The Philatelist Read online

  I continued apace, laboring away the hours. On Saturday last I had visited the opera, and still wasn’t able to free my head of the insidious female duet in Norma. Good music, and like all music of that degree, it was like to drive me insane. Just then I was interrupted by the bozo, a one-time soccer player who occupied the diagonal cubicle. He was a large person, and his trousers were so much too short that anyone could see the scars on his right front leg that very frequently extruded into what ought have been my own private area.

  “Hey, Hugh!” (His voice was loud enough, bringing several workers out of their concentration.)

  “Still here.” (My voice, too, was loud enough, and after traveling the length of the very narrow and tapering room, impinged on the portrait of the company President and bounced right back again.)

  “You watch the game? The Peacocks?”

  “You bet! Those ole Peacocks. Really something, waddn’t it?”

  He was not a bad person, Bozo, and would have been even better had he been weaned instead on the female of his parents. Today he had done a poor job of shaving and had a tad of toilet paper adhering to his chin. It was a mystery to all of us how he had qualified for this job, though it might probably be related to our Deputy Chief, a man never glimpsed by any of us, but a well-known soccer fan all the same. Accordingly it was incumbent on me to listen to his (Bozo’s, not the supervisor’s) patter. Meanwhile I was beginning to tap into some hitherto-unpublished numbers concerning cashew imports/exports taking place between two of our country’s most reliable dependencies.

  I had not meant to suggest that we two males, Bozo and I, had been forced into service amidst a gaggle of post-normal women, even if to say so would have been accurate. Some of these were pretty and some were not, and one was an Ashkenazi woman who before his suicide had insisted that her son become a doctor and a lawyer at the same time. In truth she really was a good-looking woman with a definite philatelic quality in her profile. It has been said that Helen’s breasts were so lovely, the Greeks used the dual number when referring to her.

  These then were the human resources (once called “people”) who occupied our long (thirty-eight feet) and narrow (nineteen feet) cell. From my position near the front, it looked approximately like a seven hundred-square foot working space for twenty to twenty-five persons, a total that fluctuated with the weather and manifest attendance of the personnel.

  Five

  I have chosen to retire! Or anyway just as soon as I have earned my pension. It is true that I could take retirement somewhat earlier than that, but only at the cost of about two hundred and fifty Euros per month. Two-fifty, an amount sufficient for half a dozen out-of-print books with original covers on them. Or, expressed differently, eight opera tickets. Or a certain nineteenth-century Chinese postage stamp for my collection. A double handful of Kellogg Pep cereal pin-backs, and funds enough left over for a second-hand .45-caliber revolver available from my personal pawnbroker. Or, more imperative still, an improved dietary for my dog. Indeed, I needed that money and was determined to have it, even if I must go back to digging for truffles in Central Park.

  It was with these thoughts in mind that I took a day’s sick leave, and after harvesting my first full night’s sleep since my last illness, opened up the footlocker at the foot of my cot and drew out the third volume of my Islamic collection, following which I micturated in the place reserved for that and washed my face.

  Next, I put on Walton’s Violin Concerto and then opened to Persia in my superbly illustrated stamp album printed many years ago in pre-independent Latvia. The dog had been fed and was content and knew not to annoy me at times like this. True, it was somewhat windy out-of-doors, and from time to time I could hear one or another of the shutters slamming against the sheetrock. Or pick up the sound of an automobile passing in the street. And yet I remained calm throughout the morning. I had locked the gate and had parked a sawhorse across the walk leading to my front door.

  Very good. And so at 10:27 exactly I opened the album and turned to page 614. It’s true that I have a very decent collection of Persia, even perhaps among the best in the city, judging by its reputation. Acting with caution, I turned one entire page at the same time and laid it flat, a noiseless tactic that revealed of a sudden a swatch of colorful “values,” as we call them, showing the same ruthless Shah in a twelve-unit series. There’s enough history on that page to fill an encyclopedia, even apart from Thistlewaite’s wonderful monograph on early Iranian postmarks. Certifiably the most polyhistorical of all persons—he was also a cello virtuoso—that man’s cognizance seemed to reach all the way back to the Cenozoic and the philatelic history of those awful times.

