I am a simple man whose life has become unbearably complex. Perhaps that is why I chose to send in my story to Photographer X. Maybe by disclosing some the truth behind the immense lie I can straighten my life out, and return to my normal job: postman.
My motto as a postman was this: “Neither rain, nor sleet nor snow nor dark of night shall stay this courier from his appointed rounds.” In my long, and forgive my boasting, illustrious, career as a postman I had weathered all sorts of hazards to get the mail delivered to the people of this fine nation. I drove my mail truck through two hurricanes, five tropical storms, three hail storms, and one riot, in my early days as a postman in Florida. Then I made a fateful move to a different region of the country, which will remain undisclosed in this monologue. I worked for many more years there, cheerfully doing my duty to the common citizen and upholding the esteemed tenets of the United States Postal Service. I forged good relationships with my hardworking colleagues and the many people whom I delivered to. I worked late into the inky evening, requesting a route long enough that it would carry through the day past sundown. Indeed those were happy days, and I still long for them; driving into the night, the wind blowing through my open mail door and breezing through my hair. But, alas, all good things must come to an end, and unfortunately, those fine days ended in a most strange, some might even say paranormal way.
It all started when a new postmaster was hired. I watched with a tear in my eye as the old one retired, for we had gotten along very well. I did not in least suspect what lay ahead, though. My new boss seemed alright at first, although in some small ways he struck me as strange. He didn’t blink, and he moved around in a stiff, unnatural way. As time went on and months passed, a cloud started to hang over the post office. Mail started being diverted and withheld for no explainable reason, and postal service even discontinued some routes. At first I reasoned that the military base that lay near our community had something to do with it. Perhaps the mail had to be rerouted for some unknown, but innocent, military protocol. But as more time passed the situation grew more and more sinister. And my new boss was behind it. He issued the orders and had the intercepted mail sent directly to his office in the back of the building. He would offer no explanation, and indeed became fierce when asked. My fellow postmen were as worried as me about it at first, but the postmaster seemed to have a sickly charm about him, and their worries were slowly bent into dull apathy. No one cared anymore. The whole thing wore down on me, aggravated me, consumed me. In the course of six months I became bitter. By that time it almost seemed that the entire office was against me, using their collective will to make me sink into their sense of dull existence, a life without the joys of a mail route well done. About a month earlier than that I began carrying a hand gun, perhaps out of irrational paranoia. On numerous occasions I had overheard the postmaster babbling away on the phone in some foreign tongue, I don’t know, but it may have been French. The other workers absolutely stood in the way of me looking at the intercepted mail. And for no apparent reason. Finally, the goading got too much for me, and I, for the first time in my career, acted against the Postal Service.
My metal shears and .45 in tow, I paid a late night visit to the post master’s office. The mail was kept in a large locker behind his desk, and I cut through the lock in a jiffy. To my astonishment, nothing was in it! Confused, I wondered if I had been wrong about it all, maybe I was delusional. Then I looked to the floor of the locker. There was nothing there, just a black void. I flipped on my flashlight and peered in to the hole. Somehow, the fiend had carved out a secret room beneath his office! I lowered myself down into the abyss. The secret room was filled with file cabinets, presumably containing some of the misdirected mail. Against the far wall stood a desk with a computer monitor and several computer cases. Flickering on the screen was a screen saver of the Eiffel Tower. Adrenaline was flooding my bloodstream, and I was more excited then ever before. I stepped up one of the cabinets and opened a drawer. There were manila folders, all containing neatly laminated sheets of paper; the missing mail! Each sheet had an index number printed on the top, and a sinister glowing symbol emblazoned upon it. What mail was of such worth that it must be stolen from the public, protected by plastic armor and filed away in a secret basement? I wondered if every post office in the nation, the world, now had a secret facility like this. I started reading the sheets of stolen mail. There were pages upon pages about supposed UFO sightings, abductee support groups, meetings of psychics, secret business deals, contraband encryption software, black helicopters and many other strange conspiracies. I don’t know how long I flipped through those forsaken documents, but I was overwhelmed that someone would go through such lengths to steal information from people mainstream society considered loony. It all made me come to one conclusion: it must be true. Why else the trouble?
To be continued.......
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