Insomnia #1906
Had a neighbor who stole my mail – unknown frequency, but the bastard stole both incoming and outgoing letters.
First month’s rent check never made it to the landlord.
One day he left a card – addressed to him, opened – in the mailbox.
Apparently he felt guilty about his felonious ways…
… me, I felt guilty returning a piece of opened mail. How the hell is that supposed to look? … and what was going to happen if I didn’t return it?
Of course, up to then I had no idea he had been stealing mail. I walked over to his home down the street and delivered the letter after returning home from work one day (just after sunset).
He didn’t open the door at the first knock, however, I knocked again because the lights were on (a sure sign that someone is home if it’s just after sunset – don’t know of anyone who leaves their lights on all day).
He came to the door but left the chain in the latch and pretended to be “holding the dog back” (his words, not mine).
I passed the letter through the four inch aperture.
He said something about “putting the dog away”, closed the door, and re-opened the door twenty seconds later to let me in.
He had a small stack of mail. “Postman has been delivering it to the wrong address…”
Right.
The oldest piece was postmarked a year prior.
I could almost swear he was the same man I’d met two years prior in another city, the man with the respirator tank who watched people walking down the street from the surveillance cameras in his bunker and had scurried out, tank in tow, to say hello when he saw me walking down the street – but somehow he was frailer, now.
Afraid but unwilling to be afraid alone – maybe pent-up and shy – with no place to mount his cameras.
The mind tends toward lumping the irrelevant things together – a series of similarly-coiffed leading men from bygone eras’ film become a single Übermensch actor, disagreeable odors and flavors churn together indistinguishably in some singular back-alley cesspot, and hoary shut-ins become The Archetypal Shut-in where one has the unfortunate occasion to make contact.
The mail thief and the bunker-dweller are doubtless different people, not that it would matter much – the common threads of their solipsistic stories must patch together some sorry, worn-out quilt of loneliness, TV dinners, and misery for each to cry himself to sleep with when the weather’s cold.
Here’s to hoping you die a certain kind of death, creepy old bastard – you interfered, got the postal service involved when all you had to do was knock, ask for a cup of sugar and acknowledgment of your pathetic existence.
