some research for a project.” Ben knew he wanted to avoid that line of questioning. Besides whatever ramifications it might have for his job, he just didn’t want this man knowing anything about Benny. “Nothing that couldn’t be put off till later.”

  “Well if you’re sure there isn’t anything you could be doing, I guess it would be nice to have the place to myself for a bit.” The auditor settled into Ben’s chair and put his feet up on Ben’s desk.

  Ben gritted his teeth at the gall of the man and strode from the warehouse. Sylvia wasn’t far behind, but she didn’t say anything until they reached the break room. “What are you going to do with your new found freedom? Chase down more improbable leads? Or stand on some street corner getting sick handing out flyers again?” Ben ignored her intentional jabs and started to leave the Center, but she followed close on his heels. “You know, you still haven’t apologized for leaving us this morning.”

  He pushed through the front doors and waited until Sylvia was standing in the muggy heat with him before answering. “What do you want from me? I’m sorry you couldn’t handle things by yourself. It’s not like I know a damn thing about this place anyway. All I want to do is make just enough money so that I can keep looking for my son and do just enough so I don’t get fired so I can keep using the databases.”

  She studied him a moment before responding. “Well with that attitude, I doubt you’ll be keeping it much longer, and for that I’m sorry.” Sylvia didn’t wait for him to make another comment and returned to the building.

  Ben waited until the door had closed before rubbing his hands over his face. She didn’t get it at all. No matter how much he had thought she cared, how well she listened to him talking about Benny, it had all been a mask for her just not getting it. And how could she? She wasn’t a parent; her own parents had died when she was too young to understand the sacrifices they had made on her behalf. She would never understand the amount of pain he was in and the fact that he would do anything to make that pain go away, even for a little while.

  Taking a deep breath, he managed to open the door of his car, but then he didn’t know where to go. He wanted to be at his desk with the search engines at his fingertips, learning everything he could about Moscovich, but that was no longer an option. The search engines he had access to on his home computer were childish in comparison to the ones at work, but they were all he had now, so he headed back to his apartment.

  When Ben got home, he dumped his bag on the kitchen counter and went straight to his computer. He fidgeted while it was booting up, then jumped up to turn on the radio. He needed noise, some other human voice, just something to break up the silence and the whirring of his computer fan.

  Once he was connected to the Internet, he typed in all the identifying information he had found on Leonard Moscovich. There wasn’t much from before that day’s news; the first two pages of results were simply news articles about the arrest and discovery. Ben started printing out every article and picture. After an hour of reading and printing, he started affixing the new pages on his wall. He even drove an extra-large push-pin into the map at the Moscovich farm.

  Then he went back to his computer and started to dig deeper. He backtracked school records, newspaper articles, anything he could think of that was open to the public, which was a surprising amount. He found out that Leonard had been on the football team in high school for a season, though he had not done well enough academically to maintain a spot on the team. There was also an editorial ten years ago citing Leonard Moscovich as a case study for how the
local school system had failed children with learning disabilities.

  Everything Ben came across he printed and then stuck to the wall, the papers starting to form clusters: childhood, high school, adult life, news reports. And finally, an update saying that Leonard Moscovich was going to be arraigned the next day at the Atlanta courthouse at noon.

  Ben stayed at his computer for most of the night, taking breaks to get another beer and use the restroom, but not sleeping until after dawn had broken. His alarm woke him not an hour later for work, and he briefly contemplated destroying the chirping box, but he knew he would not get back to sleep anyway, and he didn’t have the money to afford a replacement.

  Luckily, it was a Friday, meaning it was casual dress. Unofficially, of course, but it seemed to be by consensus. He dowsed himself in the shower, struggled into an old pair of jeans, and stopped at the Krispy Kreme to get himself the largest coffee possible and a few donuts. He was planning how to attack the city databases to get more information about Moscovich as he pulled into the parking lot and only remembered that Reg had taken over his systems when he saw the older man firmly planted at his desk.

  “Good morning, Ben. Say, when’s the last time you gave this old baby a tune-up?”

  Ben winced at the overly jovial tone, replying, “Not in the month I’ve been here,” before he wandered down into his warehouse with his coffee and donuts. He found a camping stool that had been lost two years ago, pulled it out, and reclined against the bookshelf of 2008 to try and nurse his hangover, in reality it was more his still-drunkenness, in peace.

  He was just finishing the second donut when Sylvia found him crouched in his hiding space. “Planning on working today?” She had her hands on her hips and glared at him from under her cocked hat.

  “You know, I was thinking about it, but there still seems to be a royal ass in my chair.” Ben leaned back and closed his eyes.