Postal Efficiency

Headed over the Charles Street bridge for the fifth time in 24 hours I notice how beautiful this awful city can be.  Then someone next to me elbows my arm and my book falls to the floor, page lost forever.  My coffee threatens to spill but I manage to contain it, and myself.

When the train screeches to a stop I walk through the complex string of halls and stairs until I’m standing in front of South Station. It looks and smells like it always does, nestled in its labyrinth of construction, a fortress of travel and refuse.  The Main Postal Facility that services all of Boston stands beside it, my destination, and it shares in the sinister smile that this whole city seems to have for me.

Inside the Postal Facility I gather with a group and we are led down stark halls glancing at people working on conveyer belts in rooms that we are ushered past.  I feel like I’m in a horror movie and what’s going on in those room is too awful to be seen.  And in some ways I guess it is.  The people there are made to sort all day long, a certain number of letters per hour, per day, and per week or their precious pensions will be torn to shreds before their eyes.  One woman looks up at me hopelessly, and I wish that I could offer her some means of escape.  For a second I contemplate throwing her my cell phone and yelling “call for help” but I am once again pushed past the door before I can act.  Feelings of bloody rebellion fill my head as we continue on down the hall.

What is no doubt miles of building later I am directed into a small room with carpets and large windows that allow the gray glare of daytime in, burning my eyes after the long dark trip through the Boston Central Postal Facility.  There are danish on the table nearby and coffee in a great container with a spicket standing beside them.  Others help themselves, but I’m too bizarrely affected by the morning’s events to want either.  Instead I make my way to a plastic chair and make my self as comfortable as I can considering the circumstances.

A man sitting a few rows up nods to me as though he knows me.  I ignore him at first but he is persistent, unrelenting.  Finally I move a few seats closer and he looks at the ground while he speaks to me.

“Hey.  Are you interested in liberation?” he asks.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I reply.

“Do you want to be a hero today?”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

He seems satisfied with that, and says nothing else to me for some time.  The meeting is called to order a few moments later, and I move my seat just a few seats away from the strange man, and try to listen.  The speaker begins by introducing himself.  He continues on endlessly about postal processes, especially, but not limited to, how they pertain to magazine publishers.  There is a discussion first of inserts, and then of flyers, moving on to in-house stamping services, and then pre-stamped mail services.  And there is more, oh so much more.  Eventually what is doubtlessly hours later another man is introduced, and this one is as unlike the mild mannered postal curator as one could be.  The new speaker, who meets my eyes as he takes the podium is suspicious looking, almost sinister.  He wears a dark suit with silver buttons at the collar and the wrists, and his way of walking wreaks of villainous intent; his stance calls up the image of a man controlled by the corporation; the man who has come for our children and our freedom.  I momentarily think of the woman at the conveyer belt working her days away in a huge concrete room lit only by fluorescent bulbs and I’m sure that this is the man to blame.

And then the strange man sitting by me nods and points at the new speaker with his eyes.

“Do you want to be a hero?” he asks again.  The sound of it echoes in my ears.

The man with the dark suit begins to speak and I realize that I do want to be a hero, and this is my chance. I look at the tattered man, no doubt some revolutionary profit sent here from South America, or the Middle East to counsel me in the art of war. I nod.

“There is a lab under the building,” the informant says to me under his breath.  “And under that there is a bomb.  If you free all of the people in the building, I will free all of the people outside of it.” He extends the second “all,” to include everyone in the world.

Now, I’m not crazy, and as much as this setting is strange and my imagination can fill in features of a spy story around this bizarre facility, I know where to draw the line.  When crazy looking guys say the word “bomb” you need to tell the authorities.

“This man has a bomb,” I say as I stand up, pointing at my recent comrade, the crazy man in the dirty suit sitting one row back.

People around me are startled into inaction.  But the speaker, the villain, merely looks to the side and for a moment I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing.  Ten men step out into the room and rush the man, my conspirator, as though they had been prepared for this all along.  My friend stands and looks at me with fear and disappointment in his eyes.  When the men descend upon him, he tries to escape, but knows that he will not.  The guards, who were waiting in the wings of a conference on Postal Efficiency and Services for Magazine Publishers begin to beat him and he yells out.

“This is a facility for human testing, and these people need to be stopped.  Please, listen, all of you.  I am not insane.”  There is commotion and my fellow seminar goers flee wildly to all sides of the carpeted room.  One man even climbs onto the window-sill in fear.  But by the time he is up above the rest of us, the rebel is out of the room and all is silenced.  Everyone looks around stunned.  There is not a sound for a long time, and then the speaker asks us all to return to our seats.  Slowly and reluctantly people return to their places, they pick up their coffee and danishes and turn again to the strange looking man at the front of the room.

As though nothing happens he resumes his speech on Postal Efficiency.

I’m confused for a while and sit listening more to the buzzing in my brain than to him.  Eventually I raise my hand to ask a question.

“Yes Mr. Meil,” the speaker says staring me down.

“Shouldn’t we have policemen here, or bomb squad people to check out if that guy was telling the truth?” I say standing.

“No,” he says and turns away.  “That man was a lunatic, and you are all quite safe now that he’s gone.”

I am not sure why, but I just don’t believe him.

“How did you know my name?” I ask as an afterthought as I sit.  The man looks at me puzzled at how to answer this question.  Then, with a flick of his hand two men appear from just outside of the room and approach me.  I stand slowly, with my hands raised and allow them to take me peacefully out of the seminar. They escort me through the long dark halls, past the workers who have no expressions, and past the room where the woman I had meant to save no longer stood, but another stood in her place, and out into the gray cool day in front of South Station.

The men say nothing but return to the innards of the building and close the doors with a click.  I stand for a long time thinking of nothing and then walk down the stairs of the station and return for my sixth trip on the T, towards my home.  The city outside the windows as we pass over the Charles Street Bridge is calm and uninviting.  The Charles River is choppy and gun metal gray below the bridge.  I don’t open my book for the ride home but stare into the sky, and then into the darkness of the tunnel as it envelops me.  I am not sure what to think of the day, and so I choose to think nothing and tell no one what had happened.  As the train jumbles me and rumbles below my feet, I begin the process of forgetting.