Mail Issue
	Deep within the deceptively small confines of an indistinct post office an overdressed mail sorter  recites the truth of all things to a man on an invisible ledge.
	“Mail is male, and we all get fucked by it,” said Mikael Serling. “Think about it, these white rectangles are launched like semen across vast distances till they end up in a cold cavern, where they wait pregnant with ideas– ideas meant to change,” He continued. “Listen Stevens, these oblong envelopes, these spermatozoa, they're ICBMs designed to do one thing, murder your identity without fear of reproach.”
	Jonathan turned toward his work, eyes glazing over names,  flicked up the volume on his mp3 player, and listened to breathless ranting fade into The Fall's motorik.  His hand began to adapt the beat as threw the mail into its predetermined slot. On a snare he grabbed, on a kick he threw, and on a cymbal he cast a polite glance at Mikael (lest he figure out that Jonathan's left ear was not nearly as attentive as his right.)
 	–Six months, six months and he hasn't figured it out, and hey speaking of which, why is it that I can tune this guy out, but when it comes to that hairy, pipe fitting beast across the hall, I feel like my frenulum turns into Niagara. Which reminds me, the tenant meeting's tonight.
	“Stevens, have you read your literature? Do you know that the U.S. Postal service hasn't made a profit since 2006? If you do, you know that it's because of the new stipulation that they had to pay for the future healthcare of those not yet retired. Why is that? It's the same reason why going postal is a thing. They know what all this proximity to still life does.”
	The drone of Mikael's rants. They only served to add to mundanity of the job. Check, throw, check,  throw. Though, It allowed Jonathan time to reflect, and sometimes those Alex Jones style rants managed to find some peculiar truth, which is why, though he would never admit it, Jonathan left one ear free. All for that rare utterance capable of projecting a world. He had done this since Mikael had made one particular remark, one about the path of pulp.
	Mikael had been quoting some book  about an underground mail service. He was driving home some point about the inability to communicate, but what had captured Jonathan's mind was something else. A remark about connection. In Mikael's elliptical explanation of just what had occurred in his erudite book, he made mention of a quote, “Philosophy is  just the history of philosophy.”
	From that quote, a framework began to emerge. A glance down at the envelope in his hands, a thought of pulp. He pictured the South American workers, sweat drenched, tying red and blue ribbons around trees denoting the survivors from the paper trail; the harvesters crushing weeds underneath wheels as their insectoid arms  divide tree from stump. He thinks of the sun pouring over this previously atramentous land, he thinks of the carbon harvested from the charcoal piles used to make ink; the wood mashed and pulped into paper. Paper being labeled and packaged and shipped to foreign lands where it is done the service of becoming a textual snapshot, an impermanent crystallization of an idea– a mass equation of flesh and thought that ends with the writing of hello, goodbye, and even the grandest philosophical thoughts of an era. An idea that for an instant, Jonathan feels a part of.  This spider of ambiguous body, grasping the world tight, weaving it into a web where no part can be moved without  damaging the others.
	At four. the whirr of the belt feeds slowed, and  slices of paper stilled. The workers donned Canadian caps, Italian sunglasses, and  Chinese coats. They filed out of the office in a delta. Mikael and Jonathan each took long strides, Jonathan's getting longer with every phrase out of Mikael's mouth. Until finally, they reached Jonathan's car.
	“You can see how this all relates to 1930s air mail scandal.”
	Jonathan nodded like an unrepentant teenager feigning guilt as his hand snatched the door. “Yes Mikael, I see it perfectly, but I have to get going; tenant meeting's tonight.”
	“Stay private.”
	“Will do.”
	At that, Mikael stalked off to his car, and Jonathan's shoulders drooped. He got into his car, and drove toward the ocean, toward home.
	↓↓
	Third Union Estates, its walls pockmarked with years of acid rain and caked in enough layers of brown paint to look like the work of a coprophiliac  Rothko, was Jonathan's home.