  I owned precisely ten of those twelve stamps, a personal failure that left two loathsome blank spaces on the page. At one time I had pasted two defective issues here, but I need to make it clear at the outset that imperfection is not in my nature, neither when at home, or sleeping, or at my station when at work. I had rather amputate my own foot than to accept even the most innocuous faults of society, of life, and of ordinary people especially. Ordinary people? Am I then so great that I can talk like that? No, absolutely not. Save on Wednesdays of course, and the occasional Saturday perhaps.

  Six

  Wednesday having arrived, I leapt up in joyful alacrity and headed off to work. The day was bright and sunny, but instead of bookstores and stamp and coin traders, I found only jewelry stores and women’s shops along my route. Judging by what was visible, a stranger would assume the town had six times as many women as the other kind. Rotten with wealth, this macabre city was like an overripe fruit full of putrescence and prone at any moment to explode. I had awoken in unusually good spirits, and although the Sun today was white as platinum and giving off a humming sound, I quickly relapsed into my authentic self. I heard voices (shards of broken glass they seemed) emitted by policemen, bus drivers, and delivery people. I perceived a woman marching at my side and immediately began to walk more quickly lest it appear that we comprised a partnership of some kind. Her hair was pink as cotton candy, while her mouth was like a suction cup. Her teeth were good, pretty good, and never mind that one had died and was out-of-parallel with the others. Her chin came to a point, as eventually it must. But of course the main things were her eyes, furious-looking instruments half-hidden under granulated lids.

  We had come into a realm of glass buildings where even a mediocre soprano could have brought the whole mess down about our ears. I slowed, hoping the woman—we both wanted to be free of each other—would move ahead of me. Her heels, longer than pencils, punched holes in the cement and made noises like a teletype machine. We moved past one of the few places in Manhattan where Christians were wont to gather, in this case a congregation of snake handlers with an ambulance standing by. We passed a department store, the window full of manikins in erotic underwear. Saying nothing, we continued hastily past the memorial display of Monica and Bill in the buccal position. Remove these evanescent shops from Manhattan and the economy takes the bookstores down with them. The woman had also slowed, embarrassing the both of us. Finally I turned to her, saying in my jocular fashion:

  “Shall we honeymoon in Hawaii?”

  She never smiled.

  “I feel that two children ought be enough, yes?”

  I have said that the demise of women’s shops would imperil the nation. But that was before I went down into a hole in the ground where right away I detected two desiderata of that gender waiting for the subway in heels and hose, earrings, skirts, hairdos, perfume, and ankle bracelets. A cynic might say they wanted to draw attention to themselves.

  They wanted to draw attention to themselves.

  Years ago, I had laid claim to a certain seat on the morning subway, and since that time I’ve often wondered whatever happened to the X-ray technician, the insurance man, and the shoe salesman who previously had shared with me that car. I have the highest esteem for such people, for those who have taken on the most boring activities that modernit
y has invented in order to enhance the lives of the fortunate and the rich. Today I found myself squeezed in between two well-dressed men exchanging pages of the same newspaper back and forth. I was not too dignified to steal glimpses of the headlines, fore and aft:

  A famous actress had allowed her left nipple to be seen.

  The bombing campaign in Bolivia was continuing apace. An American airman had been shot down and was missing, while in retaliation some four hundred farmers and other terrorists had been slain.

  Copper futures, down at 6:00 PM last night had recovered by 9:22.

  Interracial marriage numbers were improving in the South, and Congress had withdrawn part of the National Guard.

