The Undeliverable
| 17 min read
The dead-letter office where Naomi Frankel worked occupied the third sub-basement of the postal annex on Delaguerra Street, a room the size of a small gymnasium lit by fluorescent tubes that had been humming the same off-key note since before she was hired. Above her, in the upper floors, machines sorted the living correspondence of the city, the bills and postcards and jury summonses, at a speed no human could match. Down here, everything was slow. Down here came the mail that had failed.
Naomi had worked the dead-letter desk for nine years. She was good at it, which was a strange thing to be good at, because being good at it meant being good at reading the ghosts of intentions. A smudged address, a torn zip code, a name spelled three different ways across a single envelope. She could look at a water-stained parcel and reconstruct where it had been trying to go the way a paleontologist reconstructs a whole animal from a fragment of jaw. Most of what crossed her desk she solved and sent back up into the living stream. What she could not solve went into the long process of opening, cataloguing, and eventually, if no owner surfaced, destroying.
She did not mind the work. She had come to it after a marriage ended and a career in something louder wore her down, and she found she liked the quiet and the puzzles and the absence of anyone standing over her shoulder. She liked the smell of old paper. She liked that the mistakes she corrected were other people's, for once.
The first letter came on a Tuesday in October, in a batch of about two hundred that the pneumatic chute coughed onto her intake table at nine in the morning.
It was an ordinary envelope, cream colored, good stock, sealed. The handwriting was careful and old-fashioned, the kind of penmanship they no longer taught. The address was complete and legible, a house number on Merrivale Terrace, a real street on the east side, and the name on it was Eli Osgood.
The problem was the return corner, where someone had written, in the same careful hand, a single line beneath the sender's address: For Eli, who will be born in the spring.
Naomi read it twice. She turned the envelope over. There was no postmark, which was itself unusual, because a letter could not reach the dead-letter office without first entering the system, and entering the system meant getting cancelled. This envelope had never been cancelled. It had simply appeared in the batch, as though it had been born already lost.
She set it aside and worked through the rest of the batch, and by lunch she had forgotten about it, or told herself she had. It surfaced again when she cleared her table, and rather than file it with the undeliverables she slipped it into her cardigan pocket, which was against regulation, and which she had never once done in nine years.
That night, in her apartment, with the radiator knocking and a bowl of soup going cold beside her, she opened it.
She justified this to herself easily enough. A dead letter with no living recipient was, by the office's own rules, subject to opening. The recipient was not merely absent. The recipient did not exist. There was no Eli Osgood, not yet, according to the sender's own words, and so there was no privacy to violate, only a puzzle to solve.
Inside was a single sheet, folded twice, covered on both sides in the same careful hand.
My dear Eli, it began. You do not know me, and by the ordinary way of things you never will, since I will be a long time gone before you draw your first breath. But I have been told, by a source I have decided to trust for reasons I cannot explain even to myself, that you are coming. A boy, in the spring, in the house on Merrivale Terrace where I spent the happiest years of a difficult life. I am writing to you across that distance because I find I cannot bear the thought of you arriving in that house without knowing that someone was glad, in advance, that you would.
Naomi lowered the page.
She was a practical woman. Her first thought was of a hoax, some elaborate art project, a game. Her second thought, close behind, was of the handwriting, which did not look performed. It looked like the handwriting of someone who wrote letters as a matter of course, in an era when people did, an era that was decades gone.
She read the rest. The writer, who signed himself only as your friend across the water, told the unborn Eli small things. That the light in the front room of the Merrivale house was best in the late afternoon. That the third stair creaked and could be avoided by stepping to the left. That there had been a lilac in the back garden which the writer had planted himself, and which, if it survived, would be enormous by the time Eli came, and would smell like heaven for two weeks every May and like nothing at all the rest of the year, and was worth the whole year's wait for those two weeks. Most good things are like the lilac, the writer said. Be patient with the year for the sake of the fortnight.
The letter ended: I will write again if I am able. Your friend across the water.
Naomi sat for a long time with the page in her lap.
The next morning she did something she was not proud of. She looked up the Merrivale Terrace address in the postal system's own records, which she had access to for the purpose of tracing recipients. The house existed. It had existed for over a century. And the current registered occupant, as of a change of address filed eight months prior, was a couple named Osgood.
She told herself this meant nothing. Osgood was not a rare name. The letter was a coincidence layered on a coincidence.
She told herself that, and then she went down to the third sub-basement and began, quietly and against every regulation she was sworn to uphold, to look.