	–Jesus, what a day. Another nine hour shift thanks to mister secret history; I should start filming him, that'd be an internet sensation for sure. Wait Jonathan, last time you did anything negative to him (shut up) he'd come back with  the Carrera. How did he afford that? Now to just open my door, put on some Can and fall asleep to sputtering nonsense of a different type. Wait, what's this?
	He approached the cracked glass door of the main entrance, a single flier printed on the back of a taco advert (Tacoma Tacos' two taco Tuesday) was taped to the inside.
Meeting moved to APT 238, Frissel residence
	An exasperated sigh left Jonathan's lips.
	–Just because he's a cock, and his hair probably bought OPEC a Learjet... jesus he's gonna be there and he's gonna bring it (burn anything lately) up again, and he's gonna fucking use the landlord against me. Just suck it up, John. You can deal with him while there's others. Anyways, might as well check my mail.
	He unlocked the door, listening to the latch slide in its assembly, and pushed it open.
Tile was torn out, and pipes sprouted in and out of ceiling like vines from a canopy.  Pillars bent slightly in the middle under the accumulated weight of the five additional floors added last year– this was beyond unsafe, but the inspection list at city hall was being used as wallpaper. The mail boxes were tucked behind a small protuberance in the wall where a payphone used to be. In front of them stood a tall man in a featureless suit. Jonathan looked over at him, and the man grinned out of his face.
	–Obviously a cop, the smile gives it away, just grab your mail and get out.
	Even as Jonathan unlocked his aluminum box, the man kept grinning. As the box swung open he backed around the protuberance, jerking himself as if he were in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Jonathan thought this strange, but ever-since they started drugging the cops, they tended to be a little happy.
	He reached into his mail. His fingers danced about the papers, gathering them up. Then his fingers hit something cold, beyond cold, gelid.
	–It's probably just food, so I should just come back for it later, um uh, after the meeting.
	Even as he thought this, his arm dragged it out. He managed to stop just as his wrist felt the raised edge of the box. Sweat began to slither off his nose, dripping onto the damp floor, and disappearing into a water stain.
	–Yes, best to leave it.
	Jonathan staggered over to the elevator, forgetting to close his mailbox. He pressed two, and awaited his escape. Yet if he was to look back he would not have seen a mail box, but a void.
↓↓
	The tenant meeting was over. People stood around Charlie's apartment talking weather, sports, and the recent local elections (the incumbent had won by nine percent, most blamed his victory on his planned expansion of the Siemens' district). Jonathan had found a quiet place hidden between two rather extensive pipe systems.
If there is one thing Charlie is good for, it's his apartment. All these pipe  fitting practice sets make the place look like a Gilliam movie. You can barely walk without tripping over an s-bend. Where is Charlie? Oh no, here he comes, be nice, be funny, but bland.
	“Hey Charlie, how's the apartment?”
	“You go blind recently?”
	“uh...”
	“Because it's not good . Just like the rest of this excuse of a complex.”
	“I don't know about that, it's warm in winter.”
	“And so is the desert. You wouldn't want to live there.”
	“I'm sorry for asking.”
	Charlie took a flask from the inside of his jacket, and offered it to Jonathan.
	“You seem tense, have a stiff one on me.”
	“Thanks.” Jonathan took the flask, and with the desperation of a long dry alcoholic gulped down the whiskey.
	“You know John, you start drinking I get the urge to get the extinguisher.”
	“Then why offer?”
	“Because, as much I loved that disposal, you look like a regular schmuck.”
	“Thanks, I guess, um. I'm going to go talk to the landlord.”
	He carefully stepped over a few pipes, and made his way to the kitchen where the landlord was busy talking to Sandy from 314 about the pie competition they were planning for Labor Day. Jonathan took a moment to look around.