  Further information was not visible to me, whereupon my attention turned to the cleaning woman, as I assumed her to be, sitting just opposite me beneath a specious advertisement for erectile devices. She was tired, overweight, and in her exhaustion she had let her knees fall apart, an unpleasant scene. But how would I like it, to dust the furniture and mop the floor in order to make a bunch of goddamn businesspersons happy? And had I not always done my own furniture and floors, howeverso seldom it might have been? And how was it that our system punished this good woman on behalf of the scum sitting at my side?

  I was dreaming about blood and revolution, anthrax spores and the burning of New York, when just that moment the train came to the right place and I must perforce abandon my seat to the bozo who had been hovering over me for the past minutes. You should have seen how the world’s most prosperous, luckiest, and most essential people leapt from the train to go racing in a panic for their office buildings. A dignified individual in a grey suit smote me by accident with his briefcase and continued running forward. In 480 BC, the Athenians had rallied to defend their city. But this?

  Consumables were faring well, but by the time I reached my own building, rutabaga options had fallen once again. Forcing my way through the bozos mustering in the hall, I espied an apprentice adult, as I calls ’em, a young one wearing a fractal tie. Destined for greatness, the boy had not only accepted every meme in circulation, but also those that hadn’t been invented yet. I envied him of course (how could I not?), him and all other people blessed with the gift for believing what they should.

  There was a little chocolate cupcake waiting on my desk. Was I the most popular member of our group, or not? I smiled, twice, complimented Tiffany on her new blouse and then, fueled by coffee and chocolate icing, set to work with the sort of energy that might endure for up to fifteen minutes. Seen from the other stations, my double-breasted suit was cerulean blue and my facial expression entirely neutral. My hair, the best part of me, looked as if I had tried very hard to comb it but had failed. They like that, women do, sincerity mixed with failure.

  Will night never come? I had been on duty for the better part of half an hour, but still had nine full hours before crepuscule. Darkness comes early in the Adirondacks and other good places, but even there the unspeakable sun was currently at work exposing all the ugliness of the visible world. Wise people stay in bed, waiting for the night. One sole distraction, namely that one of the Tiffanies, a comely girl, was dressed in a skirt a good ten inches shorter than the law ought have allowed. They do it on purpose, women and girls. However—and you have already divined this in me—I have inured myself against these ploys. My second wife had also been alluring in her clothes, if rather less so at other times. And besides, I’m a full 52 years old.

  Today I had been assigned to monitor a country that I’m not allowed to name, a square-shaped territory in the extreme southwest of the European continent. Concerning the Spanish language, I know enough of that not to need the translation service. Clearly this NATO ally of ours was beginning to chafe under the demands of the world’s premier economic and military power. Must she indeed participate in the bombing of Bolivia?

  “Let Spain be Spain!” I wanted to say, concerning the unnamed country alluded to just an inch or two above. I oughtn’t even write that down on paper, save that no one shall ever see it.

  Came two o’clock I began to feel a headache coming on. There was no need for me to seek permission, not after so many years of service, and I was able to exit the building while attracting the notice only of the bozo who operated the information desk, a “friend” of mine, as I had permitted him to imagine. We smiled, each to each. The day was sweet, mellow, and melancholy, and reminded me of a certain Hungarian stamp. Yes, there were a number of bookshops and antiquaries here, one conscientious publisher (since closed down), and some five or six million digestive tracts that fomented daily enough waste material to fertilize the Asian steppes. I have seen these systems hurrying off to work, going to places they detested in order to perform actions they deplored under supervisors they despised. I wanted to tell them how at one time we used to work at home or on the farm, laboring amongst whom we loved while practicing self-sufficiency, or near it. And hadn’t I rather be a wheelwright, or goldsmith, an enamellist, a sixteenth-century printer, or grow seedless avocados on a spread somewhere in the Yucatan?

  I proceeded northward along the wide sidewalk that carried to another sandwich-shaped structure also formed primarily of glass. In Aachen, they say, Charlemagne abided happily in a palace made of wood. I was so tired of it, of glass and steel, glossy automobiles, of people’s faces inset with gills and glands, of breathing holes and glistening eyes that shift one way and another under random compulsions emanating from the dark side of the cortex. Horrible, and yet this is how for fifty years and more I’ve looked upon the teeming world. Just then I set eyes upon a small brown immigrant he must have been, his face as vicious as a snake’s.