The dead-letter office kept its unclaimed correspondence for seven years before destruction, in a warren of steel shelving at the back of the room that Naomi had walked past ten thousand times without ever truly searching. She started there. She was looking for other letters with no postmark, other envelopes addressed to the unborn, and she found them faster than she had any right to.
There were eleven that first week.
They were not all to Eli. There was one to a girl named Sunday Marsh, who will come in the autumn, to the tall house by the reservoir. There was one to a set of twins, unnamed, addressed simply to the two who are coming, from one who went. There was one to a child whose name the writer did not know and so left blank, a gap in the ink where the name should be, with a note beside it: I am sorry I cannot call you by your name. It has not reached me yet. But you are no less real for being nameless to me, as I was no less real for being nameless to the one who wrote to me.
That last line stopped Naomi cold.
As I was no less real for being nameless to the one who wrote to me.
She read it again. The writer of that letter had, at some point, been written to. Across the same impossible distance. By someone else who had known they were coming before they came.
She began to sort the letters not by recipient but by hand. There were, she determined over the following weeks of careful evening study in her apartment, at least a dozen distinct writers among the letters to the unborn. But two hands appeared far more than the others, and those two hands, she slowly understood, were writing to each other.
Not directly. That was the thing that took her the longest to see, and that changed everything once she saw it.
The first hand belonged to a woman. Naomi thought of her as the Gardener, because she wrote often of plants, of the lilac and of a fig tree and of the particular way frost took the last roses. The Gardener wrote to a boy who would be born in the spring, in the house on Merrivale Terrace, and she signed herself your friend across the water.
The second hand belonged to a man. He wrote in a jagged, hurried script, nothing like the Gardener's careful loops, and he wrote to a girl. To Margaret, his letters began, who will be born in winter, in the flat above the chemist's shop on Colvin Row. He signed himself the one who went before.
For a long time Naomi read them as two separate correspondences, two lonely people writing across time to children they would never meet. Then she noticed the dates.
The letters were not dated in any calendar she knew. But the Gardener referred, in her later letters to Eli, to the man who wrote to my mother before I was born, whose letters I found in a tin behind the bricks of the fireplace when I was nine years old, and read every year of my life since. And the hurried man, in his letters to Margaret, referred to the woman who wrote to my father before I came, whose lilac I have never seen but have smelled in my dreams, because he described it to me so often.
Naomi laid the letters out on her floor. She moved them around for three nights.
What she assembled, at the end of those three nights, was not two correspondences. It was one, folded back on itself like a ribbon.
The Gardener had been written to, before her birth, by the hurried man. The hurried man had been written to, before his birth, by the Gardener. Each of them had grown up reading the other's letters, tucked in a tin behind a fireplace or under a floorboard above a chemist's shop, letters addressed to them by name before their names existed anywhere in the world. And each of them, in turn, moved by the strange grace of having been expected, had sat down and written forward, to a child not yet born, whom they would never meet, and whom they had come to love the only way the arrangement permitted, which was in advance and at a distance and without any hope of reply.
They were writing to each other. Not in a straight line, but around a loop. The Gardener's letters to the unborn boy were read by that boy, who grew into the hurried man, who wrote to the unborn girl, who grew into the Gardener, who wrote to the unborn boy. A closed circle, each of them the other's ancestor and the other's descendant, each of them raised by the other's tenderness, each of them passing that tenderness forward to the person who had, in the impossible geometry of the thing, already passed it back.
Naomi understood, sitting on her floor at two in the morning with the radiator knocking, that she was looking at a love story with no beginning and no end, conducted entirely between people who never once occupied the same moment of time.
She wept, which she had not done in years, not even when the marriage ended.
The practical questions did not go away. If anything they sharpened. Where were these letters coming from? Why were they surfacing now, in her batches, uncancelled, unpostmarked, as though the system that could not deliver them had grown tired of holding them and had begun to hand them, one by one, to the single person who might read them properly?
And what was she supposed to do?
She was, after all, a clerk in the dead-letter office. Her entire function was to reunite mail with its intended recipients, and where that was impossible, to catalogue and destroy. She could not deliver these. The recipients were not born. Some of them, if the loop was true, would not be born for a very long time, and some had perhaps been born and died already, in whatever century the Gardener and the hurried man belonged to, and the letters had been rattling around outside of time ever since, looking for a door.
But one of them.
One of them had an address that existed today. A house on Merrivale Terrace. A couple named Osgood who had moved in eight months ago. And a boy, if the letter was to be believed, coming in the spring.
Naomi did not sleep the rest of that night.