	Charlie's apartment looked like the interior of a complex HVAC system. Pipes criss-crossed through the air, and exposed wiring hung a few inches from the ceiling. Cold air rushed in from a large crack in the rear of the kitchen. The table was eclipsed by piles of bills, ads, and espionage novels. Jonathan took a copy of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold off a chair and sat down.
↓↓
	–What the hell? Where am I? IS this my apartment, why am I cold, how did I get here?
	It was his apartment. The X-Files poster said as much. He was in bed, and his head sounded like the end of Mahler's First Symphony– bursts of percussion intersected by buzzing violins. He sat up, and felt his back stick to the sheets, and a thin pool of sweaty vomit raced down his stomach.
	He had drank again.
	–Ah fuck, what did I do? Oh no, I did that. Oh Charlie, I should never have made that joke. Nazi, German. It was the blue eyes! The Blonde Complexion! Sleeping with the landlord. Penis in leathery flesh. I need to vomit, where's the toilet? This is it, this is the terminal velocity of my path to eviction.
	Jonathan fell upwards, and labored to the bathroom where he upchucked a good portion of his rent. His turned over to look at the bathroom clock: three PM Saturday. If he was being summoned before the landlord, the notice would be here.
	In a haphazard frenzy he threw on whatever was in reach first, stumbled out of the apartment, practically begged the elevator to fall, and ran to his mail box. He was now just two steps from the ledge, would he be leaping or walking back, he decided he needed to see the height first. So he tensed his muscles, gathered up an electrical impulse in his brain, sent the action the potential down, and began his laborious walk to a potentially active bomb.
	His hand reached in and began to root...
	–What's this?
	He grabbed the gelid object. It was fuligin, a hole absorbing all light.  It loomed in his vision till it eclipsed all but itself. The sun had no bearing here. Flipping it over he saw in auric white lettering a return address.
5021 West Horselover Ave
Third Union Estates
Apartment 239
	His address.
	Sound ceased. Stillness dominated the physical, and his chattering mind was reduced to a few ellipsis. He craned his head up, expecting Rod Serling, the X-Files theme, something to make sense of this. None came, and Jonathan Leslie Stevens felt just that– a name alone.
	He felt like one of the lives he glazed over at the post-office. An entire summation of someone's life crystallized into a moment that had taken millions, laborers, programmers, presidents, soldiers, family, and even Stevens to make possible. Yet here he was, a name on folder sent to him, by him. Someone, somewhere in some post-office changed his life in one moment of  automated decision. That is to say if it even was a post-office. Despite that, at that moment he felt free, he felt fluid. He looked down at the envelope, dropped it. Concluding that privacy, the belief in the security of mental, and bodily integrity meant nothing if your name did not.  He walked to the elevator with purpose, he would end his rent trouble.
↓↓
	Charlie Frisell was eating a pound cake when Jonathan kicked in the door. Frisell was reaching for his gun when a single bullet tore through his eye, and exploded in his cranium. He was dead before Jonathan Leslie Stevens could know the truth.
↑↑
	When Mikael had heard the news, his first thought was on the government. They had seen fit to monitor almost every aspect of modern American living. Phone taps, email, mail reading,nothing was sacred.
	It seemed that they had trained poor Jonathan to kill, split him in two. He knew they did it through mail, something to do with letters as snap shots– hard drives for personalities. He knew Jonathan was compromised. That's why Mikael had to do it, that's why he spent all that money on nanopaper. It was why he bribed that cop, he had to get threw to Jonathan show him the fragility of his idenity. Alas, Mikael had been too late, Jonathan had killed.
↕↕
	A smiling man in a featureless suit watched from a featureless van as Jonathan was carried away.
	–Yes! My mission has been a success. Father will be so proud that his new mail toy works. Funny Man is convinced he was responsible. Pipe man is no longer in the game, and I shall get a chocolate. Father will be most pleased.
	The smiling man started the engine, it sputtered, and belched fumes. The cracks in the road sprouted green as his exhaust cast a shadow over the fractured asphalt, giving an illusion of smoothness, but only for a moment.