Dead Letter Office-Clay McLeod Chapman
Dead Letter Office
By Clay McLeod Chapman
note number one
Imagine I’m at a park. Been sitting on this bench long enough to blend right in. Pigeons are paying me no mind, pecking at the ground. All of them flocking around my feet, huddled together. Heads bobbing up and down. Completely unaware that I’m even there.
So I stand. Just leap to my feet, bolting upright — sending them all flapping back into the air, this burst of birds blasted into the atmosphere, scattering over the rest of the park.
This is my final thought. That last abstract to race through my head before it all goes dark. I’ll come back to it later. Better to get it out of the way, up front. Put it behind us. No need to dwell on what it will be anymore. Now we know.
There’s a hallway between the back of my throat and the birdshot. No pictures on the walls. Just two hollow cylinders, a smoothbore corridor leading straight to my neighbors. Their door-knocker’s shaped like a hammer. One rap and the walls peel back, propelling my houseguests at point-blank range.
Come on in. Sorry about the mess.
I’ve practiced. Rested a pair of penny rolls across my tongue, bound together by a rubber band. Got a good taste of copper in my mouth, that metallic tang — making me think about the moment when I’m swallowing the real thing, both barrels, tasting the sulfur residue from the last blast.
Makes you wonder about all the different instances that gun’s been fired, all the people who’ve pulled this trigger before you. What the circumstances were. If they were any different from your own.
Loaded both chambers, which seems like such a waste.
One door opens, the other keeps closed. I’ll never leave this room again.
Filled my pockets with all the extra shells I wouldn’t be using, taking them to the park with me. Grabbing a handful, I’d crack back the red plastic casing. Peeled away the cotton wadding like I was unsheathing a peanut, getting gunpowder all over my fingers. Licked them clean, tasting for salt. Only my tongue began to burn. Rolled the 12-gauge pellets around in my palm for a bit before tossing them like breadcrumbs, feeding the pigeons.
Let them peck at the lead until their beaks chip down to nothing.
Let their intestines ignite with cordite. Let them die from the inside out.
Back to that last thought. It’s there within the millisecond between me squeezing the trigger and breathing in a storm cloud of nitroglycerin, inhaling enough gunpowder to burn through my lung tissue. Just before the bullet charges past my gag reflex. Brain matter bursts out from the back of my head, escaping through the exit wound like pigeons fluttering into the air.
The wet bits taking flight. Clumps of hair flapping about. Birds disperse, scattering in every which direction, before finally settling back down on the ground again.
note number two
Time to jump. Stay under the rope. Do this right and your feet never touch the ground again.
I’m humming the first thing that comes to mind, remembering some nursery rhyme from when I was younger. Just a little girl.
Gypsy, gypsy, please tell me.
What my fortune’s gonna be.
We keep repeating the verse until the girl jumping makes a misstep — her legs tangling up into the rope, snagging at her ankles. Whoever she trips on is the kind of man she’ll end up marrying one day.
Rich-man, poor-man, beggar-man, thief.
Doc-tor, law-yer, In-di-an chief.
That’s the magic of skipping rope. The power of prophecy, to look into the future and foresee your fate. Who our husband’s would be, how many children we’d have, what type of house we’d live in. Don’t need a crystal ball. No need for tea leaves. We’d conjure up tomorrow today with nothing but our feet.
The double bounce. The slide swing. The straddle cross or the heel touch.
We get our hands clapping. Head shaking from side to side. Lifting the knees, slapping the palms of our hands against our legs. And the repetition of the verse, this low monotone drone, like it was some incantation — like we were slipping off into some trance, some somnambulistic dance, where the spirit enters your body the quicker you skip, opening up a door inside yourself. Welcoming that apparition in.
Nothing but a bunch of jump rope heretics, skipping to the beat, whipping that cord around at two-hundred revolutions per minute. The name of the game is to keep increasing the speed, see how fast we could get that rope going — until the very line vanishes, blurring the barrier between our feet and the ground. Until it looks like we were flying, hovering above the rest of the world. Gravity can’t have us anymore. We’re weightless now. We’re free.
Doctor, doctor. Call the doctor. Sarah’s gonna have a son or daughter.
Wrap it up in tissue paper. Send it down the elevator.
We keep repeating the verse until the girl jumping trips up. Whatever number she misses is what she’ll be the mother of when she grows older.
Boy, girl, twins or triplets.
Boy, girl, twins or triplets.
Boy, girl, twins or triplets…
But looking that deep into future comes with consequences. There’s a price to pay. You’re bound to that rope now. And everybody trips. Only a matter of time before one of your feet snags, everything suddenly snapping back into vision. The rope wrapped ’round your neck. Your feet on the ground, wobbling on top of some chair. Nothing but a breath away from taking that last step forward.
The rope divides your past from your future. Always has. Everything below the noose belongs to history — the air underneath, caught in your lungs. While above are all the things that’ve yet to come — the blood halting in your head, the burst capillaries. Your jaw clenching tight, that snippet of your tongue bit off between your teeth. All you have to do now is cross the line. Jump in.