She went back to the office and she found every letter in the Gardener's hand addressed to Eli, and there were nineteen of them, spread across the shelves, hidden in batches that had accumulated over years. She read them in order, and they told the whole shape of a life the Gardener had lived, or would live, or was living somewhere the calendar could not reach. The lilac. The creaking stair. A description of grief, when someone the Gardener loved had died, written not to spare the boy the knowledge but to prepare him for it, because you will lose people, Eli, and I would rather you knew from someone who loves you that it can be survived, than learn it alone and think you are the first. Advice about a first heartbreak. A recipe for bread. A long, funny account of a dog the Gardener had owned, a bad dog, a wonderful dog, dead now, or not yet born, Naomi could no longer keep the tenses straight and had stopped trying.
The last letter to Eli was short.
My dear Eli. This is the last I will write, because I am near the end now and my hand is not what it was. I have loved you your whole life, though you have not lived any of it yet, and I know that is a strange thing to say and I no longer care how strange it sounds. Somebody loved me before I was born. A man I never met wrote to me across the same dark water I am writing to you across now, and his letters made me feel, my whole life, that the world had been expecting me, that I was not an accident dropped into an indifferent house but a guest who had been prepared for. I have tried to give you the same. When you find these, and I believe you will, know that you were wanted before you were possible. Plant something for the one who comes after you. Your friend across the water.
Naomi held that letter for a long time.
Then she did the thing she had been circling for weeks, the thing that would end her career if anyone ever traced it, the thing that no regulation in the thick binder above her desk had a category for.
She gathered the nineteen letters to Eli. She put them in order. She placed them in a single large envelope, and on the front of that envelope she wrote, in her own plain hand, nothing like the Gardener's, the address on Merrivale Terrace. She added no return address. She thought for a long while about whether to include a note of her own, some explanation, and decided against it. She was not part of the loop. She was only the clerk who had found the door and, for once in her careful, rule-bound, disappointed life, decided to prop it open.
She did not put the envelope into the system. She was afraid of what the system would do to it, afraid it would cancel the letters or lose them or route them back to her own desk in some closed circuit of bureaucratic irony. Instead, on a gray Saturday in early spring, she took the train to the east side and walked to Merrivale Terrace herself.
The house was tall and narrow, brick, with a green door. The front room windows faced west, and Naomi thought of the Gardener's line about the light being best in the late afternoon, and it was late afternoon, and the light was, in fact, extraordinary, a low gold that lay across the whole street like something poured.
In the back garden, visible through the gap between the house and its neighbor, an enormous lilac was in bud. Not yet in flower. But swollen, ready, a week or two away from the fortnight that justified the year.
A woman was visible through the front window, moving slowly through the golden room with the particular careful gait of someone very pregnant. She had one hand on the small of her back and the other resting on the curve of her belly, and she was looking out at the street with an expression Naomi could not read from that distance but chose to believe was peaceful.
Naomi did not knock. She could not think of a single thing she could say that would not sound like madness. She simply climbed the three steps to the green door, stepping to the left out of an instinct she could not have explained, and slid the thick envelope through the brass slot, and heard it land inside on the floor of a house where, in a matter of weeks, a boy named Eli would be born into a room full of afternoon light, in reach of a lilac about to bloom, wanted before he was possible.
Then she walked back to the station in the gold light, and she went home.
The letters kept coming. They come still. Naomi has stopped trying to solve the mystery of where they originate, because she has decided the mystery is not hers to solve. Some doors are only meant to be held open, not walked through. She has become the custodian of the loop, the one still point in the turning of it, the clerk in the third sub-basement who reads the mail of the unborn and, when an address happens to fall inside the narrow window of the possible, quietly sees it delivered.
She has, she estimates, matched four now. Four children written to across the dark water, four envelopes slid through four slots on four gold afternoons. She keeps no record of it, because a record could be found, and because the whole point of the arrangement, as far as she can tell, is that it must be done for its own sake, forward, without hope of reply, in trust that the tenderness will complete its circuit somewhere she cannot see.
Sometimes, late, she thinks about writing one herself. To a child not yet born. She does not know any names the way the Gardener knew Eli, and she has no house with a lilac, no fireplace with a tin behind the bricks. But she thinks she might not need those things. She thinks she might simply write to the one who is coming, whoever you are, wherever, whenever, and trust the same door that has been feeding her the mail of the dead to carry it forward to whoever needs, someday, to feel expected.
She has not done it yet. But there is good paper in her desk drawer, and a pen that suits her hand, and the radiator knocks through the long evenings like something patient waiting to be let in, and she thinks that this spring, when the lilacs come, she will begin.