  At three o’clock, or just slightly after, I bumbled into a stretch of yellow tape that marked the boundary of the “no go” region where the police and census-takers refuse to go. Although very bad for the country, the presence of these people was said to be good for the economy. Here heroin was in popular use, and homicides were reported in round numbers. I admit it, that I harbor some respect, just some, for people who turn away from normative careers, from advertising and public relations, from the law and social work, from mainstream publishing and every other form of exertion that engrosses numbers of unrelated persons. It is true of course that the really interesting subjects would bore most such people quite to death.

  I went on. It’s my intention to know this city, to face up to it bravely inasmuch as I consider it a large-scale mock-up of the human soul itself in decadent phase. There’s a place downtown where for a high fee, one can watch derelicts fight to the death with knives. Under my microscope I once saw a bloated amoeba marshalling a crowd of cowed paramecia. A town, this, where some have no homes and others have fifty-story buildings all their own, and where the inverse ratio between human quality and monetary success moves closer every day to absolute perfection. But mostly my concern is for those who gave their lives for this country, never dreaming it could turn to this.

  A crowd had gathered outside the 66th Street Retrogendering Center, where a dispute seemed to be in progress. Crossing hurriedly to attend to it, I almost collided into a large bearded man or woman who offered me a pamphlet of some sort with a photograph on the cover of copulating movie stars. I watched a black woman shuffling toward a chauffeured car, her face a masque of ignorance and putrefaction.

  I strolled past a tall, crystalline building whence the country’s decision-makers were wont to issue IPOs, leveraged takeovers, etc., etc., and all those other ingenious “instruments” that granted them control equally of racehorses, foreign policy, and seventy-two-hole golf courses. Where were my horses? I have read far more books than any of these. For years now, I have been craving for a merciless dictatorship consecrated to the humiliation of the rich and ignorant. There, in that longed-for place, the women will be as loyal as Penelope, beautiful as Helen, noble as Héloise, and the town crowded with philosophers in lieu of what we see around us.

  I had taken three cups of coffee at noon, but now w
hen it came time to expel them, there wasn’t a facility anywhere. Did Lawrence have this problem on his trek to Akaba? I stepped into a department store, but after roving up and down the aisles I found, not a restroom precisely, but rather a pot to pee in, as people say. Strange world, this. A man can get a blowjob here for silver change, but if he needs to piss, or more, he’ll have to run back home again!

  When in the course of enjoying New York, it’s bad practice to avoid the Museum of Modern Art. Even so, I just didn’t have the stomach for it on this autumn day. The pedestrians were already startling enough for me. I saw a queer with purple fingernails, and next a starving dog whose face reflected great wonderment as to how it could have come to this. I hastened to buy a quart of milk, but when I returned the creature had altogether disappeared. Another of my headaches was coming on, this one yet more serious than yesterday’s. Fortunately for New York, indeed for city people everywhere, I had brought no firearms with me.

  Having never actually used a pot to pee in, I finally came to a facility at the corner of Fifth and Priscilla, and after decanting a volume of urine (with blood in it) along with a quart of milk, delayed there long enough to peruse the graffiti. Only here may one see the true sentiments of all those men in expensive suits. It was now exactly four minutes past 3:16, and I had miles to go before I’d have to pee again.

  Always prepared for the onset of depression, I drifted half unwillingly into a subsurface pawnshop administered by the sort of person one expects in such places. The fellow had accumulated all manner of obsolete wedding rings, photo albums, and a silver saxophone with an autographed baseball nesting in the bell. I looked for, but could not find, second-hand gall bladders available for transplant. And yet, strangely, the few pieces of artwork to be seen, amateur material rendered by housewives and the like, were so much superior to the cultural signifiers in the Museum of Modern Art that I was tempted to invest in them.