The Philatelist Read online

  The Philatelist

  by

  Tito Perdue

  Books by Tito Perdue

  Lee (1991)

  The New Austerities (1994)

  Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994)

  The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004)

  Fields of Asphodel (2007)

  The Node (2011)

  Morning Crafts (2013)

  Reuben (2014)

  The Builder: William’s House I (2016)

  The Churl: William’s House II (2o16)

  The Engineer: William’s House III (2016)

  The Bachelor: William’s House IV (2016)

  Cynosura (2017)

  Philip (2017)

  Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come (2018)

  The Bent Pyramid (2018)

  The Philatelist

  by

  Tito Perdue

  Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

  San Francisco

  2018

  Copyright © 2018 Tito Perdue

  All rights reserved

  Cover image: “Inverted Jenny,” 1918

  Cover design by Kevin Slaughter

  Published in the United States by

  COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.

  P.O. Box 22638

  San Francisco, CA 94122 USA

  http://www.counter-currents.com/

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-940933-97-9

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-940933-98-6

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-940933-99-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Perdue, Tito, author. | Perdue, Tito. Good things in tiny places.

  Title: The philatelist / by Tito Perdue.

  Other titles: Good things in tiny places.

  Description: San Francisco : Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd., 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018016128 (print) | LCCN 2018019286 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781940933993 (E-book) | ISBN 9781940933979 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

  ISBN 9781940933986 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781940933993 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3566.E691225 (ebook) | LCC PS3566.E691225 A6 2017

  (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016128

  CONTENTS

  The Philatelist

  “Good Things in Tiny Places”

  About the Author

  One

  Besot with cruelty, time persists at a steady pace. Myself, I had retreated into my neglected garden and by the end of May had sown a full one-eighth acre in pulse beans, parsnips, collards, and potatoes. I will go so far as also to admit that in order to discourage visitors I had taken unto myself a starving dog who had weighed more than seventy pounds, even in his dilapidated state. But here I bring to a stop any further discussion of myself, my life and times, and of how I had come to occupy this special moment in the country’s dwindling history.

  Two

  My house is a good house, and the dog loves it, too. From across the street it might seem a shabby place, for which reason he and I no longer indulged that point of view. But as to the interior of our rather unordinary dwelling, the rooms are tall but narrow, so tall indeed that only by means of a high-wattage bulb assisted by a flashlight could a person finally descry the ceiling overhead. Many years ago, a yellow moth had settled there and perished, remaining a landmark as it were, hardly visible through the accumulation of cigarette smoke.

  As for the rest, my home has fourteen rooms on several levels, trapezoidal spaces, some of them, congested with books and other cultural materials requisite for a person of my type. I also own good reserves of canned foods, dehydrated milk, purified water, smoked hams, and some hundred-weight of dog bones for the animal who hasn’t yet vouchsafed to me his quondam name. I do believe we could hold out in this place, we twain, for months, or until great balls of fire (forecast by me) at last come rolling down from the encompassing hills.

  We have our own peas and beans, too (see above), and books and stamps enough to satisfy our joint requirements

  I won’t mention at this time the condition of the upstairs rooms, the attic, the cellar, nor especially the parlor, an incongruity left over from the Victorian period. Nor do I speak of my neighbors; of them I most particularly do not wish to speak at this time.

  They live on the corner in a blue frame house that reiterates some of the more attractive features of my own hundred-year-old house. A modern family incorporating several highly unlike sexualities, the father has lately been retrogendered into a pretty good facsimile of his original self, and can even sometimes be seen shoveling snow in a more or less manly fashion. The mother, on the other hand, the bohemian of the family, is now being given important roles in the kabuki theatre on Second Avenue. Meanwhile her son, an esteemed surgeon specializing in heart cockles, is employed by Massapequa Hospital as a part-time instructor in transactional levitation. He has three children of his own, products of liaisons with a black woman recently let out on probation, and a Navaho priestess from somewhere in the Southwest. His wife, the official one, has contributed three further children to the household, as also a fourth individual fetched here from a clinic in Romania. A victim of cocaine and type II carbohydrates, the youngest of the daughters is said to be living with a Taoist futures trader and yoga instructor living out on Staten Island. Taken as a whole, the group has two, possibly three grandmothers forming a “tag team,” so to speak, of transgressive-looking personalities coming and going at all hours.

  I will admit that I did make one effort to befriend these people, which is to say until they began to befriend me back. A week or two of this, and we seemed to have silently consented to have nothing further to do with each other.

  I have a neighbor on the other side as well, a retired professor of some sort who lives alone in a house larger even than my own. A disturbed individual, he appears to enjoy his life in New York City.

  But I’m by no means certain that I’ll continue with this little diary, if that’s what it proves to be, and whether I should allow myself to nostalgicize over an earlier period that really wasn’t anywhere near as good as we know damn well it was. But I’ve digressed.