It was always when I was on the outside of the rope, looking in — watching the cord whip around, waiting for the right moment to take that step forward, hop on in, that I would take the deepest breath, ushering in as much air as my lungs would allow, as if I’d never breathe again.
Sarah, Sarah — jumped in the fire.
The fire too hot, she jumped in the pot.
The pot was too black, she jumped in a crack.
The pot was soon over, she jumped in some clover.
Clover’s too sweet, she kicked up her feet.
One, two, three. Sarah jumped in a tree.
The tree was so high, she couldn’t go higher.
‘Long came a breeze, blew her away.
note number three
The roast has been marinating all morning, stewing in its own juices. Rib eye. Such a tender cut, three inches thick. Looks like some raw offering for the oven. It’s been preheating patiently in the kitchen, just waiting for me to toss it that slab of beef.
The last words I will have ever heard your father say to me were — What’s for dinner tonight, honey?
I told him it would be a surprise.
Just make sure he doesn’t come into the kitchen right away. Wait a while for the air to clear.
The gas is turned on to its hilt, purring from the taps at full blast — hissing whenever I get too close, the pilot light ready to roar. The oven doesn’t trust me yet. The king of all kitchen appliances.
Look at me, kids. Your mother’s become a lion tamer.
I have a chair in one hand, aiming its legs directly at the oven — a dish towel in the other, whipping it through the air.
Kneel, I say. And the oven obeys.
Open wide, I command, snapping the rag just above my head. The oven cracks its mandibles back, hinges squealing. Its breath is faint, nearly odorless — but the more I inhale, the heavier my head gets. I can smell the remnant scent of our past pot roasts, still caked to the roof of its mouth. The charred aroma of dozens of dinners coagulated to the burner ports, the flame openings. Beef brisket. Pork tenderloin. Veal cutlets. T-bone steaks. Glazed hams. Roasted chickens. Thanksgiving turkeys.
I’m already dizzy by the time I slip my head in, holding the oven’s lower jaw with my left hand, the upper with my right, fingers cupping over its teeth as my neck slips through. I rest my face on top of its tongue — the grille pressing against my cheek, leaving an indentation in my skin.
Hurry, hurry. Step right up.
The circus has come to our kitchen.
note number four
When you can watch a building topple onto itself in a cloud of dust and wonder why more buildings aren’t crumbling to pieces all around you, almost painfully wishing that more buildings did. Just to make something so wrong that somebody actually spoke up about it. Screamed something articulate.
Nothing is structurally sound.
Not up here. The wind is so shrill, it actually stings. Hurts the ears. Sometimes I can barely even keep my eyes open. I’ll have to turn away from the wind, let the current blow over.
Forty stories. Nearly six hundred feet. Everyone looks so small from this far up.
Somebody at the water-cooler said a recent study determined that when a person commits suicide, they affect six other people on an intimate level. Complete strangers. It’s a domino effect of self-destruction. One person kills himself and a half dozen others tumble from the repercussions.
My game-plan is to aim higher. Go for broke.
That’s why I waited until lunch break.
Did you know the world record for the highest number of dominoes set up single-handedly and toppled over is three hundred thousand six hundred and twenty one tiles? Took seven weeks to set up, thirteen hours a day. And it all came down in less than four minutes.
Want to know who holds the title? Some woman in Singapore. Halfway through her preparations, a cockroach scuttled across the floor — knocking over about ten thousand tiles before she could catch it, kill it, crush it under her heel. Days worth of work, all down the drain. She went ahead and laid out these foul-smelling leaves along the ground, barricading her work with her own homemade bug repellent. Even then, every night, she’d have these terrible dreams about insects creeping in and tipping over all her dominoes. Each morning, she’d hold her breath and say a prayer as she walked back in — fearful she’d find that they had already collapsed in the middle of the night, toppled over with the flick of an antenna.
Up here you find the patterns. Look at how everyone lines up along the sidewalk, heading in different directions — this endless procession of tightly-packed people snaking on for blocks.
Domino toppling is the perfect balance between architecture and destruction. Hours go into meticulously designing this intricate configuration, aligning tiles in an elaborate tapestry — only to destroy it. One flick of the finger and it’s all gone. Once that chain reaction is set into motion, there’s no stopping it. No going back. All that work falls over in a matter of seconds. And when it all comes down, you’ll have nothing to show for all your effort but the aftermath. Left with just the rubble.
So you inhale the dust. You let the soot and asbestos settle into your lungs.
You see who crawls out from the debris. Dusted bone-white. Their eyes looking blacker than ever before, these dark wet spots in the midst of all that ash — like the face of a domino, arranged in a random assortment of circular pips, two dots, three dots, four or six, their smudged numbers blinking open and shut, open and shut, trying to get their vision back.
All it takes is that very first domino, the actual catalyst for disaster. The pushover. One person tumbles and the others follow along.
Today, I am that trigger. The beginning of the end. A demolition expert in the most human order. One leap from me and it all kicks off. Free-falling at eighty miles per hour.
And watch them all topple beneath me.
Watch me knock them all down.
Copyright C 2007 Clay Chapman