The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
By the end of the day all urgent packages and messages within the city limits (including extended suburbs) must be delivered. At the end of the day who can know what disaster might follow if such a delivery has failed to go through?
At the end of the day Sam wonders if there will ever be a time when his job ends at the end of the day. At the end of the day Sam is still driving his van up and down the same streets, endlessly circling the same routes where every day he delivers packages wrapped in plain brown paper to people who are rarely at home to accept them. Sam wonders, briefly, if any of these absent recipients might imagine that magic played a part in these timely, mysterious deliveries, but he admits to some difficulty crediting the average person with such imagination.
At the end of the day Sam tries to remember if his job has ever been any different than it was today. He began the job when he was eighteen, right out of high school, intent on earning a few dollars while he decided what his heart’s work might be. Delivering the packages had been a game, and an opportunity to learn the routes which might some day lead into his future. His father had once told him that sometimes what you like to do has little relation to what you can get paid to do. Sam discovered times had changed—now it had almost no relation.
At the end of the day Sam dreams about an early-morning ambition he once had to be a poet. Now the dispatcher’s soft but unerring patter is the poetry that fills him like alcohoclass="underline" “Four thirty-two, four thirty-two, Park Avenue, Trader Bill’s, four forty-four, Wilmott Square, three-two, three-two.” But the dispatcher’s voice faded out hours ago, and he is lost with his delivery, packing his lost message through the late afternoon, the message itself no doubt a longed-for poem, and his quest fit subject matter for poetry.
At the end of the day fatigue is a shadow-self just beginning to separate from his skin, adhering stubbornly to his body, waiting for the dying sun to change its color. Sam wonders what a sun the blue-gray color of death would do to the shape and texture of the human shadow. He suspects that it would do nothing, for the combination of polluted air and skyscrapers filtering the sun has already resulted in many blue-gray sunny days. And he has simply become used to these shadows whose tone and color remind him of the face of his grandmother a few hours after her death.
Those shadows with legs stagger out of alleyways as if intent on stealing his package and plagiarizing his message, but he is highly skilled at the wheel, sailing around them so closely they spin so quickly that blood flies from their mouths like song.
At the end of the day shadows form with little resemblance to the objects casting them. Behind a street sign looms a giant, upraised fist. Bus benches front a broad torso broken in half. Corner streetlights hang below huge, shadowed eye sockets. The spaces between tall buildings are filled with gray, unfocused limbs attempting to crawl their way back into the roar of evening traffic. Now and then Sam vaguely recognizes a profile or a stance. Over the years he has known some of the men and women who built, formed, and poured these inhuman monuments. But as the pace of the day wears to its end, his sense of recognition fades, the transition into night making him an alien plying his vessel through the narrow lanes of fragmented landscape.
Out on the main streets there are few pedestrians, for this is rush hour and most have retreated to their cars for the long, anxious ride home. But he knows that there are those who cannot afford cars, who take to the sidewalks and the buses. There are those who cannot afford homes, who cannot afford even a shadow, and who look exactly the way their missing shadows would look. Gray and smudged as if they had struggled against erasure. These people live in the alleys and doorways and under the bridges, where countless shadows collect. There they blend together and blend with the night. Sometimes streetlights send them running, but few of the streetlights work downtown. The city does not pay its bills.
Someone else is unable to return home at the end of the day, he knows, someone trapped in an office positioned awkwardly between dead streetlights, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the urgent package Sam has been ferrying through every section of the city. His client is late. Sam is even later. But far later still, he suspects, is the city itself, changing its names and hiding from its tired messengers.
At the end of the day he thinks about his children, and how they must anticipate his arrival. How the three of them will line up at the base of the stairs as he enters the front door, each with a question, a request, or the gift of today’s story. It is the stories he likes best, and he will devote the most time to these, the daily retellings of how the world is both the same and constantly changing, perspectives he misses on his repetitive routes delivering messages and packages across the city. The questions are sometimes almost as interesting, inquiries as to the nature of life, the world, and the end of the day. He seldom has answers—his life as deliveryman having limited his insights—but the questions make all of them think, and it is his children thinking that he prizes above all else. The requests are seldom true requests but merely excuses for talking; having been filled by the endless chatter of hot exhaust expanding and contracting metal all day, he is more than happy to listen to his children’s aimless talk.
Awaiting a change of light he stares down at the package also waiting, resting solidly across his right front seat. At the end of the day he again wonders why he never looks inside the packages he delivers, why he never reads the messages. There is always ample time for such surreptitious activity. With the current volume of traffic no one really expects him to deliver either packages or messages on time. And yet so many are marked urgent. So many, he is told, must be delivered by the end of the day.
In fact, he has long suspected that the messages he delivers are never very urgent, for if they were his clients would use the telephone or the fax machine. He has wondered if, rather, what he delivers are scattered moments of contact, simple statements of existence from random citizens to other random citizens, with the unpredictability of his delivery times an essential part of the message. During holiday seasons there are always many more such messages to deliver. He sometimes considers inserting his own messages into his deliveries for random distribution, but thus far has not had the courage.
But at the end of the day the particular package in question seems much more than this. At the end of the day his final message seems an essential delivery. At the end of the day it seems the job he took on after high school has all come down to this. He can feel his van deteriorating, bolts and washers and scattered bits of metal dropping off from the stress of his final delivery.
At the end of end of at the end of the rat a tat tat tat . . .
At the end of the day he wonders what his wife is cooking for dinner. The traditional role she has taken in their lives has always made him feel guilty, but although he has attempted to convince her many times to continue her career, she has adamantly declined, preferring the company of their children with their endless supplies of questions, requests, and stories. In recent years his attempts to get her out of the house have been rare. At the end of the day he envies her place in their home.