  Three

  No one was happier than me, which is to say until I began to dip into the prose confabulations of that iniquitous Leward Pefley, whom I hold at fault for a number of other things as well. However, to be fair in all things, it wasn’t he who inflicted life upon me at this most ill-chosen time in history. Of course you must realize that in those days to bring children into the world wasn’t the same transgression and moral crime that it has since become. A man in 1950—and I don’t ask you to believe this—could support a numerous family out of his own sole efforts alone, and never need send his roommate and/or her offspring out to earn additional incomes. Nor made to suffer that onerous surcharge for having partnered within his own race.

  To speak of friends and colleagues requires me to mention those friends and colleagues, a heterogeneous group comprising neither real friends nor genuine colleagues, nor very much of anything else. Daily do I shave and dress, force myself into a pair of pretty good shoes, and then impel myself down to the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. and 33rd Street, where for the past two years my car pool partners have gathered me up and carried me off to a thirty-story office building made chiefly of glass. Riding in silence while at the same time examining the back of the heads of the three men sitting just in front of me—engineer, bureaucrat, regulator—I felt obliged to speak:

  “Dreadful weather.”

  All three men turned to look at one another.

  “Hey, we got us a meteorologist for Christ’s sakes!” Lester said. The single worst human being of the whole postmodern era, he played golf
on weekends and used an after-shave lotion. I blushed, at the same time producing a smile so weak and artificial that I blushed again on behalf of that as well, an “epiphenomenal” reaction, to use the sort of language these people abhor. Truth was, this Lester was a pale and thin sort of entity, and even had I one hand tied behind my back, I could easily have snapped his neck in half. I could see clearly where two of his frail vertebrae (one frailer than the other) ran down into his collar.

  “Epi what?”

  “Phenomenal. Epiphenomenal.”

  “Damn, Hugh! Where do you get that stuff?”

  I opted to remain silent for the following time. We were passing through a Dominican neighborhood, recently pacified, where an alert person like me in a speedy car like ours could catch glimpses of the contents and personnel of many of the little stores and shops. I spied a fat woman with a stereotypical face, and behind her a half-opened door wherein someone lay sleeping. Came next the vision of some fifteen evil-looking and self-despising men squandering their benefits at a neon-illuminated bar that ran back into the depths of the building. Myself, I’ve always preferred blue and purple for neon signs, but couldn’t really complain about the virid green that mixed and matched so well with the quality of the tavern’s clientele.

  I earnestly did not wish to report to work that day, not with the weather the way it was and more threatening. Turning my attention to home, I was confident that the dog had preempted my favorite place already, which is to say that ancient rocking chair with the gingham cushion and broken slat. A person of my disposition can find perfect happiness watching the rain from a perch such as that, provided only he had his stamp album in his lap and a cup of coffee near at hand. Provided of course that he had thunder and lightning, too, and the sight of little birds sheltering concernedly anent the late-autumn leaves of my walnut tree. That was when I recognized that the driver had been, and still was speaking to me.

  “Absolutely!” I answered, which seemed to satisfy them. By this time we were moving through a black precinct where I caught sight of a recumbent garbage can in which could be seen two hundred coffee grinds, a saturated menstrual pad, and a gallon jug holding the residue of what looked either like wine or something worse.

  Me, I was hardened to it. All men, after all, are created equal, a truism vouchsafed us by that most ignominious of the founders. Not to forget the women, equal too, one of them now pressing languidly down the sidewalk in her bathrobe. And after I had spent so many years trying not to be intolerant about such matters! Saw I then a dog, devoured by mange, dragging his chain behind him. (Now if only I could divest myself of all standards, I might still be the most tolerant of persons.)

  The Whimple Street unemployment office now came into view on the right-hand side, a doleful sight spilling over with the living discards who had proved digitally inept. “Can you retrofogame the lateral i/v/o sylogrades?” Without a doubt, the country needs more immigrants.

  By 8:41 the office building, the same in which I had wasted seventeen years, shunted into view. The construction workers of New York have built hundreds of fine, tall, and aspirational buildings, but only then to stand by and watch them fill with businesspersons. I experienced a sharp pain in my kidney, a Monday morning symptom that intensified as we drew to within a few hundred yards of the place. I couldn’t yet identify the silhouettes in the fifth-floor window, though clearly they were those of human beings. A woman was taking off her coat, doing it in the brisk way that showed how glad she was the week-end was over and she was back at work. Having then settled at her desk, she began working on her nails. I felt a headache coming on. Devoid of value, her activities enabled her to forget that time was rushing by, that she was inscribed on death’s agenda, and that the world contained innumerable books and postage stamps that neither of us at end of day had time enough to analyze. These were the reasons I was near to tears when finally our two-tone digitized Dacia came to a halt in the parking lot.

  “S’matter, Hugh?”

  “Monday!” I replied.

  I arrived at my desk nine minutes too early, but atoned for it by fidgeting with my tie while at the same time opening and shutting the drawer that held the remains of a bottle of aspirin, an anthology of eighteenth-century English pastoral verse, and a just-released two-volume biography of an out-of-favor Hungarian philosopher. Not that ever I had been given time by my employer—I do not exactly know who my employer really is—given time to read more than ten pages of the introduction to the first volume and none at all in the second. (My employer, to revert to that, is a semi-governmental organization assigned to the collection of information related to a whole raft of things.) Codenamed “Goofy.” I was assigned mostly to abstracting, indexing, and critiquing industrial and agricultural reports emanating mainly from East Europe. What, they feared another Marxo-Fascist upsurge, those who paid my wages?

  “Can’t be too careful,” I frequently said.

  I had my morning éclair and coffee while at the same time scanning the city’s most prominent and most loathsome newspaper. We were not of course allowed to utilize tobacco products, nor maintain firearms and ammunition in any part of our clothing or desks, nor the cloakroom neither. I did have an 8 x 10 photo of the young Corneliu Codreanu in a stand-up frame, confident that none of these people could identify the hero. “My cousin,” I lied. “Served in the Police Action in Honduras.” Other photographs adorned my cubicle.

  Today’s newspaper: A black girl had been offended in Idaho, and a team of psychiatrists were on the way. A group of well-meaning immigrants had capsized in a mid-Atlantic squall. Racism was suspected. Following the accession of Kirgizstan, the European Union had captured an estimated twenty percent of the Central Asian market. Page three showed an angry crowd of white liberals demanding their voting rights be cancelled. Though locked in two patent disputes, a software company had devised a capability that required a change in the Bill of Rights. On the bright side, a lesbian movie star had been named ambassador to France. Bismuth futures were up, the trade balance down, and experts were recommending a variety of strategies.

  Four

  I never wanted to continue with this “log” of mine, or anyway not until when for reasons to be explained later, I’ve decided to pick up where I left off two days ago. My approach requires me to justify myself, to give gifts, to offer flattery to everyone, and never ever to cheat on taxes. And isn’t every member of an alien species wise to do the same? Dare I ignore sporting events? To openly expose my politics? Was I to confess my preference for some human races (one actually) over others? Was I, in short, to let myself be transported by majority vote direct to the guillotine? Was I, etc., etc., and so forth? Lead the nation to the sunlit uplands of human inequality? Hell, no. And do it all by myself alone?

  It was too much, and anyway I adore my role as an undercover agent. I can think my baleful thoughts, thoughts that would astound the world and leave the population gasping. I might turn my back on sporting events and carry with me (either in a satchel or balanced on top my head) the most pernicious of my books and music, and the other accoutrements that cause ordinary people to confront their own mediocrity, and mayhap yours as well.

  Having dealt with the éclair and coffee, I settled into my niche. It was 9:04 by the clock when at last I turned on my rebuilt computer and waited for the picture of myself at age 24, the most iconic of my icons, to resolve itself on the screen. It was an heirloom, that machine, and one that had endured a great many repairs and, yes, a lot of unfair ridicule. Someone had sent an email, but I was smart enough to erase it. Even here, here among my fellow salarypersons, I had enemies, bad people, feminists mostly, impervious to my courtesies and graceful behavior. Came then the news via that same computer, a recitation of generic misfortunes beginning with the disquieting decline in the price of sorghum futures.

  There was a woman—call her Tiffany—who sat just fifteen feet to my right-hand side. I had been expecting her to speak, she who was generally so full of cheery gre
etings; instead, today, she appeared to have been discouraged by the sorghum business.

  “G’morning!” said I, aiming for the hole in her left ear. “I like that scarf!” (An unexceptional article carrying images of daffodils. It might have sufficed for a dusting cloth, nothing else.) “It matches your eyes!” (The eye on the far side of her nose, that was possible. It most certainly did not match the nearer one that had required New York’s most implausible prosthetic. Apparently she had been hit by a dart at some age, and the color of her iris had largely drained away.) “Just lovely.”

  “Oh, you’re just so gallant, Hugh. But keep it up!”

  I smiled, holding it for about as long as I could. She was the mother of two daughters by half a dozen men, and so imbrued in post-modern philosophy that she couldn’t understand why things hadn’t worked out as well as they should.

  There were of course other Tiffanies in that room, most of them divorced or unmarriageable or addicted to psychotropic drugs. I do not mention the person nearest the door, who might be a woman, too. Could anything be more dispiriting for a person of my kind than having to go on day after day, pretending to be no better than one’s associates? Meantime my computer, “Tiffany” I call it, was throwing up all sorts of material that had no bearing whatsoever on my assignment, insofar as I understood said assignment. In brief, I was being asked to find corroborating evidence of the agricultural situation in Nepal, and because I knew nothing of the preposterous language of that place, I was to pass the whole mess through a translation service maintained either by the Army or by a certain fiber purchasing conglomerate under the direction of MLK University. For me the work was rote, and yet it was for this that I’d been bonded, insured, fingerprinted, and interrogated annually over the whole of my career. More vitally, my pass bore a color photograph in profile, a list of felonies, and a DNA hologram that described my chemistry and supposed propensities.